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Anyone who’s watched a recently recorded TV show or sports event will see social distancing in place. From screens showing people watching online and canned laughter to widely spaced out quiz contestants and presenters spread out around the CBeebies house, entertainment is having to adapt. This now needs to be the case in your marketing, to show you’re adapting to the changing world of masks and 2 metre high fives. Here’s some great examples of brands staying current in a pandemic world with social distancing in marketing.
Amazon don’t always have the warm fuzzy feeling in their marketing, choosing to focus on speed and convenience. Outbreaks in factories and warehouses make headlines, so Amazon are quick to show their team being taken care of. Employees in masks, temperature checks and masks being transported around the world, to make sure they can keep going, shows the public they can order using Amazon safe in the knowledge that the people behind the delivery aren’t being put at risk.
One of my personal favourites. Let’s face it, communicating digitally doesn’t always go to plan. Tech break downs, barking dogs, wifi connection issues, propping up your phone and embarrassing home life events in the background are all here, along with everyone’s favourite “you’re on mute, I can’t hear you” – they’re all here. Heineken gives a nod to everyone staying safe at the expense of convenience in a humourous way, and it really works as a way of putting social distancing in marketing.
There is information to show that people feel more positive about adverts with masks in, perhaps because it better reflects real life right now. Vistaprint have made masks the key focal point of their advert, promoting masks as not something to hide behind, but a show of solidarity and resilience. Print isn’t even mentioned here, but personally I remembered their name the next time I put my mask on.
Launched at the start of the pandemic, this Dominos advert showed that while staying home can feel isolating, it’s also a chance to, well, dance around in your pants before a pizza arrives. It’s not perfect as you see the pizza being handed over and no masks, but then this is perhaps before all of the processes kicked in. And it’s still a fun way to look at staying home.
For those that aren’t big enough to be doing massive TV adverts, these ideas can still be transferred to your marketing. This is actually an opportunity to embrace video as more people are used to more raw video footage. COVID-19 marketing for SMEs can be as simple as a screenshot of the online team talk as part of a social media marketing campaign, an altered strapline or logo to incorporate social distance or the use of masks, or a reassuring chain of email marketing to show how a business is not just surviving the pandemic, but working to be resilient and thrive.
(image from Subway)
Get in touch for more information on marketing through a pandemic with social distancing in marketing
Your website is the lynch pin of your online marketing, but websites are now more than an online brochure or a way for people to read about your business. The aim of all websites should be to convert visitors to active leads or even prompt people to buy. It’s a sad fact that the average landing page conversion rate is only 2.35%. Whatever counts as a ‘conversion’ to your business, do you let the rest of that traffic die? For B2B businesses, if you can identify your website visitors, then you can follow up this traffic by targeting those businesses.
This is possible with reverse IP tracking. Reverse IP tracking can be a B2B marketer’s secret weapon but it is consistently underused. It’s a technical process needing specialist tech and skills but basically, you can look up the owners of the IP addresses of your website visitors and from there you can often tell from which business the website visitor is from.
The implications for B2B marketing is immediately obvious. If you have a target marketing, and a list of all the businesses that have recently visited your website, you can cross reference them and find potential leads that haven’t converted online. You can then proactively target this lead yourself.
This might all sound a bit ‘big brother’ but it is totally legal to identify your website visitors in this way, and it’s an invaluable way to mop up the 97.65% of your website visitors that aren’t converting. You might even spot your competitors sneaking a peek at what you’re up to!
This isn’t completely lost on B2C businesses either. Getting an idea of the kind of companies that website visitors are coming from could give you an idea of the kinds of people/professionals you’re attracting to your website.
You can’t track every single IP address unfortunately. There are those with settings on their IP address which means you can’t identify them, but even a high percentage of identification creates leads you otherwise would never have known you even had.
Get in touch for more information on using reverse IP tracking to maximise the success of your website moving forward.
COVID-19 changed the way that everyone marketed, very quickly and very extremely. Overnight events were cancelled, shops were closed and face to face meetings died out. More and more people were using digital methods to stay in touch and that included social media.
Social media networks were suddenly under pressure to help their users maintain relationships with their loved ones, and at the same time were looking to provide business tools that addressed all of the new challenges.
Many didn’t disappoint, and here are a selection of some of the tools and even tweaks that social media networks made as COVID-19 swept the world.
Launched in May, Facebook’s newest videoconferencing feature – Messenger Rooms – allows up to 50 people to video chat at the same time, with no limit to how long you can talk for. In addition, you don’t even need a Facebook account to join a room so it’s open to everyone.
For a B2C company that uses Facebook a lot, who were planning on holding a small event of around this number, Facebook Rooms made this an adaptable possibility.
In the world of work, sharing information on LinkedIn has been a bit of a minefield. People are having to share news of furlough, redundancies, temporary or permanent closures and product changes and delays. A ‘like’ or a round of applause or even a sad face doesn’t seem appropriate when you’re trying to communicate ‘keep your chin up’.
