Remember the good ol’ days when your business could post pretty much anything and people would like it? Or four years ago when simply using a photo as a Facebook post would increase your engagement by 110%. Yeah, those days are gone. It’s 2016 and Facebook knows how much you rely on social media marketing – and while using the platform is free, getting impressions for your business definitely isn’t nowadays. Yes, it may be frustrating, but there’s a reason that Facebook is a business that makes BILLIONS of dollars a year even though their service is “free.” They got you all hooked on their free advertising and then slowly, every time they tweaked their algorithm, made you more and more invisible to your audience. “But they liked my page,” you say. People have had Facebook for so long they have liked hundreds of business pages over the years – […]
Graphic Design For Newbies
Many small and medium-sized businesses don’t have a graphic designer on staff, but all of them need business materials designed – menus, price lists, logos, business cards, letterhead, social media graphics, banners, ads. Pretty much all of your business collateral has design elements to it. If you don’t have a designer on staff, those elements have to come from somewhere. Do you think it needs to be you doing the design work? If you’ve gone the extra step and bought Creative Suite to try to give your poster or social media graphic a professional feeling but you’re probably feeling awfully overwhelmed right now. Sure you can watch YouTube videos for hours that will teach you how to use basic Illustrator tools, but that still doesn’t teach you how to design. Thankfully, we have a team of graphic designers that are here to give you tips to help ease you into the design […]
Social Media Captions That Get Noticed!
Social Media is quickly becoming all about the visuals – especially Instagram. Having a stunning image or a fun video is super important, but don’t forget about the words! The images are how you draw your audience in, but captivating captions are how you snare them. It’s tempting to stay inside of the box and keep the copy safe but you won’t get nearly as much engagement. Go try it, post a killer picture on Instagram with just average run-of-the-mill copy and then try it again after employing our handy tips for creating captivating captions, trust us, you’ll get way better engagement. So, what are these fancy tips we’re talking about? Read on, good friend! Who You Talkin’ To? Know your audience. I know we preach on this fairly often, but that’s because in all communications it is SOOOOO important to know who you are talking to. Know your audience. […]
Create a Great Landing Page
How long do you think you have to convince someone to stay on your website? If you answered in the minutes, you are wrong. 30 seconds? Wrong. You have 10-15 seconds – at the most. In those ten seconds, you have to communicate your value as a company and your ability to fill their needs, wants or desires. Your landing page is the space you have to communicate all of this information in seconds, so it had better be a good one. It doesn’t matter how good your company is or how much money you spend on pay-per-click advertising; if your landing page isn’t up-to-snuff your business is going to suffer. How do you make a landing page that people want to stay on? Glad you asked! Let us tell you… Strategize Like communications and marketing operations, if you haven’t formulated a strategy, why are you bothering? Without a plan […]
Create a Killer Call to Action
Every time your business communicates externally there is an end goal. That goal can be anything, maybe you want people to buy your product, download your ebook, search for a product or click your link. A call to action is simply telling your audience what they should do, it’s a not-so-bossy way for a brand to be bossy. The images, graphics, and copy that makeup marketing are there to explain why your product is the best; the call to action is there to help nudge your audience in the direction you want them to go. Calls to action can be anything you want them to be but as a general rule, they are 1-5 words. Seems easy, right? Nope. Coming up with the perfect call to action to up your conversion rate can be a daunting process. Thankfully, the talonX team is here to help. The Mental Game Just having […]
Rio Olympics 2016: Our Fave Commercials
The final curtain has dropped, the closing ceremony is over and the flame has been extinguished. That is it for the 2016 Rio Olympics. No more watching doped up Russians try to dominate sports, no more crazy leg breaking injuries happen and good-bye to the weird and (likely) disgusting green pools. Even better, it is time to go back to our regularly scheduled programming and go on with our lives. There is one thing that we just might miss though – Olympic commercials! Or more accurately, commercials featuring the Olympics. We love us some lists here at talonX, so we decided to count the Top 5 commercials for the Rio Olympics. Visa Carpool to Rio We like it, we just don’t love it. It is entertaining, it is shot well, it has a cute premise. Hell, this commercial even features the velvet voice of Morgan Freeman, so why do […]
Get Your Content Marketing Strategy in Place
Content marketing is the art and science of developing and distributing content that delivers valuable, timely, and consistent information to a pre-determined audience. Essentially, content marketing is creating newspaper articles that are company or industry-specific, that people actually want to read. It’s the art of being a journalist, for a company, without having to write for a newspaper, because who reads those? In previous posts we talked about how to create timely, valuable, consistent blog posts, we have come to realize that we put the cart before the horse with that blog post. What good is having great content if you haven’t properly implemented your content marketing strategy to begin with? So, we’ve compiled yet another handy-dandy list to help keep your content marketing strategy on track. Mission Critical Make a mission statement for your content. Yes, you should have one for your company, but you should also come up […]