Barefruit Marketing Archives - Page 4 of 12

Marketing, even when you’re crazy busy

Posted on April 12, 2021February 1, 2022 by fruityadmin

Our region has been so fortunate to have had so much business recently. We’ve heard that many local businesses have been overwhelmed with demand. Considering how difficult 2020 was, this is an amazing place to be so soon after. Whether you’re crazy busy with high demand, expanding your business or working towards getting back to pre-COVID times, marketing is always important.

Marketing does help drive sales, and so much more than that. So even if you think you’re busy now, you’d be taking a big gamble to let it slide from your business strategy. The Northern Rivers has been flooded with visitors, and your marketing tells these people why they should consider you. Without these messages, your competitors will be thanking you.

In It to Win It

If you’re not in the game, you can’t win. Good marketing makes consumers think of you first when they need the product or service you offer. The brand awareness, interest and desire for your brand will impact your sales positively, no doubt. Keeping up with social media, traditional advertising, emails, digital marketing, SEO (whatever forms your strategy) keeps your brand in the forefront of consumer’s minds. If you drop your marketing efforts, even from just one channel, your competitors will already be ahead of you. Vying for consumer’s attention is a competitive game, so you must always play if you’re serious about growing your business.

Slow and Steady

It’s hard to keep up with marketing when you’re busy but you can’t let it take a back, or even a side seat. Consistency always wins. Right now is a great opportunity to put long-term marketing strategies in place to drive awareness and sales for the future. With a surge in domestic travel and people moving to the area, you can expect to see business steady all year round and your marketing efforts need to reflect this. You’ll need to continuously communicate with visitors, the locals and the new people arriving in our area. Businesses that never stop marketing experience a forward-momentum situation, like a train getting faster and faster along the tracks. Don’t slam the brakes on your marketing when you’re busy - doing so could slow down your sales in the future. To maintain sales (and to grow them!), be consistent.

Always Communicate

Tactics such as social media marketing, email marketing, print, TV advertising and PR help you tell your brand story. The more you communicate value to consumers, the more they consider you a voice of authority in the industry, especially if you’ve got something interesting, valuable or different to say. In 2021, brand activism is extremely important to influence purchase decision-making, so tell your story and communicate your brand’s personality to consumers.

Having a long-term strategy and consistency in your marketing activities helps you compete against your competitors, maintain and drive sales in the future and grow your business. To keep moving forward, don’t stop what you’re doing.

Related Tag: Marketing Gold Coast

Westlawn

Posted on February 20, 2021May 22, 2023 by Nat

The brief

Westlawn approached us to revamp their current website. With an aim to reflect the brands' customer audiences and create a more user-friendly website that was optimised for mobile and future proofed for today's technology.

Our response

Following customer research undertaken by our team, we addressed several key updates for the web design project, which included:

A custom-designed and responsive website
Integrating better technology into the site to improve marketing opportunities
Refreshing the brand with a new additional purple colour to positively uplift the personality of the brand, along with designing unique iconography to explain their services and created a curated image library to use and build upon.
Photography direction for new staff shots for the site
Pricing calculators and tools for customers to use for free
Implementing a strategy of gathering Customer Stories, for more brand trust and transparency on what Westlawn can offer, using real life examples and integrating this as part of their ongoing digital and email marketing.

Why is blogging so important?

Posted on February 2, 2021May 7, 2024 by fruityadmin

There’s a reason for everything. Back in the day, blogs were used as a platform for writing and sharing opinions, ideas and stories. These days, blogs serve so much more purpose. From improving your website ranking on Google, to asserting your expertise on a topic, to assisting with content creation for a truly integrated marketing approach, blogs, or news, or whatever you want to call them, are a highly important part of any successful digital marketing strategy.

Did you know?

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997. The short form, “blog“, was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in 1999.

