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The hidden risks of TopBuzz

With many services out there for marketers, producing content and getting it to your audience has never been easier. However, not all services are trustworthy. We recently came to learn about TopBuzz, a platform that has divided opinions.

All started with an email…

A couple of weeks ago, we received an email out of the blue from TopBuzz, a content distribution platform, claiming to be ‘impressed’ by a video we did for a client. The email content was quite generic and seemed to be automated. TopBuzz said they were able to enlarge our video audience via their platform and we would be compensated for all the views we got.

A couple days ago, we received another email. This time, it was from a person claiming to be from this company, boasting about the number of active users and the number of views that all the videos get that are shared on their platform. She was very forward in her approach and encouraged us to become a ‘premium creator’.

TopBuzz email

Now, we did a little bit of research on these guys and it was scary to see what would have happened if we signed up with them.

TopBuzz key things we discovered:

  1. According to past users of the platform, the communication from TopBuzz is poor and scarce if you ever try and contact them. If you have a problem with something, TopBuzz are unlikely to help and at best, you might receive template emails that are likely to be irrelevant.
  2. This brings up the next problem. If you are unhappy with the platform…too bad. You can’t delete your account and your content will stay on TopBuzz’s platform forever.
  3. However, it gets worse! TopBuzz can use any videos uploaded to their platform in whatever way they want. Say you work hard and make a viral video. If that video is on their platform, they can publish it as their own and you would get no credit. Unfortunately, most users only realised that this was their fate only after signing the contract without reading the small print in their T&Cs.

We were never interested in using this platform in the first place as the video we created for our client was content produced for a niche segment, it was an hour long and was a face to face interview. Targeting a mass audience and making revenue off views was not on the agenda, therefore, using this platform would have been unnecessary.

If you are producing viral videos, pursuing avenues through social media seems to be a safer option. For example, with Facebook, there are various pages that are dedicated to redistributing content according to different tastes.

Nevertheless, it’s important to be aware of dodgy services like this so be sure to do your research before jumping in!

Sources:

https://medium.com/@attibear/should-you-gin-up-for-topbuzz-ca19d5c1edac

https://digitalfox.media/tech-rhino/topbuzz-5-big-problems-service/

Use Content Marketing to Build Your Brand

 

Every business wants more customers, correct? However, not all businesses have the financial resources to pay for advertising or other costly marketing strategies to get people to their websites.

What are the options if you have budgetary constraints? You can use content creation and marketing to help build your business.

Develop and use a content brand strategy to help spread the word about your business offerings. Building brand awareness takes time, but it will play a critical role in your business success.

Sometimes, you can actually re-purpose content that has already produced results. Why not use the keywords and already proven successful content and focus your energies on promoting that content more aggressively?

Develop a Strategy

You have to develop a plan, follow it, and make modifications where necessary while you work. If you don’t know where you are going, you won’t get there.

Start with determining your “why”. Why are you creating content? Who are you trying to help and how can you help them better than others? Define your goals and make sure your content aligns with those goals.

Be Authentic

Trying to pretend you are someone you not usually doesn’t work out well. People are not stupid, they will eventually figure it out. It is important to develop trust with your readers and potential customers.

If you are not genuine and are being fake, you will lose business.

Build Your Reputation

Reputation is everything. Trust is built with those who have good reputations. Prove your value to potential customers by writing helpful, relevant, and authentic content.

Tell Your Story

People don’t like to be bombarded with sales advertisements or pushy sales content. It is a turn-off to most, so you will want to avoid being too promotional in your content marketing.

Instead, be sure your content is used as a means of communicating with your potential customers without selling.

Writing helpful and valuable content will help you build awareness of your brand by attracting and nurturing. You will be able to acquire new customers and retain current ones.

Your brand is actually your business story so make sure you tell it in interesting, relevant, unique, and useful ways. Share your expertise with your target market to position yourself as an industry expert.  

Know Your Target Market

If you don’t know who your target market is, how can you write content for them? Remember, you are not writing content for yourself, you are writing it to your potential customers.

You need to make sure your content is interesting, helpful, and relevant to those will are likely to make a purchase from your company. If you sell musical equipment, it would not be helpful to write a post about knitting. Stay on topic and be sure you are speaking to your desired audience.

