Social media is constantly changing and evolving, so it is crucial for even the most successful brands to reevaluate their strategy from time to time to keep up. Social media helps with attraction marketing. Use these strategies to optimize your social media and to make sure that your brand is constantly staying on top.
Your marketing strategy is not something that you should take lightly. After all, the success of your business, whether it’s big or small, is going to depend on your ability to generate customers. Without effective marketing, it’s going to be very difficult to grow your audience, not to mention your customer base. However, if you do just a little bit of research, you’ll quickly find that there are two main types of marketing: inbound marketing and outbound marketing. The question is, which should you use for your business?
Outbound marketing is the more traditional form of marketing. The main strategy of an outbound marketing campaign is to get your company’s message to an audience that consists of potential customers. For instance, running commercials on TV or radio, placing ads in magazines or newspapers, or putting up billboards outside. These are all forms of outbound marketing. The idea is that people who need your product or service are, hopefully, exposed to your ads and will come to you as a result.
Whereas outbound marketing involves forcing a message to an audience, inbound marketing focuses on putting your business in the position to be found by your audience on their own time. Most inbound marketing efforts are digital. For example, setting up a website and a social presence, writing content aimed at your target audience, and optimizing your content for SEO (search engine optimization). The idea is to make your brand easy for potential customers to find or stumble upon when searching for relevant information online. Once found, you can then nurture them through the sales funnel at their own convenience.
Inbound marketing can also be used in email marketing. Read more here.
Which type of marketing better suits your business is going to depend on various factors, such as what your budget is and what your goals are (are the more short-term or long-term?). However, as a smaller to mid-sized business, inbound marketing is going to be your best bet. It’s much more affordable and allows you to steadily grow your business over the long term. But that doesn’t mean that you should ignore outbound marketing. Outbound can still be incredibly effective, despite the fact that some mistakenly think that it has become obsolete with the advent of inbound.
Outbound marketing tactics can still be incredibly useful. There’s a reason why businesses still run large ad campaigns in magazines or on TV. There’s a reason why it’s so expensive to run a commercial in a 30-second slot during the Super Bowl. That reason is that outbound marketing still works. It’s a great way to increase brand exposure if you know what you’re doing.
Even if you don’t have a massive budget to work with, outbound marketing can still be effective, especially if used in conjunction with your inbound marketing strategy. After all, you can use outbound to market your online presence. For example, you can put your website or social media handles up at the end of your commercials, on your print ads, or on your billboards. You can even put QR codes on your print ads that people can scan with their smartphones.
The primary reason why advertising your inbound efforts on your outbound efforts is so effective is that most people are using a smartphone, tablet, or laptop while they are watching TV — or have one on hand when they pass by a billboard or are flipping through a magazine.
There’s no reason to choose just one. Both inbound marketing and outbound marketing strategies have their pros and cons. Inbound tends to be a more long-term strategy, while outbound is more short-term. As such, using them together allows you to run a more comprehensive omni-channel marketing strategy. The more complete your marketing efforts are, the greater the odds of success will be.
Year after year, marketing videos grow in importance. Video has never been easier to consume for Americans, especially when considering the increasing quality of smartphones and tablets. Video is also the easiest way for people to absorb information. Additionally, according to a prediction by Zenith, the average person will spend around 100 minutes a day watching videos in 2021. The pandemic certainly had an impact on these numbers as well. People have more time on their hands to watch video content, especially those who have switched to a work-at-home environment.
Because of this increase in video consumption, a video marketing strategy is an absolute must. The following are some of the different types of marketing videos that you should consider producing this year.
Educational videos should be used to help inform your audience about a particular subject. No video marketing strategy will be successful without them. This is because the more informed your audience is, the more confident they will be in making a purchasing decision down the road. Educational videos provide them with the knowledge they need to understand your business and the solutions you offer. There are several types of educational videos, including:
When is the Best Time to Post on Social Media?
