The Sponge Blog: Evolve – embrace brand evolution. - Insights and ideas about design and marketing from The Sponge Sydney

To me brainstorming new online business models is a great deal of fun. My team and I really enjoy the challenge of developing innovative ideas and understand the technical freedoms and limitations of the internet. Recently we have had the opportunity to work on some exciting and boundary pushing online strategies. In this post I will share with you some of the key questions we work through to develop an effective online strategy.

In most cases an online strategy is not an off the shelf solution. The internet gives us the freedom to market any combination of products and services and with the technological advancements that are constantly being developed it creates the opportunity to be innovative in the way that they are delivered. These innovations can create a superior user experience and generate a real consumer buzz.

To develop an effective online strategy my team and I like to spend a couple of hours with a client working through (and often brainstorming) what we believe to be some of the key questions. I have grouped them into bite size pieces below. Keep in mind that a lot of these questions are broad stroke and are intended to spark meaningful (and often lengthy) conversations and have natural follow up clarification questions. To keep it relatively simple they are not included here.

Knowing that there is an worthwhile opportunity

1. Who is your potential market or markets?
2. Are they on the internet?
3. Is there a proven demand for your offering?
4. Is demand rising or in decline?
5. Is there an undersupply, or an oversupply of what you are offering?

Branding your offering

1. Is this a new brand, a sub brand or a standalone offering?
2. Have you named it to position it correctly for your market?
3. Does your brand identity and design style appeal to your market? Does it convey the value of what you have priced it at?
4. Does your value proposition communicate the value of your offering clearly and concretely to your market?
5. Is your domain name easy to say, memorable and matches your brand name?

Selling your offering

1. Do you know what motivates your market to buy?
2. What is truly unique about your offering?
3. Why will your market buy from you?
4. Does your offering require short or long term education to be accepted by your market?
5. Does your offering require an introductory offer, or free trial period to make a sale?

Delivering on the sale

1. How do you intend to handle online payments?
2. Are you delivering locally, interstate, or globally?
3. Does your offering require warehousing and shipping? How do you intend to manage this?
4. Is your offering a onetime sale, or is there an opportunity for repeat sales, or a subscription sale?
5. Does your offering have natural complimentary offerings that you can also provide?
6. How do you intend to deliver your customer service?
7. How can you add value for your customers over and above your offering? (This question fits in next category too!)

Marketing & Usability – Getting more sales

1. Does your offering have an inherent referability? Is there one you can create?
2. Is it more important to constantly add new customers, or increase the number of transactions with your existing ones?
3. How scalable is your offering?
4. Do you know what else can be done on the internet with current technologies that may complement of advance your offering?
5. Do you intend to create a community for your clients?
6. Have you considered the useability and functionality of your website for your customers, both immediate and for the future evolutions?

Financing, Longevity & Exit

1. Is your offering immediately monetizable?
2. How many sales do you need to break even and then become profitable?
3. What does success look like for you?
4. Is your offering a short term or a long term business model?
5. What is short term and long term to you?
6. Do you have an exit strategy?
7. How do you intend to fund your venture (short and long term)?

I hope these questions help you with your online strategy. If you would like to dive deeper into any of these categories or questions, or get some professional help developing your online strategy, simply drop us an email now.

One last question.What other good strategy defining questions do you know of?

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Your answers to our survey have given us the top 10 services we offer that you want to know more about. They are:

1. Online Marketing Strategy
2. Brand Positioning
3. Website design and maintenance
4. Search Engine Optimisation
5. Social Media for Business (facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc)
6. Web Video
7. Business & Brand Naming
8. Google Adwords
9. Email Newsletter Marketing
10. Logo Design and Stationery (inc digital templates)

Over the next 10 weeks I intend to post an article each week working through this list, starting with Online Marketing Strategy. If you can’t wait for information about any of these subjects you are welcome to contact our team to arrange your own personal consultation.

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As one of our core services is creating (and managing) brands for new businesses, my team and I have the frequent pleasure of meeting with entrepreneurs. I think many of these entrepreneurs wouldn’t call themselves this, however Webster’s dictionary defines “entrepreneur” as: ‘one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.’, so in my opinion they definitely are.

I personally admire the bravery that it takes to invest in an idea. I feel a kinship with this type of person as it is something I do time and again (with varied success!). Even with the uncertainty that accompanies creating a new business, there is freedom in knowing you are in control and not at threat of being fired.

The economist and entrepreneur Paul Zane Pilzer informs us in his Entrepreneurial Challenge that with the current economic climate, you really have no choice but to become an entrepreneur and the time to do it is when the going is good, not to wait until times are tough. I am not saying that you need to quit your job today and invest in that idea you have stewing over. I am saying that it is definitely worth a discussion to see if it is feasible.

