B2B Archives - Page 9 of 20 - Creative Agency Secrets

An Open Letter to Sumo.com

9 May, 2017/5 Comments/in B2B, Marketing ideas, SEO /by Rebecca Caroe

Dear Globally Successful Technology Business Owner,

Sumo.com logo and header

I am delighted that you have successfully bought a new domain for your business sumo.com and are seeking to transfer the strong SEO from SumoMe.com to the new domain.

Tough job.

Your marketing coordinator wrote to me with a list of URLs on my site which are pointing to the old domain. I understand how much easier it will be for you to regain Search Engine first page results if these are redirected to the new domain.

She asked “do us a huge favor” to change the hyperlinks and to “change any mentions of SumoMe to Sumo“.

This is actually a lot of work on my website.

So I wrote back

Dear Nxxxxx, This is a big ask. May I suggest you offer us something to compensate us for our time? Maybe two free months of usage?

Waiting for a response…. since April 7th, 2017.

Lots of love

Rebecca (Pissed off business owner)

Marketing Rant coming up…

It does NOT have to be like this.

Be innovative with how you ask for Testimonials [or other favours]. How about offering a charity donation, an internship, some free consulting with your experts…. so many choices and so little cost to the business.

I am sick and tired of corporations taking advantage of their hapless customers and when the ONE TIME that I have some influence over the situation – they expect me to roll over and act dumb.

What would you do?

PS. No, none of the links are active – so the lady doesn’t have to do more SEO work to resolve the redirects [free little joke from me there!]

lightbulb creative agency secrets content marketing

A Masterclass In Content Marketing – When You’re Out Of Ideas.

8 March, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Content Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

I was reading my Facebook feed and a US based content marketer of my acquaintance posted this request.

“OK, we write blog posts every month for a beach client. We’ve been writing for him for several years and the team is getting a little brain dead trying to drum up fresh ideas. Would love your help. They are a family-friendly vacation rental company (houses for a week, no weekends). Please leave your brilliant suggestions below & thanks!”

I couldn’t resist the challenge – but first, I started to read the answers she’d already garnered from her community.

What did I find out?

That there are a ton of creative folks whose minds are happy to help out when asked.

And so instead of stunning you with my amazing insight, I’m going to reproduce below the long list of suggestions made about what content to write about for a beach client. And show you how you can adapt and learn from this list for your own business content marketing.

How to use this content insight for your business

First, print out this article onto paper (old-fashioned, but helpful for this exercise).
Pick up a writing instrument (mine’s a fountain pen with liquid ink).
Draw two columns alongside the list of articles.
Go though the list and in the first column write down the underlying theme of the article title.
Then in the second column write down what an equivalent theme would be for your business.
Lastly, brainstorm 3-5 topic titles for each theme you write down for your business.

Have you got over one year’s worth of content already?

Here’s how to make the most of your archive and to lock good content into strong keywords and hashtags that convert.

The goal of content marketing is to get your website found, your brand recognised and aligned with the reasons people buy from you. Creative Agency Secrets does local marketing. I have many local marketing keyword phrase-laden articles on our website. So when the local “grease monkey” in Pukekohe (don’t try to pronounce that if you’re not fluent in Maori) searched online for a local marketing agency, we showed up in the list, he called us; we’re meeting on Friday. This is a marketing tactic that works and starts dialogue. And you can do it.

But if you think that ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ is the tactic, you’re wrong.

You must understand why people buy, what attracts them and then double down on the tactics and topics that already work for you.

Get canny with advanced content marketing

Make a keyword theme map with a few hundred keywords you’re probably not targeting. The keywords should dictate the content you write. Use an independent, non-Google, non-Bing keyword discovery tool like SBI (we have an account and can do this for you).

Now you have that keyword theme map, which of the keywords are on page 2 of search results that could benefit from relevant, internal backlinks on your site?

Also, does your business-model actually need new content? What does any single, new piece of content do for the business? Instead, how about focusing on the 20% of content that is already producing results and instead of writing more – promote that content more aggressively?

Re-purpose the content that converts and share each piece more often also put it into every format (i.e. image square, image rectangle, video, audio, cinemagraph, infographic, ebook, slideshow, podcast guest) to maximise both its impact and its re-useability.

