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Brand vs Logo

Posted on by Allison Robinson

Have you ever wondered what the difference between Brand vs Logo? A lot of times, the two terms are used interchangeably. But brand and logo aren’t the same thing, and just because you have a logo doesn’t mean your brand is all good.

Aren’t brand and logo the same thing?

All squares are rectangles. But not all rectangles are squares. And there you go! The same thing applies to brand vs logo. Your logo is a part of your brand, but your brand includes much more than simply the logo.

So then what’s a brand?

A brand is the set of core values and beliefs of your business and what you represent. It’s not only your products and services, but how you treat customers and even employees. So if people walk inside and instead of “Hello”, you say “Welcome to Pizza Pete’s, the Petest Pizza south of Santa’s House”, then your weird greeting is part of your brand.

All brands have beliefs and values, whether they’re written down or not

It might seem silly to write down what you believe as a business, but customers are going to make the judgment for themselves anyway, so why not give them a push in the right direction? You certainly don’t want to be known as “The one that cheats people” because someone spread bad information and you have nothing to counter it!

Back9 - Brand Vs LogoBut beyond that, customers want to know that they’re in good hands. They want to know why you went into businesses. “I saw a discrepancy I could take advantage of to make a lot of money.” Sure, maybe that’s true. But if you were successful, there was still a need that you fulfilled. And you probably learned a lot along the way too. Talk about that!

The logo doesn’t matter then?

No no, that’s not true at all! Just because your brand is more than your logo doesn’t mean the logo doesn’t matter. Your logo is the visual representation of your brand. It’s what people associate with your product or service. If you have a logo that you’re attached to and people can recognise, then great! Avoid major changes with it or you risk having to regain some of your audience.

But what if you’re a new business or your logo is Meh at best? Professional designers put in a lot of hours into designing a logo – from type to colour theory – because of how important it is. Sometimes, a painful amount of hours for something so small. But they look at sizing, colour schemes, symbolism, mood, and a whole lot more. People see it and think of your business, so it’s crucial that it gives off the right impression!

Need help with your logo or brand?

If all of this brand and logo stuff seems a little too much and you’d rather focus on just doing high quality work, we can help. Our dedicated team has specialists for everything from graphic design to writing these blogs, and everyone does what they’re good at! We can help manage your brand and create a new logo that you’ll be sure to love–after all, you have the final say! Get in touch with us today to get started.

What is the buyer’s journey?

Posted on by Allison Robinson

As a buyer, do you want to be prospected, or demo’d, or closed? The answer is almost always no. This is because it depends on which stage of the journey you’re in. The buyer’s journey is the series of steps a buyer makes before making a purchase. It is a crucial part of understanding your ideal customer and your inbound strategy. There are 3 stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

For awareness, these steps add zero value to a buyer. Buyers are looking for additional information about your product that can’t be found online.

As a business owner or a salesperson, you can personalise your sales process to the buyer’s context by understanding the buyer’s journey. Whether you’re selling directly to customers or you’re b2b, in this blog post, we’ll define the buyer’s journey, and show you how to think through it when attracting new prospects – from leads to customers and to being delighted.

Why does the buyer’s journey matter?

The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.

The journey consists of a three-step process:

  1. Awareness Stage: The buyer realises they have a problem.
  2. Consideration Stage: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it.
  3. Decision Stage: The buyer chooses a solution.

The graphic below illustrates a sample buyer’s journey for the simple purchasing decision of a doctor visit during an illness.

 

Buyer'S Journey Stages

How to Define Your Company’s Buyer’s Journey

If you don’t have an intimate understanding of your buyers, conduct a few interviews with customers, prospects, and colleagues to get a sense of the buying journey. Here are some questions you should ask to put together the buyer’s journey for your business.

Awareness Stage

During the Awareness stage, buyers identify their challenge or an opportunity they want to pursue. They also decide whether or not the goal or challenge should be a priority. In order to fully understand the Awareness stage for your buyer, ask yourself:

  1. How do buyers describe their goals or challenges?
  2. How do buyers educate themselves on these goals or challenges?
  3. What are the consequences of inaction by the buyer?
  4. Are there common misconceptions buyers have about addressing the goal or challenge?
  5. How do buyers decide whether the goal or challenge should be prioritized?

