What’s Trending in Marketing of April 2024

May 1, 2024/in Advertising, Articles, Attraction Marketing, Brand Development, Consumer Marketing, Digital Media, Directors, Social Media, Trending, Video Marketing /by Stevens and Tate

Step right into our April 2024 edition of “What’s Trending in Marketing,” your portal to the freshest marketing trends and insights. Stay ahead of the curve with our collection of marketing trends and reports for the 2024 year.

Noteworthy Marketing Trends and News

Additions in AI Advertisements

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is making it easier for brands to reach consumers with AI-powered tools. They’re introducing new features to personalize advertising campaigns, like creating multiple versions of ads tailored to individual users. Additionally, they’re offering personalized product recommendations based on what users have browsed and liked. These tools are available on both Facebook and Instagram, aiming to make shopping experiences more seamless and impactful. Read more here.

Brands Values and Their Customers

To keep your customers happy, it’s important for your brand to reflect their values. Most shoppers want brands to share their beliefs, and many have stopped buying from companies whose values clash with their own. To stay connected with customers, brands will focus on showing what they stand for. A survey found that nearly half of marketers plan to invest more in creating content that highlights their brand’s values, with only a small minority decreasing their investment. Read more here.

The Rise of Podcasts

Given the surging popularity of podcasts and online audio, marketers are increasingly recognizing the value and potential of these platforms for reaching and engaging with audiences. In a survey conducted on marketing trends for 2024, 82% of marketers expressed their intentions to either increase or maintain their investment in podcasts and audio content. This signifies a strategic shift in marketing strategies, with more emphasis placed on leveraging the power of audio to connect with consumers in meaningful ways. Overall, the continued growth of podcasts and audio content presents an opportunity for marketers to expand their reach, build brand awareness, and foster deeper connections with their target audience in the evolving digital landscape. Read more here.

Learning Marketing Trends and Ideas

Interactive Email Marketing Trends

To stand out in the competitive online marketing scene, businesses are turning to interactive email strategies. These emails go beyond traditional text and attachments, offering engaging features like animated GIFs, navigational menus, integrated forms, rotational banners, and sliders. Google’s enhanced compatibility ensures seamless viewing across devices, while emerging trends like key frame animation and cinema-graphs add even more excitement. Interactive emails not only catch customers’ attention but also streamline user experience, making them a vital tool in modern marketing strategies. Read more here.

Innovative Video Strategies to Transform Your Senior Living Marketing

Digital technology has revolutionized marketing for senior living communities, offering unprecedented opportunities to engage potential residents and their families. Video content, in particular, is a powerful tool for showcasing community amenities and values. As seniors increasingly embrace digital platforms, mastering video marketing is crucial. Videos can tell authentic stories, educate viewers, and provide virtual tours, all essential for attracting and informing prospective residents. Leveraging digital strategies like SEO optimization and YouTube presence enhances the reach and impact of video marketing efforts, allowing communities to connect meaningfully with their audience and foster trust in the decision-making process. Read more here.

How Brands Market To the Different Generations

Generational marketing targets different age groups based on their unique needs and preferences. Baby boomers value quality and respond well to email and TV ads, while Generation X prioritizes convenience and brand loyalty, engaging with social media and video content. Millennials seek authenticity and personal connection, favoring social media and influencer marketing, while Generation Z prefers an omnichannel approach and values brand ethics and authenticity. Understanding each generation’s characteristics is crucial for tailoring marketing strategies to effectively reach and engage with them. Read more here.

Recent Marketing Trends, Reports, and Updates

Nano- or Micro-Influencer Marketing

More brands are leaning towards collaborating with nano- and micro-influencers instead of celebrities or big social media stars because they charge lower rates and still generate high engagement. Reports show that marketers prefer working with small-scale influencers, with nano-influencers charging between $5 to $25 for a TikTok post and micro-influencers asking for $25 to $125. These smaller influencers also boast higher engagement rates, meaning their followers are more likely to take action based on their recommendations. To ensure a positive return on investment, it’s crucial to collaborate with influencers whose followers match your target audience. Read more here.

