Our Blog

Forget keywords – Marketing agencies invent words now

By Sydney Fleming-Gale on 11 October 2013

We thought we would inject a little light-hearted content into, what appears to be, a sea of negative commentaries on the Google Hummingbird update. Who needs Keywords when you can invent words for your marketing campaign? 

Much to the annoyance of many SEO and content marketing agencies keywords are now predominantly ‘not provided’ in organic search analytics, making the SEO analysis of your website a cryptic puzzle. 

As other marketing agencies shout their annoyance at this extra workload and plead the importance of keyword targeting, one agency, McCann Melbourne to be exact, have instead chosen to invent and market their own word. And the result is rather impressive.

McCann created an entire content marketing campaign based around a word that essentially does not exist – ‘Phubbing’. As extra evidence of their marketing feat the Australian agency even managed to hardly mention the product they were marketing (which just so happens to be a dictionary) until the final seconds of their video campaign.

The video they produced ‘Phubbing: A Word is Born’ is a factual and emotive story that explains the existence of a phenomenon that has no name. McCann, being McCann (the origin of viral hit Dumb Ways To Die) set out to fill this word void with a name. So let’s take a look at how they went about it.

The situation:

Continue Reading

INFOGRAPHIC: Content Marketing Trends 2014

By Danielle Stagg on 4 October 2013

According to this wonderfully detailed infographic on marketing agency trends for 2014, as found on Brand Republic, 93% of of all B2B marketing agencies are using Content Marketing, with 30% of all budgets being allocated on the discipline.

Further, 70% of marketing agencies are producing more content than they did last year.

LinkedIn and Twitter were the most popular platforms for marketers to use, while the biggest challenged cited by marketers for not doing more was a lack of time. Perhaps this correlates to the 86% of marketing agencies who report having someone in-house to oversee content marketing strategy.

Continue Reading

Email Marketing Tips- How to Create Great Content

By Danielle Stagg on 30 May 2013

This article was written by Ryan Hickling, Head of Email at Digital Marketing Agency, TMW.

One question I’m often asked is, “What email marketing tips do you have/ how can I make my emails stand out from the crowd and what are the latest cool/sexy techniques that I can build into my email campaigns?

Email marketing tips and best practices

From an implementation point of view there’s a huge variety of different methods you can use to engage your audience and I’ll briefly cover off a couple of ideas under Cool Functionality below.

However, people continually overlook the basics of great email content like those seen within the Copy and Design sections in this post. Regardless of the type of email campaign or subject matter, you need to be thinking of the following when going into the design and copywriting phase of your email build. Here are a couple of basic email marketing tips to help you get started:

Continue Reading

Effective content marketing strategy: Do's and Don'ts (Part 2)

By Danielle Stagg on 17 April 2013

You can read part one of this series here.

Continue Reading

Effective content marketing strategy: Do's and Don'ts (Part 1)

By Danielle Stagg on 11 April 2013



Content marketing is the creation and publication of interesting content (such as blog articles, comment pieces or multimedia shares) with the objective of driving traffic to your site and promoting your brand. Having a good content marketing strategy is essential for anyone looking to keep up with their competitors, foster consumer relationships and get the attention of potential consumers.

Key types of marketing content:
  1. Viral: Content that is designed to spread and be shared across social platforms. This content marketing strategy has a short lifespan and is predominately designed as a quick-fix, that is, to entertain, provoke (often emotional) reactions and to provide the 'wow' factor. It's great for growth and getting your name out there but doesn't offer the reader much in terms of substance. Examples of viral content marketing include infographics, videos, stats and picture galleries.
  2. Lead gen: Marketing content that aims to point out a problem or gap in the reader's knowledge and to then provide a solution (solved by opting in or signing up). This is a popular content marketing strategy encompassing all aspects of marketing, PR and brand journalism. It is designed to spark some kind of call to action.
  3. Sales gen: As above but with the objective of triggering a sale rather than a sign up.
  4. Discussion: As you would expect, this type of content is designed to create conversation and promote interaction between not only the reader and publisher but the readers themselves. This kind of community-focused thought-leadership is best characterised by comment or reaction pieces, industry overviews, insider/insight articles or instructional pieces, for example Do's and Don'ts (just like this!).
One of these content marketing strategies should always be applied when creating any new piece of content. Content is, after all, a marketing tool and should ultimately aim to drive users to the site and boost brand awareness and consumer interaction. Without an objective, as above, it's helping nobody.

So, with that out the way, here are our very own Do's and Don'ts, to help you develop your content marketing strategy.

DO: Offer the reader something

Viral content marketing aside, each piece of content should help the reader in some way. This could be through educating, advising, entertaining or offering some kind of solution. Yes, at the end of the day Content Marketing is just that, marketing, but it should ultimately lead the reader to some kind of goal rather than just be self-serving. It should aim to encourage contribution and engagement while positioning your brand as a go-to thought leader or expert.

DON'T: Regurgitate old content

In the real world recycling may be great, but online there's nothing worse. Your content marketing strategy should be inventive and reactionary, incorporating developments in the industry, the latest viral trends and consistently offer your readers something new, fresh and engaging.

DO: Make it search-friendly

All marketing content strategies should be SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation)-friendly. That means when generating your content you need to take into account what your audience is looking for and what is likely to draw attention. With Google's updated algorthyms now kicking in it can be hard to stay ahead of the system, but SEO Moz is a great place to start. Also make sure you are monitoring your social footprint and the traffic your content generates. This way you'll know what is working and what isn't, as well as identifying room for growth.
Continue Reading