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What is Ingredient Branding & How Does It Work?

June 9, 2023/in Articles, Brand Development, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Mark Beebe

There are many different marketing strategies to employ to increase the value and name recognition of your business. There are traditional marketing strategies, like commercials, billboards, and events. Then there are digital marketing strategies, like social media advertising, contests/giveaways, and community engagement.

Each of these methods can be a great strategy for getting your business name out there, generating new leads and customers, and growing your business. If you’ve been in business for awhile and already have an established business name, then you have some potential advantages for increasing your business’s value and brand recognition. One of these advantages is a strategy marketers call ingredient branding.

What is Ingredient Branding?

Ingredient branding is a marketing strategy where a component of the business is branded as a separate entity. This helps to add more value to the parent company and make their product/service seem superior to its competitors.

You’ve probably seen this strategy in use several times before without even realizing it. Here are a few examples of ingredient branding by large brands:

Dodge’s Hemi engines
Citgo’s TriCLEAN fuel
Dupont’s Teflon
Intel’s Intel Inside

Intel Inside is actually credited with the conception of ingredient branding back in the ’90s, and was the first success story of having an ingredient helping to promote their business.

How Does Ingredient Branding Work?

Each of these ingredients were developed and branded separately from the main business to make their product seem better. Dodge put together an entire campaign around “That thing got a Hemi?” to help promote the engines they use in their trucks. When Citgo started branding its TriCLEAN fuel, it was able to focus more on the quality of its fuel over its competition, rather than only competing with gas prices.

These two cases are specifically about an already well-known company branding an ingredient that it already uses to help increase value of its product.

But there are other ways that ingredient branding can work. Some products are already ingredients in and of themselves. Let’s think of a few:

Tide detergent
Arm & Hammer baking soda
Splenda sweetener
OnStar
Oreo

And so many more.

Let’s dive into these examples. Tide detergent is already a well-known brand. However, you’ll often see other cleaning supplies that contain Tide. Since these products know that consumers love Tide detergent, they’ve worked with the company to include Tide as an ingredient and help promote their product.

This works both ways, though. Including Tide as an ingredient in another company’s product, it receives even more promotion for their own brand. So essentially, the financial deal struck between the two companies is mutually beneficial.

Arm & Hammer is another popular ingredient brand. You’ll see products like cat litter, toothpaste, and more that contain Arm & Hammer baking soda. Splenda sweetener is another ingredient brand that consumers will commonly see promoted among other products.

Back to vehicles, customers see OnStar’s security service as an amenity when buying a car. This means that customers will pay more for a car with this feature installed, which can be pretty valuable for an automaker.

And finally, Oreo is a popular cookie that is sometimes used as an ingredient in other products, like cookies and cream ice cream, McDonald’s McFlurries, and coffee flavoring.

Learn more about 7 Steps To Launching a Packaging Brand

Can Ingredient Branding Help Your Business?

If your business isn’t prominent enough to be branded as an ingredient, perhaps your business is one that can benefit from including an ingredient in its product or service. By including a well-known ingredient in your business model, you’re able to promise a level of quality that is already well-known to consumers.

One example of an ingredient in the digital marketing world is social media scheduling tool Buffer. If possible, many new SaaS companies in the digital marketing will offer Buffer integration with their service because they know how popular Buffer is.

Offering a well-known ingredient in your product or service can be a great way to promote your product to consumers who already use that ingredient in other products.

Ingredient branding is a great way to provide more value and marketability to your business. What are some popular ingredient brands that you’ve heard of?

4 Essential Brand Components

June 6, 2023/in Articles, Blog, Brand Development, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

There’s a common misconception that many people have that a “brand” is basically just the name of the company and the logo that they use. While these elements contribute to the overall brand of a business, the term “brand” is actually much more comprehensive than that. It involves many different components, which is why it takes a lot of thought in order to successfully develop your brand. The following are the four main brand components that you will need to address when building your brand and what kinds of strategies you can put into place to further develop those components.

1. Brand Identity

Your brand identity is how you want your brand to be perceived. It’s important that you know what your brand identity is and what you want it to be. If you don’t, how is anyone else supposed to know? You’re going to have a tough time generating brand awareness if you lack a strong brand identity. The following are a few steps that you should take to establish your brand identity:

Identify your mission

What was the reason you established your company in the first place? What is your company’s goal? Consumers want to know what your mission is (and they don’t want to hear that it’s “to make a profit”) and it will reflect who you are as a company.
Establish your unique value proposition

Your unique value proposition is what sets you apart from your competitors. It’s a statement of how your offer benefits your customers, how you will meet the needs of your customers, and what makes your offer unique. Every marketing campaign you run should align with your unique value proposition.
Create your brand’s visual identity

