In a crowded marketplace for trade and membership associations, keeping up with the top new marketing and branding trends is essential. Here are four top branding tips worth adding to your trade association marketing mix.
Find Your Audience. Many trade associations, especially those with large audiences, often think they have a sense of who the right members are, and where they are in their careers. Yet, the marketplace is dynamic and ever-evolving. It’s important to regularly survey both members and non-members through market research if possible, and through email outreach to your database at the very least. For membership associations, making sure you understand the trends of those in school or just entering the workforce is essential. This audience may be a key element in your long-term growth, but it will know very little about you or the value you can bring to them at the start of their careers. Recognizing what they want and need, and marketing that to them, is difficult – it’s often a hard audience to reach.
Feed Your Audience. Creating the right content that they will find valuable and not just a sales pitch needs to be a key component of your marketing mix. That means investing the time and energy to create a regular stream of blog posts as well as insights and offers so that your association is viewed as a thought leader that can help shape careers. The second part of this equation is getting that content in front of your
target audiences. This needs to include a regular cadence of emails that push out this content, a smart organic and paid search strategy, a cohesive social media plan with consistent execution, and a banner ad and retargeting program to ensure that your brand reaches the audience and reinforces your value.
Your Content Needs to Grab Their Attention. In today’s internet overload landscape, people no longer read but rather scan headlines and images, looking for something that is interesting and grabs their attention. While it’s easy to rely on text-based outreach, incorporating compelling graphics, video and even animation can move the needle more quickly. This will become even more significant as engagement moves more and more to mobile devices. The small screens favor video and graphics and are less kind to text that is hard to read and
navigate.
Measure and Monitor. Keeping on top of the pulse of your members and target audiences takes time and effort, but is worth the energy. Membership surveys at least once a year are a good, cost-effective place to start, but it won’t get you insight into non-members. Invest in
a thorough market survey at least every other year to test how your brand is perceived versus other competitors. Monitor other players closely so that you know if they may be moving in a new direction, or increasing their efforts to dominate the space. The goal is no surprises. If there are changes to the market or your position in the market, the sooner you recognize these trends, the better you will be equipped to respond.
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Trade association marketing is never easy, and for trade associations, the competitive landscape has never looked more crowded. Not only are there more organizations chasing new members, there are also more for-profit companies offering competing services. As a result, whether you are with a trade association whose members include large corporations, or a membership association with thousands of individuals enjoying your services and offerings, it takes a strong brand strategy and a sophisticated outreach plan to efficiently and effectively continue to attract new members and retain existing members, and to drive attendees to your conferences and events.
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The old way of doing business for even the most established associations may not cut it anymore. In just one example, we’ve been working closely with a long-established membership association that is feeling the increased competition and has realized through market surveys that its brand awareness has been flat or declining over the past several years. Part of the reason is that more competing organizations are offering similar services. But much of the cause may be a result of having spent years branding its products and events separately from the association itself – a significant challenge for organizations that offer a wide range of services that have each been branded individually. As younger prospects are entering the market, they may know the products, but they don’t know the brand. Our solution is a multi-tiered, integrated approach that combines programmatic online media campaigns, fresh and compelling themes and creative, and a separate set of campaigns for the branded products themselves, all tied together through new messaging with the simple measurable goal of increasing brand awareness and engagement with the association.
For another large association that has been around longer than any other competitor in its vertical, one of the challenges has been a result of its age – its brand was getting stale. Our approach was a fresh look for the conference that brings in most of their annual revenue. For this client, our focus was on a bold new creative design that takes the brand color palette and re-imagines it as bold, contrasting tones that pop from a distance, with 3-D shapes that both fit the brand and stand out at a large trade show.
The point is that, for trade association marketing, there is not one solution for associations who need to up their game to attract and retain members. We’re not in Kansas anymore, and the old ways of doing business won’t get you where you need to be. It’s 2018, and time to take your marketing program to the next level.
It’s pretty obvious that videos placed on YouTube have huge appeal with consumers who love to be entertained while seeing a product or brand in action. YouTube videos can be cutting and funny, irreverent or just dumb, yet they have the capability of capturing consumer attention and driving interest and conversion. Good videos translate to more sales—according to one recent survey, consumers are nearly two-thirds more likely to purchase a product after watching a video.
But how well does that work for enterprise and business-to-business companies? Do videos on YouTube help with marketing when the the target buyer may be a busy executive, the sales cycle can be long, and a variety of different types of individuals may have input into the decision?