Boost your visibility on search engines

Regularly updated website content, of which a blog is one element, will play a significant role in improving your Google ranking and getting relevant traffic to your website. This is because blog articles, that are optimised for search engine algorithms, will show up more often in search results. More online visitors = more leads. But how and why, you ask? Well, Google’s main goal is to provide people performing searches with the most relevant and up-to-date information to answer their queries. This will ensure Google users have a good experience and return over and over again. So, to get your website to the top of the search results, you need to help Google offer the best search results., Your regularly updated blog on your website will help significantly.

But you don’t have the time ?

We appreciate the time it can take out of your working week to put your creative hat on and write hundreds of words for your website on a regular basis. We work with many clients that admit that this task is one of their marketing tasks that always slips down the to-do list and never actually gets done. We get it, it’s hard when you’re running a business and wearing so many hats to find the time to come up with ideas, let alone write about them.

And there is more to writing a blog than you might think. It’s not just composing words, but knowledge of digital strategy does come into play. Knowing how much to write, which keywords to include, which pages and websites to link to, how to optimise sentences, paragraphs and images for SEO best practise is equally important.

Hand over your blogging

Outsourcing the things that are not your core strength and that take away from your real passion is a sensible business decision. Let the professionals do what they do best, so you can do what you do best. Handing over your blog copywriting to an agency will free you up to run your business. Barefruit can handle this on your behalf and have a number of blog programs to choose from.

Our discovery process allows us to get to know you, your business, your customers and your brand’s tone of voice. It’s imperative to us that we absolutely nail how your brand’s personality is communicated. We’ll then do the research, write your blog, source the images, upload it, optimise it for SEO and make it look pretty.

We can write a one-off blog post for you, or give you peace of mind for the next few months with our 3 blog or 6 blog bundles – the more you have, the more you save. So, if you know you need to write some blogs and don’t have the time or skills, or simply can’t be arsed, fill in the form below, and let us take it off your hands.

Should I Outsource Marketing?

Posted on January 20, 2021August 28, 2021 by fruityadmin

Here are 5 reasons to outsource your marketing in 2021 and beyond.

Do you need a marketing team but can’t quite justify bringing on full-time staff? Even if you already have a marketing team, perhaps you need more time for high-level strategic and creative thinking. Maybe you need additional expertise and resources for a one-off project or other elements of your marketing plan? Businesses, small and large, outsource their marketing activities to agencies to do more with less resources.

With more and more businesses outsourcing their marketing, let’s look into why it’s such an attractive option.

1. Access to expertise, resources, technology and unique perspectives

By working with a marketing agency, you instantly increase your resources and capabilities for your business. Gone are the days of having an idea and not being able to execute it to the standard you’d like. When you bring on an agency to look after your marketing, you absorb their experience and expertise, as well as the technology and software they use. Agency employees are experienced in creative thinking, looking at the bigger picture and by being outside of the internal business, they bring unique perspectives to business solutions.

In-house marketing can be great, but usually you end up with a team who are all-rounders because you need them to do lot of different tasks. Agencies are able to provide businesses with people who are specialists in a particular area. Need a new brand video? An agency will have a videographer and a video editor. Need an ongoing digital campaign? An agency will have someone to look after your social media, someone for your Google Ads campaigns and someone else for your SEO strategy. These people are all experts in their field, so you know you’re getting the best of the best.

When you outsource your marketing, you instantly have the tools and the people to make your ideas come to fruition

2. You’ll save money

In-house marketing teams are expensive, not to mention the cost of the equipment, hardware, software and materials required to do the job professionally. When you consider the time invested in finding the right person for the job, recruitment, training and salaries, in-house marketing is quite a big investment. The average annual salary of a Marketing Manager in Australia is $90K (and that’s just for an individual). Instead, when outsourcing, your business can receive the support and expertise from an entire team of marketing professionals (top-level strategists, copywriters, creative directors, graphic designers, digital marketing experts, web developers and account handlers) for much less. Plus, an agency gives you flexibility; it’s up to you how much you want to invest, whether it be on an ongoing- or project-basis.

