When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we noticed this gem submitted in this landing page project.
Let us start the slow clap for aarsita. Check out more great work on aarsita’s profile page.
Nicely done, aarsita, nicely done!
Image Source: Edward Musiak
Marketing can be expensive and often, unpredictable. The most successful marketers and teams set clear, crisp goals, develop smart strategies, and experiment with different tactics. But even then, many campaigns fail to return the money marketers invest on marketing efforts.
I’ve previously written about lean marketing – testing your ideas in small batches, listening to feedback, tweaking campaigns, and re-testing. There’s another important concept that complements lean marketing: marketing velocity.
Marketing velocity is the speed at which marketing efforts deliver measurable results. You can accelerate marketing velocity with various enabling technologies like marketing automation, CRM and other tools and techniques. But at the end of the day, the true measure of marketing velocity is the speed with which you develop your goals, set strategy and most importantly, deploy tactics.
Keep in mind that marketing velocity and agility are two distinctly different concepts. Velocity is about doing things faster. Agility is about testing in small-batches, listening/measuring outcomes, tweaking and re-testing.
Why should you care about marketing velocity?
The answer is deceptively simple: speed matters. Until you actually deploy your marketing tactics, you learn nothing. You can spend months strategizing, developing theories, creating collateral, etc. But real testing doesn’t begin until you actually market.
If your competitors are able to set their goals, develop strategies and deploy marketing campaigns at a faster velocity than you can muster, you will never be able to beat them in the market unless your strategies and tactics are materially better. Even if your strategies and tactics are better, you’ll still need to deploy them at a reasonable pace. After all, there are many good tools that allow marketers to track, measure and turn-around real time insights about their marketing efforts. The best marketers can make adjustments and tweak their strategies in near real-time. If your competitors are doing so and you’re not, you’re already falling behind. Ultimately, you need marketing that moves at the speed of ideas.
Here are three tips to help you improve your team’s marketing velocity:
It’s tempting to simply pick up the pace of your marketing tactics and assume that your marketing velocity will naturally increase. Before you do so, you need to develop a clear set of goals. After all, doing something faster, without a clear goal, is pointless.
Goals shouldn’t be easily achievable – but they should be realistic. This is where many marketing teams fail.
At least in my experience, it’s counter-productive to have many goals tied to a specific strategy. You can have many different strategies, and different goals associated with each strategy. But you should not have more than a few well-defined goals for each strategy. In the past, when we’ve set many goals for a single strategy, we found that the results were often noisy and non-actionable. It was too easy to meet some of the goals, but difficult to meet others. This noise led to indecisiveness and ultimately prevented us from learning and tweaking our marketing strategies and tactics.
Your goals should be directly connected to your key business objectives. If there’s no direct connection, you’re merely creating and increasing noise. If you choose more than 1 or 2 core goals, you’ll mostly distract yourself and your team.
For example, few businesses will benefit from increasing their audience on Facebook or getting more shares or “likes” there. Likes, impressions, page views – these are mostly vanity metrics that don’t produce tangible business outcomes. Such metrics might be relevant to growing an already established brand (although even for established brands, those are mostly vanity metrics), but they are rarely helpful to startups and small businesses.
Kissmetrics has a terrific post exploring how different marketing teams set goals.
Once you’ve defined a clear set of goals, develop strategies intended to meet each goal. Here are a few good reads on building marketing strategies: Building Online Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses from Moz, Gear Up Your Small Business Marketing for 2017 from Melinda Emerson, 5 Steps to Creating a Killer Marketing Strategy from Peter Daisyme.
Instead of investing weeks or even months to plan and research, develop your untested assumptions and quickly test those assumptions.
For example, do not commit to a three month email drip-marketing campaign that takes you one month to implement. Instead, set-up one to two week mini-tests that you can deploy within 1 or 2 days. For example, here are some quick and simple tactics you can test during the holiday season.
If your experiments fail, don’t worry — this is normal. Many of the marketing tactics we try at crowdSPRING fail. But it’s better to fail with campaigns that take 1 or 2 days to create than with campaigns that took you months to develop. This is where marketing velocity can truly help you.
As I mentioned above, most marketing tactics fall flat or fail. But if you’re smart about testing in small batches, failures can lead to incremental success. For example, if you run a short email marketing campaign that you deploy within a few days, you can assess open rates, click rates, and A/B test subject lines, images, etc. When you run your second email marketing campaign the following week, you’ve already gathered valuable insights that help you to tweak and to improve the follow-up campaign. If you keep iterating in this fashion, each successive campaign will build on what you learn from the prior campaigns, This way, you improve the odds that you will meet your marketing goal(s).
Compare this with a team that spends a month building a deep drip-marketing campaign. During that month, they’ll learn nothing actionable. In fact, they won’t start learning until they deploy their campaign.
Ultimately, keep in mind that when you invest a majority of your marketing time, efforts and budget into developing strategies and tactics (rather than executing them), you make a gamble that your strategies and tactics will actually succeed. This is a sucker’s bet because most marketing strategies fail. Increase your marketing velocity and you’ll put yourself and your company in a much better position to succeed. Execution is everything.
Entrepreneurs and small business owners typically don’t believe they can learn anything useful from the biggest and most successful companies in the world. After all, brand building at-scale is typically very different than brand building in the startup and small business world. Nevertheless, smart entrepreneurs and small business owners pay careful attention to important market forces and trends that shape some of the world’s best brands. These entrepreneurs and small business owners know that despite the many differences between large and small companies, important insights that can help shape their marketing strategies.
BrandZ publishes an annual most valuable global brands report. The 2016 Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report offers important branding lessons for startups and small business.
Google is listed as the most valuable global brand, with Apple, Microsoft, AT&T and Facebook rounding out the top five. It’s remarkable that all of the top five brands are technology companies. In fact, the only non-technology company in the top 10 is McDonalds (at number 9).
Here are 7 key take-aways from the BrandZ 2016 report (and the important lessons for small businesses and startups):
Disruption was one of the key trends in the 2016 rankings. Interestingly, three of the fastest rising brands – Amazon, Starbucks and Facebook – continued to disrupt their own business models. It’s remarkable that only a few years ago, Facebook didn’t have a mobile strategy. Today, most of Facebook’s billions in earnings comes from mobile.
There are many products and services in the marketplace and a lot of noise. Smart brands attempt to be omnipresent and useful to their customers. The best brands deliver great value. Just look at how Amazon has managed to build many multi-billion dollar industries while delivering terrific value to consumers.
We take this to heart at crowdSPRING. We’re currently overhauling our entire product – replacing every pixel and line of code and rewriting every line of copy, in order to deliver better value to our customers and prospects.
One common mistake made by many small businesses and startups is to assume that once they have a great logo, they’ve created their brand and now just need to do a little bit of marketing. A brand is more than logo design. But marketing efforts can fall flat if you lose credibility with your marketing collateral. You must keep an eye on branding (easier for the world’s biggest brands – they can spend billions building their brands) because it’s too easy to make a branding mistake that can cripple your small business. For example, if your branding is inconsistent or consistently poor in email and content marketing campaigns, people will notice.
The best brands excelled in combining digital and social media marketing efforts. Consumers are everywhere and most companies have trouble reaching them if they focus only on digital or social channels. For example, content marketing strategies can work remarkably well, but get a huge lift if you can follow content posts with a strong social media push (Brands with “personalities” tend to do better). This is especially important because younger consumers have different shopping habits. According to BrandZ:
For example, the millennial dad is not the stereotypical errand boy-man, mindlessly checking off items on his partner’s shopping list. He is often the shopper and decision maker, and therefore a person brands need to get to know better. With the rise of mobile banking, the counterintuitive surprise about millennials is that they sometimes prefer to bank in the physical world first, establishing trust through a face-to-face encounter, before transacting online. Millennials pay for goods and services not only with cash, but with other currencies, including their time and their data.
Great brands have genuine, clearly articulated and consistent missions. Successful startups (Uber, Basecamp, Airbnb, MailChimp) often share this trait. Here’s an interesting read on Airbnb’s branding and mission, from a few years ago when Airbnb rebranded.
The company’s purpose must be genuine and an extension of your brand’s functionality. BrandZ explains:
Higher purpose seems to work best when it is a natural extension of the brand’s functionality. In the car category, Volvo returned to its emphasis on safety, a genuine purpose that helped drive sales. Tesla appeared for the first time in the BrandZ™ Cars Top 10 as a brand providing high performance and low carbon impact.
