Category: Content Marketing

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Ben Jerrys Twitter Treats 1200x600 c default
Ben Jerrys Twitter Treats 1200x600 c default

Most Twitter users hardly ever use all of the allotted 140 characters they’re allowed to tweet. Ben & Jerry’s decided to utilize this fact to promote a witty campaign called Fair Tweets (see the video splainer – a BIGEYE favorite), not only for its company, but also for a good cause.
On May 14, in honor of World Fair Trade Day, Ben & Jerry’s asked Twitter users to donate their spare characters to raise awareness of Fair Trade. They created a user-friendly application that allows people to type tweet whatever they’d like and automatically fills in the remaining unused characters with a Fair Trade message and hyperlink. So, if your tweet is only 20 characters, Ben & Jerry’s will immediately fill in a 120-character message about Fair Trade for you … and they might even throw in a link or hashtag too.

Once your message is created, you simply click the “Tweet It!” button, and your Fair Trade message is sent off to Twitter for all of your followers to see. It takes two seconds (depending on your typing skills), and spreads awareness for Fair Trade around the world. Not to mention, it leads people to Ben & Jerry’s as well. Promoting a cause through your company is always admirable, but Ben & Jerry’s showed us how to make it clever and fun too. We think they deserve two thumbs up for promoting themselves and a good cause in a cool, non-garish sort of way. Don’t you?

To learn how to effectively incorporate twitter into your campaign, contact us here!

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Content Marketing Creative & Production Digital Targeting Services Insights Integrated Media Media & Analytics Media Planning and Buying Paid Search Paid Social Video Production
What to Expect in 2011 – Part I
What to Expect in 2011 – Part I

If 2010 was up for a marketing superlative, it would definitely be voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” This past year, we saw the launch of the iPad, the expansion of the Facebook “Like” button to other popular websites and the rise of singer-songwriter Justin Bieber, who can thank YouTube for the fact that he can now retire at age 16. But while 2010 focused on finding new, bigger and better vehicles to market products and services, 2011 will focus on tying them all together. Gunning for the “Best-All-Around” title, 2011 will be the year that we see businesses weave online, print, broadcast, mobile, and social media initiatives together into a greater marketing plan to achieve bigger goals. And the leaders of the pack will be those who recognize this need to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Read on to find out more about Covenant’s projections for 2011, and how big-picture thinking could lead to a big ROI.

1. Video

In the next three years, 90 percent of the Internet will be video, according to Cisco Systems. Video has become a powerful way to talk directly to your target audience and build upon or strengthen the relationship they’ve already established with your brand. Video can also be repurposed on multiple platforms, from your company’s website to its Facebook Fan page. Your customers can even share the videos with their friends and family by reposting links or by embedding the video itself onto other Web pages. And the unique thing about video is that it can still be viewed years after it is initially posted.

There are many ways that video can be utilized on the Web to not only promote your brand, but also to establish it as the go-to resource in your industry. If you’re a healthcare facility, add a five-minute tutorial on tips to avoid the flu before cold season (such as washing your hands, just like Mom always said). If you’re a homebuilder, show short clips of a remodeled cabinet you did, with before and after shots. The idea is to think of a topic that will interest your customers, and then hire a professional to do the work. While flip cameras are great for taping your grandma doing the electric slide at your cousin’s wedding, they won’t deliver the same professional look and feel that a production company can. In order to effectively position your products and services in your marketplace, it’s crucial to get the right message, sound and light in place before you start rolling.

2. Digital Marketing

The last time someone in our office used a phone book was to get to the last Sweet’N Low packet on a hard-to-reach shelf. And we would venture to say the same is true for many of our clients (unless they prefer Splenda). More often than not, consumers are looking online to gather information and pricing for the products or services they need. Therefore, companies will need to move their rates, discount packages, services, and offerings where their customers are looking for it: online.

In addition to making it easier for your customers to include you in their budget for the upcoming year, it’s also more important now than ever to include digital media in your own. With new channels and capabilities being developed daily on the Internet, websites are becoming far more complex than the five-page, static HTML pages they once were. They’re incorporating instant messaging, applications, video, podcasting, gaming, blogs, social networking, and dynamically generated content pulled by an RSS feed from other sites. All of these separate initiatives are great to keep your audience coming back for more, but this year, business leaders will need to develop an overall digital marketing plan to play out how each initiative will work together to achieve their company’s greater goals.

