Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?!
The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos, errors and spelling mistakes can be unprofessional, irritating to read and sometimes quite embarrassing (look no further than here and here if you need convincing of the latter, or a giggle!). More to the point, they can result in a loss of readership and more work (and expense) further down the line when it comes to fixing your mistake – if fixing it is even an option.
All in all, it seems silly to put time and effort into producing a well-informed, creative piece of copy then devalue it with silly errors – but how do you go about avoiding them?
The first thing to point out is that proofreading is definitely something more than giving your writing the “once over”. Especially if you’ve become particularly familiar with your piece, you’re unlikely to notice even the most glaringly obvious of errors from just a quick read-through.
It sounds ridiculously simple, but looking at your copy in a different way definitely makes a difference to what you notice. You might just spot a mistake that you didn’t see when it was on screen – and it reduces the chance of you getting distracted by e-mails too!
Again, sounds simple, but the less familiar your copy looks to you, the more likely you are to pick up on mistakes that you didn’t see before (and you’ll be surprised how much your copy seems to belong to someone else once it’s in another font!).
Mistakes and errors in grammar may become obvious when they are spoken aloud; and other people are bound to spot those obvious mistakes that you just can’t see anymore. You can also combine the two and get someone to read it aloud to you as you follow it on the page: that really does catch the errors.
You wouldn’t expect to read a piece of copy that gets crucial bits of information like numbers or people’s names wrong, but these are easy mistakes to make. The best way to avoid them? Double checking – even when you think you’re certain.
There’s not really a secret to the art of proofing…or maybe the secret is that you have to actually do it!
But either way, these tips should help you make sure that all your t’s are crossed and your i’s are dotted before you send that piece of copywriting to a client, your boss or – worst of all – to prent (just kidding! – to print.).
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more
This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more
The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more
April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more
March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more
Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more
‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more
We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more
Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more
It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more
The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more
If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more
After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more
The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more
When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more
In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more
Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more
In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more
It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more
Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Audiences want content that is educational, interesting or entertaining – and are savvy enough to spot thinly veiled sales pitches. Try to ensure that your content isn’t all “me” focused by providing relevant, valuable content that is likely to engage your audience – which will not only increase the chances of them reading it, but also sharing it within their social networks.
There’s no point publishing a new piece of content every day, if that content is of little or no value to your audience. Valuable content will build trust with your audience and encourage them to return. Interesting content will increase engagement with your audience and encourage them to share. And returning visitors and shared content means that Google will know that your content is good quality – which could help your ranking on search engine result pages.
It can be easy to forget about the actual content of your content! There’s no point cramming your content with key words or affiliate links as they can distract from the audience’s engagement and experience. And remember – content doesn’t have to just be lots of text; you can include images, infographics, videos, key takeaways, graphs, tables or quotes.
So you’ve written a great piece of content – it’s relevant, interesting and you know your audience will like it. You hit publish, and wait…
There are two key elements to good content marketing (and the clue is in the name!) – great content, and marketing that content. If you don’t promote your content, you dramatically reduce the chances of your audience (current and prospective) finding it.
A few ideas for promoting your content are: share it with your subscribers via a newsletter or emailer, publish it as a post on LinkedIn or use social media to promote to your extended networks and link back to your site.
It’s essential to plan your content to ensure a good mix of topics, media and contributors. It can also help to avoid last minute panics when you suddenly realise you’re due to publish a blog post tomorrow, but have no idea what to write about! Here at Coussins, we use an editorial calendar so we know who is writing, what they’re writing about, when it’s being published and where it’s being publicised.
So there you have our top five common content marketing mistakes. Do you have any to add to the list? Comment below to tell us if you do have any to add and click here to find out more about our marketing services.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure you it’s oh so worth it, because in fact the rewards the plan brings – saving time and money, managing responsibilities, avoiding confusion and problems – well, they completely outbalance any initial delays.
So what exactly is a project plan?
Well its style will vary from company to company, but fundamentally every project plan should include:
1. The key project milestones and the tasks required to complete each milestone 2. Who is responsible for completing each task 3. The deadlines for each milestone, creating the project schedule
The plan could then also include; project goals, people involved, their contact details, the time required to complete each task and the associated costs.
How do we create one?
Whilst it might seem daunting, creating a project plan can actually be pretty straightforward. Once you’ve established the key milestones and the tasks required, you can then work out the time required to complete each task, and then an accurate completion date – ultimately resulting in the overall project delivery date.