Customers are looking for a flawless, frictionless experience and typically have little patience when the experience is less than perfect. Many years ago, companies could offer a poor customer experience and customers would tolerate that poor experience because there were few options for customers. This is no longer true. There are numerous options for nearly all customers, and poor experience is a sure way for a startup or a small business to lose customers and go out of business. Just look at cable-cutters and the amount of business lost by traditional cable companies (that have, historically, had terrible customer service and experience).
Brands that are meaningfully different tend to be more successful. Consumers are looking for “a bit more” from most brands – not just the products and services they purchased. This is an opportunity for smaller brands to deliver great value and personalize products, services, and communications. For example, Drift wasn’t a market leader in messaging/lead generation, but they’ve made up for it by focusing on a powerful content strategy (posts, podcasts, transparency) that has given them a good lift in a very competitive market. As an example, here’s a recent post from their blog where Drift shares all of the email content it sends to customers and prospects.
Millenials are naturally drawn to technology brands. But equally important, brands that innovate and have a higher purpose appeal most to younger employees. This is a global trend, and evident not just among the worlds biggest companies, but also evident among startups and small businesses. For example, McDonald’s (the world’s 9th best brand) is moving its headquarters back to the West Loop Chicago (from a suburb) in order to attract younger employees. The West Loop is already home to many startups (including Basecamp, Threadless, crowdSPRING, Respect, Startup Foundry, and many others). But location is only one factor. There’s a reason that technology companies dominate the top 10 in the 2016 rankings – nearly all of these companies are considered innovation leaders.
This is an especially important lesson for small businesses competing against large multinational companies. Interesting cultural trends are pushing local brands above successful global companies. For example, Intelligentsia Coffee enjoys a great reputation as a local brand. Why? According to to the BrandZ report:
Along with the desire for less expensive products, several other factors drive this trend, which is especially evident in FMCG [Fast moving consumer goods] categories. First, local brands have gotten better in quality and marketing, in part because they have learned from multinational competitors. Second, consumers increasingly prefer local brands for nationalistic or other reasons. In India, for example, consumers feel that local brands better understand and respond to the country’s rich diversity. Finally, consumers in these fast-growing markets also look for brands that act as partners in helping to build the nation. To many consumers, local brands seem more likely to pursue this purpose.
Smaller brands can compete with big brands because you can reach the consumer anywhere, physically or virtually. But even for local business, you must have a web presence to reach consumers virtually.
The best brands understand that marketing messages must be customized to each generation. Marketing to Baby Boomers, for example, is different than marketing to Gen Z. According to BrandZ:
In an age more tech-driven than ever, Gen Z is raising standards for brands. Even with the proliferation of omnichannel, interactions are expected to be more human, benefits higher-order, and offers more individually relevant. Close attention to this generation – leveraging the vast amounts of behavioral data it generates wherever possible – is crucial for building lasting connections, outpacing evolving needs, and ultimately winning with the consumer.
The best brands also understand that blindly attaching your brand to various opportunities is fraught with peril. For example, many brands mistakenly attach their marketing efforts every October to Pinktober (celebrating Breast Cancer Awareness Month).
What other advice would you offer small businesses and startups building their own brands?
[We’ve previously written about important lessons small businesses and startups can learn from the world’s best Brands. If you’re interested in prior brand reports, What Small Businesses Can Learn From The World’s Best Brands, Branding Secrets of the World’s Best Brands, What Can You Learn From The World’s Best Brands, and Small Business Branding: What You Can Learn From The World’s Best Brands.]
Continuing with a longstanding tradition, the Oxford Dictionary has chosen 2016’s word of the year: post-truth.
Sound nonsensical? That’s actually kind of the point.
Post-truth, according to Oxford, is, “an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’”
In a year punctuated by a bitter American election and mind-boggling Brexit vote, that sounds about right, doesn’t it? In both cases, the masses made decisions spurred not by facts but feelings, backed by a surge sharing of fake news on social media. When confronted with information that directly contradicted their feelings, few were moved to change their positions. It was never about the truth. It was about what they felt was true.
In fairness, though 2016 may stand out as an extreme manifestation of such decision making, it’s actually far from a novel social paradigm. And frankly, it’s not really a cultural thing. It’s literally hardwired into our brains, no matter how cool and analytical we might think ourselves.
Well before the 2008 election, American clinical and political psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Emory University conducted a study examining the neural patterns exhibited by partisan and neutral voters when presented with conflicting information about candidates on both sides of the aisle. The goal was to see how the brain processed such contradictions — what parts of the brain were stimulated.
In the end, it was the sections governing emotion that lit up like a Christmas tree. As Westen explains in his book The Political Brain:
The political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures, and policies to make a reasoned decision. The partisans in our study were, on average, bright, educated, and politically aware. They were not the voters who think “Alito” is an Italian pastry, the kind of voters who have raised so many alarm calls among political scientists and pundits.
And yet they thought with their guts.
This is not a phenomena reserved to political decision making, either. In fact, research suggests that emotions not only drive our decision making, but that they are essential to it.
Around the same time that Westen released his book, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy and head of the Brain and Creativity Institute Dr. Antonio Damasio was conducting a study of patients who had experienced significant trauma to the areas of the brain which regulate emotion. The subjects were all quite intelligent and capable of organizing and analyzing information, but they struggled to make even the smallest of decisions. Why? Without emotion establishing the framework for parsing that information, they were incapable of making up their minds.
His research explained that this is literally a function of how our brains are structured. In his book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Damasio writes:
[H]uman reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many levels of neuronal organization, rather than on a single brain center. Both “high-level” and “low-level” brain regions, from the prefrontal cortices to the hypothalamus and brain stem, cooperate in the making of reason.
The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with the body functions necessary for an organism’s survival. In turn, these lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with virtually every bodily organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations that generate the highest reaches of reasoning, decision making, and, by extension, social behavior and creativity. Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason.
What Damasio found is that without access to the systems which regulate emotion, the brain literally cannot engage in effective reasoning to a conclusive end. No emotion? No ability to decide.
In other words, this whole idea of being in a “post-truth” world is little more than hype. This is not a cultural trend. This is biology.
It’s not like we haven’t known this for years. Research from Caroline Winnett and Andrew Pohlmann of The Nielsen Company suggests that 90% of all consumer purchasing decisions are made subconsciously. Companies realized that a long time ago, and have built empires on the notion. It’s no accident that some of the most successful brands in the world are those that sell an experience in the shape of a product.
Pouyan Salehi of PersistIQ explains this concept through the lens of Starbucks:
They’re selling more than coffee. They’re selling familiarity. People won’t risk getting sub-par coffee at a place they don’t know; they know exactly what they will get from Starbucks.
They’re selling social acceptance. Everyone goes there; it must be the cool thing to do.
They’re selling a “third place” atmosphere. People are tired of working, but don’t want to go home yet, so they go to a “third place” where they can lounge with their friends or cuddle up with a book.
This is the vision Starbuck’s CEO had when he took the throne, and has stood on his head to bring that vision to fruition.
But more than anything, they are selling an experience. When you go to a Starbucks, you are getting the experience of being in a European coffee bistro, not just an ordinary café. That’s how it was conceptualized by the founders from its inception.
The friendly baristas, the European atmosphere, the smell of fresh grinds all culminate into an experience like nothing else. That’s how you create a demand for your product. That’s how you sell coffee without selling coffee.
But this isn’t just about a few bucks on a cup of coffee. Even the biggest financial purchases we make are driven by emotion.
Take, for example, buying a house. It’s one of the single biggest investments people make during the course of their life, and an incredibly complex one at that. There are dozens of variables to be considered, ranging from price to location to space to features. And yet…
“Buying a house is an inherently emotional investment,” explains Oren Jacobson, Director of Strategic Marketing for new home sales training and management firm New Home Star. “The house you buy will become the home where you and loved ones will be making memories for years to come. Of course emotions are going to play a central role in such a purchase. As a result, our sales agents are trained to sort of serve as psychologists. Our job is to help people make the decision that’s right for them, and the best way to do that is to help them understand the decision in terms of what’s most important to them.”
The influence of emotion on purchasing decisions isn’t unique to consumers, either. As Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and CEO of Broadsuite Media Group Daniel Newman writes for Forbes:
In a recent study performed by the CEB, which examined the impact of personal emotions on B2B purchases, it was found that 71% of buyers who see a personal value in a B2B purchase will end up buying the product or service. In fact, personal value had two times the impact on the buyer than business impact did. In short, the survey found that without question personal value, perhaps better read emotional value overwhelmingly outweighed logic and reason in driving purchase decisions.
