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Getting Brand Communities Right and How to Build One

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By Toby Britton

Every marketer knows that the holy grail of marketing is the all-important word-of-mouth recommendation. In search of this, brand advertising has, in recent years, leaned heavily on influencer marketing, to both gain reach and approximate the word-of-mouth recommendation as closely as possible. In reality, influencer marketing is no match for direct brand advocacy from the customers themselves.

With only 4% of customers trusting paid influencers (according to a UM Wave study), the importance of authentic people-centric marketing is something that brands simply can’t afford to ignore. So, while there’s a strong case for paying for reach and awareness via sponsored influencer tricks, brands who are not leveraging earned media from their most vocal existing advocates could be missing a trick.

Many brands have been tapping into the power of user-generated content for a while now. However, the savviest are going one step further, and building brand communities.

What is a brand community?

A community is a group of individuals with similar values and interests, who are bonded by their difference from outsiders, their traditions, and their sense of obligation to each other. When a community forms around a brand, it taps into people’s fundamental emotional and social needs, creating strong bonds between the people in it and the brand they love. When they express passion for a brand in a brand community, it resonates strongly and is reflected back through relationships with other community members. In a successful brand community, like-minded individuals are able to bond over not only a shared love of a brand but over the possession of particular skills and interest in similar experiences. Naturally, when this happens, a stream of authentic earned media is developed, with community members sharing content with little encouragement.

By allowing brand communities to self-support and flourish with minimal input, brands have the chance to form profound personal connections with customers for a fraction of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign. With the rise of brand community marketing, the new generation of marketers will need patience, plus a new skill set and a knowledge of specific systems and principles to develop and manage effectively. However, once mastered, community marketing will richly reward brands with dedicated and enthusiastic customers, leading to word-of-mouth growth, increased customer-made content, and outstanding return on investment.

What do members of a brand community look like?

Brand communities are as diverse as the brands that work with them. A community could be composed of regular enthusiastic customers, or brands can recruit a subset of creative customers to collaborate with. What tends to be the most important criteria and one of the biggest differences between community marketing and influencer marketing, is brand love; an authentic love for the brand that exists regardless of any community membership, where such super fans genuinely want to help that brand succeed.

One of the biggest sources of community power for brands is the Creator Economy. This is an economy created around over 50 million passionate and highly skilled individuals around the world who have built businesses and communities around their own personal brands online. They can range from musicians to hairstylists, to business experts, and more. They tend to be present on the main social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and adept at utilizing their talents to create well-presented, top-quality content. In a brand community, individuals from the Creator Economy, regular customers, and those who fall somewhere in between have the chance to interact with a brand in a fresh way.

How to use technology to grow a brand community

Building a brand community might sound tricky and time-consuming at first, and while it’s possible to sustain brand communities using existing social media, specially built digital community management platforms will do much of the heavy lifting for you. Through social listening using hashtags and @mentions, such a platform will identify the super fans and creators that would be the best fit for your brand community.

Brands can then easily recruit these potential brand advocates to their brand community using such a platform, and provide them with an exclusive digital space in which to connect with fellow community members.

Inside this digital space, brands can brief super fans on projects and collaborate with them on campaigns. You’ll be able to provide them with the tools they need to get started, and, in exchange, they’ll bring both their creativity and customer knowledge to the table. You can also use the community space to get feedback on new products and reward super fans ethically in a number of ways, which could include providing them with a platform for their work, workshops, courses, or charitable donations. Often, being able to play a meaningful role in your business is reward enough.

UGC generated by super fans can then be carefully curated and licensed through community management platforms, and published directly to brand channels such as websites and social media, or exported for use in other marketing campaigns.

Examples of great brand communities

Lego Ideas is a community website where anyone can submit new builds using existing Lego bricks, new designs are lightly moderated, showcased, and put up to a community vote, and the winning designs have a chance of being turned into a commercially available Lego set and earning 1% of royalties. Since 2014, this open-to-all marketing model continues to successfully the growth of a thriving community of Lego fans, as well as ethically rewarding the most creative and dedicated amongst them.

Dove’s ground-breaking marketing campaign #ShowUs is a fine example of community marketing in the social justice space. Facilitated by community technology, Dove collaborated with regular consumers who had extraordinary stories to share, in the Dove community to generate a photo library that truly reflects the diversity of beauty around the world, with the aim of improving the representation of beauty in advertising.

Although it can be tricky for brands to champion social causes without seeming superficial, Dove’s existing brand authenticity and willingness to celebrate its shared values with brand fans proved to be a recipe for community marketing success. The challenge set to creators resonated incredibly well, resulting in the world’s largest photo library of women and non-binary individuals, and winning the campaign multiple awards in the process.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, the key to a thriving brand community is to tap into existing creator talent and enthusiasm, by taking the time to develop a new marketing skillset alongside taking advantage of the best in cutting edge community management technology. Get the balance right and you can nurture a sharing culture; one that can thrive and deliver endless earned media with little intervention and no financial transactions.

Feature Image Credit: John Cameron

By Toby Britton

Sourced from Brandingmag

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Merging offline and online marketing is a smarter way to drive sales

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By M Muneer

E-fulfilment, or an electronic response, blended with traditional methods is the key to optimising a company’s one-to-one marketing efforts

E-fulfilment, an electronic response to a direct marketing request, can be an important part of a company’s marketing strategy to reach customers directly. In the right situation and to the right customer, it can offer several advantages.

