So what is a marketing calendar? Simply, it’s a document that will help you schedule and monitor your marketing activities over the coming year. Importantly, a marketing calendar helps you project when and how much your marketing activities will cost across the year ahead.
 
Use these five simple steps to create a marketing calendar to boost your business and brand in 2020.
 
1. Create a Marketing Schedule Calendar
Get a 2020 calendar and mark each day/week you want to launch marketing activities for your business. Consider days/weeks that are key sales periods, of course this will depend on your business and key markets. Remember, to make sure you firstly take the time to reflect on your 2019 marketing activities and identify what provided the best ROI.
 
2. Identify Marketing Deadlines
After you have identified your key dates for 2020 on your Marketing Schedule Calendar, count back four weeks and mark it as “Marketing Deadline”. This is when you should have your marketing activity finalized and ready to go. Too often important marketing activities are rushed and this greatly impacts on the creative process being compromised.
 
3. Make Strategy Time
For every day/week marked “Marketing Deadline” schedule at least two weeks before as “Strategy Time”. This is when you need to make time to review the overall marketing strategy to make sure it is inline with current objectives and will provide a real ROI.  Marketing KPIs you need to be measuring to better understand your ROI may include: website traffic and engagement, social media reach and engagement, marketing qualified leads (MQL), sales qualified leads (SQL), and of course sales growth relevant to the marketing activities.
 
4. Consider Production Time
Effective marketing involves creating, drafting, revising and delivering. Identifying creative partners and briefing them on your business takes time. Producing marketing materials, booking quality advertising space or media spots also takes time. By leaving this all too late will limit your potential ROI. This is why it is extremely important to focus and plan ahead for 2020.
 
5. Build Professional Relationships
Finally, now is a great time to start reviewing or building new relationships with designers, agencies and media outlets in preparation of launching your 2020 marketing activities. By reaching out now you will be able to start to develop relationships with key partners. Like effective marketing, creative business relationships take time to build.
 
Scopic works with you to strategize and maximize your marketing returns, contact us to find out more.

As the end of 2018 quickly rolls around, it is now time to start proactively planning your 2019 marketing spend and activities. Guaranteeing marketing success in the year ahead will require you to reflect, focus and plan ahead.
 
Use these five simple steps to create a marketing plan to boost your business and brand in 2019.
 
1. Create a Marketing Schedule Calendar
Get a 2019 calendar and mark each day/week you want to launch marketing activities for your business. Consider days/weeks that are key sales periods, of course this will depend on your business and key markets. Remember, to make sure you firstly take the time to reflect on your 2018 marketing activities and identify what provided the best ROI.
 
2. Identify Marketing Deadlines
After you have identified your key dates for 2019 on your Marketing Schedule Calendar, count back four weeks and mark it as “Marketing Deadline”. This is when you should have your marketing activity finalized and ready to go. Too often important marketing activities are rushed and this greatly impacts on the creative process being compromised.
 
3. Make Strategy Time
For every day/week marked “Marketing Deadline” schedule at least two weeks before as “Strategy Time”. This is when you need to make time to review the overall marketing strategy to make sure it is inline with current objectives and will provide a real ROI.  Marketing KPIs you need to be measuring to better understand your ROI may include: website traffic and engagement, social media reach and engagement, marketing qualified leads (MQL), sales qualified leads (SQL), and of course sales growth relevant to the marketing activities.
 
4. Consider Production Time
Effective marketing involves creating, drafting, revising and delivering. Identifying creative partners and briefing them on your business takes time. Producing marketing materials, booking quality advertising space or media spots also takes time. By leaving this all too late will limit your potential ROI. This is why it is extremely important to focus and plan ahead for 2019.
 
5. Build Professional Relationships
Finally, now is a great time to start reviewing or building new relationships with designers, agencies and media outlets in preparation of launching your 2019 marketing activities. By reaching out now you will be able to start to develop relationships with key partners. Like effective marketing, creative business relationships take time to build.
 
Scopic works with you to plan ahead and maximize marketing returns, contact us to find out more.

For a brand to attract and engage with an audience in a saturated global market it needs to communicate its brand in a consistent, relevant and authentic manner across all channels to all audiences. The smartest way to maintain strength across your brand is to create a style guide with exact specifications, guidelines and examples.
 
What is a brand style guide?
A brand style guide (also known as a brand book or brand guide) is simply a reference tool that helps content creators maintain consistency by establishing what a brand must look, feel and sound like at all times. It’s one of the most important resources of your business. It sets a clear focus for all parties—employees, partners and investors.
 