Interviews are an excellent way to provide detailed information about certain subjects to your audience while also providing a personality to engage with. You can film interviews with both employees and upper management as well as experts that are relevant to your industry. What’s great about interview videos is that they are incredibly easy to produce.
Certain events, like industry tradeshows, conferences, fundraisers, and round table discussions, can reveal a wealth of information. Film these events and edit them into event videos for your audience to enjoy.
These types of videos focus on customers and their experiences using your product or service. Not only can you use them as social proof that your products or services work, but they make it easier to build trust with your audience. Potential customers are much more likely to relate to and believe what previous customers have said, after all. Using case studies and testimonial videos, you give customers the chance to explain what their challenges were and how your product or service solved those challenges.
A big part of creating a successful brand identity is presenting your company as being relatable. You don’t want your audience to think of you as a big faceless corporation, after all. Creating videos that depict your company behind the scenes is a great way to do this. It shows that there’s a human element behind the business. There are tons of ways to go about creating behind-the-scenes videos. A video of the day-in-the-life of the typical employee or a video of the manufacturing process of a product are great examples.
These are five different types of marketing videos you should consider creating in 2021. As you develop your video marketing strategy, remember that the quality of your content matters — and so does the audience that you’re creating it for. Always keep viewers in mind to ensure that your video marketing efforts are relevant.
Developing your brand is essential to your ability to attract new leads and convert new customers. The more recognizable your brand becomes, the easier it will become to generate brand trust and to build your audience. For instance, if a consumer is searching for a specific solution and they find two or three options, one of which is from a brand they recognize, they will typically gravitate towards that brand. As such, recognizability is crucial. With that in mind, the following are five ways that you can improve brand recognition this year:
If you can’t recognize who your audience is, you can’t expect them to recognize your brand. All of your branding strategies and decisions depend on who you’re trying to reach. A company’s worth is highly reliant on whether or not they provide solutions that meet the needs or solve the problems of its customers. If you’re targeting people who have no need for your solutions, then those who do are going to be confused about your brand. The more you understand who your audience is, the more likely you’ll be able to build a brand that they will be able to recognize.
You need to be clear about what your objectives are as a brand. This includes your mission, your vision, and your purpose. Think about how Apple’s message is about innovation and creating technology that’s not only user-friendly but essential to a creative and independent lifestyle. This message is clear because Apple has developed and promoted its message since the 1980s. If your message isn’t clear, consumers become confused. An unclear message can send the wrong message, thereby hurting your brand’s recognizability. 
Your brand identity involves a lot of different elements. The most obvious is the logo. If your brand becomes strong enough, a unique logo can be recognized even if your company name isn’t part of it. Take for example Nike’s swoosh. Everybody knows that the swoosh is Nike even if their name doesn’t accompany the logo. Although the visual connection of the logo is important, it’s not the only component of your brand identity. The tone of voice you use in your content, the reputation you have, and the brand storytelling you use to deliver your message are all vital to building a strong brand identity.
Consistency is key to making your brand recognizable. If your message varies from one platform to another, people are going to get confused about who you are. For example, if you run a clothing company and you position yourself as a luxury clothing brand on Instagram but then promote affordable shoe wear on Facebook, people won’t know what you are or who you’re targeting, making it more difficult to recognize your brand.
Additionally, the aesthetic of your brand and the tone of voice should be consistent over all channels. Use the same colors and logos on every platform. Do not change the tone of your brand to try and fit the channel you’re using. If you use an excited, informal tone on one channel, don’t use a formal, level-headed tone on the other. If you switch tones, people won’t recognize that you’re the same brand using both channels. Consistency across all of your marketing efforts is essential to building a strong brand that’s recognizable across all channels.
Even if you’ve spent a lot of time crafting your brand, you still need to build awareness to boost recognizability. This is where your marketing efforts come into play. You need to figure out where and when you can reach your target audience, as well as what marketing efforts will help to effectively deliver your message and spread brand awareness. Such efforts will not succeed overnight — you need to develop a comprehensive long-term branding strategy to successfully boost your brand recognition.
