Summertime! The sun is shining, flowers are blooming, and patio loving Canadians have almost forgotten what the dead cold of winter feels like. It is also the time for the big fun summer social media contests. A lot of businesses want to increase brand awareness or want to get people into the shop and think that running a social media contest is the way to do it. A well run social media contest is a great way to get people to interact with your brand and gain likes or followers. On the flip side a poorly run campaign can actually alienate people and leave them with a bad brand association – clearly something you don’t want to have happen. Thankfully we’ve run a campaign or two in our day and we are here to help. There are a few things you want to think about when planning to/running a contest […]
Turn Your Blog Into an SEO Machine
In a previous blog post we talked about how to use your blog as a publishing platform for your killer content marketing, but a company blog is useful in so many different ways, it is a great search engine optimization (SEO) tool as well. If writing an engaging blog post is a skill and writing a blog post for SEO is a skill, then writing for both really is an art form. Luckily for you, we have an artist or two on staff that are willing to share a few trade secrets with you. Writing for SEO is pretty easy, just keep a few principles in mind. Remember what you learned about writing in school? These principles all apply. Think before you write, know what you want to say, have a clear message, and please do write something that people want to read about. If writing doesn’t come as naturally to […]
Create a Great Blog
Content marketing is all the rage these days and for good reason, it works. So what is it? It is the art of creating valuable and consistent content that makes people want to read and share it. Giants like Ted, IBM, Chipotle and HubSpot are pretty much publishers in their own right, they have played the content marketing game like it’s a sport and it has worked out well for them. They do, however, have innovative visionaries at their helm and big budgets to back them. Without the big budget, how do you, take advantage of the content creation game? With your blog, of course. Your company blog is a magical place that can help in so many areas of marketing. It can help get people into your business, drive sales, create brand awareness and up your search engine optimization (SEO) standing. Your blog is what allows you to be […]
Building a Brand — The Right Way
Every day we work with small, medium, and large businesses on building a brand. Sometimes they are startups that require a complete brand built from the ground up; sometimes it is with bigger companies that previously had a solid brand but didn’t have the guidelines in place to keep it from getting diluted. Branding is as important for smaller businesses as it is for the behemoths. It is the way that a business differentiates itself from the competition. Brand gives your audience an immediate idea of what they can expect from your company. People hear brand and think that it’s this huge time-consuming monster that is going to eat up all their time that could be better spent on balancing the books or finding new products. Not true. Building a solid presence does require a little bit of investment of time and capital at the beginning, but it should not […]
How to Get a Job at a Creative Agency
So you want to get a job at a marketing agency. Who doesn’t want to work in a creative agency? It’s clearly where all the fun people work. Bar carts, candy stations and games like foosball and pool are the norm. It’s like a fun version of Mad Men, minus the rampant sexism and is where creativity goes to flourish – in theory, at least. talonX is no exception, not too be too modest, but we’re insanely fun to work with. We are always listening to wicked tunes, drinking mad amounts of coffee and we never (ok, rarely) take ourselves too seriously. Our team nights are pretty epic too. Naturally, people are regularly contacting us about potential employment. We have seen it all from people trying to get hired, the good, the bad and the downright WTF? Being the kind people that we are, we thought we would help out […]
Virtual Reality — The Future of Digital Marketing?
In the not-so-distant future, babies will be born and they will grow into kids who never knew a world without virtual reality. VR won’t be some new and awe inspiring technology to them, it will be the norm. The digital experience for these kids will be completely different to that of their parents and their grandparents. Until such a time, VR is this new(ish) and fascinating technology that is finally becoming financially accessible for us average folk. If you have had the opportunity to step into a virtual reality world you can immediately see how it is going to change the face of the digital world and it is only in the infancy stage right now, VR is only going to get bigger and better. Some of the virtual reality outlets are obvious, playing a video game is never going to be the same, you will be IN the game. […]
Sitemaps Are Like Pirates Gold
A sitemap is better than a treasure map. Ok, whoa… that’s not entirely true, allow me to rephrase. To your website, a sitemap is better than a treasure map. When you put a sitemap into a web designer’s hands it is akin to putting a lost pirate’s map into a treasure hunter’s hands – only a good web designer will strike gold more often than the treasure hunter. It is incredibly common for people to create a website kind of like they would a business card. They just want the website out there with a little information about who they are, what they do and then how to contact them. As time goes on they realize that they want a page for this, a page for that and the next thing you know their website is a 60 page monster and a nightmare to navigate. All of this could have […]