Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing hosted Verena from Hanover, Germany on an Erasmus Traineeship in Belfast throughout October 2017. As part of Verena’s professional development she set about logging her new skills and experiences. Find her journey with TrainingMatchmaker.com hosted by Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing in her blog below: I completed my traineeship in the company: Trainingmatchmaker.com. This company specialises in...

Influencer marketing was destined to explode in 2017 and Instagram is one of a number of social media platforms perfect for Influencers to share brand content as a result of a trigger. Blogger or celebrity content can come via a business request or it can be self generated and unprompted in order to share an Influencers love or frustration with brands and businesses. Influencer marketing involves targeting the influential people that your...

Lessons from Northern Ireland’s Instagram Influencers NI Bloggers: 1. My Sisters Closet 28.5k followers in August 2017, 36,900 followers in June 2018 Fashion, Beauty and Lifestyle Blog. The 2 sisters are also Co-founders of The Boudoir Boutique & MSC-The Label Practical Influencer Marketing Examples and Lessons:   Instagram post using a simple diamond ring product photo from Lunns – achieved 223 hearts and 3...

  Instagram has quickly grown into a massive social network with both a mobile and web presence. It shows no signs of slowing down, yet a worrying low percentage of businesses in Northern Ireland currently use Instagram for marketing. If you are not yet using Instagram as a marketing platform, here are 5 reasons why you might wish to rethink your decision.   Acquisition   The Instagram Platform allows you to Reach Instagram...

With over 15 million businesses on Instagram as of July 2017  (up from 8 million in just 4 months) Watson & Co Chartered Marketing Chartered Marketer – Christine Watson takes a look at some Instagram for business examples provided by Northern Ireland brand marketers and the lessons we can all take from their content marketing efforts: Business to Consumer 1. Discover Northern Ireland –...

As a Chartered Marketer and committed contributor to the local marketing community in Northern Ireland, for the past decade (including a 2 year spell as Chair of The Chartered Institute of Marketing Ireland) our founder Christine Watson recently led a CPD workshop for The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) – Ireland region at the Entrepreneurial Spark Belfast base entitled: ‘Marketing Magic with Online Reviews’. Over the...

If you manage a business you will appreciate the power of a positive social review, accepted wisdom is that a 4.8 star review leads to credibility and sales.  The dreaded one star feedback may lose you customers, and definitely won’t make your CEO’s day.  Interestingly, 5 star reviews aren’t generally believed to be true.   However, social listening offers important learning for businesses, and in this digital marketing world is a...

  To help our local businesses determine which local business awards will support their strategic and tactical messaging aims we’ve started to compile a list. The aim is for this to become a definitive go to list and to achieve this, please do let us know of any we’ve missed. We also plan to build this list up with website and social media details including hashtags and entry deadlines as and when (or should we say – if)...

You’ll never get a second chance to make a great first impression is one a favourite quote bandied about by our WorldHost Customer Service Trainer: Chartered Marketer – Christine Watson. It is also a lesson that every business should adhere to every single interaction – customers, suppliers, fellow workers, online via website, facebook, google and more.   First impressions are formed in a. one tenth of a...

Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing founder Christine Watson is an elected board member of The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Ireland region. A former Chair of the CIM Ireland board from 2013 to 2015 Christine currently volunteers on the Communications and Education sub-committees. Volunteering for your local marketing community isn’t a thankless task, it offers great opportunities to meet like minded professionals both locally...

The Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing Digital Business Skills (‪#‎DigiBizSkills)‬ tool of the week is Pinterest Best compared to a pin-board or scrap-book pinterest lets you create your own visual online pin-boards on specific topics or subjects of interest to you/your brand/your customers, allowing you to pin relevant online images and website links all in the one place. See it as...

Our ‪#‎digibizskills‬ tip of the week (17 April 2016) – Things change (and in the digital marketing landscape they change often). It’s your job to keep your marketing out of hot water by keeping yourself up to date. Facebook competition rules initially banned the use of any Facebook function as an entry mechanism and back then marketers and page owners were in fear of Facebook deleting their entire business Facebook page for...

