How Brands Use Memes to Connect with Consumers
Memes have become a part of our daily lives, and their use has expanded beyond entertainment to become an effective marketing strategy for brands. Memes are humorous images, videos, or texts that spread rapidly across various social media platforms. As they are a form of user-generated content that has the potential to go viral, reaching millions of people worldwide in a matter of hours, brands are now incorporating memes into their marketing strategies to connect with their target audience.
Augmented Reality in Marketing: Engaging Customers with Immersive Experiences
Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that overlays digital information and graphics on top of the real-world environment, creating an immersive experience. AR has been gaining popularity in various fields, including marketing and by integrating AR into marketing campaigns, businesses can create engaging and interactive experiences for their customers, thereby enhancing brand awareness, customer engagement, and sales.Read more
5 Must-Try B2B Marketing Channels
With so many marketing channels available, it can be hard to narrow down on the ones that can earn your Business-to-Business (B2B) the best ROI. You may be asking yourself, why should I try B2B marketing channels? I’m here to tell you exactly why you should.Read more
What Marketing Looks Like in 2022, and How Marketers Should Adapt
SEO Marketing Tactics You Should Avoid
Here are some tactics you should avoid when it comes to your SEO strategy:Read more
Why Your Marketing Campaign Will Fail Without Videos
Have you realized that there has been a shift from photo to video marketing for the past few years? One of the biggest challenges brands face when marketing their brand awareness is producing quality and shareable content. The internet is now a noisy place, and to make your brand stand out, and you need to have captivating and exciting content. So how do you do that? The secret is creating short, bold, memorable, and educational videos. As they say, a video is worth a thousand pictures!
Marketers are starting to realize they can elevate their marketing strategy and campaigns by incorporating more video-based content. Especially with the rising popularity of TikTok and Instagram Reels, marketers realize that photos are not cutting it anymore and that videos are what’s grabbing their audience’s attention. This does not mean that images are not valuable because they are; videos can be slightly more effective at engaging an audience.
It takes time to build your platform, build your followings and build your customer’s trust. There is no such thing as an overnight success as it takes time. Your brand will gradually build when you put in the effort is needs to be known.
Here’s why video content marketing is critical to a successful marketing campaign.
Videos Attract Your Desired Audience
When it comes to driving awareness and engaging with your target audience, video marketing is an effective marketing tactic on social media. Creating video content will attract valuable attention from existing and potential customers. Video content can spread brand awareness and build your business’s community by forming a connection between your organization and its target audience. Videos can include the benefits of your campaign, what you want to inform and educate the audience, and the core purpose of your marketing campaign.
Videos Build Trust & Loyalty
Building trust is vital for the success of any business. When you humanize your brand, your customers can see your brand as a reliable option and perceive the people behind it as trustworthy. The more trust you and your product or service have, the greater chance of your customers sharing positive word of mouth reviews, sharing your story, and ultimately increasing brand awareness. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool so ensure you focus on your customers and show them how your product/service can add value.
When creating a short video for your marketing campaign, think about building your brand’s story and developing ways to connect with customers. For example, your video might include showing behind-the-scenes snippets, how-to demonstrations, or educational videos about facts or customer results. Think outside the box and be different from your competitors to give your audience a reason to choose you and make your business better.
Connect with Followers on a Personal Level
The key to client engagement is not attempting to sell something but by telling a story. Being helpful, adding value, and being an educational resource has become more critical with videos.
By using video marketing for a campaign, you can humanize your brand by showing behind the scene content. This makes your customers feel as though your brand is relatable, authentic, and trustworthy. In time this will help build a stronger connection between yourself, the consumer, and your brand.
Videos Drive Engagement
Staying ahead of the competition in a highly saturated market is not easy, especially when many small businesses have been popping up during the pandemic. Even with paid ads across various social media platforms, businesses of all sizes struggle to stand out from the crowd.
That is why producing an educational video that communicates your brand and adds value gives consumers a reason to share it with their friends, families, and even co-workers.
Since Tiktok and Instagram Reels are booming, creating short, effect and engaging content is what you should be doing to deliver a successful marketing campaign. Start a trend, make your brand known and stand out from the crowd by communicating and demonstrating your brand personality and unique marketing campaign to your target market.