Building your brand is crucial to your company’s success. Even if your brand has been established for some time, brand development should never stop. You should always look for ways to increase brand awareness, and improving brand recognition is necessary to do just that. As such, you should consider implementing these effective strategies to improve brand recognition in 2021.
In 2021, food brands should be targeting Millennials with their advertisements, however the traditional media avenues are not as effective in reaching this younger generation of consumers.
Millennials consume advertisements through technology because it is so integrated into their lives, with 81 percent using televisions, 76 percent using laptops, 40 percent iPhones, and 48 percent using desktop computers. Read more
When it comes to marketing, many businesses focus on trying to attract as big of an audience as possible. The more awareness you generate, the more potential customers you’ll have, after all. However, it’s crucial that you don’t skip a step when it comes to generating leads. Just because your marketing efforts have successfully attracted new leads doesn’t mean that they’ll automatically convert into sales. Most of the leads you generate will need to be nurtured before they’ll convert into customers. As such, no inbound marketing campaign is going to be complete if you don’t implement a comprehensive lead nurturing strategy.
People who discover your brand are going to be doing so at various points of the sales funnel. Everyone is going to be in a different place. For instance, some leads will be in the awareness stage, which means that they are still doing research about their problem. Others may be in the consideration stage, which means that they are looking for solutions to their problem. Then there are those that are in the decision stage, which means that they are comparing solutions from various brands and are in the process of making a purchasing decision.
Lead nurturing is all about meeting the needs of your leads. The goal is to present them with the information and guidance that they need to move through the sales funnel. However, lead nurturing is also about building a relationship through your marketing and communication efforts that not only educates leads and builds trust with your brand, thereby creating a connection that lasts beyond the first sale.
Lead nurturing is an important aspect of marketing. Read more here.
It’s not just about moving your leads through the sales funnel so that you can close a sale. The following are a few of the additional benefits of a strong lead nurturing strategy:
The following are a few tips on how you can successfully nurture your leads through the sales funnel:
Effective lead nurturing is the best way to increase your chances of converting new leads into customers. It’s also important to note that it is essential to building long-term relationships with your customers. The more time and effort you put into developing leads, the more likely they’ll be to return as repeat customers.
The success of digital marketing has been noted for some time now. Every business has some sort of digital marketing strategy. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital marketing became even more effective than ever before. People were essentially trapped inside for more than a year, which means they spend significantly more time online. As a result, they became easier to reach via digital marketing efforts. However, as the pandemic comes to an end, cities will eventually begin opening back up. Knowing this, it’s critical that you begin planning an out-of-home advertising strategy.
Out of home advertising refers to any advertisements posted outside, where countless people will see it. The more people walk or drive by out-of-home ads, the more exposure your brand receives. Obviously, out-of-home advertising was nowhere near as effective during the pandemic as it once was since everybody stayed inside. There are lots of examples of out-of-home advertising — billboards are one of the most common types. Billboards also include murals, posters, and junior posters. Billboards can be both paper and digital as well.
Is Newspaper Marketing still Valid?
In-home advertising, such as digital marketing, TV commercials, radio ads, and the like, are often preferred by businesses (especially smaller to mid-sized businesses). However, you should strongly consider out-of-home advertising as well. While the pandemic undoubtedly hurt the relevance of out-of-home ads, people will be looking to get out and about post-pandemic. As cities open up and people make an effort to spend more time outside, there will be more opportunities to reach them using out-of-home advertising. If that’s not reason enough to begin planning an out of home advertising strategy, consider the following benefits:
For instance, placing your outdoor ad in a location that has a lot of pedestrian traffic will ensure that it’s seen by a lot of people.
