editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

Review Your Branding From A Seller’s Perspective

June 26, 2020 No Comments

Branding: We either love it or we hate it.

As real estate investors, our brand and our message can be a deciding factor in whether a seller reaches out to us to potentially purchase their home. Before you ever speak to them, your brand speaks to them.

It’s important to think about how a seller sees your business. Think about your logo, your message, your website and any other marketing you’re putting out there. You have to stand out from the crowd.

Think about what you want your potential seller to know about you:

• Do you enjoy helping others who are in tough situations?

• Do you give any of your profits to charity?

• Are you locally based?

• Do you have a family?

• Do any of your family members work with you in the business?

• How long have you been in business?

• How easy is it to work with you?

• Are you able to assist with cleaning out the property?

• Is it OK if the property needs a lot of work?

Your branding should focus on the positive aspects of your business, with the seller in mind — not the money. They want to know that they can trust you.

On social media, anytime you post or share something on your business page, consider how it will be perceived by future sellers. This is a key reason many real estate investors have two brands or companies. One is for buying distressed properties, and the other is for selling those properties. When you think about it, your audience for both brands is drastically different, so it only makes sense to separate them.

For any marketing you do, ask yourself if your parents or grandparents would look at your mailer or other marketing piece and give you a call. Get their honest feedback. They’re usually part of your target market, and if there are areas of your marketing that turn them off, it’s important for you to know and to potentially make changes.

In addition to thinking of how your parents or grandparents would react, also consider reactions from those who have:

• Lived in their home for decades.

• Raised their kids in that home.

• Inherited the home from a family member.

• Struggled with health and finances and just can’t handle the upkeep of their home.

You can impact their lives for the better if you focus on the seller and solving their problems. When you build your branding around this (and it is true), a motivated seller will be more likely to reach out compared to a brand that’s not personal.

No matter what market you’re in, you need to stand out in a positive way. Having your brand and marketing showcase how you can help a seller out provides a positive first impression. If they reach out to you, continue providing value that is helpful to the seller. You might not get every deal, but helping as many people as you can will only yield positive results down the road.

Ask yourself now: Are your brand and your marketing showcasing your best features?

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Mike Hambright

Mike Hambright is a real estate investor, mentor and coach, and is the Founder of FlipNerd.com and the Investor Fuel Mastermind.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Barilla pays influencers to peddle pasta because no one’s making TV ads

June 26, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from Crain’s Chicago Business

Influencers can often produce content faster and more cheaply than a TV ad campaign team, helping brands adapt faster as consumer circumstances change. Italian pasta company Barilla, whose U.S. headquarters is based in Northbrook, is a case in point.

(Bloomberg)—Advertising has mostly collapsed, but brands are still spending — just not on billboards, newspaper ads or TV spots. This has opened a new frontier for social media influencers, the newcomers to the ad game, that could help them bounce back when the crisis eases.

The great pullback in advertising budgets hasn’t been evenly distributed. Spending on platforms such as Facebook Inc.’s Instagram and ByteDance Inc.’s TikTok is down, even for influencers, just not as much as traditional media.

It’s partly about following the consumer. There’s not a lot of motivation to freshen up a billboard when streets are so empty. Cinema screens are dark, and there are hardly any commuters to read the free newspapers handed out at rail stations. However, social media usage has surged.

Though there’s still less impetus for, say, travel destinations to ink deals with social media stars when the airline industry has all but ground to a halt, some brands that would never have considered an arrangement with an influencer are giving them another look.

Before Covid-19, companies might have considered influencers, and their large fan bases, a “support mechanism” rather than something that’s central to brand planning, said Frances Sinclair, a strategy partner at Dentsu Group Inc. agency Carat. The sudden economic shock and lifestyle upheaval wreaked by the virus is changing that.

“We’re seeing brands shift their investment from more-traditional media channels, which might not make sense to them at the moment, to being in an influencer environment where the engagement is very real-time and ready,” she said.

It’s also important to change the content of a campaign to reflect the reality of life under lockdown. For example, standard ad campaigns featuring carefree, optimistic people mixing freely outdoors are on the back burner in a post-virus world marked by job insecurity, health fears and uncertain prospects.

Influencers can often produce content faster and more cheaply than a TV ad campaign team, helping brands adapt faster as consumer circumstances change.

Italian pasta company Barilla, whose U.S. headquarters is based in Northbrook, is a case in point. A year ago, the brand was wooing consumers with a glossy television spot which showed tennis champion Roger Federer cooking its spaghetti at a mansion reception with top chef Davide Oldani.

To craft a more appropriate message for their locked-down audience, Barilla’s marketers looked to social media star Chiara Ferragni, whose portraits modelling red-carpet dresses and pool-side leisurewear have drawn 20 million Instagram followers.

Recently, she’s been showing off her homemade Barilla spaghetti dinners instead.

“One of the reasons brands use influencer marketing in this moment is that it’s fast to activate and solved the issue of production that was on halt,” said Alessio Gianni, the company’s digital and content marketing director. “Content is more spontaneous, close to the people. Chiara, being Italian and locked at home as everyone else, cooked herself a carbonara. It was the best person to involve.”