If the location is a very small place that is not overly commercial use the social content which is already being shared by visitors by searching “nearby” or local name hashtags. The smart folks at from Socialize.co.nz demonstrated this to the Paeroa Chamber of Commerce members. They brought up content on social media that tourists and visitors were sharing. This already had the place name tagged on photos and other socially shared content. If local business owners re-shared that content, while tagging each other, they could build up some serious momentum around the town name on social media. And all this without creating any original content at all.

So thanks to Karen, she has helped us write your masterclass on advanced content marketing.

46 Content Article Suggestions for a Beach Client

What to pack (by season, by age of child, when Grandma is staying)
Activities for road trips
Kid friendly restaurants/ attractions
Road trip checklist to make sure your vehicle is road ready
Beach fashion
What to do when the weather is less than perfect
First aid tips
Disaster relief while on vacation at the beach
Books to read on a beach
Local beach walks
Easy meals
Meals using local ingredients and where to buy them
Newest spots to check out this year… There are always new restaurants opening
A feature on Oregon inlet fishing charters… My next door neighbor will be on the newest edition of wicked tuna, on fishin’ frenzy.
The history of the area is also very interesting… And there are a wide array of topics, from casinos to shipwrecks, to boat building.
The different types of architecture you can find out here is neat, too… Flat top houses (there is a tour each year), nags head style cottages (what do each of the different ornamental elements on them mean?), life saving stations, etc
Beach nourishment is coming to the northernmost beaches this year, too. What is beach nourishment? They are dredging sand from the ocean and pumping it onto the beach to widen them.
Top reasons people didn’t go to the beach, but should have
How to make the best sand castles
Top 5 reasons not to bury a sibling in the sand
Food that goes best with sandy fingers
Beat the heat with these 3 things
How to avoid sand spurs
Top 3 things kids really want in a beach vacation
Top 3 things adults really want in a beach vacatio,
Don’t leave___ until you have eaten the____
What NOT to do when you’re at the beach (leave the work and technology at home)
What to do when you want to sit on the beach and your spouse doesn’t
Fun stuff off the beaten path
Volunteer options when you’re staying at the beach (relax and do good at the same time)
Best place to get coupons to save money on local attractions
Do this, not that (places to go, places to avoid, etc.)
Top movies to watch on netflix while you’re at the beach
How to tell if you shouldn’t wear a bikini or speedos
Top reasons to visit in seasons other than summer. There are lots of events in the spring and fall
Sea glass and shells are best found in the winter months
The Secret to finding the best shells and sea glass
Best places to take your kids out to eat
Which restaurants are best for a date night
Art projects for the beach
10 things to bring with if driving to save $$
What to do in the rain
Playing card games for 5-8 year olds
Camps or other activities they can do
Fun community activities if you want to meet others
Where to shop for food
Best source of local restaurant discounts

Preparatory work for direct mail lowers costs

2 February, 2017/2 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Direct Marketing, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

Direct mail is a highly effective marketing technique that delivers sales revenue in a short time frame.

Some direct mail is poorly conceived and so does not achieve its potential.

[WARNING – this is not always true].

Printed direct mail promoting a printer

I received three mailers from a printing firm which serve as a great example of a campaign that could have been much more effective with some pre-planning working with an expert in direct mail campaign structure such as us.

Direct Mail campaign structure

Using a mailing list of marketing agencies, three print pieces of DM were posted out.

The copy promoted “digital by nature” and a new world of digital printing.

The positives

Each card had a number to show where it came in the sequence
Each one showed different paper colours front and back
Each card had the print specifications for the front and back detailed which was cute
All print was beautifully executed
The 3rd card showed how to set up artwork to work with digital White Toner
The 4th card showed how to set up artwork to work with digital Clear Toner

The negatives

I did not receive the first card so the campaign opener was lost
My agency does not buy print or do graphic design, we are not a good prospect for this service
No landing page for the campaign on the website
When I first visited there wasn’t a mention of the campaign on the homepage, there is now.
This goes to a landing page which has the wrong link in the contact us button.
Wrong link – testing would have showed this up

