Frankel Interactive

5 Useful Strategies to Upgrade Your Identity as a Brand

Adam Frankel — 2016-09-28

Do you think it’s time to upgrade your branding strategy? If you do, then keep reading as I am going to enlighten you about some new branding techniques that work.

Branding is everything

Replace the question “What is a brand” with “What’s not a brand.” Branding is ubiquitous. A brand can be anything and everything. Brand identity cannot be reduced to any particular aspect.

A half eaten apple reminds you of Apple.Inc because the Cupertino-based company has a similar logo. It’s not that we consciously think of Apple, our subconscious mind just signals us. Successful brands have crept into our subconscious and made a permanent place there. As a result, we see them everywhere.

Do not pigeonhole branding into any rigid aspect; doing that amounts to restricting branding. The lesson to learn from the examples above is whatever reminds someone of your brand is a part of branding. Try putting brand’s essence in everything to increase your reach among the customers.

Communication matters

The quality of communication is critical to branding. Communication can kill your brand. At the same time, it can grow your brand and increase your sale.

A cold approach to communication is a strict No. A lukewarm approach won’t do any good either. Today’s coveted customers are mostly Millennials as boomers are transitioning into saving for retirement. And millennials value the experience alongside the product. Poor communication can turn them off.

Mistakes brands make at the time of communicating with audiences include:

Using wrong channels: Select a channel that suits your audience best. Millennials are on social media 24/7. Communicate with them through social channels. Among the social channels, some like Pinterest are skewed to women. Use those channels to connect to female audiences. Older generation still prefers communication over phone. So dial their numbers and be very polite.

Remove clutters: Communication clutters include connection downtime, obscure information, turnaround time delay, etc. Make sure you have a steady Internet connection at office. Lack of proper communication between customers and customer service reps qualify as clutters. Proper communication removes them.

Sell the brand

But don’t sell the product. A brand is bigger than a product. Brands that follow archaic strategies only pitch their products. While one product may be stellar in quality, another product may very well be terrible.

Selling the brand is always a safer bet. It encourages brand loyalty. The top brands have a dedicated consumer-base. Unless they embark on a poor-quality-product-release spree, their consumers will remain loyal to them. Microsoft killed the “start” menu in Windows 8 and went for a Smartphone-esque slate style.

They have gotten a lot of flak for this, mostly from loyal consumers. But despite criticizing, the customers didn’t dump Windows in favor of Linux or OS X. This proves brand loyalty can offset negative product experience, provided it’s an aberration, not the norm.

You cannot command loyalty from customers unless you leverage content marketing. Red Bull has built and sold a culture by doing so. Top brands develop content strategies based on customer survey findings; the survey findings allow them to identify those aspects of branding that customers will love to buy.

C stands for

Call-to-action. It also stands for customer service. By adding them up, you can grow your brand. Let me explain how you can link them together:

The onsite elements that typically lead to call-to-action include

Services page
Customer testimonials
Product image/video
Flat discount offers

You can personalize these elements, but they can never be as effective as customer service. Customer service is an untapped resource when it comes to sending traffic to CTA. The reps can monitor the quality of engagement and take visitors to pages with call-to-action buttons.

Customer service can have a presence beyond a website, make a foothold on the platforms which are the major sources of traffic, such as social media. The best thing about customer service is it is interactive, unlike the said onsite elements.

Southwest Airlines used Twitter to engage with customers. See the screenshot below:

On social media or over phone, a customer service rep can initiate a conversation with a customer or a prospect and encourage them to visit the Call to Action page. That said, the lead must be a warm one. If it’s a customer, he must be a satisfied customer. Leading an unhappy customer to a Call to Action page is awkward and off-putting.

Emotional connection

Connecting with people on an emotional level has its perks. Far-sighted brands push consumer emotion to the extent that customers fail to separate brands from living and breathing individuals.

There are several driving factors behind brand personification. But none can be as strong as an emotion-driven connection. Nielsen’s Global Loyalty Sentiment Report points out the attributes that cause a shift in customer loyalty. See the infographic below:

Brands that succeed in establishing emotional ties with audiences are perceived differently. Customers and noncustomers alike perceive them in terms of humane attributes. Below is the visual depiction of human emotions associated with brands across the world:

Source

Brands that embody the qualities depicted in the infographic don’t have to overdo anything. Customers feel a subconscious inclination to buy from them. Content marketing, especially visual content is instrumental in helping brands incorporating the qualities and creating and nurturing a warm connection with their audiences.

Summing up

The five strategies discussed here can help you mark a new era in branding. Don’t follow these strategies blindly, rather have an experimental approach while following them so that something new comes from them - something that’s hard for us to anticipate and will be a surprise..

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

5 Free and Paid Marketing Tools that SMBs Can Use

Adam Frankel — 2016-09-16

Online marketing has become highly automated these days. We’re no longer having to manually manage each social network and campaign individually. There are tools now available that aggregate our favorite platforms and enable us to control our efforts from a single dashboard.

To try and take care of it manually is simply too aggravating not to mention a waste of time and money.

Assuming you be subscribing to the notion that automation makes your life easier, here’s a list of free and paid tools you can leverage in your online marketing efforts:

LinkedIn advanced search

LinkedIn is not a search engine, so don’t expect their new search feature to show you results for product searches. LinkedIn Advanced Search connects users and lets you find industry thought leaders. Business owners looking for networking partners can leverage this feature.

What’s new in Advanced Search?

The new search feature, show results based on boolean strings. There’s an option for negative search. See the screenshot below:

We used “sales manager not corporate” as the search query. Such queries narrow down the results pool. Had you used “sales manager or artists”, then the query pool would have been huge because LinkedIn would have shown people from both professions. The query “sales manager and artists” would have prompted LinkedIn to display only those people, who are both artists and sales managers.

