[weglot_switcher]

Influencer & Content Marketing: take advantage of new ways to connect with your customers

Introduction

In a recovering global market, how do you connect with new and existing customers whilst building brand trust? -Take advantage of Influencer and Content Marketing.

Influencer and content marketing strategies present great opportunities to connect with your customers, spark brand interest and create a loyal following. Both options are affordable and help brand your company in imaginative ways, allowing you to connect with customers worldwide.

Next, we’ll discuss these two strategies, their benefits, what to watch out for, and our final thoughts on what might work best for your company.

What is Content Marketing?

With Content Marketing, companies create branded material to either directly or indirectly sell products or services. One way to use content marketing is to develop a blog, publish an ebook, write case studies, or send newsletters.

Also, social media posts, podcasts, videos, customer reviews, and brand campaigns can fall under Content Marketing. When used effectively, this strategy can educate, entertain, engage, and fix your customers’ pain points to increase key conversions. 

For instance, on international women’s day, Linkedin created a viral video documenting real-life stories of women overcoming difficulties caused by the pandemic. The campaign was named #WeCanDoIt and brought attention to women’s issues during the pandemic, generating public discussion and raising the profile of LinkedIn.

What is Influencer Marketing? 

Influencer marketing is when a company calls on individuals with a dedicated internet following to promote their products or services. When social media started to take off, the marketing game completely changed, and brands began to use social media as a direct advertising channel. By collaborating with influencers to reach potentially millions of followers, companies can connect with new customers, improve website traffic, and increase revenue.

For example, the world-renowned skincare brand Olay used influencer marketing for a 28-day campaign. During this time, the  ‘Fearless 9’, a collection of influential models and athletes, exchanged normal beauty regimes for Olay’s skincare products in preparation for a makeup-free event. By creating the  ‘Fearless 9’ and using the #FaceAnything hashtag, Olay sparked a women’s movement to embrace natural beauty, bringing authenticity to its marketing and helping the brand connect with a wider audience.

Key differences between Influencer and Content Marketing 

Content Marketing

  • High-quality info-rich content;
  • Clearly defined & targeted audience;
  • Company-created content;
  • Create customer action & generate leads;
  • Full control of content & type; 
  • Helps drive SEO & organic results; 
  • Low-cost and affordable for any size business. 

Content-Marketing

Influencer Marketing

  • Social media marketing;
  • Less control over influencer’s content creation;
  • Increases brand awareness & promotes products;
  • Focuses on content distribution, sharing, tagging, viral videos etc.;
  • Costs vary depending on the influencer’s followers;
  • Instantly build trust, especially with new customers.
  • Results depend on the influencer’s impact.

Influencer-Marketing:-take-advantage-of-new-ways-to-connect-with-your-customers

Benefits of Content Marketing to your company  

For most companies, an instant way to help drive traffic and develop SEO is through content marketing. It’s cheap, accessible and a proven way to build brand awareness.

Let’s have a look at the main advantages of Content Marketing for your business:

Improve your brand’s credibility

If your company creates high-quality, unique, and valuable content, you’ll stand out from the crowd and build credibility in a competitive market. One way to do this would be to share positive reviews and testimonials to create trust in your brand.

Stronger customer relationships

By creating great content consistently, customers will feel they can turn to your brand for up-to-date information and product queries, helping build strong and long-lasting customer relationships.

Create a voice for your brand 

You can build an expert, trusted and reliable voice in your market by creating content. Whether your company is in retail or finance, content allows you to regularly reach out, engage and share your knowledge with customers.

If someone searches for your products and finds a wealth of quality information, it will help build trust and increase the chances of conversion.

Improve website traffic 

The main benefit of Content Marketing is that it will increase website traffic through online search results. According to Hubspot, companies that post 16 blogs per month can generate 4.5 times more traffic: hit those SEO keywords and see traffic improve.

Influencer-&-Content-Marketing:-take-advantage-of-new-ways-to-connect-with-your-customers

What to keep in mind with Content Marketing 

When using Content Marketing as a strategy, keep in mind the following:

High level of consistency

You must publish content regularly but consistently at a high quality, and depending on company resources, this could lead to employee burnout or having to turn to expensive writing agencies.

