video storytelling

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

/in , , , /by

When vetting brands, consumers often look far deeper than the simple surface messages that portray a company. In today’s age, more than ever, customers are choosing brands based on their set of core values–a major player in a brand story–in an effort to better understand the people behind the logo.

Your brand story and your company’s core values dictate exactly who you are and can give you a significant competitive advantage by outlining the age old question, “Who are we, what do we do?” In other words, you put your “why’s” and “how’s” on your proverbial sleeve. This level of transparency makes brands more human, more approachable, and more connected with their target market.

Core Values in a Nut Shell

In short, your core values tell your target buyers why you do what you do and must be at the epicenter of your brand story as well as the focus of your day-to-day business functions. Another way of looking at core values is character: who you are, how you go about your business, and the name you carry into your daily tasks, but these values must come from the heart and should stand out in the marketplace.

These core values are what connects your brand to your customers on a “human” level. Evaluating your core values can be a little more in depth as it truly resonates through the drive within your business. That evaluation begins by asking why your business exists, what your purpose is, and what obstacles you face to deliver on that purpose. All of these “outer layer” questions should point back to your “why” and should be able to justify what lies at the center.

Be a Storybrander, Not a Storyteller

The most iconic and memorable brands imbed their beliefs, core values, and emotions into your psyche. Storybranding is how memorable brands generate an enduring, lifelong value or belief system that stays with their customers and engages their buyer personas. In other words, companies are characterized by their ideals and personified through them. Storybranding is an attraction marketing tactic that marries your company, its belief system, and the beliefs of your customers.

There are some important differences between storybranding and storytelling, though. Storytelling allows your brand to make a connection with your customers through current events or marketing. This allows consumers to better identify with what’s happening in your business. Storybranding, however, seeks to put your brand’s beliefs and deeper meaning before your customers in order to evoke stronger emotions therefore generating stronger bonds.

How do you build a brand story? Learn the process here.

Be Your Story’s Hero

super hero

The key to your brand story is to highlight the hero within it. Of course, with every hero in every story, there is something relatable, pure, and honest about that character. In the case of storybranding, that hero is you–is there a more perfect script for your brand?

With our protagonist identified, it’s super important to tell those why’s and how’s of the story. This is where your core values come in.

Speak to those core values and instill them in your customer’s mind. Make sure they know the heart of their hero and can relate to exactly what your brand stands for. Once you’ve made that emotional attachment, begin to outline the how’s of your brand story by outlining the competitive advantages you have over others in the market. This is what truly seals the deal, but without a reason, your brand simply can’t speak as loudly as it could. In other words, keep your core values close to home.

Furthering Your Brand Story

Your brand story is completely unique. No one else can say it the way you do and no one else can replicate the pillars you stand on as a company. If you need a little help, consider a free marketing consultation where a marketing professional can help you develop and say your brand story the way no one else can!

Click here to learn all there is to know about telling your brand’s story.

5 Website Redesign Tips That Will Generate More Phone Calls

/in , , , , /by

Your website is not only useful for providing company information and generating leads, it’s also useful for getting potential customers on the phone. If you design your website properly, you can increase the number of phone calls that you may receive, which, in turn, can give you a greater opportunity to close sales. The following are five website redesign tips that will help you to generate more phone calls:

1. Make your phone number visible

The last thing you’ll want is to have a visitor to your website searching for your phone number. If they want to call you, they may get frustrated and give up if they can’t find your number anywhere. This is an easy issue to address: place your phone number on every page of your site in a location where it doesn’t overwhelm the entire page, but where it’s easy to spot. For example, the top right corner of the page. You don’t want it to dominate the page because that will make visitors feel pressured. However, clear positioning will make it easy to find at a glance.

 2. Use effective calls-to-action

Encouraging leads to call will help generate phone calls. Visitors often don’t know what they want to do in terms of taking an action and will need a friendly push in the right direction. Use calls-to-action (CTA) on every page and make sure that they are relevant to the content of that page. For example, if you are running a real estate company and you have a blog post providing tips on how to stage a house, you can add a CTA at the end telling the reader to call you for more information or advice on how to sell their house. Add the number in your CTA to make things easy for them.

Why are call-to-action phrases so important?

3. Add click-to-call options

A huge percentage of your website’s visitors are likely browsing your site on their smartphone. By implementing click-to-call options, you’re more likely to generate calls from these mobile visitors. A click-to-call option allows the user to simply tap the phone number listed in your CTA. This will automatically dial the number on their phone. When it’s this easy to call, mobile users are much more likely to do so. Otherwise, they are going to have to pull up their keypad and dial the number in manually. This extra effort may discourage them from calling you right away.