Our policy of only accepting new “non-competitive clients” means our clients are spread across many different industries. With this variety of industries comes the privilege of experiencing and learning many different business models, processes and practises. One benefit is that we can share these practises with our clients in different industries, in some cases giving them first mover advantage. Similarly and sometimes more importantly, we can use them to shape a newly born idea, brought to us by an entrepreneur, into a fully developed brand and strategic business model.

We have two such projects in the development which I will touch on briefly now and share with you in detail in future posts once they have launched. One is an international business model that worked successfully ten years ago, but has been flailing in recent times due its laborious and out dated processes. We have streamlined this model into a completely scalable, cashflow generating online model with a powerful referral funnel and client retention system.

In the second of these we recognised that what the client thought was the product would work better as a free lead generator and the actual ‘profitable’ product is something else entirely. The new product has the potential to generate more than eight times the revenue from each client than the original idea. Furthermore if we are successful in adding the value we plan with this project, the repeat revenue is ongoing.

You may be thinking how does this fit in the realm of branding?

My team and I believe that client experience is a huge part of branding. If you get the client experience right, you will get the brand right. An awesome example of this is Zappos! Zappos generates over a billion USD in online sales annually, with 80% coming from existing clients. Their focus is their company culture and their client experience. I recently read to Zappos CEO Tony Hseih’s recently released book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose in which he goes into detail about how Zappos got to where it is today. I highly recommend it!

When evaluating a new idea for a business or a brand, we like to think of it from your new client’s perspective. In the formative steps of creating a business there is every opportunity to shape the client experience completely so that it is ideal. Naturally this is heavily intertwined with the business’ process, so to us it is a critical part of branding and something we care very deeply about.

This kind of work is exciting to us and we relish every opportunity to create something special. Have you got an idea you want to discuss?

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We have been working closely with some interesting entrepreneurs and organisations in the last two months who have really pushed us to work out our creative muscles. One project which is poised to go live in July has given us the opportunity to influence a positive change in Australia’s culture. I say this with some hesitancy, as I know full well that this kind of change is no easy thing.

The project, which I cannot disclose too much about right now apart from it being based around drinking, is about to go into a beta testing phase prior to the launch and we would like some help from 18-30 year old socially active Aussies to help us iron out any kinks. If you can help and would like to get an exclusive preview, email us for more information.

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The weekend before last my fellow sponge director and I participated in a great motorsport event called the Italian Connection Trophy. We have been involved with it for three years as a sponsor and its charity (as of this year) is The Duchenne Foundation. If you are like me, you will not have heard of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) – it is the number one genetic killer of boys worldwide. Throughout the event we were all very moved by the video and the cause and donated everything we could to the Foundation.

The organisation is great, the cause is great, but there is one flaw which was a talking point through the event (due to the Duchenne car livery). Whoever was responsible for the domain name doesn’t appear to have thought it through carefully enough. It is www.blueball.org.au and it makes sense when you understand the logo and concept behind the brand for the foundation, but not so much if you haven’t seen it before. In my opinion the decision was made by someone too close to the brand and the curse of knowledge has clouded their thoughts. A quick look at blueball.org confirms the natural association that can be made.

The point is to think carefully about the domain name you are choosing for your brand. Have friends or family read through your short list to pick out flaws, or misreads that you cannot see. To see what some really bad examples a quick Google search for “bad domain names” returns a page with nine Bad domain names, as it says:

…these are companies that didn’t spend quite enough time considering how their online names might appear – and be misread…

1. Who Represents is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is www.whorepresents.com
2. Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange Advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com
3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net

You can read the rest here, but you get the point.

Having said that, up until a recent check if you accidently omitted the .au in our domain name and typed www.thesponge.com you would have landed on the today sponge contraceptive device website!

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If you are directing people to your website through any kind of marketing and you are not using landing pages, you might want to STOP EVERYTHING AND READ THIS!

What is a landing page?

The short answer is that a landing page is any page within your website that a visitor lands on as an entry point, including your home page.

Why are landing pages critical for website owners today?

There are two main reasons, but before we get into them let’s touch on the variety of ways that a new visitor can arrive at any landing page within your website. Typically visitors come from word of mouth, word of mouse (email, Twitter, Facebook, blog post, etc), a link within another website, your business collateral print material (brochures, fliers, stationery, business cards, signage, livery, uniforms etc), traditional advertisements (TV, print, radio, outdoor, directories, etc), search engines, or paid online advertisement (Google Adwords, display ads, yahoo, online directories, Facebook etc).

The first reason for landing pages is heavily associated with the smart marketing methodology of making relevant and specific calls to action, tailored to the people who will see them. Without going deep into it, smart marketers know that creating relevant and targeted calls to action can improve your conversion rate and reduce your cost per sale.