Europe’s biggest pay-TV provider, Sky, has enlisted Dentsu Aegis influencer agency Gleam Futures to promote shows and movies to homebound families. Parenting Instagrammer Louise Pentland posted pictures to her 2.4 million followers showing her children contentedly watching “Trolls World Tour,” made by Sky’s parent Comcast Corp.

Sky is using digital channels like Instagram and getting near real-time feedback in a way it hasn’t before, said Dentsu’s Sinclair.

“Whereas once it might have been very much about the brand and the content, now it’s very much about the experience you have within your isolation,” she said.

Influencers were a rare bright spot in M&C Saatchi’s April market update, which cited “steady” business in the newer channel despite “a sharp drop in demand across the group.”

S4 Capital Plc’s CEO, Martin Sorrell, said some European clients started to change their thinking on influencer marketing that month, accelerating a digital transformation of advertising that was already underway. S4’s IMA agency has picked up work on an influencer campaign to promote HP Inc. laptops.

“We certainly saw that on the influencer side—so whereas I think it was pretty dead in the back-end of March, it got pretty lively as we got into April,” he said.

Influencer marketing can still be a minefield given how easily a brand campaign can appear cynical and turn off followers. With billions of people tiring of lockdowns and worried about coronavirus, companies can’t look like they’re seeking to profit from a miserable situation.

“A lot of the feedback the influencers receive from their audiences is: ‘How can you go on like everything is normal, saying to buy this candle, or this make-up?” said Robert Levenhagen, CEO of marketing software company InfluencerDB.

That’s limiting any boost the medium can receive from the current situation. M&C Saatchi’s Thompson said lots of social media stars are shunning commercial ventures in favor of charity and community work.

It’s taken years to convince many companies that there’s as clear a return on investment in influencers compared to TV or other forms of digital advertising. It’s been easy for influencers to buy “fake followers” and generate artificial engagement activity, making it hard to assess their true audience reach and impact.

There’s always the risk they’ll do something dumb that gets a company all the wrong kind of publicity. That’s made some traditional brands reluctant to jump in, according to Hayley Brady, a partner at Herbert Smith Freehills who advises companies on digital advertising.

In 2015 Kim Kardashian promoted a morning sickness treatment but failed to mention its side-effects, earning a reprimand from the FDA. Then there’s the bad behavior: YouTube star Logan Paul lost advertisers in a controversy sparked by posting a crude video which showed a dead body in a Japanese forest known for suicides.

Still, the ability of influencers to pivot quickly to match popular sentiment is what’s boosted their appeal for some brands in the current environment. This bodes well for their outlook when the worst of the pandemic is in the past.

“Influencer marketing spend will come back quicker,” said Dafydd Woodward, global head of INCA, the influencer division of WPP Plc’s GroupM. “It’s agile, because we can create content very very quickly that reflects the mood of the nation, and the messages that are being put out by governments.”

Sourced from Crain’s Chicago Business

In Uncategorized

Is that message really from Amazon? Tech giant cracks down on fraudulent email campaigns

June 25, 2020 No Comments

By Taylor Soper

Amazon this week filed lawsuits in three states, aiming to squash what it describes as fraudulent affiliate marketing schemes driven by email campaigns purporting to come from the Seattle e-commerce giant.

The suits allege that companies in Georgia, Michigan and Texas wrongly used Amazon’s branding in spam campaigns designed to send traffic to fake Amazon-branded surveys run by online marketers. Those marketers then made money off advertising impressions, according to the suits.

It’s part of a broader effort by the company to crack down on fraud. In May, the company filed suit against companies in Washington state and India, alleging that they tricked new users of Echo speakers and other Alexa devices into paying for purported technical support. Other actions by the company have targeted everything from get-rich-quick scams to fake customer reviews to sales of knock-off products.

The latest suits were filed against Michigan-based companies Sendwell and Lakeshore Development Group; Georgia-based PhatLogic; Texas-based Omala Internet Solutions; and Germany-based SpreadyourAds.

“Amazon has no tolerance for schemes fraudulently using our brand, and we are appalled at these bad actors’ attempts to deceive our customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “We are advocating for customers by holding these bad actors accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

Amazon says it has shut down the campaigns and has secured an agreement from the Michigan defendants to stop using the company’s brand.

The company filed a similar lawsuit last year against an Illinois-based affiliate marketing company, First Impression Interactive, and won prohibitions against use of the Amazon brand by that company.

Separately, Amazon says it has stopped a series of fake Amazon-branded email campaigns from companies and people in Colorado and California, with the people involved agreeing to stop using the company’s trademarks or brands

The affiliate marketing schemes are different than recent phishing scams that caught police attention last month, using purported Amazon branding to trick recipients into divulging personal information.

Amazon says customers should report unsolicited emails and texts here, and the company has more information about decoding suspicious emails, phone calls, and webpages here. The company has previously filed similar lawsuits to prevent scammers from fooling Amazon customers.

Feature Image: Amazon alleges that several companies fraudulently used its brand in affiliate marketing schemes to get consumers to fill out fake surveys. These images were included in lawsuits filed by the company.

