Tag: Brand

Why Print Is Still Important In A Digital World

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In this ever more digital age we live in, with websites and digital media, there is still a need for great design for print. It’s easy to forget how effective ink on paper can be, there are many advantages to this form of marketing. We’ve compiled a short list of why printed literature is still a key piece of your marketing toolkit.

Tangible
Printed literature is an object that can be physically touched and held by your clients – for instance a magazine or a brochure, many of these are found in our homes or offices which are likely to be left around for years, subconsciously leaving a imprint on peoples grey matter. Compared to internet ads which normally disappear within a couple of weeks!

Credible
Print is able to give your clients and consumers that sense of legitimacy. The fact that anyone can just create a website to do anything is overwhelming and the fear of scams and viruses come with this problem, where as print has a more professional image that comes with it.

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Branded
Print is also a great way to give your brand a very professional image to make it stronger. However, in order to be successful when doing this you must ensure your communications are consistent throughout. Colours, fonts, images and style of writing should all fit within your brand guidelines and adhere to your company’s ethos.

Targeted
Sending out direct mail is a great way to reach a niche audience that have been harder to reach via online marketing techniques. Not all businesses are completely sold on the internet and feel that some advertisements can be viruses or spam, print allows you to break through the online marketing blur and specifically reach your target audience while still keeping that professional image.

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Engaging
79% of people will act on direct mail IMMEDIATELY*. An engaged audience is far more likely to respond to call to actions on advertisements as the majority of readers trust the information that they read in newspapers, magazines and flyers, making print ads a great way for brands to continually build a growing client base.

To Conclude, Print is

      Tangible
      Credible
      Branded
      Targeted
      Engaging

Overall when marketing your business you need to utilise as many different channels as you can to reach your target audience. Most of your marketing activities will be online, but there is also a segment of consumers who really will engage with printed literature. Finding the right balance between all marketing facets is key.
*Royal Mail MarketReach Mail & Digital Part II, Quadrangle, 2014
*‘From letterbox to inbox: Building customer relationships’ dma.org.uk

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Why Blogging Is Important To Your Business

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There are many arguments as to whether blogging is still relevant especially in this ever expanding social media marketing environment. But it does not matter whether you are a small business, or a multinational company, blogging is a massive part of your online content, presence and marketing strategy. Here are a few benefits that your business will receive from blogging regularly. Enjoy!

SEO

Regular blogging helps to boost your business’ SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Search engines love new, up-to-date and valuable content and by blogging the search engines will reward you by boosting your website in the rankings. This improves organic search visibility and increases website traffic.

 

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Brand Story

A blog allows you to tell your business’ brand story. A blog is a great place to offer consumers a better insight into your company, philosophy, employees, and ideas. It also tells your customers why you’re in business and how you can help them. It also gives your business a way to touch on some of your issues, concerns and prospects. Your blog posts will give you a great way to share your voice and personality, building up trust and increasing your brand’s likability.

Increase Traffic 

Your blogs will give you an opportunity to make relevant content for your consumers, this is a marketing tool used to drive traffic back to your business’ website. For this to work, the blog on your website will be the foundation for all of your social media platforms. Your business should already be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. You should be posting links with relevant visuals of what you are blogging about to your social sites. This way you are giving your social followers more of a reason to click through to your website.

Increase in Sales 

Roughly 60% of consumers will feel more positive about your business after reading content on your website. When a consumer is looking to purchase a product or acquire a service, consumers mainly want a business that they can rely on. The best way for a consumer to do this is to look for proof to see if your reliable or if you can actually deliver what you say you can. By sharing regular blog posts your business is showing what expertise you have and how your potential customers can trust you.

 

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Target Audience 

Blogging will attract your business’ target audience. By writing blogs that are helpful and relevant, your business is attracting visitors to the website that would otherwise not know your business existed. Also by showing expertise in your industry by blogging, this can instil trust and make your users more inclined to purchase a product or service from you. A blog can give a business a way of connecting with customers and prospects through a two-way conversation. It signals to visitors that your open to comments, feedback and even criticisms. This allows you to form a business perspective, as learning what’s on the minds of prospects is marketing gold.

To Conclude, Blogging….

  • Increases your business’ SEO
  • Lets your consumers understand your company’s brand story
  • Drives traffic to your website
  • Increases sales of products and services due to increased website traffic
  • Reaches your target audience

Blogging has now become more than just an individual’s hobby; it is now a very influential tool that most businesses of today use regularly. Blogging has been able to create an even playing field among businesses, allowing small businesses to compete with the Fortune 500 companies. A business does not need millions of pounds to maintain a blog; all it requires is someone educated in the field or even willing to do research in order to consistently keep updating and educating your readers.

 

Do you need any help with business blogging? 

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When A Brand Becomes Background Noise

Let’s get one thing clear, we’ve all experienced this at some point in our lives. It may have happened in our inboxes, on social media or during an advert on telly.