How I would have improved the campaign

Combined telephone canvassing with direct mail
1. Checked the database by phone first asking one question “Do you design for print?”
2. This would have reduced the downstream print and mailing costs, focused the campaign
Published a landing page URL on the collateral
1. Tested all the links so the contact us URL was correct (it currently references the same page it’s on)
2. Included a “behind the scenes” video to show the inside track of the skill Valley Print used to create the mailers and the challenges they faced e.g. printing white on black for the envelope
Used a courier delivery not NZ Post to improve delivery success
1. This is particularly important for a posted print direct mail series
Followed up by phone with
1. an invitation to watch the video
2. stay in touch
3. subscribe to news updates
4. further qualify for future work opportunities
This would have built a mailing list, fully up to date and ready for in-house new business sales team to continue to work in the coming months
Planned follow up campaigns including more of the excellent tutorials for designers

Ready to talk direct mail with us?

Give us your challenge and let the creative team loose!

Do Consumers Need to Know Where Our Business is Located?

8 December, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Case Studies, SEO /by Rebecca Caroe

Today’s always-on global world could make your business location seem to be an irrelevancy. But the opposite is true. Local marketing is now the fastest-growing part of online marketing specialisms. And it matters. Let me explain.

So here are 3 examples for you to use when considering international website domains.

Feel local but act global

A client asked “We operate in Australia and New Zealand and not sure whether our NZ target market (women 25+) will find our Australian connection appealing or a turn off, given how very passionate and patriotic us Kiwis are! I’m getting mixed messages when I ask around.

We don’t want to hide our Australian connection, as it’s very important and where the business was born, with a fascinating story behind it, just not sure whether to include “Australia” and “New Zealand” optional buttons on the landing page to split off there, or if it should perhaps only appear as an option when you need to click on “events” or “locations” etc. that have information relevant only for each country?”

What should she do?

My advice is to use a single web domain as the master site for both countries and then to have separate pages for the two locations. Here’s why.

Aussies versus Kiwis – Broadly they are correct, New Zealanders want to think they’re seeing local information (and importantly local currency and phone numbers) and of course small differences in language and rugby club orientation may also come through in brand communications over time. Do Australians eat afghan biscuits? Do Kiwis eat chiko rolls?

Your Website Strategy

Ultimately the solution you choose MUST be driven by the strategy for each country. Is the website a place where people find out about you, get news on specials and what’s new, will they email you, will they phone you? If yes, then the website must facilitate separate information for each site.

Set the strategy for the website first, then worry about the technical implementation.

Take a look at this case study of some work we did for a client who needed his visitors to quickly split up into pages best aligned with their needs.

Driving visitors to the right landing page focuses traffic

A strategic solution

The home page says what the business brand is all about – the owners, your values and passions.

Then you have a “What’s On NZ” and a separate “What’s on AU” button that take visitors to what is effectively a home page for that location……

I would treat the NZ page effectively as your local domain and give it a really simple URL and so all links to the New Zealand business go there first.

An alternative to this location split is to have parallel websites which have slightly different domains e.g. nz.yourwebsite.com and au.yourwebsite.com You often see this device used by international law firms and accountants. This can be set up by your web hosts.

In practice this means few visitors go to the home page…. but that doesn’t really matter as long as local audiences are being served.

A poorly executed country strategy

By contrast, we got approached by a Perth business asking to do some content marketing with us.

They sounded like a good prospect and we fixed a phone call. I rang, answerphone with an English man’s voice…. so I looked him up on LinkedIn and it turns out the business name is BusinessName (Thailand) Co. Which rang a few alarm bells.

And his stated location was Manchester, UK. Clearly a disconnect.

When we spoke he said although their phones were VOIP and used Australian numbers; he was actually based in Thailand and he couldn’t make outbound calls to international numbers like mine in New Zealand. As any Aussie or Kiwi business will tell you, it’s extremely odd not to be able to phone the other country while doing business.

Now let’s look at a third scenario

Nimbus Portal Solutions are a client and they trade in five jurisdictions – Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, USA and South Africa plus “Global” to pick up the rest of the world.

Their chosen solution to the website location question is to locally identify the IP address of the visitor and to quietly re-set the website version to the domain best suited. So my default goes to NZ. You can check this top right in their website where a country name displays.