The boolean search feature adds flexibility to in-network searching and paves the road for influencer marketing. The industry thought leaders are influencers and connecting with them leverages knowledge sharing. LinkedIn acquired Pulse in 2013 for just this reason. Earlier, it was only a recruitment platform, but Advanced Search and Pulse have turned LinkedIn now into a marketing platform.

It’s totally free to use LinkedIn Advanced Search.

Hootsuite

Promoting a brand separately on each social network takes time and effort. Hootsuite consolidates brand promotion on social media - it has an integrated dashboard that lets you add 35 social channels including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Foursquare, Instagram and more.

With Hootsuite, you don’t have to worry about team management anymore. It makes task allocation super-easy. Whenever a member of your team logs into the dashboard, he can see what tasks have been assigned to him.

Similar to team management, Hootsuite eases up customer management. An administrator can delegate customer messages to team members and customer service reps can show those messages to customers. Hootsuite aids in email marketing too - the number of clicks, popular links, demographic info of clickers are among the insights that Hootsuite shows to email marketers.

Put simply, there’s a huge difference between marketing with Hootsuite and without Hootsuite.

Hootsuite is paid tool.

Similarweb

This tool offers stats and analytics related to web traffic. The free version of the tool doesn’t consist of very many features, but the paid version comes with a suite of cool ones.

What I like best about Similarweb is that it brings all web marketing activities and traffic analysis data under one roof. A marketer gets all sorts of information related to incoming visitors, traffic on competitor site, engagement metrics, suggested keywords for organic and PPC campaign and more.

Although useful, none of these features is unique. There are hundreds of other tools with the same features. So, where lies the uniqueness? Well, Similarweb is unique for traffic prediction accuracy, for identifying top mobile keywords, for delivering insights related to cross-device traffic, for separating conversion funnel from doorways.

Very few tools can offer so many benefits and excel in every department. And it this that accounts for the uniqueness of Similarweb.

GoAnimate

Visual content is the game changer, it can achieve what text-based content stuggles to - grabbing attention from visitors.

When it comes to visual content, videos fare better than images. Professional looking videos involving models are outrageously expensive. Animation videos are comparatively less expensive, but still can cost a lot of money.

Using GoAnimate, you can create a professional-looking animated video without needing to hire a professional. I used GoAnimate myself and my experience with this tool has been positive. I not only created videos for a landing page, but also to increase engagement for the social media campaigns I was running at that time. Videos are rarely used for drip marketing campaigns. But stats indicate including a video in an email can cause a whopping 200% increase in CTR.

The simple interface and customizable templates of GoAnimate enable you to create cool videos and embed them into your email. Voiceover is often a headache for video makers. But GoAnimate has built-in music libraries. You can choose from hundreds of pre-animated characters and backgrounds. Whether you want to create brand promotion or explainer videos, GoAnimate makes your work easier.

GoAnimate is a paid tool, but SMBs can easily work it into existing budgets as needed.

Buzzsumo

Why Buzzsumo in the list?

Because it makes content curation very easy. In 2016, content curation is the holy grail of content marketing. Over 80% of curators aim to achieve thought-leadership. An almost equal number of marketers curate content with the hope of improving brand visibility.

It’s difficult to find a trusted filter and relevant information on the web. Consumers have faith in peer recommendations, but they value neutral opinion from strangers more. Through content curation, a brand can provide them unbiased opinion and useful information. This is how brands can establish thought-leadership.

Because most brands are curating content, there’s a competition. Buzzsumo has state-of-the-art features like “influencers” and “monitoring” which make it easy to stay ahead of the competition. Buzzsumo’s smart algorithm searches for the most shared content on the web for various topics, and upon finding the content, filter it by its proprietary metrics.

To add more, Buzzsumo can be used for content creation alongside content curation. The tool lets marketers discover content ideas as well as optimize formats and headlines, and command brand loyalty.

Very few tools can facilitate both content curation and creation and be equally good at both. Buzzsumo is a smart marketer’s pick and rightly so.

The agency package of Buzzsumo is for SMBs. It costs only $300/month.

Conclusion

There are free and paid tools in this list. SMBs can use all of them. Sure, they can pay for expensive marketing automation tools, but why waste hard-earned money when the tools described here can take care of their marketing needs?

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

Why Understanding Millennial Customers is Crucial for Brands

Adam Frankel — 2016-07-27

Millennials make up a large percentage of shoppers. The more insights a brand gathers about millennials and about their purchasing habit, the better it leverages them.

In this article, we’ll have a look at stats related to millennials and deduce actionable insights from them. This article will be of help for both B2C and B2B brands.

Purchasing capacity

For now, baby boomers have better purchasing capacity than millennials. However, experts predict that by 2018, millennials will have the highest spending power among all generations. Stats confirm this prediction. In 2015, millennial spending was $2.44 trillion and by 2018, it is poised to surpass baby boomer spending power at $3.39 trillion.

Millennials are avid purchasers but they want to party with brands on their own terms. They have more expectations from brands than customers from previous generations and expect brands to value them.

According to New York Times, hotels and travel companies have gotten millennial marketing right. They offered young tourists high-speed Internet connection and power consoles for charging their electronic devices.

As a result, the millennials, especially gen-Y contributed to a sharp 20% increase in travel spending post-recession.

Purchasing habit

Baby boomers are more into saving. Currently, boomers represent 32% of US population. Their combined wealth is $46 trillion, which is equivalent to 77% of the nation’s wealth.

Millennials are not prone to saving. At the same time, there are very few impulse shoppers among them. The majority of millennials act wisely when it comes to buying. Their typical purchasing habits include:

#Trusting strangers: Millennials prefer reviews and feedback from strangers. They feel people whom they don’t know have no reason to lie to them or mislead them.

#Research precedes purchase: Millennials rarely buy without doing research beforehand. They consider online reviews as the most credible source of information.

#They hate contract: Over 65% millennials feel signing a contract means getting trapped. This striking revelation comes from Chetan Sharma Consulting. Millennial consumers are reluctant to purchase cars and prefer leasing. See the image below:

2015 was the year when homeownership in the US was lowest in last 30 years. It seems millennial’s commitment phobia is not limited to relationships.