It’s of little surprise that LinkedIn released a new reaction button which essentially means ‘sending you support’. Messaging changes as times do and LinkedIn got this absolutely right.
This actually came out a while ago but it was a relatively low key affair. In a time where people can now not hand over a real life catalogue, the potential to send people a virtual catalogue on something as easy as Whatsapp has a big appeal. It has become much more publicised and widely used as a result of COVID-19.
How it works is, a business owner gets a digital store using WhatsApp Business and inside the store, you can create any number of catalogues. You can put prices, descriptions, pictures and other ordering information. You can even add a website to each catalogue.
If you’re looking to use more social media marketing in the aftermath of COVID-19, get in touch.
The company are risk and resilience experts and as part of their consultancy work advising organisations on how to reduce their COVID-19 vulnerabilities in the workplace, they have launched a range of COVID-19 thermal fever screening camera systems.
The work we have delivered includes
A large majority of growing businesses have a website with 92% of small business owners thinking that having a website is the most effective digital marketing strategy. This is most likely why it’s one of the key pieces of collateral business owners and directors want to make sure is on brand and converting well.
Website design has evolved as more people use a wider variety of devices to browse online. A responsive website means that a website is equally well designed and user friendly on mobiles and tablets as it is on laptops and desktops, but ‘mobile first design’ for websites is taking that one step further. It is designing a website primarily to be used on a mobile device but that also looks good on a desktop or laptop.
In 2016 mobile internet usage surpasses desktop internet usage. That means that the audience on a mobile is larger than the audience with a laptop/desktop. Also, mobile internet usage continues to grow, so this audience will only continue to rise. Designing with mobile in mind might not be enough moving forward, it might need to be the key focus.
That isn’t the case in all instances though. In some industries there might still be a heavier reliance on desktop usage. Finance, games, science and technology are all areas where there is more desktop than mobile traffic. Having said that in all those instances the lowest amount of mobile traffic is still 39% and if they follow trends this will continue to rise as well.
Historically, mobile was always a side thought after the website was built – ‘does it look ok on everything else?’ The danger is that we go in the same direction with mobile with a ‘mobile first design’ approach, only checking how a website looks on a desktop as the mobile first designed website is completed.
So the question isn’t ‘mobile or desktop first’, it’s giving equal weight to all devices. Having said that, the days of bringing in mobile at the end of a website design process are gone.
Get in touch if you’d like a holistic approach to website design.
It feels as though the key marketing tools these days are all online, as people find products, services and businesses online through search engines and targeted ads. This in no way means that print is dead nor should it be. $24.66 billion was spent on print marketing in the US alone in 2018 and many businesses still have a brochure as a key piece of marketing collateral. Here are 5 reasons that brochure design is still relevant in a digital world.
Websites are good to showcase and raise awareness, but if you have a product or service that has more to explain, contains a lot of technical information or involve large drawings where you need to be able to see it all at one time, then you’re going to get more space and flexibility with a A4 brochure design.
Research on how people read websites has shown that 79% of website users always scanned any new page they came across, as opposed to actually reading it. If you’re happy with that level of interest that’s fine, but if the text itself is what’s important then a print item might be much more appropriate for your needs.
“We don’t need a brochure because now everyone has a mobile people can just look us up there and then.” Is there always signal? Do they always have battery? Is their screen playing up? Is their kid using their phone at the time to play CBeebies? And if all of this backfires on you, are they going to remember you, your name and your business or event when they get their mobile back online? If you have a brochure to give them, that’s the most mobile kind of marketing there is. And assuming the brochure design isn’t too heavy to carry you can have some on hand at all times.
If you’re running local events in particular, it’s easier to get people using brochures and flyers, as you can get your message to people in the relevant area only. It also means that people don’t actively have to be looking for your online and you don’t have to have the technical expertise needed to run localised social media campaigns.
Alien concept I know, but more than five million people have never used the internet in the UK, and in 2018, of all households in Great Britain there were 10% who still didn’t have internet access. Reasons for this might vary but the fact is that there is a decent size audience that will never see you without an offline presence.
Get in touch for more information about our print and brochure design services.
It’s not breaking news that in order to engage your prospective customers, you need to connect with them on a personal level. Businesses often create and tailor their branding with that sole aim, whether that’s brand imagery and content that resonates with an age, an outlook, a demographic or a lifestyle.
Putting a ‘real life’ face (as opposed to a model or celebrity) to branding is a growing trend in for businesses of all sizes, with that face needing to be someone a prospect relates to, likes and wants to give their money to.