The data in this study shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but what it should do is come as an important reminder to people that the reasons that people buy are usually attached much closer to their emotional center than their rational thinking. And while buyers will often push hard for specifications, data sheets and statistics in order to help them justify a buying decision, more often than not these requests are really their way of telling you that they are not yet seeing the personal value in the product being sold to them.
When you boil it all down, ultimately corporate buyers are people and that is probably the most significant driver of this bleeding of personal emotion into the B2B purchase. No matter how much as individuals we try to put our “Company” hat on and tow the company line, we allow our personal feelings to enter the buyer’s journey and influence the way we make purchases.
So no, we’re not entering some new era where facts don’t matter. There was no big change in how we make decisions. We have always prioritized emotions over logic.
But that said, how those emotions are being influenced has changed. Illustrating this is a conversation adjacent to the post-truth discussion: the rise of fake news.
Social media has a lot of benefits, but easily identifying reliable information is not one of them. Fake news has always been an issue for sites like Facebook, where engagement levels prioritizes the visibility of content in the all important newsfeed. It doesn’t matter if the content is truthful or not. It matters how people interact with it.
The fake news problem came to a boil during this year’s election, though. This wasn’t just about someone mistaking an article from The Onion as fact. These were lies dressed up to look like legitimate news, and people fell for it. Hard. As Buzzfeed reports:
In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.
During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.
Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.
Where was this fake news coming from? Some of it was generated by folks seeking to gain revenue from advertising on well-trafficked sites, many of which were based overseas. Researchers at the Foreign Policy Institute have uncovered evidence that a large amount of propaganda was pushed by Russian operatives attempting to influence the election’s outcome. In other cases, sloppy reporting gave fake stories a broader platform on legitimate news sites.
Facebook and Google have both taken steps since the election to try to crack down on the glut of fake news. Given that 44% of American adults get their news from Facebook, such changes are certainly crucial, particularly in a world where critical literacy has been deprioritized in American curriculum. While folks like to joke about older relatives sharing blatantly false news as though it were gospel, a recent study from Stanford University found that 82% of students can’t tell the difference between fake and real news, either.
But how did we get here? How did we get to a point where fake news is so easily believed that it may have swayed a presidential election? How did we get to a point where fake news is so widely accepted that a young man, just yesterday, brought an assault rifle into a DC pizzeria seeking to take down a Clinton-sponsored child sex ring that never existed?
An article from Vox inadvertently hits the nail on the head:
A big problem here is that the internet has broken down the traditional distinction between professional news-gathering and amateur rumor-mongering. On the internet, the “Denver Guardian” — a fake news site designed to look like a real Colorado newspaper — can reach a wide audience as easily as real news organizations like the Denver Post, the New York Times, and Fox News.
Did you catch that?
DESIGN.
We may not live in a post-truth era in the way that it’s being described, but we are living in an era where design has given far more people the ability to influence the emotions that have always driven our efforts at reasoning. In the past, building a professional looking website was difficult and costly. Today, you can set something up in under an hour using platforms like WordPress and Wix. That’s not going away anytime soon. If anything, such access will likely become more affordable and easier to manipulate over time.
That’s not going to help an already complicated fight against the proliferation of fake news, but for businesses, it should serve as a reminder of how important web design is to building and growing a brand.
Think about it: minimal investment in web design facilitated the rapid rise of a sprawling web of profitable fake news sites. It afforded them the facade of credibility necessary to drive social engagement with their content. While things like confirmation bias and an intensely polarized political climate certainly contributed to some extent, odds are the same content in a white font on a black page with an angelfire url would never have been circulated as widely as the news that made the rounds over the course of this year’s presidential election. They had the right look. That’s all it took.
Most brands, of course, are operating under a very different business model and offer a very different message. But if design played so significant a role under a model where the ask of the consumer was low, imagine the impact it can have on a consumer being asked to pay for something.
Research suggests that 94% of first impressions of a brand are driven by design, and that 75% of whether or not a website is considered credible is based on aesthetics. It’s estimated that slow loading times — often a function of poor design — costs global retailers $2.6 billion every year. That issue is compounded when you consider that 88% of consumers will not visit a site again after a bad experience. And if you don’t think you have an issue with web design, odds are you’re wrong. According to a report from the Society of Digital Agencies, 77% of agencies identify weak web design as the most significant weakness in their clients’ brands.
The return on investing in website design can be substantial. Improved SEO, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates all contribute to the bottom line. Case studies abound on the subject, but according to Forrester, most brands see returns between 70% and 500% after a website redesign.
And all of that makes sense if you think about this “new” post-truth reality that has always been. Our decisions are driven by emotions. Our emotions are often generated by experiences. In today’s world, our experiences are often digital and shaped, necessarily, by design. It’s the same game it’s always been. Design is just more important than ever.
Ready to take your website’s design game to the next level? Take your creative needs to our crowd of 195,000 talented professionals to get dozens of high quality custom website designs. Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back.
Image Source: Lisa Brewster
Some marketers and companies do a phenomenal job building and executing their content marketing strategies. But the vast majority of marketers and companies, especially in B2B, continue to struggle with content marketing.
What’s the problem?
There isn’t one clear answer that explains why most companies do a poor job with content marketing.
Some companies do a poor job executing cross-channel marketing strategies. In a recent survey by Econsultancy and Adobe, only 14% of marketers reported that their organizations executed integrated campaigns across various marketing channels.
Other companies rely too much on a disparate mix of technologies that often don’t talk to each other. Did you know that there are nearly 4,000 marketing technology companies delivering services to marketers? (there were only 150 in 2011).
At the end of the day, I believe most marketers and companies fail with content marketing because they focus on “content” and ignore “marketing.”
Think about it for a moment. Why are you or your company creating and sharing content? As I wrote previously:
Content marketing refers to creating information (content) that has value to others. The creator of the content ultimately wants to sell a product or service to prospective buyers who benefit from the content, but the goal of content marketing is rarely to sell directly. Instead, the goal of content marketing is to encourage people to read and perhaps engage with the content, and to begin developing a relationship with the person or entity that created that content.
Most content marketers measure “engagement” as a re-tweet or a like. But successful content marketing must go beyond simple vanity metrics. For content marketing to succeed, it must help a company develop a relationship with a prospective customer. And for that to happen, content must create an emotional reaction in the prospective customer that more closely connects the prospective customer to your brand.
Many content marketers simply don’t understand this. Great content marketing is not about curating other people’s stuff. Larry Kim, CEO of WordStream explains:
Content marketers are wonderful people, but they tend to overestimate the originality of their ideas. I try to break out of the “industry” bubble and originate new research as opposed to just curating other people’s stuff. I don’t waste time publishing my findings if the results are along the lines of the status quo.
If you want to develop a relationship with people who read and engage with your content, then the “marketing” part of “content marketing” deserves as much of your focus as “content”.
Fortunately, great marketing has one common element that transcends languages and cultures. Marketing is storytelling. Great marketing is about phenomenal stories.
Stories help shape beliefs and also help people remember the things you want them to remember. Authentic and compelling stories help build a brand.
Why are stories so critical to effective marketing?
Stories are powerful because they can create a mythology around a brand. For example, owners of the iPhone believe that each successive iPhone is much better than the model it replaces, which is not always true. Here’s a short video from the Jimmy Kimmel show pranking people with what people believe is Apple’s new iPhone 7 (it’s actually the person’s own iPhone). Watch how people react.
Incidentally, if you want to read an excellent book about storytelling, I recommend Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars.
Stories should be honest and consistent. They should also create characters your audience will like. For example, “Giving” is a 3 minute commercial for Thailand mobile phone service provider True Move. The story begins with a young boy caught stealing medicine for his sick mother. A nearby small restaurant owner helps the boy by buying the medicine and also gives the boy soup to take home to his mom. Watch the video to see the story unfold – it’s a powerful and emotional message conveyed in very simple, short video.
Compelling stories can work on their own – without props, dialogue or subtitles. Watch this phenomenal video encouraging people to always wear their seatbelt. How did you feel when the video ended?
Here’s another example: a wonderful video from Chipotle, a popular fast food restaurant known for their organically-farmed meat and produce. How do you feel about the story in this video?
One more important note about stories. Stories can have sub-plots. For example, did you know that only 39% of B2B marketers recycle content into other formats? If you’ve told a compelling story in one marketing channel, you have opportunities to focus on sub-plots in other channels and integrate the marketing.
