April 2014 - Quad Digital

Why you should be building your brand online

April 29, 2014 in Content Marketing , Quad , SEO

If your brand already earns good revenue through a digital channel, you’ve got a great opportunity.

Hopefully, you’re already capturing lots of organic traffic and I expect you’re fully engaged in offline advertising to build awareness and drive acquisition. However, given how online advertising has declined in value as consumers have found it increasingly easier to ignore, you might be wary of using digital to reach your customers. You shouldn’t be. It’s a brilliant way to build brand awareness and engagement.

The great thing about digital is the depth of content a brand can create. Video, editorial, interactive rich media; it’s quite a big list. Taking this and combining it with the disruptive technologies of social media offers your brand exciting opportunities, if used properly.

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Tags: content , content marketing , content marketing strategy , media budget , online branding No Comments »

by Ben Dickens

Why brand strategy drives content marketing

April 22, 2014 in Blogging

Recently we’ve noticed just how ingrained a bottom up strategy led by a desire to drive SEO signals seems to run. Overcoming this is one of the biggest challenges brands face. Many are struggling to come to terms with the fact that digital now is not just a sales channel but a place where brand awareness and engagement can take place to great effect.

Above the line and brand marketers have long known the importance of awareness and engagement. However, they’ve rarely been able to offer the depth of engagement that digital offers; its combination of owned media (websites and social media) with strong awareness campaigns (earned media) is the essence of content marketing and what’s more a consumer can stay in the same place to make a purchase, truly end to end. However many marketers and agencies in this space are only interested in the sale and being in the right place at the right time. That’s fine and works, but how do you grow beyond this?

Until very recently, the need to address search optimization has prevented direct response digital marketers from thinking about real human customers in any real depth. What’s more there’s been a failure to focus their campaigns on really engaging with the people who will buy their products and services, i.e. who they really should be speaking to.

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by Lola Olson

Audience building for Books About Town

April 15, 2014 in Content , Design , Quad

If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you may have heard we’re working with Books About Town, a collaboration between the National Literacy Trust and Wild In Art to encourage reading for enjoyment. Based in London, the Books About Town plans include a series of sponsored BookBenches, designed by top artists and celebrating stories linked to the capital. The benches, shaped to resemble open books, will start popping up around London this July. Read the rest of this entry →

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by Lola Olson

SEO-based approaches are marketing snake oil

April 8, 2014 in Content , SEO

Snake-oil Despite about the dangers of guest blogging with links, many companies are still interested in using this form of content marketing to boost SEO. It does make sense. It’s always been difficult to measure ROI on marketing. Just because a certain amount of people see a billboard or an advert doesn’t guarantee you’ll see a boost in sales.

SEO provides a result. It’s easier to measure in terms of a number, a position on a Google search or an improvement in a keyword. But the reality is that using only SEO as a measure of ROI is the equivalent of marketing snake oil.

It’s great if you’re on the top ten Google results for a certain search term. That does put you in the face of a lot of customers who wouldn’t otherwise know about you. But it’s not everything. It’s not building an audience. It’s not building a brand. What we encourage our clients to understand is that they don’t just need to focus on boosting their ranks in search engines, but building an audience behind their brand.

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by Lola Olson

April 2, 2014 in Content Creation

Yesterday, April Fool’s Day, released a YouTube video announcing a competition to find Pokémon. Each person who sought out a hidden Pokémon in a real world location could become a Pokémon Master. Even though the augmented reality was part of the prank, you can participate in the Google Pokemon Challenge on Google Maps in real world locations until this evening.

There’s a lot of reasons this prank works in Google’s favour, but here are the three major content marketing lessons to take away from the search giant’s Pokémon Challenge:

Tags: content marketing