by admin | 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
|
- Do you have a costed Marketing Strategy Plan for the year?
- Have you established your KPI’s, e.g.: Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Sale
- Are you being found by enough new prospects?
- Are you getting enough referrals?
- Do you have a Referral Strategy?
|
 |
2. 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
|
- Do you have all of your Social Media profiles set up correctly; do they reflect your
company and personal brand?
- Do you know which Social Media channels to focus on?
- Are you interacting with prospects and customers via Social Media?
- Do you have a Content Marketing Plan so that you can be “active and successful” on Social Media?
- Have you personally or your company carved out a niche that you are known for?
- 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
|
- 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
|
- 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
|
- Start treating these practices not as separate channels, but as one part of holistic
process.
- Have a Content Marketing Plan for each of the channels and work out how they
should be integrated amongst each other and your website.
- 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
|
- Can you easily segment your database and get insights into the behavior of your
customers?
- 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
|
- Do you have a powerful, unique brand with an interesting story to tell clients and
prospects?
- Are all your staff singing from the same hymnbook?
- 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
|
- Are you communicating regularly with your database and is the marketing
communication tailored to different segments?
- 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
|
- Do you have great content?
- Is it promoted sufficiently? No point creating more content if not enough people are
engaging with what you have!
- 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
|
- Does your brand have a well developed visual palette?
- 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
by admin | Dec 14, 2012 | Blog, Promotion
Just because you are using the highly 
emotional and fast growing medium of online video, it doesn’t mean that viewers will automatically engage with you. Here are some numbers published by Video Brewery to improve your engagement with viewers.
First 10 seconds are critical.
Research shows that 20% of visitors will click away during these first few moments. Just like Copywriting put your best stuff first; don’t save it for later, as there may not be a later. The opening 10 seconds of a video should be treated like a headline in print. If it doesn’t grab the reader / viewer then you will miss them altogether.
In the first 30 seconds another 30% of visitors will disappear, 45% by 60 seconds and almost 60% by 120 seconds.
Counter intuitively; mobile users have longer attention spans.
Most mobile users are watching online video for between 2 and 5 minutes, the 5 minutes being on an iPad when compared to desktop users.
Most shared videos are 15 seconds or shorter.
These 15-second online videos are shared 37% more often than those between 30 and 60 seconds.
As with all content marketing and in fact any marketing tactics you can only control what you can measure – so video analytics are vital to learn what is working and what isn’t. You can read the original article here.
Check out our great Fixed Fee Marketing with Online Video Marketing Packages
by admin | Aug 15, 2012 | Blog, Promotion, Strategy
‘What is a brand’ is still the most misunderstood and misused concept in the small business arena.
In previous blogs I have at length discussed the fact that it is not a logo, name or packaging, but the total sum of perceptions that your customers and prospects have about your business or organization.
It is what they think and feel about you and those emotions and thoughts are the result of your target audience experiences with your company.
But there is an even simpler way to look at the concept of brand, the way that the world of business looked at it before the word became a way for ad agencies to not only examine competitive strategies in their bid to sell to the mass market in the 1950s but also a way to mystify the advertising process and hence become the guardians of the ‘brand’.
So what did business people say before the word brand entered the everyday vocabulary of business media?
Here’s the way three great mean described:
“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it”
-Benjamin Franklin
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 min to ruin it. If you think about that you do things differently.”
-Warren Buffett
“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
-Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com
So what is a brand?
Simple – it’s your reputation. So brand building is actually all about building and protecting your reputation. Although I hate the somewhat old fashioned and hence manipulative sounding title of the book that at one stage outsold the Bible, the message in it is sincere and well meaning and one that has not been adopted anywhere near enough. I’m talking about a book that gives us all the most basic and amazing principles of persuasion, reputation building and managing people -“How to Win Friends and Influence People”
The next 4 blogs will summarize the 4 chapters of Dale Carnegie’s must read book to effective communication and illustrate the way they directly relate to the AIDA (Attention | Interest | Desire | Action) model of advertising.
by admin | 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.
by admin | 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
by admin | Feb 20, 2012 | Blog, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Training, Promotion, Strategy
There are not many certainties in the world today, but here are 3 we can examine and show you how LinkedIn can assist you in benefitting from each:
1. The world has changed and the change of pace will keep accelerating.
Whether there will be another financial crisis or not and how big it will be is not something any of us can predict or control, but jobs will keep being lost; outsourcing, offshoring, resources will keep flowing to where the return on investment is the greatest. Whether it is job vacancies or business opportunities you will have to work harder and smarter to stand out and differentiate yourself from a greater number of competitors all trying to get a smaller share of the pie.
So, who can you rely on when times get tough?
You! And the equity in you; your personal brand. LinkedIn is the perfect personal branding and publicity tool.
LinkedIn, is a way that you can communicate to the world
- What you know, your experience and expertise, knowledge and the benefits you can deliver to your clients and manage and leverage
- Who you know, your trusted network, the people that think you are good
There’s no point debating which of the two is more important, you need a good dose of both for success.
2. Online Marketing in general and Social Media Marketing specifically, together with the irreversible swing towards inbound marketing means that if your online marketing assets are not optimised and helping you and your business ‘get found’ then you will rapidly be left behind.
When it comes to B2B and professional services, LinkedIn provides the ultimate platform to combine all of your marketing assets, once they have been optimised – no point driving visitors to a leaky boat:
- Your LinkedIn Profile itself is a great way to be found by prospects and stay top of mind in front of your customers
- Your Website
- Your Blog
- Your YouTube Channel
- Your Slideshare
3. Everybody in business relies on it, everybody wants it, everybody knows it is the most effective way of attracting customers, yet when it comes to the holy grail of generating referrals very few businesses / salespeople have a have a plan and a process to turn their connections into contracts!
LinkedIn is the perfect Sales Tool for B2B and professional services marketers that allows you to leverage your networks. LinkedIn provides the perfect and simple platform for every step of a typical Referral Process:
- Identifying Referrers / Influencers in your Network
- Providing customers with a WOW experience (LinkedIn won’t help you there – you need to be great at what you do or deliver exceptional value through your products and services!)
- Stay Top of Mind through regular communication that adds value to your customers and prospects
- Educate your network how to refer to you
- Ask for targeted Referrals and Introductions, rather than ‘asking for referrals blindly’
- Recognise and Reward those that refer to you!
Don’t get left out, get LinkedIn.
To learn about our LinkedIn courses check this out.
For a Free and No Obligation Discussion about your specific needs contact us today.
Recent Comments