What the heck is BRANDING?

Branding is the expression of the essential truth or value of an organization, product, or service. It is communication of characteristics, values, and attributes that clarify what a particular brand is and is not.

What the heck is MARKETING?

Marketing is defined as the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. These are the strategic and tactical activities that generate leads / new customers.

The brand does not explicitly say “Buy me.” Instead, it says “This is what I am. This is why I exist. If you agree, if you like me, you can buy me, support me, and recommend me to your friends.”

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE AND WHY DO WE CARE?    There is one distinct difference between marketing and branding, which is their business function. Simply put, marketing unearths and activates buyers. Branding makes loyal customers, advocates, even evangelists, out of those who buy. Branding is not a logo, catchphrase or slogan – those are all important parts of branding but not the only things!

BRANDING VS. MARKETING: CASE STUDY    Here’s how this works in real life. Let’s take an auto shop business for example. They have a healthy monthly marketing budget to send direct mailings, run Facebook ads and other digital ads. However, once someone walks through their door to get a free oil change (as part of a high-converting promotion), the customer notices a dirty waiting room, a rude front desk employee and a long waiting time for their oil change. Their experience with this company is poor and they won’t be going back. The customer may also feel the need to give the auto shop a 1-star rating on Yelp, Google or Facebook because of their experience.  

However, if that same shop invested in creating a positive customer experience (e.g. offered a clean, comfortable waiting space, a friendly front desk employee), that customer could not only become a lifelong repeat buyer but also recommend the service to their friends.  

So case in point, no amount of marketing can save a continuously misguided brand. Businesses must fix the brand first! 

So how can marketers keep subscribers engaged and interested in content, without suffering from full-out email creation burn out? Enter automation. By setting up and scheduling pre-designed/written emails based on a user’s behavior, you’re delivering them the goods, while not creating work overload for you or your team. Here are our top recommendations for email marketing newbies:

New Subscriber Welcome Message

Send an automated welcome email when a user subscribes to your list! By creating a new subscriber welcome message, it will make the user feel valued. Take it a step further by offering a special incentive, such as a shopping discount or free download.

New Subscriber Sequence

Once a user subscribes to your list, it’s important to keep them engaged and to get to know your brand a bit better. You can send a series of messages that provides helpful and interesting content to build brand loyalty and trust. A good rule of thumb is to send one email each day for 5 – 7 days.

Contest or Giveaway Confirmation

Contests and giveaways are an awesome way to build your email list! Once someone enters to win a contest or giveaway, it’s always a great idea to send them a confirmation so they get piece of mind that their entry went through. Along with the confirmation, you can also provide additional information about your company, such as trending products, interesting blog posts and other helpful content.

Product Purchase Thank You

The attitude is all about gratitude in this automated email! Anytime a purchase is made, send a thank you email to show appreciation for their business. Take it a step further and offer an incentive toward their next purchase to help build loyalty and repeat business.

Abandoned Cart Email

Sometimes life happens and purchases are left to their lonesome in someone’s online shopping cart. However, this can hurt your revenue big time! According to the Baymard Institute, on average, nearly 68% of shopping carts are abandoned. Ouch. That can add up to thousands of dollars in lost sales. You can set automated messages to remind the shopper that there are items left to be purchased and recoup that revenue. This little “nudge” can do wonders for your conversion rates and generate revenue that would have been otherwise missed out on.

Have you had success with any of these email marketing automation tactics?

Connects Our Team
We’ve got team members right here in Cooperstown and also in other parts of the Northeast. Whether we’re working from home due to nasty weather or at our dedicated workspace at the Troy Innovation Garage, it’s an awesome way to stay connected no matter where we’re at!

Customizable Channels
Personalization is really simple when using Slack! We’re able to build client-specific channels for conversation, brainstorming and questions relating to client projects and communication. We can also only include the team members who are working specifically on that project.

Easy File Sharing
We can easily share, review and leave feedback for internal marketing plans, meeting notes, ad proofs, content documents and more! Slack offers a huge variety of convenient integrations such as Google Drive, Asana, Adobe Creative Cloud and Dropbox, just to name a few.

