Marketing Trends

What Experiential Marketing Companies Can Gain By Blending Experiential Marketing With Digital Works

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Experiential marketing is becoming a popular tactic among companies who realize that audiences connect with brands more successfully if they are able to participate or engage directly with the brand. A great example of experiential marketing is Samsung’s efforts at the 2012 Olympics to introduce consumers to their new Galaxy S3. They set up booths throughout London where they allowed consumers to play with the phone or to have pictures of themselves taken with the phone that were then turned into personalized badges.

While experiential marketing is a very effective tactic in itself, experiential marketing companies should be sure to incorporate digital marketing to help increase the impact that it can have. The following are a few ways that experiential marketing companies can use digital technology to improve their experiential marketing efforts.

Promote Your Events

Using experiential marketing to engage your audience isn’t going to be very effective if you don’t have much of an audience in the first place. You should use digital marketing to promote whatever events you’re holding. For example, if your company is putting up booths in multiple locations during a specific event (such as the Samsung example during the London Olympics), then you’ll want to not only promote when you’re doing it, but the exact locations and times that you will be there.

You can do this by promoting the event on social media where it will get the most exposure. Make it possible to RSVP to the event so that you can track the number of attendants that you’re expecting. You could even promote the event, but not reveal the time and place unless someone RSVPs to create a more exclusive feeling. You can also use your email list to notify people of your event and what they can expect there.

5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Use

Create Real-Time Content

Creating content during the event can be helpful for a number of reasons. First of all, it gives audiences who weren’t able to attend a chance to see the effort you’ve put into creating an experience. While they won’t have the full experience of attending, they’ll get a general idea of what it was like and will be able to learn about whatever your event was about. For example, you could live stream parts of the event.

Besides providing more exposure for your event this way, it can also help convince audience members who didn’t attend to show up to your next event (or if your event is being held over multiple days, it could convince people to show up at the next scheduled event).

Encourage User-Generated Content

Use the content that your audience creates at the event to promote it. This can be especially effective for demonstrations of new products. Simply have a hashtag available that everyone can use to tag the content they create, such as pictures or videos recorded on their phones. There are other ways to encourage users to create content as well. For example, one food company had a professional photographer at their event to teach audience members techniques for taking pictures of food. They would then post the pictures they took on Instagram using the official hashtag that the company created.

Experiential marketing is a fantastic way to engage consumers, but you should be sure to leverage digital technology to get the most out of your experiential marketing efforts. These are a number of ways that experiential marketing companies can use digital technology to help increase the overall impact of their experiential marketing efforts.

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Social Media Solutions: Understanding The Importance of Social Media Engagement vs. Following

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Social media has become one of the most important marketing platforms over the past decade or so. This is because there are hundreds of different social channels out there, all of which cater to different demographics. If you can find the right social platform, you will find it much easier to find and target niche audiences. However, one of the common mistakes businesses make is focusing too much on expanding their followers instead of engaging with the followers that they already have.

Why You Should Focus On Engagement

Social media allows you to connect directly with your audience. That said, spending your time developing relationships with your audience is much more important than increasing your brand awareness. There’s a temptation to try and get the most followers as possible, especially if you’re competing with similar businesses who are doing the same thing. This, however, will simply turn your marketing efforts into a popularity contest.

By spending your time engaging with your current followers instead of chasing the followers you don’t have, you’ll find that your efforts will have a more lasting impact. By building your relationship with your followers, you will eventually build trust and brand loyalty. This can translate to repeat sales from the same followers. Additionally, once you’ve built relationships with these followers, they will turn into brand ambassadors. They will engage with your content by sharing, liking, and commenting on it, thereby exposing followers in their personal social circles to your brand.