Companies in Partnership Marketing

More brands are teaming up with others in their industry because it helps both parties achieve their goals. This collaboration can involve co-producing webinars, appearing on each other’s podcasts, or sharing social media content. For instance, Videowise partnered with other brands to promote their ebook. Partnership marketing allows brands to reach more potential customers by tapping into each other’s audience, connect with industry leaders for insights and assistance, and gain access to valuable resources like customer insights and industry data to enhance marketing campaigns. Read more here.

User-Generated Video Content

We’re likely to see more user-generated video content because potential customers trust it more than highly-produced brand videos. These videos, created by real customers who have used the product or service, carry authenticity that resonates with audiences and increases the likelihood of conversion. To encourage customers to share their experiences, brands can ask for honest reviews, host giveaway contests for video testimonials, or collaborate with creators who can provide genuine opinions in exchange for a fee. This approach saves time, money, and effort compared to creating highly-produced videos from scratch. Read more here.

Inbox Influence: Mastering Email Marketing for Brand Success

April 18, 2024/in Advertising, Articles, Digital, Email Marketing /by marketing intern

Getting your email marketing strategy right can be a game-changer for your business and your brand. Email stands as the cornerstone of direct marketing tactics, offering a personal touch that many other platforms struggle to emulate. The key to success lies in understanding the intricacies of email marketing and leveraging them to your advantage.

The Foundation of a Strong Email Marketing Strategy

Before diving into the nuances, it’s crucial to establish a strong foundation for your email marketing strategy. This involves several pivotal steps:

Understanding Your Audience: Knowing who your emails are targeting is the first step. This involves segmenting your audience based on their preferences, behaviors, and past interactions with your brand.
Crafting a Compelling Subject Line: It’s their first impression. So make your subject line count by being clear, engaging, and intriguing without resorting to clickbait.
Personalization is Key: Tailoring the content of your emails to fit the interests and needs of your recipients can significantly increase engagement rates.

Content That Captivates

Once the foundation is set, the content of your emails is where you can truly shine and make an impact. Here’s how to ensure your content is captivating:

Value-Driven Content: Ensure every email you send packs a punch of value for your audience. This could be in the form of expert insights, exclusive discounts, or compelling narratives that resonate with their interests and needs. Aim to enrich their day or offer solutions to their problems with every interaction.
A Clear and Concise Message: Clarity is king in the realm of email communication. Your email should serve a distinct purpose, whether to enlighten, convince, or amuse your recipients. Craft your content to be straightforward and accessible, eliminating any potential confusion and making the key takeaway immediately apparent.
Interactive Elements: Elevate your emails from static messages to dynamic conversations by embedding interactive features. Polls, surveys, and clickable links not only make your emails more engaging but also serve as tools to gather insightful feedback and preferences directly from your audience, enhancing the personalization of future communications.

Design That Delivers

The design of your email is just as important as the content. A well-designed email can enhance your message and encourage readers to engage with your content.

Responsive Design: In today’s mobile-centric world, it’s crucial that your emails look flawless across all devices, especially smartphones. A significant number of your audience will be reading your messages on the go, so optimizing for mobile ensures a seamless and engaging experience. Responsive design adapts your email’s layout and content to fit various screen sizes, preventing formatting issues that could detract from your message’s impact.
Use of Images and Videos: Integrating images and videos can transform your emails from plain text to captivating narratives, but balance is key. High-quality visuals should complement and enhance your message, not distract or detract from it. Be mindful of file sizes to ensure your emails load quickly, maintaining a smooth user experience and keeping engagement high.
Whitespace and Layout: The strategic use of whitespace and a thoughtful layout can significantly improve the readability and overall appeal of your emails. Whitespace helps to break up text, making your content more digestible and less intimidating, while a well-organized layout guides the reader’s eye through your message, ensuring they focus on the most important elements. This thoughtful design approach can turn a potentially overwhelming email into an enjoyable read.

Testing and Optimization

An effective email marketing strategy is not static; it evolves. Regular testing and optimization are crucial for continued success.

A/B Testing: A/B testing, or split testing, is a critical tool in refining your email marketing strategy. By creating two versions of your email, each differing in one key aspect like the subject line, call-to-action (CTA), or layout, you can send these variants to a small segment of your audience and measure which performs better. This data-driven approach removes guesswork, allowing you to understand your audience’s preferences and optimize future communications for better engagement and results.
Analyze and Adapt: The power of email marketing lies in its measurability. Utilizing analytics tools to monitor the performance of your emails gives you insight into what captures your audience’s attention and prompts action. By examining metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can identify strengths and areas for improvement in your content and CTAs. This continuous cycle of analysis and adaptation ensures your email marketing strategy remains dynamic, responsive to audience needs, and aligned with your overall business goals.