With B2B and enterprise products and services, it is even more important to leverage a channel as important as YouTube. Here are a few simple reasons why:
• YouTube is the second most frequently used search engine, which not only means that your target audience is probably researching solutions on YouTube, but also that a properly labelled and tagged video can show up high in the search results;
• Attentions spans are getting shorter, and a tight video or animation can capture that attention better than words or images on a web page;
• It offers strong opportunities to engage with your target customer; and
• It allows you to show off your creativity and position your company as a thought leader in your market.
Here, then, are six tips for how to leverage YouTube for B2B marketing:
1) Short is Sweet. As recently as two years ago we were producing videos up to five minutes in length to showcase brands and their executives. That time has dropped by more than half. A recent study confirmed that the most successful videos on YouTube are under two minutes in length—and those around the one-minute mark are the most popular.
2) Set Up a Branded YouTube Channel. Creating a company channel delivers a better experience than individual uploads, even if the titling and tags are already aligned for the best search results. A branded channel allows for a branded experience, with creative elements that showcase the company or product. It also allows a company to segment the videos so that the target viewer can better find what they are after.
3) Be Disciplined About New Content. Just like your other social media platforms, YouTube thrives on consistent content. Just posting video without a regular refresh leaves too much silence and no reason for a viewer to come back. When you develop your YouTube strategy, make sure you can add new content on a regular basis for a sustained campaign.
4) Treat Your Video Like a Blog Post. Don’t waste the opportunities to drive traffic to your YouTube channel through other social media platforms. Think of it as you would a blog post. The more nurturing it gets from all of your social activities, the more traffic it will get. So tweet it, blog about it, post it on Facebook, and promote it through your email newsletters.
5) Advertise. Remember, YouTube is owned by Google, so you can promote your videos through Adwords for Video. There are currently three ways to advertise and drive traffic to your channel: as a pre-roll ad before the videos that viewers watch; as a banner ad when people are browsing and searching the Internet; or as a promoted video when people are searching for similar videos. Each requires a careful selection of keywords to make sure you are getting to the right targets.
6) Be Creative. A static video of an executive talking about the company won’t capture anyone’s attention. If it’s meant to be instructive, consider using animation to tell the story. If it’s a thought leadership campaign, then have experts discussing trends. Use multi-camera shots, tight editing, and professional sound and lighting to keep it engaging. It’s ok to be entertaining, but it also needs to give viewers the information they are searching for.
YouTube should be a key element in every campaign’s mix of platforms to reach and engage the right audiences. It provides the audience with visual content that can showcase the brand, and it’s easy to gather the analytics about what is working and what’s falling flat. It requires a disciplined and smart approach, but the results of a smart YouTube campaign are more engagement and conversions.
A Private Equity acquisition that creates a new entity requires a distinctive brand that conveys value and stands out in the crowd. This is particularly true for newly acquired companies that need to quickly and effectively establish a credible and competitive brand platform for their acquisition.
Perhaps the oldest and best-known example of that is Coca-Cola. Its flagship soft drink is mostly carbonated water, coloring and a little bit of flavor. Don’t get me wrong, I like Coke and drink a glass almost every day. But what distinguishes it as a brand isn’t only the flavor. It’s the 100+ years of brand equity, based on a simple color scheme and a curved bottle that make it so instantly recognizable. Without those brand assets, it’s simply another cola, a commodity that would need to compete solely on price rather than its distinctiveness.
And that may be the most valuable lesson of why a strong brand is so vital: Without it, you’re a commodity competing on price, not value. It really has little to do with how a company or product functions or its selling proposition, but it is the core elements that make the brand different and recognizable. These unique elements – in the case of Coke, the shape of the bottle and red and white color palette – and known as its “distinctive assets.” These are the crown jewels of the brand. The more distinctive, the more recognition and brand loyalty from customers. And that means revenues.
And that’s why selecting the core elements of the brand, including color, iconography, style and the logo itself, is so important. Marketers can control a brand’s prevalence in the market. More media buys, sponsorships and advertising translate into prevalence. But uniqueness is more difficult to maintain, for the simple reason that competitors may be using or decide to use those same brand elements. But if you’re using a brand element that is too closely tied to others in the market, that means that your marketing and advertising dollars are being spent at least in part to help your competitors. Identifying those key brand elements and monitoring the competitive landscape to ensure that others aren’t using the same elements is key to a successful brand management strategy.
Here are three key tips for managing your brand’s distinctiveness in the market:
- Ask your customers what they think about your brand’s uniqueness. They are your early warning system to what’s happening across your market.