4. Use a Responsive Web Design 

If you’re redesigning your website, you need to make sure that you’re using a responsive design to ensure that your site is properly displayed on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. If it’s not mobile-friendly, mobile users may have a tough time locating where your phone number is. For example, if you put it in the top right corner and your site doesn’t display properly, they may have to scroll right to find it, making it easy to miss.

5. Add a Call-Back Widget

The call-back widget is useful for visitors who aren’t able to contact you right away but want to speak with one of your representatives. For example, they might be on their computer and their phone might be out of reach. The way it works is simple — the visitor will just type in their number, which you’ll be notified of. You can then have one of your representatives call them back.

Capturing leads can very challenging, especially when you’re engaging indirectly with leads via your website. It’s generally easier to close leads when you can get them on the phone, which is why you should implement these five website redesign tips.

Real Estate Marketing

Creative Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders

/in , , , , /by

As a homebuilder in an increasingly competitive market, getting ahead with your real estate marketing plan will give you an advantage on your competition and increase your value as a contractor. In much the same way you leverage creativity in your trade, you must be creative when it comes to your marketing.

Creative real estate marketing starts with a rock solid online presence and strategy and, once established, can be built up on the foundational level. Here are 8 creative real estate marketing tools you should be utilizing now.

1. Video

Video is a vital piece to your marketing puzzle, especially when it comes to helping prospective home buyers visualize their future home. Whether you’re in the custom home market or not, video content is a great way to help your clients better understand what it is you do and what makes you unique.

Leveraging video by making them personable, relatable, authentic, and unique to your brand helps build brand awareness and rapport in your industry. These articles below can guide you in the right direction to make fantastic video content:

2. Optimized Landing Pages

Landing pages are where your online prospects “land” after reading through your content. This is your customer’s gateway into your sales funnel and where they are willing to enter your sales process with hopes of a return of more education about your brand or products.

Optimized landing pages improve the chances that a potential customer enters your sales funnel and draws their focus toward the important points about the offer presented them. Here are some resources on the value of optimized landing pages:

3. Use Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is far less scary than it may seem on the surface and can actually be an extremely valuable tool for identifying buying trends, behaviors, and interests of individuals and families seeking a quality homebuilder.

Marketing automation can (and should be) personalized and will help your leads matriculate through your sales funnel faster. This gives you the ability to nurture leads into sales and gives you crucial insights into individual buying behaviors. Marketing automation is more than drip emails and encapsulates a vast area of lead nurturing. Check out these useful references:

4. Social Media

An often overlooked aspect but highly important piece of your marketing puzzle is social media. There’s a high likelihood that your customers will start their search for a homebuilder by some form of social media, and your presence there could very well make the difference between getting a lead and losing a sale.

Knowing what to do with social media requires a bit of a learning curve to someone who may be new to it as more than a social platform. Business social media in conjunction with a quality attraction marketing campaign is a slightly different animal, but we’ve got a few key posts aimed at making your social media presence a fruitful one:

5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising may seem unfamiliar and (if put in the wrong hands) very costly; however, PPC advertising done right is a primary structural piece of your attraction marketing efforts and can greatly improve your marketing ROI.

Two of the leading platforms for PPC ads are Facebook and Google with both performing admirably for myriad industries and are critical for the awareness stage of your buyer’s journey. Take a look at these resources for leveraging PPC to your advantage as a homebuilder:

6. Retargeting

Sometimes referred to as remarketing, retargeting deals largely with resurrecting forgotten leads who have either fallen out of your workflows or to heat up a lead gone cold. Retargeting focuses largely on marketing qualified leads or MQLs. MQLs have already been qualified for sales and have entered the consideration stage of their buying journey.

This is a great time to churn up that cold lead and get it back into your lead nurturing program. Here are some ways retargeting can help your leads heat back up:

7. Content and Inbound Marketing

Often used interchangeably, content or inbound marketing leverages your expertise and online presence as a hub of information and attracts potential customers to your brand. Unlike more traditional outbound marketing where leads were often untraceable, inbound gives you the power to track your leads from beginning to end. Check out these resources for yourself:

8. Email Marketing

As we mentioned previously, email marketing is an essential part of your lead nurturing process and can keep prospective customers in the loop with what’s going on in the housing industry and your company’s building endeavors. Like any tool in your marketing toolkit, email marketing has a place and a time in your buyer’s journey. Specifically, email marketing is geared towards the information hungry buyer during the attraction phase.

