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Advertising Trends That Will Catch On In 2019

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A lot of new–and effective–advertising trends caught on this year, many of which you should consider looking into. However, it’s always important to keep track of the latest advertising trends even if some of them come and go. Advertising trends that pop up could end up being perfect for your specific marketing needs, and they are a good way to judge which direction marketing is going in general. Keeping that in mind, the following are a few advertising trends we expect to see in 2019:

A Bigger Emphasis On Voice Search

Personal assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, are growing in popularity because they are making life much more convenient for people. The technology of voice search has also grown exponentially over the past few years. This has led to almost a third of the 3.5 billion searches being performed on Google every day being voice searches. Because of this, it’s important that you begin building your SEO strategy with voice search in mind this upcoming year.

A Return To Print Marketing

Despite what some believe, digital marketing hasn’t completely killed off print marketing. In fact, it turns out print marketing still has an important place in the marketing world. As consumer email inboxes overflow with unopened emails, savvy businesses are using print marketing (such as flyers and newsletters) to reach their audience. Using print marketing to compliment your digital marketing is the smartest way to go.

Does Direct Marketing Have A Role In Inbound Marketing?

video marketing trendsInternet Watching Will Catch Up To TV Watching

Recent studies have predicted that the number of hours of video watched per day online will catch up to TV in 2019. This means that looking for ways to reach those audiences (such as on streaming sites) should be a part of your marketing strategy.

 

Micro-Moments Will Become More Important

Micro-moments are those small moments in which a person quickly looks something up online but doesn’t spend a whole lot of time doing so. For example, looking up an actor in a movie whose name they can’t remember during a discussion, or trying to find the nearest burger joint. On average, users experience roughly 150 micro-moments a day. Businesses will be paying more attention to these micro-moments in order to fulfill the needs of their target audience.

Visual Search Will Advance

At the moment, search queries are limited to text. However, this will soon change. It won’t be long until people will be able to perform visual searches by taking pictures of things with their phones. In fact, Google presented the work its done on visual search so far just this year in the form of Google Lens. Once visual search is implemented (the technology is still being developed), consumers will be able to take a photograph of a piece of furniture in order to find something similar on sale via visual search.

These are a few of the advertising trends that we predict will catch on this upcoming year. Be sure to keep these in mind as you begin developing your 2019 marketing strategies.

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5 Ways to Align Sales and Marketing in 2019

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One of the biggest challenges when running a business is making sure that you align sales and marketing with one another. It’s surprising how many companies have marketing and sales departments that never interact, leading to all kinds of inefficiencies within the marketing and sales processes due to a lack of communication. To help prevent this from happening, the following are a few ways that you can align sales and marketing this year:

1. Make Sure The Same Terminology Is Being Used

In order for your sales team to be able to take advantage of all the documents and data that your marketing team shares with them, they will need to be familiar with the terminology being used. A lack of familiarity with common terms used by marketing personnel can cause some serious misunderstandings.

For example, your marketing team may have different terms used for leads at different stages of the buyer’s journey. If your sales team doesn’t know this, they may waste resources on leads that weren’t ready to engage or miss out on leads that were. For instance, if your marketing personnel considers leads to be different than prospects but your sales team thinks they’re the same thing, you’re going to have a problem.

2. Force Marketing And Sales Personnel To Meet Regularly

In many companies, marketing and sales personnel are barely aware of one another. They might as well be foreign concepts. If you want to align marketing and sales, then you need them to be more familiar with one another. Hold weekly meetings where they can get to know each other. Discuss some of the challenges that each department has in respect to one another to try and do a little problem solving while everyone is there. If you have these meetings regularly, your sales and marketing personnel will get to know each other better and be more comfortable around each other.

This is important because it means that not only will someone from sales or marketing feel more comfortable about reaching out to someone on the opposite side for help or to provide advice, but they’ll actually know who to reach out to. Such clear lines of communication are going to benefit both your marketing and sales departments and will greatly reduce instances of miscommunication.

