29 Oct 2014

What is Content Strategy ?

What Is Content Strategy

Social media is a double edged sword, as such, it is vital to ensure that we work this technology to our best advantage. The solution to this problem is content strategy.

What exactly is content strategy? Very simply, content strategy is the planning, development and management of content, for all platforms – online and offline. These contents include not only the worded information, but also the images and multimedia used.

Why Is Content Strategy Important

Consumer experience begins the moment they engage with the brand; Consumers expect you to impress them, to give them exactly what they are looking for and to make their search easy. As such, it is evident that content strategy sets the groundwork for a long term relationship with these consumers by providing valuable, interesting and engaging information. Strategic and thoughtful planning of your content maximises awareness, branding and leaves behind a positive presence.

Most businesses do not understand the importance of content strategy, as such, the planning and development of content is seldom done thoroughly. However, businesses must now realise that with the world going online, competition is at its best. Thus, with the lack of content strategy, there is lesser incentive for potential clients to veer towards you.

When strategically planned, your content will lay a chartered path, directing consumers straight to where you want them to go. Whether it be leading them to making a purchase, or for them to initiate communication with you, your content is responsible for steering your consumers’ actions. It is all about creating material that evokes the intended emotions while setting reasonable expectations.

Content strategy ensures uniformity and continuity across all communication platforms. This uniformity is integral to gaining brand followers and induces their loyalty; if your content isn’t consistent with your manifesto, how are your consumers going to understand your brand?

Effective Content Strategy

Reflect your business’s goals and consumers’ needs.
- You can discover your consumers’ needs through conducting market research, user research, and analysing web metric
Understand how consumers’ think and speak about a subject.
- Content should then be created and structured based on that. Doing this will also help you with search engine optimization (SEO).
Communicate to consumer in a way that they understand.
- Embracing relevant writing principles and style that is in line with your corporate image but yet simple and clear for the general consumers to comprehend
Be useful.
- By being purposeful in the content that you include
Stay up-to-date and remain factual.
- When new information becomes available, update your content
Be accessible to all people.
- To make sure that all people can access and benefit from your information.
Be consistent.
- Consistency for both language and design, helps people understand and learn what you are trying to communicate, and understand your brand identity

Fyooz Feeds

The web, social and mobile revolutions have changed the world, connecting everyone and enabling the seamless flow of instant information. Traditional Marketing techniques are no longer as effective as they used to be. The amount of content and messaging being delivered to consumers every day is increasing exponentially. As such, it is essential that business are equip with the skill of integrating traditional platforms with the new age media, and generating content that serves to attract, engage and build relationship and trust with their consumers.

Depriving your marketing ventures of quality content deprives your business of an identity; your business is nothing but an empty shell. Your consumers need to know and trust you, and if your content doesn’t induce the required response, connecting with your consumers will be ineffective.

We need to acknowledge and understand content strategy and its importance. Treat content strategy as a fundamental process and you will notice a difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_strategy

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/oct/14/selling-content-strategy-digital-business

http://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/content-strategy.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/09/18/what-is-a-content-strategy-and-why-do-you-need-it/

20 Oct 2014

Fyoozie ETC

THE Apple Watch – A game changer

The much awaited smart watch has finally made its first revelation. Albeit not a physical launch, but words from Tim Cook himself seemed good enough for the world. Said to include a modern day twist on traditional watches, the Apple watch features THE digital crown; a circular knob that replaces the pinch-to-zoom touchscreen mechanic used on almost all apple products, that is now deemed as impractical on such a small display, according to Apple. Although boosting a unique new feature, the Apple watch in its entirety is not out of the world. Afterall, it is not the world’s first smart watch that promises to seamlessly link other tech products, allowing users to have it all on their wrist Untitled-3 Apple is rarely the first to the market but with a proven track record, it always blows the competition away when it finally arrives, and we are confident that there will be no exception this time around – The Apple watch WILL change the smart watch industry. Not only that, we are almost sure that it will change the way technology is consumed. The Apple watch will revolutionise the wearable fashion industry like how the Iphone did to the world of web consumption. The smart watch market is projected to be huge but it is not quite there yet, with just 400,000 smart watches shipped to the U.S. last year. However, with Apple joining the bandwagon, we are all anticipating a acceleration to the industry’s full potential. The big question now is how. What is so different about the Apple Watch from what is already available in the market that holds such high promises to catapult the industry? To answer that, we must first look at how consumer trends have changed. Read more…