The three biggest advantages of e-fulfilment are:

1 Speed: You meet targets quickly.

2 Cost-effectiveness: In some instances, it makes it cheaper to reach the customer.

3 Control/customisation: It allows for adjusting your campaign in real time, test and move forward.

One to one with customers—when content is completely personalised, including the cover letter/note, types of attachments and the content of each attachment—is expensive and time-consuming using land-based methods.

But not all situations call for solely an e-fulfilment system. Careful consideration of the types of the target being reached and the company’s marketing objective will determine the appropriate combination of e-based and land-based fulfilment components to be utilised.

For example, if a credit-card provider’s database identifies a person with an outstanding credit rating and a high income, that person may get a customised email that includes an offer to upgrade their card and links to exotic vacation destinations with special offers.

Someone else with a good credit history may get an offer for a balance-transfer offer or personal loan proposal.

Tweak as you go along

Flexibility is an important benefit of a fully integrated e-fulfilment system. Such a system makes it easy to evaluate a campaign’s rollout in real time—watch the pick-up on the first cell, tweak the campaign, watch the second cell go out, make another adjustment, and so forth.

With the proper systems in place, e-fulfilment offers direct marketers a wide range of options. It permits increased analysis and customisation of future messages, allowing marketers to see when people open the emails, and track as they click through to website links.

Real-time web reports of hits are available, detailing soft bounce-backs (server is temporarily down or a mailbox is full) and hard bounce-backs (service no longer exists or e-mail address is not valid).

If an email bounces back with a bad address or full mailbox, companies may have a call centre representative double-check with the intended recipient to confirm how they want to receive information.

The following examples offer an overview of possibilities and a preview of where things are heading for SMEs.

Case 1: Fewer reminders, more completions

A liability insurance company was using mail fulfilment as a marketing tool with its professional services clients. Names and detailed information were generated daily, with policies printed and mailed twice a week–incorporating e-fulfilment. Maximising its effectiveness was simply a matter of designing a system that converted content into a PDF file at the point it would have “gone to print” in the traditional fulfilment process.

These files are created in the same pre-printed format that customers would have received in hard-copy form. Like its traditional counterpart, the body of the e-fulfilment text message is highly personalised based on a client’s insurance history, with rate and coverage information, policy type, brand and payment method received/requested but it also includes a link to the insurer’s website for more information.

The policy itself is attached to the email and incorporates client-specific information. In addition, the insurance company finds that email enables it to send fewer reminders to get policy renewals and it is receiving more payments at a faster cycle. This could be modified for individual customers today with technology.

Case 2: Talk directly to your prospect

In many instances, customers and potential customers can request information through a variety of channels, including a call centre, website or mail.

In one such instance, a pharmaceutical manufacturer generates data daily from these sources. Based on the depth of information in the marketing database—gender, age, products requested and used—the development of highly customised text messaging and rich format attachments are possible.

The system also enables custom e-mail messaging with links to specific parts of the company’s website. In this case, the company is developing a true one-to-one marketing campaign that, over time, can be refined based on this interaction loop.

Today, companies using e-fulfilment with rich content are also engaged in parallel mail campaigns. They are not looking to abandon traditional fulfilment methods but rather want new ways to get closer to their customers.

As consumers click through the company’s websites via email links, each visit adds to their profile for future e-marketing efforts. As the file on each person is enhanced, marketers can cost-effectively move into more focussed cross-selling and up-selling campaigns.

Overall, the trend is for companies to implement one-to-one marketing tools. More and more, they are looking for expertise from direct marketing service providers that enables them to reach customers and prospects within a very structured campaign but target each one with a specific package of information via their mailbox, e-mailbox, over the phone or a website.

E-fulfilment enables you to watch a campaign unfold in real time and improve it as needed, including the way individual follow-up is done. And blending e-fulfilment (with its reporting and campaign management capabilities) with the appropriate traditional fulfilment methods is the key to optimising a company’s one-to-one marketing efforts.

By M Muneer

M Muneer is the managing director of CustomerLab Solutions, a consulting firm.

Sourced from moneycontrol

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Fine-tuning the relationship between branding and marketing

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By Phil Forbes

Your business has no doubt invested a lot of time into many facets of its operations. Two of those will undoubtedly be your branding and your marketing.

One of these is how your brand looks. The other is how that image is presented to the world.

And when you look at it like this, it’s easy to see how the two are related. But in reality, brand owners, marketing managers, and other specialists rarely understand how the two work in unison.

There are many examples of small and medium enterprises that have perfected how their branding and marketing communications complement each other. In this article, we will take a look at a few of them and why they work so well.

Why marketing and branding need each other

When your brand looks good, it’s a lot easier to spread its name, message, values, and products. That being said, looking ‘good’ is a very subjective term. Knowing what your ideal customer defines as ‘looking good’ is critical – and knowing your ideal customer is a crucial part of marketing any brand.

Source: Concrete Jungle

Already we can see how branding and marketing are overlapping.

When your brand has a design system that’s echoed over several channels, you make it easier to appeal to that ideal customer. Marketing channels like social media, your website, as well as letterheads and email signatures, should have your brand’s imagery.

Consider for a moment the role of packaging in an eCommerce brand.

A small boutique selling apparel made from locally sourced and organic materials may use those values in its marketing and branding. The area that the materials are sourced from may be part of the marketing message, the same with the fact that those materials are organic and no chemicals have been used to process them.

Such a brand can implement eco friendly packaging to bolster further their commitment to using environmentally friendly materials. This move can support their marketing efforts and create another branding opportunity.

The values of these actions amalgamate to help your customer ‘feel’ what your business stands for. Your branding is a pathway to present that ‘feel’ to your customers, while your marketing helps you find more customers to ‘feel’ your brand.