5 Ways To Optimize Your Social Media

How to Improve Your Engagement

By focusing on engagement, your followers will help you get more followers. The following are a few Social Media solutions to help you improve engagement with the followers you have:

  • Post content on a regular basis – Use your social channels to post links to your newest blog posts. When followers share your content, it will be seen by more people. The engagement level of your content can also give you a good idea of what types of content resonates with your audience. This allows you to adjust your content strategy so that your content is more relevant to your specific audience.social media
  • Incite conversation – When posting content, ask a relevant question to what you’ve posted in order to encourage your followers to comment on it. You can also simply spark a conversation by asking general questions on your social pages. Twitter is a particularly effective channel for this strategy.
  • Always respond – If your followers take the time to post a comment, take the time to respond. Whether their comment was positive, negative, or simply just a response to something you posted, answer them. This shows them that you are actively engaged and that the conversation isn’t one-sided. Be sure to respond to negative comments as well instead of simply deleting them (unless they are purposefully inflammatory). Your followers will appreciate your efforts to deal with negative experiences in a friendly and professional manner. In this way, social media can be quite effective as a PR tool.
  • Hold contests – Social media contests are a great way to engage followers. You could do something simple like hold sweepstakes in which only followers can enter, or you can hold a contest that’s a bit more involved. For example, you could hold a photography contest on Instagram. You can even have the winner voted on by the followers themselves.

How To Use Social Media To Drive B2B Sales

Social Media Solutions = More Followers

Social media solutions that improve engagement will eventually help you to increase your followers as well. Be sure to use these social media solutions to help improve engagement with followers on social media.

LeadingAge Illinois 2023 Annual Conference

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WHO: LeadingAge Illinois is one of the largest and most respected associations of providers serving older adults in Illinois. Committed to advancing excellence, we advocate for quality services, promote innovative practices, and foster collaboration. We serve the full spectrum of providers including home and community-based services (HCBS), senior housing, life plan communities (LPC)/continuing care retirement communities (CCRC), assisted living, supportive living, and skilled nursing/rehabilitation centers.

WHERE: Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center

WHEN: March 7 – 8, 2023

DETAILS:

This year’s Annual Meeting offers everything that you’ve come to expect. Through knowledgeable speakers and industry experts, quality education, exhibitors in the expo hall, networking, and the Opening Reception, you’ll find what you need to serve, support, and evolve. Stevens and Tate Marketing has two speakers featured at this year’s show.

5 Strategies to take a WOE Marketing Program to WOW: Tuesday, March 7th

President, Dan Gartlan will speak on 5 Strategies to take a WOE Marketing Program to WOW. Through examples and case studies, this session will explore how linking an organization’s WHAT and HOW to its WHY can emotionally connect with prospects to drive engagement. Join marketing strategist, Dan Gartlan, in learning how to uncover your competitive advantages and your organization’s core values or reason for being. Then, explore how to craft messaging that drives an emotional connection with prospects. Furthermore, the session will define the process that you can do with your team for discovering and articulating your organization’s WHY and how to connect your competitive advances to it in a way that makes you stand out.

5 Strategies to take a WOE Marketing Program to WOW will be presented on Tuesday, March 7th at 9:45 AM to 10:45 AM. Click here to learn more about Dan Gartlan.

Digital Strategies to Online Lead Generation: How To Drive Demand: Wednesday, March 8th

Internet Marketing Director, Nicole Wagner will be presenting Digital Strategies to Online Lead Generation: How To Drive Demand. The session will discuss how to use the online media, your website and content development to build an online presence that attracts the right audience and converts them into quality leads. Attendees will analyze their current online marketing programs and assess the strength of these programs. They will learn how to create a content program and web presence that helps them reach the right audience with the right message.

Digital Strategies to Online Lead Generation: How To Drive Demand will be presented on Wednesday, March 8th at 9:45 AM to 10:45 AM. Click here to learn more about Nicole Wagner.

You can register for this event at https://annualconference.leadingageil.org/2023/index.cfm. Learn more about LeadingAge Illinois here https://leadingageil.org. For more information on scheduling Dan or Nicole for speaking, click here.

earned media vs paid media

Inside Adwords: Exploring The Differences Between Smart Display Campaigns & Custom Intent Campaigns

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The use of PPC (pay per click) advertising can be beneficial for countless reasons. Not only are PPC ads a great way to bring in more traffic, they are incredibly cost-effective and are particularly useful for trying out new keywords or copy. It’s why Google AdWords continues to be popular with advertisers. Let’s take a closer look inside AdWords to discover some of their newer PPC options, including their smart display ads and their custom intent ads.