Add Value

You want to differentiate yourself from your competition by providing value to your potential customers in creative ways. How about using humor to get your message across? It can be a solution to a problem or anything else that fits into your business model and provides help for your target.

Valuable, helpful, creative, and memorable content will increase the likelihood that people will make a purchase from your company.

Track Your Results

Keep track of your progress. See which content yields the best results, whether those results are views, shares, opt-ins, or sales.

If you don’t pay attention to what is working and what is not working, you will waste valuable time and not get the best results of your content marketing.

Promote Your Content

You can have the best content on the Internet but if no one sees it, what difference does it make? Social media is a powerful platform to share your content.

Use Twitter to share important tips. Post a summary of your post with a link to it on LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.

The more unique, interesting, valuable, and humorous posts are generally more popular on social media and are more likely to be shared.

There is nothing wrong with asking others to share your content. If you know influencers in your niche, having them share your content with their social media audience can exponentially increase your views.

The bottom line is you should pay attention to the quality of your content marketing to build your brand, connect with your customers, build trust, and eventually make more sales.

 

My Internship Experience at Creative Agency Secrets — Abigail Mok

Hello my name is Abigail. I am a recent Commerce graduate with a major of Marketing and Information Systems. For the past month, I had the privilege to intern at Creative Agency Secrets. I am sad to bid farewell but I am glad that it has been an incredible month working with Rebecca, Conrado, and Tabhitha. I have learned so much within a short amount of time. Abigail in Queenstown

What I have learned

Throughout the month, I had the chance to step into the shoes of a marketer. I promoted events across various online platforms such as Facebook and Eventfinda. I created blog posts and mailshots.  I completed some marketing research for a client as well. It has been an eye-opening experience to help to update client websites and assisting other tasks. It increased my understanding of the responsibilities of marketers.

Within this month-long internship, I have gained hands-on experience using various marketing tools to promote events and products, which enhanced my copywriting skills. It has been both fun and challenging taking on the role of a marketing assistant. This experience has also boosted my capability to work in teams in a corporate environment. It was great being a part of meetings and observing how marketing teams work together.

A heartfelt thank you

Unsurprisingly, the real marketing world is vastly different from the textbook marketing that I know. Knowing marketing principles and having experiences creating marketing solutions for clients during my undergraduate studies still did not prepare myself for all the challenges in the real marketing world. I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to work alongside Rebecca and the team. Thank you for your guidance along this exciting journey of mine! Has been a pleasure working here and learning from you. I would also like to thank all the friendly people working at 74D France Street South. You have my best wishes!

For those who would like to intern here, you can get in touch with the team. Don’t worry if you have no prior marketing experience, I am sure the Creative Agency Secrets Team will take good care of you.

Since Christmas is drawing near, I would love to close by wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

3 Unique Ways to Increase Employee Engagement ROI

As a business owner or manager, you have most likely spent a lot of time and money on recruiting the highest quality candidates, and therefore you probably want to get as much out of these employees as possible. However, if you fail to adequately engage with them, you risk losing them to the competition. This is not what you want.

As a rule, there are three elements to employee engagement; realizing employee potential, having a common goal and promoting employee wellbeing. All three of these characteristics must be fulfilled if you are serious about employee engagement within your business.

Fortunately, it is not as hard as it may look to increase your employee engagement ROI, but you do need to ensure that you remain consistent in your efforts and take steps to engage your employees on a regular basis.

1.   Discuss your reward schemes

It may not be common practice to discuss your bonus plans with your employees, but if you are unable to offer an annual salary increase or a monthly bonus, it is better than you are open with your employees about this and discuss other financially viable ways in which you can recognize and reward your team. For example, you could have a trained masseuse come in and de-stress an employee who has just completed a high-profile and high-pressured task.

However, it is important to remember that it is not the reward itself that matters the most, it is the fact that you have taken the time and the initiative to communicate with your employees and have actively asked them what they want.

2.   Focus on offering a positive work-life balance

You may be surprised to hear that after salary, a healthy work-life balance is the most important driver for employees seeking out new employment. Therefore, if you fail to offer this to your employees, you could be pushing them directly into the arms of your competitors.