Nevertheless, email marketing is relevant throughout their journey. It can be even more critical in the middle of the funnel where leads tend to fall away. These resources below can give you a better understanding of how email marketing fits into a creative real estate marketing plan:

digital marketing tactics

5 Digital Marketing Tactics For Senior Living Communities

/in , , , , , , /by

More and more seniors are becoming tech savvy, using smart phones and tablets to communicate with family and friends. They also use their smart devices to do their own research on where they want to live and how they want to do it. This is one reason why digital marketing tactics are critical for senior living marketing.

Digital Marketing Tactics for Senior Living Communities

Your website is one of your most important assets. It’s where consumers are going to find out more about your company. The place where you build trust. Where you show your leadership in the senior living industry. It’s where they can get more information about your community.

With your website in place, what digital marketing tactics should you employ?

  1. Blogging

Blogging offers you the opportunity to provide your audience with useful information while positioning you as a trusted expert. You can use your blog to provide useful information like how to downsize, how to stay healthy as you age, how to find the right senior community and how to find work as a senior. High-quality content keeps people coming back.

Check out these tips on How to Have a Successful Blog

  1. SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) works to get your community’s website found by the search engines. It is done with keyword placement, quality content, and a dynamic website. The more you have of all three, the better your SEO results will be.

  1. Social Media

Social media allows you to engage your audience. You can share tips, post links to new content, or share testimonials. Facebook offers a place to share as well as a place where potential residents can make queries or learn more about your community.

  1. Email

Email lead nurturing allows you to make your community more attractive to people who have expressed interest. You can share community events, resident highlights and interesting tidbits to show how involved and engaged the residents of your community are. That makes it more attractive to those considering moving in.

  1. Online Advertising

Online advertising positions your brand in front of anyone seeking information on senior living communities. In fact, as they search for that kind of information, your name pops up. It can give you highly qualified leads almost instantaneously.

How Brands Use Feelings to Get People to Buy

These tactics will help you position your senior living community. You can grab the attention of seniors as well as their loved ones and care providers.

Generation X Matters: How to Tell Your Brand Story to Them

/in , , , , /by

Generation X, often referred to as the middle child, is the generation sandwiched between the baby boomers and the millennials. And just like the middle child, they often feel forgotten, especially when it comes to marketing. However, this generation has impressive buying power and are essential to consider when determining how to tell your brand story.

Generation X are now in their late 30’s to early 50’s, and are the generation that remembers a time before the technological, and specifically the digital, revolution. On the whole, however, Xers were young enough when it happened to have embraced the change and made technology work for them. They have a foot in both camps and are just as at home with print media, as they are with blogs, Facebook and YouTube.

Why is Generation X Important?

While, relatively speaking, Generation X is a small customer segment in comparison to baby boomers and millennials, they have immense buying power, which should not be overlooked. However, marketers are confused about how to reach a generation that has one foot in the past, and the other firmly in touch with digital technology and change. Research has shown that 62% of this generation still read print media, while at the same time 60% use a Smartphone on a daily basis.

Despite the difficulties of appealing to this generation, they are ignored at your own risk; after all, they account for over 30% of consumer spending, and not only are they buying for themselves, but many still have financial responsibility for their children as well. They are also extremely brand loyal, once they find a brand that is worthy of that loyalty.

Creating Consistency is Key

Given all of this, consistency is vital in your brand storytelling, not only within your story but also across the platforms through which you tell that story. However, generation Xer’s are also busy, often juggling children, careers, and responsibility for older family members. So, your story and your brand need to be instantly recognizable, and easily digestible. Short snippets of information combined with audiovisual formats make your story memorable and accessible. Generation X is not shy of technology, so utilizing channels such as YouTube, along with approaches such as email marketing, is vital if you are to get your brand’s story across in a meaningful way.

While busy juggling their many commitments, creating the lifestyle they want remains of paramount importance to this generation. They work hard and expect their money to work hard on their behalf, especially as there are few guarantees when they hit retirement. They respond well to offers, especially coupons that offer what they want at a price that is well within their budget. However, they are wary of trying new, untested companies, so when choosing how to tell your brand story, you need to develop trust from the very start.

Got tips? Sure we do! Check out these six tips on email marketing.

