James Rosene

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

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

Emotions: The Secret Ingredient of Video Advertising

Time marches on. And as it does, video advertising is marching ahead right along with it. It's beginning to be an essential piece of every brand. Without a focus on it, you'll have a lot more trouble succeeding than you would have previously. The key to a great video marketing campaign is capturing the right emotions and presenting them to the viewer. If you'd like to learn how to utilize the emotions of your viewers rather than just throwing videos into the void, well then, go ahead and use that emotion known as curiosity and keep on a reading.

Why Emotion Is So Important to Video Advertising

No one likes to watch a boring video. Unless you're in bed trying to fall asleep. In which case, it's a great sleep remedy. On the other hand, if you want to grab a viewer and not let go, creating a video marketing campaign is a bit of  balancing act. One where you need to engage with your viewers on a basic level but also make sure that you're able to get your point across in a clear manner. Something can be overly exciting, grip the viewer tightly, but still not get the point through clearly. You can also create a video that is just a long transcript of your message but leaves viewers yawning. Not a good idea.

The happy balance, in the middle, is when you spend the time crafting a video that carefully engages the viewer's emotions. And one that will connect with them on very real and relatable level.

Build a Bond

Your brand is the face of your company and using emotions to ensure that you're able to bond with your customers is key. Don't get me wrong, there are many ways to bond with customers but video advertising is one of the best, in my humble opinion. After all, you want to speak directly to the viewer, causing them to feel like they're part of something in a way that doesn't feel like advertising. This doesn't just apply to things like making your brand stand for a cause. The bond can be much simpler than that used by larger brands where various products end up tied to various causes. You just need to make the viewer feel like their purchase makes them part of something. It needs to make a believable, truthful connection with them. That's the basis of forming a very powerful bond that can be used in your video advertising campaigns.

What Emotions Work the Best?

We're not psychologists here. We're ad folk. But we'll give it our best shot with some good old common sense. Obviously, not all emotions work well when you're trying to use them in your campaigns. Evoking anger, for instance, isn't going to help matters when you're looking to make sales. The feelings which are most often invoked in successful marketing campaigns are:

• Happiness
• Friendship
• Inspiration

These feelings are generally positive and are the easiest to use. They create a positive emotional association with your brand and can inspire people to buy what you're selling. More touchy, but still usable, are negative emotions. Think about those overly sad ASPCA ads, through the use of music and imagery they inspire a feeling bad enough even the singer can't seem to make it through them. But they've also inspired a lot of donations to the cause because of that. Anger is most often used in political campaigns, where people can be made aware of issues that they want to vote against. Even disgust is sometimes used as a manipulative emotion to discourage negative behavior like smoking.

Needless to say, the emotions you use are essential to your brand. Once you've decided on a tactic it's going to become an vital part of branding yourself and effect your campaigns for quite some time moving forward. The emotional bonds formed through the use of emotion are a lasting strategy, not a one-off.

How to Use Emotions in Your Campaigns

But how do you use emotions in your video marketing? Well, for many people, the front-end strategy revolves around hiring someone with a background in making videos to do it. But you can do a good job yourself provided you think through all the primary aspects of your videos.

The Script

The script is important, of course, but it's not going to be the sole factor in making sure that you're grasping the emotions you want the audience to feel. Indeed, it can be less important than many think as long as it's primarily on message. Overly bad writing can lead an ad to be lampooned, but a decent script is probably the easiest part of keeping things moving forward.

Music

Music is one of the big factors when you're trying to get the right emotion across. I've always been a huge proponent of deeply researching and finding that perfect piece of music. It can be so very, very powerful and moving.  It's not only the music playing in the background either, but it's also the way that the music swells or fades as the script goes through its key points. Here's a few examples we did. For Intrepid, we chose music that was irreverent and motivating that captured the essence of the maverick nature of the brand. Conversely, for The Homefront Foundation, we were addressing a very serious and heartfelt emotion and that music reflected the messages that were coming across in the video.

Cinematography and Editing

The focus on your cinematography is a make-or-break element of your ad. Good cinematography can make a mediocre script evoke whatever emotion you want. Bad cuts and sloppy edits can make an ad a complete laughing stock. Which is why most people hire experienced folks to handle their video advertising. Editing is another key. While it seems obvious you'd be surprised at how many people overlook the editing process and just slouch their way through it.

The Big Picture

Always make sure that you use a focus group for an ad before running it on your website or YouTube channel. If you don't have the funds, then run it by some friends and family to see how it makes them feel. The overall picture presented should be in harmony with the feelings you're trying to invoke when they think about your brand.

Create a Brand to Remember

When it comes to video advertising the biggest key to making your campaign a win is the emotional focus. Without it, you'll be left with something bland or generic. There's a lot to be said for doing things yourself. But... there's more to be said for using a time-tested professional to handle your branding in its entirety. I hope this was helpful and please, by all means, check out some of our previous work and see if we're the right fit for you.

by James Rosene

Overhaul Your Strategy: Social Media Trends and Strategy to Follow in 2020

If you're going to make social media work for you, then you're going to need a strategy. A darn good one at that.  Whether you're a blogger, artist, or business, you need to use social media to communicate with people and raise awareness. But blindly launching a social media campaign won't get you very far. You've got to implement a strategy to achieve great things.