3. Social Media

By now, even old-school business executives that were once hesitant about jumping into the social media pool are taking the plunge. It’s no longer a question of whether or not you have social media, but rather how you decide to utilize it, and whether or not those initiatives have resulted in an ROI. Offering free giveaways or coupons to people who “Like” you on Facebook is a great way to build your audience in the beginning stages. But after you get their attention, it’s just as important to keep it there. This will happen by engaging your customer through relevant—and frequent—posts, messages, photos, videos, and other offerings. It’s also important to include a call-to-action in order to drive traffic where you want it to go, such as sharing a link to a new product or service featured on your company website. This year, expect to see more in the realm of Social Listening Research and Influencer Marketing, which allow you to analyze your target audience members to better understand your customers and their needs.

LinkedIn, a professional networking website, will also continue to be a social media platform to watch in 2011, with more than 12 million small-business leaders on its site, according to its blog last year. It’s become a huge resource for finding a job, finding a job candidate or making a connection with a potential business partner.

4. Multi-channel and Integrated Marketing

It’s great to market your company across different mediums, from online, print and broadcast to mobile applications and social media platforms. But if the vehicles you’re using to promote your brand don’t cross promote one another, you’re missing out on a lot of business opportunities you could have had if they did. For example, this can take the form of a billboard with a QR code (barcode readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera phones), print advertising with a mobile phone SMS call to action, or a link on a company website that redirects to its Facebook page to “Like” them. It should always come full circle. You want to engage your audience to interact with you and your brand, not just hit them once with a well-designed piece that leaves them thinking, “OK great, but now what?”

It simply isn’t enough to just do a newspaper advertisement or buy a radio spot anymore. It must be integrated into multiple platforms and, consequentially, be strongly branded to your company on those platforms. This will change the role of your audience members from recipients to participants.

5. Personalized Marketing

You may have already noticed this on Facebook, but in 2011, expect to see more websites with personalization capabilities. This means that if you frequently visit a website, it will track the keywords you search for and post and store this information in its database to customize what’s displayed on the site the next time you visit. It not only determines what’s displayed based on the keywords you search, but also by the pages you visit within the site and, for first time visitors, even the referring URL that linked you to the site.

With the astronomical growth of Groupon and LivingSocial in the past two years, smart startup companies are starting to use geo-location capabilities to drive foot traffic to their local businesses. This acceleration would largely be driven by discovery via location-based social experience sharing. The explosive growth of Instagram is also an early sign of this experience-sharing trend, and we will witness a whole lot more in the coming year.

6. Print

This just in: print is not dead. Print has reinvented itself more times than Cher and Madonna combined and, like their careers, it thrives by changing its look to stay relevant. In an “all-about-me” marketplace, printers have learned that in order to stay in touch with consumers, they have to get personal. Literally. Data-driven print (also known as 1:1 printing, variable data or personalized printing) is continuously growing in popularity and often involves strategically placing a customer’s name onto an already printed piece.

For example, vacation timeshares may put a customer’s name on the back of a white robe hanging in the closet of a bedroom. A sports clothing brand might put a customer’s name on the back of a football jersey. The options are endless, and it’s a great way to get creative and grab your audience members’ attention by reaching out to them by name.

7. SEO

Ah, the ever-elusive concept of Search Engine Optimization. In recent years, the most common question we get from clients is hands down, “What can we do to become No. 1 in Google’s search results?” This isn’t surprising to us since your customers, like you, are probably using search engines as their primary means to find the information they are looking for. But the answer is much more complex than the reason behind the question. Although there are definitely ways that marketing professionals can help improve your SEO through keywords, tags and content, there is no silver bullet for getting the No. 1 spot. With the introduction of new search engines such as Bing in the U.S., Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia, Google’s not the only player in the search engine game anymore. In addition, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are also becoming popular resources for searching, making it even more difficult to solve the equation to get to the No. 1 spot. In 2011, look for things to get even more complex as search engines advance, mobile phone searches get thrown into the mix and geo-location searches also become a factor in where you fall in search result listings.

Even if there isn’t a foolproof formula to guarantee your ranking, there are certainly ways to improve your SEO. Marketing experts have conducted plenty of research in this realm and can advise you of small things you can do to make a big impact in the long run.

In conclusion, the key to a successful year in marketing will be to engage your audience, be strategic in your initiatives, customize your offerings and keep your overall goal in mind. But if all else fails, post a really funny video of your cat sneezing on YouTube and watch the TV interviews, book deals, magazine covers, and sports drink sponsorships just roll in.

In need of a little guidance in order to continue on the right foot? Contact our team of marketing experts today to develop the perfect approach for your brand in 2011 – and beyond!