The visual elements of your brand certainly factor into your brand identity. Just consider the logos and color palettes of some of the biggest companies out there, from Facebook’s simple logo and use of blue to McDonald’s golden arch and yellow and red palette. A strong logo that’s instantly recognizable is important, but so is choosing your colors. Different colors have different meanings and the colors you choose can have a psychological impact on your audience as well. For example, many fast-food restaurants use red and yellow because that combination of colors is thought to stimulate the appetite. Just keep in mind that consistency is key. If you decide to use shades of blue in your logo and on your website, then you should use those same colors for your social media pages, email newsletters, and physical location as well.
Increase brand recognition

It’s going to take some time to get your vision of your brand identity out to the masses. You’ll want to generate awareness of your brand to do this through a variety of marketing efforts, such as building a website that emphasizes your mission and unique value proposition, creating content that’s optimized for SEO, using social media to engage with consumers and to post your content, and more. It’s also vital that you make sure your mission, unique value proposition, and visual identity are consistent across all platforms. If it’s not, it will end up hurting your brand identity.

Learn more about Brand Recognition

2. Brand Image

Your brand image is similar to your brand identity in that it deals with how your brand is perceived. However, whereas your brand identity is how you want your brand to be perceived, brand image is how your brand is actually perceived. Consider your brand image as the reputation you currently have with the general public. Take for example United Airlines. Not long ago, they updated their brand design in an attempt to strengthen their brand identity as a “thoughtful, modern, and innovative airline.” However, their brand identity and brand image are currently quite different from each other after numerous massive PR failures regarding their customer service. Keeping that in mind, the following are a few ways to build and maintain a positive brand image:

Spread your message via PR

Use public relations to spread your key messages as well as relevant news concerning your company. You can do this through news outlets, trade publications, and even online blogs. Public relations will help you raise awareness of your brand and what you’re doing, thereby helping to improve your brand image.
Establish a social presence

Social media is an incredibly effective way to build your brand image, whether it’s by sharing content with consumers, keeping consumers up to date on the latest news and product launches, spreading awareness of your message, and engaging with consumers on a personal level. In fact, you can even use social media to address negative comments. It’s a good way to repair potential damage done to your brand image as a result of a poor customer experience by showing that you care and trying to correct the situation.
Create high-quality content

Content will help to increase brand awareness by bringing in more web traffic. However, it can also help to build your brand authority. By publishing content that is relevant to your company and to your audience (and that’s of high quality), you’ll become a trustworthy source of information, which — in turn — will help improve your reputation and increase brand trust.

3. Brand Culture

Brand culture refers to your company’s core values and how you set an example for those values. Businesses have always

emphasized certain values; however, those values were often things like “reliability” or “honesty.” Values that are more equivalent to basic ethics. While those are important values to hold onto, more and more businesses have begun taking moral stances as well as political stances in addition to generally accepted values. These types of values feed into your brand culture as well. Take Nike for example. They have taken strong social positions by running commercials backing Colin Kaepernick and recently touting the importance of the women’s U.S. soccer team’s World Cup win. These are branding efforts touting their championing of equality, which has become a part of their brand culture. The following are a few tips to help you establish your brand culture:

Define your values

Define exactly what your values are and how your company lives out those values. Don’t be afraid of taking a stance if there’s a particular stance that you want to take. Using the Nike example again, their backing of Kaepernick was considered controversial and plenty of consumers did not agree with their position. However, those that did agree with their position became even more strongly aligned with Nike’s brand. You can’t please everyone, but by sticking to your values, you’ll be more likely to strengthen your relationship with many of your customers.
Spread awareness of your values

Let consumers know about your values by declaring them on your website or by encouraging discussion about your values on social media. Publishing content that backs your values is an effective method as well.
Ensure that your company reflects your values

There’s nothing consumers hate more than a hypocrite. If you’re flaunting your support for equal pay across social media and in your marketing efforts, then you better be practicing what you preach. Your brand culture is incredibly dependent on your ability to embrace your own values within your company.

4. Brand Personality

Your brand personality refers to the human characteristics that your company has. Developing a brand personality is vital to connecting with your audience on an emotional level and for making your brand relatable. Because of this, make sure that you use the following tips to develop your brand personality:

Learn who your audience is

Understanding your audience is something that you need to do from the very beginning. It’s an important step in building your brand identity as well. However, it’s particularly important when it comes to developing your brand personality. The way you present yourself and the way that you communicate should reflect not only who the audience is but what they expect. For example, if you have a younger audience, then a dry, formal tone may not resonate with them. However, if your audience is older, using younger slang and current pop culture references may go over their heads.
Engage with your audience

While you can get your personality across in the content you write, it’s easier to do through engaging with people. It’s why using social media is so important. Your entire audience sees your interactions and it helps establish your personality a certain way. For example, Wendy’s has a reputation for having a playful personality because of their use of humor and the pretend feuds that they get into with other brands on Twitter.
Be consistent in tone

If you’re going to be funny and informal on one platform, you need to make sure that personality carries over to all of the other platforms you use, both online and offline. If you’re inconsistent, it will hurt your ability to develop a cohesive brand personality, which will only confuse your audience.