What stories do you tell in the content marketing you create for your business? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
[Note: a much shorter version of this post was previously published on the crowdSPRING Blog a few years ago].
Solid design is the key to growing your business. Period. Point Blank. Fin. We could (and probably will) talk until we’re blue in the face on this subject, but we thought it might be helpful to hear it from others as well. This guest post is part of a new series on the crowdSPRING blog highlighting the importance of investing in good design. Why design? The real question is: why not?
Even though the numbers vary across different industries, according to Smart Insights, the average website conversion rate is definitely somewhere between 2% and 4%. In other words, a large majority of people who visit your site for the first time leave quickly, without some form of the desired action. And that is why some many companies have turned to remarketing.
So what is remarketing exactly? Basically, the term is used to describe the process of re-engaging prospects with email messages, in an effort to bring them back to your website. In other words, remarketing gives you a second chance to make a good impression. And this is why, according to statistics gathered by the Digital Information World, almost 70% of marketing agencies are moving from dollars from traditional marketing, and investing it into remarketing.
The term remarketing often gets confused with the term retargeting, partially because it works in a similar way. Just like with traditional retargeting, your remarketing process starts when a user opens your email, and a cookie is dropped into his browser. When the same user visits other sites on the Internet, your ad will be displayed prominently, and your brand will stay top of mind. This is also great for promotional purposes, because according to Exact Target, almost 80% of consumer prefer to receive promotional material through email than any other channel.
Email remarketing has become a top priority for marketers around the world mainly because shopping cart abandonment rates have increased significantly in the last couple of years. According to Sale Cycle’s most recent remarketing report, nearly 75% of consumers abandon eCommerce sites mid-purchase and leave their carts behind. This means that around three-quarters of people who visit your website and initiate an order will not complete it at all. So if you want to increase conversions, sending an immediate email to a person who left your shopping cart can be an extremely effective tactic.
The first thing you need to do is get consumers’ attention by sending them ads specifically made for them, which basically means showing them same and/or similar items they were looking at. As Experian Marketing Services data shows, personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates. Now, seeing our attention span is getting shorter and shorter, you have to assume that people aren’t actually reading your emails, but scanning through them. So avoid sending overlong, text-heavy messages, and instead use something like the inverted pyramid model.
Also, you have to keep in mind that mobile optimization is a must in today’s day and age. According to a recent Litmus report, almost 50% of emails are now opened on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets. The report has also shown that if your email isn’t optimized for mobile, around 70% of users will delete it immediately. This means that you have to make sure that your images fit every screen size, that CTA buttons are tall and wide enough and that any text links are far enough from each other, to avoid any accidental clicking.
So why does your remarketing campaign need a well-designed landing page? For the same reason, your pay-per-click campaigns need them – t maintain message match. A landing page will allow you to completely eliminate any distractions from your offer. So when a consumer finally decides to reconnect with your company, he will see exactly what he looked for, and will not get lost in the lack of message match. We will not go into detail about the basics of landing optimization, but here some things you should pay special attention to.
For starters, even the smallest changes in your landing’s headline can go a long way. A recent study conducted by the Conductor Blog revealed that 64% of users prefer the first letter in every word of a headline to be capitalized. Next, if you plan on using pictures, make sure that they are real photos, taken by a photographer and not some stock pictures, you bought for $20. A few months ago, 160 Driving Academy tested a stock photo of the truck driver against a photo they took themselves. The real one got more than 160% more visits and increased registration by 38%.
People need just a few short seconds to form an opinion. As a matter of fact, it takes only a tenth of second to form a first impression about another person, and emails, pages, and sites are no different. According to a study published in the Journal of Behaviour and Information Technology, an average person needs about 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about your site, and sequentially – your brand. Therefore, if you want your business to stand out in today’s overcrowded market, you have to be creative with your design.
Nate Vickery is a business technology expert mostly focused on future trends applicable to SMB and startup marketing and management processes. He has also been blogging in the past few years about before mentioned topics on various leading sites and communities. In the little free time left, Nate edits a business oriented website – Bizzmarkblog.com.
Image Source: SEO Linkbuilding
If you’re moving slowly or have yet to implement search engine optimization (SEO) strategies as part of your overall marketing efforts, you’re falling behind your competitors. In fact, even if your competitors aren’t thinking about SEO, you’re still missing out because 93 percent of online experiences begin with search.
Let’s take a look at the top ten things you can do to make SEO an effective part of your 2017 marketing strategy:
Like every other strategy, it will prove impossible for you to measure the effectiveness of your SEO tactics unless you establish clear goals.
Why This Is Important: If you don’t establish specific goals, you will not be able to evaluate the opportunity costs of your SEO efforts or you might give up too quickly. For example, SEO typically takes months to implement properly. If you’re not seeing immediate results, you might be tempted to stop too early. Or you might actually see some early benefits and more conversions (i.e. more traffic to your site), but you will have difficulty assessing whether you could have increased the traffic even more through other marketing efforts. You’ll also have difficulty scaling your efforts.
Tip: Think about what needs to happen for your business to succeed. For most businesses, success translates to more revenue (and profits). For example, if your revenue model is driven by advertising on your site, one interim goal could be to drive a certain amount of additional traffic to your site. If your revenue model is the sale of a service or product, your goal could be to get your cost per conversion below a certain amount after 90 days. SEO strategies, if done properly, can definitely help you do this. You can learn more about setting goals in our post on Lean Marketing 101: Setting Goals.
A conversion is an action that a user performs on your site. For example, if you care most about registrations of new users, a user who registers on your site from an SEO lead will count as a conversion. If you care most about traffic to your site, then any user that comes to your site from an SEO link will count as a conversion.
Why This Is Important: Conversions are important because you will want to know the cost to obtain each new conversion on your site. Although many SEO strategies have soft costs (your time to create great content, for example), there are still opportunity costs (and often hard dollar costs). You’ll want to keep the conversion cost below your profit from each transaction (unless the value of the customer to you over a period of time, is sufficiently high that you’re willing to pay MORE for the conversion cost than your profit for the initial transaction). Even if you measure your SEO investment in sweat labor only, you might find that investing your personal time in other marketing efforts could benefit you more.
Tip: Do your best to keep conversions tied to the same outcome for the various SEO campaigns you’ll undertake. It’s OK to have multiple desired outcomes – but it’s confusing if you keep changing between them. We made the mistake early on of regularly changing our definition of “conversion” and this created two problems. First, it created useless data because we could not compare conversion rates later in our campaigns to the earlier data. Second, it made conversion a moving target and made it difficult to evaluate our success. Once we settled on a defined conversion, it was much easier to make decisions and look at comparative metrics. Today at crowdSPRING, we measure client conversions based on the number of clients who sign up and also based on how many projects are posted as a result of a specific marketing strategy.
image credit: hetemeel
There are many excellent online tools that will help you with SEO campaigns. Not all are useful. Some won’t give you meaningful answers. Others will be very difficult to use. In the Tip below, we list some of our favorite tools (some have free plans, others have modest monthly costs). You should find a tool or two that helps you execute your SEO strategy. It’ll prove difficult for you to succeed without some help.
Why This Is Important: SEO is a very complex area and you’ll quickly find yourself lost unless you learn how to leverage the excellent tools others have built to help you. For example, one effective technique for SEO is to examine how your competitors are doing with their SEO strategies. This is very difficult to do without proper tools.
Tip: One of the most important tools for any effective SEO strategy is website analytics. There are many paid options for website analytics. Some are outstanding, while others – not so much. We like and use Google Analytics. It’s free, powerful, and easy to use. Without a comprehensive website analytics product, you’ll be blind to how your SEO campaigns are performing, and you’ll be unable to tweak them to improve conversions. Even as we approach 2017, I continue to be amazed with how many entrepreneurs and small business owners are mostly blind to the site analytics of their businesses.
Once you’ve taken care of analytics, you’ll want to identify some tools that will help you with keywords. Here are some excellent tools that can help you:
EpicBeat is a free data-driven platform that helps to highlight content trends.
If you have a small budget, BuzzSumo has a good product (cheapest option is $99 per month) that can help you identify the content most shared on social media. Their product can also help you track how your content is shared on social media.
SEMrush is an excellent paid tool (cheapest plan is $69.95 per month; we us it at crowdSPRING) that can provide detailed analytics on the top keywords used in search engine marketing by your competitors, but also which of your competitors receive the most organic search engine traffic. SEMrush has some free options too, but they’re not nearly as useful or powerful as the paid plans.