Videos are Easy to Understand
Some customers find videos a lot easier to understand as they would rather have an educational video over reading a long paragraph that will eventually make them lose interest. Videos and animations are more beneficial as they can explain more complex processes and concepts that texts and images can’t. Through videos, you can portray essential details and information in a few seconds, which is why video marketing is impactful and powerful for campaigns.
So, where and how do you start creating engaging video content? Here are some helpful questions to ask yourself:
– How will you effectively engage your audience with your mission and vision?
– Who is your target audience?
– Do you have a specific niche?
– What will make your brand stand out?
– How will you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
– How can this video promote your marketing campaign?
– Can you increase your brand awareness and brand personality?
Additionally, create a mind map and list down all your ideas.
Video marketing is a versatile way to produce content that is easily shared across multiple social media channels. Consumers enjoy watching videos because they are not only entertaining and engaging but easier to digest. As Instagram Reels and Tiktok are the latest trending platforms, it is time to start thinking about these new ways to create exciting, captivating, and valuable content for your consumers for your marketing campaigns.
If Your Brand Lacks Identity, Your Team Lacks Purpose
It is an organization’s purpose and identity to serve as both a foundation for growth and a mirror to reflect its presence in the world. It expresses why a company exists, what problems there are to answer, and who it aspires to be to each person it encounters, which is essential when 64% of consumers say shared values with a brand is the main reason they maintain a relationship with the company.
When your company starts to wander too far from its primary mission, having a solid brand strategy in place helps you recognize it and focus on your brand promise. A comprehensive marketing strategy can keep you from making decisions that jeopardize your clients’ trust by mismanaging their expectations or breaching commitments. As your company grows, it’s critical to ensure that your entire staff is on board with your brand strategy and to guarantee it’s maintained and delivers to stakeholder expectations.
If your brand lacks identity, here’s why your team lacks purpose.
Typical Brand Identity Issues
A company suffering from a brand identity crisis can easily lead to low brand management, lack of efficient leadership, and poor communication. Being unable to interrelate a brand’s image with the team culture and expectations creates internal confusion within the team. Suppose staff and managers cannot understand what their company does, the target market and desired audience, their purpose, and how staff contribution fits the brand, then how can your team effectively sell your product/service offerings?
Consumers respect transparency when it comes to companies’ services, products, values, and goals. Providing your customers and stakeholders with inconsistent and inaccurate information about the brand is an easy way to kill your marketing efforts.
Customers and stakeholders also expect brands to understand their needs and help them find new products/services suited for their needs, with 48% of Americans holding these expectations. This means staff is required to produce performance and outcomes that align with the brand’s identity.
When a brand lacks identity, it creates issues when communicating to consumers and can spark inconsistencies in management. Management that is relatively ineffective in navigating their company through the complexities of determining its brand identity, poses a severe threat to its long-term viability. In most cases, the result is wrong positioning and alienation of potential leads and existing clients.
Company Culture
Future-proofing your business from failures and producing an organization that operates with integrity and authenticity forms the basis of your company culture and brand identity. Your brand promise and brand personality and characteristics are woven together to represent your company and its place in the market. However, if your company has a mismatched culture and brand, even productive staff members can be creating undesired results and have the wrong perspective on the company.
When thinking and acting in distinctive ways internally, you’ll be able to project the unique identity and brand image you want to communicate. Staff should be allowed to interpret and reinforce brand value when managing clients.
Aligned Brand Identity with Team Culture
When a company’s culture and brand aren’t interdependent, it’s often due to a disconnect between the team perspectives and customer expectations. The lack of awareness and engagement with your brand among staff is another sign of a mismatch between the culture and brand. Your staff should be aware of what distinguishes and differentiates your brand from competitors. Staff should know who the company’s target market is and what their significant demands and needs are (which should be outlined in your marketing strategy).
If your team doesn’t have direct client interaction, you can utilize the brand’s mission and values as decision-making filters and train them to deliver a positive customer experience. If staff believe they have no involvement in enforcing the brand and its positioning, it means your culture lacks brand identity and integrity.
How to improve your brand identity?
