Taking time for reflection can help personal and professional growth. As you head into the new year, make time to pause and reflect on the past year, the lessons learned, wins achieved, and goals you'd like to continue to work towards. These prompts can help you get started.
Throughout the 24 years we've been in business as a branding and design firm, we’ve seen many organizations refresh their brands with new websites, messaging, and logos. We’re no different. We’ve tweaked and refreshed the insight180 brand several times, as a way to commemorate a shift in focus or celebrate a new chapter for the business. Each time, we’ve approached the process similarly to the way we would advise our clients if they were considering a logo refresh. If you're considering refreshing your logo, read about when and why you may want to do this sooner than later.
When was the last time you checked your social media metrics? Not just your company’s page, but your personal LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram pages? People want to engage with – and be inspired by – people, not companies. Allowing your audience to get to know you first helps them decide if they want to invest their time and money in your product or services. When done right, an active personal presence on social media can be an effective form of networking which can bring in leads and new clients for your business. So how do you know that what you are posting on your pages is resonating with those potential clients? Social media metrics. Read this blog post to learn more.
Whether you’re a small business striving for growth or a seasoned B2B company looking to stay ahead, reviewing and updating your marketing SOPs and Best Practices can make all the difference. Here are five essential steps to ensure your marketing efforts stay relevant, effective, and aligned with your business goals.
“Windowsill. . . . Piccadilly Circus. . . ” every time I see those words, I also hear them in my mind being said by the eccentric and endearing fairy godmother-like character (played by Estelle Winwood) from the 1955 movie, The Glass Slipper. She loses herself in the sound of saying and repeating some of her favorite words.
Social media for businesses should not and simply can not stand alone. While social media is an integral piece of the marketing mix, unless you have other pillars of digital marketing (i.e. writing blogs, email marketing campaigns, other ways to drive traffic to your social media channels) to support it, don’t expect much of a ROI from social media. Additionally, especially for B2B companies, solely having viewers across your social channels may not mean much of anything beyond brand awareness, which is important, but again, don’t expect a surge of interested clients from little effort!
If you want something you can measure, the end goal must be to get users back to your website (or landing page) to complete an action (i.e. sign up for an email list, give an email address in order to receive an e-book, fill out a contact form). Some people view social media for business as fluff. If done correctly, social media can be a strong ROI. When your marketing and sales efforts are aligned, social media can be the element that enriches your brand and pushes you ahead of your competition. If you spend the right amount of time and energy creating a great plan and carrying out social media campaigns that convert, it could become your brand’s greatest asset!
When beginning to use social media for business, the first steps should be creating a content creation strategy followed by beginning to create content. Whether it’s blog writing for SEO, guest blogging on sites that your audience visits or creating infographics that will be featured within an industry publication, content strategy and creation should be the first steps.
In addition to having something to share across your social channels, content creation is also beneficial for SEO purposes. If Google sees that you are actively adding pages to your site and users are finding the content on these pages useful and relevant, your site will gain recognition as being a good answer to queries users are searching for. While creating great content is definitely not all that goes into SEO and fixing any errors, speed problems, etc, should be a SEO priority, content creation is still beneficial and can snowball if you’re doing it correctly.
Social Media is usually seen as an all encompassing term but it’s really just a piece of the marketing mix–a piece that brings everything that your brand creates in front of your audience. If you see a brand posting graphics on a social media channel they have implemented a content creation strategy by doing research to find out what their audience responds to the best. After concluding that a certain set of graphics were the right fit, they are posted across the brand’s social channels. Posting on social media is a step in a company’s marketing strategy.
In addition to deciding what exactly a brand should post on social media, there is also the strategy behind which users to follow and interact with. A best practice is to follow people within your audience, people who are interested in the types of content you’ll be posting and even competitors. One great way to strategize who to engage with on social media is to go after your industry influencers. Also, if your brand is location specific, for example, if your company is strictly baltimore based, follow and interact with a lot of Baltimore based users that meet your criteria.
When you create a strategy for which users to follow and interact with, eventually your profile, specifically on Twitter, will show up under the “Who to Follow” section. Because we post a lot about branding, marketing and social media, users who are interested in those topics will often see our profile in this section.
Additionally, when users who are interested in our content share our links their followers will see our content as well.
Did you know that
44% of email recipients
Each year, organizations pay millions in marketing efforts. Whether it’s content marketing, video, outdoor, print ads, social media campaigns,etc., it’s clear to brands that it’s more important than ever to mold and maintain their audience’s perception. While “branding” is defined as what your audience collectively thinks of you, it’s up to the organization to provide brand messaging and create experiences or your audience will run amok. Through the internet and social media, consumers can investigate anything and everything about your brand, and they will. This is why brands who are transparent are the ones that will thrive.
Those of you who know me and are familiar with my role and responsibilities as “Principal of Practicality” at Insight180 will chuckle at how NOT surprising it is I would coin the phrase or espouse the concept of “Practicality Marketing.” (Well, some things should be predictable in life, shouldn’t they?)
