3 ways to enhance your landing pages

3 Ways To Enhance Your Landing Pages

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Landing pages are a great way to provide website visitors with helpful content, collect important customer information, and begin to build a relationship. They can be a great tool for generating leads for your business. But in order to convert visitors into leads, you must offer them something of value, and do so in a way that is easily navigable.

How To Improving Landing Page Performance

Here are a few easy ways to enhance your landing page performance.

Viewers should have a quick and clear understanding of the offer

People have very short attention spans, so in order to keep them on your landing page, it needs to be easily digestible within the first few seconds of viewing. Your message to your website visitors should be as clear and concise as possible. The headline should tell your visitors exactly what it is that you want them to do, and how to do it.

Using visuals to help communicate your offer can be helpful as well. Images should correlate well with the content offer, so viewers can quickly understand what it is they are accessing. For example, if you are offering an ebook, create a picture of the ebook or upload the ebook cover photo to the landing page. Good, descriptive images will make your offer more reliable, and will ultimately help convert more of your visitors into leads.

Also consider the value of your offer in what information you decide to collect. The higher the value, the more willing your visitors will be to provide information to you. This can help your company better understand your target audience.

Eliminate distractions on the page

People tend to be easily distracted, so you’ll want to make sure that there is nothing on your landing page that will deter them from providing their information and downloading your offer. It is important to remove the navigation bars and links from landing pages. While those are necessary on the home page, they can be detrimental to the success of your landing pages. At this point in the conversion process, you don’t want your visitors clicking back to a different part of your website and ignoring your offer.

Your landing page should have a strong focal point in order to enhance the clarity of the offer. Perhaps the focal point is your CTA that tells your visitors to download a white paper. Make sure that submit button attracts attention and is easy to click on.

Read More: 3 Helpful Tips To Improve Your CTAs To Generate More Leads

Include social sharing

Perhaps the only place you want your visitors to be able to navigate to from your landing page are your social media sites. Include social sharing icons so that your viewers can not only follow your social media accounts, but also so that they can share this offer to their own followers. Continuing your relationship with your visitors on social media is helpful to both your company and to them.

The success of your landing page performance depends on if they are formatted in a way that makes it simple for your visitors to digest and retrieve your offer. These tips will help convert your website visitors into leads, and further your Inbound Marketing efforts.

Are your landing pages ready to go? If so, find out how to continue guiding your leads through the Buyer’s Journey.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers
b2b branding

Using Your Brand Story To Reach Millennials In Business

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Millennials are the largest generation in the workforce today and they’re taking on important leadership and decision-making roles. In fact, nearly half of all B2B researchers are Millennials.

As a group, Millennials change jobs much more frequently than previous generations. So every six months, you may find yourself having to reintroduce your brand to a whole new group of buyers.

How do you convey your brand’s core values and competitive advantages in the best light to reach this younger generation of buyers?

In order to connect your brand with today’s prospects and customers, make storytelling a part of your content creation and messaging. Effective storytelling not only captivates Millennials but also strengthens Brand Development by conveying your brand’s values in a compelling and meaningful manner.

Stories Are Memorable

A good story creates lasting impressions of your brand. Stories distinguish your brand from the competition, and consumers are going to remember emotion, characters, and conflict from a story longer than they will remember facts about your product or service.

To put it simply, if you tell a good story that emphasizes who your brand is and what your brand believes in, people will remember it.

Stories Are Easy To Understand

Brand stories are effective, because they inform in a format that readers already know and understand. Stories are made up of three basic components: beginning, middle and end. When developing a brand story, think about those components in terms of the past, present and the future. The past highlights the challenge or the problem that your brand set out to solve. The present showcases how you solve that challenge. And the future demonstrates your success and suggests continuation of that success moving forward.

Click here to learn what brand development is and how it works.

Stories Create Trust

Millennials are more likely to connect with a brand when they believe in that brand’s core values. When Millennials are researching a purchase, they are looking at dozens of different companies, each time wondering, “Why should I buy from you?” If you engage those buyers, and answer that question with a story that is built around your core values, then you’ve built an emotional connection and the trust of that customer. 

Stories Show Your Brand’s Personality

Is your brand fun and quirky? Serious? Hip? Thought provoking? Innovative? Intellectual? Dedicated? Whatever it is, your story should reflect that.