In this post, I'm going to talk about some of the biggest and best social media trends that will improve your overall strategy. If you've been apprehensive about leaning into social media because you're not sure how to succeed, sit back, put your feet up and let us help you figure it all out. While it may not be rocket science, you can't just expect it to work for you without putting the work in yourself.

Don't Tear Down Communities. Build Them.

As we all know, one of the best things about social media is the ability to interact with your audience. And do it virtually in real time. It doesn't matter what you're selling; when you can relate your image and your product to an audience in a meaningful way, then you're going to get more people paying attention. This goes far beyond brand building. You've got to encourage a sense of community around your brand so that even when you're not engaging with your followers, they're engaging with one another.

A community can come in many forms. Ultimately, you want it to work both online and offline so the conversation around your brand never stops. You might be asking yourself (and if you're not, then I am pretending you are!) "how do you start this from the ground up?" It's important to use insights that the major platforms give you to come up with posts that take them into account. Specifically, look at engagement. Having lots of followers is a great building block, but you'll start to see followers turn into customers when your likes and comments increase. This is where it all comes back to content. Work on putting out content that gets people talking and encourages that sense of community that you're after.

Video Is King.

Video has taken over the digital marketing landscape and it's obvious now that people like to get their information from a video rather than reading it on a blog or a post. Like this one. But hang in there because there's more juicy nuggets coming your way.

You can use social media to promote your videos and even create video content directly on some platforms. Social media companies have made video easy to produce, and it's the best way to instantly communicate with your followers. Stories and IGTV on Instagram give you a platform to say and do whatever you want. Similar features are available on Facebook, Twitter, and many newer platforms. The video content that you should be pushing on your social media platforms isn't polished or sales-oriented. It should be raw and relatable to your followers so that it better suits that sense of community that we talked about earlier.

Word of Mouth Marketing.

Word of mouth marketing is a concept that we've become accustomed to for a long time. That's how a business grows from a starting point. You provide a great service, then encourage happy customers to tell everyone they know about your business. In essence, they've become ambassadors of your brand and that is very powerful. Well, obviously social media takes this concept to a completely new level. Whereas before, a happy customer might tell their sister and a few friends about a pleasant business experience. Now, with social media, you can tell someone halfway across the world about a brand that you've fallen in love with. This isn't exactly a "new" trend anymore, but this globalization of small business has only intensified and nowadays, more people are inclined to look at reviews online and take recommendations from someone they don't know on social media than trust a friend's suggestion.

So with that said, encourage people to tell others about your products and services and you'll see the awareness spread.

Outside the Soap Box.

One of the new developments in social media marketing going into 2020 is the rise of alternative platforms. Of course, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are still at the top and should be the focus of any strong social media marketing campaign. However, things like Pinterest, LinkedIn, and now TikTok are grabbing attention. Even Instagram is launching a new feature called Reels to combat TikTok.

Choosing which platforms to put your time and effort into developing depends on what you're trying to promote. TikTok is a relatively new platform that's seen rapid growth in the last year, but mainly with a younger demographic. And as I mentioned, even Instagram will have a platform like this as well.  If your aim is to sell products, Pinterest might be the best option for you. LinkedIn remains focused on B2B interactions, but it's more valuable than ever for companies that are primarily interested in that. We're seeing these "alternative" platforms rise because they've begun to hit their stride and find their niche. Now you can find an alternative platform that works for what you're trying to sell, where before it was confined to the big 3.

Build Your Brand.

Brand building is still one of the most important social media trends out there. If you don't have strong branding, then you're going to be forgettable in a world that has huge quantities of everything. The best way to stand out is to focus on consistency across all social media platforms. Consistency of voice in your content and engagement with followers is important, but so is your visual consistency. We're big on real, human connection here at the agency and we believe that providing one with your followers is a characteristic of great brands. It's all about understanding the value of personalization and a positive customer experience and coupling that with great stories. You have to believe in what you're promoting if you expect your followers to as well.

Forget Hindsight. Foresight is 20/20.

Some of these social media trends are old mainstays, while others are new ideas that have grown out of established ones. To really improve your ability to market yourself on social media, you've got to stay informed on what's happening and what's coming. What's important today might see diminishing returns in 2021. Anyway, I hope this has been helpful in understanding how important we feel putting special emphasis on branding and creating a community for your followers to engage each other in really is. You'll see positive gains in both your public perception and your digital advertising strategy.

If you'd like some help with building your brand over social media, contact us here at EraserFarm. We're a Tampa-based digital marketing firm that takes human emotion and makes it part of the DNA of your marketing strategy. Check out our portfolio to get a better idea of what we're doing for our partners and what we can do for you.

by James Rosene