by Miriam Hara | Nov 17, 2012 | Business Success, Social Media
The Social Media channel is very misunderstood. Businesses and brands alike are all jumping on the social media bandwagon – with little understanding of how it works and how to really leverage their efforts. Couple this with the fact that Social Media is increasingly becoming the most important qualifier for back links and search engine optimization efforts. It’s important for businesses and brands to understand this channel.
So what do marketers and entrepreneurs need to know and do to effectively use this dynamic social media channel? Here are a few dos and don’ts to remember when get you started:
1) Do make a commitment: There’s a difference between just dabbling in Social Media and seriously engaging with it. This isn’t a channel where you can opt-in or opt-out as you go. Think about Social Media like going to the gym: It isn’t just about showing up… you won’t get any results that way. Not only do you have to do it with intention, you must do it consistently and plan to do it routinely. Decide if you are ready for that commitment. (I hope you are!)
Social Media
2) Don’t just do it: Establish your definition of success before you start. I wouldn’t classify Social Media as a new channel anymore, it is now an emerging channel. And regardless of how you perceive it, it’s still a marketing channel. Like all things in marketing, in order for an initiative to be successful, you need to define what success means. Setting goals, articulating what’s important and why it’s necessary is key. Is it followers? Subscribers? Ranking? Engagement? Retweets? Entrants in a contest? Whatever it is – define it or you may be misplacing your energy and effort.
3) Do have a plan… please!: With so many Social Media outlets making their mark in the channel, it’s a real challenge to keep up with the latest and greatest. Even with the proven, tried and tested sites like YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram (the list goes on and on!), it’s hard to keep up. A handy piece of marketing advise that I always adhere to: If you can’t afford to do everything, pick one thing that will garner your brand or business the most return and do that initiative very well.
4) Don’t underestimate what’s involved: You can’t just fit Social Media in! It isn’t a part-time proposition or an additional task for an existing employee – chances are that role is already maxed out. This is a marketing channel that takes a dedicated, consistent approach. You need to add value, contribute, comment and engage. It doesn’t just happen. It takes research, understanding of messaging and proper brand tone and voice. It’s not just about knowing the platforms, it’s about integrating them and working them. If you want to build a community, you need to be social. It isn’t good enough to just say follow me!… you need to build a solid foundation.
5) Do your homework: Niche is where it’s at! Marketing has always been about segmenting and carving out marketing profiles of targets. Until recently, segmenting (or nicheing as I term it) was cumbersome and sometimes expensive. The beauty of Social Media and it’s digital channels is that it allows you to segment down to a minutia difference in characteristics. It can be as local or as global as you need it to be. And if there’s a defining characteristic of a target, believe me, there’s a group, a page, or a forum out there that is a perfect fit. And it there isn’t… well, isn’t that a wonderful opportunity!
All this to say, businesses and brands alike should get out there and get social with mindfulness and intention.
I’d be interested to hear your comments on the dos and don’ts of Social Media. Please share!
Want to know more about social media? Download Social Media Understood here.
by christine | Nov 9, 2012 | Advertising, Branding, Business Success, Creative, Design
As a creative person, passionate about digital media, graphic design and the visual arts, colour has always been an important factor in my work.
How colours interact with each other or to a specific object can be significant especially in design. The same can be said about how colour relates to your brand and its impact on the consumer and what emotive feeling will be identified with your brand. Will the perception of your brand be a positive or negative behavioural reaction?
Pairing the wrong colour palette with your brand can kill your identity. It’s important to know your target audience, culturally, geographically, gender, age, and also the purpose for your campaign so that you launch your business in the right direction.
Just by viewing a colour in a design, and how it interacts with your brand can completely change or send out a false representation of your brand to the viewer. Colour is such a powerful and important communication tool that it should not be neglected; it is part of our daily actions in life represented in religious, cultural, political and social influences.
Studies have shown when users are shown a bright red hue; it will create a physical feeling of anxiousness and an increase in heart rate. This would not be a good use of colour if used on the interior walls of an emergency room, but if the colour red were associated with food, it would be a positive action to a reaction. You want the consumer to feel hungry and in a response really need to go out and purchase your product.
There is so much more complexity to colour and colour theory and I could go on, but maybe I will save that for another blog.
*Just a note you may want to check out a few of my favourite artist’s that were really the pioneers with colour theory– Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc to name a couple.