Competitive market  

Markets are extremely competitive, and when it comes to content creation, sometimes it’s hard to hit high-level SEO results and compete, especially with bigger companies. That’s why you must consider all your products and services to help spark content creation, highlighting your USPs and niche factors to help push those SEO results.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing to your company 

Influencer marketing now dominates social media -take a scroll through Instagram, and you’ll find someone advertising a product. So, let’s find out why brands turn to influencer marketing:

Build trust & brand awareness 

By advertising with influencers, brands can create a human connection, helping build more meaningful relationships with customers worldwide.

Improve your reach 

By working with several influencers, or an influencer with a large following, you’ll improve your brand’s reach and connect with global customers.

Go Viral 

Many brands have had campaigns that go viral through influencers generating conversations, retweeting or posting fun content. This helps drive organic traffic and SEO results -creating an incredibly high impact ceiling for influencer marketing.

Influencer-&-Content-Marketing:-take-advantage-of-new-ways-to-connect-with-your-customers

What to keep in mind with Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing comes with its challenges. Let’s have a look at what to watch out for:

Advertising transparency 

For a long time, brands could use influencers without their followers knowing, but the demands for customer transparency now mean influencers have to state that it is a paid ad. This negatively impacts building customer trust, as many will question whether the ad is a genuine recommendation.

Do followers really mean engagement?

Brands want to build meaningful relationships with customers, but choosing a Kardashian-level following sometimes isn’t the best option to generate product interest: Likes don’t always mean sales.

Recently, brands have been moving to micro-influencers who are more engaged with their followers, as there tends to be a greater level of engagement and trust, leading to a higher chance of sales.

Money, money, money

Influencer marketing is now a multi-billion dollar industry, and those with large followings can demand large amounts of money. This means that small companies might not have the financial resources to adopt this strategy.

However, micro-influencers are becoming more valued as they tend to have greater follower engagement, allowing any sized company to take advantage of influencer marketing.

Influencer-Content-Marketing
Content Marketing fuels Influencer Marketing

Our final thoughts on Content & Influencer Marketing 

Each marketing strategy provides a creative way to engage with customers. If your company has the resources, the best way to take advantage of Influencer and Content marketing is to invest in both. This will help build trust, develop brand awareness and increase your chances of sales. Ultimately, each strategy will help bridge the connection between your company and customer for stronger, more meaningful relationships.

You’ve got mail – Our guide for successful email marketing campaigns

Introduction

Why does email marketing continue to be top-rated for effectiveness? Simply put, emails provide companies with the most cost-effective way to connect with customers, showcase their products, and build trust – all for a low investment.

For example, Sony only invested $5000 into email marketing for Playstation’s Vista Christmas campaign. Sony sent out one email to targeted PS3 owners containing a discount voucher for the console. At the end of the campaign, Sony’s email hit over a million people and saw returns of 580% for every euro spent. With numbers like this, email marketing continues to be a reliable way for companies to grow and push campaigns.

Let’s discuss how email marketing works, its benefits, what to be careful about, and how to increase your chance of successful email campaigns.

What is email marketing? 

Email marketing is a direct marketing channel. This is a way for companies to send marketing materials about their products or services. These materials are sent electronically to subscribers – people who’ve signed up to receive mail.

Today, email marketing is a powerful and important tool for companies. Emails reach current and potential customers and, when used effectively, help build brand awareness and create customer engagement. These are integral parts of the sales process for any company.

Our-guide-for-successful-email-marketing-campaigns

How does email marketing benefit your company?

Emails can play an important role in the customer journey. When they land in a customer’s inbox, emails can lead to a product, a landing page or even to the checkout.

Here are some key benefits of email marketing:

Connect with your customers

Emails help build customer relationships through newsletters, exclusive offers and recommendations.

Accessible & affordable marketing

Reach customers worldwide and for a reasonable investment

Increase your conversions & nurture leads

By landing directly in a customer’s inbox with strong, personalized and clear messaging, emails have the ability to increase conversions – send a reminder for an abandoned basket at checkout or a discount on a customer’s birthday and see the results.

Increase your ROI

According to a market research study by Litmus, emails deliver a $36 dollar return for every $1 spent. Compared to other marketing channels, these returns are hard to beat.

