We have to change the way we are using social media in 2019. Not just you, not just me, but all of us.
Read MoreChoosing the right target audience for your email marketing
We spoke recently about why email marketing is important and why it should be a key part of your amplification strategy. But there’s no sense in sending out a carefully crafted message that doesn’t add value to the people you are trying to target – but who are they anyway? Who are you designing your EDMs for and what are you trying to get them to do?
Read MoreYou need to be sending EDMs.
Itʼs a topic that comes up pretty quickly when you talk to business owners – they arenʼt getting the engagement they want on social media, the cost of boosting all their posts is too high and they arenʼt even sure if anyone is seeing their posts at all. As a company who works in the space, we hear this all too often and we see it regularly. More and more, social media platforms are becoming a discovery platform or a portfolio showcase, rather than a regular engagement channel. They are no longer the key way to capture the attention of your audience.
Read MoreIt’s Time to Marie Kondo your Communications Strategy – and Here’s How.
If I hear about Marie Kondo one more time, I am going to scream.
Read MoreFOCUS
A new year is a time when most of us review the year that has been and take the opportunity to adjust our habits moving into the new year. Call it new years resolutions or intentions or your focus for the year, now is the time to be considering how you want your year to look, especially within your work or business.
Read MoreWEDDING STATIONARY – BEN + EMMA
As a designer, any work that you undertake for yourself is always going to be heavily scrutinised. This is an expression of what you like, not what your client is directing you towards or what you need to do to make a crust. This is truly your own style, and it had best be incredible.
Read MoreYou’ll get out of your branding what you put into it.
The topic of how unhealthy fast food is for the average person pops up every second day and I often wonder, do athletes ever eat fast food in the lead up to an important event? I wonder if athletes who are in form ever eat fast food?
Read MoreDON’T JUST WRITE YOUR BLOG – AMPLIFY IT
I spoke last week about how important it is to be blogging for your brand, but it’s important to note that no one wants to be putting in all the effort of blogging without sharing it with the intended audience. While content being live on your website is a good thing for increasing your search results or giving you kudos in the eyes of Google, ultimately what we should be trying to do with any blog post is to deliver value for your customers – so we have to get the content to the people! What are you doing to amplify your blog posts? Firstly, you need to consider the lifecycle of your blog post when writing it. Is it a piece of evergreen or cornerstone content – a blog post on a topic that will continue to be relevant for an extended period of time? Or is it really topical and will only be relevant for a little while? If your content is evergreen, share it a little bit now, but anticipate that you will be able to share and promote that content for as much as years afterwards. If your content is only going to be relevant for a short period, share and amplify it quickly and regularly over a shorter space of time to get maximum mileage out of your posts. Then consider your amplification platforms. Where does your blog go once it’s live on your website? Pick and mix from the list, depending on what your marketing strategy looks like right now: Email newsletter | Affiliate or partner websites | Social media | As an article on LinkedIn | as part of a campaign promoting another piece of content | via direct email to customers (usually in an email signature) | As a printed fact sheet | Now consider the piece of content itself – what are the ways that we can get maximum mileage out of this one idea? Some of these I touched on earlier in the article. You can share a blog post with your suppliers or partners in the hope that they will share it with their audience. You can turn a brief (350 words or so for best results) blog post into a longer report or fact sheet. Turn quotes from the blog post into images to go onto your social media. Create an explainer video that…
Read MoreWHY BRANDS SHOULD WRITE BLOGS
Whether you call it copy, content, news, updates, articles or blogs, writing words that you share regularly with your customers is becoming more and more important for businesses. Blogs generally fall into one of the below topics: Product information | Service information | News | Corporate messaging | Industry education | Work reviews | Industry updates | Blogging was once considered the domain of young people who wanted to share their every thought, sort of like a diary online. Now, bloggers are major influencers online and writing a corporate blog has a host of benefits for your brand. Here’s why you should be putting pen to paper (or keys to screen) for your business. Become an expert voice in your industry or space Blogs provide an excellent avenue for brands to share insights on your product, service or corporate mission and culture – heck, it can provide you with an opportunity to criticise your competitors or call for greater legislation. A blog provides you with an opportunity to share your knowledge with your customer base and allows you to position yourself as an expert within your field. But with great power comes great responsibility – make sure that you have a clear, strong, correct message and take time to really consider what it is you want to say, who you’re targeting and what you want them to get out of it. Contributions to SEO – particularly with googles new changes Blogging contributes in a number of different ways to your search engine optimisation – it provides more keywords for Google to index from your site and updating content attracts users to your website in the first place. The Google algorithms are constantly changing, and in the latest update in June of 2018, Google announced that they will be giving greater search results to those brands who create engaging, regularly updated content that people want to read. So whether you’re publishing blogs on topics that people regularly search relative to your business, or whether you’re explaining concepts, strategies and processes, what you write will contribute more than ever to the discoverability of your brand. Forced consideration Sometimes, particularly with new products or services, brands just create these things out of a perceived customer need. The marketing strategy, the communication strategy, where precisely the product or service fits in the market – that can be a bit…
Read MoreDIGITAL ADVERTISING IS NOT A CURE ALL
I was once told an absolute gem of a fact that has really stuck with me through the years, so forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. You are more likely to complete Navy S.E.A.L training than you are to click on a banner ad. And yet brands continue to invest in and be disappointed by the results achieved through new ways of, and greater quantities of, digital advertising. Whether it’s the post that appears every 10 images in your Instagram feed or the onslaught of promotions you see in your email inbox or around your favourite blog, there are more ways than ever to target people digitally. Digital advertising should never be seen as a cure-all as part of a marketing mix. Simply launching digital ads, whether they are display, social, or programmatic, does not guarantee you business. It’s really as simple as that. I can completely understand in a small business that we believe, in the modern age, that there should be a magic fix, a simple solution to promoting your products to the right people. But its just not true. Those who make the platform (Facebook is a really easy example in this case, but all the platforms are similar in this regard) are trying to get you to spend more and more on digital marketing – and so they promise highly targeted, specific delivery to your ideal audience. The reality is that they can’t guarantee that – and even if the ad is served to the right audience, that doesn’t guarantee that the audience is interested in the product or service you’re trying to sell. In the days of print advertising, a print distribution of 50,000 units did not guarantee you 50,000 purchases. It did not guarantee you 5 purchases. It simply told you how many eyeballs would be on your ad, maybe, if they saw it at all. Im not trying to suggest that this is the right approach either, particularly if your brand has low marketing budgets, but we need to think more broadly about how to target our ideal audience and not simply look for the quick fix. The horribly unsexy truth is that the best way to capture your ideal audience Is to create content that engages them. It’s not as simple as “build it and they will come” but use the technology we have (namely social media,…
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