On-the-Go Mobile Capabilities
Our team is constantly on the go and need a communications tool that packs more of a punch than run-of-the-mill text messaging. As I write this, we’re finishing up the details for a client email blast on Slack with team members who are both in the office and offsite. It’s mobile capabilities are just what we need to keep projects moving forward without lag time.

Snooze / Away Notifications
Sometimes we’ve got to “go dark” for important meetings or put our heads down and grind out a project without distraction. Slack’s snooze feature allows you to be inactive while your away doing other things. You can also set a specific status, such as “In a meeting,” “Out sick,” “Commuting,” or “On Vacation,” so you’re team will know whether you’re reachable or not.

Does your team use Slack? What do you think about it?

Dynamic, Interesting and Fun Content Is a Must
Give the people what they love! Social content always needs to be helpful and valuable but now with more features available on many platforms, your brand can add lots of personality into the mix. You can play around with fun visual features such as, color transitions, paper-cut illustrations, vast landscapes, animate GIFS and more!

Chat Is Where It’s At
According to an article from ManyChat, Facebook Messenger is used by 1.3 billion active users each month. This translates into huge reach for future communications with visitors – especially if you are a tourism or retail brand. It’s an underutilized channel now – but like every new channel it will get saturated soon enough, then it will be more challenging to carve out a subscriber base.

Video Is Everything
Video is crushing it in terms of social engagement so brands should seriously consider upping their game in 2019 to include a lot more video content in social content. Even if you post just brief clips, it will be easier to command attention from the viewer! In fact, according to a report by HubSpot, Where both video and text are available on the same page, 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service. On top of that, 83% of consumers would consider sharing it with their friends!

TIP: Don’t shy away from LIVE video content! Some ideas could be live Q&A, behind the scenes videos, etc.

Kicking Growth Mode Into High Gear
Quality over quantity is essential. While we will continue to focus on growing engaged audiences across platforms, this growth needs to also be tied to highly-engaged followers. “Empty followers” serve no purpose for your brand. This can be accomplished by retargeting content or an action (e.g. like our page, view our video) specific to the content they reacted to.

Surge in Instagram / Facebook Stories
Using Instagram or Facebook Stories is an awesome way to capture “in-the-moment” content. Using this tactic is a more engaging way to connect with your followers. Plus you can add really fun elements, such as gifs, music, stickers and more.

TIP: Use specific #hashtags so that your brand can find user generated content. With the changing API’s it is becoming more challenging. Here are some categories to consider:

• Brand Loyalty #

• Event #

• Product specific #

• Seasonal #

Would you add any other social media predictions to the list?

Pay to Play on Social Media
There’s no such thing as social media being “free” anymore. Paid social media campaigns continue to bypass the mysterious algorithm nearly all social platforms have gone to over the past two years. Brands have incredible opportunities to deliver multiple forms of attention-grabbing media (e.g. video, downloadables, images, web links) to highly targeted audiences – however, it continues to be attached to an investment.

Customization is Key
Whether it’s dynamic targeting retail customers shopping carts, targeting your emails and followers using personalized messages and content. Customers are looking for an experience that is customized to what they like and what they are seeking. According to The Next Scoop, “Every customer is unique with their set of demands or needs. To identify that uniqueness and cater to them is the recipe to win over today’s customers.”

Voice Search
“Alexa, what’s the weather forecast today?”  Voice search is taking the digital marketing world by storm. Optimizing natural search phrases are going to be more critical as audiences are using voice search through multiple devices, such as Google Home and Amazon’s Echo Dot. Brands can even build and upload their own Skill to build authenticity, credibility and trust with listeners.

Audio Content
Are you into dill pickles, antique radios or WWE wrestling? Then, there’s a podcast just for you! Podcasts continue to grow in listenership because of their mobile-friendly portability, vast variety of topics and it’s a passive form of content to consume. Plus, it’s easier than ever for brands to create and distribute podcasts. Anchor.fm is one of our favorites!

Chat Bot and Messenger Marketing
According to ManyChat, Facebook Messenger Marketing is in prime position to become the world’s #1 marketing channel in the coming years – already with 1.3 billion active users each month! The companies who become early adopters of this fast-growing channel are going to have a serious advantage over their competitors. Chat flows and bots create a more natural and frictionless interaction for your audience that yield unprecedented engagement rates when compared to email and SMS.

What do you think 2019 has in-store for your industry’s marketing practices?