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How to Use Viral Marketing 1200x600 c default
How to Use Viral Marketing 1200x600 c default

Viral marketing (also sometimes described as marketing buzz, viral advertising, or buzzwords) can be defined as marketing techniques that use existing networks to spread awareness of a particular brand or service and thus creating a process whereby the existing network is responsible for propagating the marketing message and this can take the form of video clips, interactive games, adverts, eBooks, images or text messages.
[quote]The overall goal in creating a viral marketing strategy is to reach a wide audience in the shortest time possible and with as little expenditure as can be managed. [/quote]The message receivers are responsible for carrying the message across to other receivers and so the marketers try as much as possible to create a message that will appeal to their target group which should be people that have preferably a high social networking potential , making it more likely for the message to go across through the targeted medium to the target audience.

In order to use viral marketing successfully, you should be able to meet these three conditions:

– Identify the right messengers to propagate the message

– Create the right message

– Choose the medium to diffuse the message

Identify the Messenger

The messengers ideally are the people that are always looking for new things in an area. They actually specialize in this area or take it as a hobby. They could be bloggers or reviewers and will usually have a lot of following for their opinions.

Once they get the message and are happy with it, it gets transmitted to their immediate social network and thus gets propagated to friends of friends and when rightly done it might make the whole world within 24 hours. Imagine the impact it might have on the potential of a company to sell.

Creating the Message

Getting the right message, the right pitch is the key to viral marketing. The message should essentially be simple, easily memorable and should sell itself. This is the greatest part of the venture, and the right message will always find a way out. Sometimes it may take several attempts and slight changes to make it more effective and viral.

The Environment

The environment, the timing and the expectations of the public all play a vital role in the propagation of a message. It should resonate with the economic and political climate at the time. However unlikely messages have been known to take hold and spread, so you just have to pull your resources together and give it a go.

There are many strategies that you can adopt for effective viral marketing and learning how to use viral marketing for your business from time to time can establish you, give you a wider customer base and generate profits for your business.

Some of the elements you can include in your viral marketing strategy include:

Offering free products and services

Free services and products are usually very attractive and call for a lot of attention. Viral marketing usually uses the idea of offering services to individuals that propagate the message, usually if they are able to let the message reach a certain number of individuals, they are more likely to get a free product or service. Generally the free offer calls for attention to your free product, but it might also be a direct way of getting the person to explore other products and services on offer which might eventually convert to a sale.

Using Existing Social Networks

Without an existing network of peers to take up the message, a good message may remain in marketing dump and never see the light. Even if you don’t have a social network, it will be essential to create one, link with people, leave messages on their message boards and participate in forums. Once you get this organized, it will be easier to get your message across to the first group of social network active people that are important for spreading the message across once they get fired up!

Prepare for the Expected Increase in Traffic

In order to successfully use viral marketing, you should be prepared for the increase in traffic, or in sales. Not being able to satisfy the curiosity of the people that have come into contact with your messages will spell failure on your part, and may even incur a backlash from the very socially active population that are first on the line. Therefore make sure that your equipment and staff are well able to handle the possible surge in business that may arise from the marketing effort.

Create Compelling Messages

Use great design and clever marketing to create a compelling message. Viral marketing is as much a psychological process as a marketing activity. Strive to understand what moves your niche population and you will be more likely successful at creating something that they can identify with, love and spread around.

In need of a viral marketing message that will resonate with your target audience? Contact us today for proven ways to boost traffic for your brand!

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How to Identify Different Types of Ad Agencies
How to Identify Different Types of Ad Agencies

Advertising is one of the earliest concepts of human economic activity. This has developed with the coming of every new technology and continues to grow each day. Drawings, printing, telephone, television and more recently the internet and social media marketing have all made their mark in the history of advertising, and who knows what tomorrow might bring.
Advertising can be done individually, or by the use of a marketing agency. Depending on the kind of product or service that you wish to market, and the population that you wish to meet in terms of the strata of the population as well as whether the population is local or if you are looking for a worldwide distribution, you will want an ad agency that is able to handle your proposal effectively as well as reach the target population.

You will also have to make this choice based on the advertising strategy that you think is efficient for you and thus make sure that the agency you chose is specialized in this aspect of advertising.

[quote]Ad agencies are normally classified based on the media that they specialize in, and because of this classification, it is easy to see ad agencies that specialize in television ads, radio ads, newspaper ads and more recently web and new media ads. [/quote]

Marketing agencies are usually classified based on their scope. You might want to check if the agency serves a particular location as in a Orlando marketing agency or if the agency is has a global network and therefore a wider reach.

