brand packaging resources

Top 7 Packaging Design Resources

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Today’s package designers have such a wide variety of tools, technologies, and materials available that they can create just about anything they envision. Add in digital printing and their amazing design options become available to everyone. If you are looking for packaging design resources, here are 7 to get you started.

Packaging World

The world of packaging continues to evolve. To keep up with the latest happenings in the industry, you need to keep in touch with Packaging World. They offer daily articles on a variety of topics about what is hot, what materials are on top, and the leading inspirations designers have today.

The Die Line

Do you want to see the latest design inspirations from students all the way to big corporations? The Die Line is definitely the place to start. You get access to a packaging directory as well as a complete library of designs. There are new designs being added all the time, so you have a wealth of inspiration at your fingertips.

BXP (Brand Experience)

Packaging design comes together at BXP. It features design inspiration from the entire globe along with industry headlines and a fully stocked directory of packaging design resources. You get to meet some of the brightest talent in the design world. It is a place for inspiration and trends.

Seven Steps To Launching A Packaging Brand

Packaging of the World

 Packaging of the World is like an art gallery of package design. You get to see some of the best design work from professionals around the globe. The best part is that you can filter the gallery based on exactly what you want. You can search by country, category and even most popular.

Retail Design Blog

The Retail Design Blog from the Creative Craft Laboratory brings selected retail packaging designs to the world. You get to see exactly what designers have in mind in a visually stunning presentation. The blog is updated every few days with even more designs. That makes it a resource you can return to time and time again.

Packaging Design Archive

If you are looking for a place to do package design research, the Packaging Design Archive is the place to start. You have the opportunity to see a wide range of designs in any number of presentations. You can filter by typography, shape, design aesthetics, materials, and environmental category, among others.

Brand New

The design firm Under Construction offers up Brand New. This features a true library of packaging designs. You get to see the latest inspirations. But, what makes this site extra special is the fact that you get a thorough review of many designs, which helps you know why a particular design works (or not).

All of these packaging design resources will give you inspiration, news, updates, and design help with any packaging need you might have.

marketing technology

Using Marketing Technology to Build a More Visible Brand

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The success of some of the newest brands on the market is due to marketing technology. Brands like Uber, Air BnB, Lyft, Grub Hub and Seamless have managed to leverage marketing technology to paint the perfect picture of their ideal customer. All these brands are itching to reach the same costumer base. The companies mentioned above are looking at city-dwelling millennials who love to travel and value convenience. Through MarTech, the above brands have been able to use the data they’ve collected to tailor the user experience specifically to their customers.

While new brands seem to have marketing technology down to a science, older brands are lagging behind. Unable to invest in a marketing agency to collect and decipher data, small and mid-size businesses are lagging even further behind.

What is marketing technology?

Back in the golden age of marketing, there were four things that most companies focused on; price, product, placement, and promotion. Placing a product in the direct line of sight for consumers, and promoting that product through TV, magazine, sales, and adverts was the core foundation of marketing. Today, things are different. New School marketers focus on The 6 Cs; Making contact, connecting with the userbase, monitoring consumption, considering consumer needs, starting a conversation, and building a community and monitoring consumption.

New school marketing presents its challenges. It isn’t enough to collect the data from consumers; a company must be ready to utilize that data. In most cases, the job is easier said than done. This is where marketing technology comes in. High-end marketing software makes it easier to collect data, follow trends, and, perhaps most importantly, pinpoint patterns within the consumer lifecycle. These patterns allow a marketing professional to make educated guesses about product performance. It also allows professionals to tweak campaigns to fit current trends based on the date they’ve collected.

[Read about Effective Marketing Strategies for a Changing Economy]

The new school of marketing

Martech has changed the landscape. Besides data, it has changed how companies are reaching their preferred clientele. Influencer marketing is a relatively new concept, mostly born out of the Martech space. Influencer marketing entails identifying influential individuals in a space. For example, a makeup company may send over free samples to a YouTube beauty guru. Another may offer their fitness tea to an Instagram model. These paid influencers have built a wide fanbase through social media. Influencer marketing allows marketers to leverage an influencer’s following to reach a particular demographic. It can be considered word of mouth marketing for the new age.

The push of outbound marketing and the pull of inbound marketing is another difference between the old school and the new school. The pull of inbound, however, needs to be measured uniquely through the use of marketing software and technology. Through the creation of more data, we must move into a space that best utilizes that data to create a harmonious user experience. All the data in the world won’t matter if it isn’t being used to harness a complete and clear picture of the target demographic.