By Taylor Soper

Taylor Soper is GeekWire’s managing editor, responsible for coordinating the newsroom, planning coverage, and editing stories. A native of Portland, Ore., and graduate of the University of Washington, he was previously a GeekWire staff reporter, covering beats including startups and sports technology. Follow him @taylor_soper and email [email protected].

Sourced from GeekWire

In News

This major change to Google search makes it easier to find what you’re looking for

June 25, 2020 No Comments

By Mark Wycislik-Wilson

Google will now highlight what you have been seeking

People use search engines in a variety of ways, and if you’re just looking for general information about a subject, it’s a simple matter of clicking search results. But if you’re looking for references to a particular snippet of text, finding where it has been mentioned on a page can be problematic.

Google has always been able to surface pages which contain the text you search for, but now an important change is being made that will make it easier to locate the text. It means you’ll no longer have to press Ctrl and F to perform a secondary search for a phrase once you have visited a page.

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When you experience the change, you will wonder why on Earth Google didn’t do this earlier. So what’s the change? It’s actually something that the company has been doing with AMP pages (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for around a year and a half. When you click on a snippet of text in search results, you’ll be transported to that exact piece of text on a page.

More than this, Google will also highlight the text in question helping to dramatically speed things up. It’s great if you’re looking to find the full text of what was said next in a speech, but don’t want to have to read through a lengthy transcript to track it down – Google does the hard work for you, and take you straight there. While this is great for searchers, it might not be so great for websites as it means that visitors could jump past ads straight to content.

Seek and ye shall find

The great news about the feature from the point of view of anyone with a website is that no action needs to be taken by the site owner. There are no changes to code needed, as Google takes care of the whole process entirely automatically. Just as it has done with AMP pages, it is now doing with HTML pages too.

It is possible, however, for site administrators to opt out of the “featured snippets” feature, as Google explains in a support document. The company explained on Twitter how the feature makes use of the Scroll to text function to take searchers directly to text snippets:

While, in theory, the feature should work in all browsers, there may be issues from time to time. Chrome is likely to yield the best results but, as ever, it’s worth ensuring you have all of the latest updates installed for your browser of choice.

Feature Image Credit: Future

By Mark Wycislik-Wilson

Sourced from techradar

In News

Best Websites to Explore and Download Free Design Resources

June 25, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from Linelcons

The world of designing has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. This has resulted in a massive increase in digital freebies that you can find online. These free design resources can be used by designers and developers to create aesthetically pleasing and attractive interfaces. Moreover, beginners can even study these free design resources to understand how they are built.

Every month, there are countless freebies released on the internet. In this post, we share with you the top noteworthy websites to explore and download free design resources. Let us begin!

SketchApp Resources

Sketch App Sources is a great free design resource to explore for free design options. You can download your favorite sources for free and choose from a whopping 4370 sketch resources. This website is a powerhouse of UI Kits, wireframes, icons, wearables, mockups, forms, and a host of other data. This website offers an unparalleled collection of fantastic tools that you can use for all kinds of design needs.

editor

By Mike Hambright

Sourced from Forbes

Influencers can often produce content faster and more cheaply than a TV ad campaign team, helping brands adapt faster as consumer circumstances change. Italian pasta company Barilla, whose U.S. headquarters is based in Northbrook, is a case in point.

Sourced from Crain’s Chicago Business

By Taylor Soper

Sourced from GeekWire

Google will now highlight what you have been seeking

Seek and ye shall find

By Mark Wycislik-Wilson

Sourced from techradar

SketchApp Resources

Muzli Extension

UIdeck

Freepik

GraphicBurger

Invision Design Resources

Prototypr

FreebiesBug

GraphicsFuel

DesignResourc.es

Free Illustrations

Design Resources for Developers

Interfacer

Colors and Fonts

Illustrations Tools

UI Goodies

UnDesign

Design Resources for Software Devs.

Sourced from Linelcons

The updated Google, whenever it arrives, will emphasize “Page Experience,” based on the Core Web Vitals. These include Loading, Interactivity and Visual Stability, as well as mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS, and “no intrusive interstitials.”

By Stephen Silver

Sourced from The National Interest

By Laurie Sullivan

Sourced from MediaPost

YouTube: The #1 video-sharing platform

YouTube video specs

TikTok: Fastest-growing video-sharing app

TikTok video specs

Facebook: The #1 social media platform

Facebook video specs

Instagram Stories and posts: Best for sharing your moment

Instagram regular posts video specs

Instagram Stories video specs

Why IGTV marketing?

IGTV video specs

Tips to use IGTV marketing

1. Define a video style for your brand

2. Republish your live videos using IGTV

3. Make announcements by Instagram Stories

4. Create specific IGTV Series

5. Include influencers in your IGTV plans

6. Take advantage of user-generated videos

7. Cross-promote your IGTV videos on other networks

Final word

By Tom Siani

Sourced from jeffbullas.com

Goal visualisation

Stinky Fish

Crazy Eights

Sketching exercises

Ideas pitching

Replay

Remote working tools

Conclusion

By Danny Bluestone

Sourced from The Drum