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
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.
Christmas is a solid seasonal marketing campaign that even the most straight-laced B2B company usually puts something out for. Whether is a feel good bit of community spirit, an invitation to party or an animated carrot fighting other seasonal root vegetables, Christmas is a solid bet.
But it’s not the only one and people are no longer limited to festivities like Christmas, Mother’s Day and Easter. More American style holidays and events are creeping across the world including Halloween, Black Friday and the SuperBowl. In addition there are the awareness campaigns and novelty days including International Women’s Day, World Friendship Day, and even Bartender Appreciation Day!
Why do seasonal marketing campaigns?
John Lewis is a great example – they’re in the background and a well known name but come Christmas, the John Lewis Christmas advert coming out is practically a holiday in itself. Not only that, the aftermath – where other marketing departments around the UK try and poke a bit of fun or respond to the advert theme. It reminds people that John Lewis is a great place for high quality gifts with the extra dose of Christmas spirit that goes with a novelty character with a festive theme.
It’s said that it can take 6-8 touchpoints before a person gets to the point of buying, and there are a variety of factors that will determine when a person gets to that stage – budget, pay dates, priorities, and so on.
If you’re marketing for people to buy for Christmas or a seasonal event, there is a definite end date that people need to buy for.
Christmas as an example of seasonal marketing, doesn’t change much from year to year. Trees, tinsel, baubles, lights, these are pretty much always going to be acceptable to use at Christmas. Updating it to fit in with different promotions or themes every year is a relatively inexpensive exercise. There are a number of seasonal campaigns where this can be the case – Easter, new seasons, sporting events and so on.
If you’re looking for more ideas on implementing seasonal marketing into your business, get in touch.
Everyone knows the term PR and everyone know the term advertising, but there is often confusion on where one starts and one ends. There are a couple of clear distinctions when it comes to PR verses advertising but it’s true, the two do often overlap.
Advertising is most often paid for, in that you pay for an advert in a paper or on TV, or you pay for a stand at an exhibition and so on. PR is theoretically ‘free’, but in truth you would likely need a PR professional or agency who would charge a monthly retainer or fee.
If you pay for advertising, then that advertising goes ahead as long as you pay the invoice. With PR, you’re putting the message out there but there is no guarantee that media will pick it up. How well it works is dependant on how strong your message is, where it’s communicated to, what else is going on and how your story ties in to everything else in the world. It can even depend on whether or not an editor or writer’s personal ideals, values and preferences.
Everyone knows what an advert is – it’s someone trying to sell you something. PR is marketing messages tied up in news, whether that’s a product release, a new appointment, an ethical stance, a campaign or a new partnership. It is often only those that are in marketing or business, or have an idea of PR, that can tell that what is ‘news’ is actually marketing messages cleverly distributed.
With PR, there’s no ‘news’ that is completely visual whereas in advertising there are often adverts where all there is are visuals with very little text. Language skills and experience is much more important when it comes to PR. Design is much more important when it comes to advertising. Having said that, there are more elements of design creeping in to PR in the form of infographics and video.
If you’re happy for as many people as possible to see your message and that exposure is what you’re hoping to achieve then advertising is a strong bet, as it is guaranteed exposure in the place you want to put it. If you are looking to establish trust with the general public, as maybe a more complex or established business, then PR is something to consider.
In reality, it is a mix of both advertising and PR that will get you the most sustained results. If you’re looking for some information on how advertising and PR can help build awareness and belief in your business, get in touch.
It’s possibly an exaggeration to say that any marketing campaign could change the whole world. But that’s not to say that marketers only sell things, the campaigns they make can make a huge difference in perceptions across society (as well as sell things)!
This month has shown a strong example as Cadbury’s join forces with Age UK to help fight loneliness in elderly people across the country. To help understand what that kind of extreme loneliness feels like, TV presenter Sue Perkins spent 30 hours in total isolation, then having explored the impact of loneliness, Cadbury’s packaging of the Dairy Milk bar stated it’s donating 30p from every pack sold to Age UK. Awareness of the Cadbury’s adverts increased by 11% in the over 65’s.
