Things learnt (and what not to do... or say) from experience in the skincare and beauty industry

Guy says to his girlfriend who has Eczema... "You've got a cracking body!"

Things learnt (and what not to do... or say) from fourteen months spent marketing B2C and B2B in the local Australian and emerging international skincare and beauty industry.

After managing a local Perth marketing agency it has been nice to work in-house this past year or so in an Australian skincare brand, applying real-world best practice marketing strategy in a fully integrated approach across traditional offline and current online channels.

Branding - brand consistency. The brand is what your consumers say about your business! So go and actually ask and listen to them. Determine your ideal consumer persona profile so you can match the marketing delivery to suit their interests and go to where they hang out so you can engage where it is appropriate and they are ready or wanting to make a purchase decision.

Rebranding is a big decision and don't take it lightly. Learning is an ongoing exercise in refinement and if you measure you can make informed decisions rather than purely emotional or personal preferences that don't align with your ideal client persona. A shorter product and company name makes many things easier!

Compliance is a complex area and important for all members of the sales and marketing team to be on the same page. Creating a set of rules of engagement for the brand which covers local and international regulations for advertising and data management is similar to having a style guide for the business to be consistent and compliant.

So what pay-per-click (PPC) channels did I use?

Google AdWords with remarketing, Facebook Ads, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn Ads. All with highly structured targeting to narrow in to the desired intended audience. Providing reinforcement to other campaign activities and as social supported sales actions.

What were my principle marketing channels and what was my preferred provider tools?

EDMs - eMarketing using MailChimp. MC is so powerful and versatile with quality template management, list building tools (built our B2C list up to 100K active subscribers this year), connects into ecommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, has detailed campaign tracking with ecommerce reports so you can make informed decisions about ROI and the automation tools are very powerful.

FAX - old school but still effective for B2B and the Ozmedia online platform is convenient, cost effective and has some great prospecting lists to increase reach in with this medium particularly for PR.

POSTAL - Direct Marketing to CRM segments with personalisation and strong brand design created awareness and part of the multi-touch point approach to connecting with warm leads and a prospecting CRM database for B2B that I built with over 10K+ leads that was central to the marketing activities.

Did I just do Facebook for my social strategy? No! Though I built a strong, loyal and highly engaged following of 28K+ followers on Facebook who enjoyed sharing their stories and creating genuine positive sentiment towards the brand, and Facebook was certainly the best performer when it comes to ROI in advertising, I still created substantial cross pollination and brand reinforcement across many popular social media channels including; Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ (yes it's still active), Flickr, Tumblr, Ello, Snap, YouTube and Vimeo. This substantially assisted building inbound links to the website for SEO and for search engines to learn about the positive sentiment around the brand. Social assisted sales improve through a commitment to content and engagement within these channels. Preparing a comprehensive library of canned responses to FAQs improves reply response time and ensures consistency to the brand message and style.

Other exciting and highly effective strategies included identifying key influencers across social media channels and collaborating with these as part of content marketing and building inbound links, building a substantial network of bloggers working on creating brand awareness and product testimonials. Positive product reviews are the backbone of generating trust signals for converting new consumers and useful for CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) when placed at pivotal points of the sales funnel.

Another CRO tool I implemented quickly was an exit pop within the shopping cart in an attempt to capture consumers abandoning the shopping cart part way through to save the sale which worked very well and was also supported by email automation with follow-ups an hour after leaving the shopping cart and next day with suitable incentives.

Adding an Affiliate Marketing solution integrated with the BigCommerce shopping cart tied into the Key Influencers is a more recent addition to the marketing strategy deployed. It can exponentially grow brand visibility and sales. LeadDymo was my tool of choice and a very powerful affiliate platform to connect, manage, provide a resource library, measure and pay the affiliates.

The tools I used almost daily included; Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier, After Effects, Acrobat, Google Analytics, AdWords, Hootsuite, and each social media channel app on phone, tablet and desktop, BigCommerce, MailChimp, WordPress and a few others.