Your story should highlight your personality and showcase what is different and unique about your brand. It should demonstrate your values and what motivates and inspires you. This will bring your brand to life and create a human element that allows customers to develop an emotional connection to your brand through effective Brand Communication.

Stories Are Sharable

Strong brand stories will spread through social media. Enhancing your story with visuals and videos will expand the reach of your story and make it even easier for others to share.

Current research shows that 62 percent of Millennials are more likely to buy if a brand engages them online. Sharing your brand story will help build relationships between your brand and the growing group of Millennial buyers.

story branding

color psychology

How to Use Color Psychology in Marketing

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When it comes to building your brand, don’t underestimate the importance of color. The colors you choose are crucial to your brand identity. Just think about some of the most famous brands out there and the colors associated with them, such as Nike and black, Starbucks and green, and Target and red, just to name a few. The colors you choose will always be associated with your brand, which is why you need to choose them carefully (and why they need to remain consistent across all of your branding efforts). One of the most important things to keep in mind is that color isn’t just an aesthetic choice, it’s a psychological one too.

The Power of Color: How to Use Psychology in Marketing

Using Color Intentionally

There are two primary ways to use color in your marketing efforts. The first is to make certain marketing elements stand out. For instance, adding a colored call-to-action button at the end of a blog post instead of using regular anchor text. If the button stands out from the background, it will immediately draw the eye of the reader so that they don’t miss out on your CTA.

The colors you choose for your website’s background and text is crucial as well. Not only does it impact the overall aesthetic of your website (which is important as it reflects on your company’s professionalism), but it also affects the ease of use. If you use two colors that are too similar (such as yellow text on an orange background) it becomes incredibly difficult for visitors to navigate your site. Your color choices should provide enough contrast so that foreground elements stand out from the background.

Finally, don’t overuse color. For example, choosing to use five different colors throughout your home page will create visual clutter that will overwhelm visitors. It works better if you choose no more than two colors that combine to create visual balance.

What Every Creative Advertising Agency Needs To Know To Endure The Digital Transformation

Using Color Psychology

Different colors elicit different feelings. By using certain colors, you can engage your audience by making them subconsciously feel a different way. Most successful brands choose their colors based on this idea. Take for example McDonald’s. As everyone knows, they use two colors: red and yellow. They complement one another aesthetically and are chosen for their psychological meaning. Red is often associated with friendliness, while yellow is associated with happiness, both of which are emotions McDonald’s embraced as a major part of their brand voice. Red also happens to be a very stimulating color that’s meant to trigger feelings of hunger. Combined, they attract attention from hungry customers.

Also Read: The Strategic Difference Between Branding and Marketing and How They Work Together

Color Breakdowns

All colors have some sort of effect on the psychology of consumers. With that in mind, the following are a few of the different colors you could use in your branding and the psychological meaning behind them:

  • Orange – Orange is associated with physical comfort, motivation, and positivity. Payless Shoes and Home Depot use orange as their primary color for these reasons.
  • Green – Green represents harmony, peace, health, and growth. Financial institutions use green to promote growth (of wealth), while many health products and stores use green to promote health (such as Whole Foods).
  • Blue – Blue is closely linked to trust and dependability. Many technology companies use blue to promote the idea that their products are dependable, such as Dell, GM, and Honda. Companies like Facebook and All-State also use blue to promote trust.website design

 

  • Brown – Brown is used to create feelings of trust and security. It’s why UPS prominently uses the color for everything, including their uniforms and trucks.
  • Purple – Purple is associated with luxury and royalty, which is why brands that promote their products as luxurious use purple, such as Cadbury, Hallmark, and Louis Vuitton.
  • Pink – Pink represents compassion, love, and empathy. Pepto-Bismol and Victoria’s Secret both use pink to this effect for different reasons.

Choose Your Colors Wisely To Improve Your Marketing Efforts

As you can see, the use of color is incredibly important to your marketing efforts. Not only do your color choices affect the aesthetic of your website (as well as its ease of use), they are also vital to defining your visual identity. As such, be sure to choose your colors carefully as they will have a psychological impact on your audience.

social media marketing
optimize your social media

5 Ways To Optimize Your Social Media

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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.

Top 5 Ways for Social Media Optimization

1. Tailor to your audience

Read more

What’s Trending in Marketing for August 2024

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Welcome to our August 2024 edition of “What’s Trending,” where we bring you the most relevant marketing trends and insights. Stay informed and ahead of the game with our curated collection of marketing trends and reports in summer 2024.