The takeaways for brands, therefore, are having positive user-generated reviews backing them and not pitching anything resembling a contract to millennials.

Millennials and advertising

Digital advertising is going through a turmoil right now. Viewability rate declining, growing use of ad blocking tools and programmatic advertising are changing this landscape. Millennials are indifferent, often apathetic to ads. This is one of the challenges of digital advertising.

Almost 50% millennials feel TV ads are overly promotional and word-of-mouth marketing is more reliable. Only 17% said TV ads motivate them to buy.

Millennials don’t want ads, they want stories instead. Michael Brenner of Entrepreneur.com highlighted this in his article. He provided many supporting details, but we don’t need those details to confirm this because the image below says it all:

It’s the screenshot of a video that compiles banned commercials. Just see the level of engagement - more than 10 million people viewed it and over 10K people gave it a thumb-up. They enjoyed the ad content but will they buy from the brands featured in the ads? Not necessarily.

To impress millennial consumers, brands need to delight them with great stories. Otherwise, the ads will be ineffective. That’s the insight we can deduce from here.

Gender difference

There are plenty of differences between boomers and millennials. But there’s one similarity - millennial men and women are different in many areas akin to boomer men and women.

The key differences between them include

Openness in early-adoption: Millennial men are early adopters. They are first to try out new gadgets and technologies.
Women love groups: Millennial women love to travel in pack and take group-selfie. They like doing things with their female besties unlike the men who are lone rangers who like eating, shopping or going on trips alone.
Women make buying decisions: Millennial women make purchasing decisions as moms and on behalf of their spouse or partners.

What can we deduce from the gender differences cited above?

Here are the deductions:

Deduction 1: Brands that cater to male audiences should come up with new product ideas. Technology brands have been doing this for long. It’s time for other brands to do the same.
Deduction 2: Travel and hotel businesses have good reason to make their services skewed to women. Traveling is a group activity and so, travel brands can attract female customers. That being said, male consumers shouldn’t feel left out.
Deduction 3: Advertising should pursue millennial women to purchase baby products and fashion accessories for their partners or better halves.

The good thing about millennials is the gender differences don’t lead to gender imbalance or discrimination. Brands need to keep that in mind.

Entrepreneurs and employees

Unlike boomers, millennials often switch between the two roles. Many of them have been both employees and entrepreneurs. What differences does it make?

It is believed that entrepreneurs and employees have different taste. But when it comes to millennials, that doesn’t hold true.

This insight is crucial for B2B brands. Five years down the line, most of the C-suite positions will be filled by millennials. PWC’s research indicates that 63% executives will retire in next five years. A separate study shows more than 80% millennial workers will handle managerial duties in five years.

At the same time, 75% workers all over the world will be millennials by 2025. This indicates B2B relationship in the future will be handled by millennials.

We know that millennials are tech-savvy and they are on social media 24/7, which means the B2B interaction will be social media driven in near future. As millennials prefer uniqueness in a product, B2B firms would have to produce unique and exciting ideas, and use social media to promote those ideas.

Clearly, millennials close the gap between entrepreneur and employee. They are the first generation ever to do that. B2B enterprises need to value them as employees and also as corporate decision makers.

Summing up

Before we end our millennial tour, we need to inform readers that millennials show brand loyalty. If a brand, regardless of whether it’s B2B or B2C, treats them well, looks after their needs and most importantly, offers them a delightful experience, they’d put the brand in their whitelist.

Image Courtesy: www.privacy-analytics.com

Key Tips to Leverage Instagram for Brand Benefit

Adam Frankel — 2016-07-07

Visual marketing is now an important part of SEO. Google values links that come from visual content. Even text-based content these days is becoming more dense with graphics. It’s because of this transition that brands are now leveraging social networks where visuals and graphics are shared with almost an unconscious click of a mouse.

Instagram is one such network.

This channel presents immense marketing opportunities and can help a brand in a number of ways:

Instagram now has more than 400 million active users
In 2014, almost 20% of Internet users had Instagram account
It is considered the most important social network among U.S. teens
The Instagram mobile app has registered 30 billion photos shared between users thus far

The stats above indicate why it is essential for every brand to use Instagram as a platform for visual marketing.

Among the useful Instagram marketing tips, the key ones are:

Deep link in bio

You can promote your brand through the link in the bio section. So place links strategically. Most brands put homepage link in the bio section. Does that help? Yes, it does. But it’d be better if they post deep links in the bio area of an Instagram profile.

For example, if you post your landing page link, then visitors on your profile will be taken straightway to the landing page of your site. Oftentimes, brands post specific images to Instagram but add homepage links. They should add the link to the page that has information, related to the image. By doing that, they signal to Google that there’s a contextual connection between their brand profiles on Instagram and their websites. Google values such connection.

Let’s say you are an automobile brand and you upload images of a shiny car on Instagram. The accompanying link should be of a page that has information about the make and model of the car. This will more value to your branding.

Use hashtags

Twitter is not the only hotbed of hashtag marketing. There are plenty of other similar networks and Instagram is one of them. The #chooseyourwinter campaign by Nike is a great example of the engagement that marketing on Instagram can generate.

The campaign helped Nike grow its user-base on Instagram and skyrocket its sales. Like big brands, smaller brands can also leverage Instagram. The #EEEEEATS campaign by a lesser-known brand called Infatuation was among the hugely successful campaigns on Instagram. Over 2 million posts were tagged with this hashtag.

The brands in the example belong to the B2C niche and they sell consumer goods. Visuals of consumer apparels are likely to go viral if appropriate hashtags were used. If you sell furniture like teak chair, bedding sets like mattress and pillows or have a restaurant, which serves a mouthwatering buffet, then find a suitable and actionable hashtag to make your campaign go viral on Instagram.