As brands bombard us with each passing day, they fail to understand why engagement rates are reducing, or why marketing just isn’t working the way it used to.

Falling short in marketing can have a worse effect than to even have no marketing in the first place.

Take this example.

So I sign up to a newsletter. I decide, “Hmm, my living room could do with a better TV. I do like the one we’ve got, but my friend’s TV has all this cool stuff and is bigger.” So I sign up for Hi-Def Electronics’ newsletter. What do I get to my inbox? Well, I get a “Welcome to our newsletter”. Not what I was expecting, but okay.

Tomorrow comes, “Meet Dan, our latest recruit.” Meet Dan? Who’s Dan?

I’m pretty sure that employing new members to Hi-Def is very important to the company, but I’ve only just been introduced to your brand. I don’t care too much about who you bring on. For all I’m concerned, the sales team could be a tower of giraffes.

“Hi-Def Fitness Monthly Event.” “Find us at stand D356”; I was signing up for a TV newsletter, I don’t want to go to an event about fitness. That’s why I’m searching online.

How brands can cause friction

With newsletters, it’s not necessarily the quality of the content produced, but the volume at which it happens. You’ve probably seen this before. I’m currently signed up to a list on Groupon, a global company that offer deals on a wide range of things.

At first, I thought it was a good idea to sign up. Since then I’ve been inundated with deals day after day, some of them good, but a lot of them aren’t even related to what interests me. For that reason, I soon lost interest in the brand and started hitting the delete button as soon as they landed in my inbox. A lot of brands make this mistake by not keeping a consistency on the content they send out. The longer you leave this, the more damage you risk to your business.

We get mentally inundated by brands

These days, we don’t even need to leave the bedroom to understand how many brands are involved in our lives. As human beings, we have a tolerance to quantify how much is too much, before it’s handled subconsciously. We might not be aware of it, but brands like Coca-Cola are so well embedded into our lives, we simply take no notice of them.

With certain brands however, this might not always work the way it should.

As we all know, the brain is a very complex organ. If for some reason it begins to associate a brand with something negative, such as a previous event or an emotion, that’s pretty much game over for them.

When you see the same brand, same person, same logo over and over again, all these associations with the company turns to background noise. You may not notice these changes at all, but your brain soon filters them because it can’t handle the volume at which it’s receiving. So the next time you see that associated brand, your brain switches on ‘filter mode’ and deals with the issue at hand, which may happen on a subconscious level.

Team tip #1: Be unique, be consistent and don’t become repetitive. Consistency in terms of design language is good. But consistency in general may lead to repetitiveness.

Quality is too low or not regular enough for my attention

When quality of the content is lacking or too infrequent to matter, you’ve got yourself a growing problem. This goes back to what I was talking about with Groupon, where one out of a dozen emails were interesting. But the same thing happens if it becomes too infrequently, where having fewer engaging messages will guarantee that people will not want to pay attention and engage with your brand.

You may not know this with Facebook, but if a campaign doesn’t perform up to par with others you’ve produced, the next time you send out a campaign, they’ll set the bar much higher than normal. That way you’ll have to work harder to get the same reach of engagement.

Team tip #2: Make sure to keep an eye on how each campaign is performing; if you notice a spike in engagement, try to figure out how and why this happened.

Team tip #3: Consider producing content that helps and entertains the customer. This might be an obvious one, but we’ve all seen the countless posts about “our latest product range” and “introducing the latest member to the team.” This might be relevant to some, but if the customer signed up just for insight, everything else is just background noise. In short, make sure to only focus on creating content that is insightful, rather than the frequency they get sent out.

Users have limited control over what they receive

Most websites still don’t offer the option to let the user choose the frequency they get emailed, which in my opinion is quite frustrating. If you send out regular emails, why not give control back to the users and let them choose how often they want to receive those emails.

Team tip #4: Even better, give them the choice to choose what type of emails to opt into, be it marketing tips, educational, etc.

 

In short:

  • Keep an eye on how well (or not) your content engages with the audience – if you fall short in an area figure out why that’s happening.
  • Bad marketing is just as bad as having no marketing at all.
  • Don’t sell your services all the time; make sure to create engaging content that is also educational.
  • All companies should use brand guidelines right? The same should apply for your newsletters. Create a brand focused template and stick to it!
  • Sometimes campaigns don’t always need to be about the services that your company offer. How about creating a softer campaign that subconsciously draws the reader in while promoting your brand.

5 Fonts Your Company Should Show The Red Card To

Much like a manager picking his starting 11, choosing the right typeface for your company can be an arduous task. It’s important that your company’s image and ethos are reflected in the typeface that you choose, and getting it wrong can mean a blurred understanding of your brand and the services that you provide.

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Introducing The New Mee

After months of blood and sweat (but no tears), we’ve finished! Our new brand is in effect throughout the studio and on our social media channels as of today, and we couldn’t be more excited about it.
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