Hearing the Voice of Generation X

Generation X has strong opinions, is generally worldly-wise, and drawn to companies that are ethical, and which promote ethical goods and services. These need to form part of your brand story if you are to begin to build the trust of this generation. However, you also need to show that you value your customer, as well as the planet.

Excellent customer service is essential to Generation X. They need to feel valued and respected by your company and your brand. If they do not, you will know very quickly. This generation, more than any other, is not afraid to take the time to say what they think, and they expect you to listen. So, your story needs to focus on the customer and show that not only do you accept and listen to feedback but also that you act on it. That means that while the fundamentals of your story – your ethos, mission, and goals – may not change, how you achieve these needs to be tweaked to adapt to the changing needs of this generation.

The 5 W’s Of A Thank You Page

/in , , /by

Thank you pages are an important part of the inbound methodology. To better understand a thank you page, it is best to look at the 5 W’s: Who, what, when, where, and why.

Who sees a thank you page:

Anyone who chooses to follow a link on your website to obtain an eBook or a white paper of some sort, is going to see a thank you page. These people can be prospects, leads or customers.

What the page should look like:

A thank you page should look similar to your companies website. The thank you page should include the main headers which can be seen on your website as well as the name of the company. Most importantly, the message that states “thank you for ___”. You fill in the blank with signing up or downloading the eBook, etc. Additionally, the time frame in which the person will receive the information they have requested. To the right side of the thank you page, it is good to include information related to the topic. Additionally, including a CTA to increase lead conversion, is a good addition as well. When designing your thank you page, it is important to remember that it should NOT be a blank white screen that says thank you.

When a thank you is important:

Thank you’s are always important. Especially because in today’s time, people are always looking for information. By providing a thank you page, there is a good chance the person could return to the website. These pages are something very positive.

Read more on how a thank you page is not the end but a continuation.

Where to go after this step:

Once someone has seen the thank you page, they will be waiting for the information requested to be sent to them. It is important to get back to that person within 2-3 business days. Something else that can be done is to start sending emails to that person with information similar to what they requested. This way, by keeping your company as a part of their attention, they won’t forget about you.

Why these pages are important:

These pages are important because it shows people that you care. It also shows that you will get back to them with the information they are looking for. Thank you pages are important when converting people in the inbound methodology.

Overall, thank you pages are a great addition to have as a part of your website. Don’t forget that these pages appear after someone has requested information. That means that your website will need to include call to actions.

how to tell your brand story

How To Tell Your Brand Story Using Personas

/in , , , , , /by

When considering how to tell your brand story, you must think of the role of the audience as well as that of the storyteller. Stories create wonder, excitement, and engagement in the world they create. Through storytelling, your business can engage with its audience on a much more emotional level. Connecting with your key audience is vital, and can be achieved through the creation of buyer personas.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents the behaviors, goals, and needs of your current and potential customers. Once you know who they are, the problems they are facing, and what they want from life, you can begin to see how to tell your brand story in a way that reaches them and provides the answers they are looking for. The more thoroughly the buyer persona is fleshed out, the more focused your brand storytelling can be, and, consequently, the more effective.

Where to Start with Your Buyer Persona

As with any storytelling element, you start with what you know. Who are your current customers? What age group do they fall into? What gender are they? This information can be gleaned from login details, email lists, and customer feedback. If you make use of social media platforms, the data your customers share publicly provides a wealth of knowledge. You will find that specific characteristics are more common than others, providing you with the basis for your persona. It is essential, however, to create more than one persona, or you could have too narrow a view of your potential audience.

Using Your Brand Story To Reach Millennials In Business

Putting the Flesh on the Bones

how to tell your brand story

Once you have these details, you can begin to ask further questions that allow you to fill in the gaps and create fleshed out individuals. Give your buyer persona a name, age, and gender. Determine their marital status and flesh out the details of their immediate family. Don’t forget to consider their level and type of education, as well as how long they have been out of school. All of this is important because how you approach a single millennial will differ significantly from how you tell your story to a married member of generation X with a mortgage and a family.

Give your personas a career, responsibilities, and challenges. How do you think they approach these elements in their life? How do these aspects affect their levels of trust, loyalty, and their approach to taking risks? These are again all crucial elements in how you tell your brand story and what image of your company you create.

Don’t forget to consider their social life as well. Your buyer personas need to be as human as possible. As well as helping you to create a connection between the audience and the story, this helps you understand where they spend their disposable income, and what you can do to redirect more of that spending towards your brand.