When effective branding is implementing by a stable business build around a good product, your customer is in a prime position to remember your product and why it’s different from your competitors.

Quality branding helps your User Generated Content, too.

Simply put, User-Generated Content is pictures, reviews, videos, and such featuring your product, created by your customers. Without going into too much detail, it’s a fantastic way for trusted content creators to spread your brand’s name around their engaged audience. It is also excellent at proving that your business is real and it creates a good product.

Take, for example, unboxing videos.

Unboxing videos are:

Pretty impressive numbers for a video that’s little more than your product being taken out of a box.

Video source

Video marketing, in the form of unboxing videos a perfect example of marketing (user-generated content) overlapping with branding (customised small business supplies).

This is a perfect example of how good branding (quality packaging) enhances your marketing efforts (user-generated content).

The rewards are simply more significant and more long-term when marketing and branding work together.

Consider the following word: Nike.

What first comes to mind?

  • the goddess of victory
  • The US anti-air defence missile system from the 60s
  • ‘Just do it’

It’s the tick, Air Jordan’s, and sport that comes to your mind.

The fact that ‘just do it (Nike’s marketing) and the tick (branding) is the first thing that enters your mind is proof that both elements are working in unison.

Subway.

  • A form of mass transport, often used underground in urban populations
  • ‘Eat Fresh’

Just another example of how your brand can use these two creatures side by side.

Using your branding for marketing purposes

Hemp Juice is a manufacturer of CBD oils. This market has exploded since society has been made more aware of the therapeutic benefits of cannabis. Regulations have also been changed to allow the product to be taxed and sold.

The brand has gone in a unique direction with its branding. When many competitors have taken the cold and sterile medical/clinical approach to branding, Hemp Juice uses warm colours, round shapes, and informal copywriting.

They take this approach as they know that their target audience doesn’t necessarily need the ‘medical’ image to be convinced of the product’s effectiveness. This is because Hemp Juice’s audience is more than likely already familiar with such a product.

Hemp Juice’s branding strategy complements its marketing when we take a look at its use of colour.

The company sells several types of oils in the same tincture bottles, yet each formula has a different strength and is designed to have a different effect on the user.

On retail store shelves, the array of colours pop and stand out, drawing in the potential customer’s eye – a great retail marketing tactic.

For their eCommerce store, it’s a quick and easy way for users to understand that ‘this colour has this effect’ – a great way to speed up the buying process.

Here we see how good branding complements both online and offline marketing.

Social media marketing and branding

Nearly 4 billion (yes, with a ‘B’) have access to and use social media. With consumers in the US and Europe now wanting to keep their money in local communities and move away from large corporations, the power of social media marketing has never had the potential it does today.

In other words, social media is a marketing channel that’s ripe for your business’ branding. 

However, you’ll only garner notoriety and brand recognition on social media if you create the right content, speak to the right people and present your brand with the right imagery.

This is a great moment to remind you, whether you’re a marketing manager, brand owner, or budding entrepreneur, that ‘branding’ consists of much more than a fancy logo and sleek colour palette.

Your branding is your word choice, the vocabulary used in your messaging, and it’s the tone you use when writing blog content. It’s the faces and body language of the presenters in your video content and all the greetings your customer service staff use.

Tailoring your ‘branding’ to the right marketing channel, whether a social media platform or not, is crucial.

LinkedIn, a social media channel more tuned for a B2B brand, is obviously a lot more professional than, for example, Instagram. This, therefore, dictates the way that you use your tone of voice to communicate a message. Similarly, a flash sale of 15% off probably won’t get much traction on LinkedIn. Instead, it’s a channel ripe for your brand to talk about challenges your industry faces, present your businesses’ values, and attract a different type of customer.

Mr Fothergills is a British retailer of seeds, bulbs, and other plant varieties.

They use Instagram, a very visual social media channel, to present the quality of their products and explain how to get the most out of their products and general gardening tips, and sharing the content of their other customers.

The tone of voice is consistent on all posts, as are the responses to any comments left. The content shows off the high quality of their products, and overall, it’s very appealing to look at as you scroll through your Instagram feed. The content is tailored to that medium, while the marketing presents the brand’s values.

Mr Fothergills’ LinkedIn tells a different story.

Here, they discuss content involving the export of goods to Europe post-Brexit. This is something that has an effect on the company’s B2B or enterprise clients. They still communicate with a friendly and open tone of voice, creating that consistent marketing message. Their values are still focused on a quality product, again showing that the company uses its branding effectively in their marketing efforts.

Fine-tuning your word use and the messages you push in all marketing channels, not just social media, is core to making your branding help your marketing.

Branding, your image, customer loyalty, and marketing

It’s much cheaper, easier, and faster to get a customer to buy from you again, rather than convince a customer to buy from you for the first time. This is where the power of customer loyalty really starts to make an impact on your bottom line.

Good branding and marketing, accompanied by a great product, naturally create and foster customer retention. As a result of the above, your brand’s name stays in the customer’s mind, and they’re more satisfied with your brand.

This retention rests heavily on the trust that your branding and marketing initially built between you and that customer. Consumers often remember how they first heard about your brand!

When marketing to reactivate past buyers, consider a different message to build that relationship. If your product competes on price and tries to be the lowest, add more value to the sale to increase average cart spend and live time value. You can do this in the form of buy one get one free or an extended warranty.

Remember, though; it’s hard to change your brand’s image at this point. Suppose your brand is seen as one of high quality and rugged durability. In that case, it’s going to be challenging to make a customer start to see you as affordable, accessible to everyone, and produced en masse.