Inside AdWords’ Smart Display Ads

Smart display ads are ads that are automated by Google. This helps to make creating display ads much easier since all you’ll need to do is submit your creative assets (such as images, headlines, subheaders, and copy) along with your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal and Google will determine what the best possible combination of these elements are in order to meet your CPA. Google will also automatically find placements for your ad.

There are a number of advantages to creating your ads this way. For example, benefits include:

  • The ability to test out different ad elements for other ad campaigns.
  • Test ads that haven’t been working to see if any elements are salvageable.
  • Find new placements.
  • Spend less time optimizing and managing your own ads.

However, it’s worth noting that there are a few drawbacks. Namely, you’re giving up a lot of control over your ad. For example, you can’t bid down, you can’t exclude placements, and you don’t have control over the devices your ads are placed on.

How Your Web Page Speed Effects Your SEO and Adwords Performance

Even though you do give up some control, what makes smart display ads worth using is the fact that Google will automatically test out different elements of your ad to find the best possible combination.

Inside Adwords’ Custom Intent Campaigns

The custom intent audiences option now offered by Google AdWords provides a more accurate way to target consumers who are looking to make a purchase right now. It’s the equivalent of being able to walk up to a customer who is browsing items inside of a physical store and engaging with them. Using custom intent audiences, you’ll have a much better chance of closing a sale since the audiences your ad will be targeting will be looking to buy something that’s similar to your product or service.

For example, if you’re marketing an airline service and want to target customers who are going on vacation, you could set your customer intent to target people who are looking to go on vacation in Hawaii. Not only can you target potential customers searching for flights to Hawaii on Google using keywords like Hawaii vacation or flights to Hawaii, but you can also reach them on YouTube while they are watching Hawaii travel videos.

Adwords’ Custom Intent Makes Finding Your Audience A Breeze

Using the custom intent audience feature is easy. When creating a display ad, simply select “target” and choose “intent.” You can then choose either ‘DIY” which allows you to combine links and topics in order to pursue customers who are most likely looking to buy what you are selling, or you can choose “Auto-generated,” which leaves the work to Google’s machine learning technology in order to create audiences that are exclusive to the data of your brand based on inference.

When creating your new audience, you’ll name the audience, enter any keywords or URLs that are related to your target audience, and then create it. Based on the custom audience you’ve created, you’ll be provided with useful information like estimated reach, associated keywords, and potential audiences according to phrase.

Although the custom intent audience feature can be extremely useful in reaching customers who are looking to buy immediately, it’s worth noting that this feature is only valuable as a short-term strategy. If you’re looking to nurture leads over the long-term, using this feature is not the best option.

Choosing Between Smart Display Ads and Custom Intent Audiences

When looking inside AdWords to determine what the best PPC option is for you, you need to figure out exactly what you’re goal is. If you’re trying to boost sales short term, then using the custom intent audience feature can be quite valuable. When it comes to smart display ads, there’s much more that you can use them for, whether it’s attracting more long-term leads, finding new places to reach your target audience, or identifying what elements of your ads are the most effective to help with future ad campaigns.

How To Transition From Traditional Advertising to Inbound Marketing

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If your brand has been focusing on solely traditional advertising methods, then it’s time that you consider inbound marketing. Although traditional advertising, such as TV or radio commercials, print ads and billboards can all be successful strategies when properly utilized, they are short-term strategies.

Purely focusing on these advertising methods also means that you are missing out on an enormous online audience. It also means that all of your marketing budget is going into a short-term strategy. By also implementing an inbound marketing strategy, you’ll set your brand up for more long-term marketing success while increasing your brand exposure to a bigger audience. Of course, transitioning from traditional advertising to inbound marketing is going to require some work.

