2013 Trends, Predictions and Importance of Content Marketing Strategy

2013 Trends, Predictions and Importance of Content Marketing Strategy

by | Jan 24, 2013 | Blog, Content, Design, Promotion, Strategy

What are you going to do differently in 2013?

Checklist for New Year

The Mayans were wrong, we are all still here, your clients and prospects still need you, but
they are increasingly harder to communicate with; grabbing attention is more difficult and
keeping it is even harder.

Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is not only the definition of insanity but
it also means that today you will NOT get the same result, but one that is substantially worse
– you will be going backwards.

For your convenience we have prepared a summary of Hubspot’s 27-page Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2013 and one we have turned into a simple Marketing Action Plan Checklist.
1. Inbound Marketing (Get Found*, Convert, Analyse) will become more important and both
small and large enterprises are dedicating more of their budget to online / digital and away
from Outbound / Traditional Marketing.

*Get Found = Social Media+SEO+Blogs+PPC

CHECKLIST
  1. Do you have a costed Marketing Strategy Plan for the year?
  2. Have you established your KPI’s, e.g.: Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Sale
  3. Are you being found by enough new prospects?
  4. Are you getting enough referrals?
  5. Do you have a Referral Strategy?
 

 

 

TMN Content Marketing House2. Marketing Communication is moving away from Campaigns to Real Time Communication thanks to Social Media and immediacy of client expectations. Prospects are increasingly contacting / finding (Inbound Marketing) prospective suppliers / sellers and they want answers NOW! Technology will keep driving these changes with new widgets, gadgets, readers and scanners, RFID tags, and of course apps! Gamification will also grow as a marketing tool beyond product placement to improve the delivery of content in a more enjoyable way.

 

CHECKLIST
  1. Do you have all of your Social Media profiles set up correctly; do they reflect your
    company and personal brand?
  2. Do you know which Social Media channels to focus on?
  3. Are you interacting with prospects and customers via Social Media?
  4. Do you have a Content Marketing Plan so that you can be “active and successful” on Social Media?
  5. Have you personally or your company carved out a niche that you are known for?
  6. See how we deliver Content Marketing for our clients

 

3. CRM and Unified View of the customer will become more and more important, and some
of the new systems are now integrating Social Media information for their client records.

ACTION
  1. If you are thinking about these issues please give us a call. Choosing the CRM system
    (or getting the most out of your existing one) is a minefield and we have access to a number
    of world-class experts at qubePartners as well as our own team that can assist you.

 

4. Mobile Optimisation of Websites will keep growing and become a must have channel for
many businesses.

ACTION
  1. Pretty easy to do depending on what your current website has been built in. Give us a
    call and we can provide answers very quickly.

5. Social Media, Content Marketing and Off Page SEO will keep overlapping and merging
and On-Page SEO “tricks of the trade” will play a less important role. Social Search and User
Generated Content with Facebook’s and Google’s focus in this area will undoubtedly
make a big impact!

ACTION
  1. Start treating these practices not as separate channels, but as one part of holistic
    process.
  2. Have a Content Marketing Plan for each of the channels and work out how they
    should be integrated amongst each other and your website.
  3. Check out our website dedicated to LinkedIn Training and Consulting

 

6. Smart or Dynamic Content (ala Amazon Recommended for You) will enable you and your
competitors to serve up highly personalised messages to the right audience at the right time.

CHECKLIST
  1. Can you easily segment your database and get insights into the behavior of your
    customers?
  2. Can your CRM, ERP, Email Marketing technology / software act on the insights?

 

7. Story telling will become even more important as companies scramble to be seen more
human (than their competitors) and develop a trustworthy, approachable and caring brand
personality.

CHECKLIST
  1. Do you have a powerful, unique brand with an interesting story to tell clients and
    prospects?
  2. Are all your staff singing from the same hymnbook?
  3. Download our Brand Design Questionnaire from our Free Marketing Resources
    Section (it’s the 4th document down the page) – knowing and acting on the answers in
    this document should be the cornerstone of your marketing communications.

“The advent of social media has meant that the world of separate internal and external
messaging has disappeared. If a customer talks to your Customer Service department, they
expect the same response they’d get if they talk to marketing, or sales, or engineering.
Creating a unified external face is critical. If you want to build long-term relationships,
you’ve got to have a consistent, human voice – coming from all levels of your organization.” –
NICK JOHNSON founder useful Social Media

 

8. Email will not die but become more personalised, relevant and targeted based on real time
data.

CHECKLIST
  1. Are you communicating regularly with your database and is the marketing
    communication tailored to different segments?
  2. Are they engaging with your content and offers?

