5 quick marketing wins to defeat the cost-of-living crisis
During a cost-of-living crisis, businesses really need to stand out and attract customers more than ever.
But how? Try these cost-effective marketing tactics.
Enter: The Brand-Building Playbook
Building a strong and successful brand is essential for any business looking to stand out in today's crowded marketplace. Social media is littered with the corpses of ‘blanded’ companies who failed to resonate with their market and customer, and just kept on plugging away with the wrong strategy.
With this in mind, we wrote a playbook is for those who want to build captivating and remarkable brands that demand attention and inspire loyalty.
If you run a lean organisation, don’t get a custom-coded website. Here’s why:
When it comes to creating a website, there are many options available to individuals and businesses alike, but two stand out above all others: custom-made websites and online website builders (such as WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace).
Each option has its advantages and disadvantages, and the choice between the two ultimately depends on a variety of factors, such as, budget, technical skills, and desired features – however, one stands head and shoulders above the other when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO).
Scale-up series: what is experiential marketing?
In the latest instalment of our scale-up series, we look at ‘experiential marketing’, a form that really stands out from paid product ads, pop-up banners, and content.
If you offer complex services, consider making a shadow brand to use as a lead magnet
We commonly work with organisations that offer complex products and services that find it hard to concisely articulate the benefits without overdoing it. So sometimes, we advise a strategy of creating a shadow brand to use as a lead magnet for people that might have an interest and need for the service or product, so that there is space to detail more about what it actually is.
Scale-up series: What is a brand activation, and when should you do it?
A brand activation is a marketing strategy that aims to bring a brand to life and create a deeper connection with its target audience. It involves creating engaging experiences that allow consumers to interact with a brand in a memorable way and spread it with others they know.
Scale-up series: What are your brand ‘touchpoints’?
As a digital brand experience agency, we work with many clients from different sectors and markets, however, notice terms are used interchangeably, and wrong in some circumstances. So, over a series of articles, we wanted to clarify how we see the meaning of industry terms, starting with brand touchpoints.
What invitational marketing is, and why your strategy should include it.
The focus of invitational marketing is on creating an enjoyable experience for the customer, rather than pushing a hard sell (aka persuasion marketing – we’ll cover this soon). The invitational approach to marketing is often used in industries where building relationships with customers is important, such as in luxury goods, hospitality, and service industries.
Stop neglecting your website to focus on social media marketing
A common problem we see in businesses that are starting to grow past the point of being a start-up (referred to as the scale-up phase), is the same marketing tactics that helped them grow from just an idea into an actual business, is using the same growth tactics.
Recently released data suggests global internet users are now numbered at 4.95 billion, compared to the 4.74 billion social media users. Google alone serves more than 40,000 search queries every second on an average day, that’s over 3.5 billion searches per day – something that social media cannot measure up against.
Tighter internet privacy will force marketers into exploring new outreach ideas, whether your culture is ready to or not.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) in the UK, have limited the customer data available to companies to understand who might be interested in their products or services. As consumers, we’re reclaiming our right to explore silently, without being bothered by irrelevant noise from loud, rubbish advertisers.
When you combine these changes in law with Apple positioning itself as ‘privacy brand’ in its recent updates and changes to further strengthen its privacy protections, the success of marketing campaigns is getting harder and harder for brands to measure. And will only continue to do so.
How are you attracting leads to your business in 2023?
The pandemic has shown us that focussing your profile-raising activities purely on physical and word-of-mouth interactions is a critical vulnerability for businesses.
It limits you to people in your geographical area of the ad placement, but also that your target customer happens to see it and takes a positive perspective of your organisation afterwards. It doesn’t allow for engagement outside of the local area, and we suspect, that it won’t lead to organic marketing (that is people talking about it) unless it really is remarkable.
What is your brand’s personality?
This may seem like an obvious question when we ask, but many clients aren’t able to communicate what their brand’s personality is.
This is important because without being able to describe the space where your brand fits in, you’ll waste time in hunting around unnecessarily to find it when you could be reinforcing and defending it. Even if you can’t define the exact street, you should know the neighbourhood or city (see our article on how this metaphor works).
Traditional marketing is dead. Get over it.
It’s time for companies to understand that we’re now in the era of content and influencer marketing, so your Pay-Per-Clicks (PPC) spend is almost irrelevant. And if you’re still reluctant to believe digital personalities make money by making content, let us signpost you to some astonishing examples.
Map out your customer journeys to see your branding gaps
Mapping out your customers’ journey helps to identify the effectiveness of your previous marketing campaigns and strategies, generate fresh ideas to take advantage of new technologies and platforms since the last campaign, and plan where and how the future ones might look to start conducting gap analysis and training needs analysis on.
What is a key customer demographic analysis, and how do you do it?
By mapping out multiple customer profiles (unless your offering is really niche, you should have more than just one), you’ll be able to prioritise where to aim your efforts to increase awareness amongst their cohort, which one should be focussed on (as it might vary with the seasons), and how much resources to allocate to those efforts.
Why you should optimise your branding for mobile-first customer journeys
With the transition of most of our attention away from the outside world (especially over winter and in the last few years of the pandemic) towards social media, streaming content, and maybe soon – the metaverse, the reach of traditional marketing platforms like billboards is slowly dying off.
Start-up series: Why you should have a square, landscape and portrait-orientated logo.
A fundamental concept of running your own enterprise is understanding why you need multiple different logo versions; therefore, we’re going to link the 3 main logo orientations to times when you may need them.
The hidden dangers of ‘blanding’
A fundamental principle of brand design is the concept of ‘MAYA’, an acronym of ‘most advanced, yet acceptable’. It’s a position to define where a brand’s personality should sit that’s enough away from its competitors to be remarkable, yet close enough for those to gauge what sector you work in without too much guesswork. The ‘most advanced’ element is the notable component of the idea, as it highlights the importance of being easily memorable to maximise chance of long-term success.