We also love and use tools from Moz and highly recommend them (particularly Moz Pro, which starts at $99 per month). BuzzStream (starting at $24 per month) can help you research link-building possibilities. We’ve never used BuzzStream but have heard good things about them.
Every business is different. Generally, what works for one business (from an SEO perspective), may not work for another business. That’s why it’s always important to constantly test different variations of pages (or selected content on the pages (called multivariate testing). You can’t simply copy what a competitor is doing and assume it will work for your business.
Why This Is Important: Unless you constantly test, you won’t be able to optimize your site to maximize your SEO efforts. By constantly forcing your best performing pages to beat “challengers” (other pages you’ve created to see if they might perform better), you’ll continue to make sure that your landing pages are converting well.
Tip: Products like Optimizely, a tool we use and like at crowdSPRING, will easily let you set up A/B tests (and multivariate tests) to test different versions of pages and content.
image credit: mil8
User experience is important – probably as important as the content.
Why This Is Important: After a user clicks your search result in a search on Google, Bing, or another search engine, the landing page is the first thing they’ll see on your site. So spend some time thinking about where to send your users when developing your SEO-focused pages. In some cases, it’s perfectly appropriate to send them to your home page (but this should rarely be your goal for SEO). In other cases, you’ll want to create special landing pages that are closely tailored to your goals. For example, although our homepage ranks pretty well for many searches, we’ve created custom landing pages for hundreds of different terms, including logo design, web design, stationery design and many more. We’ve also been experimenting with new landing pages for certain categories, like the book cover design page you see to the right.
Tips: Most people tend to ignore landing pages, thinking that once the user is on your site after clicking on a result in search, they’ll find their way around. That’s a dangerous assumption. And it’s wrong. Similarly, many people don’t pay attention to bounce rates. Bounce rates measure how many visits went only to that landing page and nowhere else on your site. Bounce rates are not a complete measure, but do help you assess whether certain pages are better than other pages in drawing traffic further into your site.
You should worry about optimizing for user intent, not necessarily keywords. to keep a user on a landing page, be sure that your landing page content delivers on the promises you made in your search results. If you need some help, the terrific designers at crowdSPRING can help you to optimize your web design.
Also, keep in mind that page load speed, and whether your page is accessible easily from a mobile device, are also important SEO factors. Pages that are not accessible from a phone, for example, will do poorly in mobile search results.
You’ll want to spend some time researching the keywords that will drive SEO traffic to your site. This can take time. Look at your competitors and find the keywords they are using to market their products or services. Look at the meta keywords in their HTML code – these will give you lots of insight into the keywords your competitors consider important (but keep in mind meta keywords have become much less important over the years). Use tools to create permutations of words, to find singulars, plurals, synonyms, etc. of your intended keywords.
Consider other resources that let you focus your efforts with some precision. For example, most small businesses are not aware that you can target very inexpensive advertising to hyper-local recipients on Facebook (see number 2 in that link). For example, a bakery can target recipients in their zip code and set up specific landing pages for those campaigns. In that way, paid campaigns (like search engine marketing/ppc) can align nicely with SEO-focused campaigns.
Why This Is Important: The more granular your campaign, the better you’ll be able to understand what’s working for you and what’s not working. This will allow you to minimize your costs and to maximize the return on your efforts. Broad SEO campaigns simply don’t work. You’ll have to pick specific keywords and phrases and focus your strategies on lifting your search results for those keywords and phrases. If you search for “crowdsourced logo design” for example (in Google), what are the top 2 or 3 results you see? Most will see crowdSPRING in the top or second spot.
Tips: Keep an open mind about keywords. Are there other ways to refer to the same terms that are not quite as popular? Long tail searches can take longer, but might allow you to build your overall SEO strategy at a more rapid pace.
In 2017, SEO will continue to evolve and topics, not just keywords, will become important. This is known as semantic SEO. You can read more about this in a good post by Orbit Media Studios.
You should also pay attention to another trend – featured snippets in search results – that could impact your SEO efforts. Featured snippets are a direct answer to a search result, generated by Google, from one of the results. It appears at the top of the search results and typically has a substantial impact on the efficacy of SEO efforts for a specific keyword or phrase. From 2014 to 2016, the number of featured snippets (also known as rich answers), nearly doubled.
image credit: mag3737
Sometimes, you might chase a search result that will prove impossible to win. In most cases, that’s because your competitors and many other companies are chasing the same keywords or phrases. Even if you successfully get to the top in SEO, you hae to maintain your SEO ranking to have a long term benefit. If that’s the case, think about other ways people could search for the same information and consider whether some of those longer tail results could prove more beneficial. Or simply shift to a different set of keywords or phrases.
Why This Is Important: It is important that you look at all relevant data, and it’s true that more data is often better. But that’s not always true. Early in our campaigns, we waited too long to make changes and regretted waiting when we saw that our efforts simply were not moving the needle.
Tip: If you were a user of your service or buyer of your product, how would you find your company? What searches would you do? Look to see what results are coming up in those searches and study what others are doing for SEO. Whenever you search for something, you’ll see, at the bottom of your search results, other words and phrases other people have used to perform similar searches.
image credit: zoomar
SEO is a complex area and while certain things might seem easy – effective SEO is anything but easy. I’ve invested many thousands of hours into learning SEO techniques and strategy and I know that I still have a long way to go to master this skill. Most importantly, the effort, especially for SEO, is ongoing and unfortunately, SEO is constantly evolving and changing. Don’t be afraid to leverage professionals who specialize in this area. You’ll find some of these people in SEO trends articles. For example, here’s a good list from an SEO Trends 2017: 44 Experts on the Future of SEO article from Search Engine Journal. You can also review this terrific list from MOZ – their recommended list of SEO/Web marketing consultants, firms and agencies.
Why This Is Important: You can quickly get swallowed up by all of the things you’d need to do to execute an effective SEO strategy. This could be a full time job. For several people. Make sure – when you are spending your own time on these efforts, that there’s value to you doing it. And if there is – go for it.
Tip: Most people will need some guidance about basic strategy – and nothing more. Others will need guidance plus execution. Everyone is different. When you engage SEO experts, talk to them about the types of services they provide and the cost for those services. Consider what your needs are and consider starting lighter (fewer professional services) and building from there. You can also leverage some tools (less effective) if you can’t yet afford professionals. For example, Raven Tools provides both SEO technical analysis and online marketing tools, starting at $27 per month.
Some content about SEO strategies and tactics is quite helpful. Much of it is useless – and even more importantly – much of it is wrong, written merely as click bait.
Why This Is Important: Some SEO companies are outstanding. Others are average. Yet others will HURT your business. We’ve worked with all types. For example, there’s a lot of noise about various strategies that are not only wrong – but can cost you dearly in terms of SEO. These include hidden content, stuffing meta keywords with too many word, doorway/gateway pages designed for search engines, not people, and link farming (using networks of link “farms” to generate cross links among many sites).
Tip: Ignore Black Hat SEO techniques (like the ones I listed above). Ignore anyone who claims they can guarantee you a top result in organic search. There are no guarantees. Question anyone who says they can execute an SEO campaign in a few weeks. Especially for highly competitive keywords, effective campaigns take 3-6 months (or more).
image credit: Cayusa
Even though you’re executing an SEO strategy, write content for your audience and for real users, not for search engines. Compelling stories create content marketing unicorns, not keyword stuffing.
Why This Is Important: Many businesses forget that they have customers or users and are developing content for their community. SEO is important – but not at the expense of gutting your site in order to drive traffic – unless that’s ALL you’re trying to do. Over time, real and meaningful content will bring the right kind of traffic to your site. Don’s sacrifice early short-term gains for long-term success.
Tip: Do optimize what you write for SEO, but don’t get fixated about SEO. Create good content, and SEO will, over time, take care of itself. Do think about landing pages the user experience – these are both very important. Although search engines will be crawling your pages, your users ultimately help you to make money – and you have to make sure that they find your site easy to use and navigate.
image credit: matt [sucka MC]
What suggestions can you add to this list? Can you share a story from your experience?
Image Source: Wikipedia
330,940 projects launched. 12 million backers. $2.79 billion raised.
And that’s just on Kickstarter. To date.
Crowdfunding has been around for centuries, with roots traced to the early publishing space. Its more modern manifestations began in the late 90’s, with bands and film producers turning to the crowd to see their projects realized. ArtistShare launched in 2003, providing early proof of concept for internet crowdfunding, but it wasn’t until the launch of indiegogo in 2008 and Kickstarter in 2009 that the model really started to take off.
