Advertising

Beginner's Guide to Integrated Marketing Campaigns

Integrated marketing campaigns make sure your brand is communicated consistently to your target customer. You want to ensure that your brand is telling a story to your customer across different social media channels and different devices. This story needs to be consistent to avoid confusion but also symbolize what your brand can do for your target market. This is why integrated marketing can help you reach new potential customers. It can help your brand hit all points for a seamless experience. If you're unsure of how integrated marketing campaigns can help your business, this guide is perfect for you. This article is the beginner's guide to integrated marketing campaigns.

What Integrated Marketing Can Do for Your Business

Before jumping into what integrated marketing can do for your business, it's important to understand the basics. Integrated marketing, at its most basic, is about making sure the brand is hitting every point in the campaign. It should be a seamless experience for the consumer. It's integrating all of your channels, and making sure they are staying on brand, communicating the same message to your core audience. Your team should be collaborating to make sure that everything is consistent. When you have a unified approach, it can create an effective integrated marketing campaign that results in more leads and more sales. Now you have a basic understanding of what integrated marketing is, it's important to see how it benefits every facet of your business.

Understand Your Target Audience

Your target audience is who your integrated marketing campaign is for. You need to know how you are going to help them and what their problems are if you want to create an effective marketing campaign. Your target market's problems are what will guide your campaign. Everything should revolve around your target market, especially how you are reaching them and what kind of content you are putting in front of them. Integrated marketing is about making sure your content is visible across all channels, which means it should be hitting every kind of customer. It should make them feel connected with your brand. This is why it's important to evaluate and define your target market before you create an integrated marketing campaign. You need to know how you can help them.

Elevate Your Brand

Integrated marketing also elevates your brand. It makes it more visible and consistent when it's seen on different social channels. When every campaign is consistent with what you advertise and post on channels, it makes people understand what your brand can do for them. It makes your brand memorable. It elevates your brand above your competitors because you are showing how your brand is everywhere. You are sending out the same message and sending it out everywhere. When you have a consistent branded message, it gives your business more authenticity. It also creates trust with your target market.

Your Team Benefits

You will also find that integrated marketing benefits your employees, your team. It helps them avoid confusion because you have a unified approach. In addition, your team knows what it needs to accomplish. They know what the overall goal and message of your brand are and how they can send that message out to the core audience.

Improve Your Revenue

When you have a unified vision with your team members and your brand is consistent, it can help increase your revenue. Your target market will trust your business more because it's more visible. This will result in more website traffic, more leads, and more conversion. Being present everywhere also means that you have a higher chance of converting more visitors, which can also help you increase your revenue.

What You Need to Consider

While it's great to look at the benefits of integrated marketing campaigns, you also need to consider some of the strategies involved in this approach.

Here's a look at some things you need to consider with integrated marketing.

Your Content

Your content needs to be consistent across all platforms. When you have a consistent message, it helps avoid confusion. This means your blog content needs to be the same as your social media content. Your advertisements also need to have the same vision.This also means making sure you are using every outlet to communicate your content. You are using video, plain content, webinars, and more.

Being Consistent

Whatever story you decide to tell your target market, you want to make sure it's consistent. You want to tell that same story across multiple channels. The story should be about how you are helping your target market overcome a problem. This is why it's a good idea to communicate your message as consistently as possible so your target market who hang out on different platforms understand what you can do for them. It also gives more consumers an opportunity to sign up for your offers and become leads.

Now You Know Everything About Integrated Marketing Campaigns

Integrated marketing campaigns are a great way to make your business more visible to make your brand more exposed to your target market. But in order to get to that point, you need to make sure that you know everything about your target market. You need to know how to communicate your brand consistently. This requires figuring out what channels are going to benefit your brand the most. You need to assess what your budget will be when you create integrated marketing campaigns.