When we first crafted this blog (21 April 2016) it was all about the Queen’s 90th birthday, we personally seen 121,000 tweets using the hashtag #HappyBirthdayYourMajesty appear before 3.30pm. Not only did it inspire us as marketers to think about hashtag creation and use for special occasions or promotions for the purposes of user generated content but it also made us wonder how your business makes customers, who chose your place to...

19th April 2016 and it’s time for the Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing Tuesday Tip This week we encourage you to activate your call to action button on your business facebook page (and if you have done so already, then quickly log in and check to make sure it’s still relevant and working!). Calls to action can help you to facilitate and encourage your Facebook visitors to take actions that are important to your business – for...

Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing ‪#‎DigiBizSkills‬ ‪#‎Tool‬ of the week – https://www.easel.ly for creating infographics easily! We’ve used this tool ourselves to create the networking checklist and customer journey imagery...

Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing #TuesdayTip – 12th April 2016 –  Take a few seconds to make sure your website is mobile friendly – check your mobile friendliness now by entering your website url into: https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ With visits to websites via mobile overtaking visits via desktop devices – positive user experience should be top of mind for everyone with a website Read...

Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing and our clients including Lough Neagh Partnership and Lough Neagh Eels – Inaugural Eel Eat Week and Erin Grove Preserves have all achieved sales results directly from online networking via our Twitter hour tweets, so we thought it would be useful to provide our digital marketing clients with a list of local networking hours where they too can communicate to target customers and those who may lead...

5th April 2016 and it’s time for the Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing #TuesdayTip This week we say: walk in your prospective customers’ shoes and GO Google your business! Google my business is a Free Business Listing on the Google search engine and ensures that your brand shows up in the top right hand side of Google searches. Capitalise on this opportunity: add contact details, opening hours, pictures and even videos of your...

  Having trained over 1,000 service professionals in the WorldHost Customer Service and WorldHost NI Ambassador – Welcoming Visitors to their Destination programmes across Northern Ireland we are very privileged to be able to boast about the many hotels and restaurants on our client list. Following a social media conversation on Twitter during an online networking conversation for #Magherafelthour (every Tuesday 9pm to 10pm) we...

When Nicola Bothwell of NB Chartered Marketing and Christine Watson of Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing won the PR contract for Funeral Services Northern Ireland, part of the Co-operative Group a sensitive marketing challenge began. One of the key recommendations from our initial PR audit was the launch of a National Poetry Competition and www.fsni-nationalpoetrycomp.co.uk was born The competition launches for a fifth year in 2016 and has...

Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing in Belfast offer traineeships for their WorldHost customer service client: Leonardo Logistics Ltd, a Cookstown based business founded by Eileen Mullan, who facilitate EU programme: Europaeischer Bildungsverbund – European Education Network. German trainee Caroline shares her WorldHost experience in Belfast during December 2015: My name is Caroline and I am from Berlin in Germany. After graduating my...

Chartered Marketer and Licensed Customer Service and Digital Marketing Trainer Christine Watson at Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing takes a look for Business First at the changing customer service demands of meeting and conference venues by a key target customer segment – event planners. July 2015 witnessed the opening of the world’s first hotel serviced by robots. Could Northern Ireland event attendees expect a greeting at a venue...

  Chartered Marketer and Licensed Customer Service and Digital Marketing Trainer Christine Watson at Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing takes a look at the intensifying pressures facing local businesses as a result of increasing customer demands of brands online and shares some tips on effective digital customer service management. A quick Google Trends search of the key words ‘customer service’ along with just one of the many online...

European Union Trainee Julia, from Germany, shares her professional development experience with Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing and Northern Ireland tourism journey including reader tips from her first visit to Belfast in September 2015: Starting my month in Belfast I was really excited. I looked forward doing a traineeship for one month at Watson & Co. Chartered Marketing. I registered myself for this program in Germany at...

Our founder: Chartered Marketer Christine Watson shares with you her top 10 tips to overcome writers block when devising content for your digital marketing channels. Good content is never out of reach, you just need to look for inspiration in the right places. We encourage any content marketers experiencing writers block to seek inspiration from:       1. Reviewing Smart Insights​ Content Marketing Matrix by Dave Chaffey 2....