3. Get things done, and faster

We get it, running a one-man show is a lot already. Employees and business owners, especially in small business, are often stretched for time, fulfilling their day-to-day responsibilities and operations. This leaves no time for strategic thinking, creative concepting, development and production of campaigns, let alone urgent advertising deadlines and ongoing digital marketing Gold Coast.

Sometimes it can take time to get the ball rolling on campaigns and other marketing activities when you’re doing it all yourself. If an order comes up or you’re slammed with organising a market day stall, we know your promotional efforts will slip down the list of priorities. The thing is, they really shouldn’t, especially when you are busy. When you don’t have the time, an agency does, and the promotional activity will become a constant. In turn, you’ll increase your sales and revenue at a constant too.

4. Analysis and Reporting all done for you

It’s one thing to run a campaign and engage in marketing efforts, but it’s another thing to analyse performance. Arguably, one of the most important stages in any marketing activity is the analysis of how it performed. Understanding consumer engagement and drawing insights from the data collected will inform future marketing direction and reveal the-all-important Return on Investment. Unfortunately, there is sometimes not enough time to pick apart the data in an in-house marketing team, which is why outsourcing marketing activities can really be valuable for businesses.

Ultimately, it’s better to get the experts in to analyse the data, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for. Further to this, some analysis tools that agencies have access to are expensive and difficult to use without proper training. We’re not saying you can’t do it, not at all. However, it’s probably more convenient and resourceful to leave it to someone who knows what to do.

5. Strategic Direction

Agencies are constantly reviewing their campaigns and investigating data because it’s in their best interest to execute successful campaigns for their clients. Analysis also informs how a campaign can be improved for the future, which in turn informs strategic direction.

Business and marketing strategy go hand-in-hand. Agencies work with many different businesses to, ultimately, help the business grow and this can involve high-level strategic direction. If you’re pressed for time or feel like you’re not sure what needs to be determined when it comes to business strategy, an agency can really help. They’ve got experience with helping businesses across all industries, and they do it all day, every day.

All in all, we’re all for outsourcing marketing, no matter the size of the business. Whether it’s handing over organic social media management to an agency or having them concept and execute TVC and radio advertising. Gaining access to a team of experts who are highly experienced across many different services at a lower cost than hiring one to two internal marketers is enough reason in itself to get in touch with an agency.

2020 at Barefruit Marketing

Posted on January 18, 2021January 2, 2024 by fruityadmin

This is the last time we talk about 2020, we promise! Although it was a weird year last year, many lessons were learnt along the way. We’re looking back to 2020 to recognise and acknowledge our growth, our flexibility, our productivity and our teamwork (oh, and the funny times too!).

Full of hope and motivation for the beginning of a new decade, 2020 started off with a bang. Everyone was feeling refreshed for the new year after a break over the Christmas holidays. The bush fires that had devastated regional and remote NSW had finally come to an end and, truthfully spirits were high. Then came along COVID-19 and little did we know how much this virus might have on the world as we knew it.

As Australia’s cases rose, restrictions around the country tightened. Before we knew it, the Barefruit office closed, and we were all sent home to work on reduced hours. It was so difficult to see our many of our clients and local businesses really struggle through the first lockdown. Much of our work was put on hold, however our rebrand project for Korff Wealth continued on amongst a few other projects. This included the beginnings of Rafiki Zabibu wine...check it out here.

We saw the opportunity for Korff Wealth, a financial services boutique to roll out their rebrand while Australia was in lockdown. Why? Because more than ever before, Australians were turning to experts for financial advice. It was an exciting and challenging time for the Barefruit team, working over the phone and internet to deliver a rebranding project.

After 60 days at home, it was finally time for the kids to head back to school which meant we got to go back to the office. Thank goodness! It was unprecedented times for our clients, with business slowly starting back up in our town. We dialled up our flexibility to deliver a ‘Back2Business’ campaign, including coaching programs and marketing packages to generate new leads. We also worked to help our clients take advantage of government grants that were available for small businesses to use for marketing and communications. Our ability to capitalise on opportunities such as these was essential to the success we have seen in recent months, and we feel very proud about it.