The following are the steps you’ll need to take to incorporate inbound marketing into your overall advertising strategy:

1. Understand The Advantages Of Inbound Marketing

If you don’t understand how inbound marketing differs from traditional marketing, then you’re going to end up applying the same type of strategy. Namely, your online presence will focus on promoting products and services. Posting online advertisements isn’t going to cut it. Online audiences differ greatly from those that you are targeting with traditional marketing efforts.

The idea of inbound marketing is to provide consumers with something valuable along with the information that they need to educate themselves about your brand, products, or services. By doing this, you’ll position yourself to be found by potential customers instead of having to find them. Inbound marketing also allows you to engage directly with your audience. This makes knowing what they want and need more important. They not only have a choice as to what content they consume, they can actually respond to your marketing efforts as well.

2. Use Your Available Data

Any data about your business and its customers should be carefully analyzed to help guide your inbound marketing strategy. This is because inbound marketing is all about optimizing your advertising efforts based on the data you have available. In fact, you should continue adjusting your strategies based on the new data that you’ll be collecting.

For example, you should use the information on your existing and past customers to expand your audience and create a buyer persona. By creating more in-depth buyer personas using customer online behavior data, you ensure that your content will be relevant to your specific audience. Your buyer personas should inform everything you produce and post online.

Five Inbound Marketing Resources Every Marketer Should Know About

3. Establish A Plan

Inbound marketing is so broad–it incorporates a wide range of strategies, including your website optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and more. You’ll need to have clear short-term and long-term goals so that you can judge the performance of your efforts.

For example, one of your long-term goals may be to increase brand awareness. By setting this goal, it will inform the marketing strategies you implement (such as being active on social media or using PPC ads) and will also allow you to judge your strategies based on that goal (such as page visits over time, conversions over time, number of social shares, etc.).

4. Repurpose Offline Content

Many of your traditional advertising efforts can be repurposed online. For example, the newsletters that you may have been sending out can be turned into email newsletters instead. Your copywriting team can transition from writing copy for print ads and commercials to writing blog content for your website. You can even use your research reports and white papers to create infographics and eBooks.

Once you’ve decided to transition from traditional advertising to inbound marketing, you’ll want to follow these steps in order to get started. Doing so will help establish a foundation for your inbound marketing efforts to build on.

Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

Understanding Growth Driven Design & Its Methodology

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Your website design is arguably the most important element of a successful inbound marketing strategy. The website is the foundation of all your online marketing efforts, after all. When it comes to designing your website, there are two main ways to go about it. You can implement a traditional website design, in which you employ the best practices of website design into the creation of your site, or you can use a growth driven design.

What Is A Growth Driven Design?website redesign process

The big difference between a growth driven design and a traditional design is that a growth driven design focuses on the creation of a systematic and interactive website that can adapt to changing technology as well as to the changing needs of your audience over the years. This allows you to make informed improvements to your site based on continuous learning, visitor research, and regular testing.

While traditional website designs can be just as successful, they require complete redesigns in order to implement any major changes that you might want to make in the future.

The Three Phases of Growth Driven Design

The growth driven design process is all about constantly measuring the performance of your site and making changes based on what you’ve learned to improve that performance. The following are the three phases of a growth driven design:

1. Strategymarketing-make-or-break

The first step is to create a strategy by performing an audit of your current website, allowing you to see what works and what doesn’t. An audit will not only help guide your design, it will also help provide you with benchmarks that you can compare your new design to moving forward. Part of your audit should include user testing, interviews, and surveys to get a better understanding of how visitors interact with your site. Once your audit is complete, set measurable goals that will help define the results you’re looking for. Finally, revisit your buyer personas and buyer journeys to help guide your content strategy.

Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company?

2. Launch Pad

Once your strategy is in place, create a launch pad. This is a site built using your strategy and wishlist. It’s not a finished product even though it’s completely functional for the end user. Essentially, it’s a working base that you can build on over time and allows you to track user behavior and begin the process of ongoing optimization.