These are the four main brand components that you will need to address when developing your brand strategy. A strong brand requires a strong brand identity, brand image, brand culture, and brand personality. Implementing a successful brand strategy that develops all four of these components increases brand trust, loyalty, and awareness.

Digital Communication Tools to Help Build a Human Brand

May 30, 2023/in Blog, Digital, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Mark Beebe

Whether you’re a brand looking to establish a human connection with your audience or an individual seeking to engage with peers and build professional networks, leveraging these digital communication tools will undoubtedly enhance your ability to connect, collaborate, and succeed in the digital age.

The success of your brand depends on much more than just convincing a potential customer to try your product. While in the past the customer experience has been based around the product being offered, these days, you need to look at the big picture. It’s not just about the customer experience in regards to your product. It’s about the emotional connection that they are able to form with your brand.

Customers don’t just want a product, they want a relationship with the brand that is selling them that product. You need to focus on fostering an emotional connection instead of just trying to build awareness for a certain product. Fortunately, building an emotional connection with your audience is easier than ever before with the number of digital communication tools that are at your disposal.

The Importance Of An Emotional Connection

Customers are human beings. They have hopes, dreams, and feelings. In a world where their product choices are practically limitless, they will want much more out of a brand. They do not want to engage with a corporation. Customers want to engage with a brand that’s relatable on a personal level. Their desire for connection in such a world is not surprising. A brand that is able to touch them emotionally is going to make them more engaged.

There are many ways that you can do this; reinforcing the beliefs or perspective of your audience, supporting the goals or perspective of your audience, or challenging your audience to do greater things.

Creating a Brand with Social Listening and What Tools To Use

How Digital Communication Tools Can Help Foster An Emotional Connection

Engaging on an emotional level with your audience is easier than it’s ever been, as long as you make the effort to do so. The following are just a few ways that digital communication tools can help you to connect with your audience emotionally and to build meaningful relationships with them:

Video content – When it comes to content, few other forms are able to engage audiences on an emotional level like video content. There are numerous reasons for this. First of all, people consume visual content much more easily than written content. Secondly, you can use actors or even real figures that audiences can relate to on a personal level. Thirdly, you can emphasize certain emotions much more effectively through the production of video, from the look of how it was filmed to the type of music that’s used to how the video is edited.
Segmentation – Segmenting your leads and customers based on the data you’ve collected (via opt-in forms, surveys, and more) will provide you with valuable insight into who your audience is and how you can connect with them. It also allows you to personalize your content much more effectively, which will make it easier to drive engagement.
Social interaction – The use of social channels makes it easy to engage with your audience directly. Direct interaction makes it easier to build meaningful relationships. You’ll have a bigger emotional impact on those who witness the interactions on social media as well.

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Building a human brand will help you build long-term relationships with your audience based on real emotional connections. Use the digital communication tools available to you to emphasize emotion in your marketing efforts. Doing so will help your audience relate to you on a more personal level, thereby driving engagement with your brand.

Brand Leveraging: Partnering with a Positive Brand Brings Attention to Your Own

May 23, 2023/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Media /by Dan Gartlan

Brand leveraging is quickly becoming more common as it becomes harder for messages to break through the clutter. This marketing strategy uses the power of an existing brand to support a company’s entry into a new, but related product category by communicating valuable product information to the consumer.

Utilizing recognizable pop culture can help you establish credibility. It adds emotion, and further draw in a potential customer- and more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon.

Incorporating Recognizable Visual Stimuli in Brand Leveraging

Combining your product with recognizable TV and movie characters has a great impact on a customer.

For example, In Walmart’s recent commercial the owners of notoriously famous cars use their Grocery Pickup service in preparation for Super Bowl LIII. As Gary Numan’s futuristic song “Cars” plays in the background, drivers race to Walmart in iconic vehicles, including the “Ghostbusters” car, Lightning McQueen from “Cars,” Batman’s Batmobile, the “Dumb and Dumber” dog car, KITT from “Knight Rider”, Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine, the “Back to the Future” DeLorean, and even Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage. Every generation can recognize this ad, there is something for everyone.

Walmart’s U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Barbara Messing said in a statement on the store’s website that this ad is the “biggest and first-ever cross-platform national marketing campaign for Walmart Grocery Pickup.

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Familiar Celebrity Voice Endorsements in Brand Leveraging

When a celebrity endorses a certain product, you can’t always see their face. Sometimes, the only thing you can recognize is their voice. However, this still has a powerful effect on potential customers.
If you’ve ever watched a television commercial and felt for sure that you knew the voice-over artist from somewhere, chances are, you’re right.

