Category: Marketing

Visual brand identity is essential to establishing a strong brand presence and standing out in a crowded market. A cohesive visual identity across all platforms, especially on social media, can build trust and credibility with customers, as it shows that you take your brand seriously and have invested in its presentation.

Social media has become an integral part of marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes. While creating compelling content is essential, the look and feel of your content is just as important as the message you’re trying to convey. In fact, statistics show that the earlier you invest time in quality branding, the sooner you will see success in differentiating your brand from competitors and conveying your brand’s personality and values.

That’s where Canva comes in. Canva is a design platform that allows anyone to create professional-looking graphics, including brand templates specifically designed for social media, even if you have little to no design experience.

Research has shown that humans are visual creatures, processing visual information much faster than text. According to a study by HubSpot, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. HubSpot also prove that consistent brand presentation across all platforms increases revenue by up to 23%. Another study by Venngage found that using custom branded visuals in social media posts can increase engagement by up to 650%. This emphasizes the importance of creating visually appealing content can have a significant impact on engagement rates.

How to create your brand templates in Canva

• Upload your Brand Kit: Open Canva and select the “Brand Hub” tab to add your brand’s colours, fonts, logos, and other design elements. This will serve as a guide to ensure that all your templates reflect your brand’s style consistently across all of your content.
• Choose a template type: Canva offers a variety of template types, including social media posts, presentations, business cards, and flyers. Choose the type that best suits your brand’s needs and the type of content you plan to create.
• Add elements: Use the easy-to-use drag and drop interface to add Canva’s wide range of design elements, such as text, images, shapes, and icons, to your design. To add an element, simply drag and drop it onto the canvas.
• Keep it simple: Your templates should be easy to use and adapt to different types of content. Avoid cluttering your templates with too many design elements or text blocks. Keep it simple and focus on the essentials.
• Use grids and guides: Canva provides grids and guides to help you align your design elements and create a more visually pleasing template. Use them to ensure that your templates are well-balanced and easy to read.
• Save and share: Once you’re happy with your design, you can save it and share it with others. Canva allows you to download your design as an image or PDF, or share it directly to social media or via a link.
• Test and refine: Once you’ve created your templates, test them out to see how they work in practice. Make any necessary adjustments based on feedback from your team or audience.

In conclusion, the look and feel of your social media content can have a significant impact on engagement rates and brand recognition. Utilising Canva by building templates designed specifically for social media, you can create a cohesive visual identity, increase brand awareness, and make a lasting impression with your audience. So don’t overlook the importance of aesthetics in your social media marketing strategy – it could be the key to unlocking your brand’s potential.

Opinion piece by Laura Jackson – Account Manager at Air Marketing

When you’ve not got a lot of time, or your marketing budget is smaller than you might like, you may have to choose between the two. If this is the case, which one should you go for?

We’ve put together this short guide to help you make the right decision.

What are paid marketing and organic marketing?

Paid marketing (unsurprisingly!) is any type of digital marketing that you pay to implement. It includes advertising on search engines like Google and Bing, as well as paid social advertisements on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. It’s estimated that 45% of small businesses have a paid marketing strategy in place.

Organic marketing is any type of digital marketing you don’t pay to implement, although you might spend money creating it. It includes everything from blogs and case studies to email newsletters and social media posts. With organic marketing, you’re making and publishing content that doesn’t just encourage engagement but is optimised for relevant keywords, increasing the chances of ranking highly in search engines like Google.

Paid marketing and organic marketing are great for driving traffic to your website and building brand awareness. However, there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Organic marketing: the pros

It’s low-cost

Many businesses use organic marketing for one reason: it’s low-cost and, in some cases, has no cost.

It’s free to set up social media accounts, and if you’ve already got a website, you don’t have to pay extra to start a blog. Not only this, but there are a lot of great tools, like Canva, MailChimp, and even Chat GPT, that businesses can take advantage of when it comes to organic marketing.

Still not convinced? Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and can generate three times as many leads!

It’s excellent for search engine rankings

If you want to target customers, build trust, and generate leads, it’s crucial to rank as high as possible in search engines.

