It goes without saying that if you want your brand to stand out you need to be different, but how do you differentiate your brand while still connecting to the masses? Easy, popularity shouldn’t be your focus. This does not mean you should disregard everything you know and have learned about good branding and graphic design, it just means that you should never compromise the soul of your brand to please the masses. If your brand lacks authenticity your target audience will smell it like fear and will retreat accordingly. No one wants anything that tries too hard. If you craft your brand with the hopes of becoming popular, or ‘going viral’ chances are you will experience quite the opposite. These types of attempts generally land flat and vanish into obscurity. If you want to make a splash and rise above the crowd, you have to build a brand that […]
How to Hashtag Like a Pro
How you look at hashtags depends on when you were born. Most of the generations that came before millennials see # and automatically think of the pound sign. Now, in the digital age where social media reigns supreme, we have co-opted the pound sign and turned it into a hashtag – Oxford even added it into the dictionary. Hashtags came into popularity with Twitter. There was a time when Twitter was all the rage for social media marketing because their innovative hashtag feature made it easier for the audience to both find and engage with businesses the world over. When Instagram exploded onto the scene it really made hashtags “cool” again. Hashtags have become so pervasive in our world that pretty much every social media engine gives you the ability to use them. That being said, each social platform has its own unique set of challenges and etiquette when using […]
Rock Your 2017 Marketing Strategy
Goodbye 2016, helllloooo 2017! It’s a new year and you have returned to work all refreshed and ready to rock this year. Did you resolve to kick your marketing game up a notch? Before you run ahead full throttle with the new idea you had after a few bevvy’s on Christmas, stop. Slow down and start with a solid marketing strategy. Business owners and employees know that they need marketing, but many don’t have a solid strategy in place. To ensure the success of your super great marketing ideas in the year to come, start with your strategy – and no, replicating what you did last year probably won’t cut it. Marketing is constantly evolving and so should your strategy. So, what should your marketing strategy include? Well, it really is dependent on what your marketing goals are, what your industry is and so on. We do still have a […]
Facebook Live is the Bombdiggity – For Now
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 […]