Leveraging Automation

Automation can take your email marketing strategy to the next level. It allows for timely and relevant engagement with your audience without requiring constant manual effort.

Welcome Emails: Crafting an automated series of welcome emails for new subscribers is a pivotal first step in nurturing a lasting relationship with your audience. These initial communications should warmly introduce your brand, highlight the value of your offerings, and set the tone for future interactions. Tailoring this series to gradually educate and engage your new subscribers can significantly enhance their connection with your brand and encourage continued engagement.
Behavior-triggered Emails: Leveraging behavior-triggered emails allows you to send highly relevant and timely messages based on specific actions your users take. For instance, if a user abandons their shopping cart, an automated email can remind them of their incomplete purchase, possibly offering a discount or answering potential questions related to the transaction. Similarly, showing interest in a particular product could trigger an email providing more detailed information or related items, thereby personalizing the user experience and increasing the likelihood of conversion.

The Art of Engagement

In the end, the goal of your email marketing strategy is to build and maintain a relationship with your audience. Engage them with stories, involve them with interactive content, and always provide value. Your emails should feel like a conversation, not a sales pitch.

Beyond the Inbox

To wrap up, perfecting your email marketing strategy is about much more than just sending out emails. It’s about creating a comprehensive experience that starts with a compelling subject line and ends with a satisfied customer. By focusing on your audience, crafting captivating content, designing for impact, testing and optimizing, leveraging automation, and prioritizing engagement, you can turn your email marketing efforts into a significant asset for your brand. Remember, in the vast sea of digital communication, your emails are your ambassadors. Make them count!

Enhancing Creative Output in Your Advertising Strategy

April 18, 2024/in Advertising, Advertising Agency, Articles, Creative & Messaging /by marketing intern

In the fast-paced landscape of advertising, standing out is not only an advantage but a necessity. Achieving higher levels of creativity in advertising can set a brand apart, fostering memorable campaigns and engaging potential customers in meaningful ways. This article explores why elevating creativity is critical, what makes an ad campaign truly unique, and offers practical tips for enhancing creativeness within your advertising team.

The Imperative for Higher Creativity

Creativity in advertising is the catalyst that transforms ordinary ideas into captivating marketing messages. It allows brands to differentiate themselves in a crowded market and connect with audiences on an emotional level. The benefits of increased creativity include:

Differentiation: Creative advertisements cut through the monotony of traditional marketing by presenting something unexpected. These ads stand out vividly against a backdrop of standard content, captivating the viewer’s attention instantly. This not only avoids the trap of blending in but also significantly amplifies your brand’s visibility in a saturated market. The result is a distinctive presence that can dramatically improve market penetration and consumer awareness.
Engagement: Unique and imaginative advertisements capture and maintain the viewer’s attention well beyond the initial viewing. This sustained engagement keeps potential customers focused on your brand for a longer period, enhancing both the impact of the message and its retention. Such engagement is crucial in converting interest into desire and ultimately, action, as it keeps the consumer mentally and emotionally connected to the brand.
Brand Recall: Creativity serves as a key differentiator in advertising, making ads more memorable and setting them apart from the competition. When advertisements are creative, they create lasting impressions that make the brand easier to recall. This is especially important in competitive markets where being top-of-mind can significantly influence consumer purchase decisions. Effective creative ads thus become synonymous with the brand, enhancing recall and loyalty.
Emotional Connection: Ads that are not only innovative but also creatively engaging have the power to resonate more deeply with audiences. By striking an emotional chord, these advertisements go beyond mere visual or auditory appeal to forge a stronger, personal connection with the audience. This emotional engagement not only enhances immediate response rates but also builds longer-term brand affinity and loyalty, driving consumer behavior in a more sustained manner.

