Tag: content marketing

Color Psychology and Branding

Posted on by CMPR

Why is it Important to Choose the Best Colors for Your Branding?

Color psychology and branding is one of the most important factors in consumer behavior and marketing. Consumers make their minds up about a product, service, or person, in about 90 seconds. More than half of that decision process can be attributed to color alone, so choosing the right color palette for your brand can be crucial to the company’s success. Having a set color palette is not only critical for the consumer’s attraction, but also for the cohesiveness of the brand content on social media and your website. Content that correlates with your company logo and overall image can help with brand recognition and distinguishing yourself from competitors.

Colors evoke different emotions in different groups of consumers, so it is important to reach the audience you desire with the right branding.

What Different Color Tones Mean & How to Choose the Right Ones

Typically, psychologists separate colors into three categories: cool, warm, and neutral. Cool tones include blues, greens, and purples. These colors are more subtle and invoke feelings of calmness, relaxation, and peace. Warm colors on the other hand are more exciting and energizing to the consumer’s eye. Reds, oranges, and yellows catch attention quickly and are used to generate a positive feeling in the audience. Neutral tones like black, brown, and white offer a sleeker and more professional look. Guide to Color Psychology in Marketing | Chamber of Commerce

Knowing this, the first step in deciding on colors is to think about your brand’s values and purpose and how you can make your design choices align with those things.

Who is your target audience?

How is your brand memorable?

What is your company’s value?

These things can be a starting point to determine how you want the audience to feel about your brand.

How Demographics Affect Perception of Color

The demographics of potential customers can affect how they perceive color and what that could mean to your brand. Knowing your target audience is imperative to choosing the right colors to ultimately attract the appropriate consumers.

Men and women often have varying preferences when it comes to color. Studies have shown that women are generally more drawn to softer colors, whereas men prefer bold ones.

Generational differences also have an impact on color preferences. Gen X and Baby Boomers tend to gravitate more towards colors that are viewed as mature and classic such as yellows, whites, blues, and dark reds. Millennials and Gen Zs typically prefer colors that are soft and neutral, like pastel pinks and greens, as well as browns and whites. Generational Colors: How to Attract Various Demographics Via Color (amywax.com)

Knowing that demographic factors can influence how one perceives colors, identifying your target audience is important to determine your brand’s colors.

Next Steps

After learning color psychology, play with various color schemes to see what you like for your branding and marketing. Free resources like Coolors and Canva are excellent tools to help you in your designing process. Once you begin posting, take note of how others respond to your beautifully crafted posts and use this information to keep what works and fix what doesn’t in your marketing strategy.

Additional References

View of Color Psychology in Marketing (jbt.org.pk)

Color Psychology: How Colors Influence the Mind | Psychology Today

AI Threatens What Makes You Unique

Posted on by CMPR
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is like a new shiny penny in a world where we expect technology will make our lives easier. I would say that some things are definitely better with the speed of tech. However, when it comes to implementing AI in content planning, I am concerned. I think it is a good idea for businesses to be wary of AI, because AI could threaten their ability to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Business Goals

To explain my rationale, I’m going to start with some of the steps we take to create a content plan. First we start with business goals and marketing objectives. Usually business goals are to 1) earn revenue, 2) profit, and 3) grow. Marketing objectives are determined by your goals and they usually revolve around customers and converting them into sales. It is a lot easier to set a revenue goal than to achieve it. The huge number of businesses competing on the Internet of Things creates many challenges.

What Makes Your Product or Service Special?

Every marketing class or book will tell you to figure out what makes your service or product unique. Doing that will make it easier to stand out on the internet. In marketing we call what makes you special, your differentiator. Your differentiator is composed of what you provide, why and how you do it and the customers in your target market. You may think that you have the coolest and best product or service in the world. However, if your customers don’t see it or need it, then nothing else matters. You need to know who your customers are and that process digs deep. It involves research, understanding what their pain points are, and what you can do to solve their problems. Once you know what makes your business the best one for them, you start your digital marketing plan. Everything that happens next is reliant on how well your content communicates your value to your audience, and how successfully it reaches them.

