A selection of our latest news and advice is posted below but please do contact us for initial recommendations. That bit is free and we welcome all challenges.“

Matthew Rymer, Managing Director
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There is a growing need to help vulnerable, desperate horse owners who care passionately about their horses, to find suitable new owners, sharers and loanees who will give their horse a loving and caring home. Our software team is now developing a bespoke online system to marry unwanted horses with appropriate adopters, for our JV client, Hauctions. We have now entered a consultation phase with The British Horse Society and National Equine Welfare Council and other interested parties ahead of a launch in November.

Rebecca Evans, Vice Chairman of The National Equine Welfare Council (NEWC) has joined the Hauctions team to manage this development. Rebecca has worked in the equine welfare charity sector since 1999, previously working as Equine Welfare and Grants Manager at The Horse Trust where she was responsible for managing a multi million pound programme of welfare grants covering cutting edge scientific research, post graduate scholarships, educational literature and a variety of projects to promote responsible ownership and the welfare of the horse.

The objective is to rehome potentially useful & valuable horses, in particular ex-racehorses, to knowledgeable, experienced, suitable homes.  By implementing a professional screening process, unlike any other online system,

All horses are screened as to their potential usefulness and only those which could be potentially useful as companions or rideable horses will be listed.  All applicants are screened and only those which match the requirements of the horse’s needs and owner’s requirements will be put forward for consideration.   Trials, visits and veterinary exams are strongly encouraged as are home checks.  Loan agreements will be generated to suit the requirements of both parties once a suitable new carer has been found.

By providing this service to help rehome horses where value is not an issue but finding the “right home” is crucial, Horses4Homes will help to significantly reduce the number of healthy horses,  unnecessarily slaughtered each year and reduce the burden on equine charities.

Customised, relevant and up-to-date newsfeeds on a website will improve your search engine ranking and provide a solid connection with your market.  Unique news feeds can also be exploited across other platforms and distribution channels including RSS, email marketing and PR campaigns.

The Benefits of News Feeds
Instant delivery of unique, relevant and topical news feeds will ensure your website is always up-to-date. Those who want to read your articles will keep coming back increasing the number of repeat visitors. Your site will also be seen as the place to go to for news about your industry. With the articles residing on your own website, there will be no need for any more external links to news articles, keeping your hard-won customers on your site.

• Be seen as an ‘authority source’ for your industry
• Important keywords can be included in xml and in the article body copy in order to help identify news pages to the search engines.
• News articles can link to the most profitable internal website pages to aid navigation for readers and to direct web crawlers.
• News can be automatically reformatted for clients, subscribers and readers in the form of an e-newsletter to encourage traffic back to your site.
• News pages are dynamic, which helps search engines regard the site as current.

Levels of service

Research and copywriting For Unique & Frequent Content
We will plan, direct and commission relevant freelancers to prepare unique articles for your site, relevant to your strategic objectives and your specific audience.  Articles are not duplicated in the same form across the World Wide Web, which is important to search engines seeking high quality content.

You, as the client, will have full control over the types of stories written. You can change the brief at anytime and we will ensure that all news feeds will conform to and change with your SEO strategies.

Alternatively, a less expensive system is to publish RSS feeds from news sites.

Publishing
We will develop a system to add a separate static page to your site to encourage search engines to explore and crawl a website more frequently (including important keywords in the news url to help identify the page). Articles can be archived to encourage further crawling of the site, and to provide an invaluable online knowledge resource to site users.

Processing Engine
We can help locate a suitable tailored or RSS feed and develop a processing engine module within your administration console, allowing the site administrator to:

- View all stories
- Search / sort
- Edit / delete / publish/ unpublish
- View how many feeds were received and stories imported
- Persent stats on a realtime chart on the console dashboard

We can also develop dynamic front end photo and video galleries. We can time the delivery of the feed to suit your needs, for example when viewing figures are high or when readers log on in the morning.

Interested?
Please contact us for further information and a range of choices.

Whether it is a phenomenal website, online marketing strategy, complex software solution or mobile app, we guarantee price and delivery date. Our creative team in Cheltenham, UK and our dedicated team of software and website specialists in our Bucharest office work seamlessly together to successfully deliver:

Corporate websites
Document and Content management systems
Online customer helpdesks
Billing and trading systems
Online sales environments
Membership management
Personnel recruitment and administration platforms
Property and sales platforms
Discussion forums and voting systems
URN FMCG promotions
Auctioning systems
Booking and reservation platforms

As marketing becomes increasingly technology led, The Marketing Farm is ideally placed to provide all the marketing disciplines you need under one umbrella, seamlessly integrating great concepts with smashing technology to generate value and results. Contact us to find out how we can help your business.

The commonest mistake of an amateur marketeer is to clutter the message with too much information. I have often passed a local business’ roadside sign and wondered how on earth one can be expected to read the essay without braking hard and causing a collision.

Successful messaging needs to be lucid. Keep the flavour of the message simple, unique and memorable and its length digestible.