Build a large audience

With an estimated 3.8 billion email accounts worldwide, emails hold great potential in building your audience.

Run marketing tests

Emails have the ability to run A/B testing of subject lines or call-to-actions, allowing companies to measure the best-performing emails.

What to watch out for when using email marketing

Email marketing provides great opportunities for companies, but there are some key things to be aware of before setting up a campaign.

Size of your emails

Test the size of your emails before sending them, avoiding emails that are too large and difficult to load.

Design of your emails

Understand how your subscribers will read your emails, whether mobile, tablet, or computer, as each has different settings – character limits in headlines or how images and information is presented – you want customers to see the email you design, not a reconstruction due to the customers operating system.

Customer engagement

Keep finding unique, interesting and fun ways to engage your audience, as many subscribers may have signed up and need nurturing to become high-quality leads.

Avoid becoming spam

Spam fills customers’ inboxes worldwide and is often deleted without reading. To avoid this happening, read this great article by Mailchimp on avoiding spam filters.

Our 7 best practices for successful email marketing campaigns 

Here are some key considerations to building a successful email marketing campaign:

1. Build up a reliable mailing list for your company

People that make purchases or sign up to be subscribers will form your email list. To continually build up more subscribers, you’ll have to think of ways to engage, attract and maintain customer interest.

Try to avoid purchasing an email list. Email marketing is about quality and building your relationships with customers – better to have 10 repeat customers than 100 unlikely to purchase.

2. Select a trusted Email Service Provider (ESP)

There are many email marketing service providers that help companies with email marketing strategies. They help build up your customer base and provide professional and helpful tools for managing and growing your company.

3. Create a well-researched marketing plan

When setting up an email campaign, ensure you know your audience, set realistic goals, define success, and have attractive content for your customers.

4. Set your key performance indicators

Make sure you know what you’re trying to achieve before going live with your campaign.

5. Test your email marketing system

Before emailing customers ensure your emails are in perfect working order, the designs work for each platform, and the call-to-actions lead to the right places.

6. Send your emails at the best time

Discover when your audience best responds to emails and set up a timing schedule for the best results.

7. Track your results

It’s important to know your open rates, click-through rates, new subscribers and more to see the effectiveness of your campaigns. What might work for one customer might not work for another, and by tracking, you’ll understand your customers better and be able to categorize accordingly.

You’ve-got-mail---Our-guide-for-successful-email-marketing-campaigns

Our final thoughts on email marketing 

Email marketing is a proven and powerful marketing tool to reach customers. When used with the right strategy, an email campaign can help drive sales, build brand awareness and create lasting customer connections. These rewards for a relatively low investment make email marketing essential for any company’s future marketing strategy.

Increase your marketing productivity with Automation

Introduction

How are 92% of companies improving campaign effectiveness, lead generation, and revenue? -Investment in marketing automation is the answer.

Take for example, the multinational media company Thomson Reuters. Frustrated by a high volume of weak leads in email marketing, Thomson Reuters introduced marketing automation to create ideal customer profiles and a scoring system to target quality leads. This transformed the speed and quality of Thomson Reuters sales, with revenue from marketing leads increasing by 175% and lead conversion time dropping by 72%.

With proven results, marketing automation is a great way to maintain competitiveness, increase revenue and improve user experiences. That’s why in this article, we’ll discuss marketing automation in detail, its benefits, how it works, and some best practices when automation is introduced.

What is marketing automation? 

Marketing automation is an effective way to manage production tasks. It allows companies to automate repetitive processes like email marketing and social media posting, target quality leads, and efficiently market across many channels. This helps companies save time, improve productivity and increase revenue.

Marketing-automation
Marketing automation

How does marketing automation benefit your company? 

Here are some key benefits to your company:

  • Reduce the risk of human error
  • Avoid repetitive tasks and save time
  • Streamlined processes
  • Personalized targeting & better customer experience
  • Increase production productivity
  • Increase lead conversion rate
  • Improve campaign measurability and targeting

How marketing automation impacts your company

Let’s take a closer look at how marketing automation targets certain areas to drive revenue.

Qualifying Leads

If you have an automated system in place to measure customer behavior, email interaction and surveys, your lead qualification process will be much more effective and successful.

Nurturing Leads

By sending targeted and personalized automated emails based of customer actions, potential high-quality leads won’t be missed.