When it comes to successful out-of-home advertising, it’s crucial that you know your audience. If you know who you’re trying to reach, then you can determine where the best place to reach them is. For example, if you’re advertising a high-end luxury product, placing a poster for it at a bus stop in a lower-income neighborhood doesn’t make much sense. Instead, it would be more effective if you put it up in an area of town where there are multiple luxury stores in operation. This way, the customers of those stores will see your ad.
In addition to understanding the audience you’re trying to reach, you will also need to figure out the best placement
for your ads. An ad displayed on the side of a building where it’s difficult for nearby pedestrians to see is going to be ineffectual. You’ll want to make sure you know where the ad is going to be placed and where it will be visible.
Finally, the message is very important. Just because people see your ad as they walk by doesn’t mean that they will remember it. Make the messaging and branding clear. Try to make the ad as memorable as possible. People who see clever or memorable ads while they are waiting in traffic will often share them on social media.
As the pandemic nears the end, consumers are going to be making up for lost time by going out, whether they’ll be heading into the city on a night out, going to the park, or traveling to see friends and relatives that they haven’t seen for a long time. Knowing this, there is going to be a huge opportunity to reach a bigger audience using out-of-home advertising.
Inbound marketing focuses heavily on increasing brand awareness and building brand trust. As such, people sometimes confuse inbound marketing strategies with public relations (PR) strategies. After all, public relations is about maintaining the integrity of your brand. However, they are actually different from one another — although they do depend heavily on each other for success. The following is a breakdown of the differences between inbound marketing and PR and how they can work together.
Inbound marketing is a multi-faceted strategy that consists of a range of tactics for promoting products and services as well as for educating consumers. The ultimate goal of inbound marketing is to attract and convert more leads in order to generate more customers. The goal of PR isn’t to generate and convert leads and customers. The goal of PR is to maintain and improve the public perception of your brand. Basically, a good PR strategy will help you build a favorable reputation. Unlike inbound, PR focuses as much on targeting shareholders and employees as it does on potential and existing consumers or clients.
Trust is vital to your ability to convert new leads. The more brand trust you generate, the easier it becomes to close new sales. As such, a good PR strategy can supplement your inbound strategy. When it comes to PR, it’s not just about putting out good publicity and improving your reputation — it’s also about preventing a bad reputation.
PR requires that you get on top of situations that can damage your rep. For instance, if customers are leaving bad feedback on your social media pages, you can’t just ignore it or it will hurt your public perception. As part of a successful PR strategy, you would address poor feedback. Show that your brand cares about the experience of its customers. In fact, if you handle such feedback effectively, you could even turn it into a win that actually boosts your brand trust.
PR also includes publishing notices about new products and services, or about upcoming events. These announcements double as promotional content for your business. This can pique the interest of your target audience, thereby bolstering your inbound marketing capabilities.
The following are a few of the public relations (PR) strategies that can go a long way towards improving your inbound marketing efforts:
A good PR strategy can help you control the public perception of your brand, thereby ensuring that you maintain a good reputation. Such a reputation is vital to building brand trust and, as such, can help to bolster your inbound marketing efforts.
There are many benefits to working with a professional marketing agency, no matter how big your business is. A marketing agency can help develop, execute, monitor, and analyze your marketing strategy, thereby assisting in the growth of your company. As a direct result, you’ll also reduce the amount of time, money, and resources you need to throw at your marketing efforts, allowing you to focus on other business-related tasks instead.
However, it’s critical that you build a close working relationship with your agency. You’re entrusting them with your company’s future success, after all. You’ll want to make sure that they’re tailoring your strategy to meet your company’s needs. Keep in mind that a strong relationship is one that both sides work to develop. As such, the following are a few important elements of a successful client-agency relationship that you should be aware of:
An agency needs to know exactly what you’re expecting from them, both in terms of what services they are providing and what metrics you’re expecting them to achieve. If you don’t lay out your expectations from the get-go, then they won’t know whether they’re on the right track. You should establish milestones and standards. On top of that, make it clear that you expect clear communication and transparency so that if there are any issues, the agency will share them with you and explain their course of action. Otherwise, they may just go at it alone without your input.
