Posts Tagged ‘communication’
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
I recently ran across an article that addressed the “Power of Packaging” written by packaging expert Steve Kazanjian. As I’ve tried to put the importance of product packaging into words, I couldn’t say it better than Steve. The article, published on Ad Age, was a slam dunk. Here are some excerpts:
“Packaging is far more that a product’s vessel; it is the physical manifestation of a brand experience. Because of this, packaging should be a critical piece of a brand’s integrated communication strategy”
This is a profound statement regarding packaging. Steve goes on to explain that 100% of a brand’s purchasers interact with the packaging. They touch it, hold it, open it, store it, and dispose of it. At each point of interaction lies an opportunity to create a brand impression. A few examples Kazanjian uses are a follows:
1. The cork bottle stopper for Grey Goose Vodka cues the customer into a connoisseur experience which drives a high price point for the product. Would Grey Goose’s brand be as effective with a screw cap? Definitely not.
2. Lets look at orange juice. When packaged in a clear bottle, it communicates freshness. When orange juice comes in a carton, it says “Pasteurized”. Never thought of it before but I agree 100%.
In 2011, marketers are focusing heavily on social media to create highly personalized brand experiences while overlooking the effectiveness of packaging. Meanwhile, consumers are seeking rich experiences with brands and packaging. Subtle visual and emotional cues that good packaging can provide earns customer loyalty. Packaging is powerful and pays huge dividends to companies who utilize it effectively.
Follow Steve Kazanjian on Twitter.
Follow Ad Age on Twitter too!
Tags:brand identity, branding, communication, customer loyalty, Grey Goose, Marketing, packaging
Posted in Marketing, Packaging Design | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 15th, 2011
Have you ever wondered what crowdsourcing is? I have heard of it, but never fully understood what it was. For starters, the name crowdsourcing came from combining crowd and outsourcing. By definition, crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community. Still confused? Well when a company has a problem they usually hire someone to perform the necessary procedures to fix it. Now a company will involve a crowd to help them solve their problem. A larger group of people has a higher potential of finding a better solution than compared to one person. So the basic idea then is to tap into the collective intelligence of a group of people to perform business related tasks.
Crowdsourcing increases productivity, while also allowing to hear feedback from more than one individual. A lot of businesses are using crowdsourcing to gain insight and solve problems. As social media has become the way we communicate, crowdsourcing is becoming more and more popular. Businesses may use crowdsourcing to get opinions on a new logo design, voting on a product design, or rank songs and movies. Crowdsourcing can be used for any purpose a business needs.
Sony used crowdsourcing to get people from untapped audiences the chance to think of new ways to tackle the sustainability challenges we face. This started in September of 2010 when Sony set up an online open forum. PepsiCo also dabbled in crowdsourcing last year when they created their Refresh Project campaign. They asked for customer’s favorite ideas for community involvement and they would fund the ideas that got the most votes. Mob4Hire is one of the world’s largest mobile research and testing companies and they used crowdsourcing to test products.
Crowdsourcing connects businesses with their consumers and produces collaboration. It gives businesses the chance to hear what a group of people have to say to get more feedback and opinions.
Tags:business, collaboration, collective intelligence, communication, consumers, crowdsourcing, feedback, involvement, marketers, Marketing, outsourcing, Social Media, solutions
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Social media has encompassed our world and lifestyles. Not only is social media used for personal reasons, but now businesses have put their mark on social media. Marketing via social media is a great way for businesses to get connected with a vast amount of people at the same time. It creates communication among consumers and has the potential to attract new ones. One of the main benefits of using social media is that it is free and easy to use. All you basically have to do is create a profile and let the marketing begin! Keep in mind that content is key to having a successful social media campaign. If your content is not interesting or useful, you will have no luck with social media.
