Inbound Marketing services provide high exposure with affordable services, such as:

• Brand & Logo Development
• Content Creation & Copywriting
• Website Design & Optimization
• Email Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization & Marketing
• Multimedia Consulting
• Social Media Marketing
• WebPR
• Online Advertising & PPC

How Does Inbound Marketing Help Your Business?

Inbound marketing enhances your direct marketing efforts and gives you the tools you need to capture, and stay in constant contact with, your most qualified leads. Whether you need a professional website, an email campaign or multimedia content to demonstrate your products and services to prospective customers, an eMarketing Agency’s inbound marketing strategy offers several options to turn your website visitors into buying customers.

For Small Businesses Who Want Results from Effective, Targeted Marketing

Evolve Creative Marketing’s comprehensive e-marketing products and services will help you increase your qualified leads, convert more sales, and provide you with the tools you need to analyze and measure your success. Essentially, everything you need to build a strong brand online.

Are you tired of wasting your marketing budget on ineffective and expensive outbound marketing services? Contact us today and to get your online marketing on the right track!

Evolve Creative Marketing specializes in Online Marketing and Communications from Perth, Western Australia to Ontario, Canada.

Competitive Analysis

It’s not a new concept, most people in business have put together either a business plan or a marketing plan at one stage or another, and will remember a portion of the process where they went and collected as much information on their competitors as they could. Usually the information gathered was focused on Product, Price, Distribution, and Promotion (the traditional marketing mix) which was used to form an analysis of their competitors and determine where exactly their company (or project) fit in. This process was often a time-consuming, but rewarding activity that provided valuable insight.

At Evolve Creative Marketing, our full service marketing and design firm, we use competitive intelligence and analysis as the backbone of our branding and marketing strategy. With a focus on data, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Marketing Communications resources are a part of the process that we regularly use to help businesses understand market trends and opportunities in their area.

Our market analysis expertise allows us to evaluate a client’s Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and competition to identify gaps within their target market. This insight is used in evaluating marketing, search engine optimization and advertising opportunities. Armed with this information, we can better align our client’s design and communications to focus directly on profitable gaps or neglected areas of the marketplace. I thought I’d prepare this article to provide some insight into the rationale behind this.

Marketing Your Brand

There’s so much involved in marketing a brand, it’s without a doubt a very time consuming task that encompasses every aspect of a business. Developing a sustainable brand requires research, goal setting, and some – well, a lot of creative innovation. Once the work of brand creation is complete, it’s important to put it to work, continue to test it and promote it. It’s equally important to continue to evolve your brand and grow your company so that you don’t lose momentum and stall.

Gone are the days when the idea of “a brand” should last for more than 20 years. With stiff competition, a plethora (I can’t believe I just used the word “plethora”) of promotional media, and an abundance of new emerging products, services and technology to go with them, businesses must be willing to evolve their brands to stay competitive.

Competitive Analysis

Modern Marketing is a fast paced environment, with social, political, geographical and other trends changing at sometimes a daily pace, or faster. Businesses often get caught up in their own activities and lose track of what their competitors are doing. In my opinion, this is a big mistake.

Competitive Intelligence and analysis is one of the most important components of a marketing strategy, regardless of the size of the business or project. A small portion of what you can do through Competitive Intelligence can include:

* Tracking your competitors reputation through Social Media, Google Alerts, and other tools
* Analyzing Online Keywords through meta data and targeted On-Page SEO keywords can help identify what terms are being targeted (what terms your competition feel are relevant)
* Researching Website page strength can provide you with information on what content is most popular
* Search Marketing (pay-per-click) Ads can also be analyzed based on Keywords, with the right tools and know-how you can discover which PPC Ads are performing the best for a specific term

As you can see, there are a lot of different elements that can be examined through Competitive Intelligence, the benefit of which will be cost saving and provide you with not only a better understanding of your competitors, but also of your customers. If done right, you will be rewarded with a great understanding of the culture of your business, product/service, competitors, and the language being used by your targeted clients.

Where to start?