6 Effective Call To Action Examples

3. Align Your Marketing And Sales Goals

The most effective way to make sure your marketing goals and sales goals are aligned is by creating an SLA (sales level agreement). The SLA should outline what the goals are for each department so that everyone is aware of what everyone else is attempting to achieve. An SLA also clearly defines the roles of each department in the lead generation process.

4. Coordinate Content Strategy Between Marketing And Sales

Your content strategy is a big part of your marketing efforts. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to just leave the content strategy up to your marketing team without consulting your sales team. Encourage your marketing team to get together with sales in order to discuss your content strategy. There are two reasons you should do this:

  1. Your sales team can inform them about certain promotional events or products/services they’re going to push, which allows your marketers to create content that’s more aligned with that strategy.
  2. Your sales team can inform marketing what kind of content they tend to use in order to nurture leads. In cases where marketing and sales don’t work together, marketing often develops content that’s never used by sales, which is a waste of resources.

5. Use Effective Marketing Solutions That Improve Collaboration And Communication

There are a number of tools you should integrate into your marketing strategy that will help align sales and marketing. For example, a CRM solution, such as HubSpot CRM, provides a centralized location where both marketing and sales personnel can monitor customer data and interactions. Additionally, automation tools such as lead scoring can be very helpful in bridging gaps in communication. Lead scoring allows marketers to automatically assign scores to leads based on their actions. Sales personnel can then use these scores to identify high quality leads to engage with.

By using these methods to align sales and marketing, you’ll help to reduce the miscommunication and inefficiencies that often plague the lead nurturing and sales processes. If your sales and marketing departments are isolated from each other, make sure that you implement a strategy to align your sales and marketing this year.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Preparing Your Marketing Strategy for 2019

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Successful marketing is based on your ability to continuously improve your efforts on a year by year basis. This means that now that 2018 has come to an end, you’ll want to take into account the previous year’s marketing successes and failures as well as new trends and needs when preparing your marketing strategy for 2019. The following are the steps that you should take to do just that:

1. Review your 2018 marketing strategy and tactics

Start by looking back at what your marketing goals were for 2018 and whether or not you were able to achieve them. Take a careful look at the various tactics that you implemented to determine which ones had a positive effect on the achievement of your goals and which ones fell short. You should use what you’ve learned to craft your new marketing strategy.

2. Review who your target audience iscompetitive advantage

Odds are you already have a good idea of who your target audience is, especially if you believe that your marketing efforts in 2018 were successful overall. However, audiences change over time. Make sure that you review your target audience and your buyer personas. You’ll want to make sure that you know exactly who you’re trying to reach as this will help to drive the different tactics that you implement this year (such as your content strategy and your social strategy).

3. Create new SMART goals for the year

You can’t have a marketing strategy without marketing goals or else you’ll have no idea whether your strategy is performing successfully or not. To make sure that you can judge the performance of your goals, make sure that they are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). You can use what you’ve learned about the previous year’s goals (whether you achieved them or not and how realistic they were) to create this year’s.

5 Examples for Great Social Media Branding

4. Determine how you will achieve those goals

Once you’ve set your goals, begin coming up with ideas for how you can achieve them. You may want to reuse some of the same tactics you used last year, especially if they were effective. Those that did not work need to be replaced by new tactics. A good way to brainstorm new tactics is by looking at some of the recent marketing trends as well as marketing tactics suggestions made by industry professionals for this year.

5. Establish your marketing budgetmarketing strategy

Make sure that you establish your budget and take note of your resources before you begin creating your marketing plan. You may not be able to implement all of the tactics you’ve thought of–at least not right away, which means you’ll need to prioritize your strategy.

6. Create your marketing plan

Once you’ve taken into account your budget, begin crafting your marketing plan. One of the best ways to do this is by dividing the year into months and listing what new tactics you want to implement on a month by month basis and which ones you want to continue throughout the year. This gives you a visual representation of all of the marketing activities you’re committing to every month that will give you an idea of whether it’s realistic or not.