- Leverage your distinctive assets across every campaign to maintain consistency. And do the same for advertising and marketing creative.
- Monitor the industry closely for anything that looks similar to your brand assets.
Is Your’s a Distinctive Brand? Let Bluetext Assess Your Brand in the Market.
Private equity firms are constantly in need of developing a new brand for their acquisitions, often including a new name, look, logo, and visual identity, along with a website and a go-to-market strategy to launch into the market. Along with private equity acquisitions often comes risk, from regulators, legislators, and policymakers, particularly if the acquisition is in a regulated industry like financial services, healthcare, or even defense.
Bluetext has worked with dozens of private equity firms to develop effective brand strategies and successfully launch those new companies into the market. Whether the goal is driving drives leads and revenue for new acquisitions, mergers, and rebrands, or positioning a new brand in for growth, we’ve seen the challenges that they face, especially with regulators. We’ve often partnered with The Vogel Group, which specializes in assessing risk for PE firms, to help those companies find the right path to success.
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When the word among private equity firms spread two years ago that one of the many companies that helps defend individuals’ financial security from identity theft may be for sale, it piqued the interest of some of the larger private equity firms in the market. The target acquisition would bring a ready-made brand to the buyer from which to build and grow its market share. That’s where the partnership between The Vogel Group and Bluetext comes in to play. When working with our clients on the opportunities and risks for an acquisition, we work together to determine if the purchase makes sense and how that company needs to be repositioned in the market to achieve PE’s business objectives.
PE firms saw two large hurdles to overcome if they wanted to acquire the company. The first was on the regulatory and legal side. By virtue of having one foot in the financial services sector and the other in the privacy and identity theft defenses world, any company in that space faces scrutiny at the federal level by the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Board—both of which take in complaints on a daily basis against companies that protect against identity theft.
The second was the brand itself. For the PE firm wanting to take advantage of the acquisition target’s name recognition and customer base, it would also have to contend with FTC charges that it had engaged in false advertising, and the fact that it had far more complaints with the Better Business Bureau than similar services.
To move forward with the purchase meant a thorough risk analysis in Washington that reviewed the possible exposure before regulatory agencies as well as Congress and a marketing and brand strategy that could reposition the company away from its past reputation. The winning bidder on the acquisition was one of the leading cybersecurity firms on a global scale. Its solution for how to upgrade the identity protection brand was not to rename the company, but rather to pair it with an existing brand that was a fit from a business standpoint and that would soften its image and give it more credibility – a halo effect that would allow the positives to overtake the existing perceptions and legacy.
The buyer performed an extensive brand audit to find the best fit within its portfolio of products and services. It smartly did not want to abandon the acquisition’s name altogether – it had far too much brand equity. And even though, like many companies in this market, it also had faced criticism from regulators and the Better Business Bureau, its market penetration was strong enough to overcome those reviews with the right positioning.
So instead of starting new, it looked for a line of products that complemented the new acquisition’s solutions and created a co-marketing strategy to soften its image. That other branded line of products was a consumer-grade suite of cybersecurity products that would have a target audience similar to those who need protection from identity theft. As part of its repositioning, it launched the brand strategy with a message that is loud and clear: The acquisition and the cybersecurity brand “are now part of one company, with one mission. More protection for the digital threats of today’s connected world.”
This positioning inspired a new logo for the brand, that never lets buyers forget that two companies now lived side-by-side as part of the larger company’s family of products. The marketing campaigns taking this new brand to its customers is laser-focused on keeping the two brands locked together – ensuring a larger market and a positioning strategy that move away from its legacy.
Want to learn more about how Bluetext and The Vogel Group can help you with your acquisition and brand strategy? Contact us today!
The Bluetext Blog has been focusing on website design for the best user experience. In this post, we are examining five trends that companies need to understand as they examine the performance of their website design and whether it is delivering a successful user experience that is delivering results for the brand.
Cards are Taking Over. Card first became popular in consumer-focused social sharing sites such as Pinterest and Facebook for placing clusters of information – including text, photos, and links relating to one topic – in one place. For 2018, they are already gaining in popularity and offer a visually appealing way to organize and display larger data content in a smaller space. Cards also allow visitors to quickly assess the category of information and decide immediately whether they want to click on it or not. They are easy to manage and companies can select different arrangements and sizes to emphasize some types of content over others. Because of this obvious advantage, particularly on a smaller screen, cards are moving into the mainstream across all platforms.