Use videos

Instagram is not YouTube. The channel is famous for being the hub of images, not the hub of videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t share videos on Instagram. In fact, it’d be a sheer blunder if you dismiss Instagram from your video marketing checklist.

Below are the reasons your brand needs video promotion on Instagram:

Your competitors are using Instagram for video marketing and reaching out to a large number of users. Don’t believe me? Okay, then see the graph below:

Source

The graph above shows video sharing almost got doubled in November 2015 from January of that year. Clearly, if you are not promoting yourself on Instagram using branded videos, then you are lagging behind.

Sarah Fama of ReelSeo listed some advice that can make video sharing on Instagram more profitable for you. Here are the advice, check them out.

The targeted audiences

What if the visuals you are uploading on Instagram fail to create engagement and convert visitors into leads? The entire Instagram marketing campaign will become purposeless then.

To make the campaign better performing and productive, you need to pinpoint the target audiences. In my opinion, the easiest way to identify them is tap into the juncture where audience demographic meets brand loyalty.

Not getting it yet?

Okay, lets put it this way…

Instagram, just like other visual networks, have users from diverse demographic groups. Some of those groups may show interest in your product while other groups may not. Among the ones who display interest, some will buy from you and some will not.

The targeted segment of audiences may be narrow but they are the ones who will buy from you. Check the audience engagement details, identify the active ones, sort them out in accordance with demographic characteristics and measure the depth of their brand loyalty.

Normally, visual networks account for a high engagement rate, which is why, it becomes difficult for a brand to identify target audiences. Tallying the demographic details and brand loyalty index may come in useful for them.

Use Instagram tools

Instagram has plenty of tools for brands to use. The editing tools and filters can enhance the quality of your images. The business tools include analytics to monitor the in-network growth, ease cross-device accessibility, identify and manage Instagram followers, etc.

Instagram has recently introduced a new advertising platform. The platform is self-serve and its impending success is owed to the fact that Instagram ads are two and a half more times likely to be clicked compared to ads on other social channels. The new ad interface gives brands access to various ad formats. Brands can choose between a visual brand storytelling ad and a 30-seconds long video ad - whichever gets the message across.

Here’s a list of Instagram tools that clue you in on the right time to post, give you access to stats and fetch actionable insights from the pits of the visual channel.

Summing up

Marketing opportunities are rife for brands on Instagram. They have to work a little harder to understand the platform and their audiences. Of course, as we’ve discussed here, Instagram gives them access to various tools to ease these tasks. Harnessing the tools and promoting a brand with cool visuals will surely have a rewarding payoff for them.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

5 Tips Every Brand Should Follow to Re-engage with Their Customers

Adam Frankel — 2016-06-21

Experts believe re-engaging with existing customers is better than finding new customers. Research suggests the former is more profitable than the latter in terms of sales.

Getting success in re-engagement depends on a couple of factors - The brand experience, customer feedback, retention rate are some of them besides removing lead gen bottlenecks, nurturing qualified leads and keeping them warm.

In this article, I’ll give you tips on customer re-engagement.

List buildup

Re-engagement begins with building a list of customers.

It’s the very first step and it’s important.

Some of your existing customers may now want to stick to your brand any longer. Some want to turn to other brands for a change, while some are not happy with your pricing. Identify such customers and exclude them from the list of re-engagement targets.

How to identify them?

Check the recent transaction history and spot those who haven’t been purchasing from you for a long time. There’s no point to inflating client lists by adding inactive customers to it.

Among the active customers, target the ones whose cart or order sizes are of comparatively larger orders. Such customers bring a better ROI. Getting a customer who will spend $400 is better than getting a customer who will spend only $40.

Check how active a customer is and how much he’s buying from you. These two are the criteria for sorting out the existing customers, you should be re-engaging with.

Returning visitors display ads

Visitors who keep coming back to your site are retarget baits. Problem is you can’t contact them via email because they are anonymous. You only have their IPs in your website’s server log, but that won’t help you identify them.

But identifying returning visitors is a must because they are likely to buy. Retargeted display ads can make them purchase from you. Studies indicate display ads can make returning visitors 70% more likely to buy. Display ads can be shown to them in the following way:

You can place a cookie which will stay in their browsers. Big ad networks like Google Adsense, Adroll and Bing all support this. You’ll get the cookie code from the respective ad network.

This process is thoroughly explained by the infographic below:

Source

Each individual social network has its own way of showing returning visitors display ads. Facebook, for example, allows you to set up Facebook pixel on your website. It has a conversion pixel-tracking dashboard which allows you to create custom audiences.

Automated email marketing

Email marketing is no longer manual. It is now automated and called drip marketing. Automated email marketing gives you an edge in re-engaging. State of the art email marketing tools come with a custom dashboard, which lets you perform the following tasks:

Compose emails following suggestions offered by the tool.
Schedule mails so that they are being automatically sent to the customers.
Track the open and response rates of mails sent to clients.
Set priority so that the tool sorts emails accordingly.

Many brands are skeptical about the effectiveness of email drip campaign. Here’s some information that can make them rethink this:

Email drip campaign can nurture leads and keep them warm. Customers don’t want their favorite brands to be non-responsive. If you don’t keep contact with them, they’d lose interest and look for other brands. The gap between two consecutive mails sent to clients should be one quarter of a year.

The content and subject line of an email are important. A personalized subject line can increase the engagement rate by 22%. Tools like MailChimp can make the subject line and the body content personalized. The key benefits of automated email marketing are the following:

It segments email contacts according to location, industry, interests, etc. This way, the emails are sent to targeted respondents and drive the CTR up.
It nurtures the leads obtained from landing-page sign up. Such leads often don’t convert into sales. Nurtured leads cause a sharp 20% increase in sales compared to non-nurtured leads.

A re-engagement strategy that doesn’t include email drip marketing is incomplete.

Customer advisory board

Even though it’s a new idea, it is quickly getting traction. Offering your clients a place in the customer advisory board (CAB) brings double benefits. First, it ensures customer engagement and secondly, you get honest opinion from customers on the product or service quality.