The way that you promote incentives to reactivate past customers can also affect your image. If your brand prides itself on elegance, luxury, exclusivity, and opulence, a flash sale with 20% off everything will more than likely undermine that image.

Branding and marketing symbiosis

Every customer-facing channel of your business is prime for your branding and marketing efforts to spread your products, name, values, and morals. Making your branding complement your marketing efforts and vice versa isn’t particularly hard, but not many brands consider the symbiotic relationship between the two.

At the end of the day, your marketing efforts are never really done, and your branding can continuously evolve and change should your buyers’ sentiment also shift.

By Phil Forbes

Phil is a bearded Australian living and working in Poland. When he’s not taking Packhelp’s custom packaging to the world, he can be found trying not to kill his plants, pretending to be a stormtrooper, or hanging out with his dog.

Sourced from noupe

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A 5-Step Guide to Writing Content That Achieves Your Marketing Goals

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By Peter Roesler,

If you want to write content that makes an impact, start with these steps.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Peter Roesler,

Sourced from Inc.

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Quiet is the new loud: Why stealth marketing is trending

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Balmain, Gucci and Louis Vuitton are experimenting with low-key marketing strategies to engage with key opinion customers. Unexpected ad platforms are also coming into favour.

Louis Vuitton and Gucci quietly hosted pop-ups in lower-profile locations of Somerset and Brooklyn respectively, in the past 10 months. While traditionally, a new launch is followed with media interviews and influencer previews, both of these pop-ups were left to be discovered by their local communities. In turn, this prompted user-generated social media responses, says Todd Sachse, founder of Sachse Construction, who built the stores for both brands. For Gucci, it was part of its continual “test and learn” approach to engage with its community. Louis Vuitton declined to comment.

Similarly, Balmain halted print campaigns in fashion magazines including Vogue this year, in favour of spending some of its marketing budget on full-look styling. Clothes are presented on a model as directed by the brand for a fee instead of being chosen by the magazine’s stylist, sources close to the company told Vogue Business. It’s not the only luxury brand to have invested in full-look styling in recent years, industry professionals say.

As consumers seek out newness and authenticity and designers look to stand out from crowded advertising channels, luxury brands are using more subtle marketing tactics to get their message across. Low-key marketing strategies that are less interruptive and, ideally, more organic are being tested. No longer should a brand’s main focus be the key opinion leaders (KOLs) or influencers, instead it should be on connecting with the key opinion customer (KOCs) – highly engaged, everyday customers of a brand – experts say. For luxury companies it marks a continual shift away from a top-down approach of selling the luxury ideal, towards so-called “stealth marketing” where consumers are made aware of a brand without realising it.

Fashion week attendees holding magazines. Some brands have pulled ads in publications and are paying for styled...
Fashion week attendees holding magazines. Some brands have pulled ads in publications and are paying for styled editorial looks instead. Edward Berthelot/Getty Images

“We’re all getting a bit jaded and tired of the hard sell. Marketing that is in our faces is just not clever, so customers end up blocking it out,” says Nicole Armstrong, executive strategy director at R/GA, the ad agency for luxury brands including Givenchy, Nike and Moncler. “[Stealth marketing] is basically a relationship-building tactic that can also be shared and talked about. You do that by creating moments.”

Stealth marketing is making more of an impact because people are overloaded with paid media, adds Armstrong. Screen fatigue is also growing: 75 per cent of respondents surveyed in January 2021 by the OAAA and The Harris Poll said they were paying less attention to online ads. R/GA’s brands are prioritising building long-term relationships with their customers to incentivise them to shop over longer periods of time, as opposed to a specific moment.

Retention vs recruitment

Unlike flashy billboards and sponsored social media posts, the primary objective of stealth marketing isn’t recruitment but retention, a challenge for brands of all sizes as customer loyalty becomes a priority. Nike has gradually shied away from big-budget print and television ads over the past decade and is instead investing in smaller neighbourhood stores and events, and value-added services that lets it engage with more localised audiences. “There is a new desire from brands to get closer to local communities, and to make it feel like an authentic connection,” Armstrong says.

True loyalty is the end goal; the feeling is emotional and leads to customers believing they’re part of an exclusive group, Armstrong says. It’s why the key opinion consumers are becoming increasingly important in luxury, she explains. Not only do they appear more trustworthy and relatable than KOLs, they require less spending from brands.

KOCs, whose potential was first recognised in China and are in their infancy in terms of awareness among Western marketers, are long overdue in fashion, Institut Français de la Mode professor Benjamin Simmenauer believes. Many fashion influencers found fame because of their glamorous lifestyle or inspirational style, rather than through any “recognisable expertise,” he argues. This is unlike other industries such as photography, gaming or cars, where key opinion leaders tend to be experts in the subject. KOCs fill this gap, he says.

Unexpected platforms

Some brands are diversifying their media buy and are experimenting with advertising on unexpected platforms such as WeTransfer. Kering, parent company to Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, as well as Stella McCartney have recently hosted ads on the file transfer service’s site. The spike in the platform’s revenue from luxury fashion clients began in 2018, when “brands were looking for alternative platforms [to advertise] in the digital space,” says WeTransfer’s chief advertising officer Natascha Chamuleau.

Over 70 per cent of WeTransfer’s users work in the creative industries, according to the company, which means being able to offer partners a gateway into a premium creative community, explains Chamuleau. Brand safety is another perk. “We offer full screen exclusivity where you’re not advertised alongside other content that could potentially damage your reputation,” she says. An ad space for a few days on Wetransfer ranges between five and six figures, according to the company. Kering and Stella McCartney declined to comment.

