Author Archives: Marketing Network The

Briggs Communications

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.

Your network is your biggest asset and LinkedIn is the way to leverage it.

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

1. What you know, your experience and expertise, knowledge and the benefits you can deliver to your clients and manage and leverage
2. 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:

1. Identifying Referrers / Influencers in your Network
2. 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!)
3. Stay Top of Mind through regular communication that adds value to your customers and prospects
4. Educate your network how to refer to you
5. Ask for targeted Referrals and Introductions, rather than ‘asking for referrals blindly’
6. Recognise and Reward those that refer to you!

Don’t get left out, get LinkedIn.

To learn about our LinkedIn courses check this out.

Insight GIS

Seeing is Achieving

InsightGIS is an IT company that specialises in geographic information systems (GIS) and location intelligence. Our services add value to your business and information systems by merging them with locational information. You gain the benefits of visualising your data and easily accessing your information.

Selling the brand first

Selling the brand first

What is a brand? Sounds like a fairly basic question to ask, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t really know the answer.

A brand:
- Stands for something
- Has an emotional connection with it’s customers
- Has some need that it fulfils for it’s customer
- Is often hard to substitute
- Is unique
- Is associated with a logo and should have a tagline

How do you build a brand?

A brand is not something that naturally evolves; it is a based on a strategy to target it towards a specific group of people, and makes it relevant and appealing to them. A brand has a meaning, a benefit and an objective. The rule of thumb is to lead with an emotional benefit and support this with a rational benefit. An emotional benefit is what draws your customers to your brand and builds loyalty. For example, Nappies – the emotional benefit is that by using Brand X you will feel like you are the best mother that you can be. Whilst, the rational benefit is about performance and has to do with the practical functionality of the brand, for example, having side panels on the nappies to avoid leakage and the 100% hypoallergenic cotton fabric.

Why build a brand?

Brands are not easily substituted and this important is from a commercial perspective. If you have built a strong brand, your customers will feel loyal to your brand and this makes it difficult for competitors to take your market share. By raising the “barriers to entry” for new competitors, you are effectively making the market seem unattractive to new entrants – this keeps your customers coming back to you.

At The Marketing Network, a marketing agency an advertising agency, all in one, we help design, plan and execute branding strategies to ensure that your brand is as strong as it can be. Download Brand Design Questionaire

We also recommend brand health audits on existing brands to ensure that they are relevant and building the emotional connection that is needed to create loyal customers. Download Marketing Check Fax

B2B Branding, selling the brand first

In B2B, particularly in start up businesses, time and investment is reserved for R&D and production. If this is all that you do, you’re not going to make it. You’ll be another business with a great idea or a great product that finds itself a little lost in the commercial world.

Your product is only as good as the strength of your brand. Brands attract attention; brands get noticed and brands are memorable. Investing in building your brand protects you from other companies trying to take market share from you and raise the barriers to entry.

Let’s work through an example, imagine you developed the “intel chip” and were ready to take it to market. You had put an enormous amount of work into R&D, production, manufacturing, forecast, and financing – but it had no brand, no tagline, no logo. It has a value proposition; you know what it does well, what it does differently, who will benefit from it and how it will change people’s lives. However, these elements are not easily communicated without a brand, something to bring it all together and make it mean something to your target audience.

In B2B often people think that brands are a fluffy/nice to have, non-essential item. Without one though, if you were take the “intel chip” to PC manufacturers and tried to on-sell it, you are offering them just another component, and what is stopping another company with the same amount of resources and expertise from offering the same type of chip cheaper? Brands help you to charge a premium, brands help you to mean something to your customer and brands are not easily replaced by substitutes (when you invest in them).

At The Marketing Network (www.themarketingnetwork.com.au), a marketing agency an advertising agency, all in one, we come in at the early stages of product development or even when your product is just an idea. We help you to create a strong value proposition to build an emotional connection with your brand, so that when you are ready to launch, your brand is ready too. Read more about B2B Marketing at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2B_Marketing#B2B_Branding.

SMEs: Stand tall and play with the big boys

I am sure that you can put your hand on your heart and say that your new product or service is different and unique.

You have a point of difference that would convert a prospective customer in seconds. But how?

Here’s a checklist to ensure that you convert your prospective customers:

1. Look reputable:

• Have you got a logo that looks substantial?
• Do you have a tagline/slogan/positioning statement under your logo that communicates your point of difference?
• Does your website wow your customer?
• Is the content on your website relevant and proof read?
• Is all your marketing material consistent and themed?
• Do you have an office address and customer service number?

2. Build confidence:

• Do you offer guarantees and or warranties?
• Do you have testimonials from existing customers?
• Can you use the logos of existing customers to create instant credibility?

3. Get noticed:

• Do you have and regularly update a blog, to exhibit thought leadership and improve your SEO?
• Do you update your customers through email and LinkedIn/twitter/facebook?
• Do you have listings and or advertisements in business directories?
• How is your Google ranking?
• Do you do sponsored(Pay Per Click)advertising on Google?
• Do you regularly communicate through email and direct mail with your customers and new leads?
• Is your point of difference obvious and consistent in all your forms of communication?

To find out how we help our clients to play with the big boys, contact us now. We are a marketing agency and advertising agency, all in one and our website is full of information on brand identity and styling, content development and campaign development. By working on looking reputable, building confidence and getting noticed, you’ll look just like a big player in your market, on a small budget. Remember ‘Perception is Reality’! We’ll help you to launch your brand successfully and maximise the return on your marketing investment.

On a small marketing budget it’s all about choices

If you have a small budget and your marketing agency is suggesting email marketing – consider the benefits of a direct mail piece instead. The payoff could be better.

The main difference is that direct mail is considered a more acceptable form of communication for new leads, especially if you have a great offer. Whilst email is a cost effective was of keeping in touch with people who know and love you, but is often dismissed as spam when it arrives in the email inbox of a prospect.

If you have a decent budget, then hedge your bets and do both! But, if you don’t then you have to know the facts before you make your decision

At The Marketing Network, a marketing agency and advertising agency, all in one, we understand that you can’t have it all, on a small budget. So we suggest that to really get your brand noticed, consider the old fashioned way – snail/direct mail. The rationale is quite simple.
• Firstly, you are putting your brand in the hands of your target market.
• Secondly, it engages all the senses, plus addressed mail has an emotional component (i.e.: it’s addressed to me, I feel special).
• And lastly, the letterbox is the least cluttered promotional channel. The inbox is full and the letterbox is quite empty!

On a small budget, it makes sense to look for a channel that is less cluttered, allows for a high degree of creativity and has a far higher chance of getting noticed. A direct mail that ends up in the bin was read first!