Consideration Stage

During the Consideration stage, buyers have clearly defined the goal or challenge and have committed to addressing it. They evaluate the different approaches or methods available to pursue the goal or solve their challenge. Ask yourself:

  1. How do buyers educate themselves on the various categories?
  2. What categories of solutions do buyers investigate?
  3. How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each category?
  4. How do buyers decide which category is right for them?

Decision Stage

In the Decision stage, buyers have already decided on a solution category. For example, they could write a pro/con list of specific offerings and then decide on the one that best meets their needs. Questions you should ask yourself to define the Decision stage are:

  1. What criteria do buyers use to evaluate the available offerings?
  2. When buyers investigate your company’s offering, what do they like about it compared to alternatives? What concerns do they have with your offering?
  3. Who needs to be involved in the decision? For each person involved, how does their perspective on the decision differ?
  4. Do buyers have expectations around trying the offering before they purchase it?
  5. Outside of purchasing, do buyers need to make additional preparations, such as implementation plans or training strategies?

The answers to these questions will provide a robust foundation for your buyer’s journey. Once you know these answers, you can tailor your content and website to meet your users’ needs. The next step is to create content like blog articles, videos, and images.

SEO vs. SEM: The Ultimate Showdown

Posted on by Phil Robinson

Quick, in a fight between SEO and SEM – who would win? Are you going to put all your money on the reigning champ? Or do you think the rising star will steal the title match? Choosing the wrong option can make it so that you don’t get the best possible results for your business. So before placing that wager, it might be helpful to know a little bit about the contenders.

SEO – The Veteran

SEO has been around for a long time, enough that it usually doesn’t bother using its full name. Search Engine Optimisation is a series of best practices that search engines such as Bing and Google use to decide who goes on the first page and who goes on page 1,546,242. And as the name suggests, the closer you rank to Number 1, the better. But how does your site get that coveted spot through SEO? If you remember how complicated the periodic table was in Chemistry, the folks over at Search Engine Land created one about SEO with a whopping 35 factors.

Search Engine Land Seo Factors Periodic Table (50%)

Each of these factors is taken into account when a user types in a simple search, such as “Best pizza in the world”. If you type that in and see a whole bunch of local places pop up. Then you might be shocked to find several results that are right down the street. The best pizza in the world, right down the road, and you never even knew!

Well, that’s because along with the factors from the periodic table of SEO, some search engines such as Google track various user metrics as well. These include factors such as:

  • The type of the device the person searched from.
  • The location they want to search for.
  • And their current location while doing that search.

This is why the Maps results tend to show what’s nearby instead of places on the other side of the world. That’s because few people are probably willing to hop on a plane for lunch, no matter how good the pizza.

An endurance fighter

SEO prefers to wear down and outlast its opponent, which is why many new sites won’t start ranking immediately. Proper SEO is more of a marathon than a sprint. Hurrying to the goal will only tire you out. And if your business is like most companies, you plan on being around for the long haul. Of course, that means that you’ll want to plan for SEO to work accordingly. Important factors such as creating useful content take time to analyse. Moreover, search engines like Google need data to know if your blog “The Best Blog Ever in This and All Other Realities” lives up to its name or if that’s only true for you.

Because SEO doesn’t go for the one-hit knockout, companies that promise the top spot on Google for your keywords can’t be taken at their word. If they aren’t outright lying, they may use Black Hat SEO—the performance-enhancing drug of the digital world—that may potentially have short-term results but come with hefty penalties when Google the referee finds out. This is why established marketing companies let clients know upfront to treat SEO as an investment. Often, this means rebuilding your website, making new content, and getting positive reviews, things that can’t be done overnight. All of this makes for a better-performing long-term site. Both for search engines and for the customer, which is why SEO is so important and shouldn’t be ignored.

 

SEO may not attack quickly, but it doesn’t go down easy either.

 

SEM – The Newbie

SEM, short for Search Engine Marketing, works a little bit differently than SEO. Instead of focusing on building organic results through long-term investment, SEM works on a faster scale through paid advertising to feature as a top result. Like SEO, there are several factors that go into proper SEM that ultimately decide if your campaign will be successful. It’s more than simply paying more than everyone else. Otherwise, we would probably have a lot more scammers using SEM to spread viruses!

