Looking back over our shoulders
Looking back at 2012 we’ve written a lot (like in 2011) but took a pretty long break after the summer. With a sudden increase in workload we had to concentrate on clients’ assignments. This is no excuse though as part of our company’s mission is to collect, analyze and diffuse knowledge.
Fortunately enough there were a few events scheduled in the second half of the year that kind of forced us to resume writing. First of all we were accredited for the press coverage of the SIAL fair in October and met dozens of innovative companies which gave us enough new thoughts to write many articles. In the same month we also resumed our monthly trips to European cities to visit innovative retail concepts. We started with several trips to Paris because of the two contests that had just finished in September: the Paris Design Week and Paris Design & Shop.
All in all we ended up publishing 3 articles a week as usual and our audience grew ca. 50% in 2012 vs. 2011. Unfortunately only 20% of our readers are English-speaking and our 2011 objective to reach the balance between French- and English-speaking readership has not been met.
A new website
First of all we will revamp our website to make it easier to grasp. We were very much inspired by the work done by one of our clients (Connectis) which did a great job at changing its corporate image and proposing a very clean and professional website.
More structure in our articles
Second we will revamp the very structure of our blog articles. We always tried to put as much information as possible in our articles. This resulted regularly in unstructured articles that missed their purpose. We will definitely stop with this. Here I’d like to thank Frédéric Wauters who gave us the opportunity to follow a “writing strategies” training which I highly recommend. In the future we will strictly stick to a given structure for each article we write: you’ll get headers to help you structure your reading and you’ll get advices at the bottom of each article. The advices will be of different types:
· “Advices for your market research and your business plan (be it in Brussels, Belgium or elsewhere)”
· “Advices for your marketing strategy”
· “Advices for your innovation strategy”
Those three kinds of advices correspond to the three fields of expertise we’ve developed: market research and coaching of entrepreneurs, marketing strategies with a focus on satisfaction and loyalty, innovation with a focus on meaningful differentiation.
Photos better integrated in the layout
Last but not least we will publish more photos but will stop putting them annoyingly in the middle of the text. We will group them in a gallery at the end of the text, just before the advices section. This will give the article a neater look.
Different types of articles
We have noticed that our readers don’t always want to read long articles. Sometimes they just want to refresh their heads with new concepts, a few pictures … and less words. We will do just that by introducing two kinds of articles: longer articles including an analysis and shorter ones which will just bounce new ideas, new concept and help you think for yourself about what you can do in your own business. The latter will be called “One Day One Idea” and will include a few advices too.
This is the last article that will not contain the advice section. Yet you should not forget that our intention is to inspire you for your market research and your business plan (be it in Brussels, Belgium or elsewhere), for your marketing strategy and your innovation strategy.
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Marketing, Misc..