Track your customer journey

With marketing automation, you can track the customer journey to determine what marketing information is vital for purchase and the products that provide the highest conversion rates.

Social media posting

By using automation to post, you’ll save time, create brand consistency, and transform your approach to content creation.

Responsive chatbots

When built effectively, chatbots answer customer queries quickly and easily and are a great lead generation tool. This is especially important since 80% of customers claim query time influences loyalty chatbots.

Automated reports

Instead of spending hours developing reports, automation allows you to create PDF reports in a few seconds.

Follow up emails

Send follow-up emails to customers who explore your website, leave their basket unfilled, or contact you through customer support. In addition, email marketing can be automated by providing reminders of any next steps customers need to take.

Invoicing & payments

Automate the billing process for clients and handle payments following accounting policies.

Marketing-automation
Marketing Automation

Our best practices for your company when introducing marketing automation 

For companies to feel the benefits of marketing automation, it’s essential the automation is fully understood and is used with proper direction.

Here are 5 of our best practices for marketing success:

Understand your customers

Create campaigns with your target audience in mind. You should know your customer’s demographic, interests, motivations, and pain points. This will help tailor the content of your automated campaigns to their needs and avoid generic messaging.

In addition, customer understanding expands to the journey. By providing customers with the right material for each stage of their journey, automation can help customers progress to the final purchase or another specific goal.

Collect the right data

By having valuable customer data, you’ll deepen your understanding of customers and will have the ability to run campaigns that fall in line with emerging patterns.

Set up lead scoring

You’ll need automated workflows to set up lead scoring, where points are based on customer behavior. Their score will indicate how valuable they’re to your business. Once your lead scoring system is set up, you’ll know the leads that are suitable for sales and those that need additional nurturing.

Have multi-channel experiences

Increase the chances of customer engagement by communicating with them in various ways.

Track your progress

Continue to monitor your marketing automation outcomes to help you determine what is and isn’t effective. These insights will help you make any necessary adjustments to your workflows and will inform your future marketing strategy.

Our final thoughts on marketing automation

Marketing automation can be a lifesaver for many companies. When combined with a good strategy, it can help nurture leads, boost conversions, and create more efficient and effective workflows. From this, companies can scale more effectively and save time and money in day-to-day activities, building a brighter, more cost-effective path forward.

FAQ:

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation automates repeat processes and helps companies effectively manage a range of production tasks.

How do I choose the best marketing automation solution for my company?

When choosing a marketing automation solution, consider what you want to achieve and how the long-term goals of your company.

How to design a logo that builds trust, captures your values and draws attention

Introduction

We say never judge a book by its cover, but we definitely judge a brand by its logo. With 60% of customers telling us they’d avoid a company based on a logo’s appearance, brands need to create memorable logos that represent their values and, most importantly, are attractive to their audience.

Take Apple, for example. The apple logo is simple, powerful and timeless, only undergoing subtle changes since its creation in 1977. This Apple with a bite removed has provided the company with an instantly recognizable identity, allowing Apple’s fortunes to grow to  $2504 billion. 

In this article, we’ll give you a primer on how to create a great logo, from logo design principles and tips, to an introduction to Canva, a free web-based design app you can use to create your own memorable, business-building logo.

To avoid staring at a blank canvas when beginning your design process, consider our 5 design principles. These are often considered building blocks of many logos.

Aim for Balance

A cluttered logo with messages will lose meaning and confuse the viewer. By concentrating on alignment, spacing and symmetry, a well-balanced design can be achieved with a clean aesthetic.

Design-a-logo
Aim for balance

See Repetition

Repetition can help lift a logo and lead the viewer to important information. However, one key thing to remember when using repetition is to have small changes in each pattern. The best example of this is Mastercard:

Design-a-logo
See repetition

Try a Hierarchy

If you want to highlight key information in your logo – follow a visual hierarchy. This essentially means you guide the viewer through the information in a clear, well-considered and strong visual way.

Design-a-logo
Try a hierarchy

Use Contrast

Try putting two different elements together for an effect that will catch attention – colors, lines, patterns -anything that creates a visual impact.

Design-a-logo
Use contrast

Go Bold

Make one of your visual elements the most recognisable element of the logo – normally your name. This grabs the viewer’s attention and focuses on a specific aspect of your company.