7. Execute your marketing strategy

There’s no point in having a marketing plan if you don’t execute it. Schedule the different marketing activities that you’ve planned out so that you can follow your plan throughout the year.marketing strategy

8. Continually review your marketing strategy throughout the year

Don’t just blindly follow your marketing plan if it’s obviously failing. One of the huge benefits of inbound marketing is that you can make use of analytics to track the performance of various tactics, using your goals as benchmarks. If something’s not working, find a way to adjust your efforts or replace it with a different tactic so that you’re not wasting valuable resources. This ensures that your plan is not only effective, but efficiently executed as well.

Use these steps to learn from the success and failures of the previous year’s marketing efforts to put into place an effective marketing strategy that will achieve your goals in 2019.

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What’s Trending for January 2019

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Staying up to date with all the latest marketing trends is a great way to keep your marketing efforts fresh and to find new tactics that can help improve your overall marketing strategy. That’s why every month we like to share some of the latest marketing trends so that you can see what’s new. The following are some of the marketing trends that have been catching on lately.

Noteworthy Marketing News

YouTube Ad Campaigns Begin Targeting TV Screens

Although mobile is the dominant platform for YouTube views, more and more people are watching YouTube on their TVs. YouTube is extending their ad campaigns onto TV devices to provide advertisers with greater reach. AdWords API capabilities for TV targeting will be accessible to advertisers beginning on January 8. For more information about these new TV screen targeting capabilities, read Marketing Land’s recent article on the subject.

YouTube Phasing Out CTA Overlays In Favor Of New Ad Extensions

YouTube will begin offering their new ad extension for TrueView in-stream ads and will eventually offer them for bumper ads as well as TrueView video discover ads. Although a minor change, the CTA ad extensions will be able to be applied to new and existing overlays, whereas overlays are created as part of the ad. For more detail, read Ginny Marvin’s write-up on YouTube’s switch to CTA ad extensions at Marketing Land.

HubSpot Reorienting Itself As Platform Vendor

HubSpot has long been known as a product suite, but that’s changing soon as it realigns itself as a platform vendor. Following HubSpot’s recent partnership with AWS, HubSpot is planning to become a platform that will support an increasing population of apps that support interactions with HubSpot. Read more about HubSpot’s shift at Martech Today.

Improving Your Marketing Program

We recently published a blog post reviewing some of the most effective marketing trends of 2018, including a focus on brand, authenticity, social change, and omnichannel marketing. Learn more about these 2018 marketing trends and how you can implement them into your marketing efforts in 2019 by reading Terry Becker’s post.

Clutch.co! Names Stevens and Tate Top Ad Agency in 2018

Here at Stevens and Tate, we have earned recognition for our marketing expertise for almost three decades. In 2018, we were named the top ad agency by Clutch, a third-party company that ranks B2B service providers on a yearly basis. Find out what Clutch had to say about our services by checking out the announcement on our blog.

Top 5 Marketing Tactics You Should Use in 2019

As you review your marketing strategy and prepare for the new year, you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your efforts. In this article, we go over five marketing tactics that you should make sure to implement into your marketing campaign if you haven’t done so already, including adding chatbots, producing video content, creating user-generated content, and more.

Why TV Advertising Remains Effective

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Three View Behaviors Common On YouTube in 2018

If you’re using YouTube as part of your marketing efforts, then tracking how your users behave is an important part of figuring out how to best engage them. Three of the most common YouTube user behaviors of 2018 include viewing content exploring alternative and minimalist lifestyles, searching for inspiration, and searching for a way to connect. For more details into the behavior of YouTube users in 2018, read Gina Shalavi’s article on the subject.

The Return Of Trust In Media

Trust in media has been on the downslope since the late 1970s, reaching an all-time low in 2016. However, new studies show that the media is regaining the trust of the general public, in part due to a focus on transparency that includes attempts by journalists to defend their work, better fact-checking partnerships, and more. Learn more about how the media has become more transparent and has regained the public’s trust by checking out Sara Fischer’s article on Axios.