Along came July and our pregnant Agency Manager, Cat, was due to have her a baby very soon. It was time for Barefruit to bring on a new employee to fill Cat’s position. And so, we welcomed Charlotte into an Account Executive position. We can’t quite believe that we were not only able to survive 2020 as a business, but we also were able to expand the team. In fact, we even needed to get Sara, our previous Agency Manager, back in for a day a week as Charlotte moved onto more and more client work. On 29 August, Cat welcomed her little girl, Bonnie, earth-side. The new Barefruit bubba has visited us a few times since, and she is absolutely gorgeous.

As business continued to improve in our local town, we were awarded with more and more projects from existing and new clients. In September, we helped North Coast Community College launch their new Primary Industries Training Centre. This was a major highlight of our year. We worked to organise a launch event for this new training centre and series of certificate III qualifications, while simultaneously creating media buzz and as much free publicity about it as possible. The event was a huge success with dignitaries, local publications and special guests all in attendance. From this, numerous articles were written about the new NCCC Primary Industries Training Centre, and NBN ran a feature on the local news the evening of the event. Read more about the fantastic day it was here.

The second half of 2020 really flew by. Before we knew it, it was Spring, and business was returning to normal in our regional town. Not to mention the onslaught of tourists from Sydney and Brisbane who greatly helped business in the Northern Rivers recover from the impacts of lockdown. We worked with artist Len Collins to set up a new website, multiple shoots for Tweed Holidays Parks took place, we worked with a start-up to create a company name and branding. We organised a Golf Day event with Northern Rivers Food in return for event sponsorship, continued ongoing work for all our retainer clients and saw our beer packaging design on the shelves of bottle shops. Recently we were awarded a TVC job for Raine and Horne.

After 414+ creative briefs, 500+ hours of pro bono work, 15 new websites and 15+ new branding projects we wrapped the year up, celebrating with a fantastic Christmas Party with Behind the Barrel. Thank you to everyone who made the year it was at Barefruit. We are forever grateful to be where we are today in 2021, thanks to the support of our staff, our clients and the local community.

Related Tag: Digital Marketing Byron Bay

Apple’s iOS Update Will Change Facebook Advertising

Posted on December 22, 2020September 20, 2021 by fruityadmin

Earlier this year at the annual Worldwide Developers' Conference, Apple announced product and policy changes that will affect how data is shared across iOS. Unfortunately, the limits this change places on advertising will disrupt the growth of small businesses and the free internet.

Don’t get us wrong, we are all for proactive privacy measures and data transparency. We believe in a world where personalisation and user privacy can coexist. In saying this, we aren’t too happy about the policies Apple is bringing in.

What will change

The new iOS 14 update will force people to opt-in for their data to be tracked on their mobile devices and across the web. By opting out, Apple’s proposed changes will limit your ability to effectively reach, understand and engage people on their mobile devices and across the web. This will disrupt how you control who sees your ads, understand the performance of your campaigns and draw insights of user behaviour. Over time, you may see an overall decrease in ad performance and personalisation and an increase in cost per action.

Specifically, these changes will limit your ability to:

“Effectively deliver ads to people based on their engagement with your business”
“Measure and report on conversions from certain customers”
“Ensure that your ads are delivered to the most relevant audiences at the right frequency”
“Accurately attribute app installs to people using iOS 14 and later”
“Predict and optimise cost per action over time and efficiently allocate budgets” (Facebook, 2020)

In summary

The changes to the policy in the iOS 14 update will make it harder for small businesses to reach their target audience. This limits growth and the ability to compete against the bigger players. It’s important to note that Facebook advertising isn’t (and shouldn’t be) the only driving force for selling online, gathering leads, building brand awareness. It is essential to create integrated campaigns across multiple platforms so that messages reach consumers in many areas of life, not just online.