Design-a-logo
Go bold

 

Our 7 design tips to help your logo stand out

Here are 7 design tips to help you understand why certain logo designs work better than others.

Choose your color scheme wisely

There are basically two color palettes logos can be chosen from:

Analogous Color Palette

Two colors are used that are side by side or close to each other on the color wheel. This presents a peaceful, calm and relaxing image.

Complementary Colors 

These are colors chosen on the opposite side of the color wheel to create an image that contrasts, attracts, and stands out.

Design-a-logo
The color wheel

Try white space in your logo

Rather than add to your logo, why not take away? Negative or blank space can provide an artistic balance.

Design-a-logo
White space in a logo

Use readable typography

Make it easy for the viewer to understand any text in your logo – don’t create something messy and hard to understand. Check out this great article by Adobe to find out more about the best fonts.

Design-a-logo
New Balance

Pay attention to measurements & symmetry

Balance your logo by ensuring the text is equally spaced and that all visual elements are symmetrical. This will help your logo look more professional and provide a sense of harmony.

Design-a-logo
The North Face

Create contrast with shapes and lines

Create visual interest by layering shapes, colors, and lines, drawing the viewer’s attention to different parts of the logo.

Design-a-logo
Patagonia

Icons must be memorable

If a company uses a symbol in their branding, it needs to be instantly recognizable. Apple has the apple, Nike has its swoosh, and Starbucks has a two-tailed mermaid. Each icon presents identifiable imagery, and the image reflects the company’s values.

 

Design-a-logo
The symbol of Nike

Surprise your audience

Use an element of surprise or a rule break in your designs to catch your audience’s attention and have your logo design stand out, but try not to go overboard with the rule breaks.

What is Canva?

Canva is a free graphics design software that helps users create professional-looking designs without any prior experience. The program can make posters, flyers, social media posts and more – all while easily adding text or images.

 

Our step-by-step guide to designing your logo on Canva

Step 1: Open Canva 

Open up Canva and search ‘logo’ to begin building on the right format.

Step 2: Choose your template 

Canva has a huge free library of templates for you to choose from and for any industry.

Step 3: Begin to customize your logo 

Use the advice in this article and start trying out different ideas.

Step 4: Take advantage of the design features 

Search through the many additional design features to create a more imaginative logo.

Step 5: Download and build your brand identity 

When you’re happy with the final design, download and start to build your brand identity.

Our word of advice with Canva

Although Canva is an excellent piece of free design software, we highly recommend you consider professional advice when designing your company logo.

At The Color Club, we offer companies a special design package. Our marketing experts will guide you through the design process as part of your corporate visual identity – understanding your market, customers, and future aspirations – before designing your logo and helping you build your global brand identity.

 

Our final thoughts on logo design

Logos are the most recognizable brand identifier: if a company has a great logo, the chances of market success are higher. With this kind of impact, companies should work with a marketing specialist to design a memorable logo that reflects a company’s core values – done rightand there’s a chance your logo could be part of our culture forever.

Google Search Console: Our guide to ensuring your website runs free from errors

Introduction

When it comes to keeping your brand’s website online and visible, Google Search Console is an invaluable tool. But companies using Google Search Console must understand the website errors it finds, from 404 returns to Crawl issues. In doing so, companies can avoid long periods of website downtime that frustrate their customers and cause large financial damage –up to $1 million in some cases.

As website errors put a company’s reputation and money at risk, we created an easy-to-follow guide on the most common Google Search Console errors, what each error means and how to fix the errors, helping companies to feel confident in resolving future problems.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console provides insightful data to help companies understand the market. This data includes information on how a company’s website is found, where customers are from, and what webpage has the most search traffic. With all this information presented in an easy-to-read format, Google Search Console is considered one of the most powerful marketing tools in the market, and best of all, the software is free.

At The Color Club, we believe Google Search Console performs at its best when paired with Google Search Analytics. We previously wrote about how to connect the two platforms in a different article, please read here to find out more.

Google-Search-Console:-Our-guide-to-ensuring-your-website-runs-free-from-errors

How to fix Google Search Console Errors 

Google categorizes its site errors into two types: warnings and errors. Warnings typically don’t affect users, and therefore, we’ll not focus on these in this article. Errors, on the other hand, are more serious and could potentially cause a bad user experience.