The concept is appealing, especially in a world where tough interest rates and fickle investors don’t exactly favor those without a sterling resume or cash to spare. Crowdfunding allows anyone with a vision and hustle to realize their dreams. By defining what you’d like to do, why you’re the person to do it, how you plan on getting it done, and what you’re able to offer to those supporting your efforts, you can attract thousands of small donations that help make it happen.
But make no mistake: launching a crowdfunding campaign for your latest, greatest idea is hard work. In the early days of internet crowdfunding, it might have been a bit easier. Not everyone was using the tactic, and expectations for how a campaign would be set up and run were much lower. But today, there are over 4,000 projects currently live on Kickstarter alone. The competition is fierce, and people expect much more from your campaign if they’re going to be forking over the money.
Your idea might be new, your experience might be light, but your brand needs to look ready to rumble right out of the gates.
“People underestimate the important role of strong design in their Kickstarter planning,” explains Brooks Johnson, seasoned Kickstarter campaign manager and founder of White Unicorn Agency. “40% of people respond more to visual stimulus in marketing than they do text. Are you speaking to them? What are you saying? From your logo to the images used on your campaign page to the collateral leveraged on social media to promote the campaign, you’re going to need a lot of brand-centric, compelling design assets to be successful.”
And Brooks would know. His 2013 Kickstarter campaign for audio reactive fashion wear brand DropShades started with a goal of $15,000, but raised more than $78,000 over 34 days — 520% over their target.
So what design assets are necessary to launch a successful crowdfunding project?
Before you even think about creating a Kickstarter account, you need to take the time to define your brand and create an accompanying logo. It can be tempting to put pedal to the metal once you decide you want to try to crowdfund your idea, but in reality, you’re not asking people to back your idea. You’re asking them to back your brand. And if you don’t have a strong idea of what that brand is, odds are your potential backers won’t either.
Once you can clearly define who you are, what your unique value proposition is, why you’re better than the competition, and how you want to be perceived, it’s time to settle on an image that represents the promise you’re trying to make. The development of a strong logo will serve as a cornerstone for the creation of the rest of your campaign and the correlating design assets.
You’re going to spend a lot of time crafting the text of your actual campaign page, but before you go there, take the time to put together a website for your brand. This can serve as a dry run for the creation of the campaign itself, and grant your brand additional legitimacy as some backers take the time to research you before agreeing to pledge.
Some may see this as an unnecessary step. What happens if you don’t hit your goal and it all falls flat? After all, only 35% of projects are successful. Doesn’t that make building a website a gamble? In theory, the answer is yes, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. The reason only 35% of projects succeed is because they don’t think about things like this. You want to be ready to hit the ground running when your project ends, and having a website in place is part of that equation. Plus, if your project isn’t successful, and you’re serious about making your dreams a reality, having such assets in play can put you in a stronger position to find funding elsewhere.
For a crowdfunding project to be successful, you’ve got to commit to the hustle. That means loudly, consistently promoting the project and asking people to participate. Though there are plenty of ways for you to do so, the most important in this day and age is through social media. To make those calls to action compelling, you’re going to want to pair them with solid graphics.
The pages directly tied to your brand are going to need custom avatars and header images. Updates on progress and time left should be conveyed graphically whenever possible, especially considering that images are 40 times more likely to be shared on social platforms than text updates. You’ll want to prepare as much of this as possible ahead of time to minimize stress during the campaign itself. That means having graphics ready to go for specific time and monetary goal markers.
For many people, the starting point of interaction with the brand you’re trying to create will be on the Kickstarter campaign page. This is your chance to stand out from the crowd. A quick perusal of projects that were unsuccessful reveals a common trend: visually dull campaign descriptions, either heavy on text or uninspired in terms of design. From your header image to the images inserted in the various sections of the campaign page, you’re going to want visually stimulating and brand-consistent graphic design.
A great way to accomplish this goal is incorporating a stylish infographic into your campaign set up. Infographics are some of the most widely shared forms of media on the web. Why? Because they present information in an appealing and succinct manner. Instead of loading up your campaign with oodles of text, say the same thing with a visual representation of the information. It will help potential backers get to clicking that pledge button a lot faster.
If you ask the most successful folks on sites like Kickstarter, they’ll tell you that having a strong video is crucial if you want to hit your funding goals. It’s your chance to tell your brand’s story in a way that requires minimal effort from the potential backer. They click play, they watch, they listen, and they decide. Kickstarter themselves point out that projects with a video are 66% more likely to be successfully funded.
It’s important to have a personal touch in these videos. Backers are investing in you as much as they are the product you’re trying to fund, so appearing on camera and speaking about what’s inspired you to go down this road is necessary. But you’re also trying to convey that you’re someone to be trusted with the money. Investing in professional videography, animation, and editing gives you the professional edge you need to build credibility.
Running a successful crowdfunding campaign is hard work. It takes a lot of time, planning, and effort to get off the ground, and even more to make sure you hit that all important goal. Though it’s tempting to focus on the product you’re trying to create, don’t forget for a second that crowdfunding platforms are not just a place to raise funds; they’re a marketing platform as well. By making sure you’re hitting the all the right notes with design, you increase your project’s chances of doing well.
Image Source: Pixabay
Creativity is often regarded as a key ingredient in professional success, regardless of field, and rightfully so. Whether you’re a scientist trying to figure out a solution to one of the world’s great problems, a therapist trying to break through with a difficult patient, or a coach looking for new ways to motivate your team, creativity is an essential component in achieving your goals.
But for businesses, creativity can often be seen as make or break. It’s not just about thinking differently as we attempt to solve problems, but finding the most creative ways to communicate how we go about the solving. In a world where dozens of companies are promising the answer to any given question, creative competitive positioning is frequently the only way to make sure your solution gets top billing in the target audience’s mind.
But to say creativity is a necessary part of business success is a lot easier than delivering on creative messaging. Especially in a digital world that moves at warp speed, it’s not difficult for brands to get to a point where they’re settling for “good enough” in order to keep pace with the demands of the marketplace. Breaking out of that cycle can be challenging.
But it doesn’t have to be. Science says so.
Creativity is usually discussed in a very abstract fashion; it’s an intangible and fickle commodity that’s impossible to teach or manufacture. At least, that’s always been the assumption. Recent research suggests otherwise.
In an October 2016 study out of the University of Kent, researchers Anna Jordanous and Bill Keller sought to define what, exactly, creativity was. They, too, found that discussion of creativity frequently took place in the abstract, but they also found that there were common threads in academic circles when discussing the nature and diverse manifestations of creative processes and outputs. Using natural language processing and statistical analysis, they conducted an empirical analysis of the way language was used to describe creativity. They then analyzed the results using a confluence approach, which rests on the idea that creativity exists at the intersection of specific attributes rather than being derived from a single factor.
What they found was that 14 specific ideas continuously surfaced in conversations about creativity.
While there are certainly ideas in this mix that remain intangible, the most interesting takeaway is that the bulk of these ideas relate to process, not inherent ability. Creativity appears to have much more to do with how we practice in our given realm than it does some innate quality. In other words, it is something that can be cultivated under the right circumstances.
Additional research from November 2016 supports and expands upon the idea that creativity can be developed. Researchers from New Zealand, Minnesota, and North Carolina worked together to determine the impact of creative activity on well-being and future creativity. What they discovered was that creative activity led to a positive impact on an individual’s enthusiasm and energy, which lead to greater creative activity. Each day of creative engagement compounded the positive effects of the days preceding it.
These two studies, held relative to one another, carry an important lesson: if creativity is process driven, and continued creative engagement leads to increased enthusiasm and creative output, there is no need for businesses to hit that creativity rut. It’s said that practice makes perfect. That seems to apply to creative endeavors as well.
The problem, it seems, is building these processes into your preexisting systems. For many companies, incorporation of the 14 elements listed by Jordanous and Keller may seem an overwhelming proposition. This is where crowdsourcing can come into play. Think about it:
In other words, posting a crowdsourced design project is a perfect starting point (and refresher) for those trying to foster sustainable creative efforts within their business. You get a one week crash course designed to make you think differently about how you approach the creative process, and a stellar final result to boot.
So what are you waiting for? Take your creative needs to the crowd and jump start your in-house creativity today!
You read all the guides on digital marketing funnels, defined your audience personas, created your editorial calendar, and spent hours researching and writing the perfect content for your customers. After posting the content, your blog post got retweeted by an influencer and traffic to your site has doubled. Congratulations! Now, it’s time to do it again.