A classic example of a company using a real person for a big brand in the past might be Richard Branson for Virgin, but there are few people that could relate to a billionaire businessman that lives on his own island. People might fly Virgin but it might not be the case that Richard Branson was the draw. Another ‘big brand name’ James Dyson, by comparison, might also be a billionaire but he pitches himself as an inventor and engineer looking to solve problems rather than someone creating a business empire.
Using a business founder’s face as part of their branding sometimes happens organically. The rise of reality TV like Dragon’s Den means that business founders including Levi Roots of Reggae Reggae Sauce singing fame, university friends Will Hodson and Henry De Zoete of Look After My Bills and Trunki Dad Rob Law have been thrust forward. This platform gave them the opportunity to demonstrate how their product came about and why people should use it. They often didn’t even need to win investment to get their business off the ground (they passed on Trunki!)
Other people ‘step up’ as the person who saw a need and filled it for personal reasons. Organic, honest videos of founders, small business owners and entrepreneurs showing their passion for their product can inspire and motivate.
Other times it’s the members of staff that are put in the limelight. Supermarket workers, factory workers and builders have all played a part in branding, and who can forget customer service adviser Howard of Halifax singing fame and unlikely sex symbol?!
Brand promotion is about more than just logos, colours, photos and animations. The people behind the business are a part of the brand. If you have the passion and the people, get in touch to see how we might help you use the best asset you’ll ever have.
A new study by Campaign Monitor has shown that the average email open rate in the UK is 18%, with the click rate being only 0.9%. It also showed that the average unsubscribe rate for emails is nearly three times the click through rate. In a busy marketplace and a fast filling inbox, you have to shout pretty loud to get your email marketing heard.
If your 1000 emails are only getting you 9 clicks, then surely the answer is to send more emails right? Send 5000 emails and that’s five times the number of clicks?
Or is it better, perhaps, to increase the amount of relevance and interest, and therefore the number of opens and clicks?
The fact is the more emails you send, the more you spend. The marketing agency you use will charge you for the number of emails sent as that’s how they will be billed by the software they use, not because of the amount of work needed. It is better for the marketing team to be putting the same amount of work in on design but spend more time making it as relevant to the audience as possible and sending less of them, than it is to send them to five times as many people. They will most likely get better results as well.
How can you make email marketing more targeted?
Emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened and marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns. Using something as simple as someone’s name ensures they know it’s an email that was meant to come to them specifically, and not the first 5000 people on a list. Whilst consumers are wising up to the fact that this is done automatically and that emails aren’t being written manually, the personal touch still has an effect.
Over half of all emails are read on a mobile device. If you’re only targeting those in front of a laptop and your design reflects that, you risk putting off over half of your audience. If something is harder to find a way to click through then people aren’t likely to do your work for you.
If you have a business with several products and services, is it best to send all emails to all prospects and customers to get more clicks? For example should a veterinary surgery send it’s special offer on dog shampoos to all pet owners, or just the dog owners? Would a toiletries company benefit from promoting new leg waxing strips to a male customer in his 7os?
Businesses collect a large amount of information on their customers based on loyalty cards, service records and email sign ups. By using that data you can send 500 emails to people that are definitely your target audience for a product or service rather than 5000, only 500 of which would possibly be interested.
By adopting a more sophisticated and data based approach to your email marketing, you reduce the risk of reducing your click through rate and more importantly, increasing your opt out rate. Get in touch to look into a more intelligent way to market using emails.
On 13th January Google confirmed that they rolled out a ‘broad core algorithm update’ but what is that? A Google update is where the algorithm is adapted to take into account the latest trends and technology and ensure that their search rankings display the best quality and most up to date content.
The way that Google explain this is “to imagine you made a list of the top 100 movies in 2015. A few years later in 2019, you refresh the list. It’s going to naturally change. Some new and wonderful movies that never existed before will now be candidates for inclusion. You might also reassess some films and realize they deserved a higher place on the list than they had before.”
Google updates used to be flashier and more dramatic with names and versions such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird. These days they are more low key and less branded as SEO becomes less of a novelty and more mainstream. However, a Google update is still every bit as unexpected and mysterious, with no warning and no hard and fast rules of how to ensure your website doesn’t take a hit.
There have been extreme examples in the past of huge companies taking a big hit with no notice. In 2013 a Google update absolutely tanked the ranking of Interflora not only generic terms like ‘flowers’, ‘flower delivery’ and ‘florist’, but even for its own brand name. There is nothing solid publicly on why but there was speculation on unnatural and paid for links.
The only real way to avoid being penalised by a Google update is to treat your website as if Google is about to change their algorithm every day. Like you’re a chef with kitchen that needs to be clean enough to pass a surprise health inspection at any time.
SEO optimised website design and content marketing of a high standard is essential to keep on Google’s good side and ensure a prominent profile on the search engine that takes up 86% of all organic search traffic. This is a long term investment, as the alternative is spending high amounts on paid ads and referral links in order to maintain a steady stream of relevant traffic.
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