A style guide should include all the essential guidelines for your brand’s identity voice and tone especially the elements listed below.

• Brand Position: Brand story, mission and values.
• Logo: Color, size, positioning and clear space.
• Color Palette: Print color (CMYK) and digital color (RGB) codes.
• Typography: Font type/s, size, color, spacing and alignment.
• Imagery: Mood, size, focus, clear space and background.
• Copy: Key words, word count and tone.
• Print Material: Specific specifications and examples.
• Digital Material: Specific specifications and examples.
  

A well-thought-out style guide is an essential reference tool for creating branded content. To clearly and effectively communicate with your target audience in a consistent and effective way you should always refer to your style guide, as it provides brand stability and strength.

Scopic works with businesses to create engaging and memorable brands, connect with us to find out more.

What is a brand style guide?
A business’s brand is one of its most visual assets.  Business branding reflects the core personality and culture of a business. It sets clear direction for employees, and creates meaningful connection points for target audiences. For a brand to be truly engaging and memorable, it must strongly communicate its brand in a consistent way across all channels to all audiences.
 
The smartest way to maintain consistency across your brand is to create a style guide with exact specifications, guidelines and examples. A style guide is simply a reference tool that helps maintain consistency by demonstrating what a brand must look, feel and sound like at all times.
 
Essential Elements of a Style Guide:

• Brand Position: Brand story, mission and values.
• Logo: Color, size, positioning and clear space.
• Color Palette: Print color (CMYK) and digital color (RGB) codes.
• Typography: Font type/s, size, color, spacing and alignment.
• Imagery: Mood, size, focus, clear space and background.
• Copy: Key words, word count and tone.
• Print Material: Specific specifications and examples.
• Digital Material: Specific specifications and examples.

To clearly and effectively communicate with your target audience in a consistent and effective way you should always use your style guide as a starting point.
 
Scopic works with businesses to create brand style guides that provide clear direction for employees and partners connect with us to find out more.

With so much attention on social media marketing and the role of influencers it is easy for businesses to overlook email as an important part of their marketing mix.
 
Findings from a recent Adobe survey (​Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report 2017) on email marketing indicate that consumers are sick of branded emails that are hard selling, uninformative and irrelevant.
 
However, there was a positive and that was consumers would still rather get an email offer from brands compared to direct mail, mobile apps or social media. As Adobe puts it, consumers still have a love affair with email, but these days a bit more balance in needed. 

As we have noted in previous articles on mobile website design, 2017 is the year that website mobility will really start to matter — if you want to provide a positive user experience for your audience.

So this is just a quick reminder — to make sure you regularly test your website is mobile-friendly.
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Once your website is live (ideally during soft launch) and whenever you make changes to your website — test it — test it across various mobile devices, including smartphones/tablets of all shapes and sizes. Also — test it — across various operating systems like Windows, iOS and Android.

Test every page — test the menu and logo positioning, text formatting, image quality, button and input field location and sizing. Whenever you are testing your website, consider the target audience, or ideally ask a 3rd party to test it for you to gain a real understanding of the user-friendliness of your website.
 
Scopic works with businesses to create quality content that grabs attention and delivers a positive user experience, contact us to find out more.

This shift away from traditional “celebrity endorsement” can boost product exposure and drive sales far more effectively and efficiently than traditional marketing.
 
Influencer marketing has three key benefits:
 
1. Relevance
Influencers communicate in a manner that is more relevant and targeted to a specific audience or demographic.
 
2. Authenticity
Influencers have pre-established credibility with an audience and more importantly across their social media platform.
 
3. Exposure
Influencers directly engage with a targeted audience and have already built an existing relationship through quality content creation that is — shared, liked, followed… 

Scopic helps businesses better understand and engage with their target audience, contact us to find out more.

As you have no doubt heard by now, online content marketing is the new currency of our digital age, and if done correctly, offers one of the most effective ways to communicate with your target audience.
 
But don’t let this shift in how we communicate and share information have you think that the old school Press Release or Media Release has had its day. Media releases should still be an essential element of your public relations strategy. They are an extremely effective way to share business achievements, product releases and event announcements with a wider audience via credible media outlets. 

Here are five tips to writing an effective media release for free.
 