Unleashing Uniqueness in Campaigns

To foster uniqueness, consider these strategies:

Challenge the Norm: Encourage your advertising team to critically evaluate and question established industry norms. By challenging conventional approaches and brainstorming unconventional strategies, your team can develop creative campaigns that truly stand out and capture market attention.
Embrace Risk: To achieve groundbreaking creativity in advertising, foster an agency culture that supports and rewards calculated risk-taking. Encourage bold, innovative ideas that may seem daunting at first, as these can lead to the most memorable and effective campaigns.
Leverage Multi-Disciplinary Insights: Enhance your creative processes by integrating diverse skills and perspectives from different fields. This collaboration across disciplines can spark unique ideas and solutions that a single-focus approach might never uncover, leading to richer, more effective advertising outcomes.

Tips for Cultivating Creativity

Improving creativity in advertising isn’t about enforcing more rules but rather about creating an environment that nurtures innovative thinking. Here are some actionable tips:

Regular Creative Workshops: Organize workshops that emphasize not just idea generation but also the development of diverse thinking skills. These sessions should encourage creative problem solving and out-of-the-box thinking, equipping your team with the tools to innovate consistently.
Invest in Creative Tools: Employ a content integration tool that merges data analysis with content creation. This technology facilitates a seamless workflow, enhances productivity, and leads to the generation of fresher, more relevant advertising ideas.
Inspire with External Creatives: Engage creative consultants from outside your agency to infuse new energy and perspective into projects. External creatives can see things your team might miss and bring invaluable insights that radically transform your campaigns.

Incorporating Data and AI

Integrating technology such as AI and data analytics can dramatically enhance creative outputs. These tools provide insights that are not immediately obvious and can predict trends that are about to take off:

Data-Driven Marketing: Utilize data-driven marketing techniques to harness insights into customer behaviors and preferences. This strategic approach enables the crafting of targeted and innovative campaigns that are finely tuned to audience needs, enhancing resonance and engagement.
Transforming Digital Marketing with AI: Implement AI tools to automate routine and repetitive tasks within your marketing processes. This frees up your creative team’s time to concentrate more on strategy development and innovation, thereby enhancing productivity and fostering more creative outcomes.

Elevating Creative Standards

To consistently achieve high levels of creativity in advertising, it’s essential to foster an organizational culture that embraces creativity and to provide the tools and training needed:

Cultural Reinforcement: Actively recognize and celebrate creative achievements within your team to cultivate a culture that values innovation and originality. By highlighting and rewarding creative success, you boost team morale and encourage a continuous pursuit of innovative ideas. This cultural reinforcement helps sustain a high standard of creativity and drives the team to consistently push the boundaries of conventional advertising.
Continual Learning and Development: Encourage your team members to continuously evolve by offering them opportunities to learn new creative skills and adopt the latest technologies. Provide access to training sessions, workshops, and seminars that focus on emerging trends in the advertising industry. This commitment to continual professional development helps keep your team at the cutting edge, ensuring that your advertising strategies remain relevant and effective.

Ready to Innovate?

Increasing creativity in advertising requires commitment at every level of an organization, from junior designers to top executives. It demands a shift towards a more integrated, data-informed, and technologically equipped workflow. By embracing these changes, agencies can ensure that their creative output not only meets but exceeds the demands of modern audiences. This structured approach not only delineates the pathways towards increased creativity but also integrates advanced tools and methodologies that can redefine how creativity in advertising is conceptualized and executed.

To discover how we can help your brand reach unparalleled creative heights, Contact Us for a free consultation.

Emotional Advertising: How Brands Use Feelings to Get People to Buy

September 12, 2023/in Advertising, Articles /by Dan Gartlan

Emotional advertising uses emotions to connect with consumers and encourage them to buy a product or service. This type of advertising appeals to the heart rather than the head, and it can be quite effective in leaving a lasting impact on customers. Informing your audience is important. You want potential buyers to understand what their problem is, and how your products or services can solve that problem. Unfortunately, people don’t generally make purchases based on information alone. It turns out that people are more prone to making emotional purchases than informed purchases. It’s why commercials consist of much more than an explanation of a product’s use. Instead they use emotional advertising to target the viewer.

It’s effective, and it’s why connecting with your audience on an emotional level will benefit your marketing strategy.

The Benefits of Emotional Advertising

Targeting your audience’s emotions through your advertising efforts makes it easier for your audience to connect with your brand on a personal level. Purely informational advertising can be difficult for people to connect with. One of the issues with that kind of advertising is that the audience might remember the information you’ve provided, but not the brand itself.

