There’s a simple rule about consistency in advertising design: Each execution should have a similar look so that your campaign becomes recognizable, benefitting from the frequency of each impression with your target audience. Consistency results in familiarity, which leads to trust. We marketers know it and live it. That is, until it comes to the voice of the brand. Then, consistency hardly exists for most of them.

Brand voice is just as crucial to marketing communications as design, yet most people fail to define how their brands are represented in the written or spoken word.

Pause for a moment and listen to what’s going on in your office or home. You recognize the voices without even seeing who’s talking. The same should be true for your brand. Your prospects and customers should be able to get far more than words from how you ‘speak.’

Your brand voice represents your style and attitude.

The personality and tone of your ad copy, social media posts and website copy should become synonymous with your brand.

Chatbots. Facial recognition. Artificial intelligence. These days, marketing feels less like Mad Men and more like the handiwork of mad scientists. Our connected gizmos vacuum up data so marketers can target us with eerie precision. Am I the only one who doesn't want my TV watching me? Alas, I digress.

In a world that increasingly resembles Minority Report, an old-school marketing technology still reigns supreme. You guessed it. I'm talking about email. According to a survey of US marketers conducted by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and Demand Metric, the median ROI of email marketing is 122%.

As a marketing strategist, or anyone who is working towards marketing goals, your marketing mix should strategically ladder up to your objectives. Finely crafted marketing strategies should guide every touchpoint you have with your prospects and existing customers. For example, if a tactic effort you are considering doesn't fall under one of the strategies you’ve chosen, you shouldn’t do it.

Strategies are the how to help you achieve your objectives.

Okay, so how do you get there? A strategy should never be a guess, an assumption or just an idea you've brainstormed. Success as a marketer requires many things, but without data and proper marketing planning, you're really just planning to fail. 

There is ever-increasing demand these days that marketing produces a provable ROI (return on investment). And rightfully so. Marketing is indeed an investment that should pay off. And since we can better measure the effects of our marketing activities each day, it’s right to expect proof of success from our marketing spend. We provided a simple formula in our blog about how to track marketing results.

As marketers, we face the challenging reality that consumers have more control now than they’ve ever had before. Consumer feedback by way of ratings is drastically shifting how we satisfy our basic human needs. Yelp! influences where we eat. Uber, how we move. Rotten Tomatoes, how we’re entertained. Travelocity, where we vacation. Rate My Professor. how we learn. And perhaps most importantly, Amazon influences what we consume. The consumer’s search for transparency has collided with humanity’s advances in technology. Digital tools of due diligence, like Amazon reviews, have drastically narrowed the gap between consumer needs and the right product or service.

Advanced Customer Experience

Customer experience is the new competitive advantage. According to a 2017 Gartner Customer Experience in Marketing Survey, in two years’ time, 81% of marketers expect to be competing mostly or completely on the basis of CX. On paper, this stat can seem ridiculous. But in practice, it couldn’t be more intuitive.

In the era of plentiful data, how does the Creative Professional — who relies on her taste, skill and instinct to make things that other people will consume — navigate a world in which insightful data is every bit as important as her intuition?

It used to be the case that, as a creative professional, her goal was to create something that was both beautiful and effective. Is it good? Does is work? If she could answer “yes” to both of those questions, she’d done her job.

A study done by the Pew Research Center in 2010 asked four different generations what made them unique. The answers varied by generation, except for one thing — each generation said they were “smarter.”This was the first thing I found when researching various generations, and it was both a funny and interesting place to start.

No where else have consumers become more accustomed to a customized experience than in healthcare. Each of us carries a unique medical history and physical makeup, so we don’t expect a one-size-fits-all approach.

The modern marketer believes that marketing is so much more difficult today than ever before. There’s no captive audience watching one of four networks during primetime. There’s no printed circular that bumps your sales each Wednesday. No radio remote- broadcast from your store where people flock to meet the deejay and maybe get a free t-shirt. No e-mail blast that overloads your website. Man, it’s hard… until you start listening to your prospect.

A/B testing has been around for years. If you haven’t started implementing A/B testing, today is a great time to start. Most email marketing platforms now offer some sort of A/B testing as part of their service. You can A/B test almost anything on emails and websites, but some of the most popular elements to test are: subject lines, headlines, CTA buttons and imagery. For the purpose of this article, we are going to focus on testing email subject lines to increase open rates.

How do you compete in an oversaturated social ad space? In the era of binge-watching and short attentions spans, marketers are challenged with creating content that is to-the-point, adaptive to the platform and personalized. We need to reach audiences with familiar content, reliable content and consumable content.

I wrote my last blog about snackable videos, so I’ll be sticking with the food theme as I take a minute to dive further into consumable content. To make content consumable, we can’t simply dump content on a user and expect the results to be long-lasting. We need to do more than just engage. We need to maintain engagement. So we must create supportive content that is easily accessible and encourages continued relationships. Enter the age-old solution of storytelling.

There are many different tactics one can use for a digital campaign. My personal favorite? Video, of course! Should it be decided that video is going to be utilized for a campaign, then great! I’m a big fan of that decision. 

But before we jump in head first, it’s important for us to understand the objectives of the campaign. We can put our heads together and create the most amazing piece of video the world has ever seen, but if it doesn’t align with our overall strategy, then it doesn’t do us any good. It is our responsibility as creatives to convey the appropriate messaging to the appropriate audiences via the appropriate channels. So the first thing we’ll do is familiarize ourselves with the task at hand and answer a few key questions:

• What are the goals of the campaign?
• Who is our audience?
• What platform or platforms are used to reach that audience?