It has been a very beneficial experience working hands-on in this industry with B2B and B2C marketing challenges, particularly the opportunity to explore marketing in the Asian pacific region and with China's Tmall, JD and Alibaba shopping channels and WeChat social media, and even the influential Chinese Daigou buyer network.

Anti competitor behaviour, negative SEO attacks, including negative review posting by competitors and other aggressive competitor behaviour is apparent in this industry and requires companies to be vigilant and constantly monitoring their brand mentions and have strategies prepared to deploy rapidly to counter common sniping attacks.

Training and educating the staff on social media, social networking to build contacts and selling to engage in the sales cycle helps to amplify the company's social posting and increase reach. LinkedIn is a powerful B2B channel that many businesses fail to identify and leverage.

Well I hope you found something useful as I did, from this look back across my recent experience. I'm now back into an agency role this Monday with Toby Creative as the Head of Marketing, and I look forward to providing insight, strategy and technical support potentially for your business should you wish to engage.

Find me on LinkedIn to learn more about my 20+ years experience in marketing:
http://au.linkedin.com/in/mattlynchseo

Free Training Courses - New 2016 Marketing Series

Welcome back to 2016, we hope you enjoyed your Christmas break!

Vorian Agency is once again proudly supporting the development of local Perth businesses during 2016, through the provision of 15 business marketing training course topics at no cost for attendees. These two-hour duration training courses held in our West Perth training facility, cover 15 popular marketing topics and are presented by leading marketing specialist Matt Lynch. Designed to enhance your knowledge across a range of marketing disciplines; Matt guides new and established businesses with essential knowledge, useful take-away tips that you can implement straight away, debunks myths, explains terminology and enables you to have informed conversation on what needs to be done with current best practice methodology.

The 2015 series proved very popular, with positive feedback and reviews from participants. It was great to see so many participants come back, time and time again, to attend the other courses on offer, and take advantage of the business networking opportunities.

2016 Course Information is available to view and book online: BOOK ONLINE HERE.

For our regular attendees, there are now two brand new seminar topics added in 2016.

2016 Topics Include:
•Branding
•Facebook
•LinkedIn
•Twitter
•Google+
•Pinterest
•Instagram
•MailChimp eNewsletters
•YouTube Video Marketing
•Hootsuite Social Media Management
•Search Engine Optimisation
•Google Analytics
•Google Adwords
•WordPress CMS
•Social Media Crisis Management

We're Here To Help
Vorian Agency is ready to assist your business marketing preparations through consulting services, training, strategy, implementation, monitoring and reporting. Preparation is the key to success.

Contact us 1300 100 333 or email info@vorian.com.au for a free no obligation meeting and information on the range of services we offer.

Did you receive our FREE 2016 Vorian Agency Marketing Monthly Calendar Resource? You are welcome to download to use in your planning for 2016 marketing campaigns. This very useful 2016 monthly marketing planner spreadsheet has worksheet tabs set up for each month with columns for the Days of the Week, the Dates, then additional information supplied that includes; WA Public Holidays, WA School Term Dates, and Significant Events/Celebration Dates throughout the year so you can plan your Marketing and Social Media campaign posts.

2016 Course Information is available to view and book online: BOOK ONLINE HERE.

Is your Marketing prepared for the new Financial Year?

As July 1st rapidly approaches, it is now that time of the year to consider the new financial year, allocation and distribution of marketing budgets, analysis and review of the successes with ROI from the past financial year, and goals for the new financial year ahead.

For many of our clients this past year, significant ROI success has been had through Pay-Per-Click advertising across multiple channels, where we offer; Google Adwords, YouTube Ads, Remarketing, Bing Adwords, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads and now Twitter Ads. With useful focused targetting features to match demographic profiling, and capture consumers at the time of interest and intent to purchase, this style of marketing had lead to higher conversions and sales.

Mobile technology is an integral part of your customers everyday lives. As a marketer, you need to get on board now, if you haven't embraced this aspect of your marketing preparedness. Probably not 'every' mobile marketing activity is suitable for your particular business, so you do need to carefully consider the appropriate options.