Increase in Subscriptions

Subscription-based services have been becoming more and more common lately, and are expected to continue to grow in popularity. These services provide companies with recurring revenue. Subscription-based services also increase customer value, and can be used to incentivize higher engagement. Consumers especially value subscription offers that are tailored to customer preferences. Read more.

Lowe’s is Rebranding

Lowe’s is rebranding. The home improvement retailer is now calling its retail media network “Lowe’s Media Network.” They will be launching four new channels this year: direct mail for install services, in-store audio, paid search, and email. Lowe’s will also be expanding placements on their app. Read more.

Skin Care Pop-Up Event (With A Bus)

Neutrogena is hosting a Boost Bus pop-up event on August 31st and September 1st in Toronto. People will have the opportunity to talk with skincare experts to learn about skin vitality, protecting the skin, and hydration. The event will have games and prizes in addition to product samples. Read more.

Improving Your Marketing Program

6 Tips for Improving Brand Communication 

Brand communication is how your company communicates with their current and future customers. Good brand communication builds and maintains brand loyalty among customers in addition to setting your company apart from the competition. It is a core aspect of a company’s strategy and is important to the company’s success. Click here to learn six tips for improving your company’s brand communication.

5 Ways to Improve Your Display Ads 

Display advertising is a kind of online advertising that uses copy, images, and other visual elements. They come in many different formats like banner ads, video ads, interactive ads, and more. The benefits of display ads include brand awareness, visual appeal, performance tracking, and targeting capabilities. Click here to learn five ways to improve your display ads.

The Website Redesign Process- Why Content Comes First?

Redesigning a website is a time to boost the brand image, refresh the look and content of the website, and update all the product listings and sales offers. Learn why copy should be refreshed on your new and improved website, and how to do it. Read more.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Say Goodbye to Third-Party Cookies

Due to their users’ concerns about data privacy and protection, Google is currently phasing out third-party cookies. This will be finished in 2025. Being able to use third-party cookies to track user behavior across sites has allowed for audience segmentation and the use of targeted ads. To keep gathering consumer data without third-party cookies, offer rewards to users who give you their information and keep utilizing first-party cookies. Read more.

User-Generated Content

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Consumers’ desire for authenticity on social media platforms has given rise to user-generated content. Many customers do not trust advertisements, but they trust content made by real people. In the past five years, search engine interest for “user generated content” has increased by 200%. Read more.

Ethics and Sustainability

Your product or service alone is no longer enough. Today’s consumers care about the values of the brand selling that product or service, particularly the values that pertain to social and environmental responsibilities. This has prompted brands to partake in and showcase ethical and sustainable practices. Read more.

Extreme Personalization

The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is allowing marketers to tailor digital experiences to individual consumers better than ever before. This personalization through AI will allow marketers to give consumers inclusive experiences. AI can also assist marketers in understanding their audiences and delivering content to consumers in local languages. Read more.

Give your website a makeover Get our FREE website redesign checklist here!
Inbound Marketing Strategies

Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies

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Successful inbound marketing depends on your ability to engage your leads and to nurture them through their buyer’s journeys. However, you’re going to have to attract leads first. Because technology keeps evolving and the way that people use the Internet keeps changing, it’s vital that you continuously update your inbound marketing strategies so that you can continue to attract high-quality leads.

Top Inbound Marketing Strategies

With that in mind, the following are a few inbound marketing strategies you should consider implementing this year:

1. Focus On Optimizing Your Content For Featured Snippets

Although you can still attract a lot of high-quality leads by ranking first through third on Google’s SERP, it’s no longer the first thing that users see. Instead, the first thing that appears on Google’s SERP is their featured snippets. Websites listed in featured snippets tend to get a boost in organic traffic since searches often click on the website links listed on the snippets.

Learn More about Google’s SERPs

2. Develop Relationships With Micro-Influencers

Social media influencers have massive followings. This means that if they highlight your brand on their channels, it could significantly increase your company’s exposure. However, such social media influencers tend to have broad audiences, which means many of their followers may not fall within your target audience. On top of that, it can be difficult for a small to a mid-sized company to get the attention of such an influencer, much less to convince them to promote your business.

Instead, you should consider finding micro-influencers. These are influencers with smaller audiences that focus on more niche subjects. You’ll have a better chance of building a relationship with a micro-influencer — and their audience will probably have greater overlap with your target audience as well.