Factors That Influence Consumer Purchasing Decisions

Essential Website Optimization Techniques to Increase Visitors

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Does it seem like the number of page views on your company website just won’t increase? A simple and efficient solution to this problem is to optimize the blogs on your website. Essentially, optimization means making your resources as efficient and accessible as possible. Even the best quality content that is posted regularly will not be read by internet users if they can not easily find it using a search engine. Stop wasting time waiting for users to come to by applying these website optimization techniques.

Keywords are key

The strategic sharing of the blogs on your website is just as important as the content they contain. Optimization requires that you include keywords and long-tail keywords, or phrases, in your blog. Keywords are topics and phrases of significance that users type into the search engine when seeking solutions to their problems. For example, I might type the key words “best Chicago summer wines” into Google to find answers on the Internet.

Another aspect of keywords is that they are widely searched, yet specific at the same time. For instance, the words “wine” or “best wines” would not be optimal keywords since they are too general. By contrast, “best Chicago summer wines” are much better long-tail keyword because they specific, including details like region and season.

Read our article about 3 key benefits of SEO

Popularity contest

In order to determine the popularity of certain keywords, check your website’s keyword analytics. If the visits are too high, you should write about something more specific. If the visits are too low, you may not decide not use that keyword. However, if you’re feeling determined, you can write content containing that keyword with hopes of boosting the page views associated with it. Another technique you can use to find popular keywords if by typing certain words into search engines such as Google or Yahoo and seeing how many results come up. Be sure to base your keyword searches off of your buyer personas and they language they might use.

Spread the word

As much as the presence of the keywords is important, so is the strategic placement of keywords in your content. If you insert too many uses of the keywords, you are likely to be flagged as spam. On the other hand, if you don’t insert enough keywords, users may have a harder time discovering your content through given search engines.

The two most crucial places to insert your keywords are in the page and post title. An example of a title for the keywords “best Chicago summer wines” could be “Top 5 Summer Wines to Buy in Chicago This Summer.” Other important places to put your keywords are the blog’s URL, image alt-text, headers, and external links in the article. I also encourage you to include 1-2 uses of long-tail keywords in the body of the blog post, but making sure they don’t seem forced. The key to the insertion of key words is to make them seem natural, because bombarding a reader with them will seem like a marketing ploy.

video storytelling

Video Marketing Ideas: Using Storytelling In Social Media

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Storytelling is one of the most important aspects when it comes of successfully conveying your message to your audience and giving them an idea of who your brand is and what you stand for. While storytelling is something that can be done via all types of content across all platforms, it’s particularly effective in video content on social media. However, coming up with different video marketing ideas that help strengthen your brand’s storytelling can be challenging. The following are a few video marketing ideas that you may want to implement on your social media channels to aid your storytelling efforts:

1. Film Your Customers’ Stories

Telling the stories of your customers is an easy way to get viewers to relate on a more personal level to your brand. When you film the story of your customer, they become the main character, which allows you to demonstrate through their story how you were able to provide a solution to their problems or needs.

2. Tell Personal Stories

Tell your brand’s story by showcasing how your company came to be. For example, you can focus on your owner as the main character and show how they started the business. This is a great way to put a face behind your brand and to make your company more relatable to your audience.

3. Create Fictional Stories

In addition to using the stories of your customers, make up some of your stories. Fictional stories often give you the opportunity to add humor and excitement that real stories don’t always have. For example, you could make the main character a superhero but keep the problem or need the same. If you’re selling a carpet stain removal product, it might be humorous to show a superhero having trouble removing a carpet stain even though you just showed them having no issue at all taking down a bad guy. Just make sure the message is clear and that you end with a strong call-to-action.

4. Film Documentary-Style Videos

Documentary videos give audiences a look into the process behind your company, whether it’s showing the process of working with a client or showing what a typical day at the office is like. It’s a good way to showcase how hard your company is working to help your customers.

5. Provide Behind-The-Scenes Videos

Behind-the-scenes videos give audiences a glimpse into what it’s like to work for your company and into what you and your company are trying to achieve. These types of videos make your brand feel more human as opposed to just being a faceless corporate entity.