 

A precision fighter

Google Ads is easily the most popular SEM method because of its enormous range of options—and because Google is used for searches worldwide over 80% of the time. Google ads can be extremely broad or extremely specific, from targeting users all around the world to a specific group that lives within a few kilometres of a specific location. This range of options is incredibly useful… If you have any idea which ones you should be using.

Google Ads Interface

Many people have heard of PPC or pay-per-click advertising, but AdWords can work in many other methods as well. Along with PPC, there are options for CPA (Cost per acquisition such as a call or buying from the website), CPV (Cost per view), and many more. There is even the option of doing call-only ads that can also work as a stand-in for businesses that don’t have a website. These create ads that have a brief message and a link to call the business directly from the search results.

 

Google Ads uses an Ad Rank score to determine which position your ad will show; or if it will show at all. Ad quality and the quality of your landing page—the page the user goes to on your site after clicking the ad—and the bid amount all go into ad rank. Better quality ads and landing pages mean you can have your ad shown with a lower amount, but also means if you want faster results you can opt for a higher bid while you work on your website.

 

SEM zeroes in on a weakness with precision and hits hard to get the results it wants fast.

So who wins?

It’s the age-old battle of strength vs. speed, power vs. endurance. None is inherently better than the other. Do which one will work better for you depends on your goals and timeline. Imagine if they could work together instead… But who says they can’t?

The tag team: The Digital Dynamic Duo!

A combination of SEO and SEM methods tends to have the best overall results. However, putting both powerhouses in your corner costs more upfront but has a much greater chance of a high return on investment. SEO helps your site to be found on organic searches and makes it more accessible and useful to users. SEM helps your site by targeting a subset of users through advertising that can put you at the top of search results. By betting on both, you maximise your chances of winning the fight.

Seo + Sem

Can’t I just learn the marketing techniques and do it myself?

If you’re thinking of jumping in the ring yourself, then well done! However, keep in mind that there is a lot to learn and digital marketing is a full-time job in and of itself. It’s like learning a foreign language. Once you get the basics down you might feel like you have a handle on it. That’s until you talk with the native speakers and realise you have much more to learn. Only in this language, the rules are constantly changing. Several times a year, Google makes major changes to its algorithms. And some of the old rules get KO’d overnight.

 

That’s why many local businesses choose to work with a professional digital marketing company— Like us! Get in touch now if you want some help from the pros. Keeping up with the latest changes and best practices is what the best SEO companies in New Zealand do best. And that can leave you to focus on what you do best – Running your business!

Most businesses that leave the marketing to the pros find they have more time to do what they love, which often makes everyone come out a winner in the long run – instead of getting knocked down in every round – if not knocked out in the first.

 

What is digital marketing?

Posted on by Phil Robinson

Whether you’re Start up business or a Seasoned Pro, you may have asked yourself “what is Digital marketing? And how can it truly benefit your business? Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and their websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

With how accessible the internet is today, would you believe me if I told you the number of people who go online every day is still increasing? That’s why is essential to have a Digital Marketing Strategy in this day and age. Especially if you want to succeed online.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already hanging out: online!

Continue reading “What is digital marketing?”

How to create Google Sitemap

Posted on by Phil Robinson

You wouldn’t design a new kitchen without drawing up a plan first, would you? Similarly, you’d never want to design a website without creating a Google sitemap.

A sitemap is a file of code that lives on your web server and lists all of the relevant URLs that are in the structure of your website. It helps search engine web crawlers determine the structure of the site so they can crawl it more intelligently.

Here’s an example of what a sitemap file might look like:

Sample-Sitemap-Code

Image Credit: Sitemaps.org

We create sitemaps when we first design your website, add pages to it, and/or redesign it. It’s kind of like a “floor plan” for the site, which especially comes in handy whenever the site gets changed. Along with boosting SEO, sitemaps can also help define a site’s navigation scheme so you avoid internal linking issues.

You might be thinking to yourself, “But I thought sitemaps were more visual, like a web”. That’s a visual sitemap, as opposed to an XML sitemap — the latter is what we’ve been talking about so far.

4 Steps to Building a Sitemap

1) Research & Plan

When we first begin planning your sitemap, we think about questions like: What are your website/ UX UI design goals? Who’s your target audience, and what do they want to see?