10 Agency Pros Explain How Their Workflow Was Improved By AIartificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence continues to develop at a rapid pace to the point where it’s starting to become commonplace. Businesses across the world are using AI to help improve the efficiency of their workflow. Find out how by reading the Forbes article in which ten agency pros describe in detail how AI has helped them to improve their workflows.

 

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

Starting 2019 Strong: A third award from Clutch

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Over the course of 2018, our partnership with Clutch has been a close one. We’ve worked with this leading ratings and reviews firm to collect client feedback and gain insight on what we do best and, more importantly, what we could do better.

So far, this close partnership and our tight client relationships have helped us earn a place on two of Clutch’s awards lists. Now, we’re finishing 2018 with a final award as the Clutch team announces the top design and branding agencies across their platform. We couldn’t be more grateful to our clients who have taken the time to speak with Clutch about our work together, giving the platform the proof they needed to rank Stevens & Tate among the top.

Your Company’s Core Values Play a Role in Developing Your Brand Story

As we look to the next year, we’re confident that our client relationships will become more close-knit than ever, and we’ll maintain the same unique approach to every client challenge that has earned us a place as one of the top advertising agencies in Chicago and beyond.

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PPC landing pages

A Year In Review: Advertising Trends of 2018

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The year is almost coming to an end, which makes it the perfect time to take a look at some of the most popular advertising trends that caught on in 2018. The following are not only some of the most popular advertising trends of the year, but also some of the most effective ones that you may want to continue implementing into the new year.

1. Focusing On The Brandbrand development process

Businesses are switching their marketing efforts to focus more on their brand than on their products and for good reason–focus on the brand will never become outdated, whereas product messaging will become outdated the moment you release a new product. Not to mention that by focusing on the brand, it will be easier to sell products and services, whereas focusing on a single product or service will not have that domino effect. By focusing on your brand, you can establish yourself as being more relatable to your customers. This is a challenge if you’re just focusing on marketing products.

2. Being Authentic

Trying to appeal to your audience by being something you’re not simply doesn’t work anymore. Audiences are smart and they can tell whether or not you’re being authentic. They can sniff out a company that’s trying way too hard to be cool and to win over an audience. Being inauthentic is going to turn off your audience, not to mention potentially make your brand look dishonest.

Content Marketing Trends to Track in 2018

3. Embracing Social Change

It wasn’t long ago that businesses shied away from any kind of social issue (or anything that could be viewed as political) in fear that they might alienate part of their customer base. However, it turns out that by taking a stand for what you believe in, you’re more likely to strengthen your relationship with your audience. And even if you lose some customers as a result, odds are you’ll gain just as many for the same reason. A great example of a company embracing social change is Nike and their Colin Kaepernick ad.

4. Omni-Channel Marketing

There are a lot of marketing channels that you can use to reach your audience. However, picking and choosing one channel and focusing on it shouldn’t be the extent of your strategy. Businesses are leveraging multiple channels of marketing and using them to compliment one another in what’s called omni-channel marketing.

Examples of this include promoting content on your website via your social media channels. These channels don’t need to be within the same type of marketing format either. Many businesses are crossing their inbound and outbound channels. For example, it’s not uncommon for a business to promote their social media presence on the commercials they’re running on TV. This kind of cross-channel promotion helps improve the effectiveness of your reach.

These were some of the biggest advertising trends of 2018. While they are called “trends” they are legitimate marketing strategies that should remain effective well into 2019, making them worth considering as a part of your future marketing campaigns.

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

Stevens and Tate Named Top Ad Agency in 2018 By Clutch.co!

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Whether you’re looking for a commercial or a full on marketing campaign, our team at Stevens and Tate has been offering the best solutions to our partners since our start in 1992. As a B2B service company, we recognize that our success stems from the success of our partners, and that is why we aim to deliver exactly what our clients need in order to boost their business. It is because of our client-focused mentality that our firm has caught the attention of ratings and review firm Clutch, who has ranked us as a leading marketing agency!

What is Clutch?