3. Create Short Video Content

Although long-form video content is certainly effective, it tends to work better as an engagement tool rather than an attraction tool. Short-form video content does really well on social media especially. People are more likely to watch through the entire video and share it with others on their social channels if it’s on the shorter side. Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok also focus on short video content, and those sites have skyrocketed in popularity over the years.Inbound Marketing Strategies

4. Consider Using Progressive Forms

Potential leads are often discouraged from converting through opt-in forms if there are too many questions.  If they feel like the offer isn’t worth the information they have to give up, they’ll just leave your site without converting. You can solve this issue by using progressive forms. Progressive forms require that leads fill out a new form every time they download a new resource instead of asking for one form to be filled out upfront. The advantage of doing this is that you can just ask for a couple of details each time so that it doesn’t feel like they’re providing that much information to you.

5. Optimize For Voice Search

Voice assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, have drastically increased the number of voice searches performed over the past few years. While text-based searches are still the most popular way to perform a search online, voice searches continue to increase. In 2019, a third of the U.S. population used voice search. As such, you may want to begin optimizing for voice search. You can do this by adding a voice search snippet to your blog posts. You can also begin writing content in a more direct and conversational way.

6. Optimize Your Website For Mobile Use

There are now billions of smartphone users in the world today. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile use, it’s going to hurt your search rankings. Additionally, mobile users who do stumble onto your site are going to have all kinds of trouble navigating it. This is because a site not optimized for mobile use won’t display correctly on smaller screen sizes.

7. Adjust Your Content Strategy Around The Use Of Clusters

Topic clusters are a more organized way to create content. Essentially, you create a pillar page on a certain topic, then create separate pages (such as blog posts) that cover related subtopics. These pages are then all linked to your pillar page, creating a cluster of content. The reason this is so effective is that it leads to a higher number of internal links. As such, visitors have an easier time navigating through relevant content, while search engines have an easier time identifying context, which can lead to boosted rankings and more organic traffic.

Finding new ways to attract your target audience is critical to your inbound marketing efforts. Because people change the ways that they use the web as they adapt to new technology, it’s important that you continually revisit your inbound strategies. As such, consider implementing some of these inbound marketing strategies to attract new leads in 2021.

lead generation tips
Website Redesign Process

The Website Redesign Process- Why Content Comes First?

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The decision to redesign a website marks a major milestone in the growth of a business. It is a time to boost the brand image, refresh the look and content of the website, and update all the product listings and sales offers. Interestingly enough, although refreshing your website content is often ignored during the website redesign process, it should actually be near the top of the list.

Why Should You Refresh the Copy on Your Redesigned Website?

Copying over existing content from an old website to a new one seems like a good way to save money. However, it can actually end up costing you more in the long run. Instead refreshing your website will benefit your company in the following ways:

  • Your refreshed copy will give your new website a different layout, complete with latest in website design. Trying to force outdated content from an old web page onto your new site is not the best use of your time and resources.
  • Your refreshed website will reflect your current branding and product mix. More than likely, the focus of your business has changed since your last website redesign. You want your website to reflect this growth.
  • Your refreshed content on your new website will rank higher on search engines because it will be current and optimized. If your old content is not ranking well, copying it over to your new website is pointless. In fact, search engines could see it as duplicate content, which will pull your rankings even lower.
  • You’ll give your customers the new, relevant content they crave. Fresh and consistent content will attract more visitors to your website as well as increase customer loyalty.

How Does Copy Fit Into the Website Redesign Process?

With so much riding on your website redesign, you need to make sure to hire the best people for the job. A copywriter is a critical member of the team who brings a specific skill set to the project. A good copywriter should be able to present a company’s benefits and key selling points. They should also understand the ins and outs of search engine optimization and know how to develop copy that search engines will love.

Developing copy begins in the earliest stages of website redesign. The site map, developed during the design phase, organizes each page on the site and identifies the content needed for each page. This is where the copywriter’s job comes in.

While the website designer works on wire frames, the copywriter begins developing content. Eventually, the two come together, marrying the design elements of the website with the copy contained within. This stage gives the team the ability to see how well the new design showcases the content, and vice versa.

Also Read: Do You Need to Redesign Your Website

After design approval, production begins. This is when the copywriter develops final copy and applies it to the new web page at the appropriate time. Although refreshing your new website’s copy may take work, it will pay off soon enough and give you a leg up on the competition.