The typical website

Imagine a salesperson standing outside her business, working hard starting dialogues with people about her various products as they pass by, but as soon as someone shows interest in a product she mentions, she directs them into the showroom and shuts the door behind them leaving them alone to find the product that interested them and work out what to do next, amongst the mass of options on display before them. Similarly for websites, businesses tend to direct all enquiries to a homepage that has been designed to deliver all the available information for their business, but not the specific information for whatever it was that got the attention of the prospect in the first place.

This may be fine if you only ever sell one specific product, to only one type of client, with only one call to action. However if like most businesses you don’t, and you have invested your time and money starting multiple, targeted and relevant dialogues with your prospects (through your marketing pieces and advertisements), to the point where they are interested and have landed on your website, doesn’t it make sense to continue that dialogue directly, with little or no distraction, and walk them through your specific steps to complete the sale for that product or service? This can really only be done by creating a focused landing page, or system that does just that for each and every unique dialogue that you open.

The second reason is equally important. Do you know the exact return on investment you are getting for the money you are spending on your advertising? For most businesses it can only be estimated from an overall period sales/leads/enquiries report. When you utilise unique landing pages for each and every marketing piece, you can track every online enquiry, sale, or visit, right back to the originating piece. It is as simple as creating a landing page and URL like this for a campaign: www.thesponge.com.au/ROI and using Google Analytics intelligently in your website.

The good news is that Google Analytics is a free resource. The bad news is that your web team may not understand landing pages or Google Analytics, or if they do, may not have the practical experience to implement a system that will work for you.

There is a pretty good chance you have encountered a landing page style currently being used by growing numbers of internet marketers which is appallingly ugly. It is really saddening, though they do follow some basic principles that we believe in and practice too. Those are to make the page a single column and include all the answers to the typical questions that a prospect will ask, and to direct the visitor to one specific action, either buy, contact, subscribe to a list, or a variant of one of these. Here at The Sponge we believe there is absolutely no reason for your website to be aesthetically unpleasant in order to make you more profitable. In other words, you can have beautiful and effective landing pages.

We are in the really early stages of evaluating the viability of providing a hosted landing page solution for cases where you know your business could benefit by using them, but your current web team is unable to deliver and you don’t want to offend anyone, or burn any bridges. If you or anyone you know are interested in this model, please let us know ASAP so we can factor it into our study.

I hope this has got you thinking and I would love to receive any questions that arise and comments.

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I have been talking a lot lately about the legitimate incorporation of a social media strategy for businesses. To put it into a context that can be easily understood I recently wrote a post under the title of this post. If you have not read it already, I urge you to jump over to Anthill or thinksocial.com.au and give it a read.

I want to briefly add that in order to compare it I may have given the impression that social media is an easily quantifiable marketing exercise. It is so much more than that, which brings me to a few key hard to measure benefits for businesses active in the social media space:

Managing Your Online Brand Reputation

People are (or should be!) talking about your brand online right now, and social media gives you the ability to listen and be involved in the conversation directly.

Create a Community of Brand Advocates

Create brand advocates & advisors by keeping them active with frequent contact. Be where your audience is and expand your database. Create online brand communities who will continue to market you to the web.

Become a Knowledge Leader

Be seen as the leading edge in your industry and share your perspective and expertise. Learn of new developments as and when they happen around the world. Monitor what your market is really thinking and saying about your competitors.

Customer Service

Respond to your client’s and potential client’s queries live and direct, either publicly or in private depending on the impression you wish to make or whether it can help others at the same time.

Secure your Social Media Identity

Similar to branding through domain names. Have you secured all your social media profiles?

Display Business Intelligence

Social media trades traditional media spend for labour cost. By activating your social media strategy you will be seen as maximising your existing expenditure (staff) which in this economic climate is critical.

Open a Recruitment Channel

Create an online identity that can attract like minded people into your organisation.

So whether or not you think that Social Media may be where the bulk of your market is, the comparison in the linked post identifies it as a similar channel to a print publication, where the exact same question can be asked. The question I put to you now is which medium of the two is growing right now?

So how have you started using Social Media in your business? If you need help: thinksocial

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A friend of mine sent me a advanced release of his new book a couple of weeks ago. After reading it I feel compelled to give you 3 reasons NOT to get this book. When you read it and are inspired by the information contained within…

1.  You will have people all around the world talking about you!

2. These people will visit your website and buy from you!

3. You may even become the authority in your profession.

…all by simply harnessing the power of the internet and creating a World Wide Rave. Who would possibly want such things?

The book is called World Wide Rave and it is written by a friend of mine named David Meerman Scott. The truth is that this is a short, entertaining and easy to read book that will leave you with a list of things to try yourself (or talk to your design team to assist you with). I have to admit, here at The Sponge we have used, and continue to use David’s wisdom and suggestions on many of our clients online strategies.

You may want to look at some of David’s previous books and ebooks too at his blog.

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