Setting marketing strategy, how you operate in the competitive environment, agreeing marketing objectives, feeding up into corporate objectives and down into sales objectives – you know, the whole planning thing. All of this would usually be the domain of your marketing director – that’s fine for large organisations with big budgets. But what about new start-up and smaller organisations that can’t afford to invest in a full time high-level marketing resource?

net72 can help by providing such a resource on an ‘as and when required’ basis – an experienced marketing professional to act as your marketing director. Your organisation benefits from experience gained and lessons learned through many years of working with other organisations combined with a fresh outside perspective and no internal political agenda. Usually, an arrangement is made for a predetermined number of days per month with access at other times.

At its most fundamental level, brand is the way consumers identify your product or service and as distinct from other similar offerings. Branding started off with the practice of cattle farmers burning their mark, or brand, onto the hide of their animals so they could be identified. The word was adopted by the early marketeers when they started to use indefinable names or labels for their products and so branding was born.

Things have changed significantly from the early days of simple labelling with a whole industry having been built up around brand creation, brand promotion and brand management. net72 will work with you to either create a brand from scratch or to rebrand an existing organisation.

Branding is not about taste or pretty logos, it is about following a process, the end product of which is the words and pictures that make up the brand – logo, style guide, copy platform, straplines and so on. If you want us to pitch for your branding exercise, we could show you a bunch of pretty logos but what would be the point. Instead we will sit down with you and explain the process and once you’ve got it, you’ll know what to do next.

We are pleased to have a number of exciting graphic design and printing projects with clients Mainspring Fund Services and Chayora.

Design without a brief is just art! We take pride in delivering high quality design to meet the requirements of even the most demanding client – this often involves helping the client develop their brief. Branding – net72 has created many brands for clients from scratch including developing the name and the logotype. In addition, we have taken existing brands and either refreshed them or undertaken a complete rebrand.

Sales collateral – The most visible embodiment of the brand is usually the communications pieces used by an organisation: this will include presentations, brochures and data sheets.

Style – When creating a brand, one of the deliverables is a style guide. This lays out clearly how the brand should be used including; the logotype, fonts, imagery and photography as well as copy tone.

We are just as capable of working with pre-existing guidelines as we are using brands we have created. On-screen or off-the-page – Whether it is a web site, a brochure or an advertisement, we are familiar with producing media specific designs.

It’s not what you say but the way that you say it? Clear, concise copy can be the key to clarity in customer communications.

Only words? – The words you use and the way you use them say a lot about your organisation.

Copy tone – The style of copy you choose to use can project the style of your business. We are equally skilled in writing formally, through relaxed to casually.

Copy consistency – ‘The Brand Police’ will often focus in on graphic consistency and ignore some of the dross that often passes as copy however, consistency in copy is just as important as the pretty pictures.

Words and pictures – Brand is about creating an image that represents your products and services – making the copy style match the values and aspirations of your product is just as important, if not more so, than choosing the right Pantone colour for your logo. What’s more, the words and pictures should work together to create the unified brand identity.

Writing for journalists – A sales piece should, by its very nature, be bursting with benefits – send out a benefit laden press release and it will end up in the bin!

Off-the page, online or broadcast we have been producing ads for the last 20 years or so. Customers are using rich media online on their own site or through ‘broadcast’ channels such as YouTube or Vimeo.We have the capacity to produce a full-blow corporate video or generating shorter “stings” and “memes” to help boost your Social Media engagement.

We have produced a couple of TV ads and have the capability but when it comes to advertising, our pedigree is more towards radio. Radio is an effective way to reach a wide audience quickly and cost-effectively.As with any other type of advertising the approach varies depending on your business objectives; brand awareness, offer driven, direct response etc.

We are able to manage the entire process from undertaking media research and planning, through to concept, scripting and production and post-campaign analysis to understand the effectiveness of your radio campaign. Radio works well and especially in conjunction with online and traditional media to create a coordinated cross-media campaign.

We can generate a totally bespoke web site design that matches your current look and feel or that of a brand that we have developed. We will take you from concept, through development of the design to the final release at each step, checking back to the brief to make sure we are hitting the mark.

We design sites that responsive; this means your website will re-organise the content depending on the device that is viewing it so it displays on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Often, the best way to achieve a well designed website is to use one of our templates that can be integrated with our full content management system to give you an easy to use website. We will then customise and bespoke the template to met your brand guidelines and provide consistency of design across your online and offline collateral.

Check out some of our websites – Chayora, Mainspring and Beavis Morgan.

We create intelligent web sites that deliver the functionality you require: content managed, e-commerce, rich-media, interactive – it’s up to you.

Basics – At entry level, we can build a simple set of pages that provide you with a web presence, we can make areas that you can update using a simple word processor style page so you can keep it fresh.

Content managed – We can build a fully Content Managed site using a Content Management System (CMS) that lets you add pages, move pages, edit them, upload content including pictures, video and audio – you can, for example, have dynamic content on the homepage that’s drawn from other areas of the site.Our main skill is in working with WordPress but we also have experience with other popular CMS and e-commerce platforms.

Fully featured – We can add our range of modules that include; member/client management, event management, interactive calendar, with complex interactivity and functionality or, our software engineers can develop bespoke modules to address specific needs. We add this functionality by using and customising existing off-the-shelf plugins. For more complex functionality we commission bespoke development.

We provide a fully integrated online management service. We make sure that your website is search engine compliant with the basics including; robots.txt, meta tagging, submission to Google. We will set up Google Analytics on your site so we can manage and monitor traffic, create a Google Place and if required, set up Google AdWords. We will set up Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube accounts where appropriate.

We can help you with your Social Media management; generating content with text graphics and rich media; posting to your Social Media feeds and managing any response.

We can also help with direct mail and direct email campaigns to tie back in with your online activity to create the balance between push & pull.