Archive for January, 2012
Red Hot Topic #12: Breaking Down Brand Barriers
Posted by Tracy Stottler | Filed under Advertising, Travel Marketing
Every great brand has a personality. And like a real person, a brand builds relationships based on its characteristics and reputation. That is why defining the elements of your brand is essential. A brand is not simply a logo, a symbol or a tagline. A brand is a living entity—a collection of perceptions and beliefs that live in the hearts and minds of your customers. It’s the basis of communicating who you are.
But before you can work on building your brand, you must carefully analyze the possible barriers to its success. Certain market conditions can hinder your effectiveness, so it’s vital to identify and avoid those barriers early on. We urge you to consider the following in your own analysis.
Competition
Understanding what is available in the marketplace and potential consumer desire is essential to brand positioning. It is important to compile a list of your competitors, areas of benefit not currently claimed by them, any possible weak positions and ways in which your product shows superiority over the competition. This will put you at a distinct advantage in developing plans and creative concepts that garner results.
Positioning
To be effective, a company’s position in the marketplace must be unique, desirable, believable, deliverable, integrated and consistent. Work to establish brand positioning based on these criteria in order to develop successful marketing plans.
Location/Targeting
In the world of marketing, it’s about defining and redefining the targets. You need to know who your customers are before you can craft and deliver a message that speaks directly to them. It’s vital to have the resources necessary to mine the most accurate data and identify the high-quality sources that provide the best-qualified leads.
Timing
Is there a demand for your product or service at this time? Are there seasonal or time-sensitive considerations? By identifying exactly when the planning and buying are happening, you’ll be in a better position to build marketing delivery at a time when people have an interest in your brand.
Internal Buy-In
A brand cannot thrive simply by putting your logo everywhere. It’s about attitude, which starts with your senior leaders and staff. Your organization needs to understand your core brand values and live and breathe them every day. You need internal advocates that are your spokespeople, who demonstrate what your business stands for. Without this support from the ground up, a brand rarely succeeds.
Cost
Investing in getting your brand right is critical to laying the groundwork in any future marketing activity. You wouldn’t build a house without a foundation, and you shouldn’t build a marketing plan without solid branding in place. Most effective branding efforts can be costly, so unfortunately, it’s the step that is most often missed or, worse yet, cut from the strategic planning process. Finding the time and resources to get the right branding in place is the most important thing you can do.
Take control of your brand with the proper investigative and analytic approach, and be sure to stay current on market trends by subscribing to industry publications and newsletters. For more information about how you can crush your brand barriers, contact jgurtman@danacommunications.com.
Cover Your Bases
Posted by Michele Clerici | Filed under Advertising
I was once compared to a baseball umpire. As a professional proofreader, it’s my job to make the calls on the rules of language and accuracy. When I do my job right, no one notices. But if I make a bad call, I’m bound to have an angry crowd to face.
The reason why I like this analogy is because it perfectly illustrates why proofreading is vital to any successful brand. You’ll always hear about the obvious tenets of building a strong brand, like research, strategy, design, analysis, etc. But what about the importance of quality control?
We say that a brand is not a logo, a symbol or a tagline. It is a living entity—a collection of perceptions and beliefs that live in the hearts and minds of your customers. We say that a consumer should experience your brand in every facet of your product or service—from the hotel front desk to the company Facebook page. It’s in the way you design, the way you sell, the way you decorate, the way you speak, the energy you show and the tone you take. Whether you realize it or not, all of these elements contribute to how people perceive your brand. And unfortunately, so do your mistakes.
If you want consumers to trust your brand, you must show them your trustworthiness. If you want them to rely on you for their needs, you must show them your reliability. And no matter what your intentions, if you produce flawed creative and informational output, people will see your brand as flawed too.
Quality assurance is paramount to effective marketing. Just like a proofreader’s job, it may go unnoticed by your audience when done right, but you can bet that it will be front-page news when it’s not.
You have a limited opportunity to capture—and keep—the loyalty of consumers. If you want to win their business, you’ve got to play the game right—and that means taking the proper steps to ensure flawlessness in your brand messaging.
