Author: cm08

What are enhanced conversions?

Enhanced conversions increase the accuracy of your conversion measurement and enable more successful bids. It enhances your current conversion tags by securely sharing hashed first-party conversion data from your website to Google.

Unlike conventional conversion tracking techniques that depend on cookies, pixels, and click IDs, enhanced conversions use Google’s enormous user base to link user activity. This is achieved by requiring advertisers to send Google customer data regarding conversions, which is then linked back to a Google account – securely and safely by hashing the data.

What is The Color Flow? 

To understand The Color Flow, first you need to understand brand management systems (BMS). A BMS is a powerful tool, or set of processes that are followed to create consistency in branding across multiple channels and touchpoints. This is normally done in one centralized location to increase productivity, collaboration, and reduce unnecessary work-steps, and this is exactly how our advanced BMS, The Color Flow works.

3 ways The Color Flow helps you  

With our BMS, companies have the ability to manage hundreds of marketing campaigns on a global scale, all in one place. This is essential for all businesses, from companies looking to grow and enter new markets to ones that are established and looking for more sustainable marketing. By introducing The Color Flow, companies are one step closer to achieving their marketing objectives. Here’s how it helps:

Advanced Marketing Performance Measurement 

With The Color Flow, a company’s marketing performance is continually tracked, analyzed and evaluated. This helps create transparency in the work process, and by integrating Microsoft BI and Google Data Studio, marketing performance results are accessible at any time in automated reports, and personalized visual dashboards.

The result being a company has access to valuable data that’s logically and coherently presented. Market patterns become clear, and companies are able to predict future trends, and make more timely, accurate, and data-backed decisions.

Performance Statistics from The Color Flow:

• 35% Performance improvement from digitalization of operations
• 15% Marketing operations’ performance improvement from continuous intelligence

Centralized Global Marketing Production

One of the key features of The Color Flow is that it centralizes all marketing projects into one place. In doing so, all marketing assets can be accessed at any time, from digital banners to motion graphics, with real-time updates on delivery and production, making it easier to monitor progress.

Another impact of centralizing is that it increases collaboration. All teams work together on one shared platform, which breaks down rigid communication barriers and creates stronger marketing alignment.

Recently, centralization has been a growing trend within the marketing world, and in Gartner’s 2020 Marketing Organization Survey it was discovered that 66% of Marketers now have full, or a primary centralized marketing organization.

Increased workflow efficiency 

All successful projects begin with a successful brief. That’s why when creating one on The Color Flow, there are easy to follow steps, customizable tickboxes, and all required materials can be attached inside the individual project case. This reduces time spent on clarifying misunderstandings and finding documents.

Once a project has been launched, there is an inmail function that allows all those working on the project to communicate directly with each other. This means the end of frustratingly long email trails, and the chance of missing out on key information. Additionally, all communication history with inmail can be easily accessed and viewed, avoiding workflow disruption when there are changes on project teams.

As projects grow from initial brief to final submission, there is also a growth of information. With The Color Flow, this data can be stored in its system, and by doing so, erases the need to repeatedly download files.

If these small inefficiencies above are ignored, it could cause problems for a company’s workflow productivity in the future. This becomes especially problematic when trying to grow and become sustainable in the global market, as company’s end up losing precious time and money.

A key feature: The Color Flow proofing tool 

The Color Flow’s proofing tool is there to make life easier for both internal and external teams. It streamlines the work process with its friendly user-interface, making it easy to collaborate, make changes and view progression of individual projects. Let’s take a look at how:

• Projects can be viewed side by side in PDF format without the need to download.
• Titles, text and pictures can be highlighted with innovative tool selections.
• Drawing tools help highlight whole areas that need changing.
• Users can add comments, upload additional files, and make corrections.
• All updates are made in real-time

Overall, the proofing tool is a great additional feature of The Color Flow that helps improve the quality of projects, and shortens their time to market with its cooperative, inventive and dynamic user interface.

The four versions of The Color Flow  

Whether a start-up or a global company, we have a version of The Color Flow that will suit any marketing needs, and budget. Our four different versions provide flexibility, and each have unique ways to create a positive impact. Here’s our four versions:

Free Standard

• Immediately manage marketing production workflows
• Connect to our production services.

Business

• Access to Marketing intelligence dashboards
• Customized Options
• Automatic monthly reports
• 4 consulting hours/month

Premium

• Third party supplier possibilities
• More customized options
• Increased number of users and storage
• 8 hours of consulting/month

Enterprise

• Maximum users & storage
• Third Party suppliers
• All customization and addons available
• 12 hours of consulting/month

How The Color Flow is implemented

Is The Color Flow right for you? 

The right BMS is proven to dramatically improve a company’s brand performance, and The Color Flow is an advanced BMS that helps many companies today.

These companies differ in size, budgets, and future goals, but the flexibility The Color Flow provides helps all of them grow and strengthen. By Implementing our system, productivity increases, workflows become more efficient, and impactful data-driven decisions are made.