The first thing you want to do is make a list of competitors, you can chose which ones to include based on similar products, size of business, range of distribution and other factors. One good starting point is to look at which companies are often grouped in with your own, but don’t forget to add at least one “major player” a company that appears to have a much larger market share than yours and has the potential to have a much larger marketing budget for promotion. You can look at the major player as where you want your company to be in the future. Sometimes it’s also wise to look at a newly emerging company too, being a start-up, they may be using new technology or strategies as they enter into the market.

Once you have your list of competitors you might want to include some of the following into your research: Competitor Name, Size of Company, Products, Location, Range of Distribution, Pricing, Affiliate Program (if they have one), Community (what platforms are they using and  what is their position), Referrals (who do they have on their side), Targeted Key Terms (what terms are they using to describe their business, product, etc), Targeted Messages (how are they communicating with their audience, what promotional material do they use, what are their most popular web pages, etc).

By discovering how your competitors are finding success in their marketing, you can build strength and sustainability into your own brand.

Establish some competitive goals for your business. One set of simple competitive goals can be to include Alexa and Google Page Rank as a metric to evaluate your online marketing success compared to your competitors, and try to out-perform your competition in terms of website traffic and “importance.”

At Evolve Creative Marketing, we offer sustainable design and competitive intelligence because clients need a comprehensive strategy to survive in today’s market, we go beyond traditional graphic design and web development to give our clients an edge. All of our client projects begin with competitive analysis as the backbone of the marketing campaign. From the market data we gather, we develop a sustainable brand and marketing strategy. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your company, feel free to give us a shout.

An estimated 80% of internet users find web resources through organic search results using search engines (Google, and Yahoo), 15% of internet traffic comes from people typing in the specific URLs in their web browsers (direct traffic) while 5% comes from other sites through other, generally speaking, paid advertising like banner Ads etc. So the importance of showing up in search results is very clear, as is the value of good SEO.

Unfortunately when websites are created, most developers don’t offer any value-added SEO services. In the end, this results in some pretty unhappy website owners who wonder “why isn’t my website showing up in search results?” But all is not lost. Search Engine Optimization is becoming a more common interest for graphic designers and internet marketers alike. The importance of “Keywords” is practically commonplace, and should be expected as a part of your internet marketing campaign.
Search Engine Optimization Keywords

Keywords are, put simply, the terms most searched for (in the search engines) that relate to your topic. By making sure that you strategically use these terms you can assist the search engines in categorizing your site and placing it in search results. Keywords are not the only component of SEO, and should not be as relied upon as most “experts” would have you believe.

In fact, Keywords make up only around 15% of the Search Engine Optimization recipe. There’s a lot more to SEO that gets overlooked and is misunderstood like domain registry, back-links and anchor text, hosting, social graph and link popularity. All of these are important parts that bring together the whole flavor of real Search Engine Optimization, some a little more important than others.

Now, I’m not trying to devalue the importance of On-Page SEO and Keyword usage. 15% may not be a majority component, but it is still a part of the whole, and if worked at properly your On-Page Keywords will also contribute and tie into your Off-Page Search Optimization.

Social marketing is important, if for no other reason it’s a way to let your business out of the house to run around, meet other businesses and get some well deserved stimulation. Actually, it doesn’t even need to be all about your business. Social marketing can equally be about the individual.

I use a bunch of different Social Marketing platforms, Facebook , Twitter, Youtube , LinkedIn, heck, I even use Blip.fm. I’m not going to mislead you and say that I don’t use social media for business. I do. But I don’t use social media with the expectations of gaining leads. Honestly, I don’t.

I think its Madness that some people calculate social media success by the number of followers/friends or subscribers that one has. Like any crazy person, I distance myself from those who do. Having a goal of being the center of attention is never very social, and even for dogs it’s considered bad behaviour. Routinely I go through my twitter account and un-follow those that are using services designed to harvest followers and send out spammy bulk tweets. I want to have a twitter account and follow people who are more interested in being social than they are about being the center of attention.

I use Facebook to connect with old friends, family and some business colleagues who I genuinely like, I’ve also set up a Fanpage for Evolvingminds so that I can hopefully get insight into what our “Fans” are interested in, and if they hate something that we’ve written about or done.  The Fanpage is (for business) a place I can engage and manage the reputation of my business.