So, let me explain what I mean. These days, there’s a lot of evidence to support the importance of writing blog posts and white papers to demonstrate your thought leadership and high level of expertise to your prospects. We advise it all the time and we’ve seen the benefits first hand with our own advisory firm clients who’ve adopted the practice as a successful marketing strategy. For many firms, it has catapulted them to significantly higher levels of business. But there are right and wrong ways to go about it and how well or poorly you do it makes all the difference.
All too often, such content is written to demonstrate how smart a firm is, how much “better” their expertise level is, how much “more” they offer the prospect. And these things might actually be true, but coming right out and saying so can make people’s eyes glaze over and create skepticism.
The best way to communicate such messages is to focus on your ability to provide practical answers to clients’ common problems and quantify their success in some way. I like to call it “Practicality Marketing.” What was the practical, bottom-line result of what you were able to do for your customers? How do they benefit? What do you help them achieve? (And just as important, what would THEY say you help them achieve?)
“Practicality Marketing” is a way of looking at, and framing what you offer in a way that is more customer-focused and relatable. Marketing from a practicality perspective forces you to think in terms of what prospects want from you and how you can help them instead of what you want to brag about. Don’t get me wrong. Bragging has its place. Marketing is all about telling the world how great you are. It just comes off better when your clients’ successes do the talking for you.
— Chris Quinn, principal and brand strategist
Remember all those times you posted a great article or image on your Facebook company page and you wanted to like or comment on it as yourself but couldn’t? Thanks to Facebook’s latest change you can now like and comment on page posts as yourself and other pages you admin. With the ability to interact with a page post as yourself, opportunities to start or continue a blossoming conversation arise. If you post an article on your organization’s page, you could then comment as yourself detailing what you think is good and/or bad about it. When your friends and others who like your page see your comment, this could spur a conversation. While you’ve always been able to comment on page posts, commenting as yourself brings a new facet.
Read more about this new feature on Social Media Today.
To learn more about newsjacking, read my article, “Newsjacking: Reaching Your Audience in Real-Time” and check out the chat below.
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With social media, there are some tactics that stand out and have a large return on investment. For some brands, crowdsourcing can be the key to creating conversation, reaching beyond a current target market and creating brand loyalty, trust and strength.
A few examples of crowdsourcing are:
American entrepreneurs may have a well-earned reputation for risk taking, but once we have a modicum of success, we tend to turn into a timid bunch—or maybe the better term is reluctant. We’ve figured out what works on our own for initial growth, so we start relying on that status quo experience, often refusing to recognize changes appearing on the horizon, reluctant to see what’s right in front of us.
As brand advisors to consultants, professional service firms, nonprofits and other advisory firms, we often see the fear of change take hold in our clients. Where we see it most is when we’re addressing brand—brand name, brand identity and positioning strategy (learn more about the difference between these marketing terms here). While so many CEOs are ready to take risks in hiring or launching new products and services, many are quick to dismiss the value that a re-brand could offer. They feel themselves tied to the “brand recognition” they think they have, limiting their opportunity for growth. The problem is this: when making decisions, many of us focus only on what we have to lose rather than all that we could potentially gain.
And heck, it’s scary. Change is scary. Loss is scary. Our brains work hard to fight change; plus our habits, which have helped us succeed so far, are powerful and efficient (read more in this great Forbes article). You’ve worked hard to establish a reputation and grow. But what are you missing out on by not taking a closer look—or an objective look of what you might gain?
I write this blog post as I’m thinking about several of our clients who are in the midst of great change. One in particular, with whom we still work today, swore almost a decade ago that he would never change his business name, but upon closer examination (via a 180 Positioning Workshop™), not only changed it, but changed his business model, developed a spin-off company, rebranded both and subsequently grew six times over in four years.
He called me today for some advice on refreshing the spin-off company and said, “I will always remember what you said during our workshop when I was so worried about our brand equity. . . you said, ‘right now, nobody knows who you are.’ And you were right! We were afraid to change.”
While my words may have sounded harsh, he needed to hear them. He and his staff had already gotten so involved in their routines that they didn’t realize how much further they could go.
What our exploration did fundamentally, was enable him to focus more on all the possibilities and potential gain that a change would offer versus the loss of his “brand recognition.”
This name change and rebrand ultimately allowed his entire team to regroup and speak from the same set of brand values. It helped differentiate the company in the marketplace and brought a new pride to the team. Sharing that new life, that new story, became part of the excitement now shared among all of the staff, clients, and prospects, which created more excitement within the industry. When done correctly, a rebrand can be the event that breathes new life into an organization, reassures existing clients and helps attract new ones.
When seeing change in terms of what you have to lose, your focus is on staying safe, avoiding mistakes, fulfilling responsibilities—all honorable pursuits—you’re hanging on to what you’ve got and that’s okay, but it likely won’t help you grow.
If, instead, you see change in terms of what you might gain, your focus is about moving forward, maximizing potential, and reaping the rewards. It may require more of a leap of faith, but it’s also about creating opportunities for success.
Neither approach is wrong. However, the latter is an approach that can energize an organization and propel it forward.
So how can you learn to embrace change for the sake of your future happiness, particularly when it feels risky or uncertain? The answer is surprisingly simple: when you think about making a change, focus only on what you have to gain, and let go of those thoughts of what you might lose. To find out if
it’s time for a brand refresh, read more