Stealth marketing is simply another tactic in a brand’s toolbox to engage and grow their communities, but how much a brand wants to invest in a quieter marketing approach depends on how much control they are willing to relinquish, explains R/GA’s Armstrong: “If you’re not in the ether and being talked about, you will naturally be forgotten, so there is a need to have some form of messaging shared. But as a brand, how much do you want to own that message?”

Not looking to be trying too hard is another key benefit of stealth marketing. “When an advertisement is too obvious, it’s not credible anymore and can be harmful to a brand’s image,” says Simmenauer. This isn’t to say lifestyle influencers and product placements are over, but shifting consumer preferences mean that brands will need more subtle strategies in the mix, he says. Luxury is no longer about exclusivity, but identity and belonging, and people take pleasure in the intimacy of consuming and interacting with a like-minded community, he adds.

Some brands may struggle, because the approach only engages with specific individuals who have like-minded interests, rather than multiple segments of a brand’s customer base. The key is to find the right balance between retention and recruitment marketing.

“The biggest benefit of stealth marketing is that there is often a high level of involvement, so consumers will walk away with an innate understanding of what a brand is about and what their universe entails.” She references a Confucious proverb: “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I might remember, but involve me and I will understand.” In that sense, stealth marketing can be incredibly powerful, she says.

Feature Image Credit: Edward Berthelot/Getty Images

By Kati Chitrakorn

Sourced from Vogue Business

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7 Marketing Tricks Every Business Should be Using

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By Sierra Powell

With the traditional way of passing news from one client to another, you get clients, yes? But not as many as it should be.

It is a challenge to achieve the number of clients you need for growth through word of mouth. For that reason, stronger, better, and more contemporary strategies are needed to attract new customers. Below we talk about 7 marketing tricks every business should be using in growing its market.

1. Having Incentives for Referral Clients

For a business to grow it needs clients, and for you as a business person to think of marketing it, it means you have an existing target audience. You can use your current clients to help in spreading the word and trust me with an added incentive in your sentences the word will spread even faster.

When we talk of incentives, I mean rewarding the existing customers with gifts or discounts to any referral that turns to a client.

2. Business Cards

Having business cards that can be handed over to any potential customer is essential. it is one of the pillars in marketing for any business. Through networking and the internet you can work better and faster, it does not discard business cards but it strengthens the need for the card. It is easier to get a bigger audience through the network. As much as it is in giving cards.

3. Networking

With the rise and growth of the internet, networking is becoming one of the most used and effective means of marketing. With social media accounts for your business, it becomes easier to communicate with your clients. You can take advantage of social media handles to advertise and promote your business. This can be done by posting regularly to remind your clients or even give updates on existing products, and services.

4. Marketing Through Emails

With being active on the internet; that is, promoting your website if you have one, and integrating social media accounts, it’s easy to get responses through emails. Email marketing campaigns give you the opportunity to stay in touch with your potential customers, leads, and customers.

It also helps in nurturing, as well as strengthening the relationship between you and your audience. The emails can be set to go out automatically probably once or twice a month. These emails may include;

  • An appreciation mail that thanks to new users who sign up
  • Emails that are auto-responders for unfinished or abandoned carts or follow-up emails based on viewed pages
  • This is very important, confirmation mails. This may include receipts, invoices, or purchase orders.

5. Advertising Campaigns using Banners, Flyers, or the Internet

For quick traffic to your business, this is by far the best trick to use. It is best for targeting new clients and should be done regularly to keep generating the traffic of new clients. Banners such as feather flags can be strategically placed in a location where the target audience can see. Just remember to make them attractive.

6. Offering Discounts, Give-away, and Even Trials

These can be listed on the homepage of your website or sent with the information emails sent out. The banners and flyers can be strategically placed where there is people traffic and can be seen easily be seen with the offers available.

However, in order not to run the risk of running your business down it is always wise to state that these are one-time offers for new clients.

7. Doing Follow-Ups

Marketing is a necessary measure for every business that is in operation, be it new or old, however, it is not enough to just do marketing and sit and wait for the results. The best strategy after any marketing campaign is to do a follow-up. For people who turned out as clients, or even the ones who responded to you in any way positive or negative follow-up is very vital.

With a follow-up, you get the chance to know what your clients want and probably make changes where necessary. This is of course on the negative responses.

Bottom-line is, marketing is essential to any business old or new. However, the methods and strategies used will determine the traffic generated to your business after the campaign. With the best being a repeat process occasionally to attract new clients.

By Sierra Powell

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

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How to Harness the Power of Thought-Leadership Marketing

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Positioning yourself as an expert is an effective way to level up your marketing strategy.

If you were to ask any seasoned thought leader who has an established track record, he or she will more than likely tell you that marketing is not easy. For the most part, it’s a gamble, as you never know exactly how your content will be received. It’s not a simple matter of filming a piece of content, plastering it with flashy jingles and edits and posting it on social media in hopes it will land with the majority and convert into sales. If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

Marketing can be challenging because there are no clear-cut rules about what works best anymore. Thought-leadership marketing, however, remains one of the most effective methods personal brands can utilize to establish their authority and position themselves as experts in their fields — when done correctly. The marketing challenge is then to devise a scalable thought-leadership strategy to productize this knowledge, then monetize it with customers and prospects.

What is thought-leadership marketing?

