Tag: digital 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?

Small Business Marketing: What Makes You Special?

Posted on by CMPR

How do small businesses survive these days in a crowded market where being discovered online is more than half the battle?  They need to know what makes them special and understand how they can directly fulfill the needs of  their customers.

The Vitality of Small Businesses

Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, employing millions and creating innovations that their size allows them to explore.  According to the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, in 2019 firms with fewer than twenty employees made up 89.0% of businesses in the U.S. and those with under one hundred accounted for 98.1%.

Rising Above the Competition

Just as there are many small businesses, there is a lot of competition and the best place to be discovered is the internet.  However, the web is a crowded place, and chances are your product is not the only one out there.  The key is differentiating what you do and sell from everyone else. 

What Makes Your Business Special?

To differentiate yourself, you need to consider what makes your business special.  What stands out about the owners, the employees, the products, and the services?  Being a bunch of friendly faces is not enough.  Neither is using words like “dynamic, innovative, or excellent” without an endorsement to add credibility to the praise. Here is an example of a successful differentiator:

Warby Parker is an eyeglasses company that started as a digitally native brand, which means they only sold online.  At the time there were dozens of different ways to purchase eyeglasses at stores like Pearle Vision, through your doctor’s office, and even at Costco and Walmart.  So how could the founders think that they could compete in a marketplace that was full of options?

They offered an alternative to customers who needed glasses by providing a simple process, a la carte pricing, and a chance to test out five different pairs of frames.  They saved people time and money, and offered the allure of an alternative name brand.  An article from CNBC explains exactly how they succeeded.  

Building Brand Trust

Once you know what makes your business special, you can incorporate the message into your overall brand.  Offering a product is not who you are, it is what you do.  In today’s world of direct, high speed, digital connection, people need to feel like they know their brands.  They need to trust their brands and to gain trust, you need to identify your customers and address their needs directly. 

For example, I spoke at a women’s networking event about content marketing and social media.  One of the attendees was a photographer who wanted to grow her wedding photo business.

Problem:  She did not understand why she wasn’t getting a lot of traction from her website which had beautiful photos that showed what she could do.  The photographer did not know what made her services special and different from others.  She also did not understand how her customers went about selecting a photographer.  

Possible solutions:

  1. She could share more information about her story and why she is passionate about working with couples and sharing their special moments.
  2. She could have blogs or articles on her website about how to choose the right wedding photographer.
  3. She could offer sample albums with endorsements from her clients.

Understanding what makes you special and matching that directly with the needs of your potential customers will build your business.  Everyone has something to offer that is unique to them.  The challenge is figuring out what that is and who needs it.  Then you need the courage and the know-how to go out there and communicate it to the right people in the right place, at the right time.

Digital Marketing: Where PR and Marketing Meet

Posted on by Claire McKinney

In many organizations PR and Marketing are not created equal.  Oftentimes PR reports to Marketing. Why?  If you are a public relations professional you know how much your expertise impacts marketing strategies, especially due to the evolution of the digital landscape.  You know where PR and Marketing Meet.

How PR and Marketing are Tied Together

Marketing will handle advertising, design, and copywriting for campaigns.   PR creates stories and messaging from information and research.  Then a publicist or media relations professional will pitch those stories to generate awareness for the brand, product, or individual. PR can do the job using stories on tv, radio, print, and online media.  But, if many people are not watching television news sources, listening to talk radio, or reading newspapers, how does the message get out? According to the Pew Research Center, the largest audience on cable or network news is around 7.5 million for evening, network programs.  Everything else is well below 5 million viewers. Radio World reports that radio listenership is struggling since the pandemic began.  There have been multiple reports on the decrease in traditional newspaper and magazine readership.  Media is more digital and online and this is where PR and Marketing meet.

Digital PR and Why Marketing Needs Us

Public Relations professionals have become much more active creating content for social media and websites.  Content driven social media campaigns are a combination of design efforts from Marketing and  writing from the PR department.  The snappy copy produced in  Marketing is fine for advertising.  But PR people know how to pitch an angle and write the appropriate copy to go along with it.   Also PR people build relationships, which we know is critical for growing a loyal and engaged audience.

Teamwork Leads to Success

So what does it look like when these two departments meet on equal footing?  In an ideal world a team that includes marketing and pr will get together to plan a campaign.  Tasks will be delegated and a structured, executable campaign will result.  Marketing will handle the images and copy, hashtag and competitor research.  It will also have developed a value proposition and target customer(s).  PR  will write blogs, articles, and social media copy.  These professionals will plan a media strategy that includes social platforms and content, plan events, and train spokespeople.

Like me, some PR people are full on Marketers.  In the end we all are determining what motivates people and why they do what they do.  In a sense, people watching and that’s the fun part.

For more information on marketing and pr visit our blog and check out:

Marketing is Not Public Relations

 

 

 

Accessible Design: UI Choices

Posted on by Sonya Dalton

Accessibility in design, when presented online, extends far beyond the visuals. My last two blog posts in this series focused on color choice and font choice. This post will focus on some more technical aspects of accessibility. These have more to do with user interface, or UI, design and accessibility. Good UI can make or break how some people interact with your content.

UI Essential: Alt-text

I briefly brought up the use of screen readers when I wrote about font choice. Screen readers are a tool that visually impaired users may rely on to navigate the web. Their name is self-explanatory; screen readers read text aloud for users who cannot read. However, text is usually the only thing that screen readers pick up on. They cannot interpret pictures. If you want a user to know what is presented in an image, then you need to use something called “alt-text”. Alt-text is found either in the metadata of an image or in the caption of an image. Some website managers allow you to add this metadata when you upload an image. If you use WordPress, for example, you may have even noticed a box labeled “alt-text” when you upload images.

It is useful to provide alt-text for any non-decorative images. For instance, if a restaurant’s website has an image of their menu uploaded, the alt-text should list off the items on the menu. The same goes for charts or diagrams that rely on visual elements. Otherwise, the information will be inaccessible to a user with a screen reader. With images that don’t have text, you can provide a description. Aim to be as descriptive and concise as possible. A user doesn’t need every little detail, but adding some flair is nice. Using proper alt-text conveys valuable information and makes for a more inclusive experience. If you’d like to include alt-text in social media, you can do so in the description or caption of your image-based posts. It won’t affect the metadata of the uploaded image, but a screen reader will catch it.

Keyboard Access

Making a website keyboard accessible is another technical design element. Many users, both with and without disabilities, rely solely on their keyboard to use their computers. It can be a very efficient way to complete a workflow. It is important that your web page follows some basic, standard commands. For instance, every element should be selectable using the tab key and either the space bar or the enter key should activate an element. These are just a couple examples. For a much more thorough guide, you can consult with WebAIM’s guidelines for keyboard accessibility. 

This one can be a bit harder to implement on social media since you don’t own those domains and can’t edit the code. How accessible those websites are is largely out of your control. However, many people do create their own blogs and websites. If you have a website, keep this in mind when selecting a pre-made theme or customizing one through code.  

I hope this has made you more aware of some of the ways people use the web. Remember that it is, however, only a small sample of the ways you can make things more accessible. The more you think about unique user cases, the more accessible you can make your content!