marketing dashboard for social media

5 Examples for Great Social Media Branding

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Large brands such as Coca-Cola and McDonalds have the necessary budgets to invest in A-list influencers and over-the-top Super Bowl commercials. The same cannot be said for startups and small-business struggling to make ends meet. This, however, won’t stop a smart marketer from taking a note or few from the best. Whether it’s a clever use of shape and color, or a catchy slogan, here are some of the best examples of what branding is supposed to look like.

1. Social media branding done right: Airbnb

Most major brands invest heavily in large creative design teams to manage their social media branding efforts. Yet, Airbnb has managed to do a lot more than just share beautiful content to solidify their brand image. With Airbnb, the customers are the brand, both guests and hosts. The company doesn’t manage nor does it own any of the properties hosted on its website and social media accounts. In fact, it only provides a forum where customers can promote and ultimately book some of the most breathtaking properties in the world.

Businesses often rely on telling their brand story to sell products and services, but Airbnb lets the customers to tell their own stories. The travelers are using their platform and Airbnb regularly hosts them on its website and social media accounts. Going through the company’s Instagram account and you’ll quickly feel exactly what it’s like to be in the customer’s shoes. The company understands the importance of social media engagement and also provides links to each and every location displayed in their content. That way they are providing their followers with the opportunity to experience what their feed is offering using a single click.

2. Brand-driven storytelling: Nike

Nike is one of the few companies that have understood and successfully leveraged great storytelling for the last 20 years as a means of developing a brand soul. One of their most successful branding campaigns was led in 1999. That year the company released a minute-long commercial commemorating the fruitful career of none other than Michael Jordan.

What made the commercial such a wild success is the fact that Nike as a brand was not mentioned at all until the very last second of the film. In the last second we saw the logo and now iconic words “Just Do It” were superimposed over Jordan’s high school photo. The entire minute-long commercial was dedicated to the great basketball player. That was something that was previously unheard of in the marketing industry.

Instead of trying to sell its products and push the brand down the throats of its consumers, Nike wanted to make an impression! The one that lasted and cemented their brand with an authentic, heartfelt story. Now, their logo and slogan can be found literally anywhere. From their clothing lines and twitter commercials to a viral video of Shia LaBeouf screaming “Just Do It” into the camera for a solid minute. Go figure!

But on a serious note, brand development requires a number of important steps, including logo design, color and font choice. All that play a major role in developing a brand voice and maintaining consistency. Finding the right agency using Google and similar search engines might be a stretch. You can find help using dedicated resources such as Design Rush which allows users to search and filter through leading branding experts based on budget, location, and their expertise.

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3. Clever brand slogan: Dollar Shave Club

The team behind the Dollar Shave Club knows exactly what they’re doing. Their “Shave Time. Shave Money.” slogan is arguably the pinnacle of marketing related puns. Dollar Shave Club offers a shaving equipment and accessories as a cheap subscription service. It includes flexible shipment without the use of contracts and tricks involving fine prints. The company has cleverly incorporated two of the largest benefits offered by its service: convenience and cost.

Its campaign is on point, quite funny and adequately defines its brand tone, voice and a pun-related sense of humor. Today, Dollar Shave Club is often being cited as a sponsor to various YouTube personalities and celebrities. That  only increases their reach and solidifies the company’s brand authority.

4. Embracing new technologies: Domino’s

Most brands fail to incorporate new technologies fast enough, but Domino’s pizza has not only managed to do just that but also stay ahead of the curve by constantly innovating their mobile ordering experience. The company has incorporated Twitter into its ordering process by offering a “tweet-to-order” option and has recently introduced its very own messenger chatbot “DOM The Pizza Bot”.

Their approach to social media branding is refreshing, to say the least.  They also pushed forward a campaign where users could visit their website, make their own pizza and share the design on different social media channels.

5. Customer experience is the best marketing: Slack

A collaboration tool used by teams to communicate and share files more effectively, Slack currently has over 2 million active daily users. What even more amazing is that the company didn’t really launch a massive marketing campaign. In fact, its success can only be attributed to the outstanding customer experience. Slack not only receives but also responds to more than 10,000 Tweets per month. Their Twitter Feed is home to “Slack Wall of Love”, a place dedicated to showcasing all the love Slack has been receiving from its users.

Your number one priority should always be building brand awareness. Regardless of whether you’re working in business-to-consumer or business to business fields. Why? Because people would not be investing in your products and services unless they know and trust your brand. Social media branding is an effective tool for maintaining a consistent brand image in order to build authority, increase customer engagement, boost loyalty and make your brand memorable.