The main goal for Nimbus is to ensure all the currencies are local and bank account / trading entities switch to match. Which is important for their business as jurisdiction for secure document storage matters – borders and locations of server hosting are aligned to the local country to stay within data protection laws.

In summary – set the website goal first and the supporting strategy will then drive the solution which works best for your situation.

This article first appeared in Marketing Online Magazine

New Year Marketing Planning – resolve to do this!

23 November, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Marketing, Strategy /by Rebecca Caroe

Ready for next year? No, of course you’re not. This is normal.

But you intend to get ready and to plan your marketing, don’t you?

Make those resolutions happen by booking in to our January 2017 Marketing Year Planning Workshop.

Join us for a Marketing and Business Development Workshop to help you get your year plan sorted!

What Will I Get Out Of It?

We’ll walk you through our 8 Step Business Development Methodology, which will create a detailed plan of activities for the year that will drive new leads into your business and position you to achieve your goals for 2017.

You’ll also learn tips, techniques and marketing tools for your business which are vital to your modern marketing success. These are tried and tested as we do them ourselves and for our clients.

Join our Group Workshop Session on 26th January 2017 in Auckland for $500.00 + GST. This fee is per business and so you can bring 1 colleague with you.

Build your business development plan for the next year and guide your business towards success.

This workshop is for business owners and managers who are responsible for finding new clients and growing revenues. It will show you the practical, tried and tested techniques that the Creative Agency Secrets team uses for its clients.

You will learn:

How to create a unique company profile.
A check list of marketing activities .
New business pipeline analysis and tracking template.
What you need to do to get better known in your industry.
Learn relationship building for getting and keeping long term clients.
How to spot opportunities for new business sales.
The business process that delivers leads.
What to measure to track progress.

Each attendee will take home a high level plan for their business – planned through the year with month by month activities.

Testimonials from Nov 2016 attendees

“It was good to be in the group and to feed off Rebecca’s comment and experience. I don’t record leads and whether they were successful and that will definitely be useful in future.” Nicola Manning, Nicola Manning Design

“I enjoyed it. It was definitely worthwhile. I thought it was a good bunch of people and it was very interesting.” Dave Sauvage, Sauvage Design

It was really good and I will do a strategy accountability partner each month. I am going to leave my paid mentor group and do this instead. I have to get into the headspace to actually go back and review everything and set goals for each month. The wide range of people was very good especially the male female diversity. Jo-Anne Hitchcock, H Architecture

“I thought it was useful and when people are at different stages that’s interesting. I could do a few things differently which is partly a time thing. Beneficial – I got out of it as much as I could.” Jeremy Sutton, Jeremy Sutton Lawyers

What’s a typical response rate for personalised B2B direct mail?

21 November, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, Direct Marketing, Lead Generation /by Rebecca Caroe

What’s a typical response rate for highly personalised B2B direct mail? What provider would you work with? I’ve heard of Enthusem and Pebblepost.
It’s a well designed card with their logo, name or website on it.

Logo for Enthusem

Your response rate for B2B direct mail depends on a couple of things

What you’re selling and whether the recipient has heard of you or has the need right now for your product/service.
If you are already known, you can get response rates over 10%, particularly if you are trusted.
One way to improve your “response rate” is to do a follow up by telephone to check they got the message and to elicit a reply verbally.
You will get the best results by working with someone experienced in Direct Response Mailings. This is a skilled position – do not expect high % returns without expertise in creating the mailing asset. If you’re inexperienced buying direct mail services, I suggest meeting a few agencies for a “Chemistry” meeting where they will show you their work and ask you about your business needs. This will educate you about the process and likely outcomes.

Lastly, both the services you suggest seem good, I’ve not used them. But a competent Direct Marketing Agency (like Creative Agency Secrets) will do a similar job of customised direct mail pieces as these businesses. Which may be much cheaper. It depends on how big your database is as to which is a good / cheap option.

We use our 8 Step New Business Development process and each has a category – this blog post is related to Step 2 – Marketing Communications and Step 3 – New Business Pipeline

Click on the icons to see more posts in each category.