Which customers should be offered a position in the CAB?

Customers who have shown interest in your brand time and again should be offered a place in the CAB. Such customers interact with you, respond to the mails sent by you and of course, purchase from you. Brands are often advised to diversify their CABs. Different customers representing different fields of business can enhance cross-niche and cross-genre potential of the CAB.

The benefits of CAB are summarized below:

#Quality feedback: From the members of the CAB, you’ll receive wise and pragmatic feedback. Such feedback will help you make your business flourish.

#Virality score: Having active customers on the board increases your virality score. New customers and many existing customers get attracted to your brand because a segment of customers do the marketing for you.

Simply put, a customer advisory board yields excellent opportunity for brands to connect with their existing customers in a meaningful way.

Loyalty programs

Through loyalty programs, you can re-engage with existing customers and make them purchase from you. Loyalty programs are all about giving customers reasons to buy from you. Here’s an example on how to make it executable:

Leads often hesitate to sign up. If there’s a reward or incentive for them, then they will find interest in the signup process and will actively buy from you. Loyalty program case studies show that a tier system drives customer retention rate up.

Such a tier system will have rewards at its initial entry point. If a customer is rewarded after an initial purchase, then they’ll be interested to buy more from the same brand.

Virgin Atlantic Flying Club followed this strategy. They introduced a tiered reward program for members. Club Red members receive discount on rental cars, holiday flights, airport parking, etc. Club Silver members receive quick check-in and priority standby seating. Club Gold members receive clubhouse access where they could enjoy a drink and get a massage.

This tiered benefit structure helped them re-engage with their customers and grow their business.

The case study above is just an example. There are plenty other ways to successfully run a loyalty program.

Conclusion

Re-engagement is becoming more prevalent in a companies marketing mix. The benefits, discussed here, explain how and why. Follow the tips shared here to re-engage with your customers and watch your business thrive.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

4 Crucial Aspects That are Responsible for Building Positive Branding

Adam Frankel — 2016-06-15

Eric Haskell beautifully explained in his article why shoppers value the brand experience alongside the product. It’s clear from his analysis that online retail is as much about experience as about product quality.

He stressed the fact that this is most notable in the millennial (18-34 years of age) audience. Unlike their parents, online retail for them is more then simply getting on Amazon and getting their everyday essentials delivered. They are more spirited than and like most things in life, they seek out what brings them pleasure. Retailers who make them smile have greater chances of selling their products to them.

Although it’s important to bring a smile on a customer’s face, acting like a clown or bombarding them with corny jokes doesn’t translate into sales. The bottomline is a positive pleasureable experience.

UX design elements

A positive online shopping experience can be hampered if the UX elements on your site are not up to the mark. UX elements are especially important because the traffic influx from the desktop environment to the handheld platform is real and the small mobile screen may not make enough room for these elements.

Color selection is an important part of UX design. Colors have psychological properties, which is why, brands often use them to connect to and bond with their audiences. Does your branding bank on any particular emotion? If yes, then highlight the emotion by selecting appropriate colors.

Keeping the mobile environment in mind, here are the three key aspects of UX design:

#Typography: My previous articles have already dealt with typography. I have discussed reducing friction in design, the much-touted flat web design, the top 2016 web design trends for SEOs and more. Throughout I have mentioned typography can make or break a website. Mobile typography is especially important because the screen is small.

#The interface: After typography, it’s the interface that a UX designer needs to take care of. This is the era of flat design and the UI elements are minimalist. Minimalist design is often slammed as boring. A fluid interface can breathe life into an otherwise insipidly flat design framework.

#The layout: Again, we need to think from a mobile user’s end. No matter how catchy the layout is, if it breaks or if the CSS elements don’t load properly, visitors will leave your site with an unsettling experience. To fix such problems, have fixed-width layout wherein a gap occurs between each end of a site and the viewport.

If the UX design of your site is perfect, visitors wouldn’t find any legitimate ground to complain.

Cross-selling opportunities

When you run a business and have a website, you expect your visitors to enquire about your products/services. A good experience signifies selling opportunities and a bad experience amounts to loss of potential selling opportunities.

But the upsides of offering visitors a positive experience doesn’t end at selling - it ends at cross-selling. How’d you know what is the most opportune time for cross-selling?

It’s when visitors are enjoying their stay on the site, getting informed and buying stuff. That’s when the odds of selling additional products to them increase. Studies on e-commerce reveal the following:

Happy customers are likely to buy more products than annoyed or indifferent customers. On the other hand, negative experiences go viral and create a snowballing effect, ultimately crashing your prospects as a brand.
Use of visuals grow cross-selling opportunities. Actually, visuals bring clarity and supplement text content. See the power of visuals in the image below:

Source

All the items on the image above have accompanying images; the images make them more presentable to visitors.

Create emotion

Brands that fail to create an emotional bond with audiences suffer. There’s an overwhelming need to have emotion-driven interaction with audiences and a genre of branding called emotional branding has emerged.

Apple is among the brands that have excelled in emotional branding. The Cupertino-based tech company was once lauded for skeuomorphic design. But later they’d humanize the iOS 7 interface. John Ivy, hired for iOS 7 development explained why skeuomorphism was replaced. In his own words “There was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally.”

Apple correctly understood that connecting to audiences on an emotional level matters, not replicating the actual world.

Here are some tips to implement emotional bonding:

Understand the emotional need of audiences. Interaction is key to understanding it. Make sure your product or service reflects audience emotions. It could be trust, humor or comfort, if they want the emotion from you, give it to them.
Use visuals. The more, the merrier. Audio visual content can come in really handy for building emotional blocks.

Customer loyalty applies to mostly top brands. Mid-level brands don’t have a dedicated customer base. The chief reason behind this is that top brands invest in creating and sustaining emotional connection with their audiences.