If you are ever unsure of the next step to take with how to tell your brand story through a buyer persona, just imagine a conversation between them and your brand persona. If it is a long pleasant conversation that finds solutions and answers questions, then you are on the right track. If it ends in an argument or, even worse, still silence, you probably have to revisit your brand storytelling strategy from the top.

How To Tell A Better Business Story

/in , /by

A critical key in modern marketing is storytelling. Now, anyone can generate and tell a story. For it to be effective, however, it needs to convey a meaningful message to your audience. Simply put, you need to tell a better business story.

The Meaning Behind the Story

There is some question as to why you need to tell your story in the first place. Who is interested in the history of your company? Your target audience, that’s who.

Connecting with your target audience requires making an emotional connection. That connection builds excitement and encourages loyalty. Storytelling is one way to do this. Humans have connected to their culture and history through storytelling for millennia. It stimulates the mind and it invokes deep emotions. It provokes empathy, engagement and perspective. And all of that promotes an emotional connection.

Visual Storytelling Techniques That Will Take You To The Next Level

Crafting a Better Business Story

How can you make your business story more engaging and exciting?

  • Tell your audience how your company is changing the world. When you opened the doors, you had a vision on what you wanted to accomplish. That vision may have changed a bit since you started, but you still have a vision. That is part of what you need to convey to your audience through your business story. You want that audience to see that vision and to embrace it as part of your brand.
  • Show your audience why your company matters. Part of what you need to convey is what makes your company different from your competitors. Telling your story gives you the opportunity to highlight what makes you different and why your customers choose your brand. This differentiation needs to be an integral part of your story.
  • Be authentic. Today’s consumers have the ability to check the facts. When you are telling your business story, you need to stick to the facts and avoid embellishing the truth. If your story sounds a bit boring, try a different angle. Even the most boring story can sound interesting with the right storytelling.
  • Focus on your audience. Your story needs to create an emotional connection with your audience. You don’t want to throw details into the story that clutter your message. When crafting your story, be sure each highlight you include invokes or enhances that critical emotional connection.
  • Be courageous and audacious. Brainstorm and explore all avenues of how to convey your business story. You may have a few bad ideas, but if you explore the inspiration behind those bad ideas, you may find the perfect angle for telling your story. Or you may find the right details to set your story apart from the competition. The bolder and more audacious you are, the better your story will be in the end.
  • Tell, refine, retell. The first time you tell your story, it will sound hesitant and awkward. You may not have the delivery smooth and the details are rough. But, that is only the first time. Refine your story, smooth out your presentation. Tell the story again. And again, and again. The more you tell it, the more you refine it, the better it will end up.

Each of these tips will help you craft a better business story. Remember, you are not going to get it perfect at first. But, the more you tell it, the more you refine it, the more authentic it becomes. And that is how you make that emotional connection with your target audience.

lead nurturing

6 Effective Call To Action Examples

/in , , /by

Great content is essential to building brand authority, attracting leads, engaging with leads, building trust, and more. However, good content will only take you so far. If you want your leads to take action once they’ve read or viewed your content, you’ll need to end with a convincing call to action. Without calls to action, your leads won’t know what you want them to do, which will make it more difficult for you to capture them. The following call to action examples will give you an idea of how to create a call to action that is effective:

1. Be Clear And Concise

Your call to action should only be a sentence or two long. If your call to action is too long, your intention may get lost. The last thing you want is for a lead to read your call to action and forget what it was that you were attempting to get them to do by the time they get to the end.

2. Highlight Benefits

You can’t tell a lead what to do unless you offer them something of value in return. For example, you can’t just say “sign up to our newsletter,” if you don’t provide a reason for them to do so. Otherwise, what’s the point in them taking action? Take the call to action examples of Ikea, one of which asks leads to sign up to their newsletter:

Sign up here to get IKEA promotions, news and exciting design ideas for your house and workplace delivered right to your inbox!

This call to action is very clear about what the benefits are to signing up to their newsletter, all while keeping it short and sweet.

3. Emphasize A Lack Of Risk

One of the reasons why it’s so important to build your brand authority is so that you can build trust with your leads quicker. The more people trust you, the more willing they will be to follow your calls to action. However, even if you have managed to establish your brand, people tend to be hesitant about providing their personal information. Because of this, you should emphasize the low risk of following your call to action. Netlifx has a great example of this:

See what’s next. Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime.

Not only does Netflix highlight the benefit of signing up (watching anywhere), they also emphasize the lack of risk (cancel anytime).