John Hamm’s Voice for Mercedes Benz

John Hamm, known for his role as Don Draper in Mad Men, voices Mercedes Benz commercials. His soothing and yet serious voice is hard to miss, further drawing in the potential customer. It also leaves the viewer curious and perhaps wanting more. The mystery of a faceless celebrity seems to have an effect of intrigue on viewers.

Julia Roberts for Nationwide Insurance

Without being in front of the screen, Julia Roberts can be heard discussing the benefits of being a member of Nationwide Insurance in some of their recent commercials. “When we were considering how to bring our message to life, we were looking for a familiar voice that would bring our brand attributes to life,” Jennifer Hanley, senior VP-brand marketing for Nationwide, said in a statement to Ad Age. “Julia Roberts’ voice brings an assuring, and confident tone to the campaign that resonates well with our target audience.”

Using Memorable Songs in Your Ads

Though large brands are known for their products and services, it is often the experience they create that actually builds loyal consumers and brand advocates. And what better way to strengthen a brand’s customer experience than to incorporate music within their ads.
It has the ability to create a wide range of emotions, tell a story, and can even reinforce the sale.

Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” song in Toyota Camry Commercial

Many generations recognize this classic song and it’s easy to sing along to. It may even get stuck in the viewer’s head, which Toyota is definitely aiming for. It shows different people zooming off to various destinations in the 2018 model of the Toyota Camry. The timing of this song being is also significant, and the Bohemian Rhapsody movie has been widely popular in recent months. With the anthem “don’t stop me now” repeating itself in the background, this song was chosen to add to the ad’s overall message – which is – driving the Camry makes you want to say “let’s go places”.

Meghan Trainor’s “All the Ways” song in Target’s Same Day Delivery Commercials

This upbeat, positive song gets the attention of people of all ages, and not just the young ones. People describe Meghan Trainor’s music as uplifting and wholesome. Target was quick to involve her music in to their advertisement campaign. The commercial highlights “all the ways” Target can assist you.

No matter the tune, music is a brand’s leading tool to create an experience.

6 Web Design Principles to Increase Conversions

May 16, 2023/in Articles, Digital, Directors, Inbound Marketing, SEO, Website Design, Website Growth Driven Design /by Terry Becker

Putting thought into your web design is a must if you have any ambitions to grow your business. While the content that you host on your site and the strength of your SEO strategy will help you attract leads, your web design will play a big part in your ability to convert leads. Keeping that in mind, the following are six web design principles for conversions:

1. Use A Responsive Design

If you’re not using a responsive design, it means that although your website may load properly on desktops, it may not be displayed correctly on smaller screens, such as those on smartphones and tablets. If your website doesn’t load properly on a smartphone, it will require the user to not only scroll up and down but also left to right — and to zoom in and out. Few mobile users will have the patience to deal with a site like this, which will lead to a significant bounce rate. Use a responsive design so that you don’t lose your mobile leads.

2. Ensure That Your Pages Load Quickly

Even if your site does load properly, few visitors will have the patience for pages that load slowly. It should take no more than one to two seconds for your site to load. If it takes three or more seconds, you’re in trouble. Leads will get frustrated and will likely abandon your site. Test your page speeds to ensure that they load quickly.

3. Don’t Include Too Many Choices

Too many choices can make it difficult for visitors to figure out what they want or to find what they’re looking for. For example, a navigation menu is a great addition. It lets visitors find your blog, contact page, product page, etc. However, if you fill up that navigation menu with dozens upon dozens of links, it becomes overwhelming. Not only will it actually be more difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for, but too many choices requires them to commit more of their time to make a decision. To capture leads, you need to help guide their decision making–offering too many choices does the opposite. Keep it simple.

Why are call-to-action phrases so important? Learn more by clicking here!

4. Use Negative Space

The visual design of a page should be kept relatively simple to prevent visitors from becoming overwhelmed. The last thing you want is a page covered in text, links, images, videos, and more. This makes it hard to find anything amidst the clutter. To avoid this, make sure that there’s plenty of negative space throughout each page. Negative space helps reduce clutter, gives your site a clean and elegant look, and makes your page easier to scan.

5. Choose Colors Carefully

The way you use color is psychologically important. Colors evoke different emotions and reactions from your visitors. For example, blue indicates trust, which is why it’s a color often used for CTA buttons. However, the colors you choose should reflect the content on your page as well as your brand in general. Just make sure you keep your colors consistent and that you don’t go overboard using colors. You should stick to a few main colors and their variations. Typically, it’s best if you choose one color along with a second that offers some contrast.

6. Use An F-Layout

Studies have shown that the attention of users is focused in an F-pattern. This means that when they first come to a page, they will be most focused on the top left and top right parts of your page. This slowly diminishes as they work their way down, which means the bottom right of a page gets the least amount of attention. Designing your pages so that they display information in an F-layout is therefore a good way to ensure that the information you want to convey is consumed by your visitors. For example, having the bulk of your content on the left side, positioning important links on the top right side, and then adding your CTA to the bottom left will create an effective F-layout.