3. Continuous Improvement

Using the information you’ve gathered from your audit and launch pad, you’ll continuously improve your website over monthly sprint cycles within an 11-month period. This last phase is made up of four stages:

1. Plan

Take note of how effective your site is and what changes have the best impact on your long-term goals.

2. Develop

Take the plan you’ve developed and implement it.

3. Learn

Review past changes to determine what worked and what didn’t so that you have a better idea of how to improve your site for the next spring cycle.

4. Transfer

Take everything that you’ve learned and share it with the different departments in your company, from marketing and sales to service and more.

Many brands are choosing to implement a growth driven design due to the ability to adapt to changing customer needs as well as a constantly changing online environment. However, this isn’t to say that a growth driven design is superior to a traditional design. Much depends on what your brand is trying to accomplish and what your specific marketing needs are. In some cases, a traditional web design may work just as well.

Understanding The Importance Of Brand Soul In Digital Engagement And How To Leverage It

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One of the biggest challenges facing any business is losing the image of a corporate entity and creating an image of a brand that’s more personable and engaging. This is called having a brand soul. Without a brand soul, your audience will have trouble connecting with your brand on a personal level.

The following are 9 ways that digital engagement can help you to develop your brand soul:

1. Own your cultural landscape

Instead of considering yourself as a supplier of products or services, begin looking at yourself as part of the cultural landscape. You should believe that your product or service is adding something to the culture and you should treat your marketing efforts in this manner. You can leverage this idea through digital engagement by emphasizing the cultural components of your audience through social media. For example, posting pictures of your products being used in daily activities.

2. Stand for a social cause

Trying to stay neutral is an attempt to appeal to everyone, and that never works. Don’t be afraid to stand up for social causes that are important to your company. Doing so shows your audience that you stand for more than just profit. Take Nike as a recent example. While their social cause involved some controversy, they have taken a stand and it has certainly made them seem much less like a company that only cares about profits. The social cause they’ve stood up for may have lost them a few customers, but it’s greatly strengthened brand loyalty as a result as well.

3. Curate content

Digital engagement isn’t just about posting content that you’ve created. While your content may be relevant, it can seem a little like you’re just fishing for likes or shares. It’s important that you curate some of your content as well, meaning that you post links to relevant content on other websites. Doing so not only helps provide your audience with high-quality content, it shows them that you care about being helpful and it’s not all just about you. This, in turn, helps build trust in your brand.

4. Encourage Conversation Through Feedback

Encouraging feedback from your audience is a great way to learn about your audience, thereby giving you the chance to more effectively tailor your content to their needs. By encouraging feedback and responding positively (no matter how negative the feedback might be) you show your audience that what they think is important to you, thereby making them more willing to reach out and engage with your brand.

5. Reinvent service and support

Be proactive when it comes to customer service and support. In addition to providing a phone number, email, and social media channel through which your audience can contact you, consider adding a chatbot that can answer questions in real time or send customers questionnaires asking about the quality of the products or services they bought.

6. Guide your customers’ journeys

Make use of all of your customer data so that you can create content for every step of the buyer’s journey, no matter where they are, be it on your website, on mobile, or on one of your social channels. Use automation to trigger the best content, offers, or messages at the right time for each platform you’re on.

Using The Right Media Mix During Each Stage Of The Buyer’s Journeys

7. Personalize your marketing

Use the information you gather from your audience to personalize your marketing. This allows you to deliver content that’s more relevant to each individual reader, thereby allowing you to build stronger relationships with your leads.

8. Provide an immersive experience

One of the traps a lot of brands fall into is creating a non-memorable experience in which visitors read their content and move. Create content using a story format to make it more memorable. Don’t hesitate to use visual content as well, such as graphics, videos, and even gifs. This helps to create more of an immersive experience for the reader.

9. Be truthful

Always verify your facts, especially if you are using statistics. In the age of fake news, the last thing you want is to be labeled as dishonest due to inaccuracies in your content creation.

Digital engagement is an important part of establishing your brand soul and showing your audience that you are much more than just another lifeless corporate entity. These are just a few digital engagement strategies you should consider implementing to help build your brand soul.