Effective content marketing can be a bit of a grind, especially for small teams or individuals with other marketing priorities to manage on a regular basis. According to a LinkedIn report, the number one challenge businesses face with content marketing is having the time and bandwidth to create content. The second challenge? Creating enough content variety and volume.
With limited time and an unlimited need for content, it is important to get the most out of your existing efforts before heading back to the drawing board. Instead of starting from scratch on your next piece of content, consider giving some of your best-performing blog posts new life by repurposing it for visual content marketing.
Why visual content marketing?
Rather than explain why visual content marketing is so important, let’s try the show, don’t tell method with an infographic:
Image Courtesy of The Media Octopus
With so many performance advantages, it’s clear how visual content marketing can breathe new life into existing content. You know your content is relevant; your blog post’s past performance has already proven that. You are just repackaging it in a format that will reach more potential customers.
With the convincing out of the way, it’s time to define the best visual formats for repurposing content.
Infographics
Image Courtesy of Visual.ly
Infographics are a popular form of content marketing because they take the substance of a good blog post or case study and compress the content into something significantly more sharable (a Mass Planner report states that infographics are liked and shared 3 times more than any other content on social media). I have written about how successful an infographic can be for businesses, but don’t just take my word for it. Neil Patel, c0- founder of KISSmetrics and Quick Sprout, used infographics on the KISSmetrics blog to generate over 2.5 million visitors in 2010 and continues to believe in the power of infographics.
“I can say with conviction that infographic publishing has been one of my most powerful marketing strategies.”
– Neil Patel, QuickSprout Founder
Many companies have repurposed their best blog posts into infographics with great success. Buffer turned their “How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch” post into an infographic during their “no new content” month (more on that here) and continues to use portions the infographic for their email courses. Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, even transforms other blogs’ best posts into infographics (he calls them “guestographics”), a method he says is his favorite for generating backlinks to his site.
With the content already outlined in the blog post, the bulk of the work is in the hands of the designer who can immediately get to work on communicating the information visually. crowdSPRING’s 1-to-1 projects are especially suited for this project, as you can pick a designer with infographic experience and work with them directly to get the exact infographic you want with a quick turnaround.
Social Media Images
Image Courtesy of @RobinGood
To drive new traffic to a blog post your audience needs to actually share your content. The best way to do that? Use social media images. After reviewing the engagement habits of their entire user base, Buffer reported that tweets with images received 150% more retweets than tweets without images so a significant bump in reach could be just one good image away.
Simply reposting the featured image from your blog post with a link to your content can get old for your audience, fast. To avoid this, you can create a series of distinct social-only images from one blog post if you know what to look for. These unique images will allow you to re-share your content multiple times without fear of repetition for your audience while testing out what kind of imagery your audience is most receptive to.
Some effective forms of original social media images are quotes, how-to’s, and screen grabs. Each of these can benefit your audience in different ways and depend on the content of your blog:
Quotes: Twitter reports that tweets with quotes get a 19% boost in retweets, so why not sneak a quote from your post into an image?
Visual step-by-steps: If your post is a guide, consider illustrating the steps in a step-by-step image. This gives the audience an overview of what to expect in the post while encouraging them to dive deeper by clicking the link.
Screengrabs: A screengrab of the blog post itself allows you to display content from the post in a different format and offers a “sneak peek” into the best part of a post.
Most social media images can be created with online image editors and a little design know-how, but don’t be afraid to look for design help for your first few rounds. Consider setting up a design consultation with a crowdSPRING expert to see if the social media images are something you should take to the crowd.
Updated Images on Blog Posts
Image Courtesy of WordPress
Once infographics and social media images start boosting traffic to your post, it’s important that your content is optimized for sharing to get more returns from new visitors. One of the best ways to help boost shares on your post is with the right amount of images. According to BuzzSumo, the right amount of images is one every 75-100 words:
“In a study of over one million articles, BuzzSumo looked at how many blog posts with images were shared. Then they looked at how many images, per how many words, got the best results. What they found was articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the amount of shares of articles with fewer images.”
With that in mind, it’s important to revisit your blog post and make sure you have the right amount of images. If not, you may want to consider creating an entirely new set of images for your post rather than adding some additional stock photography or memes. An often quoted statistic is that content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images, meaning relevance is just as important as quantity when measuring the effectiveness of blog imagery.
Because the blog post is already written, a good designer should be able to quickly understand your design needs and provide relevant, original imagery for your blog. Crowdsourced design is especially helpful for projects like this, because you can see how your blog post inspires the designs of many different creatives and pick the style most suited for you and your audience.
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Image Courtesy of Freepik
With an arsenal of new visual assets, it’s time to spread the word (or in this case, image). You can start by promoting on the obvious channels like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but it’s important to use these assets on platforms that were previously less viable to you when you just had a blog post. Platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest are visual-centric and with a new set of interesting and relevant images, you can connect to an entirely new audience for the first time.
Remember to take a look at the performance of all the different visual assets to help prioritize your visual content marketing efforts in the future. Look at social metrics like shares and link clicks and web metrics like new visitors to get a better idea of what images contributed the most value to your content strategy. You may not see a boost in performance immediately, but a consistent visual content marketing strategy will help strengthen your brand and ultimately put your business in front of more potential customers.
When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we noticed this gem submitted in this print design project.
Let us start the slow clap for rsk. Check out more great work on rsk’s profile page.
Nicely done, rsk, nicely done!
As the year comes to a close, we all tend to get a bit reflective. Here at crowdSPRING, a lot of that reflection centers on the year in design. Today we’re focused on book cover design.
It’s estimated that a buyer decides whether or not to purchase a book in the first 8 seconds, making an eye-catching aesthetic critical. But book cover design can be tricky, especially in an increasingly digital marketplace. An author’s book is listed in a grid alongside dozens of other titles, which means solid design has never been more important. It’s not enough for it to be clean. It has to stand out.
2016 has demonstrated just what kind of impact an awesome book cover design can have. Here are some of our favorites:
Was She Pretty? Leann Shapton
It’s not your average book cover, but perhaps that’s to be expected from a book that’s written almost like a graphic novel by an illustrator. The witty, biting writing aside, the cover is distinctive in multiple ways. The sprawling text of the title, taking up far more of the space than you’ll usually see, breaks with convention. It’s surprising in its simplicity, with the coloring of the text adding a layer of elegance. And as a bonus, it’s always going to stick out in the arrays found in digital marketplaces. There’s no confusing what this book is.
The Mothers, Brit Bennett
A tale of secrets and the tangled webs they weave in the context of community, love, and ambition, the plot and characters of The Mothers is well matched by its bold, striking cover. The colors and abstract arrangement of shapes make it sure to stand out among more subdued cover design, and conveys a message about the tone of the story before you even get to the summary. The fact that what, at first glance, simply looks like abstract art also implies the silhouette of a woman adds a layer of complexity you can’t help but admire.
The Stargazer’s Sister, Carrie Brown
It might be a period piece, but this modern, striking book cover is anything but old hat. The story follows a young woman struggling to find herself after having lived comfortably in the shadow of her brother her entire life, and the design of this cover does a good job of illustrating the complicated exploration she’s embarked upon. The dignified painting of a woman of stature is fractured by a constellation of haphazard fragments, representing the kaleidescope of revelations ahead of the protagnoist and the undoing of a stale persona, while the placement of the text within this unraveling implies in sophisticated fashion just where the story is headed.
The Muse, Jessie Burton
Jessie Burton is best known for her novel The Miniaturist, but her 2016 book The Muse weaves a beautiful tale itself, with a gorgeous cover to mask. The story weaves narratives from multiple time periods, illustrating a web do deceit that’s spanned decades, and the sophisticated illustration gracing its cover serves its complexity well. Not entirely breaking with tradition, it incorporates images of elements and items that feature in the story itself, but unlike more traditional covers, the composition nearly obfuscates their placement. Paired with a font that just hints at the mischief within its pages, it’s a truly satisfying arrangement where the meaning is amplified by the time you finish reading.
Shrill, Lindy West
This book is hilarious, witty, and poignant, and its cover rises to the occasion of representing its contents with panache. West details her evolution from a shy young girl, afraid of the size of her body and opinions, to an outspoken activist and writer, too often referred to as “shrill” for having the audacity to be a woman willing to use her voice. The upward slope of the type size not only reflects her personal journey but the connontation of the barbs thrown her way, clearly communicating the content and tone of the novel in a way that sticks out.