15 Aug 2014

Fyoozie Branding, Webpage

Why is a Website Necessity

Influence of digital media on the Singapore Population

4,032,919people or 77.8% of the Singapore population uses the Internet regularly
Of the 77.8% of frequent internet users, 3,457,600 people use it on a daily basis

Website is vital because:-

Consumers are becoming increasingly “smarter”
Most will initiate research and reviews of each purchase
Allows consumers to “find” you
Establishes credibility as a business
Break geographical restrictions
Enhancing Brand Recollection
Creates an opportunity for viral marketing
Accessibility
Market Research through website features
Promote your Brick ’n’ Mortar Presence
Allows potential investors to find out more about the company

18 Jul 2014

Fyoozie Branding, Consumer Behaviour, Social Networking

7 Ways to Kickstart Your Branding

Branding isn’t as simple as getting your target market to choose you over the competition, but is about persuading your consumers to perceive you as the only brand that provides a solution to their problem. But how is this done? How do I attract, engage and inspire potential customers without Jedi mind tricks?

Below are 7 key tips to spark creativity and aid you in building a convincing personal brand.

1. Consistently express your USP

No matter what business, you need to tell the world why you’re the brand for the job. Your mother always told you to be yourself, now its time to shout to the masses about what makes you special!
Think to yourself:
- What is my greatest strength?
- What unique ability do I bring to my consumers?
- What makes me different from my competitors?
- Am I an innovator? Or do I take a more traditional way of thinking?
- How do I want to communicate?
- What needs and wants can I solve for my consumers?

2. Get involved online

Websites provide a massive boost in brand credibility and should be the main focus of a brands online presence. Online you can showcase your unique talents and inform your consumers of who you are and what is so special about your brand. It also allows you to reach consumers way beyond your physical location, giving you a much bigger stage for show and tell.

Make sure your website is coded and easily resized to fit all technological platforms, smartphones, tablets etc. Talk to us about mobile responsiveness and parallax designs!

3. Harness the power of social media

Social media is ever evolving and so are the brands that are involved. Having a social media presence connects a brand to its loyal and potential consumers, which is crucial to building a personal brand. Although it is hard to compete with the over- saturated online world, it is far from impossible.
Consider these tips:

- Discover which social media your consumers are predominantly using. Once you have sought them out plan your attack.
- Think about what it is that you want to talk about. Don’t badger your consumers with spammy like messages. You want to openly offer insight and freely provide knowledge to start to boost your brand awareness and reputation.
- Don’t be afraid to Like or Follow the competition. It’s a great way to create strategic relationships with your competitors, see what they are doing, how they are talking and how you could do it better.

4. Unite your on-line and off-line efforts

Merging online and offline efforts is a great way to take an established reputation and introduce it to an off-line audience or vice versa.
Take your online/ off-line brochures, e-mail marketing, flyers etc. and repurpose them to the opposite medium.

5. Spend money to make money

Investing in your brand provides amazing growth opportunities. Spending money on the development of your brand will develop credibility, boost visibility and create a stronger brand image and value.

6. Set some realistic goals

Set yourself a goal, determine how you are going to achieve it and then go out and do it!

7. Keep it Real

Keep your brand Real, exciting and fun. Consistently expose your USP and ask the question who is it that I’m trying to reach and can I help them? Developing a brand is no cup of tea and it is often worth seeking the services of professionals throughout your journey.

15 Jul 2014

Fyoozie Design, Forms & Functions

The Perfect Office: Wood

In the age of Swedish minimalism and the cold, hard-edged brushed aluminium of Apple, wooden office accessories often make a warm, welcome change. We’ve found some wooden pieces that are beautifully functional, exquisitely designed, and that work by themselves, or compliment modern minimalist set-up.