If a delivery deadline has already been set you may need to reassess how much time you have allocated to each task, also looking at which tasks can run in parallel – they may not all need to be completed serially. And finally, you then need to allocate a person or group to each task – don’t forget to include project meetings and conference calls on the plan!
And if you need some assistance, there’s plenty of project management software options that can help you with creating a project plan. These can be especially helpful for more complex projects, however, we at Coussins tend to use an Excel spreadsheet, creating a Gantt chart, and including a column for who’s responsible – changing the cell colour depending on the task’s status, so you could create your own project plan template.
So we have the plan all laid out, but then what?
Well first off, it’s vital that everyone involved in the project is familiar with the project plan and – crucially – knows what tasks they are responsible for completing. Task allocation and deadlines should be discussed before the plan is finalised – so no nasty surprises! And where relevant, don’t forget about third parties – for example, find out exactly how much time should be allocated for printing and delivery, so you can incorporate this into the plan.
The project plan should be regularly updated and reviewed throughout the project. Although there may be many people, groups and even companies involved in a project, there should always be one Project Manager who’s ultimately responsible for ensuring the project is completed on time and within budget. In other words, they’re responsible for whipping everyone else into shape!
The Project Manager plans the work, when it needs to be completed and who’s going to do it (the project plan), ensures the tasks are completed on time, co-ordinates work done by different people, deals with changes to the tasks or deadlines as required and updates key stakeholders when deadlines are challenged or changes are made to the plan.
Essentially, we believe that there are 5 key benefits to using a project plan:
Awareness of responsibilities: everyone involved in the project knows what they’re responsible for completing, who they are working with on each task and when they need to complete it by.
Improved communications: By regularly updating the project plan, all those involved – including the key stakeholders – will be aware of the project’s progress; which tasks are still outstanding, whether it’s on target and who’s currently working on each milestone – so everyone is on the same page.
Resource planning: Since projects usually involve human, financial and material resources, a project plan enables you to see exactly what type of resources are required, how much of each resource and when.
Public commitment: A project plan forms a public commitment between everyone involved. Once a plan is finalised, each person has committed to completing certain tasks by a specified date, and everyone else can see if that person’s task isn’t completed. There’s also a shared sense of responsibility – you know Bob can’t start his task until you’ve finished yours, which will hold the project up.
Pragmatic planning: As each task, milestone and deadline has been carefully planned, the project should be completed on time. This thought-through approach means that deadlines are common knowledge at the start of a project, and should help minimise any nasty surprises.
Quiz Maker – powered by Riddle
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Of course, the concept of a brand goes way beyond simply the brand identity, and developing one is about a whole lot more than just ensuring consistency in the execution. But let’s save that for another blog – after all, you’ve probably got an inbox of emails vying for your attention!
So, let’s take a look at the ‘why?’
Crucially, an effective brand identity helps to differentiate your business, reinforce your key messages, ensure you’re at the forefront of your customers’ minds, and allows you to stand out from the competition.
Branding attaches a personality to your business, giving customers something to relate to. It helps build relationships with your key stakeholders, and in turn, encourages loyalty. All in all, it’s, well, pretty important!
So what exactly is brand identity?
People often make the mistake of assuming their brand identity is simply their logo. Well, not quite. In fact, your brand identity extends far beyond the graphic device of the company on your letterhead or website home page and into everything that a customer or potential customer sees when they interact with your company. Staff, products, services, promotional materials, printed and online communications, logo, point of sales, uniforms, displays, websites, company cars – essentially everything that gives your business an identity – you name it, it’s there!
So how do we ensure that our branding is consistently applied across all communication and interaction points – positively reinforcing your identity, strengthening your brand and driving that all important trust?
Firstly, through the consistent use of your logo and brand colours – that doesn’t mean that everything has to look exactly the same, but there should be visual cohesion. There should be standards that your branding and communications adhere to. We’re talking the likes of colours, fonts, spacing around your logo, tone of voice and style.
This is where a style guide comes in. Your best friend when it comes to branding, a style guide is a set of brand guidelines that gives any partners you work with (designers, marketers, web developers etc) a blueprint to adhere to – a treasure map of sorts. It sets out your brand identity and usually includes your proposition, brand values, corporate colour palette, corporate typefaces, and may also include example layouts for stationery, PowerPoint template, logo spacing, newsletter and emailer templates, uniform design, signage and vehicle livery. A skilled designer will be able to take on your style and – using the style guide – emulate that across all the work they produce for you.
By keeping your visual identity and branding consistent, you’ll be able to effectively develop and strengthen your brand – ensuring your business makes a strong, positive and long lasting impression.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
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Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.