This answer was first submitted on Clarity.fm

How to use brand icons to drive sales

10 November, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Case Studies, Content Marketing, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca Caroe

My philosophy of marketing is that every part of your marketing toolkit that you’ve spent money developing should be working hard to generate sales for your business.

Creating a strong visual identity is a given. But what about extending it into other marketing areas?

We have been experimenting using content marketing to reinforce visual identity branding and the USPs (unique selling points) and key points of difference of the brand. Here’s how.

Your business philosophy

When applying content marketing tactics we find that the effectiveness is enhanced when the content is aligned with either buyer personas, pipeline stage, business philosophy or point of difference. These all help to bring a prospect closer to purchase.

A strategic marketer will help you define a positioning can demonstrate continual advantage and which you can defend against competitors.

Helping your prospective clients to recognise this positioning and then to relate their experience or their expected buying experience to it is the job of the tactical marketer.

Once you’ve established the philosophy positioning, identifying each part with an unique visual identity or icon is a neat way of enabling the customer to recognise elements in your content marketing and their relation to each other. From this, they can navigate to find other related content pieces on the same theme or topic.

Case Study – the sports coach website

This client identified five buyer personas and now has a unique landing page for each one. Their website has over 20,000 pages because they have been blogging since 2007. This means new visitors find navigating the site challenging. We identified a deep resource of ‘evergreen’ content which was not getting traffic and so not getting read by visitors. From this we evolved a segmentation strategy built around a landing page and a visual icon for each visitor type.

Customer segmentation as icons

The landing page includes links to the most popular evergreen articles and also gives guidance for the visitor on where to look for similar content.

Case Study – the marketing agency

At Creative Agency Secrets, we have 8 icons which are all steps in the new business development process. On the blog sidebar are our list of categories – the first eight are numbered and each relates to one step in the process.

Working on our own blog, we needed to reduce the bounce rate and encourage deeper browsing. And so we leveraged our 8 Step New business Development Process. This identifies a clear set of stages for a tactical marketer and a framework for their marketing year planning. Each stage has a small icon and links to all the blog posts written about that topic.

Marketing segmentation icons

It’s easy to read, easy to cross-link articles and also to reference more than one icon in each blog post.

Case Study – the financial advisor

Selling services is often harder than products – defining a clear point of difference is even more challenging for the marketer. Collaborative Consulting was set up in response to the same-ification of the financial advisory marketplace. The founder, John Milner, uses his long experience to advise clients differently from others – he calls these the Six Max Factors. And using a simple graphic, each one is named and ordered.

The goal is to enable readers to become familiar with each icon so they quickly recognise them and can relate to the marketing content more easily.

This tactic will serve to reinforce the firm’s investment philosophy, remind readers why they chose Collaborative Consulting as their advisor and set the firm apart from competitors who are less explicit about the foundations of their advice and investing activities.

How to spot an opportunity to use icons

The key insight a marketer needs to bring to using logos as a sales device is to discover

Is the company able to articulate its USP?
Can you split that USP into several subsidiary elements?
Does your content marketing strategy allow the use of visual and written elements?
Can you measure changed customer and prospect behaviour as you make these changes?

That’s a great starting point – off you go!

Your home page is failing its purpose

20 October, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Branding, Digital media /by Rebecca Caroe

I had to write to a client recently to tell them that their home page was failing. It was not delivering value, it was not doing its job and was actively causing problems for the business. And this made me realise that few businesses understand the job a home page does.

Hanging Gardens home page

What should a good home page design do?

If you are an online shop, the home page has the job of showing the specials for the month or new product lines. It is often a straightforward design to implement.

If you are a software company, the home page is usually a sales page promoting and explaining your principal products.

But most business websites have a different challenge, especially those who do not sell by ecommerce. They have had a website for a few years; they may have had a couple of redesigns and the business website has probably grown to tens, hundreds or thousands of pages over this period. The priorities of the business shift over time and the website home page needs to support the new business goals and objectives.

This throws up questions

How often should I change my home page?
Should the home page have all the information about the business?
What should the home page prioritise?

The job of a website home page is to get the visitor to her destination in as few clicks as possible.

Why do visitors come?