For your mobile marketing activities, you might consider:

• Responsive website design
• Responsive landing page design
• Responsive email design with MailChimp
• PPC Advertising and Display advertising
• Native mobile apps
• SMS and MMS messaging
• Optimal campaign activity time for mobile users

For some industries, and some businesses, times are unfortunately tough, but cutting your marketing kills your business very fast! During lean times, it’s absolutely natural and necessary for a business owner to look at how to cut costs and maximise profit margins.

Remember to invest in Customer Loyalty: It’s always easier to sell to people who already know, like, and trust you. Reward customers for referrals they bring you. Call former customers as a follow-up and see how they are doing and if there’s anything you can help them with.

Create some local PR: Publicity has the power to tell thousands of prospective new customers about your business. Write a press release or find a way your company can tie into a trending event and tell the media. If you are not sure how to use #hashtags for event marketing, come along to one of Vorian's free marketing seminars for a helping hand.

Reconnect with your local business network organisations: Leave the office, shake some hands, and connect with other local business owners. Don't forget to connect with those you meet via LinkedIn.

Send weekly e-mail newsletters: This makes sure that your followers don’t forget about you. Plus it gives you an opportunity to share tips, ideas, and resources that provide value and showcase your expertise. Vorian Agency is now a MailChimp Expert Company, and can help you to set up and manage regular enewsletter content, automated mail touch points, or responsive templates that work for mobile devices.

With new pricing plans and additional services from Vorian Agency now available, please phone 1300 100 333, email info@vorian.com.au or visit our website www.vorianagency.com.au

What SEO do I need in 2015?

It’s the middle of 2015. Have you begun your SEO campaign? Despite the predictions you might have read in the past year, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is still alive and kicking, and in fact, remains as one of the best ways to boost your traffic, get more from your website and raise returns for your business.

What is SEO?

Let’s do a short recap of what SEO is all about. It is the process of identifying the keyword phrases that potential customers use in search engines to find products and services. SEO helps ensure that your website faces little to no obstacles in capturing the maximum possible volume of relevant incoming traffic.

SEO revolves around the idea that by giving your website a boost, you are providing your business with distinct advantages in an Internet-driven business environment. It helps get your business found more easily. Through this, you gain more leads, better chances at conversions and greater potential to make sales, among others.

Organic traffic is a key element in search engine optimisation. It is the type of traffic that is derived from natural search engine indexes, as opposed to traffic bought through search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns such as Google Adwords. To achieve organic traffic, pages in your website have to be optimised so that they conform to search engine algorithms and as such, get ranked in the search engine results pages.

Needless to say, algorithms can vary from one search engine to another. Google’s ranking criteria may differ from that used by Bing. SEO seeks to optimise your website for any algorithm so that you are guaranteed a good ranking in any search engine. Additionally, search engine algorithm changes periodically—keeping up with the changes and ensuring the best results every time is part of the aims of SEO.

SEO for 2015

A lot of things have changed for SEO over the last couple of years alone, thanks to shifting demands and Google’s changing algorithms. That, however, does not necessarily mean that it is too late to engage in SEO. Here are a few pointers to remember for SEO this year:

·         Google’s goals remain unchanged.

Google may have gone through many algorithm shifts but their purpose has always been to provide users with the best search results. The search giant has always considered user experience a priority and as such, has consistently rolled out algorithm updates that moved towards accurate, informative search results in websites that are easy to use.

That said, your SEO campaign must have user experience as its foremost goal as well. Put yourself in the users’ shoes and imagine what would make your search easier and much more fruitful. Will you benefit from a website that loads quickly? If so, then ensure that your own site loads fast. Would you, as a user, benefit from having more pictures in a site? If so, then add more images to your own site. Obtain the assistance of experts to ensure that the steps you take are in line with current search engine standards, but putting the interest of your site visitors first is a great way to start.

·         Never underestimate content.

As it turns out, one of the best ways to provide optimal user experience is to make information readily available through content.  Blog posts and other forms of web content are now considered as key elements of most content marketing campaigns, and are religiously integrated into many businesses marketing strategies.