How to fix a server error (5xx)

When a website’s server returns a 500 error, something could not process your request. In this instance, Google, due to an issue with your server, the webpage was unable to load.

Google-Search-Console
Your website returned a 500 error

If the server has experienced any outages recently or if there is a setup that might be preventing Googlebot and other crawlers from accessing the site, ask your IT department or hosting provider in an email.

How to fix a 404 error

If a page returns a “404 error,” Googlebot cannot locate it. Typically, it is either blank on the website or no longer exists in a location that the bot can access. Since websites evolve and grow, 404 errors are not uncommon and not necessarily a major problem.

Submitted URL Soft 404 Error

A soft error 404 is when the server is now returning a blank or almost blank page. Fixing this mistake entails setting up your website to provide a 404 (not found) or 410 (gone) response.

Google-Search-Console
This page returned a 404 error when requested

Set up a 301 redirect if the page has been completely moved or has a clear replacement (permanent redirect).

Submitted URL 404 Not Found

This message appears because the URL is no longer active. For instance, if you delete a blog entry from a website when the original webpage is entered, a 404 message would appear. If a URL should still exist but needs to be relocated, simply include a 301 redirect for the webpage to be found.

How to fix a redirect error

Set up a 301 redirect when moving (or removing) a page from your website so that the web browser is informed of the change and users are directed to a new page. However, sometimes due to pages moving multiple times, errors start to occur.

Possible causes of Redirect Errors

  • Bad or empty URL chain
  • A faulty redirect loop
  • A long redirect chain (use 3 max)

Resolving Redirect Errors

  • Minimize redirect links
  • Use a single redirect where possible
  • Use Chrome’s ‘Ayima’ to see if a page is redirected, where it redirects to and the number of redirects
Google-Search-Console
Resolving Redirect Errors

How to fix Mobile Usability Errors 

As everyday web traffic increases from mobile users, Google has provided more ways to analyze how user-friendly a website is for mobile devices. By using the Mobile Usability Report in Google Search Console, you can find out which parts of your site need to be improved for better mobile performance.

Incompatible plugins

You’ll need to either remove the content entirely to resolve this problem or, if using Flash player, update your Flash player for a more recent option like HTML5.

Same ‘device-width’ in Viewport.

With this problem, the viewport is fixed, meaning your website cannot stretch to fit different screen sizes. To resolve this issue, create a responsive design for all your website pages. This will allow you to adjust the viewport width and scaling to suit whatever device your customers use.

Call-to-Actions not working

Google advises that clickable elements have a targeted touch size of roughly 48 pixels, which is typically equal to a person’s fingerprint and about 1/3 the width of a mobile screen. For a quick fix, enlarge the button and avoid small text for easier access.

Google-Search-Console
Fix mobile usability error

How to fix Crawling Issues 

Submitted URL crawl issue

A website that cannot be found in Google searches has a crawl issue. To check the crawl issue, start a new tab and head to the webpage. Next, run an online test to ensure all links are functioning properly before clicking the Request Indexing button – once finished with this final step, Google will notify you of whether or not your webpage is indexed.

Crawled – page not indexed

This is where Google crawled the page but did not index it. To avoid this in future, make sure to include a thorough outline of every piece of page content that needs to be indexed using structured data. This enables your webpage content to be included in future searches by search engines.

How to check your errors are fixed 

With each issue, you’ll see that when you check the page’s URL, it will open a new panel on the right side of your screen.

Check this list and page details. If happy with what you see, finish the process by clicking VALIDATE FIX.

Once you’ve clicked validate, you’ll receive an email from Google letting you know validation has begun. This process may take several days or even weeks, depending on the number of issues.  Following the validation, your content will be indexed and will start showing up in Google’s search results, increasing the chances of organic traffic.

Our final thoughts on Google Search Console errors

A strong understanding of Google Search Console’s findings is an important skill your organization needs, as websites are susceptible to errors -often when you least expect them. By knowing what each error means, your brand can respond quickly to ensure your web pages remain online and errors don’t reoccur. In reducing the risk of errors, your company can avoid reputational damage, stay visible and keep on selling.