This isn’t the first marketing campaign trying to make a difference. An amazing campaign in 2012 was Channel 4’s ‘Meet the superhumans’, set out to redefine what it is to be an athlete and what strength really is. Featuring footage of a variety of athletes with disabilities carrying out sports able bodied people might find challenging and an epic soundtrack, this campaign demonstrated these 2012 athletes as role models and celebrities in their own right, and catapulted the Paralympics forward as a top event to watch, equal to the Olympics themselves.
Another groundbreaker – not least because it was a strong female statement to make at an overly masculine event; the Superbowl. Feminine hygiene company Always‘ advertising spot was where they tried to redefine what it means to do something ‘like a girl’, but showing that before society gets to them, ‘like a girl’ to young girls means ‘do it as fast/hard/well as you can’. #LikeAGirl is a hashtag that still stands today and continues to make a strong and relevant statement.
The fact is marketing campaigns don’t need to be that extreme in that they change the way a whole stadium thinks about something. But a campaign that generates a smile, a laugh or even a ‘huh, I hadn’t thought about it like that’, is time well spent and money well invested. It’s campaigns like this that will make a business not just stand out but also build credibility and trust.
The rise of digital marketing is well documented, and some have said that print, as the formally ‘traditional marketing’ source, is now the official ‘non-traditional marketing’ source. Where digital used to fit in with print, combining digital and print marketing seems to have more of a digital led feel.
One advantage of digital marketing as opposed to print marketing, is how measurable it is. You can use analytics packages to see where traffic is coming from, the quality of the traffic and the conversion rate.
Traditionally you would measure print reach and engagement but the number of people it went to or went in front of, and looking for any enquiry or sale increases. This could be unrealistic and unreliable. Having said that, using digital marketing alongside print, or just boxing clever with your print marketing, means you can pretty accurate on measuring Return On Investment (ROI). Here are some ideas on making print marketing measurable.
On digital marketing you can give complex urls on landing pages to show every aspect of the campaign and measure it’s success including location, keyword and source. On print there is no ‘click’ but you can make the CTA a specific url. “Visit www.mywebsite.com/newyearsale for example is easy to type and find, and if that url was only used on your print campaign you can see how many people are following your CTA. Even if your page does get picked up by searches, you can still see this and identify the keywords used.
The ability to see the engagement on this campaign as well as just the amount of people reached is essential, because in addition to measuring the effectiveness of the landing page, it will also help you see if the print campaign is getting the right leads to the website. It would be better to have 100 leads with a 10% conversion rate than 1000 leads with a 1% conversion rate, as if you’re paying for print by the number of items to print.
Setting up conversion tracking on your landing page means that you can see how many of those leads actually went on to do what you wanted them to do. Whether that’s clicking to buy, downloading a brochure or attending an event, using conversion tracking is essential to monitor that. A good web designer will be able to incorporate this into a design.
Whilst converting of course! The idea of giving out coupons is not exactly revolutionary but at the same time, it can be very cost effective in comparison to digital coupons. On average, digital coupons tend to perform 35% better when it comes to bringing in new customers, retaining existing customers, and raising brand awareness. However, printed coupons typically provide a higher return on investment, with digital coupons typically getting a lower ROI by 18%.
If you’d like more information on using print alongside digital marketing, get in touch with the team.
What campaigns do you remember in 2015?
‘Ride me all day for £3’, ‘Are you beach body ready?’, ‘Taste the Bush’
These words and imagery caused serious offence.
Were the companies justified in using them?
Remember this one? The reaction it produced went truly global as a story.
So a £100k campaign generated £millions of sales and rocketed the company into growth. Proving perhaps that all publicity is good publicity?
In a recent survey, 87% of people think it is “unjustifiable” to use “bad taste” to sell a product and 65% that it’s “never acceptable” for ads to be in bad taste.
So for clients to be brave, to push the boundaries to stand out, they need to balance shocking without being in bad taste….. basically to take the risk out of risky advertising.
Este Coutu
re rebranded and relaunched with D3 Marketing & wanted to drive awareness of their new website. Their clientele were easy to identify as separate and specific niches, so Google adwords and facebook ads were easy to set up to return high ROI.
The results? In one week…
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“D3 Marketing are fantastic! I’ve worked with them on a number of projects & always got excellent return on investment. They are my preferred agency and I am confident referring to my contacts.”
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