Big data analytics

Whatever connection you aim to build with audiences, demographic details, buying history, retention rate and time spent on site are important predictors. The only way you could lay your hands on such insights is digging into big data.

Brand experience is meaningless without big data. I’ve noticed that whenever big data is discussed, its technical benefits like cost reduction, virality score and ROI tracking are highlighted. But there’s a creative side to it and that’s inseparable from the technicalities.

Big data boils down to pattern detection. Discovering new pattern guides creativity. That’s the reason big data underlies creative experiments carried out by brands. The Precision Marketing Insight by Verizon Wireless is one such experiment. Through this program, Verizon sells location-based information of mobile phone users.

Big data offers value and that’s highly sought after in brand building. Lacking value makes it impossible for a brand to build connection to its audiences.

Summing up

We come back to where we started from - the experience matters in branding. The four aspects of branding that we’ve discussed here are inherently related to positive branding. If you are a brand operating in retail industry, then follow them and bond better with your audiences.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

4 Brand Storytelling Mistakes and How to Avoid them

Adam Frankel — 2016-06-01

Brands are warming up to idea of telling stories to their audiences and audiences en masse are responding to stories, shared with them by their favorite brands.

But a brand won’t be able to realize the full potential of storytelling if it commits mistakes.

What are the mistakes that brands commit when telling stories? And what are the remedies?

Keep reading to find out.

Quality of stories

Nobody likes to hear a mundane and lackluster story. Telling such a story is equivalent to telling no story, or maybe even worse, hurting your online reputation as a brand. So tell stories that are interesting.

An interesting story has many components to it, not all of which are easy to anatomize. Seemingly, an interesting story is unpredictable. Nobody likes a predictable story. Your audiences are intelligent people and their ability to guess is remarkable. While listening to the story, their minds will navigate through the possible outcomes. You have to beat them in this mind game.

An interesting story creates a permanent place in the listener’s mind. True, a branded story cannot be permanent, but it should be able to make a lasting impact on the audiences, inasmuch as audiences will remember it afterwards.

Connecting the brand

It may sound like a no-brainer. Why should we be bothered about mentioning a brand in the story when the purpose of crafting the story is to promote it? Maybe the story is to espouse the brand, but if the brand is everywhere in the story, then it’d be outright promotion and would cause more harm than good.

The best brand stories are those that exist independently as stories and wherein brands are acknowledged in a relevant context. Here are some great brand stories. Go through these stories and notice how the brands/services/products have fit in.

Audiences don’t feel any emotion when brands pitch their products before them. But a good story can make them emotional. It can make them laugh, feel empathetic, disheartened or contemplate, all the while, preventing their focus to digress from the brand. You need to invest your content marketing skills to write a story like this.

Using visual content

It’s a crime not to tell visual stories to audiences. The power of visual storytelling is immense. Stories affect our brains. Visual stories can amplify this effect.

See the image below:

Source

Notice that brain releases an organic chemical called Dopamine, whenever we are in an emotionally charged situation, thereby stimulating our emotional memory.

Stories dominated by visual content can galvanize the secretion of Dopamine in larger quantities because audiences can see everything through their bare eyes without resorting to imagination. If the story is presented in an audio-visual format, then they can listen to it alongside seeing it.

The story will trigger emotional memory in them and they’ll identify the brand in regard to those memories.

Is there any benefit in that?

Yes. Audiences will unconsciously attach emotions with the brand. Whenever they’ll think of the brand in retrospect, their brains will be plugged with emotions and they’ll isolate the brand from other brands.

This is precisely what every brand wants.

Action statement

Not having an action statement in a brand story is a mistake. There’s a purpose behind telling a brand story and that purpose is promotion, not loud promotion but subtle promotion. Experts believe such promotional techniques are ineffective unless accompanied by action statements.

Action statements are normally found on the lead gen page. But they can also be found in a brand story. When embedded in a story, an action statement cleverly insinuates what would be the best for the audiences, but it never insists them to do that.

The best place for it to occur is at the end of a story, so users can view it as a moral that they could draw from the story. Action verbs complete an action statement. Even though you just need to hint at few things and never say anything out loud, don’t stop from using action verbs; the more, the merrier.

Here are some phrases with action verbs:

Buying sensibly is caring for money
Visit the retail store if you want a discount
Stop wasting money on lousy products
Take this pill to stay fit

Notice all these phrases are related to buying, spending and choosing a product, indicating these phrases have an undertone that relates to branding. Once again, use your content marketing skills to connect your product/service to action statements.

Overcoming the mistakes

Overcoming the mistakes discussed here is a must for any brand that eyes at leveraging brand storytelling. Thankfully, it’s not difficult to fix these mistakes because the solutions are also suggested.

Image Courtesy: www.linkedin.com

5 Benefits of Visual Branding that Every Brand Should Know

Adam Frankel — 2016-04-26

Every brand wants to stand apart from its competitors, build an audience and connect with them. Visual branding is very helpful in accomplishing this. How it helps them, is what we’re going to discuss here. So keep reading.

Preserving brand identity

As industry landscapes are getting dense with competitors, brands have to deal with an identity crisis. Visual branding can preserve a brand’s identity, which depends on how fans perceive the brand.

Brands do their best to improve the perception. They put ads in newspapers and online, write blogs, host events, offer giveaways, etc.. But even after doing all these, many of them fail to preserve their identity. Visual branding can change this. Adding visual elements to promotional materials can make the adverts more effective and more powerful.

As audiences are exposed to such content coming from a brand, they start to redefine the brand. A brand’s identity consists of its vision, its ethos and its approach - everything remains the same, only these are presented in a more entertaining way. With visual branding, the recipe (Brand identity) remains the same; only the ingredients change (Visual).

Infotainment

While non-visual branding is all about providing information, visual branding informs as well as entertains. It captures the essence of infotainment. A case study depicting a brand’s journey may bore audiences, but an animation video featuring the same will never do so. In fact, it will un-complicate things that are apparently complicated.