Marc
http://www.franzmarc.org/The-Red-Horses.jsp
http://artsconnected.org/collection/111185/franz-marc
Kandinsky
http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/
by Miriam Hara | Oct 23, 2012 | Business Success, Social Media
The social media channel:
It’s the new channel, the new trend and everyone and every brand that doesn’t want to be left behind is jumping right on. Needless to say the hype is gaining momentum and believe it or not, has still not peaked. Like everything that is new, exciting and quickly evolving, there are many misconceptions and myths about the Social Media channel. Here are just 5 myths that I would like to dispel. Forgive my tone (I tend to get passionate!).
Social Media Experts: What does it take to be Social Media savvy? Is it a matter of having a Twitter account and tweeting or just pushing out content? I interviewed many candidates that say that they are experts only to find out they know how to post on Facebook and Twitter but have no knowledge of insights and measurement tools. Knowing Facebook and Twitter, oh and let’s not forget LinkedIn, doesn’t make you an expert. Social media is so much more than those three platforms (!). It’s relating to trends, it’s content creation (blogging) and it’s understanding SEO! It’s integrating landing pages, it’s about engagement and mobile and hey… it’s also understanding website analytics (can you say Google Analytics?)! but mostly it’s about how to maximize return on you’re content.
Social Media is Inexpensive: You can achieve success in less than 15 minutes a day? Really? I’m a firm believer on you “get back” what you put in. So if you only spend 15 minutes a day on your Social Media initiatives, you’ll only get that back in return… or less. Social Media takes time and effort. It’s about social engagement. That means you have to be in tuned to your market’s interests and take advantage of opportunities that daily trends provide. You need to make sure that you contribute value to your audience and your community. To be part of your audience’s inner circle, you must invest the time. So ask yourself: “How much is your time really worth?”
Anyone Can Do It: This is really part B to the first myth listed above about Social Media Experts. It irks me that people really believe anyone can do it. If you are going to embrace the Social Media Channel, one thing you should assess is how to maximize return on you’re initiative (content). Just like speaking English doesn’t make you a writer and knowing design and Photoshop software doesn’t make you a graphic designer; knowing how to tweet or post to Facebook, doesn’t make you a marketing professional.
Social Media is a Fad: News flash: Social Media is here to stay. It’s a good vehicle to engage your audience and be present during the customer decision making journey. As a business and as a brand, you really need to get your head around that or get left behind. It’s a strong awareness building tool, and if you want to be considered when customers are ready to buy… then you need to be present. Social Media is part of the marketing channels and is here to stay! As such, there needs to be an intended result, a building of strategy and a consistent, constant approach.
Social Media is All You Need: Right now, Social Media is top of mind, constantly on topic, on trend. Does anyone remember when web sites first made their debut into the business world, and hence, the marketing world. How about online digital advertising? None of these were fads and none of these have disappeared. They have their place in any solid marketing and advertising campaign. I believe that Social Media too, will take it’s rightful place in the Marketing Channel Mix – keyword being mix, melody, part of a recipe, etc…
Social Media does not take the place of Marketing. The way I see it, Marketing has always been evolving. It has always had to develop and grow. I know this is a leap, but Marketing had to evolve when television first arrived. Social Media is the new Marketing Evolution.
What are some myths that you have encountered in your initiation to Social Media? I’d love to hear about them.
by Madi Secareanu | Oct 11, 2012 | Advertising, Business Success, Events, Interactive, Social Media
Although traditional marketing and advertising campaigns are still effective, many programs and companies are now relying on digital marketing tools and approaches to implement their marketing strategies. In the vast digital realm, it can sometimes be difficult to identify which program, tool, network or approach to leverage to meet your objective. Marketers sometimes feel that they have to do it all or risk losing out on an opportunity, but marketing is about finding the right strategy and the right approach to reaching brand objectives and this concept has even more weight when it comes to digital marketing.
So in the digital space, which must-have marketing tools do organizations need for a successful digital marketing strategy?
Web Analytic Tools
Analytic tools, like Google Analytics can provide valuable insight into the success of your digital marketing campaigns. From tracking the click-through rate (CTR) of a digital ad campaign to monitoring website traffic, using web analytic tools to keep track of your numbers helps you identify what works and what doesn’t. Compared to more traditional, non-measurable types of marketing, campaigns that have tracking ability can deliver better reporting structures that help marketers hone in on where to focus their efforts. In the world of web analytics, more integrated solutions are now being offered, such as Optify, Hubspot, Acton to name a few, allowing for an integrated approach to measuring the effectiveness of your digital initiatives. A word of caution here: Tracking and analytic tools doesn’t necessarily achieve more effective results! Strategy and creative still play the most significant role in achieving objectives.