Your entire website comprises a heap of different information, advice, products and services and a visitor may be interested in all, one or none of them. So how can you guess what the latest web visitor wants?

This is where intelligent home page design comes in.

Home page as sign post

The principal task of the home page is to signpost the visitor FAST to where she wants to go. So let’s work out what this means for your website.

Go to your web analytics account and find two reports created from your actual visitor traffic this year. These are

a) the pages visitors went to on the site. This shows which are the most popular

b) the search queries people typed into Google which had your website showing up in search results (this comes by linking Search Console to Google Analytics – here’s how to set it up).

Your job is to line up b) with a) so we get the maximum number of people coming to the site and getting quickly to the exact page they are looking for.

Designing for Destination

You now know the top two to five pages on your website (after the home page itself). I’m going to offer some advice here which will help you brief your designer on the changes you need to make to your home page.

Firstly – simplify the main menu. Can you remove any of the top menu items? Give the visitor as few choices as possible, stay focused on those top destination pages. Can you reduce your menu to 5 options? (Home, About, Contact Us plus 2 others?). Can you remove sub-menus or drop-downs? We advised Armour Safety to put icon images of their popular product groupings on a side menu; ordered by popularity. Clicks followed immediately we made the change.

Secondly – highlight popular destination pages in the home page design. Make it very obvious in the home page design elements what these are. You can use images, boxes, icons, buttons, large text – all are useful devices to focus attention. By repeating these popular destinations in the home page design and the top menu, you increase the chances that the visitor will choose an already popular pathway. Coxmate.com.au now does not show its products on the main menu – they send visitors direct to the shop which has its own home page and details all the categories. Similarly, Apartment Specialists has 3 buttons on the home page, I’m Buying; I’m Selling and I want a Valuation. All three are on their menu, but the buttons make it easier for visitors to quickly decide where to click.

Thirdly – you have to reinforce the already popular page destinations – this may sound counter-intuitive. Don’t try and encourage traffic to pages that are not already popular i.e. double down your bets on the well-performing pages. This is the 80:20 rule in action. For the visitor who does want something unusual if they cannot find it from your menus, be sure to make it very clear how to get in touch to ask the question.

So go check how your home page is performing in its duty as a sign post – and don’t be afraid to make changes iteratively – one small change at a time so you can measure the effect before altering other elements.

We use our 8 Step New Business Development process and each has a category – this blog post is related to Step 1 – State your Business.

Click on the icon to see more posts in that category.

This article first appeared in Marketing Online Magazine

Building Trust with Clients

6 October, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, Case Studies, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

New clients take a bit of work – you have to work hard to get to know them and they you.

Ghost Street logo

Having been part of the BizDojo community we were lucky to meet a host of great folks in the co-working space on K Road.

So it’s always a delight when we get to re-connect in the interests of client work.

Not only does it look good to be able to say “we know them already” but it builds trust with both parties and also some strong marketing too.

Nice work, Tim Dawson of Ghost Street and fun to be collaborating.

Networks of networks

Which makes me think about questions I have had this past fortnight about the networks which work for me and where and how I find them.

Challenging – because when I moved to Auckland I knew few people. So here are the ones which I find useful for meeting smart folks who think, challenge, may become clients and have good things which I’m interested in hearing others talk about….

Kea New Zealand – the network that connects kiwis around the globe
SMACAKL – Social Media Club Auckland
MECCA – ICT industry consultants
Auckland Content Strategy –
AFQY – A Few Quiet Yarns – mostly tech folks meeting to talk rather than sell
Auckland Internet Marketing Group
Auckland WordPress Users Group
Devo Drinks – run by Matt Yallop – just ask for an invite
Techapuna Hi Tech Entrepreneurs – Derek Handley’s brainchild
AmCham
Business Owners Forum run by Fraser Hurrell in Albany and Newmarket
New Zealand Software Association
And a few others which I’m invited to from time to time.

Which are your go-to meetings, groups and influencers? Please add to the list.

We use our 8 Step New Business Development process and each has a category – this blog post is related to Step 4 – Profile Raising, Step 5 – Relationship Development and Step 6 – Opportunity Spotting.

Click on each icon to see more posts in that category.