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If you’ve ever compared marketing in-house vs. agency vs. freelancer, you know there are many important factors to consider. Making the right choice for your business starts with defining your marketing objectives and weighing them against your strengths and weaknesses. In this blog, we’ll review in-house, agency, and freelancer marketing models to help you make the best decisions.

What is In-House Marketing?

With an in-house model, the bulk of your company’s marketing is handled by your own employees. Most businesses with an in-house team don’t use freelancers or agencies to supplement their marketing. Building a strong in-house marketing department starts with identifying the most important roles and filling them with experienced professionals who know how to achieve your goals.

Your in-house marketing team should include a marketing manager/CMO, creative director, and specialists in:

  • Internet marketing: SEO, local SEO, PPC, content, email, and social media
  • Web: design, development, UX design, eCommerce, hosting, and maintenance
  • Creative: branding, strategy, and print media

You may choose to supplement a small in-house team with the expertise of a marketing agency, which can handle areas outside of your strengths. We’ll take a closer look at the most common in-house marketing models below.

Common In-House Marketing Models

There are three main in-house marketing models: full competency, traditional, and hybrid:

  1. A full competency in-house team possesses comprehensive digital abilities and doesn’t require any external support.
  2. A traditional in-house team handles the bulk of your marketing efforts and only occasionally seeks support from third parties.
  3. A hybrid in-house team (or in-house marketing agency) is a separate in-house “agency” that works outside of your marketing team. They’re structured like a traditional agency, but their only client is your parent company. Hybrid teams typically take a more holistic look at overall marketing strategy and will occasionally outsource highly-specialized tasks to agencies.

Benefits of In-House Marketing

There are several pros of handling your marketing in-house vs. agency advertising. We’ll dig into each of these benefits in the following sections.

1. Brand, Product, & Service Knowledge

One of the biggest benefits of going in-house vs. agency is your existing employees’ familiarity with your products, services, and unique value proposition (UVP)/unique selling proposition (USP).

Your internal employees may also have a better grasp on your personas and where prospects and customers are in the buyer’s journey. With the right training, your in-house team can become resident experts who speak to your target audience using the most effective marketing channels.

2. Company Investment & Consistency

Your in-house marketing team is deeply invested in your success, as your fortune is also their own. Plus, rather than marketing several businesses, all of their attention is focused on your brand.

In-house designers vs. agency marketing can also help you ensure brand consistency and boost your team’s creativity. In fact, 56% of businesses feel they became more creative after consolidating their marketing under one roof.

3. Improved Communication & Flexibility

In most cases, marketing in-house vs. agency means faster communication and enhanced collaboration. Even if some of your team members are remote, you can connect instantly with them for important meetings and conversations.

More immediate communication allows you to make decisions quickly and respond to new trends. It also minimizes lengthy lead times because you can easily communicate with stakeholders. Additionally, you can make quick changes to time-sensitive assets and deliverables, rather than waiting on third parties.

In House Agency Freelancer 2 jpg Marketing In-House vs. Agency vs. Freelancer: Benefits & Drawbacks

4. Data Ownership & Transparency

Going in-house vs. agency can give you a better understanding of fundamental marketing data (like spend and results) to facilitate more informed decisions. And if you do choose to work with an agency from time to time, data ownership can help you select the right services since you know your strengths and weaknesses.

An awareness and clear understanding of your marketing data also promotes transparency across your organization. In fact, 59% of marketers feel bringing their advertising in-house contributed to increased transparency, better information/resource sharing, and enhanced communication.

Drawbacks of In-House Marketing

While there are benefits to marketing in-house vs. agency advertising, there are also several significant drawbacks to be aware of.

1. Creative Stagnancy & Routine

Focusing on the same topic(s) for extended periods of time can get old quickly, negatively impacting your marketers and creative team. This can make it more difficult to generate fresh ideas or get a solid grasp on what your competitors are doing. And if your team becomes too entrenched in routine, they may stop thinking outside the box.

2. Inexperience & Lack of Resources

Depending on how niche your industry is, new employees may not have the necessary experience and knowledge to produce high-quality work. Properly training new hires takes time and may end up diverting your focus from essential marketing duties. If you don’t have enough talent within your in-house team, you’ll want to hire a marketing agency to fill in the gaps.

3. HR Difficulties

Successful marketing requires a long-term strategy, so it’s very important to hire talent who will stay with your company. You’ll have to make strategic adjustments every time an employee leaves, which will slow down overall progress towards your goals.

Turnover also heightens pressure on remaining team members to pick up the slack, which can result in unsatisfactory work or cause other employees to leave. Plus, it takes much longer to hire and train new personnel than it does to partner with a marketing agency.

4. Pricey Software & Tools

Marketing and creative tools (e.g. SEMrush, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Adobe Creative Cloud) are an expensive proposition for in-house teams with limited budgets. Plus, you’ll need to vet potential tools to determine which ones are right for your business, which can be very time consuming.

What is a Marketing Agency?

Marketing agencies employ specialists who work with you to achieve your business goals. Their staff are experts in a variety of areas, including web design/development, content, and SEO, among others. Depending on your bandwidth and needs, you can outsource some or all of your marketing to an agency (like Tower!)

Benefits of Hiring a Marketing Agency

There are many pros of working with an experienced digital marketing agency vs. in-house advertising. We’ll review the most significant benefits of working with a digital marketing agency vs. freelancers or an internal team below.

1. Immediate Results

Agencies employ seasoned marketing experts who can usually deliver results more quickly and effectively than an in-house team. They can also efficiently scale up or down with your needs, which means you won’t have to let go of internal employees if you want to pause your marketing efforts. And as we mentioned above, it takes more time and effort to hire new team members than it does to partner with an agency.

In House Agency Freelancer 3 jpg Marketing In-House vs. Agency vs. Freelancer: Benefits & Drawbacks

2. Fresh Viewpoints

Agencies hedge against creative stagnancy by providing an unbiased assessment of your marketing and innovative plans for improvement. They may suss out opportunities that you’ve overlooked because they’re not as immersed in the day-to-day operations of your business.

If the agency you choose already has experience within your industry, they’ll probably have a solid grasp on what’s already been done and what’s trending. This frees up valuable time for you to focus on highly-specialized marketing that requires in-house levels of expertise.

3. Experience & Expertise

Agencies typically specialize in certain industries, so you’ll easily be able to find one with an in-depth understanding of your market’s challenges and opportunities. And because agency staff have experience across every area of marketing, there’s no need to build a large in-house team.

Most agencies also have established connections with trusted third-party vendors like photographers and videographers. Ultimately, partnering with an accomplished marketing agency helps ensure you get the best value and highest return on investment (ROI).

4. Lower Costs

Working with an agency is usually less of an upfront and ongoing investment than hiring and training a team of in-house marketers. You also won’t have to spend any time or money on training new internal employees. Plus, agencies already subscribe to the best marketing tools, so you won’t have to invest in pricey software.

Drawbacks of Hiring a Marketing Agency

There are many benefits of partnering with a digital marketing agency vs. in-house advertising, but there are also a few cons to keep in mind. However, these drawbacks can easily be negated by working with a client-focused agency that always keeps your best interests in mind. 

1. Different Locations

If your marketing agency is located in a different time zone than your business, it may be difficult to schedule video meetings or phone calls that fit everyone’s schedules. You may also be unable to meet in person, which can be valuable at the beginning of a client-agency relationship.

2. Less Attention

You may end up feeling neglected and out of the loop if your agency isn’t completely client focused. If your account executive doesn’t function as an extension of your in-house marketing team, it’s time to find a new agency.

You’re not working under the same roof as your agency, so communication and decision making typically take a bit longer. Additionally, your agency may sometimes be slower to address your needs depending on their workload, priorities, and internal concerns.

3. Lack of Control

Working with an agency requires you to give up some control over your marketing, since they work best with the latitude and freedom to make strategic decisions. It’s very important to find an agency you can trust to always have your best interests in mind. Giving their experts the space they need to make strategic choices will net you the best results while also reducing roadblocks and bottlenecks.

What is Freelancer Marketing?

Freelancers are hired on a contract basis and provide specific marketing services to clients on a project-by-project basis. In some cases, freelance marketers also have full- or part-time jobs at other companies. You’ll find freelance marketers that specialize in every aspect of marketing, from content creation and web design to local SEO and social media advertising.

Tips for Hiring a Freelance Marketer

There are several important items to keep in mind when hiring a freelancer vs. agency advertising or building an in-house team:

  • Review their portfolio to gain a sense of their experience and skill level
  • Closely examine their LinkedIn profile, resume, and cover letter (if applicable)
  • Request referrals and testimonials from their previous clients
  • Choose a freelancer with knowledge of and experience with your industry
  • Interview multiple freelancers and compare them based on skills, experience, and rates
In House vs. Agency vs. Freelancer jpg Marketing In-House vs. Agency vs. Freelancer: Benefits & Drawbacks

Benefits of Hiring a Freelance Marketer

If you’re considering hiring a freelance marketer, there are several important benefits to be aware of. We’ll take a closer look at each one below.

1. Inexpensive Option

If you don’t have the budget to hire a marketing agency or build an in-house team, freelancers are probably your best option. In fact, 40% of businesses prefer freelancers because they’re a flexible and affordable way to quickly scale up or down.

Since they aren’t full-time employees, freelancers save you money because you don’t have to provide them with benefits. There are also no long-term commitments, and you only pay for the marketing and creative work you need.

2. Enhanced Agility

If you employ in-house marketers, freelancers can quickly step in when your team is overworked and their productivity is flagging. Plus, freelancers usually don’t have to give two weeks notice to a current employer, so they can start immediately and hit the ground running. And because you aren’t confined only to people in your immediate area, you have access to a larger pool of talent.

Like agencies, experienced freelancers can bring a fresh perspective that revitalizes your marketing and helps you think outside the box. Marketing trends are always changing, so agility and adaptability are key to success.

3. Low Maintenance

As we alluded to above, freelancers are much easier to hire, manage, let go, and replace than full-time employees. They also require less of an emotional investment from you as an employer. It can be difficult to fire underperforming full-time employees due to legal protections, but this isn’t an issue with freelancers.

Drawbacks of Hiring a Freelance Marketer

There are multiple cons to consider before choosing a freelancer vs. agency marketing or an in-house team. Here are the most important drawbacks to be aware of.

1. Longer Timelines

You’re probably not your freelancer’s only client, so it’s important to prepare for longer turnaround periods and project timelines. It may also be difficult to integrate freelancers into your existing systems and procedures, which can slow down the onboarding process. These impactful delays can be especially problematic if you’re in the early stages of developing your company.