The design of your website is essential to not only keeping your visitors engaged, but to keep them on your website for as long as possible. The longer you’re able to keep your visitors on your site, the better of a chance you have of converting them. These are six web design principles for conversions that you should consider implementing.

Soft Sell Advertising: What it is, Why it works, and How to Execute

May 12, 2023/in Advertising, Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Call To Action Phrases, Consumer Marketing, Direct Marketing, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

When it comes to advertising, businesses as a whole tend to be aggressive. They let you know exactly who they are, what they do, and why you should buy from them. Even in inbound marketing, companies will try to tie the topic of conversation in with their products or services in some way. However, this isn’t the only course of action. You can also reach your target audience and successfully engage them by advertising in a more subtle manner. Such a strategy is known as soft-sell advertising.

What Is Soft-Sell Advertising?

Soft-sell advertising is a more subtle form of advertising. The goal behind soft-sell advertising is to evoke a positive emotional response. The idea is that the customer will then subconsciously connect the response they had to the brand that invoked it. Businesses that implement soft-selling marketing will often create ads that are warm or humorous, as these tend to be the ads that invoke the most positive feelings.

The History of Soft-Selling

The idea of soft-selling first emerged in 1914, when Theodore MacManus published an ad that would become the model for the soft-sell. The ad was essentially an essay on the burden of being the best in one’s field. The ad was for Cadillac, yet Cadillac wasn’t mentioned a single time. Nor was there an illustration that ran with the ad. Yet the ad was incredibly successful.

The Benefits Of Soft-Sell Advertising

The following are some of the reasons why you should incorporate soft-selling advertising into your marketing strategy:

Less pressure on customers – Because soft-sell ads don’t push products or services, customers will feel less pressure to buy. The pressure is apparent in hard-sell ads, and it’s often off-putting. Using soft-selling ads, you give your audience the ability to discover your brand and make a purchasing decision on their own time.
Increase brand awareness – Even though you’re not pushing your brand into their faces, audiences will be more likely to share your content. The reason? People don’t share ads, they share content. When you create a soft-sell ad, you have to focus on the quality of the content and not on the sale. If you are able to create high-quality content that invokes a positive emotion, your audience will share that content. People will share content that elicits a positive reaction to their friends, thereby increasing your brand awareness.
Build more trust – Another result of having to focus on content quality is that you’ll build more trust. You’re basically offering your audience something of quality without asking for something in return. This shows them that you care about more than just sales. As a result, they’ll be more likely to explore your brand further. Not to mention that building trust is essential to building long-lasting relationships.

Examples of Soft Sell Advertising

Soft sell advertising has grown in popularity, both in regards to inbound marketing and outbound marketing. The following are a few examples of effective soft-selling ads:

Yeti – Yeti is a company that sells coolers and outdoor accessories. They filmed an entire series of videos called Hungry Life showing a well-known chef spending time in nature, where he picks plants, goes fishing, and prepares his meals outdoors. Although Yeti’s coolers do make an appearance, they are never showcased or talked about. Yeti is obviously targeting a specific audience by showcasing a specific lifestyle. That audience will then make an emotional connection between that lifestyle and the Yeti brand.
Burt’s Bees – Burt’s Bees uses their founder as the spokesperson. This is perfect because he essentially represents their main buyer persona. The Nature of Burt video introduces Burt, who explains who he is. He’s likable and funny, and their target audience can relate to him. What makes the video so effective is that it builds an emotional connection between the viewer and Burt, all without ever promoting the brand or its products.

Implement a Soft-Sell Advertising Strategy Today

Because many companies focus many of their marketing efforts on generating brand awareness, they tend to be overly aggressive. However, soft-sell marketing can be incredibly effective in terms of engaging your audience and building trust. As such, you should be sure to include soft-sell marketing tactics in your inbound marketing strategy.

Vital Factors to Consider When Implementing a Growth Driven Web Design

May 12, 2023/in Articles, Blog, Digital, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Website Design, Website Growth Driven Design /by Terry Becker

A well-designed site is vital to the online success of your business. Recent studies show that at least 94% of respondents rarely trust websites with poor designs. On the other hand, a growth driven web design is intuitive and positively impacts brand perception and lead conversion.

Growth-driven design is a revolutionary approach to creating high-performance websites founded on analytics and designed with specific objectives for continuous improvement.

Here are some important considerations when implementing a growth driven website design.

1. Customer Needs and Wants

Develop a clear picture of your target audience’s needs and wants, and determine the best way to fulfill them.

This sets the essential foundation for a growth driven web design. Start by developing a clear, focused strategy that pivots on the needs and wants of your ideal customer. While your website will launch with a simple version, focusing on customer needs helps you plan future updates and the continuous process cycle.