It’s also important to keep in mind each search engine’s requirements. The last thing we want to do is break the path of a visitor getting from a search engine to your website. Google’s, Bing’s, Yahoo!’s, and others’ requirements are fairly similar, but you’ll want to make sure you’re not breaking any specific requirements for any of them. This is especially true if you see a lot of your traffic is coming from a specific search engine.

Note: We generally only submit sitemaps to Google, but can submit to Bing and Yahoo if you choose.

For the requirements and rules for sitemaps, check out:

2) Define the Top-Level Navigation Structure

What do you want your homepage to link to? This will provide the foundation for your site’s structure, and will allow your site to grow.

Navigation-1.Png

The structure of your website plays a huge role in your site’s SEO, so it’s important to plan top-level navigation structure carefully. Specific attention should be given to the website’s depth. The further away a page is from the original homepage URL of your site, the worse it is for that page’s Search engine optimisation.

In other words, a shallow website (one that requires three or fewer clicks to reach each page) is much better for SEO than a deep website, according to Search Engine Journal.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to give general advice here as best practices can vary significantly by industry, company type, and so on. This high;ights the importance of understanding your industry and the marketing landscape in which you operate – If you want to discuss this further with us, please feel free to book a free 45min consultation.

3) Define the Second- & Third-Level Content

This is where creating visual sitemaps can come in handy. Once your homepage’s navigation structure is set,  we brainstorm and map out the pages that are two or three levels deeper into your website. This might be your “About Us” page, your team page, your hiring page and your blog etc.

Depending on the complexity of your website, you may only need two levels, or you may need up to four. And as you think out the deeper parts of your website, you may find you need to tweak the top-level navigation — and that’s okay.

Visual-Sitemap-Example.png

4. Write the XML Sitemap & Submit it to Search Engines

Once your website’s planned out, designed and coded, it’s time for our web development team to also create the XML sitemap to put on your web server, and submit it to the search engine.

When we first publish your website and each time you go through a significant site redesign, the sitemap will need to be resubmitted, so that search engines will be able to tell your homepage from your “About Us” page from your team page and so on.

Unless you’re using a platform that automatically updates your sitemap, you’ll need to update the sitemap yourself (or have us do it for you) and resubmit any time you make significant changes to your website, because if your website sucks, it won’t convert.

But remember, you’ll still either have to rely on search engines to pick up new pages organically. That means if you’ve made a really significant change to your site’s structure,  we might need to manually submit it.)

Below are step-by-step instructions for submitting a sitemap to Google, and then to Bing and Yahoo!.

How to submit a sitemap to Google:

  1. Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools.
  2. Click “Add a Site.”
  3. Enter the URL for your company (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com). Click “Continue.”
  4. Click “Crawl” on the left-hand side of the page, and choose “Sitemaps.”
  5. Click “Add/Test Sitemap.”
  6. Enter sitemap.xml after “http://www.yourdomain.com/”.
  7. Click “Submit Sitemap.”

(For more details, click here.)

How to submit a sitemap to Bing or Yahoo!:

  1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools.
  2. On the My Sites page, enter the URL for your company (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com). Click “Add.”
  3. In the “Add a sitemap” field, enter http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. (Replace “yourdomain” with your company’s URL.)
  4. Complete the rest of the required fields on the page, and click “Save.”

(For more details, click here.)

What If I Want to Add Webpages Later?

Once you define and submit your sitemap the first time, chances are you’ll want to tweak and add pages to your website every so often — and that’s completely fine. But keep in mind that if your website isn’t built on a platform that automatically generates a new sitemap and updates it on your web server when new pages are added, then every time you add a page — any page — to your website, that page will be missing from the sitemap that search engines see.

Remember, Google and other search engines will pick up the sitemap organically as long as you’ve updated the sitemap.xml file on your web server. But if you want to try to index your content the fastest way possible, you could resubmit your sitemap after publishing a new page — and it’s possible that Google would pick it up more quickly.

Once you’ve created and submitted your XML sitemap to search engines, you can start working on other fun stuff like your website’s design.

This is of course just one step in the process and it helps if you’re a little bit tech savvy.  If you need some help with a sitemap on a pre-existing website – please be aware there are some variables, (such as the platform you are using or if we can access the raw code via the cPanel on you site) and there may be no guarantee that we can help. but like anything in life, if you don’t ask, you don’t get so please feel free to get in touch, otherwise… Happy site-mapping!