Social media allows you to share, network, publish, and discuss. Although social media has these benefits for businesses, it is hard to decide which ones to use. There are so many social media outlets to choose from that it can get confusing. Let’s take a look at the most popular social media networks and what benefits they provide.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn sets the stage for networking with business professionals. It allows you to personally brand your business and market yourself to others within your industry. It is also a great outlet for providing knowledgeable content that informs and educates users. Lead generation is the most valuable outcome of using LinkedIn.
Facebook: Facebook has more than half a billion users, making it a great way to share a message and reach a large amount of people simultaneously. It opens up a communication portal and creates social interaction. Facebook works great as a promotional tool. You can promote your products, services, and events to a mass audience, giving your business the opportunity to expand. Frequent and interesting posts will help to keep users attracted to your business.
Twitter: Twitter is your outbound messaging tool. It consists of tweeting 140 characters or less messages to users. These tweets are short and concise, creating a social buzz. This buzz creates interaction with users. While you are tweeting it exposes your business and brand, and then you get to hear who is talking about you and what they are saying. Twitter is all about listening to others through feedback.
YouTube: Known as the largest video sharing community, YouTube is also a marketing and advertising tool. It gets an informative and positive message right in front of existing and/or potential customers. Creating and sharing a video on YouTube provides the opportunity to share knowledge, market products, show off expertise, and connect with users. Videos that are compelling and entertaining will catch the attention of users, also creating interaction for your business.
Tags:brand, business, communication, content, facebook, linkedin, Marketing, networks, promotion, social interaction, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, youtube
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
I will admit that I finally signed up for Twitter a week ago, so I am a few years behind. I didn’t really understand the importance of Twitter until I hopped on the bandwagon. I was confused by all the hash marks and other symbols, that I didn’t recognize how powerful Twitter is as a business and marketing tool. Using 140 characters or less, Twitter can help any business promote and share its marketing efforts to a vast amount of people. Since Twitter is one of the largest social media outlets in the world, it has also become a new form of communication. Twitter is used to share content. Businesses want to share content to attract potential customers. So here’s a crazy idea: businesses can share their content on Twitter to attract customers to their company.
Twitter may seem confusing at first, but it is actually easy to use and provides many benefits to businesses.
Here are some of the benefits Twitter can bring to businesses:
- Can impact search rankings
- Drive traffic to your business website
- Can be used check competitors accounts to see what they are sharing and who they are following
- Target the people you want to target in relation to your business
- Twitter search allows you to follow relevant conversations, trends, and people
- Hear feedback about your business from the content you share and conversations you start
Those are just a few benefits Twitter provides for businesses and marketers. Twitter also allows you to unleash your creative side. You can customize your profile, add a picture, and create a descriptive bio. Creativity combined with interesting and knowledgeable tweets will allow any business to be successful on Twitter. So the question is: to tweet or not to tweet? I will let you decide.
Tags:benefits, business, communication, content, conversation, creativity, feedback, marketers, Marketing, search rankings, Social Media, Target, traffic, tweet, Twitter
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
Traditional marketing has been centered around companies taking action to initiate a conversation, meaning companies are focused on finding customers. This is done by sending out a message to an audience through TV commercials, print ads, and cold calling. This form of marketing is called outbound marketing and it is starting to lose its effectiveness. We now have technologies like spam filtering, caller id, Tivo, and other measures to block out these outbound marketing techniques. It is also costly to create outbound marketing messages and difficult to track how successful or unsuccessful the campaign was.
We live in a world where things change everyday. Even the way we market has changed immensely. We have turned away from our traditional forms of marketing and have adapted something different called inbound marketing. This new form of marketing is centered around being found by customers. Companies that participate in inbound marketing take the stress of hoping the money they spent on expensive ads will somehow attract some new customers. Companies using inbound marketing utilize techniques such as writing a blog, creating a YouTube video, and constructing a presence via social media to draw customers in.