The Color Flow could help your marketing production flow, free from errors, into a brighter, more colorful future.

FAQ 

What is a Brand Management System?

A BMS is an advanced system, or process to create consistency in branding across multiple channels in one centralized location to increase productivity.

What are the benefits of a Brand Management System?

The benefits of a brand management system can be far reaching, but primarily include; increasing productivity; greater collaboration; and a slimming down of workflows for improved efficiency.

What is Google Search Console? 

Google Search Console is a ‘cost-free’ tool to help you learn more about who’s visiting your website, how they found it, and what pages on your website have the most traffic. This data is extremely valuable for companies as they gain a better understanding of the market, and that’s why it’s one of the most popular tools amongst marketers today. 

In addition, Google Search Console is able to identify problems on your website or apps and bring them to your attention. This avoids customers becoming frustrated with your website and having a bad UX experience.

What is Google Analytics? 

Look deep into Google Analytics’ crystal ball and you might be able to predict your marketing future. This complex marketing system provides a wealth of information on website and app performance, but understanding it is the difficult part. 

It takes time and dedicated employees to become familiar with the system, how it works and the amount of data it produces. But with patience, its insights are worth the commitment, and if your company is using other Google marketing products such as Data Studios and Google Ads, then Google Analytics can be linked with them all. 

What is Google Shopping? 

Google Shopping enables customers to look up, evaluate, and purchase actual goods from a variety of companies who’ve paid to advertise their products. Another name for this is a comparison shopping engine (CSE) – where the retailer and price of each item are displayed alongside the images.

Initially, when Google Shopping first launched, the service produced information based on specific search criteria. However, the site switched to a paid advertising model in 2012, meaning companies have to pay to be featured. Advertisements are displayed using product data that has been provided by the companies, as opposed to text-based Google ads that appear based on keywords.

Google Shopping Ads are displayed at the top of a search engine in a row of related products. Customers may quickly and conveniently click through to view a variety of products and make a purchase. They are simple ads with small descriptions. There is an image, a link, a price, a line of text identifying the company or website, and one more row that ordinarily displays a summary of the product and any advantages, for instance, “free delivery“.

Why should your company use Google Shopping?

Many companies use Google Shopping for a variety of reasons. Let’s take a look at the most important ones:

Add quality visual elements to your advertising

• Avoid text-heavy search ads
• Images persuade customers to buy
• If you’re a top seller, your star rating is shown

Improve your click-through rates

• 30% conversion rate compared to text ads 
• Strong performance growth since 2016
• Increase traffic means higher SEO results
• Higher click-through rates, better return on investment

Increase your customer reach

• Appear across different platforms; youtube, Gmail, & Google Images
• Visual ads are likely to attract more customers than a specific keyword text ad

Make life easier for your customers

• Shopping becomes much easier for customers
• Increase loyalty and satisfaction of user experience
• Opens up a new proven marketing channel

How to set your Google Shopping campaign

We’ll go over how to manually set up your Google Shopping account in the sections below. For those with a large number of products, a Google Shopping data feed tool may make this process simpler.

Step 1: Create a Google Merchant account

Just follow this link to set up an account on Google Merchant Centre. The process is relatively easy, and Google provides a great deal of information to help set up your account. This will essentially be your home to find all your products and connected product info.

Step 2: Have great imagery

Google will sometimes ban companies if they use low-resolution images. This is because it affects the customer experience, and in turn, damages Google’s reputation. Follow this easy how-to-guide by Google to make sure your images are best positioned to sell your products.

Step 3: Upload your product feed

Your product feed keeps Google informed about all your products. This information is crucial because it enables Google to discover and show your products when users enter specific product terms. But remember, you don’t need to upload your product feed if the Merchant Center is connected to your store using its API.

If it isn’t, follow these easy steps:

• Go to your Google Merchant Center profile. After selecting Products > Feeds, click the blue “+” button.

• Then enter your country and language.
• Decide the name of your product feed and choose how you’ll input information.

• To input your product information, you can use a template provided by Google Merchant Center or upload your own spreadsheet. If you decide to use the Google Merchant Center template, the spreadsheet already has the product attributes listed as column headers.
• Whereas if you decide to make your own spreadsheet, you’ll have to make the column headings for your product qualities. Once you’ve filled in the information, upload the file to Google Merchant Center.
• To access your completed product feed go to Products > Feeds > Primary feeds.

Step 4: Link Google Adwords

• You must link your Google AdWords account in order to advertise your products on Google Shopping.
• Log into Google Merchant Center and click the three vertical dots in the upper right corner. After, select Account linking.

• You can create a Google AdWords account from this screen if you don’t already have one. Otherwise, click Link account, and you’re all done.

Step 5: Create your Google Shopping campaign

• Create a Google Shopping Campaign from your Google Ads account

• Name your campaign name, country of sale, and daily budget.

Step 6: Set your bidding strategy

Choose your bidding strategy and establish your campaign budget under Google Shopping settings. This is how you pay for potential customers to see and click on your ads.