Understanding your customer needs requires creating accurate buyer personas. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers and website users. They help your team determine the best ways to communicate with empathy and personalize customer interactions.

In addition, a persona establishes a common messaging tone among your marketing team since they have a clear picture of your website’s end user.

You can start by running internal and external interviews to gather information from employees and past clients representing your ideal audience. Email surveys and phone calls are common when gathering information to finetune your buyer persona.

2. Customer Journey

The customer journey charts the road map for your website users and customers seeking solutions to their problems. Growth driven web design makes it easy to identify different stages of the customer journey and provide appropriate tools and solutions to help customers make quick decisions.

Determining the exact stage in the customer journey is essential in determining appropriate offers, website features, and supporting content for optimum conversions. The goal is to get a comprehensive view of your customer’s actions throughout your sales funnels and ensure satisfaction.

3. Fundamental Assumptions

In growth driven web design, fundamental assumptions are like the foundation for a house. Therefore, you must determine the aspects that exert the most weight on the foundation.

Establishing a strong foundation is essential to ensure the website is versatile and long-lasting. Ideally, ensure the design is aligned with your goals and has the right content to guide your team.

You can accomplish this by combining personas, customer journeys, and analytics to develop fundamental assumptions to guide your design and marketing approach for the best results.

4. Short-term and Long-term Goals

This stage involves establishing goals based on buyer persona data and customer research. Each goal is anchored in business metrics and analytics to ensure the website has all the necessary features. However, it’s essential to know what you want to achieve with your growth driven design web. Your overall business objectives guide the process by creating a clear road map.

In addition, you can brainstorm a wish list of things that might improve your website’s impact on your business and customers. Think about additional integrations, modules, features, and functionality.

This process starts by identifying elements that create the highest impact. Typically, it involves identifying the must-have and nice-to-have elements so you can cross out anything that can be added later. This process allows you to identify the core purpose of your website.

Most importantly, it helps finetune your strategy blueprint for the perfect design based on your business needs. However, your team’s collaboration between the strategist, designer, and project manager is essential to ensure the strategy aligns with your business objectives.

5. Content Development

Effective content strategy is among the key elements of a robust online presence to achieve business goals. While the minimum viable design aims at launching a functional site, it’s critical to determine the ideal content to answer user queries and move customers through the sales funnel. Ideally, you should create memorable content that connects with users and solves their problems.

The information should be simple, well-organized, and easy to understand. Visual hierarchy helps in content structure to ensure it’s logical and meaningful. This ensures that important information gets the most emphasis while less important information gets the least emphasis.

You can achieve content hierarchy by implementing visual techniques like contrast, color, white space, size, movement, and alignment. Content hierarchy improves information digestion and guides users to find important information quickly to fulfill their intentions.

6. Process Cycle

Once you’ve launched the website, it’s important to review its performance to determine the impact on your business goals. The process involves stakeholder feedback to gain insights into traffic sources and visitor behaviors. Real user data is invaluable at every stage as it gives you a clear picture of website activity.

Depending on the analysis results, you can determine the next action based on the items on your wish list.

Possible actions may include:

Improving conversions by influencing users to take specific actions
Boost the user experience by enhancing user interaction with the site to ensure easier navigation. Periodic updates are necessary to streamline the design and content.
Visitor personalization by leveraging user data to implement changes that suit evolving needs, including content offers and calls to action.
Integrating marketing assets like signup forms, social platforms, resources, and tools to provide more value to users and enhance engagement

7. User Experience

Regardless of your site’s design and the available information, user experience determines its success. You might have invaluable resources on your website, but if the user experience hardships navigating and finding what they want, you risk losing valuable prospects.

While outstanding website usability may go unnoticed by the users, poor usability has immediate impacts. Therefore, your website design must be intuitive, navigable, mobile-friendly, and accessible. Ideally, you should anticipate visitors’ actions and help them achieve their goals effortlessly.

While visual aesthetics are essential across multiple devices, upholding a consistent brand image is critical. The website should represent your business fully and create a strong connection with users.

The Bottom Line

Most businesses are shifting from traditional designs and moving towards growth driven web design. Besides enjoying additional flexibility, the companies experience more success in lead conversion and user experience.

Instead of redesigning and launching a new website every two years, growth driven web design creates an upgrade-ready design that evolves with your business. Moreover, decisions are based on data analytics to ensure upgrades are based on real customer needs.

6 Behavioral Market Segmentation Examples

May 9, 2023/in Articles, Behavioral Marketing, Consumer Marketing, Directors /by Dan Gartlan

When it comes to marketing automation, few techniques are as beneficial as segmentation, which allows you to categorize your leads based on data that you’ve collected on them. This, in turn, allows you to personalize their experience more, thereby making your nurturing efforts more effective. However, normal segmentation is based on who the user says they are; often provided by the information they fill out in your opt-in forms.