 

9. Content will remain King and more marketing teams and departments; small and large
businesses will invest into more quality content and attempt to make it go viral or at least
improve the chances of it being passed onto to a secondary audience. With falling production
prices and better and simpler technologies, we see Online Video as the ‘biggest and most
effective mover and shaker’ in Content Marketing. Most small businesses do not have a great
website, let alone reasonable video content, so this area will keep booming.

CHECKLIST
  1. Do you have great content?
  2. Is it promoted sufficiently? No point creating more content if not enough people are
    engaging with what you have!
  3. Check out our great Fixed Fee Marketing with Online Video Marketing Packages

 

10. “Sites like Pinterest and Instagram prove that visual content is really worth 1,000 words
(or in instagram’s case, $1 billion). Infographics, photos, picture boards, video, and other forms of rich-media will increase over the coming years as humans look to digest more information faster than ever before.” – Hubspot Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2013, p.23.

CHECKLIST
  1. Does your brand have a well developed visual palette?
  2. Do you have a suitable image library? Make sure this is part of your Content
    Marketing Plan

————————
Wishing you a healthy and productive 2013. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need any assistance in improving your marketing results.

qubePartners

Don’t let your trade mark become generic!

Don’t let your trade mark become generic!

by | Jul 6, 2012 | Blog, Content, Design

Bakery can continue to use “Granola”

On 8 June 2012, Justice Jagot of the Federal Court of Australia held that Australian Health and Nutrition Association Limited, trading as Sanitarium Health Food Company (Sanitarium), could not enforce its trade mark registration rights over the word “GRANOLA” against Irrewarra Estate Pty Ltd, owner of Irrewarra Sourdough Bakery.

This case demonstrates the importance of ensuring that a registered trade mark does not become generic over time. This is where advertising and branding agencies can play an important role as the way a brand is marketed has a big impact on whether a mark can remain protected.

What happened in the case

Since 1921, Sanitarium has been the owner of the Australian registered trade mark “GRANOLA”. In August 2010, Sanitarium initiated legal proceedings against Irrewarra Sourdough Bakery for infringing its registered trade mark for the word “GRANOLA” (covering “preparations made from cereals”) after the bakery sold packets of toasted nut, seed and oat mix labelled “ALL NATURAL HANDMADE GRANOLA”.

The bakery also owns its own trade mark, pictured below in relation to breads and baked goods:

Sanitarium argued that Irrewarra had infringed its “GRANOLA” registered trade mark by using it in that way.

While Sanitarium conceded that the word “GRANOLA” has been understood in the US to denote a crunchy toasted cereal and was in common use there, it argued that in Australia it has a more “boutique” meaning associated exclusively with Sanitarium-branded breakfast products.

In response to this, the bakery argued that the word “GRANOLA” merely describes the contents of the product and pointed to a list of Australian dictionary entries for the word “GRANOLA” to support its case that the word is now common.

The court’s findings

The judge took the view that the words used by the bakery: “ALL NATURAL HANDMADE GRANOLA” refer to a product consisting of grains, fruits and nuts, which may be baked or toasted into large clusters. She observed that since 2004 the word “GRANOLA” started appearing in Australian dictionaries and has “percolated” into the “consciousness of Australians”.

Thus, the bakery was using “GRANOLA” in a descriptive sense rather than as a trade mark (that is, to indicate the origin of the good) and therefore, Sanitarium could not establish trade mark infringement.

Lessons

An important lesson that flows from the decision is that brand owners should take steps to prevent their brands from becoming generic. This means that while an invented word may be validly registered as a trade mark at the outset (as Sanitarium did with its “GRANOLA” mark, from 1921), its ability to stop other traders from using the brand could be limited if the word becomes used in common language.

A good tip is to use trade marks as adjectives rather than nouns.

To do this have the common descriptive name (ie the noun) of the product or service follow the mark at least the first time that the mark appears in your marketing material.

Tip 1:

Correct: Buy CADBURY chocolate.

Incorrect: Buy CADBURY.

Correct: Use SAVLON cream.

Incorrect: Use SAVLON.

Tip 2:

If you take the trade mark out of the sentence and it still makes sense – that will be good trade mark use.