Email Marketing
Email is still one of the most efficient and effective ways to engage your customers and prospects – if you use the tool in a creative or informative way. When it comes to attracting new clients and maintaining great relationships with exiting ones, email marketing campaigns can be very effective. Companies can take advantage of email campaign managers like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor for their easy-to-use editing features and subscriber management tools to help them stay connected with customers and deliver campaigns like newsletters and promotional blasts. More recently, inbound marketing is more utilized as a term and a tactic. Rather than just pushing information out, the more effective strategies that push information out with an intent of initiating engagement onto your website, with the ability not only to track open and click through rates, but also to evaluate where potential customers go… and to capture their information.
Digital Advertising
Now more than ever people are spending more time online and on social media networks, either on their computers or their mobile devices. Digital advertising is a way for companies to reach more consumers and get measurable results. However, with the onslaught of so many digital ads, all with the new trinkets, bells and whistles, internet browsers are getting wary. Impressions still matter when assessing digital properties. The beauty of digital advertising still remains its targeting flexibility. With many digital spaces, as with Facebook ads, companies can target specific locations, interests(psychographics) and consumers with more precision than traditional advertising could ever offer. You can slice and dice niche markets to the minutia. Again, I have to say, the ability to achieve the performance you set is based on your strategy, creative and execution.
Social Media
This one is obvious – you can’t ignore the giant marketing prowess of social media. With a vast variety of tools and promotional possibilities, social media has emerged as arguably the most powerful marketing tool in today’s digital universe. From Facebook, to Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, the social media giants offer companies a valuable and effective way to reach consumers on a more relatable, engaging and exclusive level – with the ability to track and measure all efforts.
Many companies are just starting to explore the digital marketing possibilities available to them and shifting from traditional to digital campaigns. I would add a word of caution here, to approach marketing as it always has been approached, integrating parts of all channels to make a better whole. It goes without saying that Digital Marketing is one area that cannot be ignored – digital is where the customers are and where the future of marketing is evolving and as marketers it’s important to own that space.
What digital marketing tools and efforts does your company apply? And where do you see the future of digital marketing going?
by Miriam Hara | Sep 28, 2012 | Advertising, Branding, Business Success, Social Media
Or I should say, “Grow Brand Grow!” I often say that I see a Brand in terms of a life – it’s a natural! We speak of Brands as having a product life cycle, we speak of their maturity and we carefully have to nurture them.
In the height of social brand awareness, in today’s communications sphere, the concept of Brand as a living being has never been more true. Not only does Brand have to have a consistent presence through visual media, but it now has to have a consistent brand voice throughout it’s consistent platforms.
In the era of fast turnaround, communications technology is easy to fall into the momentum of constant change. It’s easy to react rather than reflect, assume rather than do research and actually know. We’ve gravitated from too much research and analysis to no research and quick fix strategies that fail in the long term. Don’t get me wrong, for tactics such as promotions and campaigns, quick analytical reference is fantastic to allow for tweaking and changing details. Although, from a Brand strategy and Brand development perspective, changing quickly is often not optimal. If Brand is not resonating with your audience, then quickly changing the tone and approach might not be the answer. But I digress.
The real subject of this post is to speak about Brands and Brand Evolution. Evolving Brands in today’s world can be a minefield. It’s important to be consistent with tone and voice, but also engage and add value. Prior to social media, Brands had to maintain a steady course in how they visually presented themselves to their audience and how they spoke to them through broadcast channels.
Today, the spectrum of Brand Personality has been broadened substantially: thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter, to name only a few. It’s not about presenting Brand in a one way flow. Today interaction is key. Traditional channels of advertising, or rather, as I like to term it classic advertising channels may still set the tone but new channels of advertising and engagement build intimacy with the audience. It is because of this intimacy that a Brand’s evolution pace is quickened. This challenges corporations and businesses to “engage” their Brand while having the ability to hold their position and evolve almost each and every day – while staying the course.
Working on Brand marketing as we do – being as close to the Brands that we work on and with – we tend to forget that our audience is not as intimate with our Brand, regardless of the new engagement channel. We are closer to our audiences than ever before, but still, they need a little more time to get to know it. Resisting the temptation to change it, to add to it is the hardest part of branding – even in today’s world.