Another effective form of segmentation you should look into is behavioral market. Behavioral market segmentation segments your leads based on how they behave. This behavioral data comes from analytics. The following are six examples of behavioral market segmentation that you can benefit from:

1. User Purchasing Behavior

Basic purchasing behavior can be broken down into four categories:

Complex– When the user is highly involved in both the purchase and decision-making process between two very different brands.

Variety-Seeking- In which the user isn’t that involved in the purchasing process. However, they may choose a different brand just to try it out.

Dissonance-Reducing– Where the customer is happy with their brand, but they know other options that could be better. This also happens, when the customer needs to make a major purchase, but there’s not much difference between the products they’re considering.

Habitual– When little involvement is needed and the product doesn’t vary much from brand to brand. It’s mainly just personal preference that matters.

These behavioral market segmentation categories make it easier to identify what users are more likely to make a purchase and how you can make your product and brand stand out from the competition.

2. Occasion-Based Behavior

User behavior is sometimes identifiable by special occasions. For example, consumers often make more purchases around the holiday season or for special events in their own lives, such as birthdays and anniversaries. Occasion-based behaviors can be split up into universal occasions, regular personal occasions, and rare personal occasions. This will allow you to tailor content to all of these different occasions in a more personal manner.

Using Customer Segmentation To Improve Engagement

3. Usage Rate

Usage rate divides your users into heavy, mid-level, and light users based on how often they purchase your products or services. When segmenting your audience based on their usage behavior, you’ll be able to focus on turning light users into mid-level users and mid-level users into heavy users while keeping heavy users happy.

4. Purchase Reasoning

Different users have different reasons for purchasing your product or service. Knowing what those motivations will make it easier to meet their needs. For example, if you are selling business software, it may have many benefits, including ease-of-use, affordability, scalability, and integration capabilities. If you have an article about the affordability of your solutions to a user that purchased your software due to its scalability isn’t going to be an effective way to engage with them.

5. Customer Loyalty

Keep in mind that just because a customer keeps buying your product or service doesn’t mean that they are a loyal customer. Customers that are continually in need of the product or service that you offer are habitual customers. Whereas loyal customers only purchase your products and services, ignoring your competition.

They are important because they end up generating most of your revenue and aren’t that expensive to cater to. As a result, it’s important to be able to identify who your loyal customers are from your regular customers. That way you can focus on building your relationship with them.

6. Consumer Status

Determining a user’s status will help you figure out how to best approach them. For example, non-users need to be aware of what their problem or pain point is before you can offer your product or service as a solution. Other types of consumer statuses include prospects (who are learning about your product or service), first-time buyers (who may need to learn how to get the most out of your product), regular users (who may benefit from supplemental products), and defectors (who are ex-customers that have chosen a product from a competitor whose trust you need to try to regain).

These are six types of behavioral market segmentation examples that can help you to more effectively–and efficiently–engage with your users and to continue building relationships with them over the course of their buyer’s journey.

Using Customer Segmentation To Improve Engagement

April 28, 2023/in Articles, Behavioral Marketing, Directors /by Dan Gartlan

Once a lead has made a purchase and has become a customer, your job isn’t over. The most successful businesses are those that turn their customers into repeat customers–and this requires you to continue building the relationships that you’ve already established through regular engagement. However, as your business begins growing, it’s going to become more and more difficult to keep track of all of your customers and to meet their individual needs. To deal with this challenge, you should implement customer segmentation.

What is Customer Segmentation?

The strategy behind customer segmentation involves using the data that you’ve collected on your customers, including the information that they have provided, their general behaviour on your website, the way they’ve engaged with you, and their purchase history, to divide them into different groups so that you can effectively target different groups within your audience at a time.

For example, if you sell pet food, then sending out a promotion for new dog food to customers who only own cats aren’t going to be an effective way to encourage them to make another purchase. If you’ve segmented your customers, you can send that same promotion to a customer that actually owns a cat or that has bought cat food in the past.

Customer Segmentation Examples

The following are a few customer segmentation examples to give you an idea of how to leverage your customer data to segment your customer lists:

1. Demographics

You can obtain customer demographic information via surveys and opt-in forms. This information can be helpful for segmentation for a number of reasons. For example, if your business sells a product that comes in an affordable model as well as a luxury model, knowing which customers fall within a high household income bracket will be helpful. Additionally, the way you engage with your audience may differ depending on their age. Certain types of messaging will appeal more to college-aged adults than senior citizens, for example, and they will likely have different pain points as well.