17 SEO MYTHS YOU SHOULD LEAVE BEHIND

marketing agency

Why Hiring a Marketing Agency is Right for You

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Success depends on marketing. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, you cannot survive or grow unless you market your brand. Marketing does require a lot of time and effort to do effectively. Unfortunately, few businesses have the resources needed to maintain an in-house marketing team. That’s why many of them rely heavily on outsourcing to a professional marketing agency.

Why Hiring a Marketing Agency?

The following are a few reasons why you should strongly consider working with a reputable marketing agency:

1. A Marketing Agency Is Less Expensive

At first glance, the monthly rate of a marketing agency might seem expensive. In fact, many companies make the mistake of thinking it’s an unnecessary expense, especially if they think they can handle their marketing needs on their own. However, when you add up the costs of running a successful in-house marketing team, you’ll realize that it’s much more expensive than outsourcing to a marketing agency.

A comprehensive marketing strategy requires a lot of different skill sets. You’ll need marketing managers, strategists, researchers, analysts, copywriters, social media managers, SEO specialists, web designers, graphic designers, and more. Each one of these specialists costs a significant amount of money to hire full-time. The costs of hiring a marketing agency for a year are often less than hiring just one full-time marketing specialist.

2. Access To High-End Technology

Because a marketing agency is focused solely on marketing, the majority of their investments are going to be in the technology needed to stay on top of the latest tech and trends. As a result, when you work with a marketing agency, you’ll have access to all of the latest marketing tools, many of which can cost an arm and a leg to purchase or subscribe to yourself.

3. Access To An Experienced And Knowledgeable Team

Trying to put together an in-house marketing team can be very difficult in part because you’ll need to know who to hire. If you get stuck with someone who lacks the necessary experience or skills, it can hinder your marketing efforts. A marketing agency makes sure that it hires only the most qualified marketers out there. This means that you can be safe in the knowledge that your team has the experience and skills needed to help implement an effective marketing strategy.

4. Scale Marketing Needs With Ease

Agency

One of the biggest challenges businesses face is attempting to scale their marketing efforts to keep up with their company’s growth. If you find that you suddenly need more personnel to keep up with the demand of your business, you’ll have to go through the hiring process. This process can take a long time. Not to mention that the marketers you hire will have to be onboarded. When working with an agency, you’ll never have to worry about your marketing team falling behind. An agency will be able to scale your needs by simply adjusting your strategy and assigning more of their marketers to your team when needed.

5. Obtain A Fresh Perspective

Even if you have an in-house marketing team, one of the things that can hinder your team is the fact that their perspective of your brand can grow scale. Being able to stand back and look at the overall picture can be difficult sometimes. A marketing agency will be able to do this since they have an outsider perspective. Their experience working on other strategies and campaigns can also bring valuable insight to your team.

Read More: Five Reasons To Hire An Advertising Agency Versus Staffing In-House

6. Compliment Your Existing Personnel

Even if you have in-house marketing personnel, working with a marketing agency can be hugely beneficial. Most smaller to mid-sized businesses won’t have a full-fledged marketing department. This means that the marketing personnel they do have are often forced to wear multiple hats. This can result in them becoming overworked and overwhelmed, thereby hurting their job performance.

By working with a marketing agency, you can ensure that the marketing personnel you do have in-house can focus on their core responsibilities. The marketing agency can provide the personnel needed to fill in the gaps, thereby complementing your existing team.

Having a team of experienced, professional marketers to help promote your business is a must. While you may not be able to afford an in-house team, attempting to leave the marketing strategy up to a handful of individuals at your company is not a good idea — especially if they have multiple job responsibilities. Instead, you should strongly consider outsourcing your marketing efforts to a reputable marketing agency. The benefit of hiring a marketing agency for your business helps to develop, execute, and monitor a marketing strategy that works for you.
30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips

inbound marketing

Inbound VS Outbound Marketing: What’s Better for You?

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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?

Inbound VS Outbound Marketing

What Is Outbound Marketing?

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.

Benefits Of Outbound Marketing

  • Reach potential customers who were not aware of your brand
  • Successful outbound marketing can boost short-term sales

Drawbacks Of Outbound Marketing

  • Most outbound marketing tactics are expensive
  • Targeting a broader audience will usually result in a lower ROI
  • May reach potential customers who aren’t ready to buy
  • Forcing message onto the audience, which can put them off

What Is Inbound Marketing?

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.