If you want help with your marketing campaign, you can contact us here.

by James Rosene

This Is the Difference Between Marketing and Advertising

Marketing and advertising seem to go together in people's minds as much as peanut butter and jelly or milk and cookies. But if you are an SME looking to invest in promoting yourself, you would be doing yourself a great disservice if you were unable to identify the key differences between the two. In fact, not isolating and using these vital areas correctly could mean slow sales and the lack of that all-important customer interaction to generate future business.

Let us break down for you the clear difference between marketing and advertising and explain how you can utilize both to ensure success in your business.

What Is Marketing?

Although it may seem rather vague the roots of marketing are in fact very simple. Marketing's main focus is making sure that the product or service develops a link to the customer. Many things can make this happen, meaning advertising is one of the many tools to be found under the broad umbrella of marketing. Other branches of marketing would include things such as product and brand design, market research, and data mining.

The goal? Starting a conversation with the customer and leaving the door open for future business. You should be present in your target audience's mind when they need you. It is clear to see then that marketing involves playing the long game and not leaving anything to chance. This is understandable as the time it takes for someone to get familiar with what a brand represents and then know where to turn to when they have that need takes time. But when an effective marketing strategy is put in place, when people do turn to you it normally is for the long haul. In order to achieve this the fundamentals of marketing are always utilized. These are known as the 4 P's: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.

Knowing where and how to strike your blows by targeting your core audience, presenting them with a product or service that you know they will be interested in, at a price that you know they will be happy to spend, makes up all the key elements of a robust marketing plan.

What Is Advertising?

Advertising has one simple purpose, to raise awareness about your brand, product, or service. It makes up that crucial final P out of the 4 pillars of marketing, promotion, making it a single strategy.

This may be done in a variety of ways however one common factor would be that you need to buy this visibility, be it through TV, radio, or on the internet via Pay Per Click (PPC) services such as Google or Facebook ads. Additionally, there is usually an advertising campaign that runs for an intense time period.

A good advert sparks curiosity and can be the hook needed to entice your customer. This aspect is vital and used to be the primary way of informing your clients of your service or product. But if you were to focus solely on advertising as a business, thinking that it is the main way you will get customers, you would be selling yourself short. How could this be illustrated?

The Key Difference Between Marketing and Advertising

Imagine you want to catch fish. If you were to go out and cast your net every day, you may be successful. Some days you would catch more and other days you would catch less. But importantly you were out there doing the work. This is like advertising. However, what if you make a plan to ensure that you fished at the optimum time. You checked your location to see where most of the fish were, and at times changed your approach by using bait to catch the fish, how much more successful would you be? No doubt you would agree that the second option would be more effective. This essentially is like having a marketing strategy. In marketing, you still advertise however it is a much more measured approach.

This is all the more important today as the average customer has changed drastically. Due to the advent of the internet experts estimate that we see upwards of 5000 adverts a day. So making your business stand out among the white noise of modern-day advertising requires a lot more effort on your part. As the marketing guru, Seth Godin says "In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible." Marketing is also measurable, with you being able to use the information from your interaction with people to your advantage either by adapting your advertising strategy or even your product.

The film industry does this regularly with test screenings. Pretty Woman, Titanic, and Sunset Boulevard are all famous examples of movies that used their marketing strategy to change their final product and with successful results.

Key Factors in Marketing Strategies

So what methods and practices would be best for your business? Well, good marketing adds value to the customer but great marketing also means you start to optimize your leads. This is again one main difference between marketing and advertising. Marketing and not advertising alone drives business. A great example would be something like online content creation.

If you are consistent in providing good content on a platform like Instagram or Facebook then you will start to have interactions with potential customers. But not just any customers. These are people that you know are actually interested in your business. This is a great choice for SMEs because it can be relatively cheap to do however can yield a core customer base. Each business is different however, therefore taking the time to understand your customer base will determine the best route for you and your business.