However in marketing, the term “type of advertising” is used to describe the primary focus of the advertising message and it can be classified as:

Product-Oriented Advertising

Image Advertising

Advocacy Advertising

Public Service Advertising

Therefore we can infer from these that type of advertising agencies will also fall within these categories.

Product-Oriented advertising

A product can be an idea, a service or a good that is the result of a company’s or a person’s activity. Product oriented advertising refers to advertising that is meant to promote this product or service to a particular audience. Here Ad agencies may use informative advertising to furnish information about the product; persuasive advertising where the approach is to try and convince people to buy, and comparative advertising that tries to show consumers how the product compares with others on the market.

Image advertising

Image advertising is the type of advertising that focuses on building up a company’s image to make it more attractive among its peers. They use strategy that increases the importance of a company and as such do not focus on particular products. This strategy is usually used in cases where a company has taken on a new name due to mergers or change of ownership, or due to negative publicity a company may need to rebrand itself.

Advocacy Advertising

These are usually advertising efforts that use the company’s public stance to voice certain opinions as concerns them or their future. In this way they companies can even sway public opinions on political issues and other debates that may affect them in one way or the other.

Public Service Advertising

These adverts are usually free of charge depending on the country and the policy of the agency that handles the advert. They are usually for the public good. It is important for nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian organizations to publicize themselves and to call for financial resources and personnel such as volunteers.

There are ad agencies that do not specialize in any one of these sectors, but embrace all the different sectors. There are also some that specialize in one or two of these and it will usually be to the advantage of the advertiser to choose the marketing agency whose profile is adapted to the kind of advertising he wishes to undertake.

Interested in obtaining more information about your target audience, and ready to enlist the expertise of an ad agency? Contact us today to schedule a consultation!

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Characteristics of a Great Website 1200x600 c default
Characteristics of a Great Website 1200x600 c default

If you hit a search term and come up with websites dealing with the same subject, it is certain that some will attract your attention than others, even when they may all carry the same content. If you are a user, you can switch until you find a site that can quickly give you what you want. However if you are a web designer, you will want to produce a website that will attract and keep your visitors engaged. [quote] The trick is to get users attracted with great web design as well as with engaging content. [/quote]
Formula for a Great Website:

Create Original Content

Besides the obvious problems of plagiarism, making sure that your content is well written, appropriately presented and unique will give your readers something to always come for. It is common to see sites that just spread the information around, or just throw keywords for SEO purposes without making much sense. Try to make give value to your visitors by presenting carefully thought out text to attract and keep them coming for more quality information.

Design for your Target Audience

Keep your target audience in mind. You cannot design for the whole world, of course you can but if you are trying to sell a product or service, you will want to target a particular niche and keep that niche population in mind when you create your site. You have to think about them, put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if you were of the target population would you like your site.

Create a simple but creative and professional design. You might have come across sites whose webmasters have included all the tips and tricks of web design that they have learned to get and keep visitors. This is counterproductive as it reduces the value of the site. What is more the user gets confused with too much elements and you may find them avoiding your site instead. Therefore choose your design and follow through to the end. If it doesn’t work then change, reinvent and give your site a facelift.

Work on your Navigation

One of the important characteristics of a good website is the navigation. Great navigation lets users see where they are on your site, and also lets them know how to move about. Use creative techniques, text and symbols to help visitors navigate your site. Chances are when a person needs to look for information on the subjects that you deal with, they will likely come to your site, and also keep coming for more as they can find what they want, and they can also reference and cross reference with ease.

Design for Speed

Make sure that your site is easy to load on the browsers. Limit the graphic elements or optimize them for speed. If your site takes too long to load, it may be frustrating and users may tend to avoid your site.

Optimize your site for search engines

Good SEO techniques will enable your site to be indexed and found. Do not use keyword stuffing or other guerrilla tactics to get your site indexed and ranked. Use keywords so that they blend naturally into your web content and you will be on the way to attracting and keeping great clients.

A Good Website should have Functional and Reciprocal links

Create good content, but support them with great links for further information that that they may find your site an excellent resource. Moreover these links should regularly be checked to know if they are not dead links. Dead links should be checked, removed and replaced.

A good website regularly has information updated. They will keep information fresh so users can benefit from fresh content. You can use feeds to let users know when content is updated and also employ social marketing skills to make people know that your site is up, running and improving daily.

Need a little expert advice on how to take your online presence from good to great? Contact our team of web development gurus today!