Enter AI for Content Marketing

Content marketing is a primary part of any digital marketing campaign. Newsletters, emails, websites, landing pages, blogs, posts, videos, podcasts, books, whitepapers, and ebooks are all content. Any of these components can be sliced, diced, and formatted for the appropriate online platforms. The issue that most business owners (especially small businesses) have is a lack of staff and time to do what needs to be done. Enter AI for creating content and your time and budget constraints are solved, right? A Fortune article on February 17th, 2023, explains that Elon Musk, the founder of OpenAI (the parent company of ChatGPT), publicly walked away from his creation. Musk indicated that “(OpenAI) no longer resembled anything like what he had once co-founded in December 2015. According to Musk, it was designed to be an open-source nonprofit, which was the very reason why it was dubbed OpenAI.” The article states that Musk’s concerns arose out of the launch of ChatGPT. He says it has turned the concept he intended into a blockbuster moneymaking endeavor for Microsoft. I’m sure everyone knows about ChatGPT by now. The software has been in the news and online thanks to the marketing muscle behind Microsoft. However, the claims it makes of creating original content, based on your prompts, reside in a gray area.

The Origins of AI Content

ZDNet provides a simplified explanation of what ChatGPT is. They say that, “ChatGPT runs on a language model architecture created by OpenAI called the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), specifically GPT-3. Generative AI models of this type are trained on vast amounts of information from the internet including websites, books, news articles and more.” The content your are getting “customized” for you, is an aggregate, pulled from a variety of existing sources. These sources are available to everyone including your competitors. They also are a part of the language of the internet. See how AI could reduce your effectiveness?

AI Could Threaten Your Unique Differentiator

So we know that using AI to create your content means accessing the same keywords, phrases, and overall language that anyone else using the software is also doing. How long will your content maintain any orginality? Furthermore, does AI understand your customers and their pain points? Can it relate to human emotions? Here is an example of my experience with AI that stems from the inability of Google to answer my questions. Have you tried searching for something on Google lately? The SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) that come up have tons of ads that are more and more unrelated to my question. The organic results are often not really what I am looking for either. I tend to abandon at least 75% of my search attempts as a result. Guess what? Google runs on an algorithm that is based on language. If we create generic language or encourage it, how does that affect our differentiators? Can you be unique in a world where technology delivers sameness? We are at the beginning of the AI marketing story. Like any new toy, everyone wants to play with it. Here’s a thought: If a metaphor for the internet of things is a haystack and an entity selling something is a needle that needs to amplify its differences to get attention. What happens when the haystack becomes a needlestack?

Why is Your Digital Personal Brand Important in 2021?

Posted on by Claire McKinney

Why should you care about your digital personal brand?  It’s not just your reputation, it is also the 21st century platform that enables you to work, socialize, sell a product, and plan and achieve goals. I was speaking with an author recently who publishes a book every year.  Prior to 2017 he says his books would sell 2,000 + copies in paperback.  Since then, he is lucky if he sells 200.  What happened?  Did his fans abruptly change their minds about his books?  Was he blackballed from Facebook? Since he is a self-published author, his primary means of selling was online, but somehow it was as if he had disappeared from cyberspace.

How do you disappear in cyberspace?

Sometime in the last five years between changing algorithms, and a critical mass of over three billion people on social media, the rules changed.  When once you could post a few times a week on a platform, build a reasonable audience, and become more popular, now you have to have a brand and a plan.  Enter CoVid, the constant stream of bad news and politics, stores shut down, and more people online than ever before, doing everything from work to school to entertainment.   Do you think this is temporary? Nope.  Even when more of us venture outside of our homes,  experts say the move to digital was fast-tracked by necessity, and much of it is here to stay.

How does a digital personal brand work?

Imagine that you are a high school science teacher by day and host a podcast on sci fi entertainment by night (or any other time).  As a teacher you go to school, see students, engage with colleagues and parents, and have a reputation as an effective educator.  You tell people about your podcast and you gain a few downloads from your connections, but nothing that will justify the time it takes to put your shows together.  How can you solve this problem and make your podcast successful?

If you had a digital personal brand with a presence on social media platforms and a business page for your podcast, you would have a base from which to start growing an audience.  You could utilize Instagram and Facebook to post your audio and link to iTunes and other streaming services.  You could research people interested in your topic and connect with them to get listeners as well as potential guests and topics for your show.  As you build your audience you could offer promotions and incentives for them to provide content for you to repost, tagging the original user.  Then you will show up in that user’s network with exposure to all of their friends and followers, and so on, and so on.(Anyone remember that Faberge commercial for shampoo?)

Why do you need to put YOU first to get noticed?