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Using Lead Scoring to Identify Your Best Prospects

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Although one of your main goals should be to capture as many potential leads as possible, it’s worth mentioning that not all leads are the same. Some leads are more qualified than others–and the last thing you’ll want to do is waste time trying to nurture low-quality leads when there may be other prospects that are ready to advance through the sales funnel. The way to ensure that you’re dedicating your resources to the best leads that are available is through the use of lead scoring.

What Is Lead Scoring?media mix

Lead scoring helps you to separate your leads in terms of how far along they are in the sales funnel and what needs to be done to nurture them. By using a scoring system, you can more easily identify which leads have more interest in your products or services. By simply looking at the scores you’ve automatically assigned to your leads, you’ll be able to tell if:

  • They need more marketing content
  • They’re ready to engage with a sales rep
  • They’ve already made a purchase and need additional direction

With proper lead scoring, you won’t waste time trying to convert a sale with a lead who still needs to read or view more content to make a more informed decision about your brand. Doing this not only wastes resources, but it also risks alienating the lead by putting too much pressure on them. On top of that, it allows you to ignore low scoring leads that aren’t likely to convert in favor of those that are.

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How To Score Your Leads

At its basic core, lead scoring involves assigning points to each lead based on certain criteria. The more points the lead has, the more qualified they are. The following are a few of the criteria that you should use to assign points to your leads:

Lead demographics

The closer they are to your buyer persona, the stronger a lead they become. Some of the information that can help you score a lead based on their demographic includes the industry they belong to, their company, where they are located, their age, their gender, their education level, their job title, and more. The closer they are to your ideal customer, the more likely they are to become a customer.

The biggest challenge in scoring your leads based on their demographics is collecting the information you need to determine what their demographics are. You’ll want to ask certain questions in your online forms so that when they sign up for your email, you’ll immediately have enough information to score them based on their demographics.

However, you’ll want to be careful about asking too much or asking questions that may be deemed to personal as this can scare leads away from submitting the form. What you can do is ask some basic questions on your initial form, then send out occasional surveys to help you gather more information.

Lead behaviors

In addition to scoring your leads based on who they are, you’ll also want to score them based on what they do. The way they navigate your site and engage with your brand online can tell you a lot about how ready they are to convert. The following are a few metrics you can use to score your leads based on their behaviour:

  • Page views – The more pages that a lead has been to on your site, the more interested they likely are in your brand. A lead that has explored your site is a much stronger prospect than one who has only been to one or two pages.attraction marketing
  • Website visits – The more a lead visits your site, the more interested they are likely to be. It’s important to understand that a lead isn’t always going to be interested on their first visit.
  • Specific pages seen – What pages the lead has been to matters. For example, a lead that has read through your product pages and that has visited your e-commerce page is much stronger than a lead who has only been to a few pages on your blog.
  • Offers converted – Leads that have signed up for your email newsletter or who have downloaded free offers (such as eBooks or whitepapers) have likely developed a certain level of trust in your brand.
  • Email engagement – Even if a lead has signed up to your email, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily strong prospects. If they’ve never opened your email, it means that they may have just been taking advantage of one of your offers and aren’t actually interested in your brand. However, a lead that has opened multiple emails is more than likely interested.
  • Social engagement – Leads that engage on social media with your brand, such as sharing, liking, or commenting on content, are likely to be strong prospects.

These are some of the metrics you’ll want to use to score your leads. Keep in mind that you can give leads negative scores for certain demographic information you gather about them or certain behaviours (such as not opening your emails). This will allow you to identify both good leads and poor leads.

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Which Is Best For Me?: Growth Driven Design vs. Traditional Web Design

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Both growth-driven design and traditional web design can be successful if you implement them effectively. The biggest difference between them is that a traditional website is built all at once, while growth driven design evolves. This makes a growth driven design more adaptable to the changing needs of your business, your customers, and technology. A traditional web design will often require a complete redesign to adapt to major changes–but that doesn’t mean that a traditional web design can’t be effective as well.

So how do you determine which type of web design will best suit the needs of your brand? The following is a more in-depth look into the differences between the two types of web design to help you decide which will best suit your needs.

The Optimization Of A Website

With a traditional website, you have to make use of the data you have to make the best possible design choices. In most cases, you may not have a lot of data yet since your website isn’t up and running. This means that you’re going to have to make a lot of guesses about your audience and your strategy.

With a growth driven design, you start off with a launchpad site that helps to collect data. You can then use that data to build your website over time. The more data you collect, the more you can add to or adjust your site. This way, your website can better reflect the information you have about your audience. This lets you continuously improve your site based on the desired path of your customers.

The Cost Of Designing A Website

A lot of brands invest a significant amount of money into their traditional web design because they understand that their website is going to have a huge impact on the success of their online marketing strategy. It’s not uncommon for a medium-sized business to put anywhere between $15,000 and $100,000 into their website. A launch pad website will costs less to build then a full blown website.

Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

However, this is only when comparing the initial costs. A growth driven design doesn’t require a lot for the launchpad site, but it will require a budget to continuously collect data and add to the website month after month. A traditional website’s budget is mostly spent on the initial launch, unless you decide on a website redesign later.

When comparing the costs, understand that a traditional web design will be more expensive in the short-term. However, consider the overall budget. Factoring in the long-term costs of growth driven design, there’s not a huge overall difference between the two designs. Keep in mind that the trial-and-error nature of a growth driven design can help offset continuous costs.

The Time Spent On Your Website

A growth driven design requires constant analysis of your website’s data in order to continually update your website throughout the year instead of just during the web development phase. This is done periodically; for example, every month or every six weeks (However, you’ll usually be billed monthly). Although a traditional website design does still require constant content creation as well as the need to track certain metrics in order to make strategic adjustments to your marketing strategies, the website itself will essentially be set in stone, which means not nearly as many resources need to be dedicated to your website.

These are some of the differences between implementing a traditional web design and a growth driven design. The main difference is that with a growth driven design, you’ll need to continue building your site over the long term, whereas once you launch a traditional website, you’re done until you decide to do a redesign. Yes, a growth driven design needs your continuous attention, but you may get more out of it as a result.

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brand development process

What’s Trending in Marketing For November 2018

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Businesses that stay up to date with all the latest marketing trends and news are more likely to see success due to the ability to adjust their marketing strategies accordingly as a result. As such, we like to highlight marketing news and trends every month as well as provide a bit of insight on how you can improve your marketing. The following are the latest marketing trends, news, and tips that we think are worth noting this November.

Noteworthy Marketing News

Google Launches AdLingo

Google recently launched its conversational marketing platform “AdLingo.” AdLingo provides the first conversational ad format outside of messaging apps, allowing advertisers to deliver ads that query users as well as respond to them. Read up on the ins and outs of the new AdLingo feature and why it matters to marketers at Marketing Land.

Pinterest Updates Ads Manager And Adds Product Pins Features

Ahead of the holiday season, Pinterest has improved its Ads Manager tool by allowing advertisers to choose business goals, select pins they want to promote, and to select an audience. They have also rebuilt their Product Pins system by adding stock information and dynamic pricing. Find out more about the changes made to their Ads Manager and Product Pins features by reading Marketing Land’s write-up.

Facebook Working On Connected TV Device

Facebook appears to be expanding its reach even further as they are rumored to be working on a connected TV device that will work in a similar fashion to Amazon’s Fire Stick or Roku. The Facebook TV rumor is explored in more detail in Marketing Land’s article, which also goes into the impact it could have on marketers.

Pandora Announces Ad Distribution Agreement With SoundCloud

Pandora has been busy making moves to become a major platform for advertisers. Not only has Pandora finally launched its own analytics tool, they also announced a new partnership with SoundCloud. According to Pandora, the partnership will make them the biggest digital audio advertising marketplace in the U.S. and will expand their addressable audience to 100 million. Marketing Land’s article goes into more detail about Pandora’s recent developments.

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Improving Your Marketing Program

Learn About The Differences Between Smart Display And Custom Intent Campaigns

AdWords continues to be a valuable marketing tool, which is why we recently explored two of their newest PPC options, Smart Display Campaigns and Custom Intent Campaigns. Check out our article to find out what the differences between the two features are and how they can benefit you.

The Importance of Social Media Engagementsocial media

One of the common mistakes advertisers make is to focus on their following instead of on engagement. Our recently published article highlights the importance of social media engagement and goes over several tips on how to improve your engagement on social media.

Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

Knowing the differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing will help to better inform your overall marketing campaign. We recently explored the differences between digital and traditional marketing, from the long-term and short-term impact to the costs and more.

Pew Reveals Relevant New Marketing Data

The Pew Research Center recently revealed new data that might surprise marketers. For example, broadband Internet penetration remains at only 65 percent amongst U.S. adults and that smartphone-only Internet usage has increased from 12 percent to 20 percent over two years. Head to Marketing Land for a more in-depth look into Pew’s recent marketing research.

Survey Reveals More Customers Plan To Use Amazon For Holiday ShoppingAmazon For Holiday Shopping

Amazon’s marketplace domination continues as a recent survey conducted by Survata revealed that the majority of holiday shoppers plan on using Amazon over any other online platform. In fact, the survey showed that online shoppers prefer Amazon 3-to-1 over Google. Check out what else the holiday shopping survey revealed at Marketing Land.

Marketers Focusing Primarily On Black Friday

A Nanigans study revealed that only five percent of retailers that responded are focusing any of their ad budget on late-season shoppers, while 25 percent of ad budgets will be spent on Black Friday weekend. Read Marketing Land’s article to find out more details about the holiday ad budget study.

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