Read More: Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

  • Higher ROI. Your marketing efforts live forever (unlike outbound marketing), which means they can continue to see results in the future.
  • You can reach more people. Billions of people use the Internet, giving you potential access to a much greater audience.
  • Inbound marketing allows you to target specific buyer personas with greater ease, leading to better results.
  • Inbound marketing is much more affordable.

Drawbacks Of Inbound Marketing

  • You won’t see overnight results. Inbound marketing requires a lot of long-term effort.inbound outbound

What Type Of Marketing Should You Choose?

Inbound VS Outbound Marketing are different from each other but you should choose one as per your business requirement. 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.

Build A Marketing Strategy Using Both Inbound And Outbound Strategies

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.

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

What is Brand Development and How Does It Work?

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A successful business depends on your ability to strengthen your brand reputation and generate brand awareness. To do that, you need to develop a strong brand. Your brand consists of a lot of different elements. Those elements combine to create a brand identity that separates your business from your competitors. Brand development is the ongoing process of creating and maintaining that brand identity.

What is Brand Development Exactly?

Brand development is a process of creating and differentiating your company’s image, products, and services from your competitors. It is like creating a promise to customers, and consistently delivering on that promise. With that in mind, the following are steps you should take to develop your brand:

1. Determine Your Brand’s Purpose

If you don’t know your purpose, neither will consumers – and that’s not going to help you when it comes to generating brand awareness. In order to set brand goals and to evaluate how your brand is performing over time, you will need to have a clear understanding of what your brand’s purpose is. Exactly why does your brand exist? What problems does your brand solve? Why should consumers care about your brand? A strong brand needs to have a well-defined purpose.

2. Differentiate Your Brand From Your Competitors

One of the things that define the strength of your brand identity is your ability to differentiate it from other competing brands. If consumers can’t tell the difference between you and your competitors, it means your brand is weak. Develop your unique selling proposition to help your brand stand out in a crowded field. Doing so will also help you craft your message. Being able to stand out is arguably one of the most important facets of a successful brand.

Read More: Developing A Brand Marketing Strategy By Determining Your Company’s Make Or Break

3. Identify Your Audience

The success of your brand will depend on whether or not you reach an audience that engages and relates with your brand. However, if you’re targeting the wrong audience, you will fail massively when it comes to building a strong brand identity and establishing a stellar brand reputation. If you don’t target a specific audience (as in, you attempt to reach everyone), your message won’t reach the right people. If you know who your audience is, you’ll be able to create content that’s more helpful and relevant to them, which will only help to boost your brand awareness and brand authority.

There are many ways that you can identify who your audience is. Use the information that you’ve collected from your opt-in forms and from previous customers. Use your social media data. Request customer feedback. All of this information can help you figure out the demographics of your audience as well as their wants and needs. Use this data to develop buyer personas, thereby allowing you to address every different segment of your target audience.brand development

4. Implement A Unique Voice

Your brand needs to be relatable to your target audience. As such, you need to incorporate what you know about your target audience’s demographics to develop your brand voice. The voice is the personality that you create for your brand to communicate with your audience. For example, Uber’s brand voice is considerate and direct. Old Spice uses a masculine and humorous voice. Nike has an inspirational voice. As you can see, the voice a company uses in all of its marketing and communication efforts defines a big part of its brand identity.

5. Create A Distinct Brand Aesthetic

The look of your brand needs to be recognizable as it will help to make your brand identifiable. The log is an important part of this. Some of the most successful brands in the world are recognized by their logo. For instance, the Nike swoosh or Apple’s apple with a bite taken out of it. These logos are so well known that they don’t even need the company name to accompany them. Keep in mind that aesthetic doesn’t just refer to the logo — it also refers to the type of font used to display your company name as well as the color combination associated with your brand. For instance, Facebook is associated with blue and McDonald’s with red and yellow.

6. Maintain Consistency Across Channels

The biggest mistake you can make is to make adjustments to your branding based on the channel you’re on. For instance, taking on a more serious tone on LinkedIn and then using a more informal and joking tone on Twitter. Or using different visual elements on social media than you use on your website. Such inconsistency will hurt your brand identity because your audience will become confused over who you are.

The importance of Brand development plays a pivotal role in the success and sustainability of a business. These are the steps that you will need to take to develop your brand. Keep in mind that brand development is a long-term strategy. Every marketing decision you make affects your brand and contributed to your brand’s identity, reputation, and awareness. As such, you need to take these steps to ensure that your brand development starts off with a strong foundation.

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