The Rollerblades example

For example it is well known that the Italian-based company, Nordica S.p.A. actively enforced its “ROLLERBLADE” trade mark rights against various retailers around Australia when they used the word “rollerblades”. As a result, the trade mark is still registered (Trade Mark Number: 480323) and traders now use other words such as “inline skates” instead.

In some situations, a trade mark that has over time, become generic, could even be removed from the Register.

Disclaimer – The contents of this article do not replace tailored legal advice

*Sharon Givoni is an intellectual property lawyer with 16 years and has clients across all industries.

Junk Mail in my Letterbox: An urgent need for proper content strategy

Junk Mail in my Letterbox: An urgent need for proper content strategy

by | Apr 27, 2012 | Blog, Design, Promotion

A recipe for depressing consumers and marketers alike! Here they are laid out on my kitchen counter:


The quality of “stuffing” in our letter boxes certainly justifies this paper waste being called Junk Mail! Here’s a sample from just one day, which is typical of type and quality SME (small medium enterprise) Junk Mail versus big retailer catalogs.

These are 2 distribution companies:

1. Letterbox Deals which comes in a brochure format – this one had around 30 pages and 27 Advertisers

2. Business Link, which is Local Advertising company which sells the space, prints and then distributes into mailbox – they had 21 advertisers all as loose leaf or brochures in different sizes and formats.

The overall standard of these and all other junk mail I have ever received is pathetic.

Most rules of design and copywritng have been broken / ignored (fact is the owners of these brands just don’t know what they don’t know).

Letterbox Deals – 8 out of 27 were just reasonable, or at least acceptable.

Business Link – 1 out of 21 was good (and it was a Franchise – Step Into Life), 1 was ok, the rest a perfect example of what not to do when it comes to Copywriting and Design.

The ratio of terrible to reasonable is the same in your local newspaper, Manufacturer’s Monthly and most other trade mags.

Interestingly the standard in North America (USA and Canada) is much higher, due to the more competitive nature of their markets.

The only reason most of these businesses are still alive is because their competition is just as bad and consumers have effectively no choice!

And here’s the bit that makes me happy – business owners who get this will prosper with the proper content strategy: by developing a brand, communicating clearly, effectively and utilizing basic communication principles.

Briggs Communications: Brand Strategy

Briggs Communications: Brand Strategy

by | Feb 20, 2012 | Blog, Content, Design, Promotion

Ready, Willing and Able

We are passionate, energetic and committed Communication specialists. Our area of expertise is in Talent Placement, Media Training, Public Relations and Crisis Management.

Website Design

Stationery Set

Word Document Template

Powerpoint Template

Creative Marketing Theme

Corporate Style Guide

Background

Client : Briggs Communications

Website: briggscommunications.com.au

Ready, Willing and Able

We are passionate, energetic and committed Communication specialists.   Our area of expertise is in Talent Placement, Media Training, Public Relations and Crisis Management.

Project Scope

Brand Strategy and Positioning

Logo redesign

Copywriting

Website Development

Creative Marketing Theme

Social Media

Content Strategy for the Web: Is Your Website Built for Online Success?

Content Strategy for the Web: Is Your Website Built for Online Success?

by | Feb 5, 2012 | Blog, Content, Design, Strategy

All websites can be classified into 4 types:

1. A site that sells product(s) or service(s) by the quality of design and copywriting, which is in turn

2. A lead generation site that attracts potential new clients

3. A customer support or self service site that reduces costs by completing routine tasks, replacing or reducing human interaction

4. A content site that educates or informs visitors about your organization or service

Most websites are a mixture of the above, yet content strategy is the key! They all need to do 2 things to be successful:

  1. Attract enough new prospects to survive and prosper by cost effectively letting their target audience know that they exist (PUSH), and/or getting found (PULL).
  2. Once prospects land on your website, their experience there needs to be positive, and this is a decision that is often made in less than 1/20th of a second! The user experience is determined by the quality of design and copywriting which is in turn developed by following a strategic process outlined by the diagram below:



Website marketing is an ongoing process, similar to designing and building a house. It is then important to maintain and build the value of your marketing properties and prevent this value being depreciated through neglect of infrastructure or promotional activity by competitors.

To get the best return on the marketing investment, time needs to be dedicated to answer the questions that assist in building a solid foundation for the marketing of your business online.

By starting at the bottom and working up, the process will be shorter, less painful and more profitable.