Making Them Work for You

If we were to give you one piece of advice about the use of marketing and advertising it would be this. Use both of them! The difference between marketing and advertising is that one is developing your business and the other is purely presenting it. Remember, advertising without marketing your business would be like getting in a car and hoping that you have enough gas to get you to where you want to go. By doing both you can have peace of mind that you will be able to reach your final destination.

To guarantee that your business will reach the heights that you want it to, you can rely on EraserFarm to give you all the advice you need to map out a successful marketing strategy or advertising campaign.

Contact us and we'd be more than happy to help!

by Cindy Haynes

7 Reasons to Hire a Marketing Agency in Florida

The average US business spends about 11 percent of its total budget on marketing. That's a lot of money, but when done right, efficient marketing can significantly boost your visibility in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

As a small business, marketing costs can become overwhelming, especially if you have an in-house marketing team. Thankfully, there are marketing agencies that can help ease the burden of marketing. Partnering with the right marketing agency in Florida can help keep you streets ahead of the competition.

The demand for outsourced marketing services has skyrocketed over the years, thanks to the convenience and reliability marketing agencies afford companies. But exactly what benefits should you expect by choosing a marketing agency over an in-house marketing team?

In this post we'll discuss what you stand to gain by working with a Florida marketing agency and how to choose a reliable one.

1. It’s More Affordable

The total cost of recruiting, training, and maintaining an in-house marketing team can be expensive. Few SMEs can comfortably afford it.

Hiring a full-time marketing manager, graphic designer, content marketing expert, web designer, and social media manager can set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. When you outsource marketing services, you pay only a fraction of what you’d pay an in-house marketing team. Even better, you get to forget about employee health care benefits, paid vacations, and so on.

2. You Benefit From Unparalleled Experience

Top marketing firms usually have a team of experts who are highly experienced in different marketing approaches, including video marketing and social media marketing.

A reliable marketing agency brings a wealth of specific knowledge on a variety of issues. They know how to address a diverse range of challenges and scenarios that you’ve probably never faced before. With such a team on your side, you are guaranteed immediate results for your marketing efforts.

3. You Get Access to Cutting Technology and Marketing Tools

Investing in the latest marketing infrastructure and tools can a highly cost affair for a small business. Training your marketing team on how to use these tools also adds to the costs.

The best marketing agencies continually invest in the latest technology and software to enhance efficiency, performance, and productivity. When you hire such an agency, you get to benefit from this technology without having to purchase it yourself. You gain access to premium-level software, services, and analytical data reports minus the charges.

4. You Maintain Staff Efficiency

Many small companies try to bypass the costs of hiring an in-house marketing team by giving marketing tasks to their existing staff. The problem with doing so is that you overburden your employees. With all that burnout, efficiency goes down, and productivity will inevitably suffer in the long run.

Besides, when you involve so many people in your marketing efforts, your entire marketing campaign likes consistency.

Hiring a competent digital marketing professional can help you optimize your marketing strategy while allowing your staff to focus on what you hired them for.

5. Scaling up Your Marketing Strategy Is Easy

As your business grows, you may need to scale up your marketing efforts. With an in-house marketing team, the only to increase output is to employ more employees, which is both costly and time-consuming.

Marketing agencies typically have readily available workers who they can deploy at a moment's notice in case you need a bigger and bolder internet marketing strategy.

In addition, these agencies already have the skills and experience required to help companies scale faster. For instance, if there’s a need to start using social media ads, you won’t need to train someone on how to do it. The digital marketing agency you hire will already have the resources to get it done.

6. You Get an Outside Perspective

When you work with an in-house marketing team for years, you tend to have tunnel vision. You hardly get new marketing ideas, which can slow down your growth. Sometimes, your employees may hesitate to express concerns over your stale, inefficient marketing efforts for fear of their jobs.

Forward-thinking companies, however, are always open to new perspectives. A top marketing agency can inject the fresh inspiration you need to turn your marketing campaign around. These marketing professionals are skilled in looking at your company from the consumer’s perspective and can help you implement what works.

