Making a Big Impression – Marvelous Marketing Methods

Promoting and marketing your brand well is important because you need to make sure you attract interest. And it’s important that you come up with unique and original forms of marketing. You have to understand that it’s not all about digital. This is not the be all and end all. Yes, digital marketing is hugely important, and you can’t very well do without it, but don’t put all your eggs in that virtual basket.

Think about all the different formats of promoting your company effectively. You have to do as much as you can to create a big impression. Wowing people and making them take note of your company is so crucial. You have to stand out these days, and really make a great impression. Here are some of the great ideas you can use that will help you with that.

Tangible Marketing

It’s a good idea to have some form of tangible marketing. This is even more important these days because we live in such a digital world. So you need to provide people with something tangible that they can touch and feel. It makes them feel more comfortable and helps cement your brand in their mind. So, how can you do this? Well, you need to look at what is involved in tangible marketing. Two of the best examples of this are business cards and flyers. Let’s consider flyers, and whether they still have a place. Well, the short answer is yes. Handing someone a flyer with information is more likely to illicit a response, and stay in the memory, than flicking through an advert. If you decide to create a flyer for your business you can market to people offline as well as online. Business cards are similarly effective. They give a unique role and professional perspective. And they can increase sales by up to around 2.5%!

Go Mobile

The future these days lies in mobile technology. If your company isn’t scaled down for mobile use yet, you need to rectify this. So many people use mobile and cellular devices every day, and they will be using these to access your business. 80% of Internet users own and use a smartphone as their primary web surfing tool. That’s why it’s important to make sure your company embraces this, and you make full use of mobile marketing. Now, there are a few things you can do to achieve this. For one thing, you need to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. It’s also worth developing a business app that users can download. That way you’re going to be able to connect and interact with users no matter where they are in the world. Going mobile is hugely important, and represents the future of business marketing.

Hashtag

You need to make your marketing suitable for modern Millennials. They represent the future of business and make up one of your most important demographics. Yes, all types of marketing are important here, but you need to connect with them on their wavelength. And what do Millennials love more than anything? Social media. That’s why you have to adopt and embrace the hashtag as much as you possibly can. It’s important to make sure you Tweet a lot about the business and that you make a hashtag a major part of the marketing strategy. It might surprise you to learn just how effective this can be for you as a business owner.

Making a big impression with your business marketing and advertising is so important. And that’s why you need to sometimes think outside the box with the things you say and do and the way you market yourself.

Creative Marketing in the Ubiquitous World of Advertising For Startups

Sometimes companies get ideas; good ideas. They discover ideas about who they are, what they want to accomplish in the world, and how they can solve some problem that no one has found the answer to just yet. The issue is, they aren’t the only ones. That’s where advertising comes in.

Advertising takes on many forms and uses many media. But, it always has the simple objective to communicate, capture, compel, and move audiences to action. In the past, this translated to the purchase of a product/service. Today, marketing specialists extend that definition to an ongoing engagement with their brand through social media, subscriptions, or online sharing.

Each of us knows the plethora of advertisements that plague our home pages, browsers and selected blogs, and how agencies spend insurmountable funds to market to users everywhere. With this onslaught of advertisements, companies must carefully decide how they are going to meet audiences in memorable and lasting ways that make them stand apart from their competitors. Retention and engagement have always been the major goals of advertising; but with the persistence of ads into every level of the lives of consumers via television, social media, and innumerable web pages, companies now find themselves in a world in which they must consistently re-evaluate how to accomplish those objectives. One way that organizations solve this problem is through the incorporation of creative and non-traditional mediums into their marketing, like animation.

Jon Collins of the VFX studio Framestore recently said in an interview: “If you can keep a viewer in a world and stimulate those senses, they will not only engage more deeply with your brand, but their recollection of that positive experience will sustain for far longer.”

However, there is a danger in creating a world that is overly stimulating to the viewer, because they end up rejecting that vibrancy in an effort to maintain a kind of visual homeostasis. Advertisements must also be tempered with a strong and carefully crafted design that appeals to people’s sense of balance, color schemes, character associations, etc, without turning them off to your brand.