Distinct Identity
Start off by reviewing your company’s purpose as this is the crucial aspect that combines an external brand and internal culture together. An essential step for developing both a strong culture and brand.
Understanding Your Message
To explain brand identification and attract qualified leads, accurate messaging can be developed and incorporated into all marketing collateral. Prospects, leads, and customers should be able to quickly learn what your organization can accomplish by visiting your website and social media platforms.
Consistency
Another step you can take is to ensure a clear understanding between staff and managers of what the brand identity is and how it is incorporated at work and in consumer relations. Providing your staff with consistency in these areas is a vital short-term and long-term factor that will help consumers, employees, managers, and stakeholders clearly understand the brand and its identity.
A company’s brand identity communicates the message it wants to send to the public about itself. With a competitive market across many business sectors, it’s critical to have a strong brand identity and communicate this in key messages effectively to stakeholders. A business’s brand identity is unique and tells a story about what the company stands for, its mission, and its products/services. When your brand and culture are aligned and integrated, you can improve operational efficiency, precision, quality, boost your capacity, increase brand awareness and marketing and generate new business leads.
Image: Shutterstock 1300655989
5 Reasons Why Marketing Matters More Than Ever
Marketing has always been around with every product and service produced by a company. More importantly, businesses succeed when innovation and marketing work hand in hand. However, while most business leaders welcome innovation in their companies, they tend to neglect marketing. This has not only caused missed opportunities, but also capital and failure to the business.
To be exact, marketing is not only about online presence and promotion of the product or service. It is way beyond that. Marketing is about building relationships with your audience while meeting your promise as a brand. It is about persuading consumers why your product or service is needed in the market and how it is different from others.
On that account, marketing has become more important now more than ever. The world is developing innovative products, services, business model, solutions, technologies and more every day. These products and services are crucially dependent on marketing to create awareness, generate revenue and profit. Businesses must focus on marketing, as a product or service alone cannot sustain a company.
Here are 5 reasons why marketing matters more than ever today.
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Brand Definition
Your brand is the most valuable asset of your business. It is important to note that branding is not just about design. Rather, it is a whole experience created for your consumers to drive sales. Branding can change how people perceive your business. A strong brand can be built through an effective marketing strategy. As such, brand marketing is an investment companies need to make to create their business assets. It is important to offer a product or service as a brand that resonates with your consumers in order to generate revenue.
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Lead Generation
Marketing has become an essential source and process in generating lead and driving sales for a business. To do well, businesses need to capture consumer attention through both inbound and outbound marketing.
Content marketing is one of the leading marketing strategies that should be adopted by businesses. Contents provide value to your audience, build brand awareness and grab the attention of potential consumers.
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Understanding the consumer
To bring your business’ product or service to the target market and increase sales, it is important to understand your consumers. Conducting thorough market research can help you understand your target audience. With that, your consequent marketing strategy can help your business effectively release your product or service in the target market and grasp the eye of your ideal consumer.
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Building relationships with customers
Consumers need to resonate their values with the brand more than ever. This will produce a sense of belonging in the consumer, resulting in strong relationships with the brand. Whether it is B2C or B2B marketing, your ultimate consumers are people. Therefore, it is not just about sales and profit, but about keeping up and building relationships with your consumers over time with consistency.
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Prepare for the future
In these unpredictable times, your business needs to deliver and continuously plan for the future. The more efficiently you plan, the more likely you are to act and produce results through marketing. In a way, marketing is more than knowing your market and competitors, as it is also about constantly getting an edge that puts your business above the rest. Ultimately, a well-planned marketing strategy will help you measure your success and rectify your voids.
If you need help from a marketing consultant with your marketing, Robotic Marketer can help your business with marketing strategies based on market research, including in-depth analysis of competitors. Our marketing consultants will ensure that you will receive the best robot-possible marketing strategy available in the world today.
3 Tools to Measure Brand Awareness and Why You Should
Source: Jeff Bullas
Every brand wishes to become famous. Well, every entrepreneur, business owner, and marketer wishes for its brand to become famous.
But as you might guess, popularity doesn’t happen overnight. Not for brands. They don’t wake up famous; instead, slowly and steadily, they grow brand awareness.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness defines the extent to which consumers are familiar with the qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.