1. Get picked up
The very first thing seen of your media release — just like your brochure content, magazine advertisement or online banner — must grab attention. Your media release headline and first paragraph need to be engaging, and attract the attention of the editor or journalist. Basically, make sure you cover who, what, where, when and most importantly why your media release should make news in the first paragraph. Remember to write in an inverted pyramid style — most important to least important, just like in the newspapers.
 
2. Keep things simple
Write in short sentences, short paragraphs and keep the information clear and concise. As a basic rule, limit your media release to one A4 page in content. This will have you focus of producing concise, compelling content — something time-poor editors and journalists are always looking for. If your media release is picked up, you will most likely get the chance to add more detail later if required.
 
3. Quote an influencer
People like to hear news from credible sources or experts in a specific field, so make sure to always include quotes. Using quotes from someone in your business, an industry leader, a local celebrity or a social media influencer will help make sure that your story is "newsworthy" and newsworthiness plays a central role in whether your story makes it to the presses or online.
 
4. Save your story
A media release is all about building positive public relations — trust — with your audience/consumer, so focus on the news first and keep a short "about the brand" to the end. A strong, trustworthy relationship between your business and media outlets is always mutually beneficial. 
 
5. Look the part
Make sure to have Media Release or Story Idea in the subject line of your email with an enticing headline. Editors and journalists will spend just a second or two deciding whether something looks interesting and should be opened up. Also, add an image or short video (30-60 seconds) that helps tell the story.

​Finally, editors and journalists will need to have your contact details in the media release to follow-up and ask questions, or to arrange an interview if required — for convenience, use the standard media release format below.
 
Head your media release with the following:
Media Release
For Immediate Release – (Date)
 
Close your media release with the following:
Media Contact:
Email:
Phone:
Media Release Ends
 
Scopic connects businesses and people through creative communications, contact us to find out more.

A recent Nielsen report assessed the importance of optimizing your business marketing mix.

The report notes that every brand has unique dynamics, however, there are some controlling fundamentals that apply to them all:

• Brands need to take digital seriously, as digital’s return on investment (ROI) is twice as efficient as TV
• Brands need to better balance the media spend across all branded products, as a balanced media spend benefits sales across the entire brand portfolio
• Brands need to better understand consumer flighting patterns, as maximizing flighting patterns is an essential way to optimize a media spend
• Brands need to support new products for up to two years following launch, as extended product support will build positive consumer behavior
• Brands need to better understand the importance of interconnected media, as a well planned and connected media flow will drive sales.

 
​Access report here: Five Steps To Optimizing Marketing Mix Strategies
 
Scopic helps businesses better understand and engage with their target audience, contact us to find out more.

As we hit the last weeks of this year before the New Year break, it is not too late to review your 2017 content marketing strategy. As you already know, to really connect and engage with your audience – it takes much more than just a few random minutes across the day – you must produce relevant, targeted, valuable and consistent content.
 
To grow your business over the coming year, you should consider these 2017 content marketing trends before you start planning, creating and publishing content.
 
1. Go mobile
As mobile device users surge and speeds accelerate, people want more than just text-based content. Mobile users want to find mobile compatible content quickly and easily, so make the user experience stress-free with clear headings, bullet points and quality visuals that engage users.
Trend Snapshot:

• 80% of users (6.4 billion people) will consume content on a mobile device by 2020  

2. Go visual
Research shows images/videos perform much better than just words on a screen, but don’t compromise loading time. An easy way to increase loading speed, is to compress/reduce images and videos to ensure audience attention is not lost while waiting around.
Trend Snapshot:

• 75%+ of marketers used video in 2016 - video content is predicted to grow 2017  

3. Go live
With live content marketing becoming more achievable on mobile devices via FacebookLive, SnapChat, PeriscopeTV and Instagram Stories live streaming will grow in popularity in 2017. Both large and small businesses will easily be able to share product launches, new campaigns and branded events.
Trend Snapshot:

•  59% B2C and 68% B2B marketers used live events in 2016 - live content is predicted to grow 2017

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4. Target content
To truly connect and hold audience attention businesses can no longer be everything-to-everyone across multiple channels of communication. With a massive amount of content being published across numerous channels, businesses need to be more targeted with the content they create.
 
In 2017 businesses must firstly take the time to identify which channels have their target audience’s attention. Once they understand where the attention is they can then better create targeted - personalized - content that snatches audience attention from competitors.

All in all, successful businesses in 2017 will know where, when, what and how their audiences are consuming content - they will have nurtured a personal connection!
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Scopic works with businesses to create targeted content that snatches attention and increases engagement, contact us to find out more.