7. You Get to Enjoy Built-in Incentives by the Agency

Every reputable marketing agency knows that delivering great results boosts their resume. Each new client they work with is a potential reference.

You can thus rest assured that when you partner with a marketing agency, you have someone who’s deeply invested in your success. The more fruitful your marketing efforts are, the better your marketing partner’s future opportunities are.

How to Choose the Best Marketing Agency in Florida

Now that you’ve seen the benefits of hiring a marketing agency, chances are you’d like to hire one soon. Here are a few tips to make sure that you get the right agency for your business.

Consider Location

Choosing a marketing agency based in your area is generally the best move. Chances are you’ll need to hold in-person meetings with your marketing services provider, and the last thing you want is to drive four hours to another city to do so.

Hire Experience and Expertise

How long has your potential marketing agency been on the field? Do they have experience marketing the product or service you offer? What is their success track record?

The answers to the questions above can help you choose an agency that best suits your marketing needs.

Consider Their Prices

One of the reasons you’re hiring a marketing agency is to make marketing more affordable for your company. While you don’t want to go for the cheapest marketing services in all of Florida, you also want to avoid agencies that charge extortionate rates. Find an agency that fits within your budget.

Choose the Right Marketing Agency in Florida

Your marketing efforts can make or break your business. One way to build and sustain an affordable, robust marketing strategy is to work with a reputable marketing agency in Florida.

Are you interested in reliable digital marketing services? Please contact us today.

by Cindy Haynes

8 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid for Small Businesses

Businesses, both big and small, need to have a social media presence. Most companies know that social media can play a crucial role in generating leads and building brand awareness.

However, many startups and small businesses struggle to grow consistently on social media. Often, this isn’t due to lack of effort but the common social media marketing mistakes they make.

Whether it’s missing the point of social networks or oversaturating your content, small business marketers sometimes miss the mark. Before starting to advertise your business, it’s best to learn these 8 social media mistakes you’ll want to avoid when marketing your small company to customers.

1. Creating Many Social Media Accounts

Signing up for too many social media platforms─ especially when starting out─ can be a recipe for disaster. For small businesses, it’s more effective and much easier to master just a few platforms before branching out to more.

If you rush to create a presence on every social media platform out there and start publishing incoherently on all of them, you get confused. Then, you may consider abandoning some of your platforms, making things worse. This kind of behavior does nothing but boost your mistrust level with your audience, which is never good for business.

2. Not Having a Social Media Marketing Strategy

In Benjamin Franklin’s words, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.” Businesses without a social media marketing plan often find it hard to provide useful content to their audiences.

Without a clear social media strategy, you’ll find it challenging to know what to post, when to post, and what your audience likes and wants. Communication with customers might start to feel disjointed and confusing. A good social media strategy includes providing useful and engaging content that inspires action.

3. Deleting Negative Comments

Do your business a favor and be transparent. One of the common social media marketing mistakes small businesses make is deleting negative feedback. You need to show your audiences that you’ve got nothing to hide to build trust in your company

It’s best not to delete any negative comments and instead respond appropriately and as soon as possible. Negative feedback online provides an opportunity for you to engage with the user who left the comment and turn everything positive. Be respectful to whoever makes a comment and address the issue head-on.

4. Failing to Create Brand Consistency

What’s so unique about your brand? Let it shine through all your content. If you care about building a powerful brand that lasts, you need to focus on the consistency of your brand.

Don’t confuse consistency with monotony—if you're going to repurpose your content make sure you do it appropriately.

You should switch up your content, test different formats, and maintain variety. All the while, your content should remain consistent with your tone of voice, brand mission, and general look and feel. Being consistent also includes keeping your promises.

5. Buying Followers

While all social media networks don’t allow users to buy followers, the urge to buy followers might become more if you don’t have the numbers. Although several thousand followers can be purchased for a few dollars, you don’t want to go that route. Instagram and Facebook algorithms hate this activity.