The Power of First-Person Experience Videos

6. Perform Product Walkthroughs

Showing how a product works will be a lot more engaging if you film it in the form of a story. You can do this by establishing a character, showing what their problem is, demonstrating how to use your product or service, and, finally, revealing the result.

Storytelling is an essential part of marketing your brand effectively, and there are few better ways to do it than through video marketing. Use some of these video marketing ideas to enhance your storytelling abilities on social media.

seven steps to launching a packaging brand

Seven Steps To Launching A Packaging Brand

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Stevens & Tate Marketing is proud to announce the launch of a new product called Truly Supplements. It just landed on the shelves of Walgreens this week, and I am so proud of our team for launching the brand. We have launched countless brands for Aldi and Walgreens with our proven brand development process. Here are the seven steps to launching a packaging brand. Read more

earned media vs paid media

Creative Marketing Solutions

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There are many creative marketing strategies that you can implement in order to increase outreach to customers and improve your bottom line. While many businesses are going above and beyond in their search for creative marketing solutions, you can simply seek to be creative within the 4 basic components of an online marketing approach (i.e. brand development, inbound marketing, content marketing and email marketing).

By seeking creative solutions within these 4 tactics, you can develop a successful creative marketing strategy. Here’s how:

Creativity in Brand Development

A creative way of increasing the relevance of your brand is by making your brand tell a story. Story-banding is an effective way to connect emotionally to your customers so they can see your products as having a greater purpose. You can achieve story-branding for your company by highlighting the inspiration behind your products and services.

Emphasize what motivates your company to achieve its goals (for example creativity, self-fulfillment, better health etc.), and incorporate your operations as a means towards achieving this goal. That way you can make your brand the hero of its own story, one which customers will relate to.

Read more on Defining Your True Brand Story and Bringing it to Life Online.

Creativity in Inbound marketing

A creative way to generate leads to your website is by having unique, yet appropriate content across all your channels. One approach you can use is to dedicate a portion of your site for product education.

If you are selling a well-known product, you could come up with creative ways on how the product can be used, how to make it last longer, behind the scenes details on how it works, etc.

One company that uses product education as a tool for its inbound marketing strategy is Gonesh Incense. The company produces incense products and has a DIY blog that contains videos on how their products can be used in many different ways; from re-using flowers after Valentine’s Day to making bath salts using their fragrance oils.

Such content is not only useful and appropriate to potential leads, but it also helps their brand establish trust and stronger relationships with customers.

Read more on The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing.

Creativity in Email Marketing

When you send out emails, incorporate interactive elements such as GIFS, rotating banners and menus. You could display an enticing sales discount or a new product launch by using a GIF. You could also categorize information about your product under different headings within a menu in the email.

This gives your customers the independence to browse product information and select whichever section they would like to read more about, right within the email.

Read more on Interactive Email Trends.

Creativity in Social Media Marketing

One way that you can utilize social media creatively is by developing targeted messages that appeal to common groups of people online, who you can bring together in relevant social media groups.

For example, a company specializing in manufacturing bicycles can create a fan page for cyclists and bring them together through targeted messages that contain useful information that applies to cycling. The more cyclists the company is able to attract to join the group, the more they can incorporate their branding into the fan page and begin to nurture their leads.

Read more on 8 Tips on Social Media Best Practices For Your Business.

Creative marketing solutions are the future of online marketing. By simply rethinking and refocusing the conventional ways through which you carry out your online marketing, you can be able to achieve creative marketing solutions and grow your bottom line.

Closed Loop Marketing

How Closed-Loop Marketing Helps Convert Leads To Customers

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Closed-loop marketing sounds like a fancy way to reel in customers, but it’s far from being the new-fangled way of doing business and attracting new customers to your brand. In fact closed-loop online marketing has been used and refined for over a decade by some of the world’s top companies. But what makes it so different?

Read more

B2B Customer Experience

4 Strategies For Improving Your B2B Customer Experience

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Customer experience (CX), involves these three key elements: people, process and technology to understand, anticipate and deliver exceptional personalized experiences. The simple truth is that the core driver of consumer behavior isn’t product features or price, it’s perception.

Today, B2C, B2B, and customer experience are all blending together. Each is important for making your brand sell, but the experience has become one hot button in the last year. It even has its own summit this May in Denver.

Here are four key ways to improve your B2B customer experience.