Don’t neglect the touch. Mobile devices are physical objects that hit a number of our senses, most prominently sight and sound. But the feel is also important, and shouldn’t be neglected. Because of the small size of the screen, giving haptic feedback can be important and enhance the small-screen experience. Adding in well-tuned clicks as the viewer advances through a screen or a list of items also improves engagement. This is particularly true for sliders and similar types of horizontal navigation that takes viewers away from the downward scroll.
The sound and the fury. Some designers feel like sound should be an afterthought, and many find the auto-play functions that are so popular across Facebook and other social meid platforms more annoying than helpful. But when done right, sound layers will enhance the web design user experience on mobile devices. Subtle but pleasant sound layers can signal when a visitor is on the right page and can reinforce the buyer’s journey through the site. They can also add to the experience when a comment is placed, or even an emoji selected.
Video is replacing static images. We all know the appeal of video for communicating information about the brand and its products or services. As video and streaming capabilities continue to get more robust, and as screens themselves better display high-res video, it is quickly supplanting static images on mobile devices. It also better engages customers – after all, video clips are always visually more appealing than static images.
Colors and borderless display. As mobile screens, now including the Apple iPhone X, are moving their screens to be completely borderless, maximizing that display field is essential. To do that, vibrant colors are making a comeback. It was not too long ago that the trend was for muted and pale color combinations to accommodate the flat designs of mobile devices. Not only do more vibrant colors attract user attention, when used in combination with the borderless display, they allow website design to literally go outside the lines for a better user experience.
Metrics-driven PR is an essential strategy in today’s competitive media landscape, helping to set the direction for public relations as well as validating its success. Traditional public relations and media outreach that seeks placements and coverage in print and online publications remains one of the most valuable assets in a marketers mix of activities. But how do you know if your PR program is achieving the right objectives? How do you know if you’re getting the value from your PR expenditure, or if the needle is stuck in the same position?
Top executives who are managing budget, as well as sales and marketing teams who have specific sales numbers to hit, continue to ask difficult questions to justify the cost of a successful public relations program because it is so difficult to assign revenues and leads directly to public relations efforts. This is not a new issue, but with so many other options that can be tied directly to lead generation, top public relations agencies know they need to have strong metrics to validate the effectiveness of their programs.
At Bluetext, we have been practicing metrics-driven PR since we launched our agency more than seven years ago. The reason is not that it’s a way to justify the expense of using a top PR firm, but more importantly, because it gives us a real-time ability to manage every PR campaign we launch for our clients, and to make quick adjustments to improve results. The alternative is to launch and execute a program without any idea of the impact on what matters most to clients: increased leads and higher revenues. The challenge, of course, is what to measure that will provide real insight into the results that matter.
That’s why we’ve published our eBook on Metrics-driven PR as a comprehensive primer on what you need to know – whether it’s for the commercial markets, for the public sector, focused on cybersecurity, or with an acquisition in mind, we share case studies and top tips for a program that measures results and achieve your strategic and revenue goals.
As the first quarter of 2018 comes to a close, it’s a good time for a pitstop to assess your digital marketing strategy and make tweaks and adjustments for the upcoming months. Based on what we’re seeing in the market and what we’re learning from the campaigns we are running for clients, here are a half dozen top tips for Q2 for a smart and effective digital marketing strategy:
- Strategy Before Tactics. It’s easy to go directly to tactics, especially with all of the new and fun ways to use data to reach target audiences. But without a clear, well-defined strategy of who you want to reach, what you want them to learn, and what action you want them to take, even the best tactics are likely to fall short of expectations. So don’t forget the basics – What do you need to accomplish, what are the options for getting there, what is the rationale for the strategy you’ve selected. These should be among the first questions to ask. Once you’ve answered those, you can turn to tactics.
- Should you Gate Your Premium Content? We’ve always been proponents of leveraging premium content, including white papers, eBooks, and even infographics, as a way of getting leads and tracking the buyer’s journey through the sales funnel. But that doesn’t mean you should always put up the gates. When content is ungated, it can provide for a better SEO return. The challenge is setting the right mix between gaining ground in a crowded space through organic search versus capturing leads, and there are many factors that need to be weighed. HubSpot has moved to an ungated model, hoping to capitalize on a stronger organic presence, but we are not yet recommending that move for all of our clients.