Clutch is an unbiased, third party company that provides rankings for B2B service providers in order to help companies who are looking for compatible partners. The rankings they give businesses like ours are derived primarily from work they have done with their past partners. Clutch contacts their past clients directly to hear their feedback and the experience that they had. On our review page, Clutch provided our ratings and the testimonials from our partner companies!

Here are only a few of the things that they have had to say about working with us:

  • “They’re a team of professionals that know how to communicate effectively.” – Owner, Grocery Store

  • “I cannot find another agency that matches their quality and their rates in equal measure – Division President, Real Estate Firm

  • “They understand our company and they understand our brand.” – VP of Marketing, Food Production Company

In addition to being highlighted on the Clutch website, our work has also been featured on their sister-website, The Manifest, where we are ranked in the top 30 advertising and marketing companies! This database provides industry reports and trends in rising companies in their respective fields, and serves as a tool that breaks down the top companies within their industries.

marketing-make-or-breakOver the years, we have had the opportunity to work with clients of all shapes and sizes! Whether their market is retail, healthcare, or the food industry, we help companies brand themselves and engage their customers effectively. Our diverse portfolio allows us to think outside of the box for our clients. It also has given us the ability to reach any market.

When working with our partners, we offer unique solutions that are tailored to their business specifically. We offer a multitude of services from branding, SEO, PPC, web design, and basic advertising. Our speciality is forming a strategy that helps your business grow and captures the attention of your customers!

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Creating Successful Holiday Marketing Campaigns

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Businesses tend to put extra effort into their advertising campaigns during the holiday season. While this is in part because people are buying gifts for one another, which means that there’s a general spike in sales, it’s also because Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become national institutions in themselves, a time when people search out great deals for things that they want. Because almost every business big and small offers deals at this time of the year in order to attract customers, stepping up your advertising efforts is the only way you’re going to stand out from the crowd.

4 Examples Of Successful Holiday Marketing Campaigns

The following are a four examples of some of the holiday marketing campaigns that have stood out over the past few years:

1) Coke

Coke put a twist on their famous “Share a Coke” ad campaign by running a holiday campaign that showed people sharing a coke instead of fighting over products at a mall. This ad works well because not only are people already familiar with the basis of the campaign, but they can also relate to fighting the crowds to get what they want before it sells out.

2) HotelTonight

The online hotel booking site’s clever campaign was headlined by the slogan “Visit, Don’t Stay.” This refers to how family members often visit one another and generally get into arguments or on each other’s nerves due to the holiday stress. Instead of staying with their family, they can stay at a hotel and simply “visit” their family.

3) John Lewis & Partners

John Lewis & Partners released their “Boy and his piano” commercial featuring Elton John this year that quickly went viral. It showed Elton John playing a song as the camera speeds through time, showing John as a younger and younger musician performing in front of huge crowds, finally settling on a version of him as a young boy getting a piano for Christmas. This ad is effective because of its use of a celebrity, its message of how a gift can change someone’s life (making it relevant to the holiday season), and in creating a feeling of nostalgia. The ad was particularly effective in that it did not specifically promote a product or sale, relying on its message to be its call-to-action.

5 Holiday Email Templates for Salespeople

4) McDonald’s

McDonald’s has used a variation of a campaign in which Santa stops by for a bite to eat at McDonald’s during his Christmas run for years now. But this year, McDonald’s stepped it up by making their ad campaign more interactive. For example, Spapchat users can play a game that makes them look like a reindeer and that requires them to catch as many falling carrots as they can.

5 General Tips For Your Holiday Marketing Campaign

Use these five tips to craft a marketing campaign that will help you stand out during the busy holiday season:

1) Make your ads holiday-themed

This one’s obvious, but find a way to tie your product or service into the holidays. The previously mentioned ads are great examples of how this can be done.

2) Use nostalgia

People often feel sentimental during the holidays, which means that using nostalgia is an effective way to make an emotional connection.

3) Use a sense of humor

The holidays can be quite stressful, which is why an ad that can make consumers laugh will stand out. See the HotelTonight ad as a fantastic example.

4) Make your offer stand out

Whether it’s a huge discount, a free trial, free shipping, or something else, your offer should stand out to make your ad stand out.