The science teacher may think creating her podcast is the hard part, but it isn’t.  The first step is having the content.  Then she needs to plan on how she is going to be in front of people who are spending time in the digital space.   Brian Solis says that we have become a society of digital narcissists.  To make that premise work to your advantage, you will need to figure out who you are; who you want to be; what you are promoting; and how you are going to communicate all of this in a consistent, branded manner on digital media.

 

Effective Social Media Marketing: Are we in denial?

Posted on by CMPR

 

Love it or hate it if you are promoting something you are waist-deep or at least dipping a toe into the social media marketing landscape.  For public relations professionals, we are always focused on effective social media marketing tactics that will build our clients’ audiences.  I’ve written about social media on this blog, often breaking down different platforms and their uses, listing the latest stats, and how to build a content strategy.  However, I am adding this to the conversation because I think many of us are in denial. Our expectations and feelings about how things should work are getting int the way of our own success.    Below are some statements related to social media conversations I’ve had.  If you relate to one or more of these, then you might want to read on.

  1. My follower count on Instagram only increases by 5 to 10 followers per week so my campaign isn’t working.
  2. Nobody wants to hear from me on Twitter because I don’t get likes or retweets.
  3. I post contests and polls on Facebook and I don’t get any audience participation.
  4. I post every day and I’m not growing.

Time for a reality check

 

It’s time to face reality.  There are 3.3 billion people on social media; there are bots and marketing agencies spewing generic content; advertising is cluttering news feeds; and if you aren’t a celebrity, you won’t gain followers by the hundreds.  So why does anyone even bother you ask?  Because there are 3.3 billion people using social media.  If your audience was just a fraction of that number you could be happy.

We are so fortunate to be able to reach out to all of these people directly.  But you have to be thoughtful, dare I say strategic about how you talk them.    If you do your homework and start talking to your “people” who want to hear what you have to say, then you will grow and you may even become an influencer someday.  If your social media platforms are not behaving the way you want them to, it is likely that you are not properly focused on who you are trying to reach and what you need to communicate.

Build Authentic Online Relationships

Relationship building online is about earning the trust and loyalty of your customers and audiences so you can maintain, and grow your numbers.   But how do you do that?  Is it by working with a company that will push out “snackable” content? (I was pitched that idea by a social marketer.  Let me ask you this: If you were at a cocktail party would you want to talk to a robot who can say a dozen sentences or a real person who can tell you about a trip to Belize)? Is it by talking about how great you are or how wonderful your product is?  Would having a roomful of cats posted on Instagram fit the bill?

Even though we can now hide behind our screens, it doesn’t mean that the skills and needs of human interaction are out the window.  If anything, you need to be even more thoughtful about your dialogue with others to practice effective social media marketing.  Your content needs to be authentic and you need to do your due diligence and research in advance to identify an audience that will be interested in receiving your messages.  After you determine your audience, you need to figure out how to reach it, what platforms to use, the content you will use, and when you are going to post and share.

It takes time and tenacity

To build an army takes an army and that’s what you are doing.  You are setting up a foundation of friends and followers who want to know about your ideas or buy your product.  If satisfied, they will help spread the word via retweets, shares, and referrals.  And as I’ve said, it doesn’t happen overnight.

When I was at a conference recently a woman asked me about an aggregation application that helped drive followers on Twitter, but she was losing followers as quickly as she was gaining them.  I told her that Twitter has been public about their attempt to rid the server of unattended accounts and spambots.  Aggregators are not a shortcut when it comes to quality, actionable followers.  The ones you end up with are often spam and other ineffective types.  You need to put a real engagement plan into action, stick to it, monitor the results, and take appropriate action when necessary.

We all need to accept that this process is going to take a lot of work.  I’ve got a business built around media with a heavy social focus, and I know about the time that goes into an effective social media marketing campaign.  But if you aren’t able to hire somebody to do it for you, then you can set up a schedule that works for you.  Block out time every day to work on internet engagement and research.  Find a tracking program or use the tools that the individual platforms provide so you can see how your content is doing.  Someone told me once regarding careers that you start with one brick and soon you will have built a wall.  So go ahead and start your construction and you will see how things progress.

The last thing I’ll add is for people who dislike social media or do not feel comfortable with it.  My advice is: Don’t establish any platforms you are not going to use.  If you feel super hesitant about social campaigning, then do not do it.   In a future post, I’ll present some ideas for alternatives that will still build your SEO presence online.

Additional Informational Resources

Here are a couple of  articles from around the internet that talk about current content and social strategies:

10 Important 2020 Social Media Trends You Need to Know

12 Social Media Trends to Watch in 2020