Thought leadership is a complex, multifaceted position that requires a precise mix of both relating skills and marketing skills. A thought leader is well versed in expressing ideas and opinions that demonstrate expertise and authority, ultimately positioning himself or herself as a leader in his or her industry. Thought leaders have the ability to influence other people, especially in business, and have immense power in changing a single narrative — because their audience trusts them.

There have been many notable thought leaders throughout history such as Elon Musk, Martin Luther King Jr., Dalai Lama and Steve Jobs. Tony Robbins is a public figure who modernized thought leadership and made it popular among today’s entrepreneurs, many of whom run coaching programs, offer educational courses and teach others how to create a life of purpose, fulfilment and freedom.

Why is thought-leadership marketing essential?

In this digital age where competition is fierce, especially among those who are the face of their brands, if you want to improve sales effectiveness and differentiate your brand, a thought-leadership strategy is critical. People want to know, like and trust you before they want to buy from you.

Thought leadership also inspires authenticity, which buyers crave in the modern world where everything seems like a sales gimmick or ad. Thought-leadership marketing is essential because your audience will be paying more attention, take you more seriously, see more value in your offers, and ultimately, it will allow you to become a catalyst for growth.

How to effectively utilize thought-leadership marketing

Establishing your brand as a subject-matter expert gives you exposure and authority, and it shows where you are knowledgeable. My own media platform, Ohwabisabi, features the stories and messages of conscious thought leaders in long-form content format, most of which is written by those who wish to establish credibility as thought leaders through writing and sharing their own unique perspectives. With ever-changing narratives in any field, this is why I also choose to use a range of platforms to share and express my views and messages in areas I am passionate in — and it’s why I started Ohwabisabi this time a year ago.

Having your message or story shared on any kind of media platform establishes expertise because it is written by a third party, endorsing you and what you stand for. When you’ve been featured, you’ll gain your audience’s trust.

Create engaging content

As content continues to reign as king, clever leaders develop thought-leadership strategies to position themselves as valuable to their target audiences. This content can come from research papers, blog posts, books and ebooks, videos and webinars.

Some thought leaders write blog posts regularly that provide value to their readers. Some create visual content on social media around trending topics relevant to their industries. Video and webinars that answer the questions most important to your audience with credible information are also an essential part of thought-leadership marketing.

In basic marketing, we learn that “everyone” is not a target audience. If your messaging to your audience is too broad, your message won’t land effectively. So, rather than defining your audience as “everyone” and spending substantial time and money getting your content in front of “everyone,” focus on those who love what you do, who you are and what you have to say. They’re the ones who will become strong, loyal advocates for your brand.

Related: Connecting With Your Target Audience Through Video

Establishing your organization as an industry thought leader is about building trust, credibility and authority, boosting the public perception of your brand in a positive way. These days, consumers use digital and social media for a large majority of the purchasing process, so how you position yourself in the digital space remains crucial.

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Founder at Ohwabisabi Media

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

 

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Increase in marketing efforts combine direct mail and digital audiences

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Sourced from The Drum

This month’s Ideal Insights from Adstra highlights privacy issues and growing trends on the national and state level.

“Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.” — John W. Gardner

This month’s update

As the world around us is starting to awaken from the pandemic, so too is the level of marketing we are seeing at our clients. We are seeing increases with our clients on both our direct mail and digital audience activities. Interestingly enough, we are also seeing an increase in combined direct mail and digital marketing campaigns. On our Non-profit side, we are seeing more than twice the number of multi-channel campaigns than we have in either of the last two years. So, what is driving this interest? Multi-channel or omnichannel marketing has always been one of those often discussed but has yet to catch fire ideas. While we cannot offer a definitive answer, we can certainly provide some insight and guidance behind the recent increase in efforts.

First up, the need to solve the impact of the announced postal increases. While digital marketers fear the impending changes of cookie deprecation and MAID tracking, direct mail marketers fear the announced cost increases in postal and printing rates. The return on direct mail campaigns is equally driven by response rates and executional costs. Marketers can adjust to small changes in cost but are challenged by major shifts like those proposed. Direct mail certainly has a place for marketers in the future, but it needs an enhancement to make the ROIs continue to work at scale and enable access to newer and younger audiences.

Second up, marketers are faced with the continuous shift away from engagement with mail by the younger generations and the bifurcation of consumers’ attention across multiple media channels. No single media has the scale of mindshare and engagement to make many traditional marketing approaches work. The walled gardens certainly offer some of the best opportunities to engage customers, but it is often on the garden’s terms and eliminates most of a brand’s ability to effectively manage the communication journey. For those brands that can exist off the older traditional direct mail audience, they can still get by, but the runway is shortening as that audience continues to age out of the business sweet spot. Never is this more true than in the non-profit space, where organizations are desperate to find younger donors and secure their long-term relevancy.

Together these two factors are driving the need to try something new. And this is where multi-channel campaigns fit in. Direct mail still has the many benefits of delivering the relevant materials to help convert customers to buy or donate, but digital offers the low-cost opportunity to build brand awareness and stimulate the discussion around a potential purchase or donation. Like anything that is new, however, success on multi-channel campaigns has been limited. In many instances, we see brands simply declare that it just doesn’t work.

Much of this we believe has to do with the starting audiences. Models tuned to direct mail response often misrepresent the value or promise of digitally engaged prospects. And digitally defined audiences do not reflect the ability to engage in a direct mail piece. Brands need to start the audience definition process anew, just like they might with any new product launch. If you haven’t looked into or understand how a multivariate test works, we might suggest educating yourself here. There needs to be far more testing of ideas and approaches before declaring multi-channel marketing as a no-go. Marketers need to better understand the entire customer engagement process and make sure their campaigns fully and effectively support that engagement.