Read more

marketing senior living

4 Senior Living Video Marketing Ideas That Will Improve Engagement

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When it comes to engaging with your audience on social media, you’ll want to consider implementing a video content strategy. This is because video is an excellent storytelling medium — and if it’s one thing that audiences can connect with, it’s good storytelling. Not to mention that roughly 72 percent of people would rather learn about a product or service from a video than from text. The following are four video marketing ideas that are particularly effective for senior living communities:

4 Effective Video Marketing Ideas For Senior Living

1. Share The Stories Of Your Staff

Getting your audience to engage with a video about a place is difficult, but if you highlight the people at that place, it becomes much easier. Putting a face to your senior living community will make it easier for potential residents and decision makers to relate to your video content (and therefore, your community) on a personal level.

Showcase the stories of some of the people that work at your senior living community and the relationships that they have built with the residents. You could also highlight the people that are in charge by showing why they decided to establish or run your senior living community.

2. Share The Stories Of Your Residents

As good as your reputation might be, you still have to work hard to build trust amongst your audience. Instead of shooting videos about how amazing your community is, consider allowing some of your residents to tell their stories instead. Make the resident or the decision maker a main character, explain what their needs or problems were and allow them to tell the audience why your community was the perfect solution. Not only can such storytelling be extremely effective at engaging the audience, but it works as a customer testimonial of sorts as well.

5 More Tips for Marketing to Senior Living Communities

3. Shoot Documentary Videos And Behind-the-scenes Footage

Provide your audience with a peek into what it’s like to live at your senior living community by shooting documentary videos and behind-the-scenes footage. Video content like this makes audiences feel like they are getting an unstaged glimpse or even a tour of everyday life at your senior living community, which can make your community much more appealing to them.

4. Tell Fictional Stories

While using video to showcase your residents, staff, and management can help make it easier for audiences to connect to your community, don’t be afraid to tell fictional stories as well. Creating a fictional video, such as an animation, for example, allows you to get a little more creative with your video marketing ideas, which in turn can make your videos much more entertaining and engaging as a result.

 

Storytelling plays an important part in getting audiences to engage with your senior living community on a more personal level, and one of the most effective ways to tell your story is through the use of video content on social media. These are four video marketing ideas that will allow you to employ visual storytelling to engage your audience more successfully.

brand story

How To Build A Brand Story

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Storytelling has been a part of human interaction for millennia. From the ancient time when families gathered around a fire for protection from predators, to the modern gathering of children around a preschool teacher, stories are a way for people to convey ideas and share experiences. The power of the story also works for building brands. Learning how to build a brand story begins with the past and moves forward.

Know Your Brand’s History

Every person who ever started a company had a reason for opening the doors. It could be to sell a product the founder invented. It could be to solve a known consumer problem. The reason could be to fill a particular niche. No matter the reason, the details of who founded the company and why is important for building the brand story.

Another aspect you need to record is why the brand took the direction it did. The founder may have started the company in one direction, but for one reason or another, the brand took its own path. Recording what happened and why is important for moving the brand story forward to the present.

Know Where Your Company Is Going

The next part of how to build a brand story is knowing where the company is going. Every brand needs a plan for future growth. That plan should be a natural outgrowth of the brand’s past and its present trajectory.

The future story is a vision of where the company’s owners want the brand to be in a given time frame. It needs to be well thought out, figuring in potential changes in the market and industry. It needs to integrate the brand’s vision, strategies, and goals.

Using Marketing Technology to Build a More Visible Brand 

Know Your Brand’s Values

What does your brand stand for? A brand’s values demonstrates what connects it to the world around it. Defining a brand’s values needs to be more than just stating an idealized version of what the brand should stand for. It should be an authentic statement of what the brand actually stands for.

Ask a customer what your brand stands for. You might be surprised at what you hear. The values that customers perceive may not be the values you want your brand to stand for. You have the power to redefine the perception, but it begins with knowing the values you want it to stand for.

Tell Your Story

Knowing your brand’s history, its future, and its values gives you the building blocks to tell your brand story. Your story needs to be authentic and honest. It should be a succinct statement of where your brand came from, where it is going and what it stands for. The story must demonstrate your company’s purpose. It should invite your audience to be part of the brand’s future.

Learning how to build a brand story is just the first step. You must align every aspect of your company with this story. Consistency demonstrates authenticity, which, in turn, builds trust with your target audience. The story should be an integral part of your website, your marketing, and your advertising. It needs to be part of your internal training for new hires. It needs to be a part of the fabric that makes up your brand.

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