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 […]
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 […]
The Art of Running a Social Media Contest
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 […]