For many campaigns, marketers see the digital component as simply brand awareness building and the direct mail piece still as the method of transaction. But in some cases, and with some audiences, it may be better to invert the thinking. Couldn’t the direct mail piece be the brand awareness piece and the digital component of the transaction vehicle? The problem with this scenario for many brands is that their websites are not tuned to transact but rather to support the company’s broader brand-building efforts.

In one of our client’s recent tests, we saw a 250-300% increase in traffic to their website out of the campaign, but effectively no increase in conversion. This was a clear case of opportunity missed because the website was not set up to close the deal. The overall campaign results showed no lift in performance, but it was clear this was more a self-inflicted failure vs a failure of the campaign itself.

In thinking about customer engagement, we would also point out here the need for consistency and alignment in messaging among channels. Where the messages are aligned at the individual level, brands are far more likely to see success than in those situations where they are not. For one publisher client of ours, they were able to drive an 80+% lift in direct mail performance for an insurance company they were working with by supporting the highlights of the direct mail materials and telling customers to keep a lookout for the mail piece. Given the success of that campaign, the publisher tried to support their own direct mail subscription offers digitally, only to find out they depressed response rates around 20%. The reason, the direct mail piece had long been designed to look like a “bill”, so customers simply paid for the subscription. By raising awareness in the digital campaign that it was an “offer”, not a “bill”, the response lift is driven by a sense of obligation disappeared.

Overall, our experience suggests that if you stay aligned and consistent in messaging at an individual level you should expect to see a 5-20% improvement in ROI. And we believe that will only get better as experience and ability to market at an individual level improve. As we learn more through the campaigns we have in the market now with our clients, we will continue to report back on the successes and failures. There is a future in multi-channel marketing, we just need to get there together.

Privacy highlights on the national level

Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Kennedy, Joe Manchin, and Richard Burr introduced the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act of 2021. The bill would “give consumers the right to opt-out and keep their information private by disabling data tracking and collection” and “mandate that users be notified of a breach of their information within 72 hours,” the sponsors said. The Verge, Gizmodo, andArs Technica reported on the bill.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Data Protection Act of 2021, which would create an independent Data Protection Agency to “protect Americans’ data, safeguard their privacy, and ensure data practices that are fair and transparent.” The legislation expands on similar legislation the Senator introduced last year. “In today’s digital age, Big Tech companies are free to sell individuals’ data to the highest bidder without fear of real consequences, posing a severe threat to modern-day privacy and civil rights. A data privacy crisis is looming over the everyday lives of Americans and we need to hold these bad actors accountable,” said Senator Gillibrand.

R Street called on Congress to take steps to protect Americans’ data from its adversaries by passing a federal data security law and data privacy law. A white paper published by the group “seeks to reframe the need for data security and privacy legislation to acknowledge a stark reality.

Greg Bensinger, a member of The New York Times editorial board, cited the 6% of U.S. daily users who have opted into data collection on Apple’s latest software update as evidence of consumers’ demand for more privacy. “Consumers have no federal rights to privacy, leaving tech companies to put in place policies as they see fit. And critics allege Apple may be coming out with the changes to get ahead of regulatory pressure and an ongoing antitrust lawsuit over its app store. Advertising is only a small part of Apple’s business, meaning it can afford to take a cut in revenue while sticking it to competitors. Ironically, Apple will have to act even more like a regulator itself to ensure that app developers are following the rules of its new software,” he wrote. “Companies did just fine for decades marketing to consumers without access to their every movement or keyboard and mouse click. And with 94 percent of Americans saying they liked it that way, it’s time for advertisers to listen.”

Consumer concerns about data privacy and the need to meet regulatory requirements like GDPR are the main barriers to growth in mobile marketing, according to WARC’s survey of over 500 marketing professionals in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).

Privacy highlights on the state level

Connecticut – Bloomberg Law, Connecticut Post, and Hartford Courant reported on failed efforts to include data privacy legislation in omnibus budget legislation in Connecticut.

New York – Legislation that would require companies to obtain opt-in consent from consumers before processing their data for ad targeting and would allow class-action lawsuits over violations was approved by the Senate Consumer Protection Committee in New York.

As we are constantly trying to feed helpful content out to our client community, we encourage you to visit our content blog where you can get our latest thoughts on industry issues. While you are there, you can also check out the new look and feel of our website. Our goal was to provide a clearer understanding of Identity, Data, and all the services we have to offer.

Should you look for more help on these topics, please reach out and we would be happy to help. Email us at [email protected]

Connect with Adstra

If you like what Adstra has to share or want to learn more about what we do, follow us on LinkedIn @Adstra, Twitter @Adstradata or Facebook @Adstradata. We welcome you to the new ideal in data.

Sourced from The Drum

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What Does the Future of Marketing Hold?

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By Michael J. Collins

Marketing is deeply in flux as rapid acceleration of digitalization and technological advancement continues to unfurl. To better predict the future of marketing requires learning from the past and accepting that the only thing that’s constant is change. The past year, in particular, has been remarkable, albeit disruptive, which has contributed significantly to the transformation to come.

For example, while Facebook advertising didn’t exist ten years ago Facebook generated $26.17 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2021 alone, mainly from advertising – which equals over $100 billion in ad dollars a year. This gets me thinking about where we invested ad dollars a decade ago.  While this is just one example of a major shift, it’s imperative to be prepared for the new technologies and marketing practices that will certainly emerge and shape our business model as we know it.

