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The Books You Need to Do Your Job Better Now

Let’s face it, most of us don’t show up for work feeling one hundred percent energized every single day. Whether it’s a mid-morning coffee break, a yoga class or a brainstorming session – we all need outlets to get the juices flowing. So, over the course of the year, we tasked clients with the big question: how do you inspire and excite your teams? Not surprisingly, many of them said they have go-to reads that they tap into for innovative ideas and strategies. We couldn’t help but share their recommendations for the keys to making the magic happen day in and day out. The Accidental Creative Todd Henry The Accidental Creative is well suited to creatives working in the in the commercial environment. There’s a learning curve to staying active in your own creative practice while giving it your all professionally. This book, loosely adapted from podcast content, provides valuable tools…

Creating a Brand Style Guide: The Essentials

Ideally, a brand should be evolving on a continual basis, however, it must retain its vision throughout its changes. The key to the successful and sustainable evolution of a brand is remaining consistent. From logo design, color, typography, and content – there must be a ‘gold standard’ with which to derive the core messaging, look and feel from. Brand style guides set tonality and provide targeted guidelines and instructions to both internal and external teams on how the brand should be communicated and seen to the public across all media and touchpoints. What is a brand style guide? A brand style guide referred to in a myriad of ways – brand standards guideline, a style manual, brand bible, or style guide – is a set of design standards for the creation of creative assets. This guide is essential in presenting both digital and print media with a clearly defined view of the brand it…

Game Changer: Finding A Brand’s Differentiator

As popular as it may be the old saying ‘ if you can’t beat them, join them’ is the exact opposite of what a brand should do to compete in the market place. Many companies can simply exist for a time employing this mantra, but eventually, the model will fail with too many players offering the same service. If there is one constant, its that the competition will never let up – there will always be an upcoming launch, a new product or a lower price. In this constant and yet, even increasing competitive marketplace, a brand’s point of view must be distilled to its clearest message possible. The stand out aspect – the differentiator – is what will attract notice, garner attention and lead to conversion opportunities. Though it may seem obvious enough for some, finding a company’s differentiating factor can be a difficult task. Here are a few ways to ensure that a…

Working Programmatic Marketing Into A Current Digital Strategy

The jury is still out on the true value and ROI of programmatic marketing, but the possibilities that it has to improve marketing efforts and efficiency through automation are hard to ignore. Significantly increasing campaign effectiveness through precise targeting and real-time analytics, adopting a programmatic marketing strategy requires care and thought in understanding all aspects of the needs of a business. All stakeholders involved in the implementation must be aware of the peaks and valleys that will inevitably be encountered. Its widely known that big brands have tapped into the powers of a programmatic approach, however, smaller brands and organizations have been slower to adopt the methodology because of resources and knowledge base. Tapping into the benefits of a programmatic strategy doesn’t have to be a cumbersome process to garner value beyond the buy. Increased Agility Streamlining processes by driving targeted consumers to the right information an organization will see a higher return…

How to Choose the Right Marketing Channel for Your Budget

One of the biggest challenges as a marketer is to use a limited budget to create a profitable marketing campaign. If there is no clear focus, it can be even harder due to the fact you have many different channels to choose from. To help you make a decision, here are a set of different scenarios of what channel best suits the situation. Best Channel to Focus On If You Have a Small Budget But Have an Established List of Customers: Email Marketing is still one of the best ways to convert prospects into customers. If you already have a list of customers that you haven’t been utilizing, you can quickly build with an email campaign with a great offer and expect some sales. However, email marketing isn’t that straightforward most of the time. You’ll need to focus on building a relationship with your subscribers and customers which can be…

5 eCommerce UX Strategies that Can Boost Conversions

There’s a lot that’s been said about improving UI for ecommerce sites. But for the overall UX design, the UI design is only a part of the story. Not putting enough of an emphasis on a great user experience can mean the difference between a sale and website abandonment. While there are many aspects of UX that you can improve, here are five different strategies that will help you see an immediate lift in your sales conversions. #1 Improve the findability of your products Ask yourself this question: can users easily find what they’re looking for? Are the product pages listed in the right categories? Do you have a search bar that can accurately help users discover what they’re looking for and can correct misspellings or make alternative suggestions? You want to make it as easy as possible for users. You don’t want them to expend much effort or else…

Spring Clean Your Image with a Brand Refresh

If you feel that you are out of touch with your audience, it might be time to spring clean your image with a brand refresh. Rebranding is done for different reasons. Sometimes it’s to target a bigger audience that can be lead to growth. Other times it’s to adapt to the changing environment and stay competitive. Regardless of the reason, this is a big change that requires big adjustments to not only your brand presentation but to also how your company functions on an internal level. So where do you start with your Rebranding? The first order of business is to figure out exactly what you want to change and how you want to change it. Is your current strategy limiting you from growth or hurting your company in some way? How can you refocus and reposition the brand goals so that you can get on course to where you…

Creating Addictive Content

It’s one thing to create content to promote your business, but how do you create something that people get addicted to and look for to on a regular basis? Getting the answer to this question can actually be what determines if your marketing strategy succeeds or not. Once you get your followers hooked to what you create, you’ll eventually build fans that will share, promote, and buy your products and services. This will naturally build your brand and help you build a strong position in the marketplace. First and foremost, everything you create needs to be easy to read and consume. So if you’re writing an article, you want a clear headline that draws the reader in. The headline should be engaging and provoke curiosity to get the reader to commit. You want the article to a certain flow and cohesiveness. To accomplish this, you should organize your article better,…

‘Hashing’ Out An Effective Social Media Grouping Strategy

What originated as a simple system of online labeling has become a part of our offline social vernacular. The hashtag (or more specifically, the number sign, #) is now regularly used in casual conversation to reference an emphasis on a specific subject and has become a pop culture icon in it’s own right. Originally used in 2007 on Twitter to make sense of the 140-character chaos, the idea to apply this method of classification originated from IRC (Internet Relay Chats) dating back to the late 80s. From a social media perspective, the widespread use of the hashtag took some time to gain traction and was further developed and implemented by Twitter in 2009 when the growing company identified the increased usage of the tagging system among its users. The use of hashtags have extended beyond Twitter and has spread successfully to most major social networks with the exception of LinkedIn. Implementing a grouping strategy via hashtags from a…

Point and Shoot: 3 Tips for a Great Photoshoot Experience

We recently had a fantastic photoshoot opportunity, thriving in an environment full of great, positive energy and creative collaboration. As a result of that experience, we’ve decided to compile a few points that we found to be poignant in improving the entire photoshoot process.   Point, Shoot, and Connect  As you go through the photoshoot, make sure to connect with your subjects. Strike up friendly conversation – the more you speak to one another, the more at ease you will all feel, resulting in the best results possible. A relaxed subject is a photogenic one – no fake smiles, and all of the warm energy will transfer to the final product.   If you’re photographing objects or a facility (as opposed to corporate headshots), speak to the individuals in charge of production or the people that work within that industrial space. Understanding the message they want to convey, the voice of…

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