5) Find a way to engage

Get consumers engaged. This can be done by finding ways that consumers can interact with your campaign, whether it’s by holding contests or by providing short games that they can play, in the same way that McDonald’s did this year.

The holidays are a time of year where consumers are looking to spend the most money, which means businesses tend to step up their game when it comes to marketing their products and services. Use past holiday marketing campaigns as inspiration and keep in mind general holiday marketing tips to create a successful holiday marketing campaign of your own.

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What’s Trending In Marketing For December 2018

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This week in inbound marketing we look at Pinterest’s new carousel ad feature and Foursquare’s new way to measure a tv advertisement’s offline impact on store visits. Read more on the changes and marketing trends for this past month.

Noteworthy Marketing News

How Small Businesses Can Compete With Amazon This Holiday Season

Amazon is convenient for the everyday shopper, but if you own a small business, you may be really feeling the pressure from the eCommerce giant, especially over the holidays. So how can you compete with variety and fast, free shipping? This article gives you three tips that can help you prepare for a successful holiday shopping season.

Facebook Shared 5 Holiday Shopping Season Tips for Marketers

The holidays are here, the biggest shopping season of the year. And if you’re like most marketers, you want to make the most of this time of year and reach out to as much of your audience as you can. Read on to see the 5 tips Facebook gave to marketers for this holiday shopping season.

Calls to businesses rose more than 375% over past two holiday seasons

According to the past two holiday seasons, it looks like customers are picking up their phones more often. This is important for all business owners, because it means that every ring could be another possible lead. And with more customers turning to their phones for answers, the more chances you have for success.

Survey: Expect more holiday spending, ‘blended retail’ shopping this year

The NPD Group shopping report for this year shows that with the rising economy, people will be spending more on holiday shopping this year, averaging $700 for gifts. Along with other important discoveries, the survey also notes that most people plan on ‘blended retail’ shopping, which is a mixture of both online and in store shopping. If you are a marketer or a store owner, remember the importance of both your online and offline presence for the 2018 holiday season.

Improving Your Marketing Program

5 Holiday Email Templates for Salespeople

The holiday season is upon us, which means you’re getting ready to send out those holiday emails to your leads and clients! Whether its a big thank you for their business, a big deal on your services or just a little holiday cheer, read this article for 5 Holiday Email Template ideas to help engage with your audience.

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

Growth driven design is a great way to adapt to the market’s demands and give your customers new material on a constant basis. Although it’s a great marketing tool, growth driven design isn’t for everyone. Whether you want to go the traditional route or take the plunge and go for a growth driven design, this article shows you the important differences between the two.


Using Lead Scoring to Identify Your Best Prospects

There are many approaches to reaching your audience, and although reaching as many people as possible can be a good approach, you want to reach the right people. How do you know you’re reaching high-quality prospects? That’s where lead scoring comes in. Using lead scoring is the most effective way to target your most potential prospects so you’re being efficient with your time.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Pinterest’s new Promoted Carousel ads will display up to 5 swipable images in a single ad

Pinterest’s new advertising feature will now allow advertisers to display up to 5 images that you can swipe left-to-right.  It looks just like a regular pin, except users can scroll through it in their feed or tap on it to look at one of the images. Giving marketers more ad space will allow them to add more creativity to their ads.

Foursquare can now measure TV ads’ impact on offline store visits

Marketers spend $70 billion dollars a year on tv advertising, but how do you measure the ROI on your tv commercial? This is the question businesses have been asking for decades, but now with Foursquare you can. Now radio, direct mail and TV commercials can be tracked to the store and even to the point-of-sale. Read on to see how they do it.

Snapchat integrates with Comscore to measure Discover channel traffic

With the new partnership with Comscore, advertisers will now be able to more accurately measure their reach in their Snapchat Discover channels. Compared to in the past when advertisers could only look through Snapchat itself to look at their reach, now there will be more data to gauge with a third-party measurement.

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

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.

Visual Storytelling Trends That Will Shape The Future For Marketers

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.

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results