Inbound marketing is an efficient way to attract customers. It is less costly than outbound marketing, especially since many social media outlets are free to use. It also allows for more accurate targeting. Instead of sending a message to a large amount of people, inbound marketing allows messages to be formed specifically to certain people that you want to hear the message. The secret to a valuable inbound marketing campaign is through content and communication. If a company focuses on useful and confident content, people will find it and like it. Communication is also key to creating a conversation with potential customers because it could turn into a beneficial business relationship.
Tags:Blog, business, communication, content, conversation, customers, inbound marketing, Marketing, marketing message, outbound marketing, relationship, Social Media, targeting, youtube
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Friday, May 6th, 2011
I never really knew or understood what the purpose of a blog was until I started writing blog entries. I used to think blogs were just for individuals who wrote about their lives, sort of like an online journal. But little did I know that businesses also use blogs to try to increase traffic and search rankings. Business blogs produce a wealth of information about a variety of topics. They are one of the key ingredients to a successful internet marketing plan.
Business blogs are a form of social media that is a communication mechanism used to create and build relationships. Content is key when initiating a blog for your business. Online users are eager to dive into information that is meaningful and engaging. Blogging also allows a business to have a personality. It gives customers a chance to get to know a business on a different level. This also gives businesses a chance to hear feedback that they probably normally wouldn’t hear. Feedback, whether it is positive or negative, is beneficial for a business because it produces interaction. Businesses need interaction to start the communication process.
Blogs are a fun way to share important content and information to customers. A blog will give a business a personality, express creativity, and produce a positive business culture.
Tags:Blog, blogging, business, communication, content, conversation, feedback, information, interaction, Marketing, marketing plan, personality, search engine optimization, Social Media, traffic
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
If you read our blog post from May 5th, 2010, we shared a study conducted by University of Maryland’s International Center for Media & the Public Agenda. This study featured 200 students who had to live 24 hours without social media. This meant no access to Twitter, Facebook, email, and even texting. The students in this study wrote blogs about their experience without social media and lets just say it was a traumatic challenge.
Now a year later a new study is released that went global this time. They asked 1,000 students from the United States, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia to abstain from social media for 24 hours They were asked to report on any successes and failures during the experience.
Highlights of the study were interesting. Students actually used the word addiction when asked about their social media usage. Some reported that they felt depressed, lonely, and even shaky without having a social media connection. They also reported that they felt like they lost apart of themselves without social media. This led to confusion and a sense of loss. It wasn’t just access to social media these students lost for a day, they also lost email, music, news, and entertainment. So not only is social media how we stay connected with others and the world, but it is also a way of life. Social media is how people manage their lives and how they communicate.
Although this study shows that a year later we are still addicted to social media, it also helped students realize their dependence. As we are becoming a society that uses social media in our everyday lives, businesses should put their own perspective on the matter. Marketers and advertisers should harness the benefits of social media for their business. This study should help businesses learn how to use social media and understand how consumers use it. Marketers and advertisers will be at full advantage if they can figure out how to use social media to better their business and attract new customers. Social media has so many facets to choose from, giving businesses the chance to experiment and find what works and what does not.
Tags:addiction, advertisers, business, communication, education, facebook, marketers, Marketing, Social Media, social media addiction, students, study, Twitter, University of Maryland
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Friday, April 15th, 2011
Basically everything we do is online. The Internet is where we communicate, shop, watch videos, read the news, listen to music, and many other things. What you may not know under a business perspective, companies use the Internet to generate leads. They do this by setting up online queries for potential customers to get information. For successful interaction with these potential customers, some contacting needs to be done. Firms are not acting fast enough to follow up on leads.
In a study reported in the Harvard Business Review showed that 37% responded to a lead with in an hour, but 23% never responded at all. The issue here is that online leads go colder faster than any other type of lead. Since the Internet is a giant marketplace for anything imaginable, it is easy for a potential customer to go looking somewhere else. It was also found in the same study that U.S. firms who tried to contact potential customers within an hour of their online query were nearly 7 times as likely to have a meaningful conversation and create communication. This then can turn into a business relationship that could potentially turn into a sale.