People have a predilection for graphic and multimedia content. Who wants to read an insipid blog post when he can get all the information from an infographic, along with a visual treat? What’s the point of wading through a whitepaper when a video with a 3D character can explain everything?

It’s an old-school approach to keep information and entertainment separate. Visual branding shows how they add up. The blend, called infotainment allows brands to tap into it and serve their audiences better content.

Expressing emotion

Brands are no longer only focused on selling stuff. They’re focused on connecting and engaging with their audiences as well. The best way to connect and engage is through emotions.

In one of my previous posts, I discussed how a brand needs to appear sympathetic to audiences, so they can obtain the benefits of empathy marketing. Now, empathy is an emotion and a brand can never tickle its audience's’ emotions with a straight face, it needs to appear humorous, empathetic or amused.

Visual branding can help a brand change its persona. Through rebranding itself with the use of visual content, an otherwise boring brand can project itself as congenial and entertaining. As a result of this, audiences start taking the branded messages more seriously than before.

Visual depiction of emotions is more credible than non-visual depiction. A funny face depicts fun, a sad face or bodily gestures depict depression. Letters and words can never express emotions in such an ostensive manner. As brands are becoming overly reliant on visual content to exhibit emotion for audience engagement, visual branding is on a rise.

Better communication

Lack of clarity at the time of communication is a problem for branding. Visual branding brings clarity in communication. There’s no need to scribble down volumes of words when an image can send the message across.

See the image below:

Source

The image above shows a young guy with a cigarette in his mouth. The smoke emitted from the burning end takes the shape of a gun, pointed at him. On the bottom right side, we see the texts “Kill a Cigarette and Save a Life. Yours.”

There’s no ambiguity and no lack of clarity. The target audiences of the campaign are people who are habitual smokers. The image above reminds them of the dangers of smoking. The texts that accompany the visual are action statement, motivating audiences to perform an action.

Another example. Look at the image below:

Source

The onlookers can ignore the texts on the banner but they are sure to notice the transformation of the woman in the picture. Had there been no image, they would have been unsure about the usefulness of the weight loss supplement. The image serves as a visual depiction of what the supplement can do to their bodies (If they are over-weight).

Hence, visual branding ensures clear communication and less resources required for communication. By using more and more visual content, brands make it easier for audiences to visualize its personality.

Brand storytelling

As brands are aiming for personification, they are adopting storytelling as a technique. One reason storytelling can be imported to branding is that we humans are programed to listen to stories. Storytelling not just facilitates visual branding, it also helps brands don a humane avatar.

In this article on TweakYourBiz, Eric Haskell beautifully explained how brands can appear as humans by telling stories and the role of graphics and multimedia in it. For brands, the benefits of visual storytelling are below:

#Benefit 1: They can quickly capture the growing handheld user-base. Mobile users love multimedia content. Brands can lasso them by showing them short animation videos or a series of graphics that tell the story of the brand.

#Benefit 2: Through visual storytelling, a brand can make significant progress in lead capturing. It can introduce itself to the site visitors by telling stories about it, the hurdles it has crossed so far, the happy clients it has served. The story can be told using audio-visual media elements, so audiences like them.

#Benefit 3: Storytelling allows brands better harness the power of social media. They can upload original images and infographics on channels like Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook and grab the users there.

To put it simply, storytelling is not storytelling unless it’s carried out by visual and audio-visual content. Such content lays the stone for visual branding.

Experiment is on

Visual content promotion completes content marketing, which is now the bottomline of SEO. The best thing about visual content is it is open to experiments.

Graphic designers, 3D developers, animation experts are all experimenting with it, with the hope of producing visual content that is few notches up the existing content. Brands need to keep their eyes open and observe how things are shaping up.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

How Brands Can Use Online Communities for Promotion

Adam Frankel — 2016-04-14

Networking is the key to success in the digital world, and online communities are based on this idea. They allow for the interconnecting of people that share similar interests, whether for business or leisure and recreation. These online communities provide a highly focused target that enable marketers to be precise with messaging and touch the exact market they are looking for.

Online communities are

Social networks, forums and interactive platforms are considered online communities. Social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn and Slideshare, let users post brief updates to their profiles and interact with a specific group of individuals they are ‘connected’ to. Forums like Digitalpoint and phpBB are used for more open online communities that encourage group discussion from the overall site membership. Forums tend to bring strangers with similar interests together where as social networks digitally connect people that are already acquainted with each other. But online communities aren't only about sharing what you had for dinner or letting everyone know you worked out today. There are sites like Github, an online community for software developers, that allow professionals to virtually collaborate, or Quora, a question and answer site also qualify as online communities.

Marketing benefits

Brands know the benefits of marketing in and around those communities. The first benefit is reaching out to audiences. Online communities generate a lot of online traffic and their membership bases give brands instant access to these highly segmented potential customers.

The second benefit is the ease of interaction. These days overt sales tactics such as spamming a forum with posts related to your product are no longer accepted methods of targeting members of an online community. A brand can pitch its product/service using subtle techniques, but being upfront about it is a clear NO. Online communities tend to operate on an advertising based revenue model, however it must balance user experience against how overt and aggressive the marketers it allows in can be.

The links you see in the guise of references on forums and QA sites are actually meant for brand promotion. The URL that appears at the end of a contributors video on YouTube is where the video provider wants the viewers to land. They are all examples of marketing craftsmanship, only the user doesn't necessarily recognize them as so.

Building an online community

Some brands have become proactive enough not to depend on already existing online communities and set up their own. Building a community online is undoubtedly a great idea if you know all the “how-tos”, which include:

Community vision

Make sure the community has a vision users can easily relate to and also reflects the theme of your brand. For example, if you sell fashion accessories and set up a forum for car owners, the community theme wouldn’t match that of your brand.

A community vision is also the community purpose. Why has the community been created? The vision behind a community can be as simple as bringing like-minded people together for discussion, or to connect people looking for people to share offline experiences (like dating, or hobbies).