While there is no scientific formula for accomplishing this task, creative specialists use techniques like focusing on one subject while blurring out the background, using particular color patterns, or utilizing symmetry to balance out an environment. The reason for this meticulous approach to curating content for viewers is the same reason that athletes train for months on end for a brief moment in the spotlight. Sometimes a brand has only one opportunity to interact with an audience member and communicate what it is and why it is worthy of their attention. And audiences are a fickle sort. With the accessibility to perhaps hundreds of alternative products or services, brands must make that one interaction a meaningful one that the viewer will remember long after the video has ended.

Part of why we gravitate towards animation as a medium is because you have the ability to communicate something as complex as sustainable business practices or a commitment to ethical animal treatment (as FedEx and Chipotle both did this past year) through imagined worlds and characters that take the viewer into a beautifully crafted narrative. While you can control things like lighting, environment, and subjects while shooting in video to a certain degree, animation can create worlds and characters beyond what is only in front of us. This allows us to control things like lighting, texture, movement, and time that we would not have as much control over if we filmed subjects through a camera. All in all, video and animation are not in competition with one another, for both are tools to be utilized for the creative dissemination of messages.

At the core of who we are as human beings is the desire for meaning and significance. Advertisers try to cultivate that kind of experience in a brief interaction that connects audiences with a brand that will last long after the meeting has ended. While the time and effort that companies spend towards this endeavor is great, the hard sought after relationship with the customer is truly the golden egg.

Check out Prodigi Arts at prodigiarts.com

If you’re serious about email ditch Mailbox for this Austin startup today.

Vancouver Startup Thinkingbox: touching consumers and corporations alike

via thinkingbox.ca

Everywhere Else: Thinkingbox is Vancouver based startup with offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Los Angeles. They bring touch to the advertising space. As they state in their about page, “As a true interactive house, our focus is to provide a 2-way communication for all brands.

[DISCLAIMER] I HATE ADVERTISING, I felt it was necessary to mention that prior to going into this article. I believe it is a necessary evil as it provides us with great and useful information for “free” (ala Google) or provides an income for sites like ours (however modest, in our case extremely modest). I tend to have ad blocking on most of the computers I use and on all my Android devices. The reason is simple – very often ads get in the way of the experience. Either through pop ups that have impossibly small close buttons or by being rudely smartly placed by those who run sites like ours.

I have to admit that a company such as thinkingbox could be what changes my view on some advertising. One thing that has always been missing in most ads, I believe, is the actual ability to truly communicate with the companies. I don’t know if thinkingbox can change that just yet. What they have managed to do is make advertising campaigns more personal by adding interactive elements to in-store displays, billboards, and building full featured digital campaigns. They explain what their focus is, “Serving the advertising industry we focus on alternative media such as Touch Screen Billboards, 2-Way Interactive Campaigns, Touch and Motion Storefronts, Mobile and Tablet Applications and everything digital.”

I have wondered how long until all the different forms of advertising would converge into a unified experience. Thinkingbox is pushing towards that idea. Once they can provide websites like ours with advertising that can really pull our readers in we hope that the (extremely modest) ad income might be able to become something better – like decent.

We will be following up with them and hope to have an interview with the founder Amir Sahba and/or Director of Interactivity Natalie Elbracht within the next couple of weeks. I’ve included videos to some of their recent work. You can find their portfolio here

Starbucks – My Starbucks Rewards Interactive Display :

Starbucks “My Starbucks Rewards” Interactive Display from thinkingbox on Vimeo.

Approach: Thinkingbox implemented a fun, whimsical and engaging interactive application which was prominently featured as a touch-interactive display window. Animated falling stars beckoned passer-byes to engage, touch and explore. Players can make the stars follow their finger, collapse into a gravity well or explode off the screen. Delightful animated details such as motion blur and bouncy spring motion enhanced the whimsical nature of the piece. The application was deployed and ran on both Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

Another example is from the Nike #KobeSystem brand. In thinkingbox’s words,

Scope: This custom app was featured along side the Nike Kobe VII System basketball shoes at a downtown Toronto Nike retailer. Customers could try out Nike shoes and then watch funny commercials featuring Kobe Bryant himself, explaining the Kobe System to various celebrities. These videos were compressed and optimized into the app that would also capture metrics on how well the app was able to engage customers.

Approach: A rich multimedia experience was required to showcase the Kobe System brand. An iPad was chosen as the medium because of its portable multitouch capability, multimedia options and ease of development.

The Kobe video can be found below:

Linkage:

Thinkingbox

Nibletz: On The Road Again – We like Ramen but we love Dinner For Two