The goal of marketing, PR, and even customer service is to grow brand awareness – to make sure people know the brand, talk about it, and recall it when the brand’s industry is discussed. These are the primary perks of brand awareness, but there are others, too.
Source: Jeff Bullas
The Ultimate Guide to Blogging
Blogging, a concept that once used to represent an outlet for individuals to document their lives online has now transformed into an indispensable part of marketing.
If your business doesn’t have a blog, chances are there is a huge scope of improvement in your marketing efforts. Blog marketing is the process of using blogs to reach and inform your target audience. So, what is a blog?
Hubspot defines a blog as “posts that allow you and your business to publish insights, thoughts, and stories on your website about any topic. They can help you boost traffic, brand awareness, credibility, conversions, and revenue.”
Blogging is as simple – and as complex – as that.
Now that we know what it means, here is an ultimate guide to improving your blogging game:
Step 1: Determine the ‘why’ you’re blogging
According to SEMrush even though your blog is a large part of your content marketing strategy, its main purpose isn’t sales – and we can’t agree more!
While you create your blog, it is important to remember that your blog is a space to show your customer that you care and want to add value to their lives. Therefore, it is crucial to publish information that will establish your brand as a credible thought leader in the field.
Blogging has other advantages too.
The Balance Small Business outlines a few other pros – it is inexpensive to start and maintain, easy to use, generates website traffic, improves SEO, engages your target audience and creates more avenues to generate revenue.
Step 2: Know your audience
While the purpose of your blog may be to establish your company as a thought leader and to elevate the brand’s image, it is just as important (if not more important) to cater to your audience’s interests.
Remember, your audience is interested in the services you offer, but it’s your job to convince them that your business is the right fit for them. So, if you start pitching your business straight away, you’re sure to lose your audience.
Therefore, it is important that you are producing something that adds value to your target audience’s lives, introduces them to new ideas and hooks them to find out more. For example, if you’re a marketing firm, there are a billion other firms out there. Your audience will look to your blog to understand what you’re doing that’s new and interesting in the field. So, you may want to talk about marketing tips, strategies and tools that may help your customer, rather than the specific services that you offer.
So how do you know what your customer wants? Create profiles on your target audience!
It’s all about breaking down your target audience by demographics, needs, financial capacity and a host of other metrics to really understand how they think, what their needs are and then understanding how to meet that need.
Step 3: Engage your audience
With a wealth of information available at our fingertips, it’s no secret that people’s attention spans are getting shorter. Therefore, it becomes very important to engage your target audience.
A catchy heading is absolutely essential to capture your audience’s attention.
This should be short, snappy and attractive. This can usually take the form of “How to” or “What is” or “10 ways to…” posts.
It’s best to use the listicle format so your content looks well-organized and delivers what it promises by establishing clear topics and sub-topics.
Next, you need to have a great intro.
The first few sentences of your blog can make or break your blog. It makes the difference between generating a lead and losing a customer. HubSpot recommends that you “tell a story, be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.”
The rest of your post can be written in any format you desire, as long as you keep your objective in mind throughout the process. This could include infographics, photos, videos, and other creative forms of expression.
Step 4: Develop a content marketing plan
Social Media Examiner recommends mapping out your marketing calendar. The idea is to create hooks around content that you develop.
This means organizing your content to come out at an appropriate time – this can include public holidays, and other important dates, as well as dates specific to your product or service such as events, conferences and tradeshows you attend or any other marketing activation that you engage in.
Step 5: Be heard
Once all the hard work of producing a brilliant blog is done, you want to share the news!
The first step is ensuring that your content is search engine optimized. This means ensuring that relevant keywords are incorporated seamlessly into the article, as well as ensuring that your blog is optimized for mobile phones. Scott Chow offers other neat hacks to SEO such as header tags, permalinks and categorization.
Other methods of marketing your blog can include simple word-of-mouth, sharing your blog across your social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, creating an EDM campaign, engaging with other bloggers and even including calls to action on your blog to engage more actively with your target audience.
And most importantly, have fun with it!
Your blog is your space to get your creative juices flowing and create something new and interesting to share – enjoy the process!