It’s batter up, and all eyes are on you. So be sure to step up your game with star quality!
Red Hot Topic #11: Will Twitter Brand Pages Take Off?
Posted by Chris Buckelew | Filed under Advertising, Red Hot Topics, Social Media, Trends
Sure, Twitter attracts Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga fans in hordes (16+ and 17+ million followers respectively), as well as last-minute deal hunters (think JetBlue Cheeps). But can the micro-blogging site compete with other social media platforms in building brand awareness?
In December, Twitter announced a redesign of its website and apps, making the start of 2012 the ideal time to rethink Twitter’s role in your marketing plan. Dana investigated and found four features of Twitter’s redesign worth noting.
- Easier to use: The redesign attempts to move the growing interest in Twitter to actual engagement—especially for social media beginners. A big change is demystifying those Twitter symbols; for example, replacing “@” and “#” with “connect” and “discover.” “Connect” lets you see who is followed, mentioned or re-tweeted, while “discover” offers follow suggestions based on your interests and location.
- More brand-friendly: The addition of business profile pages allows Twitter to compete with other social networks (read: Facebook). These brand pages (now available to a select group of companies like American Express, Dell and JetBlue) will make a bigger impression through more prominent logos, customized headers, embedded media and the ability to keep a specific tweet at the top of the timeline. Currently, customizing your company’s Twitter page is limited to the background, which is usually covered up by the timeline.
- Beyond the 140 characters: Twitter’s Promoted Ad Tweets let you extend your message with embedded video, images and more. Basically, the 140-character tweet becomes your caption.
- Better filters: Twitter now separates @ replies from mentions. The new filtering feature will allow brands (especially large ones with a lot of activity) to monitor messaging.
So what’s the takeaway on the Twitter redesign (in 140 characters or less)? Contact Dana for information and insights about using these new features to keep your brand on top—and follow us at twitter.com/danacomm!
Google PPC – Using Ad Extensions
Posted by Chris Rak | Filed under Interactive, Media, Trends
About a year ago, Google introduced a new AdWords advertising feature called Ad Extensions, which provides space for pay-per-click advertisers to include up to four links to their websites, underneath their sponsored listing.
Ad Extensions makes it uber easy for advertisers to update existing ads on a continual basis, refresh and promote various or seasonal offerings. They can be changed as often as the advertiser would like, making it possible to keep each ad up to date for current sales and marketing efforts.
This feature also expands the sizing of sponsored links. Advertisers need to bid appropriately to ensure that their sitelinks appear in the first or second position on the search engine results (a Top-2 position is required for the ad extensions to appear). However, there is no additional cost to running them. It’s just the cost-per-click, capped by the max bid amount.
There are five main extensions offered by Google:
- Location Extensions: Link your Google Places page to your ad campaign.
- Product Extensions: Link your product pages to your ad campaign, to display product pictures and prices within the Google search results.
- Sitelink Extensions: Direct users to more specific, relevant pages within your website.
- Call Extensions: Add a phone number to your campaign, and mobile users can click directly on it to call you.
- Social Extensions: Link your Google+ page to your ad campaign.
The results are proven as well, since ad extensions provide fantastic click-thru rates. While a standard text ad can expect an average click-thru rate of 1-2%, early results of ad extensions are showing 30% increases in click-thru rates for marketers, year over year. Sellers are noticing a 15-30% increase in brand PPC sales year over year.
At Dana, we are also seeing strong results from the ad extensions. Amongst our active campaigns, call extensions receive a click-thru rate ranging from 2.85 to 18.5%. Sitelink extensions are producing clicks at a rate of 8.5 to 22.7%, and location extensions are garnering a click-thru rate ranging from 5.4% to 18.1%.
Given the proven effectiveness of Ad Extensions, as well as its set-up simplicity and the expansion of on-page space on the search results page, we strongly suggest that every advertiser use some form of Ad Extensions in any ongoing Google paid search campaign.