Connecting to your audience using emotional advertising is important. Whether you’re pulling at their heartstrings or making them laugh, this makes your brand more memorable. Your audience is more likely to trust you if you appeal to their emotions because it makes your brand more relatable. It means that they’re more likely to engage with your brand, resulting in stronger customer loyalty even after you’ve closed the sale.

Not only does emotional advertising make more of an impact on audiences, but it also makes your content more shareable. Nobody is going to share a video or a blog post that is purely informational. However, they will share something they find funny or uplifting. It makes it easier to increase brand awareness.

Examples of Emotional Advertising

The following are just a few examples of how different emotions can be used to connect with your audience:

Happiness
Making an audience feel happy is a good way to develop brand association. It also makes them more likely to share your content. They will want to share that happiness with their friends and family. Coca-Cola has been running campaigns that make audiences feel happy for decades. From their iconic “I’d like to buy the world a coke“ to their “open happiness” tagline, Coca-Cola is a great example of this type of marketing.
Pride
Appealing to your audience’s sense of pride makes them feel good about themselves as well as about your brand. A great recent example is of Nike’s Kaepernick ad, the tagline of which read “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
Fear
You don’t always have to appeal to the emotions people like. In some cases, fear can be a very effective emotion, especially if you’re trying to drive audiences to take immediate action. The WWF created a campaign using fear to drive the importance of stopping climate change. The ad read “Stop Climate Change Before It Changes You” and showed a man with the head of a fish–a terrifying image.
Anger
Anger is an emotion that brands can use to get their audience to side with them over an issue. You’ll notice many political campaigns focus on generating anger for emotional advertising. They highlight aspects of their opponents their audience should be angry about, thereby aligning their audience with them.
Greed
We live in a consumer society. As such, people tend to want the newest and latest of everything. Although greed tends to have a negative connotation, it’s an emotion commonly leveraged by businesses by advertising limited editions and collectible items as well as using short-term promotions and sales. Such a strategy incorporates both greed and fear since people will make a purchase based on both desire and fear of missing out.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business

How To Implement Emotional Advertising

Getting your audience to feel a certain way can be an effective way to engage them. However, eliciting specific emotions can be more challenging than you realize. First of all, just because you’re targeting a certain emotion doesn’t mean that your audience will feel the way you want them to.

Secondly, if you go too far (especially when it comes to anger, fear, and sadness), it can backfire. Your audience could end up becoming upset with you as a result. Take for example Pepsi’s infamous commercial with Kendall Jenner. The idea was to elicit feelings of hope and happiness in the audience. Instead, it resulted in controversy and outrage towards Pepsi.

With that in mind, if you plan to use emotional advertising, you should keep the following tips in mind:

1. Understand Who Your Audience Is

You can’t elicit real emotion from someone unless you know who they are. For example, you can’t just go up to a stranger on the street, tell them a joke, and expect them to laugh. You don’t know what their sense of humor is like, after all. The same goes for advertising. You need to understand who your target audience is. It’s why you should develop buyer personas.

Buyer personas help you pinpoint the fears, needs, desires, and demographics of the various segments of your audience. If you know what their specific fears are, it becomes easier to create ads that leverage those fears. Knowing who your audience is will also make it easier to identify what makes them happy, angry, and sad.

2. Use Storytelling To Create Emotional Engagement

For an audience to feel a lasting emotion, they need context. For example, a picture of a baby might make people feel happy, but they won’t know what they’re happy about. As such, that feeling will be fleeting. However, if you tell a story that provides context, it will make a bigger impact.

For instance, maybe the baby was adopted by a couple who have been trying to have a baby for over a decade. Within that story, you present two main characters (the couple), a conflict (inability to have a baby), and a solution (they adopt). Audiences will relate to those characters and their conflict. As a result, they’ll feel an emotion that they understand and that will last.

3. Make Sure You’re Being Authentic

Nobody likes it when someone is trying to manipulate the way they feel. Audiences are smart and they can see through companies that are inauthentic.

Again, consider the previously mentioned Pepsi ad. Audiences immediately felt that the ad’s message of “can’t we all get along” was inauthentic and tone-deaf, especially at the time it ran. If you want to elicit authentic emotions from your audience, you need to be authentic yourself.

As you can see, emotional advertising can be extremely effective when done right. This means using attraction marketing and story branding ensures your audience will emotionally connect with your brand.