It is important that you are able to understand what your employees need from you as an employer; whether that be flexible working hours, the opportunity for remote working or the chance to work for another branch or office within the company. Inpulse employee engagement surveys can provide you with real-time insights into your employees and help you better predict and cater to their needs.

3.   Provide our employees with effective technology

Do you know that expression ‘a workman is only as good as his tools’? Well, this is a well-known saying for a reason. How can you expect to get the best return on employee engagement investment, if you do not provide your employees with the tools that they need to carry out their job to the highest possible standard?

Investing in the latest technologies and software solutions is possibly the simplest way to increase ROI by solving practical problems. This can free up more time for your employees to be creative or take a more active role in moving your business forward.

The key aspect to remember is that employee engagement is not something that you can just accomplish and then move on from; you need to consistently and enthusiastically engage your employees in your business if you want them to remain loyal, motivated and driven.

Karen Tobeck, CFO, Monteck Carter

Karen Tobeck our chief financial officer

If you run a business and you do not employ a CFO chief financial officer may I recommend that you examine why not?

Karen Tobeck, CFO, Monteck Carter

Karen Tobeck, CFO

I have spent two years working with Karen Tobeck and value she brings far surpasses the fee I pay.

Anybody who runs a business has three skills they need, delivering the product or service, sales and finance. Few people can do two of these. Most people can do one. Nobody can do three. This means is you must identify what you enjoy doing for your business and the one area where you need another advisor.

For me, it is finance.

Karen provides a monthly check-in with me and bi-monthly business plan goal-setting and results alignment. The key to our successful partnership is that she asks the right questions and helps me to focus with calm objectivity and external focus.

Members of my mastermind group have also hired her from their businesses. It does not matter if you already have an accountant or a bookkeeper on board. I have both and neither service is provided by Monteck Carter, Karen’s firm.

If I have challenged you today please go and look at her profile and get in touch if you would like an introductory short chat.

grown ups NZ, logo for grownups

GrownUps NZ, Richard Poole interview

Richard Poole founded the website GrownUps.co.nz and has built it up into a significant media propertygrown ups NZ, logo for grownupsfocused on the over 50s market.   What we found impressive is the ease with which the site has incorporated native advertising with traditional media as revenue streams. 

He kindly agreed to be interviewed by the Creative Agency Secrets team.

  1. What is your latest work?

    I’m continuing to work with GrownUps, although the business is now owned by Cigna Insurance, having sold to them earlier in 2016. It’s been an interesting experience moving from being a small business to working with one of the world’s largest corporates, which I’m learning from. It’s been particular useful to have more governance and rigour around process and also risk. Also, being able to work with an innovative marketer and CEO from Cigna in NZ, has been very rewarding.

    Since selling the business and taking away some of those stresses that do come with business ownership at times, we’re very proud to have doubled the revenue and also site traffic YOY plus grown membership 30%. It’s genuinely a real honour that each month we get to interact with over 160,000 visitors to the site and each week, speak with around half of our 120,000 members, via their weekly email newsletter. What’s really satisfying is that we have not wavered from our original vision from 2006 when we went live with GrownUps, whereby we seek to make every day better for any visitor to the site, whether by reading an interesting article out of the 8,000 that we now have, meeting an interesting fellow GrownUps members, playing a game on the site or maybe even being inspired to book that overseas trip that they deserve and have read about on the site.

  2. What’s impressed you?

    Having never worked in a corporate, it’s been great to see that very large corporates can work well with small businesses that they take under their wing – I think you each learn really. We’ve been fortunate having pragmatic leadership, clear guidelines and an understanding that we’re best to keep the essence of the small business feeling for customers/visitors. It actually can work very well.

  3. What’s the next big thing?

    There is no doubt that my mind seldom stops for a break in terms of thinking about meeting people’s needs, which is sometimes a challenge to be honest. At present I’m committed to GrownUps so we’ll just see where that goes over the next while. I’d love to see our ‘baby’ achieve everything that we’d imagined and hope to play some part in that, if that’s wanted.

    However, I’m 44 and there are several things that I’m keen to achieve personally and for our family by the time I’m 50. Priorities in life definitely change and so I guess we’re always all weighing up how best to live our lives and what makes us happy.