2. Geographic location

Segmenting your customer list based on where they live can be very helpful for a number of reasons. First off, you may have store-specific promotions. If you have multiple locations throughout the state or throughout the country, then you’ll want to make sure you’re targeting customers that can actually take advantage of it. Secondly, you may have products or services that are specific to certain parts of the country. For example, you may sell heavy-duty winter clothing. Even if you’re an online retailer, targeting customers who live in warm climates where it doesn’t snow will be ineffective.

3. Purchase patterns

Knowing when your customers are making their purchases and what they are purchasing can help you segment them into groups that you can target to improve sales even more. For example, some shoppers may be hesitant and may regularly leave products in their shopping carts without checking out. You could send them a special offer or discount code to help encourage them to see the purchase through. Grouping together customers based on when they make their purchases (on the weekend, in the evenings, on certain holidays, etc.) can help you time your interactions more effectively as well.

4. Device used

Tracking what devices your customers used to make purchases or to view products can be helpful in providing the right offers at the right times. For example, customers who are using mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, to make purchases are most likely doing it away from work since most people who browse during work hours do so on their computers.

These are just a few ways that you can implement customer segmentation to improve your ability to engage with existing customers using the data you’ve collected from them. Successful customer segmentation will greatly improve your marketing efforts as a result.

How Businesses Can Use a Blog To Strengthen Their Online Marketing Efforts

A Brief Guide to Sales Lead Generation

April 25, 2023/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

While your ultimate goal, when it comes to marketing online, is to increase sales both in the short term and over the long term, increasing sales won’t be possible unless you generate leads. As such, the success of your inbound marketing efforts are going to revolve around your ability to generate new sales leads. Without new leads, you can’t obtain new customers, which means the growth of your business will be severely stunted. Keeping that in mind, the following is a brief guide to using inbound marketing to improve sales lead generation.

What Is Sales Lead Generation?

Sales Lead generation refers to the process of identifying, attracting, and nurturing potential customers or clients for a business’s products or services. The ultimate goal of lead generation is to generate sales-ready leads that can be converted into paying customers.

A lead is basically a consumer (or company if you’re a B2B business) that shows some level of interest in the products or services that you offer. Engaging with a lead tends to be more productive than engaging with someone who isn’t a lead (for example, cold calling people from a list you’ve obtained or trying to hand out pamphlets to people about your product on the street).

Because you have a better chance at closing a sale when engaging with a lead, you’ll want to generate as many leads as possible. To do this, you will need to attract potential leads to your brand, whether it’s to your website or to your social media page, and find a way to convert them. This is done by giving them a reason to be interested in not just your products and services, but also your brand in general, and by encouraging them through calls-to-action to sign up to your email, give you a call, or fill out a form (to name a few examples).

Once you’ve captured your leads, you can nurture them through the sales funnel, eventually turning those leads into customers (and hopefully, loyal customers).

Ways To Generate New Sales Leads

The following are a few inbound tactics you’ll want to implement in order to generate new leads:

1. Create blog content

Setting up a blog and regularly publishing high-quality content that’s relevant to your brand is an excellent way to generate new leads for a number of reasons. The following are just a few ways that content can help generate leads:

Relevant calls-to-action can help capture leads who are reading your blog content.

Quality blog content builds brand authority, which increases the amount of trust the public has in you. This means that leads will be less hesitant to provide you with their personal information when filling out forms.

Quality blog content is more likely to be shared by your leads on social media, providing it with more exposure to more potential leads.

Properly optimized blog content can help bring more leads via organic traffic from search engines.

Related Article: How to Have a Successful Blog (Expert Tips)

2. Run PPC ads

PPC (pay per click) ads can be incredibly effective for attracting highly motivated leads. Many businesses use PPC ads on search engines like Google and Bing to find leads who are already in the advanced stages of their buyer’s journey and are looking for specific solutions to their needs or problems. PPC ads can help attract these leads and drive them to your website.

3. Offer free trials

Consumers who are looking for potential solutions to their problems or needs will be attracted to the opportunity of signing up for a free trial, especially if they are under no obligation to buy. It’s an excellent way to draw leads who aren’t quite sure what product or service they want to go with (in terms of brand) or even whether it will fulfill their specific need.

Engaging on social media by taking part in community discussions or posting comments on relevant topics can help you attract leads. You can ev

en post contests that are relevant to your brand that require users to follow you in order to participate. Your followers are leads that you can continue to nurture through social media engagement and that you can drive towards your website via content and other offers.

5. Implement a referral program

An undervalued method for sales lead generation is by getting current customers to do it for you. You could implement a referral program that rewards customers for referring leads to your brand with discounts or other similar rewards.

As important as sales lead generation is, it’s not always about generating as many leads as possible. Yes, the more quality leads you to generate, the better, but not all leads are of high quality. For example, you can technically buy leads. The problem with this is that the leads you’re purchasing may not even be familiar with your brand, which means that they may not even have the problem or need that your solution is attempting to address. Focus on generating your leads organically and you’ll create a much better chance of converting them.