Lockout, John Nance
There are a few reasons this cover design is uniquely worthy of consideration. For starters, it breaks from industry norms related to the genre. The thriller incorporating sabotage, international politics, terrorism, and more has more in common with old school James Patterson or modern works from David Baldacci, but the cover eschews the trend of dramatized, dark imagery in favor of something more subtle. It correlates with the tone and tenor of the book itself, and helps separate the book from the glut of common high stakes thrillers. Even better? The cover was designed by one of crowdSPRING’s own, GoldenPX!
These are just a few of the covers that really stood out to us this year. How about you? What were some of your favorite book cover designs?
If you need a book cover design of your own, take it to the crowd! Our 195,000 talented creatives will be all too happy to find the look that’s right for you and your story. Who knows? You might even make our 2017 Best Of list!
There are only a few more days left in the year, and it’s been a huge one for web design. Companies have started to understand how crucial a strong user experience is to maximizing conversion with their online audiences, and have invested accordingly. As they’ve done this, web aesthetics have exploded in terms of creativity, making picking a few of our favorites exceedingly difficult. Even so, these stood out from the pack.
The beloved Harry Potter author’s website was due for an overhaul, and this sprucing up was just the ticket. The custom, distinctive background nicely encompasses the value Rowling provides through her writing, community engagement, and social media presence. It’s a great example of a website design that neatly aligns with the unique value proposition of the brand it represents.
We wrote earlier this year about the exploding branding scene inside legal cannabis consumption, and this fresh look for Hemp Meds exemplifies exactly what so many legal cannabis brands are aiming for: legitimacy. The prominent featuring of a happy family and the framing of the product’s value as a solution instead of a form of entertainment were deliberate choices, and give the site the look and feel of a pharmaceutical or healthcare company. This is a fantastic case of a brand understanding the necessity of positioning in a field where expansion is more akin to a game of chess than sales game.
Ok, we’ll be the first to admit that the ask here — $109 million for a custom built, fully functional rocket — is more than a little fanciful. But this ULA site’s design almost makes the offer seem accessible to even the lowest of us plebeians. The interactive setup makes it seem like you, too, have the ability to place an order for your very own rocket ship, and the clean, futuristic aesthetic makes the experience engrossing. We might not be in a position to click “buy” anytime soon, but if we had that much money laying around, this website design would more than tempt us.
When your company grows, it’s important that your image grows with it, and this website redesign from avidxchange is exactly how you do that. The Charlotte-based provider of accounts payable and payment automation solutions had acquired three different companies over the past several years, and it was finally time to unify the brands under one umbrella. This website redesign not only accomplished the goal by creating a sharp image for the unification, but it did so while paying homage to the process that brought the company to this place with intersecting angles reflecting the composition of the company’s ultimate value.
Ok, the screenshot does not do this design work justice. Go to the website. Just do it. Now. iFly is the in-flight magazine for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. To celebrate the anniversary of the publication, KLM launched a stunning website highlighting 50 fantastic travel destinations, expertly weaving artistic design, interactive features, and gorgeous video. If you check out just one website on this list, make it this one. You won’t be disappointed.
Realistically, we could write thousands of words about the ever-evolving world of web design. 2016 might have been a trash year in many respects, but it was stellar in this regard, and we can’t wait to see what designers bring to the table in 2017.
In today’s world, where roughly 80% of American adults own a smartphone, companies know the significance of investing in a mobile presence. And given that 90% of time spent on those phones takes place within apps, it’s not all that surprising that there are now more than 2 million options available for download in Apple’s app store alone.
Though some argue that the app boom is dying off, what we see is that consumers have simply become more discerning about which apps they’re willing to download, increasing the significance of mobile UI design in making an app successful. Here are some of the folks who killed it with mobile app design this year.
It’s goofy. It’s useful. It’s gorgeous. Habitica is a role-playing game app intended to help users start and build habits. You accrue rewards and punishments in the game for the real-life activity you log. The graphics hearken back to older graphics from the early days of role play computer games, but the interface itself is sleek, colorful, and intuitive.
Not all of us may have a need to know what the tides are up to at any given point in time, but if you do, Marline is a stunning solution. The interface is simple to navigate, and the designs are elegant. Marline is a fantastic example of how keeping things simple is often the best choice.
Don’t think you need another scheduling app? You might reconsider once you take a look at the Dials Calendar interface. It’s a distinctive visualization of your day that eschews the traditional vertical display of upcoming appointments and dates. Plus it syncs with a wide variety of other scheduling apps, so you need not start from scratch. That design, paired with the visual elements, makes this one of our favorite innovations, even if it does seem startlingly simple.
We’ve written before about this standout 2016 app and its potential value to marketers, but it’s also worth showing a little appreciation for the ability of its designers to elegantly compose something so complex. The pretty graphics, paired with an easy to explore menu, spread out over a global map was no small feat to create, and the reaction of the users speaks to just how well they did their job. Ongoing integration of changes that add to without disrupting the experience show just how versatile the app design really is.
There are hundreds of photo apps out there fulfilling a wide variety of purposes. Titans like Instagram and Snapchat are unlikely to be unseated anytime soon, but Prisma’s launch this year proved the space is not yet saturated. The photo alteration app allows users to turn basic photos into full blown works of art. They keep the interface very basic, instead offering filter design that far and away surpasses what any other app out there is doing. The ability to quickly share the images to the platform of the user’s choosing makes it even better.
This year brought us a great deal of amazing new apps and refreshes for existing favorites. We can’t wait to see what 2017 has to offer.
There is no brand element so significant as a company’s logo. It becomes visually synonymous with your brand promise, with applications across every medium through which you communicate with your audience. It serves as the cornerstone of your image, defining style elements that will be extrapolated on every platform used. Given crowdSPRING’s role in helping so many companies find the logo that’s right for them, of course we pay attention to trends in logo design. And 2016? It had more than a few excellent designs come out of it.
But when you’re just starting out, you’ve got more flexibility in terms of choosing what sort of look and feel you’d like. Redesigning a logo, on the other hand, is incredibly difficult. The need to balance tradition with evolution is a challenging one to meet, but these brands absolutely nailed it.
The Peace Corps were way overdue for a refreshed logo. With the transition from their dated emblem to a more modern, flat design, they upped their image substantially. From a cleaner sans serif font to abandoning the outline from their old version, they debuted a logo that better reflects the values of the organization and the work they’re doing.
This logo update shows how even small changes can make a big difference to a brand. American talk show host and journalist Charlie Rose is known for his dedication to the truth and balance. His PBS show, Charlie Rose, has been nationally syndicated since 1993… and his logo was stuck in the same time frame. The move to a simpler, black and white logo not only makes the show seem more modern, but better reflects his no-nonsense approach to reporting.
You’ve seen their logo everywhere for decades, but their new image will have you looking twice. Mastercard pulled off a bold redesign of their logo this year that both stayed true to prior branding in color and basic shape, but simplified the design in a way that aligns with current design trends. The shift in font and italicization along with the ditching of the shadow on the name updates the brand considerably and shows the importance of typography in logo design.
The Kodak brand has tried for years now to figure out how to grow their image into an era that seems mismatched with most common associations with their name. Outside of hobbyists and a small contingent of professionals, physical film is very rarely used anymore in photography, but their name is still linked to their dominance in that space in decades gone by. But their move to an overly simplistic logo design in 2006 also walked away from their high level of brand recognition as they tried to rebuild in the digital space. The new version calls back to its era of dominance in the 70’s and 80’s but evolves through use of a sans serif font, and we’re digging it.
Their old logo had only one thing going for it: it was traditional. But with this redesign, the Houston Ballet does a much better job of catching the viewer’s attention and speaking to the value offered by their performances. It’s light, creative, and almost appears to be dancing itself. The design also helps eschew the perception that ballet, as an art form, is stuffy, instead conveying a sense of modernity that will no doubt aid in their marketing efforts.
These brands, of course, were not the only ones to evolve this year. They just did a tremendous job of getting it right. What were your favorites?
We mean it when we say that we have an intensely talented crowd of creative professionals ready and able to help you achieve your design goals. We’re incredibly proud of them, which is why we feature the work they’re doing every week in our Fresh from the Spring series.
As we reflected on some of the awesome design work done across the board this year, we realized no “best of” series in this space would be complete without celebrating the folks we consider to be the best in class year after year. So, for your viewing pleasure, here’s the Fresh from the Spring class of 2016!
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That’s all folks! We can’t wait to see what the crowdSPRING creatives do next year. Which one was your favorite?
