Marketing

Every business should have an established look and feel, they should know and understand their target market and how they compare to their competitors. Often you get one shot with consumers, and that could be purely seeing a logo when doing a Google search.  Make sure your first impression is the best impression.

When it comes to brand, consistency is key.

The look and feel of a brand should be clear on everything, and once you veer away from that a customer can find it confusing when it comes to what your business is and what it delivers. Even using different fonts can come across as messy or unprofessional, and this is where a brand toolkit is invaluable. It is a set of rules and guidelines to keep your brand consistent in every way.

From an agency perspective, developing your brand is imperative and is more than producing a fancy graphic for a logo, it’s the meaning of that logo, what the colour and the font represents in its style, it’s the language you use in all your marketing materials and communications. A lot of strategy, research and psychology is behind it all.

The more you use Google the more it likes you.

As well as having good SEO (see our SEO article) so that Google can find you, they also have a suite of services and it is recommended you use as many as you can.  The bare minimum we recommend is Google My Business and Google Analytics. 

Following on from that is Google Ads, which is the most effective way to progress to the top of a Google search page.

There is a misconception that once you have your website built, it will instantly appear on Google.  Sadly this is not the case.  Make sure you have all of your SEO and Google service ducks in a row and then begin a Google Ads campaign to create brand awareness. It will be money well spent, but remember Google Ads is a specialty and it is always best to use an expert so you are getting the best results and therefore a good return on investment.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process used to get your website content to rank highly on search engines like Google.

Let’s break this statement down.

When you type a query into a search engine, that search engine then combs through billions of pieces of website content to find the best answer.  It’s not just website text either, it’s also images or videos etc. Search engines manage to do this incredibly quickly.

How do they comb through this content and decide which is best?

Search engines use robots called crawlers or spiders to comb through every bit of content on every url. These amazing robots then process/organise that content and stores it in an ‘index’.

An index is a massive database of every single piece of content that has been found – which they rank in order of what they deem is the best and relevant to answer a query.  You want to rank as highly as possible so you appear in searches above your competition.

How do I get my website to rank higher?

Getting your website to rank higher involves a number of moving parts.  Start by making sure your website is ‘optimised’. If your website isn’t visible to search engines, you will never appear in any searches.

Each website programme should provide the opportunity for you (or marketing agency) to write your SEO and often it will let you know if it is good quality SEO or not (such as Yoast for a WordPress website).  It is all written ‘behind the scenes’ of your website.  This is what you will see on the results page of a search engine, such as a headline and a snippet of information. 

The crawlers or spiders will ascertain if the SEO matches any of your content, for example, your SEO matches the web page you are referring too.  If it does, it will help to push you up the rankings in the index as it is deemed as trustworthy.

It’s a very complicated thing:

“These ranking systems are made up of not one, but a whole series of algorithms. To give you the most useful information, Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources, and your location and settings. The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query—for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.” Google.com

This is a really interesting question, and although some print may be on the decline, it’s certainly not dead.

Which type of advertising channels you use (online, print, radio etc) is determined by your target market and which channels best match them. Often it can be a mixture.  For example, if your target market is a 19 year old female and your product is an app – then a print ad in the NZ Herald would not be the best place to spend your advertising budget.

One advantage to print can be its longevity, particularly for certain monthly magazines which have a great subscription rate and can be found in hairdressers, doctors surgery’s, receptions or other places that the public spend a reasonable amount of waiting time.  These ads will often cost a lot more than weekly publications, because of their high readership rates.

A second advantage to print is that a number of publications will also have an online version, so it can often be the best of both worlds.

Online advertising has fantastic targeting abilities and we will always recommend this channel, but sometimes having something tangible like print is still an option worth considering.