To maximise results, make sure that your content is high-quality. Readability and comprehensibility are huge factors for users. They can affect how they see you as a potential resource and how often they return to your site for your content. Boost your web content with SEO strategies to increase their effectiveness and their visibility.

Moreover, content is a great way to spread your links and strengthen your backlink portfolio. Users searching for resources will be more than happy to link back to your content and your website if your posts are informative enough. This is just another reason to invest in well-created content.

·         Go mobile.

Google reported that a large percentage of search queries nowadays are sent via mobile devices. Consequently, the search giant rolled out a mobile-friendly update last April. The update rewarded websites that have adopted a mobile-responsive design.

As more and more users surf the Internet through their mobile devices, it is within reason that your SEO strategy this year should prioritise mobile optimisation. A good start would be ensuring that your website is mobile-responsive. This would mean that users would be able to use it conveniently and comfortably even through the small screens of their mobile devices.

That said, you should be careful about potential errors, especially as the technology is relatively new. This should, however, not discourage you from taking the path to mobile-responsiveness as, with adequate preparation, the benefits far outweigh the potential risks.

The year 2015 is not too late for you to get started on your SEO campaign.  The Internet offers plenty of insights into the many steps you can take, as well as the many ways you can enhance your online marketing campaign. Get started now with Vorian Agency – a Google Partner, Bings Ads Professional company and a Hootsuite Solutions Partner.

Introducing you and your website to RSS

RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a great way for your online business to keep in touch with your website visitors once they have been to your website and keep your website 'sticky'... meaning that once you have had the visitor to your site, you can encourage them to receive ongoing information about your company, news, information, new deals or services and keep your clients engaged.

It is actually very easy to implement RSS into your site! By including the following piece of one line HTML code in the head section of your webpages you'll be all set:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="ENTER_RSS_URL">

By doing this visitors to your website will then see within their web browser the RSS icon glow orange and become active - meaning that they can then subscribe directly to your feed, which is like book marking your specials or info page so that they will continue to receive this information from you each time you post out an RSS update.

So RSS is a bit like having an email newsletter subscription service for your website, but only better.

Because RSS was created a few years back as an alternative method to email delivery to get around some of the problems related to email marketing. RSS is automatically opt-in, as the user is choosing to subscribe. There is no spam filters that block your message getting through, nor delays in delivery that can happen with email - RSS is immediate, so a great way for speed to market of your business information or new deals.

A lot of people will actually have RSS available in their email clients like Outlook 2007 and above. So they can subscribe and follow your business information from the comfort of their email application. Once you have RSS set up, you can also provide your clients with a long list of other marketing tools that take advantage of RSS, and which can receive and display RSS. So you could actually create and provide downloadable Google Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets, iPhone & iPad applications, even Screen Savers that receive and show your company information via RSS. These are some great brand building and marketing tools to help disseminate a brand awareness campaign and attract more eyeballs to your products and services. If you would like some further information about any of these just drop me an email.

So why am I harping on about RSS for your website?

Quite simple really as I'm all about driving more traffic to your online business, and retaining client interaction as well as pointing out ways to create better leverage with Search Engines. We're here to work for you and improve your online business.

RSS feeds can be crawled by Search Engines, they can even be submitted to Search Engines, along with a long list of RSS aggregator websites or online directories. This generates more exposure, and a better interaction with Search Engines encouraging them to find all your content, and particularly any new content you create and get this added into their Search Directories so your site is found more.

And here is a simple tip to actually manage and update your website's RSS feed...

Use Twitter! Yup, signup for your free Twitter account for your business at twitter.com and subsequently Twitter provides a RSS feed of your tweets. This RSS address can be put into that one line of code I provided you with at the top of this email and you are away. This means that you are using Twitter and getting your business information and website links out into Twitter and being seen there as well, and having it generated at the same time into your webpage. Bit like two for the price of... nothing!