Here’s an example. One of our clients is a custom manufacturer of sport fishing boats. One their site, they have a forum. They encourage not just owners, but anyone else that shares a love of boating and fishing to join. This community not only brings people together of similar interests, it also reinforces the brand for those that maybe in the market for a new boat, as well as driving traffic to their online ship store.

So it is important to meet two conditions when developing a vision for your online community; make the vision compatible with the theme of your brand and secondly, ensure that community members will want to share the vision.

Content is key

Content plays a major role in the success of an online community. Informative content can push leads deeper into the sales funnel. Community members want information that they consider important. Brands can provide them such information. This is how, a strong connection between a brand and its audiences can be formed.

Don’t try to sell them anything, rather work on the connection as that’s the prerequisite to turn casual users or blog readers into loyal customers. Let’s use our boat manufacturer as an example to better explain; imagine you build boats, and have set up an online community for boat lovers.

If you offer information on how boats are build, the materials used in the building process, the brands of materials and motors available, how the required skills are acquired, etc., then your community is providing a value added resource all fans of boating can turn to. Once you have the captive audience, you can inform them about how your brand of boats can make time on the water more fun, safer, etc.. It is through this content that you can capture their attention and persuade them to buy your product.

Demographic details

Birds of a feather flock together. Two community members having similar demographic characteristics have greater chances to bond than two members having different characteristics. Make sure you acknowledge this.

You can group users under demographic categories such as age group, ethnicity, educational qualification, employment status, etc. This will make it easy for them to interact with each other. Social media demographic insights are immensely important for brands. As community members interact, you can analyze their interaction and gather such insights.

No advertisement

Advertisers look for online communities that are frequented by a strong user base. They know to put their advertisements on sites with the most ‘eyeballs’, but ads interfere with the user-experience, which is why, it’s wise for online communities to avoid them when possible.

Now you've set up the community for your own promotion, not for the promotion of another brand or commercial entity. If you want to offer advertising space to outside companies, be sure they are for complimenting products or services and not anything too similar to your own.

Brand benefit

Don’t expect results overnight. Wait patiently because it takes time for community experience to turn into sales. With time, however, the online community you've founded will give you positive results.

Image Courtesy: www.linkedin.com

How These 4 Strategies Can Offer a Captivating Brand Experience

Adam Frankel — 2016-03-14

As a digital marketer, your goal is to get more and more customers. Whether you operate in the B2B segment or in the B2C, customers are your lifeline. No customers, no business.

Retaining customers is your next priority after acquiring them, and that’s possible when you make sure they are getting a seamless brand experience - something that your competitors may not be offering.

Brand experience

In 2016, 'brand experience' defines a brand. A brand cannot remain clueless about what experience it offers to its audiences. Every brand needs to see itself from the eyes of its customers to understand where it stands, in regard to providing a satisfying brand experience.

In this article, I’ll discuss how brands can offer their audiences engaging experiences so they keep coming back and want for more.

Work on the UI

A UI is not one element but an assortment of many elements. It can be broken down to the layout, the characters on it, the illumination effect, the font, the navigation items and many other items. The UI of a site determines the nature of consumer experience and resulting brand engagement.

UI design is no longer confined to desktop experience. The migration to handheld devices from desktop devices has made it necessary to optimize the UI for a better conversion rate through handheld friendly experience.

Two essential components that render an optimized mobile UI are fluidic patterns instead of rectangular patterns (which has become tiresome) and an optimal and uniform gap between a corner and the viewport.

Bring emotion

Human beings are not only rational beings, they are emotional beings too. Surprisingly, logic doesn’t appeal to us as much as emotion does. Scrolling through your news feed will easily prove that. Logical people being singled out as nerds is another proof of this.

Digital marketers can bring emotion into their brand campaigns to increase their performance. The recognition of empathy marketing has made it rather easy for them. Empathy marketing proves audiences are receptive to emotional appeals made by brands. Facebook may launch an empathy button soon.

Empathy is not the only emotion that helps brands. Fun, humor, hope, aspiration, etc are positive emotions that tug at the heart of the audiences. Making a campaign funny and humorous paint the brand in positive light. Use videos, infographics and other content formats to fill customers with positive emotion and create brand loyalty among them.

Big data analytics

Scientists say everything finally reduces to patterns. The songs that delight us, the picturesque landscapes that catch our attention, the beautiful faces that we hope to see around us are all patterns. Brand engagement materials are not exception to this rule.

To understand audience behavior and the nature of engagement, marketers have no other way than to rely on patterns. Big data analytics can lend them a hand. Digging into data can fetch marketing insights. By definition, big data analytics is all about findings patterns in large data sets.

There are correlations that marketers are not aware of, market trends that are not yet unearthed, preferences among customers that they haven’t noticed yet. Big data analytics gives them access to all these, so next time they can deliver an even better brand experience to their audiences.

Comprehensiveness counts

A campaign is like a complex machine. Unless the individual parts of a machine are perfectly in tune with each other, the machine cannot function. The same applies to designing a brand experience. Each aspect of the campaign should be equally appealing to audiences, so audiences can spot the harmony.

Imagine you have a restaurant, which serves mouthwatering food, and everyone in the town knows this. Very good. But your staff act disinterested with assisting their customers. People tend to notice the negatives and are more apt to be vocal about them over the positives. The news of the waiter treating customers poorly will spread like wildfire and ultimately hurt your branding.

To make a campaign comprehensive, a brand needs to pay attention to each single area related to it. The marketing, the product promotion, the product itself, the product experience, the delivery and the post-purchase assistance (if required), all areas contribute to forming a brand experience. If you are a digital marketer, don’t prioritize any individual area but all areas related to branding.

Customer feedback

The best way to know the brand experience is feedback you receive from customers. If the feedback is positive, customers are happy with your service and a positive brand experience is in the making. Negative feedback, on the other hand, implies a poor brand experience.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com