- Marketing Automation is Your Friend. We are a big fan of solid marketing automation software that can take over the management and tracking of your digital marketing campaigns. While we’re partial to Hubspot, we have successfully built campaigns off of virtually every flavor of tools that our clients have invested in. The value is not only in efficiently managing repetitive tasks. More important is the ability to build complicated workflows for campaigns that take every new lead and place it at the right level of the sales funnel at the right time.
- What About Twitter? We’ve moved away from Twitter as a key element in our clients’ social media strategy if they are in the B2B or B2G space. The reason is that for the most part, while Twitter is great for consumer brands as well as for celebrities, sports figures, and politicians, Twitter users aren’t looking for information or insight on the platform for enterprise brands. But the other reason is that Twitter has not invested in its ad platform, instead focusing on user acquisition. If that changes, we will let you know.
- Don’t Stop Testing! If you have the luxury of a large database for your digital marketing campaigns, use the first couple hundred recipients to test subject lines for open rates and headlines for click-throughs before launching to the rest of the list. Don’t dwell on small differences: an open rate of 15.2 percent versus 14.7 isn’t significant for lead generation purposes. But a jump of just three points for a target list of 100,000 names can translate into several thousand new leads.
- Video and Animation can Work Wonders. Adding a little bit of movement to a banner ad can draw people’s attention and get them to click onto to something that they otherwise would have skipped. If you can show off a product, that’s great. But even using the creative process to include a little bit of activity, animation or movement can break through the clutter and get viewers to pay attention.
Learn how Bluetext can help you take your digital marketing to the next level.
Marketing analytics may seem like a dry topic, but there’s an old adage in marketing communications: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. With the advent of digital marketing, online outreach, marketing automation, and digital media, this is more important now than ever. In the digital world, measuring is both easier and more difficult, but it underpins every successful campaign.
Why is it so difficult – yet so critical – to have the right analytics? Let’s take a look at four key marketing channels one-at-a-time to understand why.
Media campaigns. In the analog days of print advertising, brands could see their advertising at work, in the pages of the publications that their industry would subscribe to and read from cover-to-cover. The circulation of publications was certified by outside organizations, so calculating the reach was a matter of doing the math. What was missing was a measurement of who saw the ad and how they reacted or engaged with the brand.
In today’s world of digital advertising, campaigns are sophisticated and programmatic, meaning they don’t go to every visitor to a publication’s website, but rather only to those whose characteristics match the target audience. We take it as an article of faith that our media partners are delivering the ads as intended. The only real way to measure success is by looking at the analytics of who clicked on the ad, and what action they took once they got to that landing page. That’s why the analytics are more crucial than ever.
Email outreach. Not too long ago, direct mail was a key element in most marketing campaigns. Today, that has been largely supplanted by email marketing. Besides the significant cost savings of email versus direct mail, it’s can also be much more targeted with a good database to start from. Adding the right marketing analytics to the emails can assure that we know who has received the email, who has opened it, and who has clicked through to the landing page.
For our clients, we often will test different subject lines to see which results in the most engagement. That’s a key part of our analytics. We will also develop two compelling subject lines, and send the same email with the second subject line to any of the recipients who didn’t open it the first time. For those who never open the email, we may take them off the list after five or six emails, or keep them on the list to remain top-of-mind for when they might be in the ready-to-buy.
Social media. It’s easy to judge the effectiveness of social media by the number of followers on each platform. That would be a mistake. Followers don’t always translate into engaged audiences or influencers. It’s too easy to be fooled by “bought” followers or people who automatically follow everyone as a way to build their own profile. More important is the influence of key followers, the ones that are known as thought leaders for that market and have their own brand and a substantial following. We would rather have a limited number of these type of individuals who have an interest in and will engage with our clients’ brands, than a large number of followers unrelated to the business. Analytics tools that measure this type of impact are key.
Traditional public relations. In the pre-internet days, we could measure the impact of a pr campaign much like we did advertising: add up the number of subscribers for each publication that runs an article for a total reach. Again, that tells us little about the impact that article might have. In today’s digital age, we are more interested in strategic coverage that focuses on our clients or positions them as thought leaders – either through authored bylines or being quoted for their insight – than the mere number of hits.
Successful digital marketers are constantly evaluating where to put their resources, and how to measure the programs they are funding in terms of lead generation and sales. Advanced marketing analytics allow companies to go far beyond baseline metrics, by providing the tools to really understand how their target buyers are consuming content, what entices them to engage and interact, and what triggers a conversion. In-depth analytics -including multivariant as well as A/B testing – provide the types of information that enable more automation and personalization to map to each buyer’s journey. Getting that data in real-time from the right analytics and tools will offer the most current insights for reacting quickly and putting the best content in front of that audience, responding to what’s happening now, not what took place a week or month earlier.