The desperate salesman will tell you too many reasons to purchase. Just as we are beware of those who protest too much, we are wary of those who sell too hard.

There is a skill to condensing the message into a concise line and theme and a requirement for an external agency with necessary objectivity and perspective. Remember, even the most successful novelists rely on editors to reduce and condense their scripts. In many cases, the script may reduce by 100 pages!

As humans, we value our mental sovereignty and the most potent advertising messaging will identify triggers and exploit these so the audience completes the thought process themselves. That being the case, the audience has thrown away cynicism and come to own the thought themselves. This is messaging at its most powerful. It is virtually subliminal.

These well known slogans and straplines are all great examples of how this works. They are carefully plotting and promoting thought processes and associations.

Allinson’s Bread
Bread wi’ nowt taken out

Andrex toilet tissue
Soft, strong and very long

Apple Computers
Think different

BMW
The ultimate driving machine

Benson & Hedges
Pure Gold

Bisto
Ahh Bisto!

Bounty
Bounty – the taste of paradise

British Airways
The World’s Favorite Airline

British Army
Join the professionals

British Egg Marketing Board
Go to work on an egg
Happiness is egg shaped
You can rely on the lion
There is a lion on my egg
Was there a lion on your egg this morning?

British Rail
Let the train take the strain
This is the age of the train
We’re getting there

British Telecom
It’s good to talk

Burger King
Have it your way
It takes two hands to hold a Whopper

Cadbury’s Milk Tray
And all because the lady loves Milk Tray

Pedigree Chum
Top breeders recommend it

Penguin Biscuits
P-P-P-Pick up a Penguin

Radio Caroline
The station of the nation

Shredded Wheat
Bet you can’t eat three

Sunday Times
Sunday isn’t Sunday without the Sunday Times

Tesco Supermarkets
Every little helps

Weetabix
Have you had your Weetabix

Whiskas Cat Food
Eight out of ten cats prefer it

Wonderbra
Hello boys

Yellow Pages
Let your fingers do the walking

And of course..

The Marketing Farm
Growing Business

Because that is what we are about!

We are now in the launch phase of Hauctions®, arguably the most complex online auctioning system developed since Ebay and the world’s first automated online auction platform for horses. We are approaching the end of a year’s software development programme. Already the first horse has hauctioned (UK to Spain)! This project is a classic case of our ability to take an online dream from concept to fruition by applying software development skill and excellence with an appropriate strategy.

Launched this month, Hauctions provides online auctioning services for horses across the world. Its objective is to introduce honesty, transparency and attain true value for all buyers and sellers of horses. The fundamental advantages of publicly cataloguing and auctioning a horse to achieve maximum promotion and value is now available to every horse owner, without the need to transport the horse or any registration fees.

Hauctions is packed with all the features you would expect of a global online auction site.

• Every package 3% of Auctioned value payable only if successful auctioned
• A maximum upload of 3 videos and ten photos
• An interactive profile on Hauctions for buyer and seller ratings and feedback
• Full publication and indexing of the Entry on Hauctions
• Use of our unique secure automated online auction bidding management system with secure dashboard highlighting current bids; watch and view status; questions asked; and edit auction facility
• Automated YouTube and Twitter promotion
• Free escrow service to provide bidder confidence
• Google mapping is automatically generated for each entry’s auction page and will highlight listed vets, transporters and agents within that region
• 30 day archiving of information following sale in case of dispute with buyer
• Opportunity to automatically re-auction if the horse fails to sell at no cost

Financial Security

Escrow provides added assurance for both parties and Vendors are encouraged to use this free service.

When selecting Hauctions Escrow, the successful bidder’s monies are lodged with Hauctions to confirm the sale. This will be the value of the horse plus ingoing and outgoing bank transfer fees. The Vendor is automatically notified when the monies have been lodged and at this point the horse is deemed sold.

The monies are automatically released (less 3% and outgoing bank transfer) to the Vendor when the Buyer has confirmed on their confirmation email that the point the Vendor has chosen to complete the sales process has been completed (before the horse leaves the yard / when it arrives at the buyer’s yard).

This service provides peace of mind, in particular to international transactions.

The campaign was supported by an online campaign and supporting literature.

We are pleased to have been involved in launching a variety of  innovative new dairy products into the UK market this year, including Kerryold Honey Spread and Dairy Partners Peelable Cheese.

This will be an exciting New Year for our growing marketing and software teams. We will be launching the world’s first international equine auction site. This is the culmination of ten month’s software development.  We will be taking our joint venture client, EMS, into European and Asian trading markets with software and marketing support. We are in the advanced stages of launching several bespoke online stores. We are also developing online billing systems to enable larger businesses to benefit from paperless billing. We will continue to keep at the cutting edge of mobile technologies and app development. In addition, we continue to help many smaller businesses grow and prosper.

In essence we look forward to Growing Business! We hope we may be of assistance to yours in 2011.

Matthew Rymer