There are two main ways to set a bidding strategy:

Manual Cost Per Click

• Set your own maximum ad spend
• Target return on ad spend

Maximise Clicks

• Google Ads automatically sets your bids
• Limit cap spends on each ad.

The final step is your campaign budget. Here, you’ll need to set the amount of money your company is willing to spend every day. The amount isn’t capped daily, but Google uses this to calculate a monthly budget for which it will never go over.

For instance, if your daily campaign budget is $200 (200×30 = 6000)
Google might spend over $200 in one day, but never more than $6000 in a month.

Step 7: Choose your location & set your schedule

• Select the location of your ad
• Under ‘Location options’ you can change the Target & Exclude settings
• Set the start and end dates of your Shopping campaign

Step 8: Build your Ad groups

There are two forms of ads you can run on Google Shopping:

Product Shopping ads

• Promote a single product
• Enter your ad group name
• Set maximum CPC bid
• One ad group for all your products

Showcase Shopping Ads

• Enter your ad group name
• Set maximum cost per engagement
• Engagement when someone spends at least 10 seconds on the ad
• Choose your desired products to advertise

Final Thoughts

Google Shopping is a safe marketing investment that has a far-reaching impact due to the traffic Google generates. When part of your marketing strategy, Google Shopping will strengthen your company’s ability to discover, attract and retain new customers.

With the e-commerce market expected to grow, digital marketing channels like Google Shopping are becoming even more essential and provide a new alternative way to reach customers away from text-heavy ads.

Shooting marketing videos doesn’t have to be expensive

Video marketing is no longer reserved for big professional productions with huge budgets. In recent years, the video format has changed significantly and has become a lot more cost-effective in many ways. 

Fortunately, video has become so easily accessible that anyone can use it. Video content can be produced relatively low-budget with short production time, and subsequently used on all platforms with great effect. For example, you can film in 4k resolution with several smartphones. 

High or low budget?

Video production can be done in many different ways and made with several different budget sizes. Authentic low-budget homemade videos can be as effective as high-budget state-of-the-art-produced video commercials.

The professionally produced videos with greater budget and production time can of course give you a more professional end product. Here it will make sense to book a professional production team for the job. And while that may sound expensive, the cost of professional video production has decreased in recent years, as the technology has improved and has become much easier to produce high-quality video.

With either budget, it is important to have a well-thought plan from the start, so you will save time and effort from the first day of filming and increase the chances of reaching your goals.

You already know the drill

A good rule of thumb is that the same rules that apply to marketing material in text, also apply to video. Concentrate on the value you create for the customer and not the value the customer creates for you. Make sure to add emotions to your story with sounds and visual effects to communicate the recipient’s wants and needs. In addition to the message, the staging and expression in the video also help to characterize your brand and build trust.

Anything is possible with video

One of the most effective ways to acquire new knowledge is through visual learning. Think about how easily you can teach your customers how to use your product or service through video.

According to Cisco’s Social Media Manager Tim Washer, you shouldn’t be afraid to use a little humor to communicate messages. “Usually people are a little nervous about using humor in the business world and don’t think it belongs. But if it helps explain difficult messages, why not try to see if you can make it work.”

When humor is used to entertain the viewer, it often makes them more engaged with the content. So one of the things you can take with you here is that sometimes you have to break the mold in terms of how competitors use the medium and dare to stand out and take a chance. 

Steps to plan your useful video marketing content

First, find out what you would like to communicate and what audience you are targeting. Then decide which channel(s) to upload and broadcast through. Listed underneath, are some of the things you can keep in mind whilst creating:

• Many people watch videos online without sound – Google has a smart guide to implement subtitles to Youtube – which increases the likelihood of your audience sticking around and getting your message.
• Never burn subtitles into the video. Instead, you should always attach them as “nameofyoursubtitles.srt” files, so they can be scaled responsively on all platforms.
• The cropping of your video is important to have in mind because the effectiveness varies on different platforms.
• The length of your content is important because the time people are willing to watch varies from platform to platform.
• Include a call to action (CTA) in your videos to increase your conversion results.

When the steps above are determined you can prepare production with a storyboard. A storyboard contains outlined camera angles, written speak/cues, and a set time frame for the length of the video. 

Another good basic rule is that your message in the video must be delivered in a short and precise manner. As long as the content is relevant to the viewer, they will stick around. This is of course something that will be slightly easier if you go with the high-budget production where you can outsource for help.

Measuring and gaining success through audience data

You must understand that your audience is unique and that gaining success is a process. For that fact, the best way for you to gain success with video marketing is to analyze and study audience feedback and interactions.

The most common metric is video engagement including likes, comments, shares, and retention. Also, you can analyze if the content produces new conversions on your website, through analytics tools such as Google Analytics. If the video doesn’t give the leads you dreamed of, you might want to think about implementing a call to action (CTA) or rethink the content’s relevancy.