Our recommendation is to invest in marketing analytics that will provide real-time, data-driven insights to meet your marketing and revenue goals.
Learn how Bluetext can help develop marketing analytics that help your brand meet its marketing goals.
Content marketing is one of the best ways to drive target audiences to your website and to get into your sales funnel. A key question to ask is whether you you have the right content marketing strategy to drive organic search and grab attention in your outreach. Is it innovative and using graphics the right way? And while innovation in content marketing is certainly not a new concept, many brands still struggle with moving their content away from the traditional heavy text and towards a more engaging graphics-based approach.
Here are four solid tips for brands that are embracing a more innovative strategy for their content marketing:
1) Interesting is good. Boring not so much. This might sound obvious, but with many business-to-business or business-to-government solutions, it’s not always easy to sound interesting on technical topics. Resist the temptation to edit out content that might be fun and relevant, and that plays on popular topics or cultural experiences. Take Hootsuite as an example. There’s nothing very sexy about a tool that allows you to manage your social media posts. It’s mostly a dashboard with a number of useful applications tacked on. But Hootsuite rose to immense popularity by playing off a popular theme, the HBO television series “Game of Thrones.” It created a video called “Game of Social Thrones,” using graphics and music similar to the television show to demonstrate its capabilities. Each popular social platform has its own Game of Thrones city, and logos and images are cleverly used throughout. Timing is everything, of course, and the Hootsuite video garnered lots of buzz on YouTube. Hootsuite also makes sure that its content, even when serious, is fun, increasing its popular appeal. So while your brand or product may be technical and specialized, you can still write content with which your audience will identify on a popular level. The lesson: Don’t feel that you need to be serious all of the time. Create some fun, light content now and then.
2) Make sure your strategy aligns with your brand. IBM is known for three key assets: Its technical expertise, its role as long-time market leader, and its position as a respected source of IT information. To match its steady flow of content to its brand attributes IBM follows the same path. To uphold its reputation as a technology leader for more than a century, it has to produce authoritative content that underscores its thought leadership. Because the company is a technical powerhouse, it has to ensure that the content is technically authoritative. And because the company is trusted by millions to provide detailed descriptions of challenges and solutions, it has to make sure that its content is at an expert level. While trying to follow in IBM’s footsteps is not an easy task, it provides a strong lesson for how to approach your content. It should be well-written, possess authority, and have an expert voice. That’s what customers want and respond to.
3) Storytelling never gets old. It’s easy to fall back on technical explanations, and these are often important when conveying the value that a product or solution brings to the market. But telling a human interest story that illustrates what that technology brings to customers can be much more penetrating. Few do this better than Microsoft, whose “Stories” blog posts rarely even include the term software. Instead, they tell stories of how Microsoft technology has helped people, and in some cases changed their lives. In one example featuring sportscaster Daniel Jeremiah, the story is one of the human experience, of triumph, challenge and redemption. Daniel explains how as a scout for the Philadelphia Eagles, when he didn’t trust his instincts and the data at his disposal, he lost the opportunity to push for Seattle Seahawks superstar Russell Wilson. It’s a fun,personal and powerful story, and one that demonstrates Microsoft’s leadership not with a hard sell of its products, but with a tale that will stick in your mind.
4) Let visuals help tell the story. Visual images draw attention, tell a story, and help illustrate a brand’s true value. The problem is, many companies, particularly in the technology space, don’t believe they have much they can show using photos or high-impact graphics. I’m going to put forward GoPro as a great example of a company that relies on the visual to tell it brand story. And yes, I recognize that it’s not a fair comparison—a company that sells action-oriented video equipment of course would have great videos to show off its products. But the thing about GoPro is that it almost never actually shows its cameras in its marketing efforts. Instead, GoPro focuses on its users. One of its leading cameras is called the Hero, and its campaign is to turn its customers into heroes. Much of its content is created by passionate users who are, in turn, becoming public heroes. Companies who aren’t in the video business can take a similar approach. Tell the story of your customers and end users using video and other visual assets to make them the heroes—for the challenges they are addressing and the problems they are solving. At the very least, use visual content and images to enhance your text-based content.
Taking an innovative approach to content marketing can pay off in spades for any brand willing to think creatively and act accordingly. But sticking to some basic truths about what customers want and expect will increase your brand footprint and drive market recognition and share.