In the past few years, there were so many fake profiles selling followers that even official ads attracted fake likes. Due to this, platforms like Facebook was forced to deactivate more than 2 billion fake accounts. Also, remember your ultimate goal is getting conversions, not building a subscriber count.

6. Promoting Yourself Too Much

Social media is typically about socializing and communicating. Not many people like promotional content ─ most people hate being sold to. If you decide to spend most of your time promoting yourself, you could lose social media followers.

Since your business needs to sell, use promotion subtly. While it’s okay to post promotional material now and then, the more engaging your posts are, the more sales you’ll attract. Don’t forget to set aside some of your time to interact with other people’s content, add value, and not just push yours down every follower’s throat.

7. Not Connecting and Networking

If you have many random followers who have little to contribute and don’t embody your ideal audience you will not yield the expected results. You want to draw in and engage potential customers, professionals, and peers with similar views and interests. These are the kind of people who will likely contribute to the success of your marketing efforts.

Make sure that your interactions are meaningful. That’s the true meaning of networking ─ adding value to relationships. Always find time to engage in discussions and send personalized messages.

By doing this, more people will likely pay attention to the things you say.

8. Following Every Trend

It’s not that you shouldn’t publish a buzzworthy post, but there’s a specific time and place to be trendy. If you’re a tech company, for example, posting about the latest baking style and over-capitalizing on movements to appear “youthful” can confuse your audience.

Jumping on social media trends and posting irrelevant content is perceived as a gimmick.  It plants you in a sea of other people who jump on the bandwagon. By blindly doing what every other business out there is doing, you’re devaluing your unique voice and pushing away prospects who followed you for your individuality.

Trends are still useful in social media. But first, know what everyone is talking about and decide whether or not it’s relevant for your small business. If the trend seems to benefit your business, use thoughtful ways to join the conversation.

Be Sure to Avoid These Social Media Marketing Mistakes

Because billions of people use social media each day, social media marketing remains one of the best ways to expose your company to a large audience. However, only a few small businesses do well when it comes to using social media in the right way.

As you can tell from the list above, all of these social media marketing mistakes can be avoided. All it takes is understanding your mistakes so you can handle them.

For assistance with mapping out an effective social media strategy for your brand, feel free to contact us today.

by Cindy Haynes

It's Official. EraserFarm And Valley Bank Are Partners.

We are so proud to share our new partnership with Valley Bank. For the past two years, we've been working with these fine folks on various projects helping rebrand the bank through an ongoing new logo, a big ‘ol Times Square takeover to announce their huge Nasdaq announcement and an ad campaign. Today, we've been named their official creative partner. With two main corporate offices in New Jersey and New York City, we've had the privilege of meeting so many of Valley's amazing team members and with them developing an all-new brand strategy. This sets Valley up for not just maintaining the strong relationship they have with their current customers, but opening doors for new audiences and introducing the brand as they roll into new markets and continue their expansion. "There is something to be said about working with people who understand you and understand your brand. Our friends at EraserFarm get us. They have played a key role in creating a voice for Valley that we love and truly touches our customers. We're thrilled about our new commitment to each other and look forward to continued successes," said Mark Fernandez, Executive Vice President/Chief Marketing Officer, Valley Bank. We're looking forward to expanding on the new campaign as we move through the year and exceeding our goals for this amazing client. 

by EraserFarm

The Benefits of Infographics in Conveying Statistics and Data

I'm a big fan of infographics. I know, sounds weird. But they work well and if you're curious to know why, keep reading.

The benefits of infographics are far-reaching. They can turn difficult-to-understand information, such as data and statistics, into easy-to-read graphics. They can split a complex subject into digestible chunks.

What’s more, your audience isn't just more likely to understand the information. They’re more likely to read and remember it. If you’re ready to discover the full value of using infographics for your work or business, then read on.

Benefits of Using Infographics on Complex Subjects

Infographics simplify complex ideas. They break them into digestible chunks. They use symbols that our brain understands intuitively, so it doesn’t have to work so hard.