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Alternative Marketing Strategies
Alternative Marketing Strategies

The average person has five social media accounts, and if we told you how much time they spent on each one, you probably wouldn’t believe us. It’s time to create some unique methods for reaching new customers that your company has probably never used before. Into the world of alternative marketing, we go!

The growth of the internet and the way it has become integrated into daily life means that it can be creatively sourced as a marketing tool and e-marketing has developed from this as an important alternative strategy. The attractiveness of online marketing is that it is cost effective and makes it much easier to target a specific group with a certain marketing pitch.

Going online has a lot of intrinsic advantages also. Most of it is related to the web design ideas that you choose to integrate into your site, be it an e-commerce site or an informational website. If your website is expertly designed and developed to be beautiful, user-friendly and with well thought-out and targeted keywords, you may benefit from web marketing strategies without paying anyone. Regularly updating your site and creating links to other sites, as well as encouraging inbound links, is a cost- and time-efficient tactic that can help bring traffic and ultimately result in increased sales.

Some of today’s most effective alternative marketing strategies involve the use of social media. With social media, you can join existing communities or create new communities and in turn a brand following, offering products to people on a relational basis. For example, Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, had the largest IPO since 2014, with a market evaluation of $24 billion. That being said, investors aren’t the only ones keeping a close eye on the social media platform—marketers are, too. Here you are able to communicate with clients in a whole new way and offer your products in an informal atmosphere. When used properly, social marketing doesn’t even look like marketing at all.

Contact us here to get started on your alternative marketing strategies today!

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Advantages of Using Social Media to Promote your Business
Advantages of Using Social Media to Promote your Business

Social media is generally used to describe interactive communication and dialogue that is common to the internet today. This is sometimes referred to as web 2.0 and at the heart of this is what is known as user generated content. It included software and tools that allow users to create and share content among each other and this power of interaction can be sourced by entrepreneurs to promote their businesses.
Social media includes the use of internet forums, weblogs, blogs, micro blogging, podcasts, video diffusion, social bookmarking and site rating.

One of the advantages of using social media to promote your business is that it is relatively inexpensive and easier to use than traditional promotional media such as newspapers, television and radio. Therefore anyone with any level of expertise can use social media for self promotion and advertising agencies that do internet marketing are also able to use this to their advantage. Here are a few reasons why it’s so advantageous to use social media to promote your business:

Increasing and improving website traffic

Everyone that is interested in building a website for selling ideas or products knows that the greater the traffic to your website, the greater the chances you have of making a sale and once a customer is satisfied with the service on your site, the greater chance he has of coming again for the same product or another, and the greater the chance of recommending your sites to peers through social media.

[quote]You can also serve your company by including links in your social media posts and by sending information about your site to your network of friends that becomes propagated through the process.[/quote]

Creating space for your business

In order for your business to be recognized in its niche, you have to do marketing by spreading the information around and social media is one of the interesting ways for creating buzz about your business. Social media will permit you to build a following, and send your name about which will enable you to create a name or brand recognition.

Social media can help you engage with customers in an entirely new way

Using social media can enable you to get personal with your clients. This can create customer loyalty especially if you are there to participate in discussions, offer your opinions and regularly answer questions. Just like in normal day to day business interactions where we tend to go to the shop where the owner engages us in conversation and become friends with us, so too your customers will keep coming for more.

Social media can help boost sales

Social media has been known to return in sales, and has been one of the driving forces in internet marketing. By connecting with your peers and diffusing information and new product information, these links create interest and thus generates sales.

Social media can help with image management

Every business man takes care of his image and the company’s image and rumors have been known to destroy businesses. However with social media, you are able to keep on top and know about changes in your reputation as well as reply quickly and work to change the destructive comments and rumors.

Social media can help with marketing research

You can use social media to conduct marketing research. You can encourage people in your network to offer reviews as well as just influence the comments in a particular direction to see what your competition is doing or which product or service is hot at the moment. This can help you plan for future services and product releases.

Cost effective marketing with social media

Social media is cheaper to learn, source and use and therefore it can be very effective when used and a few minutes of your day concentrated to this activity can produce a great deal of returns for you in the long run.

It is important to establish from the outset what you want to achieve from engaging in social media. This way you can easily see whether social media provides you with a return on the investment of your time. Keep measuring your success against your goals. If something isn’t working then don’t be afraid to change it or try another type of social media.

Looking for more strategies that allow you to play up the advantages of using social media to promote your brand? Contact us today to learn more!