I anticipate a variety of changes as we look to the future of marketing, but here are some of the ways I expect marketing to evolve over the next few years.

Original and interactive content will rule.

People crave originality, creativity and authenticity in content a lot more now than they used to, but there is stiff competition for share of voice. According to Microsoft data the average human attention span is now only eight seconds, which is shorter than that of a goldfish.

Digital fatigue is real, and consumers are becoming much more selective about the type of content they digest. Businesses and brands will need to invest more in original and unique content and tap into a higher level of creativity to retain and keep their audiences happy and engaged.

Additionally, original content helps gain mentions from media and influencers, which in turn, can drive additional brand visibility and increased website traffic. There’s no question that producing high-quality original content can be challenging.  It requires tons of research, time, and effort; however, if you think about the exceptional benefits that you will get from your content and the impact on your brand you already know that it’s worth the investment.

The role of influencers in marketing will continue to evolve.

Influencer marketing has garnered a lot of interest over the last few years.  In fact, over the last three years, Google searches for “influencer marketing” has increased by 1500%.  This goes to prove that the future of influencer marketing is bursting with opportunities.

We know that influencer marketing is here to stay.  But what does the future of influencer marketing hold?  Just like all other marketing strategies, it’s bound to change with new technologies and trends. As modern consumers become more and more averse to traditional advertising, influencer marketing emerges as a promising advertising channel.

In particular, I predict that micro-influencers will play an increasingly important role. While micro-influencers may have fewer followers, they offer a more personal connection with their audience and an opportunity for much higher engagement.

Events will remain a mix of hybrid for some time.

I predicted earlier this year in a LinkedIn article outlining marketing predictions for a post-covid 2021 that many companies would make a move towards more in-person meetings by 2022. A global survey of event planners found that 30% said they would execute virtual-only events in 2021, versus 42% who said a hybrid approach would be their strategy.

At CFA Institute during the pandemic we found that our digital events were able to achieve high levels of engagement while broadening our reach beyond those who traditionally attended our in-person conferences.

I predict that moving forward, the combination of in-person and virtual elements, especially those that prioritize interactivity, will help businesses continue to deepen connections with their audiences. Brands that figure out how to include hybrid into their event marketing strategies through additional content development will stand out and have higher retention rates.

Audio platforms will continue to emerge as a solution to ease digital and video fatigue.   Digital fatigue also encompasses Zoom fatigue, which today’s marketers are no stranger to. Luckily, the rise of audio has offered marketers and event planners globally a new way of hosting online events.

This past year Clubhouse, an exclusive invitation-only social networking platform, has emerged as a voice leader. Just like a conference call, Clubhouse provides a conversation room and once the conversation is over, the room is closed. The platform offers a sense of authenticity and real-time conversation, a breath of fresh air among those who embrace this emerging channel.

In addition, live podcast events are a great way to deepen relationships with customers, expand audiences and strengthen brand loyalty.  The audio nature of podcasts offer a unique and more intimate user experience, far removed from the visual cues that we’re accustomed to.

The rise of audio options will continue to emerge in the future since listening stimulates a different part of the brain that makes us visualize concepts, creating an entirely different experience from watching on a desktop or smartphone.

It’s hard to know what other technology will emerge, but I’m eager and excited to see what the future of marketing holds.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Michael J. Collins

Sourced from Linkedin

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How Nike made taking a stand on social issues part of its marketing

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By Jeff Beer

From Colin Kaepernick to the U.S. women’s national soccer team, racism to equal pay, it’s all become a part of Nike’s brand message.

On September 3, 2018, a single tweet drew a line in the sand. A close-up shot of Colin Kaepernick’s face, with the words, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Timed to mark the start of the 2018/2019 NFL season and celebrating the 30th anniversary of the tagline “Just Do It,” the post and its accompanying video commercial lit up the cultural discourse like no ad in recent memory. Here was arguably the most popular sports apparel company on the planet siding with one of the most divisive athletes in the world. The message was clear: the swoosh would be on the side of anti-racism.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year, the company flipped its tagline to read, “For once, don’t do it,” addressing ongoing protests and systemic racism in America. Those white letters over a dark or black background embodied a message consistent with past Nike efforts around social issues, like 2017’s “Equality” spot or 2019’s “Never Stop Winning” in support of the U.S. women’s national soccer team and gender equality.

“It doesn’t matter how many people hate your brand as long as enough people love it,” Knight told Fast Company in 2018. “And as long as you have that attitude, you can’t be afraid of offending people. You can’t try and go down the middle of the road. You have to take a stand on something, which is ultimately I think why the Kaepernick ad worked.”

Knight’s outlook on the Kaepernick ad has become the brand’s playbook as it continues to look at a young, diverse audience as its core customer, and then act accordingly. Just as the 2020 European Championship soccer tournament was kicking off in June 2021, Nike released a spot call “The Land of New Football,” that featured a laundry list of inclusive characters – gay, straight, black, white, and everyone in between. It illustrated that the joy of sport should be for absolutely everyone, no exceptions.

In this interview for The Work in Progress video series, Fast Company spoke with Nike’s vice-president of diversity and inclusion Jarvis Sam, and the company’s vice-president of marketing Melanie Auguste, about how taking a stand on social issues has become crucial to the company’s award-winning marketing.

WATCH: How Nike stays ahead of the curve with its socially conscious marketing

Feature Image Credit: Scott Cunningham/Getty Images

By Jeff Beer

Jeff Beer is a staff editor at Fast Company, covering advertising, marketing, and brand creativity. More

Sourced from Fast Company

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