Read more to learn about the importance of hiring an advertisement agency.
Any relationship, whether in the business world or not, relies on open communication to work. Make yourself available to the agency if they ever have questions or if there are ever any issues. Request the same of them. You’ll want to be able to reach your team leader with ease if there is anything you want to discuss or if you have any questions that need answering. It’s a good idea to have points of contact in place so that both sides know who to reach.
By demonstrating that you expect clear communication, you’ll also make the agency more comfortable in knowing that they can reach out when needed. There are many businesses that will just leave the agency to their own devices and who won’t want to be bothered. Additionally, some agencies may operate in the same way. However, this is a poor way to manage what should be a long-term relationship.
An agency needs to understand what you’re looking to achieve with your marketing, both in terms of short-term and long-term goals. It also helps to understand what your business goals are so that your marketing strategy can reflect that. If you withhold information such as this, it
will be more difficult for the agency to tailor your strategy to your specific needs. In fact, monitoring and evaluating marketing performance will become much more difficult as a result.
Establish from the outset that you expect the agency to provide feedback when needed. This way, if you’re not providing the information that your marketing team needs or you’re not getting back to them quickly enough, they will actually let you know. As a result of straightforward feedback, you can not only strengthen your relationship over time, you can keep it from deteriorating (which will only hurt your marketing efforts). The same goes for your side: if the agency’s marketing efforts are not meeting expectations, you need to let them know. You may even want to consider implementing a mutual evaluation at specific dates.
Don’t think of an agency as a service provider. Instead, think of them as a partner. After all, their success relies on your success. If you go into the relationship with the idea that you’re partners, you’ll be much more likely to find yourself on the same page as the agency you’re working with. By treating the relationship as a partnership, the agency will have greater success meeting your company’s specific needs.
These are the factors that contribute to a strong relationship between a business and a marketing agency. It’s important that if you outsource your marketing to an agency that they make an effort to develop a trusting relationship with you; however, remember that a good relationship depends on both sides. As such, you need to meet them halfway for the partnership to be a fruitful one. Here at Stevens & Tate, we pride ourselves in not just the work we do, but the relationships that we build with all of our clients.
While senior citizens are not the only audience that senior living facilities market to, it can’t be denied that they make up a massive percentage of their audience. As such, to grow and succeed, you must market to this part of your audience. It’s also important to note that different parts of your audience will react differently to various marketing efforts. When it comes to senior living marketing, we can’t overstate how important it is to use visual aids. Visual aids can greatly improve your ability to communicate with senior citizens, especially when you consider how effective they are in their daily use.
Verbal communication tends to become more difficult as a person ages. Many healthcare providers understand that effective verbal communication requires the addition of visual cues. There are many reasons for this. Some senior citizens are simply hard of hearing, making verbal communication more difficult. Some have difficulty understanding the main message due to memory issues or other problems. Visual cues can be used to enforce a message or tone.
In real-world conversations, visual cues can include smiling, using eye contact, nodding, and using hand gestures. These visual cues also show that you’re engaged, which will make them more engaged.
Read more here to learn about how to market to senior citizens.
Reading long walls of text can bring up a lot of challenges for senior citizens. They may have some difficulty following along due to memory issues or simply because they aren’t familiar with some of the terminology or slang being used (which is why it’s so important to write with your audience in mind). Fortunately, you can make it a lot easier to get your message across through the use of visual aids. The following are a few examples of how visual aids can be effectively used:
Visual aids can go a long way towards getting your message across to a senior audience as well as to help evoke emotions. However, having visual aids isn’t going to be enough to sell your message or convey certain emotions. You need to use visual aids smartly and in a way that’s impactful. Senior audiences may have some trouble with their eyesight or may have some memory limitations, but that doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent – don’t make the mistake of dumbing your senior living marketing efforts down. Senior citizens are nothing if not smart and won’t take kindly to marketing efforts that offend them.