What you can do to get ready for the change

If you plan to deliver conversion events on your website (you can read more about this here), you may need to verify your website's domain to avoid future disruptions. Domain verification should be prioritised for domains with pixels used by multiple businesses and personal ad accounts. If you plan to deliver ads for conversion events that occur within your business apps, follow these steps.

And if you’d like to read more about these changes, visit this blog post from Facebook, explaining the iOS policy changes in-depth.

Related Tag: Facebook Ads Australia

Indigenous farming on offer at Wollongbar college

Posted on December 18, 2020December 6, 2023 by fruityadmin

Barefruit assisted North Coast Community College with the launch of their new Primary Industries Training Centre. This involved creating media buzz to generate free publicity. Our PR strategy involved sending out a press release to the media before and after the event to engage local publications. The Byron Echo, followed up our press release with an article about the new training centre in Wollongbar.

The Echo's focus was informing the public about the indigenous aspect of the new, unique Cert. III qualifications. It's a first for our local area, and perhaps one in the State (who knows, maybe even nation-wide). The collaboration between North Coast Community College and the DPI extends also to the local indigenous tribe. The new qualifications all have a Cultural unit, taught by Cultural Trainer, Tracy King. She said, ‘As a Bundjalung woman with cultural connections through kinship throughout the Bundjalung Nation, I am very passionate and a firm believer in Aboriginal cultural and heritage values to use as a tool for future generations’.

You can read more this project here.

Northern Rivers Food – Event Management

Posted on December 18, 2020December 18, 2020 by fruityadmin

our response

With a six-week lead time, the priority was to find a venue and to contact local food businesses to ask if they wanted to sponsor and/ or contribute to the day. Byron Bay Golf Club agreed to hold the event and provide catering for late lunch and Barefruit became the major sponsor of the event. Northern Rivers Food wanted to provide ‘goody bags’ for each player and award prizes at the end of the day. Organising this involved reaching out to local food businesses and collecting donations of product. Over 15 companies donated product for the goody bags and prizes.

Barefruit was also involved in advising how to promote the event as well as designing a digital invitation and social media content. Stone and Wood sponsored the event with a ‘Bar on the Green’ at hole 18. A keg was set up under a marque, accompanied by baguettes from The Bread Social and cured meats from Salumi for players to enjoy.

the fruits

The event, held on Friday, 13 November was a great success. We attracted 54 players, who played in teams of 4. This was 4 players extra than the 2019 event! Goody bags for each player included donations of product from Brookfarm, Cape Byron Distillery, Dona Cholita, Tweed Real Food, Santos Organics, Extraordinary Foods, Mt Warning Spring Water, Northern Rivers Food and Barefruit Marketing. The Stone and Wood bar was a hit, enjoyed by all.

We were particularly proud of our Barefruit Marketing lunch bag which was part of the goody bag. We included an orange, flyer, branded pen and orange scorer in a brown lunch bag, sealed with a Barefruit sticker.

Business Tips to Make the Most of Summer

Posted on December 16, 2020March 29, 2022 by fruityadmin

With the festive season and school holidays in full swing the Northern Rivers is seeing a huge influx of visitors. And, with international travel no longer an option for a Christmas getaway, this summer is going to be busier than ever before. As a small business in our area, it’s time to get creative and do what you can to capture the attention of locals and visitors. Think about how you can make valuable exchanges and build relationships to encourage future sales.

It’s time to get creative!

This summer is the perfect opportunity to gather and collect content and customers so when it goes quiet again, you’ve got something to work with. After the year 2020 was, User Generated Content (UGC) is more important than ever before. Think of ways for consumers to engage with your brand so that their experience with you is memorable and personalised. Perhaps it’s through a hashtag, a competition or discount rewarding UGC or some clever packaging.