THE WOODEN CALENDAR

Designed by Qaaim Goodwin, this is a wooden calendars that is operated by a series of ruler like sliders. The calendar can be used either horizontally or vertically, and unlike conventional paper calendars, this calendar can be used perpetually. For us, the beauty not only lies in the unconventional yet simple design, but the little touches, like the modern typography fused with the traditional warmth of wood.

AKITA WOODEN CEDAR CUPS

wooden love cups

Coffee is an integral part of every working person’s life, but not many people would probably pay attention to the cup it comes out of. Certainly, a wooden mug might elicit nothing more than an eye-brow raise…unless they look like this. We don’t know much more apart from the fact they’re designed by Yukio Hashimoto, but we’re pretty sure rich, dark chocolate would taste extra good in these mugs.

WOODEN LIGHTBULB

wooden lightbulb

We saved the best for last. This is a Wooden Lightbulb. Designed by Ryosuke Fukusada, this looks like its carved out of a solid block of wood, it’s actually a thin wooden shell which hides a bunch of low-heat, power-efficient LEDs. While this isn’t in mass production and may unfortunately remain a concept, we would love to get our hands on some and outfit out office with it.

11 Jul 2014

Fyoozie Design, Typography

What not to say to Designers

What do you do when you get a request that’s difficult to work with? Why not turn it into a poster? The guys at Zerouno have collated some of the most common quotes they get from their clients, and turned them into beautifully simplistic posters.

[creativebloq]

07 Jul 2014

Fyoozie Inspiration, Typography

Can this Font Change the World?

Sometimes we don’t always notice the impacts small things have, and we certainly don’t think that something as tiny as a font can do anything exciting like save the world. But then we came across Ryman Eco. Not only does the font look pretty exquisite (look at that Q!), if used by everyone as the default font, it could purportedly save 490 million ink cartridges and nearly 15 million barrels of oil, the equivalent to 6.5m tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.

Ryman Eco created by Monotype

Who knew that design and typography could make an impact on Global Warming?

[creativebloq]

01 Jul 2014

Fyoozie Consumer Behaviour, Social Networking

The Future of Social Networking: Virtual Reality

You might just be looking into the future of social networking.

We were all a little baffled when Facebook purchased Oculus in March, a company developing virtual reality gaming device the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift has been hailed for its cutting edge technology and tendencies to induce motion sickness, so if it had been purchased by say, Google or Microsoft, this would have made a lot more sense as these companies are known for their forays into experimental technological . But a Facebook purchase certainly raised a few eyebrows. Mark Zuckerberg had this though to say about the technology:

“Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”Read more…

30 Jun 2014

Fyoozie Branding, Consumer Behaviour, Social Networking

Social Media Trends of 2014

The social media landscape is one that is constantly changing, and one that marketers are always trying to understand. Whilst most have accepted that social media marketing is a powerful tool to utilise, many still aren’t too sure which ones to use and how to use them.

Earlier this year, Social Media Examiner published some research on the marketing trends of 2014. They looked into what social media platforms companies were using, how they used them, which platforms did companies intend on using, and which ones they still had questions about. We’ve put some of their findings in a convenient infographic. So where do you sit? What platforms are you looking to explore?

The Perfect Office: The Desk

Creative professionals would probably agree with us; we feel like we spend all of our waking hours (and probably a lot of our sleeping hours as well!) at our desk. From the moment we start our daily work, to the moment we ‘rest-our-eyes-just-for-a-bit-oh-my-god-I’ve-missed-dinner-again’, we are at our desk.

Desks then, form an integral part of our daily creative processes, and often unknowingly, can reflect ourselves; our mental processes, our personalities, even our schedules. But we also believe that desks should be designed to inspire us; to make us feel at home and put us in our element. For us, we believe that form follows function, and so we’ve found a few desks that we’d love to put on our next acquisition order.

THE ARTIFOX DESK

We love the spartan simplicity of this desk, with all its hidden nooks, crannies and slots for our “work ware”. Everything is within reach and within keep.Read more…