Did you know that Twitter has a content relationship deal with Google - meaning, that Google trawls through all the data generated on Twitter. So when you tweet a new deal, a special, a new page added to your site or information about your business it will be found by Google and added very quickly into Google's own search index. This is one of the key reasons I recommend the use of Twitter for your business!

Okay, so a bit of information for you to digest this morning. I hope it makes sense. Of course if you have any further questions shoot me through an email.

RSS Marketing

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) - How RSS Will Increase Your Business Success

Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

RSS will increase your rankings for the most important search engines and at the same time, through RSS specific search directories and engines, generate a new stream of traffic for your web site.

RSS can and will generate completely new traffic for you and help you increase the power of your existing traffic sources.

This medium is also beneficial in that it will get you listed almost immediately, even at directories like Yahoo!, and will get you highly ranked positions for your most important keywords and phrases.

And the best part: it's free and quick to set up.
100% Content Delivery - Avoiding the perils of email marketing

Forget about spam filters that are keeping your content away from your subscribers. RSS gets 100% of your content delivered. This works for direct marketing messages, e-zine publishing, customer support and so on.

With RSS you can even easily deliver daily or hourly news to your subscribers, and everything else as well. RSS will help you expand your content delivery to daily content updates, content updates by interest, content updates for different target audiences and so on. Use one RSS feed to deliver your daily news and the other to deliver in-depth articles, and so on...

So when speed to market is an important consideration for your marketing message, RSS can deliver!

And don't forget about the power of RSS personalization and autoresponder messages, which are already possible.

Discover New Marketing Opportunities

New times bring new marketing opportunities, and RSS is the leader in this area as well.

Use RSS to increase the sales of your affiliates by providing them with RSS feeds to better promote your products.

Launch your own RSS product feeds and digital catalogues (Amazon started publishing those not long ago) that bring your products directly to your recipient's desktops. Amazon is doing, but not many other people yet. Be among the first and get a lion's share of your target market. It is great for content specific subject areas that users wish to focus upon without all the other distractions.
Market through branded RSS aggregators and establish a constant connection with your subscribers. It's just like having a branded e-mail client that your customers and prospects are using every day ... but much cheaper.

Find innovative ways of delivering your ads and direct marketing messages directly to your audiences, making sure they are actually read.

Autoresponders are a great marketing tool, but are becoming ineffective because your prospects just don't want to give you their e-mail addresses. RSS gives you this very same power, but without the fear people have with e-mail.

Use RSS to market to your existing customers, affiliates, business partners and employees/team members.

Publish your own "podcast", a special RSS feed, which carries audio. Perfect for your own audio "radio station" or for getting your voice to your readers, without having to worry about too large e-mail attachments. Podcasting got so big that not only every respected internet marketers is using it, but also huge corporations.

Use RSS to deliver latest posts and topics from your forums directly to your readers, to increase forum popularity and the quantity & quality of conversations.

Get Your Content Published On Other Web Sites

Get your content easily published on other web sites to reach new audiences and use their traffic to increase your own sales, as well as achieve greater recognition as an expert in your field.

Again, it's free and easy, and has the potential of bringing your content to thousands and thousands of new prospects, who are ready to buy now.

Generate New Subscribers More Easily

Internet users are reluctant to subscribe to any more e-mail newsletters, but because RSS is so easy to control they don't have any problems with subscribing to new RSS feeds that match their interests.

That means that by having an RSS feed you can raise your visitor-to-subscriber conversion easily.

Just imagine how converting more visitors in to subscribers will improve your long-term sales ... every additional subscriber you get means a new potential sales and a long-term relationship that could lead to dozens of sales on the long-term, especially if you convert him in to an affiliate.

If however you're not using RSS, these sales could easily be lost!

Don't Worry About Messages From Your Customers Not Reaching You

E-mail messages, yes, even those from your customers and their business enquieries, are often lost due to spam filters.

With RSS, no messages from your customers or prospects will ever get lost again. That means that you'll now capture every business enquiery and respond accordingly, turning it in to a real sale.

Don't forget to measure and optimise your feeds!