Lennox Head Pizza have collaborated with @thepizzabib and local artist, MLak, to create quirky pizza boxes with fun artwork that is very shareable on social media. Don’t forget about print ads, either! We can expect this high season to last until after Easter, so an ad in the Lennox Wave, the Echo or other local publications will boost your brand's awareness. Loyalty cards, gift cards and repeat-sale-discounts are other ways to facilitate relationship building with consumers.

Trends to look out for in 2021

The marketing landscape has undergone significant change due to the impacts of lockdowns and social-distancing restrictions, across the world. As such, nostalgia marketing has really taken off. Why? We’re all craving the comfort of familiarity. Nostalgia is incredibly powerful, and it’s been proven to make consumers more willing to spend money on products and services. This makes nostalgia marketing a perfect fit for any marketing plans Australia. When you combine emotions and connections to brands from people’s childhoods with persuasive messaging, it has a strong effect on purchase decision-making. Remember the ‘Crocodile Dundee’ Superbowl ad for Australian Tourism? That tapped into nostalgia, helping Americans connect with and build perceptions of modern-day Australia.

Position Zero on Google

We are currently witnessing one of the biggest shifts in digital marketing in the last decade. It’s always been the goal to rank 1 on Google, but now there is a Position Zero to aim for. Position Zero is when text from a website is shown above search results. This snippet is pulled from Google’s algorithm as it is believed to be the most accurate answer to a certain query. Position Zero is what Google uses to answer voice searches, which is why it is becoming increasingly important. In 2021, ranking first in search results will still be essential to a successful SEO strategy, and being featured in Position Zero will be just as important, if not more so.

We made it through 2020! May 2021 be a fruitful year for you.

Meet Ollie! Work Experience at Barefruit

Posted on December 10, 2020February 1, 2022 by fruityadmin

What I learned at Barefruit

Since I arrived at Barefruit Marketing I have learned a lot about the marketing world. The amazing staff at Barefruit have taught me so many areas of marking including, but not confined to; SEO (search engine optimisation), SEM (search engine marketing), how to write a creative design brief, the importance of social media profiles for your business and how to run one effectively. I also learnt how to understand Google Analytics and use data to improve website traffic. Our social media marketing Gold Coast experts can help you establish your online business.

My experiences during my time here

In my time at Barefruit, I have been to some meetings where I had the opportunity to listen and learn a lot. These meetings were great in helping me understand how the ads that we see on TV and the internet get from an idea in someone's head to being on your screen at home. As well as how much time and money needs to be put into making the right ads to suit your business and demographic.

I have had the chance to work with heaps of different people who specialise in different areas here at Barefruit. Such as working with Fliss, Digital Account Director, who has explained a lot to me over my first two days. She explained what SEO is and how to increase your websites credibility. She explained how Google Ads work and how we can use the data from Google Ads to improve your SEO and monitor whether the ads are effective or not.

I spent some time with Lucy, an Account Executive, who has taught me how to run and schedule a social media profile. I wrote various types of posts and completed some research tasks. Then, using the information I gathered I wrote posts for social media and newsletters.

I have worked with Charlotte, Account Executive, who has shown me how important the look and ‘aesthetic’ of a social page is to a business in this day and age. I have been making some creative posts and preparing client Christmas presents, as well as writing this blog.

Album cover Concepts for our new song

Last week I had the pleasure of doing work experience at RockingHorse Studios in Coorabell in the Byron Hinterland, with four other year 10 students, thanks to Taryn McGregor. We had an amazing time working with Paul Pilsnenics, a professional Sound Engineer who showed us our way around a recording studio and helped us write and record a song.

Our song is called ‘Feel It’ by Hula Hands and it is now on Spotify for the world to hear. We thought 'Feel It' could use a good-looking album cover so Alex, Barefruit’s Creative Lead, has been showing me the creative process of making a cover for our song. He showed me how he would use the design brief to create an on-brief design. The product was a professional album cover which conveys the feel of the song from a glance.

In It to Win It

Slow and Steady

Always Communicate

Westlawn Finance Website Design

Westlawn Website

The brief

Our response

The fruits

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