Welcome to the Buzz Building Series - The digital landscape

Congratulations and welcome! You're on your way to adopting a high-impact, sustainable, digital marketing program for your business. We call it “buzz building“.

Every week, we'll deliver a concise slice of guidance and insight on how to understand, plan, implement and measure a digital marketing program for your business. Call it online marketing, digital marketing, content marketing… the objective in our eyes is the same: to generate a “buzz” around your business and to ultimately drive awareness and lead-generation. We will deliver this insight from two key perspectives:

Technical / Creative:

Rick O'Neill has over 15 years’ experience in web design, web development, search engine optimisation, email and online marketing.

Sales / Commercial:

Owen Ashby has over 25 years’ experience in Sales & Marketing strategy for SME businesses.

The combination of these two perspectives, we feel, is pretty unique and should be of huge value to you, the business owner, as you embark upon your journey to launch your very own buzz building program and take your business' online profile to the next level.

Over the next 12 issues of this buzz building series, you will benefit from the following easy-to-digest guides:

> The state of online marketing for SMEs

> The sustainable creation of engaging content

> Social Media and how to build an engaged audience – Part 1

> Social Media and how to build an engaged audience – Part 2

> Blogging; it's benefits and strategies to exploit them – Part 1

> Blogging; it's benefits and strategies to exploit them – Part 2

> Search Engine Optimisation and it's part in your strategy

> Email Marketing to amplify your content and build your audience

> Analytics and Optimisation; understanding your impact

> Reporting and building a pipeline of interest

> Audience & content. How to write a buzz building strategy

> Buzz building and the resources required to sustain it

In this first issue, we wanted to give our take on the state of marketing an SME business online in 2013, and why it's more important than ever that your business adopt a sustainable method of competing in this arena.

Rick says…

In 2013 online marketing is all about one thing: Content. In the bad old days, online marketing was all about “Black Hat” methods of Search Engine Optimisation, Spamming everyone with salesy emails, and broadcasting yet more sales messages across any Social Network you could lay your hands on. But now, Google, and the rest of the world, has wised up and now craves:

> Engaging Content

> Answers to pertinent questions

> Useful guides

> Data and Insight

If you want your business to build an engaged and sustainable audience online, you need to be present and you need to be delivering all of these things in a relevant, timely and consistent manner. Achieve this, and you will benefit from increased keyword rankings through blogging, a more engaged social media audience, increased (and more relevant) traffic to your website, establishing yourselves as thought-leaders with existing customers, and more.

To deliver this well, and consistently, requires a suite of skillsets and strategies that we plan to walk you through over the next 6 months.

Don't forget to tell your friends…

Owen says…

Rick’s right, but what that means from a Business point of view is that it is now easier than ever to “pull” prospective customers towards you.

People are using the internet and social media feeds and sites (like LinkedIN and Facebook) as a way of researching possible products, solutions and services far more than ever before.

What they’re looking for is information, ideas and recommendations from their friends, peers or colleagues that can help them filter out inappropriate products or inefficient services and narrow down their search to companies they believe offer the “best fit”…before they pick up the phone or contact anyone via a website or an email.

The challenge for you as a business, is how are you going to make sure that when people are searching for the sort of product or service you can offer, that it is you they find, your company they decide they can trust and your product or service they now believe is the “best fit” for them?

People are now immune to the old approaches of mass mailing and cold calling, they’ve built SPAM filters and JUNK files to protect them and frankly there’s so much information coming at as all every day, we’re almost numb to it.

People also don’t want to be continually sold to. They want information, insight, ideas. They want instruction and direction. They need help to make their decision and to work their way through the myriad options open to them…and this is your chance to be their guide through that decision making process.

And be very sure that if you’re not their “guide” they will find one in your competitor…

3 things to do today to gear-up for your buzz building launch…

• Take our free buzz building assessment
• Run your URL through WooRank to highlight burning issues
• Discuss this blog with your team and share this series with them

Look out for the second free instalment of our BuzzBuilding program soon!

Any questions, please get in touch.