4. Use A Sense Of Urgency

Create a sense of urgency with the words you use. This has a psychological effect on leads, helping to encourage them to take action sooner rather than later. If they decide to wait until later, they may forget about your offer, after all. Words that incite urgency include “now,” “today,” “instantly,” and “hurry,” to name a few.

50 Most Powerful Call-to-Action Phrases

5. Consider Two Calls-to-Action

Because you should keep it simple, it’s usually better to stick to one call to action at a time. However, in some cases, two may be appropriate. For example, if you offer two versions of your service, such as free and premium, or if you have a trial available, in which case you may want to have sign up buttons for the service itself and for a trial to that service. Spotify does this with their call to action, which includes two buttons:

Get Spotify Free

Get Spotify Premium

This can be effective since people who try free versions or trial versions are often more likely to sign up for the paid service as a result.

6. Make It Stand Out

Make sure that your calls to action are easy for leads to spot. Instead of just using regular text that blends into the text of your content, consider using buttons that are of different colors than your background. Many successful call to action examples also use visual images. Lyft, for example, uses an image of a driver and his passenger, who is enjoying the ride, as an image that provides an immediately positive impression of their service.

The stronger your calls to actions are, the more leads you’ll convert. These call to action examples should give you a good idea of how to make calls to action that will help improve your conversion rate.

 

innovative marketing ideas

How Data Driven Creative Is Shifting The Advertising Industry

/in , , , /by

It wasn’t that long ago that businesses had limited data to use for their creative. Marketing campaigns were often built using subjective creative instinct and little else. However, now that advertisers have access to significant amounts of data, including personal customer information as well as audience behaviors, creative decisions are being informed by their data. The use of data allows businesses to make much better use of their resources, thereby making your data driven creative efforts more successful as well as more cost-efficient. The following are just a few ways that advertising agencies use data driven creative tactics to influence your marketing campaign for the better.

1. Develop More Accurate Buyer Personas

Arguably the most important facet of any marketing strategy that you implement is the audience you’re targeting. If you’re targeting the wrong audience, your efforts will fail. This is why developing buyer personas is so important — and the most effective way to do this is through the use of customer data. You can use the data you have from previous customers as well as data from the leads you’ve captured in order to identify exactly who your audience is, which will help inform the creation of your buyer personas.

For example, you can track the behavior of your customers by viewing what pages they visited and what actions they took before making a purchase. Information like what they’ve purchased and when they purchased it will be very helpful in being able to reach your audience as well. Many businesses will also create post-sale surveys for customers to fill out that provides valuable information as well. Additionally, you can gather information from your email opt-in forms as well as from your social media followers.

2. Locate Where Your Audience Is

Knowing who your audience is won’t help much if you don’t know where they are. There are countless social media platforms on which you can target your marketing campaigns. If you choose a social channel on which your target audience isn’t present, your campaign will fall on deaf ears. Figuring out what platforms your audience uses is the first step towards reaching them, and your data can help you pinpoint where they are. For example, you can look at the social media data of similar companies to determine where they have the biggest reach, or you can add social share buttons to your content and then identify which platforms your content is being shared on most.

You can also set up business pages on several social platforms and link to them in your email campaigns and on your website. You can then track which pages receive the most follows, which will tell you which social channels you should focus your marketing efforts on.

3. Personalize Your Ads

The amount of data that you have at your fingertips should allow you to personalize the experiences of your customers, especially once you’ve created your buyer personas. For example, retargeting customers using PPC (pay per click) ads highlighting items that they added to their cart but didn’t end up purchasing can be a very effective way to close a missed sale opportunity. Personalized experiences in general, whether it’s personalized CTAs (calls-to-action) or personalized emails, have a big impact. A recent study even revealed that consumers are twice as likely to click through ads for brands they were unfamiliar with if it was tailored to their preference.

4. Create More Relevant Content

By using your buyer personas and by collecting and analyzing how your visitors engage with the content you produce, you can fine tune your content strategy to better target your audience. By tracking several metrics, including time spent on a page, engagement with the content (comments, social shares, likes, etc.), click-throughs, bounce rate, lead captures, and more, you can identify what content performs at the highest rate. You can then craft new content that’s aligned with what type of content performs well. For example, if you noticed that short-form content in list form performs well but long-form content without bullets or numbers does not, then you should have a pretty good idea of what future content should look like.

These are just a few ways that data driven creative can work and why it’s changing the way the advertising agency operates. Using the significant amount of data that you have access to in order to drive your creative marketing decisions will make it easier to successfully identify who your target audience is and how to reach them in a cost-efficient manner.