2. Disconnected Schedules

If your freelancer is extremely busy or lives in a different time zone, it may be difficult to schedule phone calls and coordinate meetings. Plus, the flexible working hours associated with freelancing means they may not always be available during the traditional workday, unlike agencies or full-time employees. Be sure to consider who will coordinate freelancer schedules, oversee/review their work, and set deadlines to keep them on schedule.

3. Variable Quality

Anyone can freelance, so properly vetting candidates is crucial to making a wise investment. Some freelancers may not have the skillset to handle multiple marketing functions, which means you’ll have to hire several people. And piecemealing your marketing often produces disjointed, lower quality work than you’d receive from an in-house team or agency.

Deciding between marketing in-house vs. agency vs. freelancer? We’d love to discuss your goals and challenges and explore how Tower Marketing can help you achieve your business objectives.

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Whether you listen to Christmas music year-round or dread the holiday rush, there’s no denying that the holidays are the most profitable time of year for many businesses. In fact, estimates from the National Retail Foundation attributed between $755.3 to $766.7 billion in sales last holiday season alone.

In order to capitalize on some of the biggest shopping days of the year, here are a few of our favorite holiday marketing ideas and advertising tips.

General Tips for Holiday Advertising

Before we dig into the tactics that can help boost your business during the holiday season, it’s important to understand the bigger picture of marketing during the holidays. Here are five goals to keep in mind when planning your holiday marketing campaigns.

1. Be Timely

It’s never too early to start planning your holiday marketing ideas and initiatives. Pages can take up to 45 days to rank, so we recommend moving any web-based tactics live no later than mid-October. While Christmas isn’t until the end of December, many people start shopping in early- to mid-November, well before Black Friday deals hit.

2. Be Brief

With advertising competition at an all-time high, attention spans are short. Keep your messaging short, sweet, and impactful for the best results.

3. Stay Focused

Online noise and increased ad costs mean that your holiday advertising ideas have to be sharply focused to make an impact. If you have a limited budget, focus on a few key days of sales based on historical data from years past.

If you’re looking for the strongest return possible on a small budget, remarketing is another great option, as you’re likely to see a higher conversion rate by advertising to former and current customers.

4. Respect Your Brand

Just because it’s the holiday season doesn’t mean that your blue brand has to transform to red and green! Consider what the holidays look like visually for your business, and allow your foundational brand to shine through in every marketing initiative you undertake.

Here are some holiday angles to consider:

  • Feel-good, charitable, emotional, and grateful
  • Exciting, flashy, and full of great deals
  • Fun, bright, and family-focused
  • Non-denominational, winter-focused, or inclusive of all winter holidays

When choosing a direction for your holiday marketing ideas, always consider your business’s brand, tone, and overall marketing goals. Slapping a graphic Santa Claus on your year-round advertising simply doesn’t cut it.

5. Be Truly Competitive

Don’t expect to own the market and see a massive boost in sales if you’re only willing to offer 10% off and free shipping. In order to succeed at marketing during the holidays, you’ll need to be generous with your sales and special offers, especially to loyal customers who have waited all year to make a big purchase and get a great deal.

If you’re a service-based company, consider offering vouchers or pre-orders that customers can buy now and use later. Not only does this create urgency and encourage sales, but it allows you to pre-schedule and guarantee your next year of business ahead of time.

In order to rank during the competitive holiday season, you’ll need to foster strategic search engine optimization (SEO) on your website year round. That being said, here are a few considerations to keep top-of-mind to expand your optimization during the holidays.

Holiday SEO & PPC Strategies

SEO and PPC should be a major focus when it comes to holiday marketing ideas. Making timely gift guide landing pages for holiday search terms is one of the best ways to capitalize on the busy shopping season.

Fill these pages not only with best-selling products but thoughtful content that will help customers who are unfamiliar with your business make a quick and easy purchase. And, be sure to focus on internal linking and all of the usual SEO-boosting suspects to get your pages ranking.

Keep in mind that like with any paid medium during the holidays, you’ll pay more per click than you do during other times of the year. The heavy competition can be discouraging when deploying your holiday marketing ideas through PPC, but it can pay off big if you are strategic in your keywords and bids.

The Merits of Google My Business

An often-overlooked element of your website’s search engine optimization is your Google My Business (GMB) profile. This panel allows customers to view your company’s store hours, reviews, and updates without even having to click through to your website.

Be sure to complete your GMB profile before the holiday season begins, and revisit it frequently to ensure your hours, contact info, and other store details stay up to date.

Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns: Signups & Savings

The holiday season is one of the best times to grow your email list organically. The trick? Offering direct, valuable savings to customers to encourage them to sign up. Once you have a customer hooked, here are a few tricks to prevent them from unsubscribing:

  • Use subject lines to create urgency around sales and deals
  • Create email automations for abandoned carts
  • Offer valuable content like gift guides and product tips

Inboxes are especially cluttered this time of year, so be sure that each email you send has a true purpose and won’t simply frustrate your customer to the point of unsubscribing.

Holiday Social Advertising Strategies

With high costs and oversaturated platforms, social advertising during the holidays can be incredibly competitive. You’ll have to be at the top of your game if you want to stand out among the crowd.

Giveaways, contests, and other content that encourages audience engagement can be particularly helpful in breaking through the noise. While you have limited space to get your message across, try to think about your audience and speak directly to them in a novel and creative way to grab their attention. At the end of the day, authentic ads that showcase great deals will do far more than screaming at users with all caps and bright flashing signs.

Writing Content for the Holiday Season

When it comes to holiday marketing ideas, content is everything. Here are three tips to keep your content thriving and bringing in new customers.

1. Be Timely

We can’t stress enough the importance of timeliness when it comes to seasonal content. It can take weeks or months for your content to be indexed and served to users. And, many users start researching holiday decorations, gifts, and more up to two months before the big day. 

That means any search-driven content you have planned needs to go live no later than October. It may feel strange working on holiday copy before fall has even arrived, but it will pay off big time come the holiday season.

2. Consider Your Unique Holiday Customers

During the holidays, millions of people shop for gifts at stores they’re unfamiliar with. One of the best ways to earn a new customer is to make sure they have everything they need to make a decision (and a purchase), even if they’re unfamiliar with your industry.

Consider building out your product pages further to aid in product comparison and streamline decision-making. Product guides that go over sizing, features, and the differences between product models can also make online shopping a breeze for those unfamiliar with your store.

3. Utilize Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the top ways that Google understands the architecture and content relationships on your website. This means that high-quality internal linking can help your holiday-themed blogs gain traction faster when every day counts.

Use links with purpose. No reader wants a constant bombardment of product links without any explanation to help them make a decision. Be sure to include plenty of helpful and educational content links, as well.

Breaking the Mold with Creative Holiday Campaigns

With so much noise online, you’ll need to think differently when brainstorming holiday marketing ideas if you want to stand out in your customers’ eyes. Consider the go-to marketing tactics of competitors and industry leaders, and then brainstorm adjacent or opposing ideas to get started.

One of our favorite innovative holiday marketing strategies over the years was a digital holiday card we created for local law firm Barley Snyder. They wanted a unique and memorable way to wish their clients and colleagues a happy holiday season. We planned, designed, and animated a custom digital greeting card that was equal parts meaningful and charming.

Barley Snyder Winter Holiday Wishes 2019

Check out the full Barley Snyder case study. 

Dreaming of an amazing holiday marketing campaign but don’t have the time or resources to bring it to life? See how our team can help!

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We understand the aversion some businesses feel when they hear the phrase “social media marketing.” You may know that Facebook has a timeline, Pinterest has boards, and LinkedIn has connections, but apart from that, it all feels confusing.

In an effort to demystify all these channels, this blog is going to break down three popular social media platforms for paid marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn, & Pinterest) and analyze their strengths/drawbacks in ad targeting, reporting, and overall efficacy. The goal? We’ll help you learn more about three of the best social media platforms for marketing and how they can help your business.

Why Use Social Media Ads for Business?

Social media advertising allows a business to reach new audiences that would otherwise be unreachable due to the algorithms behind organic social media posting. Creating unpaid (also called “organic”) posts is great for interacting with your followers, but there’s little chance it will bring in new customers or lead to sales unlike the earlier days of social media.

Some other benefits of social media advertising include:

  • Increased brand awareness at a very cheap cost.
  • Better data on the demographics and interests of your target audience.
  • More traffic is driven to your site (which can potentially increase leads and revenue.)
  • Build relationships and give people a chance to engage with (not just see) your ad.

Figuring out how to use social media marketing to grow your business is challenging, but it can have a rewarding payoff. Below we’ll explore what you can do to get started and the unique ad offerings of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

How to Start with Social Media

Before jumping in, you first need to learn about the capabilities of each platform and then pick which one best aligns with your marketing goals. Your business type and industry will determine your B2B or B2C marketing strategies on social media.

Some helpful questions to ask yourself are:

  1. Who is my target audience?
  2. Which social platforms are they using?
  3. What kind of social content do they best respond to?

When starting to develop a social media advertising strategy, it’s important to make a plan based on research. But it’s also important to give yourself room for testing, so you can gather data and learn more about who your audience is or isn’t (especially if you can’t answer the questions above). As a part of that planning process, let’s take a closer look at the specifics of these three top platforms.

How to Use Facebook for Social Media Marketing

As the most popular social media platform in the world, Facebook is still one of the best social media platforms for marketing. The benefits of Facebook marketing include:

  • Very low-cost advertising options
  • Variety of ad formats to use (video, slideshow, image, etc.)
  • Great reach with local and global audiences

Let’s take a look below at some of the specific features you can use within their advertising tool.

Facebook Audience Demographics Options

Understanding demographic targeting is crucial to creating a social strategy. It helps you see who your social ads are resonating with and plan out future ad campaigns that are targeted towards the right people. 

Through Facebook you can choose:

  • Location (specific zip codes, counties, states, or countries)
  • Age (18-65)
  • Gender
  • Languages
  • Relationship status (single, married, divorced, etc.)
  • Education level (high school grad, some college, college grad, masters, etc.)
  • Income bracket (top 25%-50%, top 10%, etc.)
  • Life Events (just moved, engaged, new job, etc.)
  • Household role (parent, etc.)
  • Political affiliation (likely to engage in conservative politics, etc.)

The extensive range of specific targeting Facebook offers makes it a prime hub for testing. It also makes it one of the best social media platforms for marketing. 

Facebook Interest Targeting

Facebook allows you to further define your audience by allowing you to target users based on their interests, activities, and the pages they “like” related to:

  • Entertainment & art
  • Brands & publications 
  • Hobbies & activities
  • Fitness & wellness
  • Business 
  • Family & relationships 
  • Food & drink
  • Shopping & fashion
  • Sports & outdoors
  • Technology

Facebook Behavior Options for Targeting

This option factors into account data collected from users on their device usage, shopping behaviors, or their past intent while interacting on the platform. It allows you to target people with behaviors that fit the following buckets:

  • Digital tools used (operating systems, browsers, plugins, etc.)
  • Mobile device or browser details (iOS, Android, tablet, etc.)
  • Purchasing behavior (for cars, fashion, tech, etc.)
  • Media consumption (radio or TV)
  • Residential status (homeowner, renter, likely to move, etc.)
  • Seasonal events and interests
  • Travel profile (business travel, frequent traveler, commuter, on vacation, etc.)

When creating your first Facebook ad audience, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll use all of these targeting options at the same time. It’s best to start simple and tighten your targeting over time based on the data you collect showing who is interacting with your ads.

Facebook’s Reporting Capabilities

Depending on your marketing goals, you can customize Facebook’s ad report columns. However, by default, your Ads Manager table will most likely include:

  • Results. This shows the number of times people took action on your ad based on the objective you set it to have: link clicks, page likes, phone calls, leads, etc. 
  • Cost Per Result. This breaks down how much you spent on each of those results. (Total budget divided by the total amount of results.)
  • Reach. The number of unique users who saw your ad.
  • Impressions. The total number of times your ad was displayed on a screen (counting any time the same user refreshed your ad as well.)
  • Amount. The actual spend of your campaign’s budget within the allotted run time.
  • Bid Strategy. How you’re telling Facebook to bid in its auction to show your ad – you can use bid caps or target costs to ensure you don’t eat up your total budget too quickly.
  • Attribution Settings. The finite amount of time when conversions are credited to the ad and used to optimize who it shows to in upcoming run time.
  • Frequency. How many times a person in your audience is seeing the ad.

*Some of the terms above will be used again below. To avoid redundancy, please reference this list for an explanation of those terms.

Once a campaign finishes, Facebook allows you to download this data into a spreadsheet. You can even customize which metrics you want to include so you’re only looking at the ones that matter to your business. 

Looking at this data will help you understand how your audience is responding and adjust your ad targeting or ad creative as needed.

three people hold iPhones in their hands

How to Use LinkedIn for Social Media Marketing

If your business is geared towards professionals or companies, LinkedIn could be a great place to focus your businesses’ marketing efforts. You’ll find it has a lot of robust targeting options to help you reach your ideal audience online.

LinkedIn Audience Targeting Options

With LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you can build a precise audience with the following options:

  • Demographics (age, gender, location)
  • Education (fields of study, member schools, degrees)
  • Job experience (job function, job seniority, job title, years of experience)
  • Company (company connections, industry, size, or a business’ name, followers, and growth rate)
  • Interests and traits (member groups, member interests, member traits)

LinkedIn Forecasted Results

While building your LinkedIn audience, the platform provides an estimated results tool that shows if your targeting is too broad or narrow. This is especially helpful if you’re new to running LinkedIn ads and have no previous data to go off of.

Ongoing Optimization

One of the benefits of using LinkedIn for social media marketing is that it shows you which demographics are underperforming while your ad is running. Then you can exclude them during your ad campaign so you see a better performance and spend with your budget. Plus, you have a cleaner audience for future ads.

LinkedIn’s Reporting Capabilities

Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn offers a wide range of data to pull from at the end of a paid campaign. By default, you can access the following metrics:

  • Impressions
  • Number of clicks 
  • Click-through-rate percentage (CTR)
  • Average cost per click or result
  • Number of conversions
  • Cost per conversion
  • Number of leads
  • Cost per lead
  • Event registrations

Depending on the goal of your campaign (e.g. brand awareness, conversions, lead generation, etc.) you can customize your view to show the metrics that best indicate success. This data will help you figure out how you can best move forward with future ads. 

Want to learn more about LinkedIn advertising? View our guide on LinkedIn Ads which goes more in-depth about ad formats, audiences & more.

How to Use Pinterest for Social Media Marketing

Pinterest allows users to “pin” posts that interest them. This allows an ad’s pin to serve as its own remarketing campaign because users can see a businesses’ pin after the campaign’s initial run.

Businesses that benefit the most from Pinterest ads typically have a visually appealing product or service.  For example, the following industries can find a lot of success with Pinterest ads:

  • Outdoor builders & home remodelers
  • Home & lifestyle businesses
  • Retail and fashion companies
  • Art and design services

Since Pinterest is primarily used for finding and saving ideas, a kitchen design company is likely to gain more traction on Pinterest than an accounting agency.

Pinterest Targeting Options

Pinterest has a relatively simple targeting interface compared to other social platforms. Your targeting options for ads include:

  • Keywords & Interests (this is where an SEO specialist can help)
  • Demographics (gender, age, location, device type)
  • Placement (main feed browser or search)

Pinterest’s Keyword Targeting

One of Pinterest’s standout features is the ability to add and exclude keywords during your ad setup.  Part of this is that its users view Pinterest as a search engine. People log in to search topics like “bathroom remodel with vanity” or “large playset for backyard”.

Compared to LinkedIn and Facebook, Pinterest has a less detailed approach to who you’re targeting. But if you have an active audience there, it can end up being an extremely effective advertising tool.

Pinterest’s Reporting Capabilities

By default, Pinterest offers the following metrics to monitor the performance of an ad:

  • Spend
  • Impressions
  • Pin clicks (who clicked into the pin to view it)
  • Outbound clicks (who clicked the URL in your pin)
  • Cost per result
  • Click-through-rate (CTR)

While simple, all this data is good quality information that helps you understand how many people are visiting your website or landing page from Pinterest.

Is There a Winner?

So, which of the three covered is actually the best social media platform for marketing? Well, it really depends. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest all allow you to build and target a relevant audience. They just offer very different types of targeting. Instead of picking which one you think is a winner, you should test which platform is your home run.

Need guidance to get the best value out of your social ads? Our team is here to help you navigate.

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Have you heard about Google’s new Core Web Vitals? An addition to the four existing Page Experience signals, Core Web Vitals are crucial to the best possible user experience (loading, interactivity, and visual stability). Google will gradually start rolling out these metrics in mid-June, and they’ll play a full role in ranking determinations by the end of August. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at each of the Core Web Vitals, how they’ll impact your website, tools for improving them, and more.

What Are Google’s Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals assess user experience (on desktop and mobile) in terms of speed and how quickly visitors can interact with a page. Each Core Web Vital “represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome.”

Rather than focusing solely on text elements, Core Web Vitals evaluate the quality of overall user experience (UX) within a page. There are three Core Web Vitals:

  1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  2. First Input Delay (FID)
  3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

LCP assesses performance and loading, FID responsiveness and interactivity, and CLS visual stability. Core Web Vitals make up the largest portion of your Google Page Experience Score, which also includes the following existing search signals:

  1. Mobile Friendly
  2. Safe Browsing
  3. HTTPS
  4. No Intrusive Interstitials

We’ll take a closer look at Page Experience Score later in this blog. Let’s start by digging into the details of each Core Web Vital.

Core Web Vitals 2 jpg What You Should Know About Google Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vital #1 :: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how quickly the largest content element on a page loads. This is typically a large, block-level piece of text, image, or video. Rather than assessing load time for the entire page, LCP examines how long it takes a page to load from the user’s point of view, which is the most important page speed metric of all.

A good LCP is less than 2.5 seconds, which means the largest element shows within 2.5 seconds of when the page starts loading. Optimizing your LCP is important because longer load times are proven to have a severe negative effect on bounce rates. To improve your LCP time, consider:

  • Removing large page elements
  • Upgrading your web host
  • Implementing lazy loading
  • Removing unnecessary third-party scripts

Core Web Vital #2 :: First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay (FID) measures the amount of time from when a user first interacts with a page to their browser’s response to that interaction. User interactions include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Selecting a menu or navigation option
  • Clicking a link or button
  • Entering text into a field
  • Opening an accordion menu on mobile

FID goes beyond your PageSpeed score because it measures the time it takes for a user to complete a specific action. That means it requires field data from real-time users and cannot be generated through lab simulations.

A good FID should be no more than 100 milliseconds to provide great user experience on the web. To improve your FID time, consider:

  • Utilizing a browser cache
  • Removing non-critical third-party scripts
  • Deferring (or minimizing) JavaScript

Core Web Vital #3 :: Cumulative Shift Layout (CSL)

Cumulative Shift Layout (CSL) calculates the total number of layout shifts that occur as an entire page loads. In other words, it determines how quickly a page is visually stable during the loading process. Page stability during loading helps ensure visitors don’t click something by mistake or have to re-learn where links, buttons, and fields are.

A good CSL is anything less than 0.1. Your score can be as low as 0 and increases every time shift layouts occur. In other words, a higher score means elements are jumping around a lot while your page loads. There’s no maximum score, but Core Web Vitals score 0.25 or above as “Poor.” To improve your CSL score, consider:

  • Adding additional UI elements below the fold
  • Ensuring ad elements have reserved space
  • Defining size attribute dimensions for media

How Do Core Web Vitals Fit Into Google’s Ranking Factors?

Core Web Vitals are a crucial new component of a metric set known as Page Experience signals. These assess a page’s overall user web experience by considering the most important non-text elements. In other words, they consider how users perceive their interactions with a page and how useful that page is in satisfying their query. We’ll examine the four existing Page Experience signals below.

Core Web Vitals 1 jpg What You Should Know About Google Core Web Vitals

1. Mobile Friendly

This assesses how easy websites are to navigate on mobile devices. This includes the accessibility of links and on-page elements, along with content readability. Every part of a page should be just as functional on mobile as it is on desktop, which is the foundation of responsive design.

2. Safe Browsing

Safe Browsing determines whether a website has problems like hacked content, phishing, and malware. It’s focused on ensuring that visitors can safely browse for what they’re looking for.

3. HTTPS

This metric assesses the security of a website and whether it’s being served over HTTPS per Google best practice recommendations.

4. No Intrusive Interstitials

This signal ensures that essential on-page content is not obstructed by intrusive interstitials (pop-up ads), promoting a pleasant browsing experience.

How Are Your Core Web Vitals Scores Calculated?

Core Web Vitals scores are calculated using the 75th percentile over a 28-day window. In other words, it uses three of four site visits (75%) to determine whether a page meets the target for each Core Web Vital. If a page satisfies the recommended scores for all three metrics, it passes the Core Web Vitals assessment.

How Will Core Web Vitals Impact Your Website?

While Core Web Vitals are certainly important, it’s key to understand that Google considers hundreds of unique signals when ranking web pages. However, Core Web Vitals can make a significant difference for pages that are competing for extremely competitive terms. Core Web Vitals will evolve continuously over time as user expectations change, so it’s crucial to stay informed.

How Can You Improve Your Core Web Vitals Scores?

There are many free tools you can use to analyze and improve your Core Web Vitals scores. Bettering these metrics can help you outperform your competitors and rank higher in Google search engine results pages. We recommend the following tools to review your Core Web Vitals scores and uncover opportunities for improvement.

Tool #1 :: Google Search Console Core Web Vitals Report

If you want to improve your Core Web Vitals scores, start with Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals Report. Located in the “Enhancements” section of your Search Console account, the Core Web Vitals Report provides an overview of how your entire site is performing.

Mobile Score with Mobile View What You Should Know About Google Core Web Vitals
Screenshot of Tower Marketing’s Core Web Vitals Report.

The Core Web Vitals Report uses field data from the Chrome User Experience Report to group indexed URLs by issue. This is because UX problems on similar pages are typically caused by the same underlying problem. Each URL is scored as “Poor,” “Needs Improvement,” or “Good.”

Once you’ve pinpointed a problem, you can remediate it using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Google Lighthouse. The following two sections examine these tools in more detail to help you optimize for UX.

Tool #2 :: Google PageSpeed Insights Report

Your Google Search Console Core Web Vitals report links to a corresponding report in Google PageSpeed Insights, which is powered by Lighthouse lab simulations. PageSpeed Insights measures Core Web Vitals using both lab and field data. Focus on the “Opportunities” and “Diagnostics” sections to identify issues on each URL and effectively optimize for site speed.

PageSpeed Insights Loading What You Should Know About Google Core Web Vitals
Screenshot of PageSpeed Insights loading Tower Marketing’s website.

Tool #3 :: Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is an automated tool that runs audits against a URL and creates a report on that page’s performance. Lighthouse 6.0 includes lab metrics for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), making it an invaluable tool when assessing Core Web Vitals.

Total Blocking Time (TBT)

Lighthouse 6.0’s third new metric is Total Blocking Time (TBT), which correlates directly with First Input Delay (FID). Simply put, TBT calculates the total time between LCP and Time to Interactive (TTI). TTI is the amount of time from when a page starts loading to when it reliably responds to user interaction.

Time to First Byte (TTFB)

The “Opportunities” section of your Lighthouse report also includes Time to First Byte (TTFB). As the name suggests, this is the amount of time it takes a browser to receive the first byte of page content.

Time to Interactive (TTI)

Included in the “Performance” section of your Lighthouse report, Time to Interactive (TTI) measures how long it takes a page to become fully interactive. TTI works alongside TBT to pinpoint and diagnose interactivity issues that can negatively impact your FID. Because it’s not field-measurable or user-centric, TTI isn’t included in Core Web Vitals.

Tool #4 :: Google Search Console Page Experience Report

The Page Experience Report combines your Core Web Vitals report with the other four Page Experience signals: Mobile Friendly, Safe Browsing, HTTPS, and No Intrusive Interstitials. Taking a deep dive into each component of the Page Experience signal can help you uncover new opportunities for improvement, which can be particularly helpful in tie-breaker situations.

Tool #5 :: Google Chrome User Experience (CrUX) Report

The Chrome User Experience Report is an anonymous public report of user experience data from millions of web pages. It measures field data (as opposed to lab data) on all three Core Web Vitals and doesn’t factor in simulations or Googlebot visits. Seeing how your pages perform in the field is a great way to pinpoint valuable improvement opportunities.

Tool #6 :: Google Chrome DevTools

Google Chrome DevTools are built into the Google Chrome browser and are designed to help you diagnose and remediate issues that can lead to a high CSL. They also measure TBT, which is beneficial when looking to improve your FID.

Tool #7 :: Google Chrome Web Vitals Extension

Available in the Chrome Web Score, the Web Vitals Extension measures all three Core Web Vitals in real-time. This instant data on loading, interactivity, and layout shifts helps you identify opportunities that can make a big difference.

Tool #8 :: Semrush Site Audit Tool

The Site Audit Tool in your Semrush account reports on a variety of data that correlates with Core Web Vitals. This includes loading speed metrics, HTTPS security protocols, JavaScript and CSS errors, crawlability, and more.

Partner with Tower Marketing to Improve Your Core Web Vitals Scores

The best (and easiest) way to identify and remediate Core Web Vitals issues is by working with an agency like Tower Marketing. Our experienced team of web developers and SEOs have the tools to bring your site up to Core Web Vitals recommendations, and we’ll fix any problems as they arise.

Want to check Core Web Vitals for your site and see how you stack up against these new Page Experience metrics?

Contact Our Team

We hear from businesses all the time that are looking for a new logo. Perhaps they’re starting a new company or are looking to modernize their business. But what many of these businesses don’t realize is that creating a brand identity will provide far more value to their company than simply redesigning their logo.

If you’re not sure where to start when creating a brand for your company, here’s everything you should know before approaching a rebranding project.

What is a Brand Identity?

Simply speaking, a brand identity is the set of elements that establish your business visually and set it apart from your competitors. These elements likely include a logo, color palette, fonts, and key pieces of messaging. They must be consistent but flexible, and perhaps most importantly, they must be functional and easy to use.

But creating a brand identity is about much more than a handful of visual elements. Your brand is in everything you do. It’s the greeting you use when you answer the phone. It’s the decisions you make on packaging and materials. It’s how you react to a crisis. Your brand is what makes you, well… you.

Your Business’s First Brand vs. Rebranding

While the process for a first brand vs. a rebrand may look similar, there are a few key differences to keep in mind.

Your First Brand

If you’re a start-up or new company, you likely won’t have as much data on your customers as an established business. In this case, external research is especially crucial to make sure you have a clear picture of your potential customers. Doing this research will not only help you in creating a brand identity, but may also be of use in your business development strategies and your lead generation.

If you’re working with venture capital, a startup incubator, or any other investors, you’ll also need to keep them in mind. The buy-in of these key players is essential to a successful brand launch.

Before you engage with a logo designer or agency, outline the internal process for your team. Include a timeline, key players who will be involved at each stage, and a budget. This will ensure the brand is developed on time and on budget and will help your key stakeholders feel included in the process.

Rebranding

If you have an existing brand and are considering rebranding, you have a major advantage over new companies since you know far more about your customer than they do. The flipside is that it can be harder to separate yourself and your view of your company from how your customer sees you.

For example, you may have in your mind that you need to level up your brand into a more formal, professional space. However, your customers may love your approachability and lack of red tape. 

While pleasing higher-ups and stakeholders matters, your company’s success relies on your customers. Balancing the needs and desires of both groups will ensure that you develop a successful brand strategy.

Part One: Understanding Your Audience

While it can be tempting to put pen to paper and start sketching out logo ideas, it’s crucial that your brand begins with your audience.

Who Is Your Audience?

Understanding your audience is the first step toward creating a brand. You’ll need to get inside your customers’ heads to understand what they look for in a product or service, what drives them to make decisions, and how to make them choose you over your competitors.

Here are some methods and strategies to explore to find out more about your customers:

  • Conducting market research
  • Holding focus groups
  • Performing social listening to see what customers are saying
  • Asking customers to fill out surveys (online or in-person)
  • Developing a persona to better illustrate your typical customer
  • Diving into Google Analytics, social analytics data, or other information you may already own that can tell you more about your customers
  • Hiring an agency to create an audience intelligence document for your company

Once you’ve decided on your method, you may need to complete further research to understand how to leverage the method you’ve chosen. Fair research without bias or leading questions is your best chance at understanding your customers authentically.

Here are some questions to consider when researching your audience:

  • Are your customers consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B)?
  • What is/are your main demographic(s) – age, gender, location, etc.?
  • What is their education level? Financial status? Marital status?
  • What drives them to choose you over your fiercest competitor?
  • What matters to them most? Price point? Quality? Convenience?

You’ll be far more successful in creating a brand identity once you have a solid understanding of your customers and know what makes them tick.

Part Two: Strategizing Against Your Competitors

In addition to researching your customers, you’ll also want to take a deeper look at your competition. You may have already gathered a list of competitors your customer mentioned in your former research, but don’t be afraid to include other competitors you know in the industry.

What do their brands look like? Do you want your brand identity to stand out from the crowd? Or would you rather blend in but do so with perfect execution? What do their brands do well and poorly?

Answering these questions as you engage with a brand designer will help you have a clearer vision of what you want. And, it will help guide conversations about your fonts, brand color palette, and brand voice down the line.

enwild logo on blue background
A logo we developed for outdoor gear retailer, Enwild.

Part Three: The Logo

Getting a new logo is exciting. It’s one of the most visual pieces of your brand and is an element you’ll likely interact with on a daily basis. Plus, it’s the face of your brand when it comes to customer interaction. Here are a few tips to make sure you get the most out of your new logo.

Put Your Customer First

It can be hard to distance yourself from your company’s brand, but remember that you are not your customer. When creating a brand identity, try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Think about their demographic, the other brands they likely shop from, and how your brand can best appeal to them. Just because you don’t like brutalist design or the color orange doesn’t mean it isn’t a great option that your customers will love.

Provide Great Feedback

One of the areas where many companies struggle is in providing their logo designer with concrete, specific feedback. Keep these things in mind to make your revision rounds go as smoothly as possible:

  1. You won’t like every design option you receive, and that’s okay. Don’t be afraid to speak your mind truthfully. Your designer has heard it all before and would rather take the criticism and help you develop a logo you love.
  2. Incomplete or partial feedback wastes your valuable time and money. Provide complete feedback from all relevant stakeholders, and resolve any internal disagreements before the feedback is sent.
  3. Be specific and resolute. Take time to absorb the logo options you’ve been given before providing feedback. Try to pinpoint the elements you like and those you don’t to give your designer clear action items moving forward.

Ask for the Right Assets

The best logos are flexible and have different options to utilize depending on the situation. For example, you may want a single-color logo for embossing or an icon version of your logo for tiny applications.

Here are some of the variations you may want to consider requesting from your logo designer:

  • Horizontal and vertical options
  • Icon only/text only
  • Black and white/one color/two color
  • With and without copyright or trademark symbols
  • Optimized for embroidery or vinyl cutting
  • Transparent/vector/pixel-based files

Your logo needs to be flexible but consistent. Getting the assets you need upfront will help your brand be a success for years to come, even if you don’t have an ongoing relationship with your brand designer.

Part Four: Supporting Brand Elements

In addition to your logo, your brand should be defined by supporting elements like colors, fonts, textures, and messaging. While your logo may be the most recognizable visual, your brand is nothing without a complete suite of elements. 

Imagine Mcdonald’s without their signature red and yellow, or Amazon’s logo in a script font. Logos need the support of a full brand strategy to do their best work.

color palette of green and purple
A colorful but intentional color palette our design team created for Robertson Insurance.

Brand Color Palette

Color palettes can be a divisive topic within a brand. You may be tempted to call out your favorite color, or maybe you want to stay with your existing colors because they have worked thus far.

Here are four things to consider when choosing or approving a branding color scheme:

  1. Your color palette should reflect your brand, not your personal tastes. Just as red and black would never be appropriate for a daycare, there are likely colors that don’t make sense in your industry or your niche within your industry.
  1. Different colors evoke different emotions. There’s a reason the cereal aisle is full of red and orange boxes and that most luxury companies focus on black and white: because brand color psychology works. Your designer will be able to help you pinpoint which colors are best for your industry, but consider the emotions you want your brand to evoke. Respect? Excitement? Trustworthiness?
  2. Take a look at your competitors’ color palettes. Do you want to blend in or stand out? There’s no wrong answer, but knowing what your brand will look like amongst your competitors matters. The best brand colors are intentional and strategic.
  3. Consider contrast for readability and accessibility. Just like brick-and-mortar businesses need to offer accessibility in the form of wheelchair ramps and elevators, online businesses should consider accessibility in terms of their design. While it’s a bit more complicated than just choosing the right colors, keeping accessibility in mind during discussions about your brand color palette can save you trouble later.
image1 Creating a Brand Identity for Your Business
A typography-focused logo for law firm Chieppor & Egner, LLC.

Fonts

Choosing a font for your brand is another discussion where everyone will have an opinion. What’s most important is to focus on your customer and your industry over your personal tastes. Check out our four top tips on how to choose fonts for your brand:

  1. Keep it simple. Your entire brand only needs one to three fonts. Choosing more than three fonts can make your brand look disconnected and hodge-podge.
  2. Prioritize legibility. Sure, a thin script font may be the perfect fit for your brand, but it loses its value if no one can read it. Consider various applications — from massive billboards to long-form documents — when choosing a font for your brand.
  3. Let your brand voice shine through. Your fonts should give customers a subconscious first impression of your company’s personality and values.

Messaging, Voice, and Tone

When it comes to brand messaging, what you say matters – but how you say it is just as important. No matter who is writing on behalf of your brand, the tone and voice must be the same. This presents a cohesive and professional front for your business that will earn customers’ trust and loyalty.

The voice and tone you choose should be consistent with the brand identity you’ve created. It might be exciting and fun-loving or determined and resolute. Whatever it is, it must be steady and present in all elements of your brand.

You’ll then need to convey your business’s new tone and voice to all employees who speak or write on behalf of the brand. Consider creating a brand standards guide that answers questions like:

  • How do I greet customers or clients?
  • What should I say when I answer the phone?
  • What person and tense do I write in?
  • How do we address (or not address) difficult subjects like religious holidays, social movements, and political events?
  • What is the elevator pitch for our business?
  • Are there any terms or industry jargon we want to avoid?
  • How do we react to crises in writing (both externally and internally)?

Part Five: Rolling Out Your Brand

Once you’re given your final logo and other brand assets, you may think the hard work of creating a brand identity is over. But the truth is, the way you present and roll out your brand to the rest of the world is just as crucial to its success.

Announcing Your New Brand Internally

Getting employee buy-in of your new brand is key. Whether you opt to include employees throughout the branding process or only notify them when the brand is complete, it’s important that you present your new brand in the right way. 

circular logo for NNBC
One of the logos our team developed for the National Novelty Brush Company.

Consider a presentation, offer free swag like t-shirts or water bottles, and include plenty of time for questions and answers. The way your brand is perceived internally will set the stage for how your employees convey your company to customers and business partners, so it’s imperative that they have a positive view of the new brand.

Announcing Your Brand Publicly

Perhaps even more important than presenting your brand to your internal team is announcing it to the world. If you’ve seen one of the many new branding flops over the years, you’ll know just how much first impressions can matter when creating a brand identity.

Depending on your industry and the size of your business, you may want to consider some of the following:

  • An event to celebrate the new brand reveal
  • A formal press release to share through PR outlets and on your website
  • A PPC campaign to clarify the change for users if your rebrand involved a name change
  • An email campaign to announce the change to your current customers or clients
  • A short statement to share on social media and your website
  • A letter and swag bag to send to key investors and stakeholders

Creating Consistent Ongoing Brand Collateral

Finally, you’ll need to set your new brand up for success so it can be used appropriately by your team for years to come. If you worked with an experienced agency, your new brand should come with brand standards and a brand style guide to share with the rest of your team.

booklet flipped open to show various Enwilid logos
A brand guide our team developed for Enwild.

These documents will show appropriate and inappropriate uses of the logo, as well as detail the fonts, brand color palette (in RGB, CMYK, HEX, and Pantone), and resources that are allowed within the brand. They will help your team stay true to the brand as the designer intended it and will give you a resource to turn to when in doubt. Everyone in the company, from the CEO to an intern, should feel comfortable using the brand and be able to identify inappropriate use.

If your agency didn’t include one, you may also want to create and circulate a tone and messaging document that explains any changes to the brand voice. This can be especially useful if you had no formal brand in place prior to your rebrand. 

Part Six: The Future of Your Brand

You’ve done it. You’ve created a brand identity that shows the world who you are and where you shine. So what next?

While you likely did some outreach during your initial brand launch, ongoing Internet marketing can help you continue to grow your brand awareness and bring traffic to your website. You may want to consider search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, or content marketing to engage new audiences and grow your business.

Above all else, stick to your brand standards, encourage your team to evolve your brand over time, and enjoy the process.

Considering rebranding your business? Creating a brand identity can be a rewarding and engaging experience with the help of a trusted brand designer.

Work With Tower

While you might think branding is more about your logo and other visual elements, content marketing plays an essential role in establishing your brand’s image too. Branding through content marketing allows you to tell your unique story, which can bring you closer to prospects and customers. In fact, research shows that 40% of brands stand out for memorable content, 33% for having a distinct personality, and 32% for compelling storytelling.

In this blog, we’ll explore the relationship between content marketing and branding to help you strengthen your relationships with customers and your overall brand identity.

Content Marketing vs. Branded Content

Let’s start by laying out the differences between content marketing and branded content.

Content Marketing

Simply put, content marketing refers to creating, publishing, and sharing educational content crafted specifically for your target audience. Producing high-quality content allows you to demonstrate your expertise, which positions you as an authority in your industry. Types of content marketing include:

  • Blogs and articles
  • On-page content
  • Whitepapers
  • Infographics
  • eBooks
  • Webinars
  • Videos

Depending on your objectives, you can use content marketing to achieve any of the goals below:

  • Grow brand awareness and expand your reach
  • Attract new prospects
  • Convert leads into sales
  • Nurture relationships with your existing customers
  • Cultivate brand loyalty

Consistently producing relevant content your target audience finds useful and informative helps you stand out from the competition. It also makes you more memorable, as readers will associate you with innovation and quality.

Branded Content

Branded content (and branding strategy) shares many of the same objectives of content marketing, like increasing brand awareness and engaging prospects. However, branded content focuses more on directly promoting your business’ products and services. It should still provide some kind of educational value for readers, though.

Because it helps you forge emotional connections with your audience, branded content allows you to demonstrate and connect with human feelings and values. And studies show that 71% of consumers are more likely to recommend brands with whom they have an emotional connection. Branded content is often humorous or entertaining, especially when it takes the form of videos, photos, surveys, and quizzes.

If you’re looking to quickly create a positive reaction within your audience that boosts brand loyalty, you should seriously consider branded content.

The Importance of Having a Brand Story

Every brand has a story. Customers want to know where you started, how you got to where you are, and what you believe in. Sharing your story helps humanize your brand and gives audiences a clear picture of the people behind the business.

Content Marketing Branding 3 jpg How to Enhance Your Storytelling with Content Marketing and Branding

Telling your brand story also allows you to relay what might otherwise be dry, uninteresting information in the form of an engaging narrative. At the end of the day, a compelling, relatable brand story plays a central role in customers choosing you over the competition. This can take the form of joining your email list, downloading a lead magnet, or making a purchase, among other actions.

How to Tell Your Brand Story with Content Marketing

While it isn’t as directly promotional and brand-focused as branded content, content marketing tactics can still help you tell your brand story. Here are a few ways you can tell your brand story by leveraging the relationship between content marketing and branding.

Tailor Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey

One of the pillars of strategic content marketing is producing useful content that’s relevant to users at their specific point in the buyer’s journey. For example, content in the awareness stage should educate users while gently introducing them to your brand. On the other hand, decision stage content should clinch the sale by concretely showing users what sets you apart from the competition.

Integrate Customers Into Your Brand Story

Producing helpful, relevant content starts with keeping users at the forefront of your mind (and brand story) at all times. Stay focused on your audience’s specific needs and pain points, and position your brand as the solution to their problems.

Doing so helps you build trust and makes them more likely to turn to you when they encounter similar obstacles in the future. In fact, 51% of consumers expect brands to create products and experiences they want before they even realize they need them.

Let Your Brand’s Passions Shine Through

A final effective way to establish branding through content marketing is to share your passion and excitement with users. Get them as excited as you are about your products, services, and the industry as a whole. This will humanize your brand by making you more relatable and positioning you as someone who understands their pain points.

How Your Voice, Tone, and Style Impact Brand Storytelling

Every brand has their own voice, tone, and style in both their spoken and written communication. Your company’s unique tone of voice encompasses how you speak to your audience and heavily influences how you’re perceived as a business. Your tone of voice also conveys your personality and values, both of which are key to branding strategy and content marketing.

A distinctive and memorable tone of voice allows audiences to recognize you without seeing your name or logo. It also helps you stand out from the competition because you stay top-of-mind with interested prospects.

Let’s take a closer look at the three most important technical elements of brand storytelling: voice, tone, and style.

Voice

Voice refers to the personality, rhythm, pace, and vocabulary behind how your brand speaks to the world. When creating written and spoken content, it’s crucial to remember that every choice you make impacts how your audience perceives you. Being thoughtful and intentional with your brand voice can be the difference between connecting with audiences emotionally or alienating them entirely.

As a general rule, you should avoid overly-technical language or industry jargon, unless it can be understood by most of your readers. Using simpler language also makes you feel more relatable and transparent. Don’t be too colloquial, though, as expressions change over time, making you seem dated.

Content Marketeing Branding 1 jpg How to Enhance Your Storytelling with Content Marketing and Branding

Tone

Tone (also known as tone of voice) is the emotional inflection (or lack thereof) that guides your brand voice. In other words, it’s how you express your voice within the context of a specific situation. You’ll want to adjust your brand’s tone of voice based on who you’re talking to, your subject matter, and your medium. However, your overall brand voice should remain consistent across every interaction you have with your audience.

Your brand’s tone of voice is composed of four main dimensions:

  • Funny vs. serious
  • Formal vs. casual
  • Respectful vs. irreverent
  • Enthusiastic vs. matter-of-fact

How you leverage these dimensions and blend them together to create your brand’s tone of voice is entirely up to you. But when developing and refining your tone of voice, you should pay close attention to:

  • The way your writing sounds when you read it out loud.
  • The etymology of your writing and which words are best suited for different situations.
  • The syntax of how your words are arranged within sentences.

Most importantly, remember that creating a trustworthy and authentic tone of voice is one of the most important facets of strategic content marketing for brands.

Style

The final piece of the puzzle when it comes to telling your brand story, style refers to what your writing looks like. Essentially, it’s the way your messaging is written and includes things like capitalization, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.

Your style signals to readers what you’re about and gives them a preview of your brand voice when they start reading your content. Make sure your style aligns with each person’s position in the buyer’s journey to maximize your relatability.

Look to Your Audience When Developing Voice, Tone, and Style

The most effective way to develop your brand’s voice, tone, and style is to closely analyze your target audience. Ask yourself questions like:

  • What communication channels does my audience prefer?
  • What social media platforms are they most active on?
  • How do they communicate with one another?
  • What brands do they engage with on social media?
  • What do they “like” and “dislike” on social media?

You’ll also want to create a unique persona for each of your target audiences that includes criteria like gender, marital status, educational background, income level, and interests. Personas help you better understand your ideal customers (and the differences between them), so you can produce relevant content that achieves your goals within each stage of the buyer’s journey.

When you’re intimately familiar with your customers’ wants and needs, you can also adopt their language and work it into your messaging. This makes you much more relatable, while also helping you build trust and demonstrate empathy.

Ready to use content marketing and branding to enhance your storytelling? Our team of content marketing specialists is ready to help you achieve your marketing goals.

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Take a look at your email contact list. Is it bloated with people who never open (or even receive) your emails, or is it clean and only made up of your target customers? Many marketers fall into the trap of stuffing their email list for marketing with as many addresses as possible, but this approach usually falls flat.

In this blog, we’ll review how to build your email list in order to connect with highly-qualified prospects and customers. We’ll cover topics like email list management, email list segmentation, and email list hygiene, among others. Let’s start by reviewing the basic definition of email marketing and the valuable role it can play in your arsenal.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing involves sending relevant, highly-targeted emails to a curated list of subscribers. It’s one of the best ways to build and nurture long-term relationships with your prospects and customers. Email marketing can benefit businesses in any industry, as it helps you promote your company, share your story, and / or softly market your products or services.

Because it’s infinitely scalable, email marketing can easily grow alongside your business. It also promotes regular communication and builds trust because you can stay in touch with your customers. And with the advent of email automation, you can stay in regular communication with subscribers without much manual effort. You can use email marketing to:

  • Raise awareness about new products or services
  • Generate leads
  • Build brand awareness
  • Sustain customer relationships
  • Re-engage lapsed customers

Studies show that 72% of consumers favor email when it comes to communicating with their favorite brands. The best way to capitalize on this is by providing unique, exclusive content via email that keeps subscribers coming back for more.

Ways to Grow Your Email List for Marketing

Wondering how to build an email list? There are a variety of strategic, ethical ways to grow your email contact list. And while building a strong list can require substantial time and effort up front, the long-term benefits include more engaged contacts and higher open rates. Let’s take a closer look at a few ways to grow your subscriber base.

Lead Magnets

Also known as opt-in freebies, lead magnets are complimentary items or services given away to obtain contact information. For example, you might use gated content to give website visitors a reason to join your email list, helping you gather leads. Make sure your opt-in freebie is something your target audience actually wants and will value enough to give you their information. Effective lead magnets include:

  • Trial subscriptions / samples
  • Exclusive videos
  • eBooks
  • Whitepapers
  • Free consultations
Email Marketing 2 jpg Building & Maintaining Your Email List for Marketing

Website Sign-Up Forms & Pop-Ups

One of the simplest ways to grow your email contact list is by including signup forms on your website. In addition to your homepage footer, you should include these forms anywhere you deem appropriate.

A non-intrusive pop-up prompting visitors for their contact information is another great way to build your list. You can use your pop-up in conjunction with the incentive of gated content to convince more people to provide their contact info. Regardless of what you choose, it’s crucial that interested users can easily sign up to receive your emails.

Organic & Paid Social Media

Another effective way to grow your email list for marketing is through organic and paid social media. Offering exposure beyond your immediate followers through things like shares and hashtagging, social media helps you reach more potential subscribers.

Invite followers to join your email list with a clear, succinct message and link to a sign-up landing page. You can also use paid advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media platforms to reach potential subscribers. Your ads should entice users to visit your website and sign up for your email list for exclusive content.

Discounts & Giveaways

You can also use discounts and giveaways to grow your email list and reach potential customers. Consider offering a discount or free shipping on a user’s first order when they sign up for your mailing list. You can also hold giveaways for new subscribers to win valuable prizes when they join.

Never Buy or Rent Third-Party Email Contact Lists

While you may be tempted to grow your subscriber base by purchasing email addresses, you should never do this. Purchasing or renting mailing lists composed of contact information scraped from other sites is ultimately a waste of your marketing spend. 

Purchased email lists are also unethical, since the individuals on them didn’t provide express permission for you to contact them. Plus, some email service providers (like ActiveCampaign) may lock your account if you’re sending to people with no proof of opt-in.

Make sure every email you send includes an unsubscribe link, which is required by federal anti-spam laws. Your subscribers should also have easy access to their email settings so they can opt down (or out) of your emails at any point.

In most cases, emailing people who haven’t provided express permission will lead to you being flagged as spam. And if enough people report you as spam, your brand’s reputation and deliverability will take a hit.

Cultivate Long-Term Relationships with Email List Segmentation

You already know the importance of reaching subscribers at the right time with relevant content they can actually use. This starts with segmentation, which is the process of dividing your subscriber list into smaller groups based on similar characteristics.

Email Marketing 3 jpg Building & Maintaining Your Email List for Marketing

Breaking your list down into smaller segments allows you to deliver personalized messaging that shows subscribers you care about their unique needs. Rather than being a nameless face in the crowd, they’ll feel connected and heard. Always remember that despite their similarities, each member of your target audience has a unique personality and set of needs.

Email List Segmentation Categories

When it comes to segmentation strategy and email list management, the sky’s the limit. Consider using buyer personas to inform your segmentation decisions, as these offer a detailed picture of who your target audience is and what they want. Here are just a few ways you can segment your email list:

  • Demographic data
  • Geographic location
  • Past email engagement
  • Purchase history
  • Hobbies and interests
  • Position in the buyer’s journey
  • Survey results
  • Website behavior

Use Email List Segmentation to Drive Analysis & Strategy

Along with being an effective way to grow your email list for marketing, segmentation can provide valuable opportunities for analysis. Monitoring each email’s open rate, conversions, and click-through-rates can help you determine which messaging is driving the best results. As you learn more about each segment and their preferences, you can send them content that’s even more tailored to their needs.

Benefits of Email List Segmentation

There are many benefits of strategically segmenting your email contact list. For starters, segmented campaigns get 14% more opens and 65% more clicks than mass mailings. Targeted emails sent to specific segments also increase user engagement and can boost eCommerce sales. Plus, segmentation is proven to improve customer satisfaction and retention, leading to increased revenue in the long run.

Implement Thorough & Frequent Email List Hygiene

Building a comprehensive subscriber list of people who actually want to hear from you is only the beginning. Research shows that email lists decline by 20-30% every year, and one-third of your subscribers will never actually open your emails. That’s why diligent email list management and regular data hygiene play such an important role in your success.

While it may seem counterintuitive, scrubbing your email list of unengaged subscribers can actually boost your engagement. This is because it allows you to market to a smaller group of people who truly want to hear from you. Engaged subscribers are the only group of people that matters, since they’re the ones who are purchasing from you. When your subscriber list is bloated with dead weight, you’re leaving money on the table.

Why Subscribers Become Inactive

There are a variety of reasons why your email list subscribers may become inactive. They may not have meant to opt-in in the first place, or they may have joined for a one-time promotion or discount. In other cases, they may no longer have a need for your products or services. And if you’re not following best practices, your emails may even be going directly into their spam folder.

Know When to Scrub Your List

As a general rule, you should clean up your email contact list at least twice a year. You should also immediately scrub your list if you experience any of the following:

  • Declining open and click rates
  • Open and click-through-rates significantly below industry averages
  • High unsubscribe rates
  • Increasing spam complaints
  • Lackluster overall engagement

Ultimately, a bloated email subscriber list can slow down deliverability rates and make it difficult to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Best Practices for Removing Inactive Subscribers

Before you remove inactive subscribers from your email list for marketing, try running a strategic re-engagement campaign. This is one of the best ways to reconnect with lapsed or one-time customers.

Email Marketing 1 jpg Building & Maintaining Your Email List for Marketing

If your emails aren’t being delivered, you should take a closer look at why they’re bouncing. Your email service provider will provide information on whether the bounces are hard or soft, so you should use this to your advantage.

Hard bounces occur when emails can’t be delivered for permanent reasons, such as incorrect addresses or inactive servers. On the other hand, soft bounces happen when emails can’t be delivered for temporary reasons, like full mailboxes or files that are too large.

When the time comes to actually start removing email addresses from your list, be sure to follow these email list hygiene best practices:

  • Remove anyone who has specifically requested to be unsubscribed from your list.
  • Always consider when a user joined your email list before deciding whether to remove them. You should also factor in the last time they opened one of your emails and how frequently you send to that list.
  • Remove any addresses that may have come from a purchased list, since they haven’t provided express permission for you to email them.
  • Be sure to create a new segment for inactive subscribers, rather than deleting them entirely. You may want to target these users later with a fresh campaign, so you’ll want to keep their email addresses.
  • Remove all duplicate email addresses or duplicate names that have different email addresses.
  • Remove any subscribers that appear to have spam email addresses.
  • Create an automation for email list cleaning, making it easier to maintain over time.

Benefits of Regular Email List Hygiene

The importance of email list hygiene cannot be overstated, and there are many benefits to keeping your list clean. Let’s take a closer look at the most valuable benefits.

Lower Costs

If you use an email marketing service, you’re probably being charged based on the number of subscribers you have or the number of emails you send. That means every inactive email address is a waste of money. Scrubbing these names from your list is an easy way to improve your ROI while lowering the overall cost of your email marketing.

Improved Statistics

Cleaning up your email list is also proven to offer increased open rates, fewer bounces, and higher click-through-rates. While the same people are opening your emails with a smaller list, that group makes up a higher percentage of total emails sent. Plus, a cleaner list means fewer bounced emails, which improves your engagement data and deliverability.

Reduced Spam Flagging

Most mailbox providers keep a running list of spam complaints. If you keep emailing bad addresses, you’ll start going to everyone’s spam folder, not just people who reported you. A clean list and targeted emails ensure more of your emails arrive in the inboxes of engaged subscribers.

Enhanced Reporting

It can be difficult to determine whether your email marketing efforts are working if your list is full of disengaged subscribers. Trimming the fat leaves you with a list of people who are actually engaging with your brand. You can use the data you glean to improve your future efforts and continue to fine-tune your approach.

If you’re ready to add email marketing services or refresh your existing strategy, we’d love to talk. Our team of experts can help you ethically grow your list while delivering targeted content directly to your customers’ inboxes.

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Online Sales – Who Is Responsible?

When it comes to sales and marketing, the overlap can be confusing — not just for professionals in the field, but also for clients. Which is more important, marketing or sales? Where should I invest my budget? Who is responsible for generating sales? Is it the marketing team, sales team, or both?

I work for a digital marketing agency and a lot of times clients hold us accountable for online sales. When this happens, those clients are sometimes disappointed when online sales are not the immediate outcome of their digital marketing. The reality is, our team works as marketers first, not salespeople. Our efforts are to attract, educate, and then funnel users on to the sales team to close the deal.

What I do as a marketer can’t be defined just within sales. It encompasses much more than that. But again, in the context of online business, what is the difference between marketing and sales. Are they separate departments? Should they be working more closely together?

I started writing this post for clarity on the matter. Plus, I wanted a better understanding of both sales and marketing in order to understand the advantages of each and to figure out how they can better work together to benefit the business.

This blog is my attempt at ending the tension between sales and marketing.

By defining the roles of each, business leaders may just find that they can eliminate tension caused by the uncertainty of who is responsible for what. Plus, with this clarity, the business can get better results all around from both sales and marketing efforts.

The Sales vs. Marketing Conundrum

How do I get sales on my website? That is usually the first question clients ask when we meet. While marketers can certainly do a great job presenting products or services in a way to attract buyers, there are some other key components that will dictate whether their efforts are successful. The product they market needs to:

  • Offer significant value to its market
  • Be a product or service that’s in demand
  • Account for the competitive landscape

No matter how good the marketing surrounding a product or service is, people won’t buy something they don’t value or understand. So it’s crucial to take time to develop a product or service that consumers will value first before passing the work of marketing and selling it along to your teams.

Businesses Need to Earn Revenue

I get it, clients want to know their ROI and I can admit it is harder for marketing to show that in some cases. The timeline of marketing can take a long time in some cases. Brand awareness and engagement don’t necessarily turn into cold hard cash straight away. This can sometimes make it difficult to quantify marketing.

On the flip side, when a business sells something like a teapot online, it’s much easier to quantify in reporting. This is where my conundrum starts. Both marketing and sales have value, but with eCommerce, it’s difficult to not lump marketing and sales together. The issue is that sometimes my efforts as a marketer are being fused with becoming responsible for eCommerce sales. But digital marketing is about more than just revenue returns. Right? Or is this just an excuse that I was making to not be held responsible? I thought maybe I was looking at the relationship between sales and marketing all wrong myself.

I went back to basics to understand the roles of marketing and sales, studying each of their processes. I wanted to figure out how they worked together so I could avoid feeling like there is a sales vs. marketing conundrum.

A Quick Overview of Marketing and Sales Management

What do sales and marketing do? I have a grasp on the marketing side, but I was still a bit fuzzy on sales.

  • Do sales act as a function of marketing management?
  • Should marketing and sales be seen as different departments or not?
  • Does marketing occur before sales or after?

I like this definition, as explained by Philip Kotler (A.K.A. the godfather of marketing).

“Marketing and sales deal with the exploration and understanding of customer needs, with the response to them through the development, production, and sales of goods and services (including innovation implementation). It also deals with the impact on customers’ needs in accordance with the strategic purposes of the organization.” (Source)

What Is The Role of Sales?

Inbound and outbound sales, insider sales, and business development — there is a lot to define that goes into sales. However, I found this definition to be quite succinct: “Sales planning involves strategy, setting profit-based sales targets, quotas, sales forecasting, demand management, and the execution of a sales plan.”

This definition looks at sales holistically. And if you’re digging deep into defining what sales are, there are plenty of people asking great questions on Quora with some great explanations.

Types of Sales

To fully understand the value of sales, it is important to identify the different types of sales channels:

  • Online sales (using eCommerce)
  • Business development
  • Inside sales
  • Outside Sales / traditional sales
  • Sales support
  • Consultative selling
  • B2B sales
  • B2C sales

I’ll be focusing more on online sales because they have a large overlap with digital marketing.

How Have Sales Changed?

Selling Ice to Eskimos

Over the last several decades, sales have changed. Sales professionals are sometimes stereotyped as being aggressive to push sales and earn their commission. There were old sayings that “they could sell ice to Eskimos” that represent how some people felt about salespeople. Not that all salesmen are this way, mind you. But early on, that was a more common approach. And the problem that surfaced with this model is that the end-user didn’t feel they were receiving any value beyond just being another number on paper to the salesman. Thankfully, the sales process has evolved for the better.

Relationship Driven Sales

Obviously, that old way of doing sales had to change. People were aware they were being “sold to” and that process wasn’t working to earn their trust. The modern approach to selling focuses on offering value and building a relationship. Salespeople are knowledgeable about their products and concentrated on building trust and rapport with the client. They are now seen as helpers and they can even create a positive brand relationship for the consumer. And in many cases, the website now acts as the point of sale (POS) in a buyer’s journey.

The Internet’s Effect on Sales

Sales were forced to change due to the Internet. It gave businesses the ability to sell and obtain leads through their own websites. And sales reps were starting to find their old role replaced by product pages, blogs, or instructional videos. This is where the sales vs. marketing conundrum possibly sparked.  Are websites replacing salespeople? Are digital marketers, who promote the website, the ones responsible for sales?

What Is Marketing and What Is Its Role?

AMA describes marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Words like “partnership” and “value” are key here. Just like sales, marketing has also changed due to the Internet. There is a shift in demand away from traditional marketing such as print, billboards, television, and radio. Modern marketing uses the Internet and everything connected to it. This includes your website, social media, and online advertising, etc. Digital marketing has the ability to be super personalized in a way that traditional marketing is not able to be.

How Has Marketing Changed?

The ability to measure and track have given marketers the data to make educated decisions on where to target and what messaging to use. Through digital marketing, we can easily see data such as:

  • New or returning users
  • Online interests
  • Demographic data
  • Behavioral trends
  • Channels that lead to sales

A billboard can’t offer you that insight. The same can be said for TV and print. That’s why more budget is being allocated to digital marketing mediums. According to the Washington Post, eMarketer expects companies to spend nearly $130 billion on digital ads, compared with about $110 billion on traditional advertisements (54.2% of the ad market vs. 46.8%, respectively).

What Is The Difference Between Sales and Marketing?

Now that we have an idea of the roles of each department, we can see how marketing and sales differ.

The Difference According to Kotler

Philip Kotler explains the difference between sales and marketing with an example. “Sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what’s really going on with customers. Marketing believes the sales force is myopic — too focused on individual customer experiences, insufficiently aware of the larger market, and blind to the future. In short, each group often undervalues the other’s contributions.”

This example really resonated with me, because I’ve seen this happen and I’ve been guilty of it myself. But again, I think it’s time to understand each role so it can receive the appreciation it deserves.

The Difference According to Mike Shaw

The differences between the roles of marketing and selling are tied to the business strategy and maturity of the product. For instance, how you sell or market a brand-new product would be different than if you were focusing on a product that was well-known and established.

However, in most cases, you can also look at it this way — the main differentiating factors between marketing and sales are their objectives.

Marketing Objectives vs. Selling Objectives

The objectives and functions of the sales department change during the course of a product’s life cycle. The size of your business can also impact what degree you market your products or services.

Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy and we can assume that not all have clearly defined roles for marketing or sales. This can be due to a lack of budget or internal infrastructure.

I honestly think this is where the confusion set in, with one person becoming responsible for many tasks. In most cases, a salesperson is told to manage the business’s marketing. So, eventually, businesses just started assuming the two are the same since it was all handled by that same employee.

However, after dissecting the role of each above, it’s clear they both have different goals, even if the same person is managing them. Let’s look at the specific objectives that marketing and sales work to accomplish.

Marketing Objectives: The 4P’s of Marketing

The marketing mix is a well-known concept that helps businesses in aligning their marketing goals.  Specifically, the marketing mix focuses on four key elements:

  1. Product: Making people aware of the product or service you are offering.
  2. Price: Establishing the value of your product or service.
  3. Place: Utilizing distribution channels to get in front of potential clients.
  4. Promotion: Creating brand awareness, segmenting, positioning targeting.

Some of these elements can take time to establish, like brand awareness or segmenting. But over time, they can hold a lot of value for more than just what you’re selling. They can lead to increasing brand awareness or boosting the relationship customers have with your business, even when they’re not buying from you.

Sales Objectives

The objectives of the sales department are to generate revenue, which requires:

  • Building customer relationships
  • Increasing sales volume
  • Reaching sales quotas
  • Exceeding revenue goals
  • Growing and nurturing lead generation
  • Managing inventory
  • Upselling and cross-selling
  • Retaining clients so that repeat purchases occur

Sales are never just one-time events. They can occur often over a period of time and the salesperson is responsible for managing everything around that process.

Sales and marketing funnel diagram

The Marketing Funnel vs. The Sales Funnel = The Purchasing Funnel

The Overlap Between Marketing and Sales

Since eCommerce websites are able to sell directly to the user, the responsibility of the salesperson has changed. But so has the role of the marketer. As a result, digital marketing is also having to own more responsibility for sales. Below is an image showing how marketing is impacting the purchasing funnel. In terms of the purchasing funnel, marketing, and sales processes come in at different stages, based on their objectives.

Modern Marketing Usually Focuses On:

Whereas The Modern Sales Process Is More Focused On:

  • Evaluation: Is this what I want? Is it the right fit? Will it do what I need it to?
  • Purchase: Taking the next step towards purchasing the chosen product.

The Relationship Between Marketing and Sales

I like how Neil Rackham explains the typical relationship between marketing and sales.

“All too often, organizations find that they have a marketing function inside sales, and a sales function inside marketing.”

This resembles the majority of businesses. Departments overreach because they don’t trust or think the other is capable or willing to fulfill their responsibilities. It is not efficient and it causes great confusion.

I am not a huge Gary Vee fan, but I do like his explanation of how sales and marketing score at different times. Keeping this in mind, the sales and marketing departments should get to know each other’s processes intimately. That way they can understand where the user is in the purchasing funnel and create a seamless transition between their departments.

The Future of Marketing and Sales

Marketers should be held more accountable for sales. I can admit that.

While there is a difference between marketing and sales, the Internet has shifted more of the sales responsibility to the marketer. The marketer has control over the website and the medium driving users to the website in a way the salesman does not.

However, I think it’s important that in light of how the Internet has evolved sales and marketing, businesses take the time to define the focuses of both teams to ensure expectations are clear and doable. Understanding what digital marketers vs. salespeople have control over and how it can affect revenue is what will enable both teams to produce better results.

I don’t think that sales and marketing should be one department, but they should definitely be working closer together than in the past.  Each service comes in at different points of the purchase cycle and has an important role in ensuring that revenue is created.  Ultimately, both are responsible.

Interested in learning how digital marketing can help benefit your sales team’s work? Learn how our digital marketing services can help your business’ sales process.

Explore Our Services

So, you want to create a print piece. Maybe you have an idea to bring in new customers with direct mail. Perhaps your sales team is requesting new brochures and product collateral. Or maybe you’re looking to put up a new billboard on a major road near your business. 

Clients often come to us with these end goals in mind, but they need help fleshing out the details to create effective print marketing pieces. With the help of our print marketing guide, you’ll have everything you need to successfully navigate the printing process.

Know Your Audience

Before you get excited about glossy paper finishes and binding options, take a few steps back. Who is your audience? What appeals to them? What will they expect from a print piece from your company? How can you meet and exceed their expectations?


Answering these questions first is key to a successful print piece. Unlike with websites and digital ads, you won’t receive any analytics on how your customers interact with the piece. You also won’t have easy editing capabilities once the piece is complete. It’s crucial that the piece resonates with your audience the first time. Do your research first to ensure that you’ll be satisfied with the outcome of your final print piece.

breochure

Understand Your Print Collateral Options

We created this print marketing guide because we know firsthand how overwhelming the process can be to those working in print for the first time. It’s easy to get excited about the final product and overlook important details early on, as the format of your piece. While the possibilities are endless, these are some of the most common print marketing formats you may want to consider.

Direct Mail

Direct mail is a broad category of print marketing that is sent to your audience via snail mail. It is often used for announcements like store openings, major sales, and new product offerings. The format for direct mail can vary from a postcard to a complex book or video mailer. You can utilize an every-door approach or buy or rent a list tailored to your business and audience. Both of these tactics will help you expand your reach and make more potential customers aware of your offerings. You can also use your in-house mailing list of existing customers to remind them of your brand and encourage them to interact with you through exclusive coupons and offers.

Brochures / One Sheeters

Brochures and one sheeters are short-form print pieces that explain your company, products or services, and contact information in an easy-to-digest format. They can be folded and sent as direct mail pieces or used by salespeople as handouts or leave-behinds. When developing a sales-oriented piece, consult with the team members who will use the collateral every day. They will be able to guide you in what features are most important to customers, what recurring questions they receive, and what would be most helpful to them in the sales process. By allowing your sales team to guide print marketing efforts, you’ll build a tool that helps them attract and impress customers.

Print Ads

Print ads can help get the word out to your audience about news, events, and general messaging. You can partner with vendors in newspapers, magazines, and any other print publications relevant to your audience. One of the benefits of print ads is that they give you the ability to update and edit your message as time goes on. Unlike with a brochure that you may have updated and reprinted once a year, print ads can change monthly or even weekly. They are your opportunity to experiment and see what messaging and imagery resonates with your customers. While print ads can’t be tracked quite like digital ads, you can use custom links for each publication to track who comes to your website from each vendor. Over time, this can help you narrow down a list of your most effective print marketing partners.

Signage

Signage is often overlooked in guides to print marketing, but it is key to making a great first impression. Outdoor signage can ensure that your business is easy to find, while indoor signage can reiterate your brand and messaging both internally and externally. Signage can also help with wayfinding to help customers know where to go and what to do when they enter your business. Prioritize signage as a functional and expressive piece for your brand. It should both serve a purpose and provide customers with a subtle indication of who you are, what you do, and who you serve.

Billboards

Billboards are a classic form of print marketing that has been revolutionized by digital technology. Both traditional and digital billboards are effective options for marketing your business to a large number of people. Traditional billboards are cheaper, but cannot be changed out as easily. Digital billboards will cost you more upfront, but they can be changed daily or even hourly to best target your audience. Much like with every-door direct mail, billboard advertising is most effective for companies that address widespread needs, like grocery stores, car dealerships, home improvement companies, and healthcare providers. More niche companies won’t see as strong of a return-on-investment unless they place their billboards very strategically.

Learn the Basics of Print Marketing Design

We created this print marketing guide because we know that oftentimes, the person handling print marketing at a company is not a designer. They’re much more likely to be a marketing director, event planner, or even an intern, and often, they have very little print marketing experience.

Regardless of your title, speaking the language of print marketing design can help you make the most of your relationship with your printer. And, it can also help you communicate with a freelance or third-party designer to make sure you get the job done right the first time.

Bleed

Ever wonder why your office printer can’t print quite to the edge of the page? Printing all the way to the edges of a piece of paper is called “full bleed” printing – and it’s unexpectedly complicated. So complicated, in fact, that even expensive print shop printers typically don’t print full bleed. Instead, documents are printed on oversized paper and then trimmed to the final desired size.

If you want a professional edge-to-edge look on your documents, you’ll need to prepare your file with a “bleed.” A bleed is a margin on all sides of your document that will be trimmed off after printing. Every printer is different, but most bleeds are around ¼” per side. You’ll design your graphics going all the way off the page (but keep text and other important elements inside the bleed), so that you have a seamless design once trimmed.

Color Systems

There are two major color systems used in graphic design: RGB and CMYK. RGB or red, green, blue is the color system used for all things digital. This includes:

  • Computers
  • TVs
  • Projectors
  • Digital billboards

CMYK or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black is the color system used by printers for physical pieces that end up on paper, plastic, metal, and more. We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of how each color system works, but keep in mind that everything you send to your printer will need to be in CMYK color.

Branding for Coleson events

Some printers will be willing to convert color profiles for you, but it’s always best to provide CMYK files from the get-go, especially if your piece includes color swatches or anything that needs to match exactly. It will ensure that your colors appear accurately in your final piece, and it will score you brownie points with your printer. If you have strict brand standards or need your colors to be highly accurate, you may also want to consider using Pantone colors.

Image Resolution

You may hear your printer mention “ppi” or “dpi.” This refers to the pixels (for web) or dots (for print) per inch that are used to create your images. The more dots, the higher the resolution, and the clearer your image will be.

The standard for printed pieces is 300 dpi, while the standard for digital pieces is 72 ppi. While you may be able to get away with a small, low-resolution image on your website, you won’t be able to in print. While there is some wiggle room (the untrained eye can’t tell 280 dpi from 300 dpi), you run the risk of blurry or pixelated images when using lower resolution files for print. Let your printer serve as your print marketing guide when it comes to image resolution -– they know their equipment best.

Other Printer Requirements

Every printer is a little different. You may receive other requests like:

  • Outline fonts
  • Embed images
  • Provide a reader’s copy PDF
  • Provide a spot gloss PDF

If you’re unsure of what your printer is asking, don’t be afraid to ask questions. It’s their job to be your print marketing guide and help you through the printing process. Failing to adhere to your printer’s guidelines may cause delays or extra fees as they will need to update your files themselves. It’s always better to ask questions early and prevent problems later down the line.

Packaging Your Files

When you’re ready to send your final file to your printer, you’ll need to package your files. Print files are huge, which means that programs like Adobe InDesign don’t actually save all of the images and files you use within your working document. Instead, they “link” to these documents to keep your file size small and your computer running smoothly.


The printer will need not only your working document, but also all of the files it references. That’s where packaging comes in. Be sure to package all images (in CMYK) as well as fonts and other assets like text files. Your printer may also request a reader’s copy, printers’ spreads, and more, so always check to see how they prefer files to be packaged.

brochure examples

Make the Details Matter

While good design goes a long way, the finishing details can really transform a piece. For a home-run print piece, talk to your printer about:

  • Paper weights
  • Paper texture & quality
  • Paper finishes (matte, satin, gloss, etc.)
  • Binding options

Attention to these details is what sets an ordinary print piece apart from a stunning one. It’s what prevents your collateral from being tossed in the recycling bin.

Paper Weights

Paper weight is how thick your paper is. The higher the weight, the thicker and sturdier the paper. 80 lb. and 100 lb. are the most common weights, with 80 lb. being standard printer paper, and 100 lb. being slightly heavier. Your printer may also mention cover stock (or card stock) and text stock. Cover stock is thicker and sturdier than text stock, and is often used for covers of print marketing brochures and booklets. Text stock is similar to standard printer paper, and is often used in single-use pieces like event programs, since it isn’t super durable. Your use case, as well as your company’s tone and presence, should always guide print marketing decisions like paper weight.

Paper Texture & Quality

Most printers work with a variety of paper companies to offer different brands and qualities of paper. Your printer will likely bring you a book of samples when you meet to discuss your project. The paper quality and texture you choose should reflect your brand. If you run an outdoor gear company, you may want to choose something rougher and more natural. If you are planning a high-end event, you’ll want something silky smooth. When in doubt, ask your printer for their recommendation. Just remember, a nicer paper will come with a bigger price tag. If you’re printing a large quantity or are working with a shoestring budget, you’ll likely want to opt for their “house” stock instead.

Paper Finishes

Your printer will also ask you what paper finish you’re interested in. There are three popular finishes: gloss, satin, and matte. Gloss finish is shiny and offers added durability to covers and single page pieces. A satin finish is less shiny than gloss, but still has some added durability. Matte finish has no shine. Much like with paper texture and quality, you’ll need to consider your company when selecting your paper finish. When in doubt, satin is always a nice middle-of-the-road option.

Binding Options & Extras

If you’re creating a multi-page print piece, you’ll also need to consider how you would like it bound. The three most common options are saddle stitching, stapling, and spiral binding. Saddle stitching uses a needle and thick thread for a flat seam inside your booklet. Staples also offer a flat seam, but are slightly less luxurious than saddle stitching. Both options work well for small booklets with less than 20 pages. Spiral binding is an affordable option that is best for booklets with lots of pages. The spiral allows the book to lie flat when open or closed.

Spot UV Printing

If you’re looking for a way to add extra visual interest, spot UV may be a good option. It allows you to add extra shine and attention to areas of your print piece that you’d like to highlight. Many companies choose to use it on their logo or on other branded elements to make them shine.

But Isn’t Print Media Dead?

While we hear people say all the time that digital is the only way forward. But for many companies, the best strategy incorporates digital and traditional marketing efforts. Digital marketing can be changed quickly but doesn’t make the same impact as physical print pieces. By using both, you can maximize your budget and your impact on customers.

Need help designing effective print marketing for your business? Learn more about Tower’s print marketing services and create an unforgettable piece.

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