 

Best books for Pitching and winning marketing work

I was doing some training with a client this week and they asked me about pitching for new business.
There are three books on my shelf which I have found useful in my 25 year career.
Shaun Varga – Brilliant Pitch – what to know, do and say to make the perfect pitch. Prentice Hall
Jon Steel – Perfect Pitch – the art of selling ideas and winning new business – Wiley
David Kean – How not to come second – the art of winning business pitches – Marshall Cavendish
Here’s a link to another article we wrote in 2012 on the topic – Best books on pitching for new business
David Kean was interviewed and I found this 50 minute audio interview useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHD4yx2pRx4

Want To Grow Your Business Online? Here’s How!

Many business owners dream of outperforming competitors through the creation of a strong online presence. If you’re ready to grow your brand online, note that the following strategies can help you do it:

1. Tap Into The Power Of Word-Of-Mouth Advertising

One of the best ways to grow your business online is through the use of key strategies such as word-of-mouth advertising. This form of advertising is empowering because it involves satisfied customers speaking positively about your brand. Because people are much more likely to invest in your brand when other people indicate that it is reputable, you want to ensure that your online marketing process involves encouraging your satisfied customers to speak positively about your product or service line. One great way to put the word-of-mouth advertising process in full effect is by asking satisfied clients to leave positive online reviews about your brand.

2. Build Relationships on Twitter

In addition to tapping into the power of word-of-mouth advertising, make sure that you begin to build relationships with your prospects through Twitter. These days, millions of individuals across the globe log onto Twitter to socialise and shop. By regularly interfacing with these individuals, you can likely gain new clients while simultaneously extending your organisation’s sphere of influence into the digital domain. Keep in mind that there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to interface with people via Twitter. The key to success is doing things that work. Thus if you find that you get a substantive response when you tweet links to your product pages, this is a solid mode of communication.

Another Twitter strategy you might choose is taking weekly or monthly polls. These polls function as a research method through which you can attain a clear understanding of things like which of your products the clients find most useful and whether or not they’re satisfied with your company’s level of customer service. You can ask all types of questions to attain this kind of information, and note that making the poll a weekly or monthly occurrence is desirable because it creates consistency around your brand and keeps prospects and clients coming back to Twitter to see what you’ll be talking about!

Note that Twitter is not the only social media channel through which you can cultivate strong relationships with members of your target market. You can also build relationships with your target market on other channels like Facebook. For example, you might run a contest via Facebook. In addition to keeping existing clients interested in your brand, this social media optimisation technique makes your organisation more visible to prospects, thereby increasing the likelihood of you broadening your base of loyal clients. Note that in addition to offering clients SMO services, companies such as Solid Cactus are pleased to provide people with virtual office services.

3. Begin Using The Right Software

One final strategy you can implement to optimise your online presence is using the right software. This isn’t necessarily a digital marketing strategy, but it is a technique that can clearly take your efficacy in the internet sphere from average to awesome. For example, the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software will help optimise communication between you and clients in the online realm because the staff will have up to date, detailed information regarding former interactions with the customer in question.

Start Growing Your Business Via The Internet! https://stormotion.io/blog/how-to-make-a-software-for-the-internet-of-things-iot/

Three strategies that can help your company cultivate a stronger online presence include word-of-mouth advertising, building relationships via Twitter, and using the right software. Start using these strategies now so your organisation can become an increasingly dynamic force in the digital sector!

Web Security from an SEO Perspective

At the end of November, we will be partnering with Acronym to bring you expert insights on how web security plays an integral part in your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

There will be a focus on incremental gains made by doing ‘the basics’ really, really well and using marketing experiments and careful measurement to create the winning formula for your marketing.

Learn more about website building services, web-enabled business systems and what you can do to ensure they are ready for google optimisation.

About our speakers

  • Dave Allum (General Manager of Acronym)
    With a background in engineering and marketing, Dave is able to deliver expert advice on how ICT can help facilitate business goals according to respective IT requirements and business needs.
  • Rebecca Caroe (CEO of Creative Agency Secrets)
    An experienced B2B expert, specialising in direct response marketing and new business development.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

7:30 am-9 am

Microsoft House

Level 5, 22 Viaduct Harbour Ave,

Auckland 1010

Use the code FIREWALL50 for 50% off!

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