Twitter, for me, is for both fun and for research. It’s a place where I can connect with people I admire, and track trends. I use twitter to find out about new products, surveys and discussions both local and around the world. With its “small-talk” nature I find twitter kinda’ fun.

I use YouTube to Broadcast and Promote, both for self-serving purposes and to provide video resources (mostly because I love playing with video.

LinkedIn is strictly professional, it is for business. It’s a place for me to promote my skills and the projects I’ve worked on. Unlike others, I don’t cold call on LinkedIn – simply because I hate spam. I repeat, I HATE SPAM. I do however love networking in a professional atmosphere, so respect the referral system that LinkedIn provides.

And Blip.fm? Well, I always wanted to be a dj. So it’s a great place for me to pretend.

I know this article kinda’ makes me sound like a social snob – I’m not. I’d love to have you a part of my social network, and I’d be more than happy to connect with you and get to know you better. You can find me on any of the links I’ve provided in this post, or better yet, just contact me here.

I skipped WordCamp Toronto ’09.

This year I decided to give it another shot, and I need to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised at the organization and the speakers this time around. For me, the first session “Blogging and Social Media” with Jeremy Wright, was the highlight of WordCamp 2010.

Jeremy Wright speaking at WordCamp Toronto. Although what Jeremy discussed wasn’t a new idea for me, it was great to hear someone outside of my own creative team talk sensibly about social media. Jeremy brought back the idea of focusing on the “Social” rather than using the “Media” as an outlet for spamming and bad social behavior, and he also addressed the myth of needing to be on Facebook or Twitter for business. I can only hope that the people attending the event, took the right notes and were paying attention to what he was saying a bit more than the two camels in a small car.

Getting a chance to speak with Pam and Dean and other attendees at this WordPress event, I realized that all of the other people were gaining something different out of the event. So I have to say, I think the event was a success. Not to mention the lunch was very good.

One thing I’d personally like to see for future WordCamps is a larger range of topics, with more advanced or thought provoking lectures. To me, it seemed the event was focused on the newbie and at least in my opinion if the WordPRess community is going to grow, then we need to help with the technical and professional level development as well.  Perhaps making WordCamp a 1-day event with simultaneous discussions would be a way to accomplish this, at least for me it would enable me to leverage my social time.

Moving forward into 2010, this is the State of the Internet.

Hanover, ON – In partnership with Saugeen Business Development Corporation (SBDC), Evolve Creative Marketing has launched a comprehensive suite of inbound marketing services to help small businesses generate more sales online and take advantage of new media marketing tools.

With an office located in the Grey-Bruce area of Ontario, Evolve Creative Marketing is part of a growing community of new media marketing innovators and strategists. The company’s portfolio includes Website Design and Optimization, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Email Marketing, Copywriting and Content Creation, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Multimedia Consulting, Competitive Intelligence, and online advertising. The eMarketing Agency will help businesses increase website traffic and generate higher sales conversion rates.

Inbound Marketing Counselor, Marketing Director and President of Evolve Creative Marketing, Jason Eke, will provide internet strategy coaching and planning services to clients of the SBDC. The firm also offers one-day workshops to educate new business owners about the benefits of using low-cost online solutions to build a loyal client base and reduce their advertising and marketing budgets. The first workshop will take place on February 10, 2010.

“Our clients recognize the need for smart, fast, and cost-effective online marketing strategies that will help them build a loyal following and grow their business online. Most importantly, they understand the importance of an integrated inbound marketing plan which includes creating, optimizing and promoting effective content and brand building activities online,” said Jason Eke, Marketing Director of Evolve Creative Marketing.

The result is an integrated new media marketing plan that includes website design, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), email marketing, conversion optimization, social media networking, and sales copywriting. The partnership will help clients of the SBDC boost revenue and gain brand recognition through cost-effective inbound marketing.

About Saugeen Business Development Corporation:

SBDC is a community futures development corporation providing business advisory and investment services to business owners in the Saugeen area, including the Arran-Elderslie, Brockton, Chatsworth, Grey Highlands, Hanover, Minto, Saugeen City, South Bruce, Southgate, Wellington, and North West Grey areas. For more information about Saugeen Business Development Corp, contact Maria Dunning at 1-877-335-7332.