Why use infographics? Because they display complex relationships with easy to understand graphics.

They activate more areas of our brain. When the information is distributed, the work is spread out. This increases comprehension and makes it likely your audience will remember what they’ve seen.

65% of people are visual learners. When you use pictures to represent a subject, their brains first filter the information through their image centers. Then it’s filtered through their memory center.

When you use text, their brain still needs to process that information through the image center. Then it moves through the language center. And finally, it filters through the memory center.

It turns a 2-step process into a 3-step process. It dramatically increases the work required and the risk of confusion. When you add math or numbers into the mix, the problem is further compounded.

Here’s an example:

If you show a person a picture of the aurora borealis, she gets it. But what if you show her the science behind the phenomenon?

Show her a graph of charged particle densities. Don’t forget to include a table of electron energy state distributions. Then wait for her cross-eyed reaction.

Don’t forget the effect of adding a splash of color in your data. In one study, adding color to a product guide increases readership by 80%. It turned something people found boring into something worth the read.

What kind of effects might it have on your facts and figures?

Infographics are Sharable and Linkable

Have you ever been to a convention? If you have, you’ve noticed how many booths give away free swag. Free tee-shirts, bags, pens, and stickers all proudly display the logo of the company giving them away.

The marketer who created those freebees knew the value of brand name recognition. In other words, your authority climbs each time a potential customer sees your logo. Your company is everywhere, so you must know what you’re doing.

Another of the infographic benefits is an improved trust in your company and, by extension, your products. And trust is paramount. 67% of consumers say they’ll stop buying from brands they don’t trust the company behind the brand.

Well, guess what? Infographics are sharable. When you use one on your website and make it sharable, it becomes your giveaway swag.

Other bloggers and website owners can reuse your infographic on their sites. Your logo will be plastered across thousands of sites: free advertising. It’s one of the main reasons why infographics are useful.

Don’t forget to embed a link in your infographic. When people post it on their webpage, they’re including a link back to your website. That’ll get you more audience.

These outbound links will also increase something called your domain authority. It’s one of the factors that search engines employ when calculating your page rank. An increase in your domain authority equates to an increase in your page rank.

That means that when someone runs a Google search, your webpage will rank higher in their search results.

Infographics Tell Stories

If you’re wondering how to use infographics, focus on the story.

Figures alone often miss their mark because they’re impersonal. They’re unrelatable. It’s difficult for the audience to see how they connect to their lives.

One of the best marketing strategy tips we can offer you is to use your data to build a story. Weave that information into a narrative that touches on your viewer’s lives. How and why should your statistics affect them?

Your readers understand the impact of your statistics because you made it personal.

They get your water purity tables because their children might be ingesting chemicals. They understand your atmospheric pressure predictions because they might have less food to eat. They grasp your population density predictions because they’ll be stuck in traffic every day after work.

Stories also produce strong emotions. They allow us to experience encounters that we never lived. And they leave us feeling as if we just lived the event ourselves.

These strong emotions increase our attention. In turn, increased attention improves memory retention. So not only do we relate to your data but we also better remember that data.

Stories also convey the history, values, and culture that unite people. When it comes to our families, our communities, and our countries, stories are the ties that bind us. They create a common ground.

You can use that to bolster how your audience perceives you. It will increase the trust they have in you. It’ll also make them see you as an authority figure.

Nowadays digital marketers and internet gurus know the value of stories. 74% of marketers use visuals in their social media messaging. They see the impact infographics have on their customers and followers.

What kind of an impact might it have on yours?

The Many Benefits of Infographics

Now that you better understand the benefits of infographics, how do they apply to you? What data are you finding difficult to convey? How can you paint it into a story that your audience can connect with?

If you run into roadblocks, run a quick search for “popular infographics” to give you some ideas. If you’re stuck and you’d like to have a conversation with an infographics expert, reach out to us today.

by James Rosene