The moral of this story is that companies need to focus on following up on online queries faster, otherwise the chance to communicate with a potential customer will vanish quickly. All it takes is one phone call with in an hour of the query to increase chances of qualifying a lead.
Tags:business, communication, follow up, Harvard Business Review, internet, leads, Marketing, online queries, qualify a lead, relationships
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011
Marketing is an activity and process for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value. It is how products and services gain a voice for customers, clients, and businesses to know they exist. Marketing is an aspect of business that has been around for many years. Have you ever wondered how it all started though? Marketing is based on the technologies of the era, because those technologies is how marketing messages were pushed through channels. Technology has evolved rapidly and continues to change everyday. We have things like social media and Internet today that is a must use tool for marketers, but it didn’t start out that way.
If we take a step way back to the Stone Age, messages were communicated by cave paintings and carvings. Since then, our lives started to evolve and stepping towards advancement. The Renaissance Era in the 15th century produced learning and research as we stepped out of the Dark Ages. We then entered the Age of Discovery, and in 1450 is when things started to change. The Gutenberg press was created, allowing for type to be movable, which is where mail order catalogs got their start. The Industrial Revolution in the 1800s increased demand for manufacturers to market their goods. The 1900s helped develop the marketing concept as science and technology started to change. Competition, communication, advertising, and branding become key factors in business. The focus on selling also grew. Direct marketing surfaced in the 1950s and telemarketing in the 1970s.
The 1990s were characterized by the boom of the Internet, which led to a vast amount of marketing platforms. The early 2000s sparked the launches of Wikipedia, Apple iTunes Store, and Gmail. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter followed. Today we are in the midst of the social media and mobile era. How ironic is it that we started out writing on walls to communicate and now we continue to do just that only not literally this time. The future holds potential for more advances in technology, which will be interesting to see what will happen next.
Tags:communication, facebook, history, internet, market, Marketing, science, Social Media, technology, Twitter, youtube
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
Social media has only been around for a short while and it has greatly exploded into a network of possibilities. Not only is social media used to communicate with friends and family, shop, and find love, it is also a way for businesses to market to their present and hopefully future customers. Social media has allowed marketers to transform one-way communication into an interactive experience. The ability to shape products and services based on real time customer feedback is the brilliance behind marketing via social media. Although social media sounds so simple, it may be difficult to decipher how to utilize social media for marketing purposes.
Here are 11 tips to help with social media usage as part of a marketing strategy:
1. Research: There are many social media outlets available and it can get crowded and confusing trying to decide which ones to use. Research should be conducted on how to use social media and what social media outlet is the best to use.
2. Set goals: Have a plan set so you can measure your progress and success.
3. Use the correct social media outlet for your audience: Different social media sites cater to certain things. To reach a specific audience, the right outlet must be used. For example, if your business sells consumer products, Facebook might be the best platform.
4. Be on your best behavior: Everything said online can be seen and gets recorded. It also becomes permanent. Think before you type.
5. Be interesting: Anything boring will not be read or followed. Updates or tweets should be lively and catch the attention of your audience.
6. Communicate instead of broadcasting: Social media is about engaging your audience and creating two-way communication. Avoid bombarding followers or fans with useless information.
7. Don’t be negative: Never say anything negative about another business. It could come back and haunt you and ruin your reputation.
8. Keep updated: Make sure you are keeping current. Don’t leave your audience to wonder and become stagnant.
9. Personalization: Make profile pages match the business atmosphere and incorporate the business culture.
10. Quality over quantity: Don’t go overboard and sign up for every social media site available. Keep it simple and only choose a couple of the top sites.
11. Use links: Add links to your social media accounts. Links help to get customers to your actual website. Also do the opposite and link your social media sites on your company website.
Tags:business, communication, Marketing, marketing strategy, Social Media, social networks, tips
Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »
