Here’s our roundup of what we’ve been talking about this week, from campaign tracking and chicken-flavoured nail polish, to why you should always be yourself.
Candice, Managing Director at F6 Agency
Boomerang
Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, a managing director, or ambitious sales manager, time is money. I came across an interesting tool this week called Boomerang.
Boomerang lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages.
Do you often find that you are emailing people across different time zones? Wouldn’t it be easier to send them an email when they first open their emails? Do you send emails out to new prospects and need a reminder that you haven’t heard back from them?
Boomerang can help you to:
- Remember to pay bills
- Schedule birthday/holiday notes when you have time to write them
- Make sure you follow up with a sales lead
- Communicate with people in different time zones
- Clear out travel confirmation emails, returning them on the day of your trip
- And lots more!
The importance of tracking your campaigns
So many customers ask us what the quickest way is to drive traffic to their website and increase sales.
Paid advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your site and increase business, but it can become expensive quickly. Especially if you aren’t doing it right or you don’t have a correct plan and objective in place.
Things you should consider before you jump straight into paid advertising:
- Understand your keywords
- It’s important that you use the right keywords that your customers use when looking for your product or service.
- Learn to identify less popular keywords so that you don’t spend significantly more money and reduce your Return on investment dramatically.
- Gather customer insights to find out what your customers are looking for or why they decided to do business with you
- It’s important that you use the right keywords that your customers use when looking for your product or service.
- Understand the different types of paid advertising and what is right for your target audience
- Display Ads or Banner Ads
- Text Ads
- Google Adwords
- Facebook or LinkedIn
- Most importantly, have your tracking ready
- If you aren’t able to see how each of your ads are performing, then you shouldn’t be buying paid advertising at all. The beautiful thing about online advertising is that you get the opportunity to track everything.
- We are pretty big on measuring every campaign and we use analytics to identify key topics, improve content and generate an ROI.
- Create a landing page
- Landing pages allow you to customise your message for incoming visitors. This means that you can continue the message that you started with your ads, which creates a cohesive experience.
- Set a budget and a plan
- Online advertising isn’t a quick fix solution, it requires patience and observation.
Elena, Account Executive at F6 Agency
What happens when brands take their slogans literally?
Chicken-flavoured nail polish. That’s what happens.
KFC Hong Kong had launched a nail polish to match their slogan “finger lickin’ good”, and not only that, you can choose between two flavours: Original and Hot and Spicy! This just made my day!
Oh, and they also made a video:
How do you build a meaningful brand?
Ask Airbnb, who’ve just won this year’s Most Meaningful Brand award at The Drum Marketing Awards. How can a brand that encourages you to let strangers in your house have grown so fast and become one of the most well-known brands in the world?
The key is to build a brand community with a clear brand culture. To not just build a brand face to the public and advertise what it stands for but to live and breathe your brand, and stand up to your brand’s values. In Airbnb, every employee is committed and works towards a shared goal, they believe in the brand and the benefits that it brings, so they deliver the best customer service. In a Ted Talk, Joe Gebbia, founder of Airbnb, said he took every complaint personally, every time a customer had had a bad experience in a property, although it wasn’t the company’s fault.
Caring. That’s how you build a meaningful brand. Showing that you care. Always trying to improve so your customers get a better experience, a better service. Driving engagement. It’s easier said than done. Buy if you live and breathe your brand, stay true to it, and put the customer first, it will succeed.
Sian, Creative Artworker at F6 Agency
Why your mum was right about the importance of being yourself
Long periods of economic unease have made people ask if they’re really getting what they think they’re paying for when they reach for their local, organic, cruelty-free, limited edition chia seeds. And with the unstoppable expansion of digital media, the chances of a brand being caught out not practicing what it preaches are high.
And nowhere is the importance of authenticity and integrity in branding as high on the agenda than in supermarkets.
Tesco recently learned the importance of keeping your brand authentic when they released a line of fresh produce (often sourced from overseas) bearing British sounding names of fictional farms. The packaging was deemed misleading, and was heavily criticised on social media.
On the other end of the scale, Waitrose has gone all out to prove its integrity, placing cameras in its farms that stream live footage to Youtube and UK rail stations. Tune in and you’ll be watching some bees leave and arrive at the entrance of a hive, or some deers lounging around in a field.
It might seem an extreme length to go to prove your brand is based on truthful values, but it’s a campaign that resonates well with the brand, as well as the current consumer climate. It will no doubt go down well with people who stay awake worrying about the upbringing of their chia seeds at night. And it’s also quite soothing to look at when you’re in the midst of a looming deadline.
Wtf is a sensorial logo and why should I care?
The parameters of logo design have greatly expanded. They’ve had to in order to keep up with digital developments. No longer do we, or should we, think of logos as a static entity that has to behave nicely in print. Instead there are now plenty of possibilities beyond static visuals to create something that resonates much better with your brand and its users.
Oi, a South American Telecoms company has updated its logo to embrace the possibility of using sound as a sensorial experience of its brand. The new identity is a system where the shape and colour of the logo is determined by the pitch and volume of a voice, making unique, user generated versions of the logo.
And for a company all about communication, a sensorial logo that reacts to voice aligns itself on a human level that perhaps couldn’t be achieved in a primarily still, and unchanging logo.