After all, the number one result in Google ends up getting nearly 28% of all clicks!

SEO is a great way to give your website a boost in the rankings. By focusing on the keywords and phrases people are most likely to use, you can drive traffic, attract the right customers, and, most importantly, make a profit!

It’s long-term

Organic marketing drives permanent traffic to your website. This means you can see the benefits of your marketing efforts, even after your campaigns have ended.

One of the best ways to take advantage of long-term organic traffic is to create evergreen content. This is information that isn’t time-sensitive, meaning that prospective customers can discover it at any time.

Organic marketing: the cons

It takes time to work

Organic marketing is not a quick fix; it takes time to see the right results. As a rough estimate, it can take six to twelve months to see your optimised blog posts rank in the search engines.

Remember that the main aim of organic marketing is to build brand awareness and engage with your audience. This can take time to do, although, in our experience, the results are well worth the effort.

It can be hard to stand out from the crowd

Did you know that 7.5 million blog posts are published every single day? With so much content available online, prospective customers can be spoilt for choice!

With organic marketing, you must work extra hard to make your content stand out from your competitors and encourage your customers to engage with you.

All the content you create should be 10x content – content that is ten times better than the existing number one result in Google.

Paid marketing: the pros

It works immediately

While organic marketing takes time to work, the critical advantage of paid marketing is that it works straight away. Just set up your campaign details, enter your credit card information, and your ad will appear to thousands of people in minutes!

This makes paid marketing ideal if you need to promote something quickly. For example, let’s say you’re offering a time-sensitive product. You can use paid marketing to push your product to your target audience as soon as possible. Conversely, you might have to wait months for an organic marketing campaign to take effect.

It offers highly targeted advertising

We all know the importance of knowing your target audience. Where they live, what they do for a living… even their hobbies and interests!

One of the great things about paid marketing is the targeting options you have available. Social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn, as well as Google Ads, gather a large amount of user data. You can use this to your advantage to ensure your ads are shown to the right people and you get the right return on your advertising spend.

It offers valuable insight into your customers and competitors

Organic marketing can sometimes be hard to track. For example, if a customer checks out a blog post, an email newsletter, and a social media post before making a purchase, which piece of content do you attribute the sale to?

Conversely, paid marketing provides you with lots of valuable information you can use to power your future campaigns. You can see which ads are leading to conversions, which copy and images people prefer, and even how you’re performing compared to your competitors.

Paid marketing is also fantastic for A/B testing. Create two ads with one small difference between them and see which one performs the best.

Paid marketing: the cons

It can be expensive

The main issue with paid marketing is that it’s ‘pay to play.’ Your website might be on top of Google when you’re spending money, but as soon as you pause your campaign, you’re right back at square one.

Some industries can be incredibly competitive, and this can drive the price of advertising up. For example, if you’re in the insurance industry, you can expect to pay up to £44 per click!

The good news is that paid marketing doesn’t have to be pricey. By regularly checking your data, choosing the perfect ad types, and targeting the right customers, you can drive sales without burning through your budget.

A skilled digital marketing agency (like Air Marketing) can help structure your ad campaigns correctly.

It can be seen as untrustworthy

As people become more digitally savvy and aware of ‘misinformation’ on the internet, they’re becoming less trusting of adverts they see online. A 2021 survey by YouGov showed that only one in ten people trust social media ads. Similarly, paid ads on Google have an average click-through rate of only 1.9%.

This means that people are more likely to dismiss ads they see online, whether on Facebook, Instagram, or Google. As a result, more hard work is needed to instil confidence in prospective customers.

Alternatively… why not use both?

So far, we’ve talked about using organic marketing OR paid marketing to grow and develop your business. However, there is nothing to stop you from using both together!

35% of businesses have integrated their paid and organic strategies to get the best effect from both. Here are just some of the reasons why combining the two is often the best approach:

• Paid marketing lets you promote your brand and engage with customers quickly, while your organic marketing works behind the scenes to build a loyal audience over time
• Paid marketing allows you to precisely target customers based on their demographic, behaviour, and interests, while organic marketing can be used to build relationships with customers
• Paid marketing gives you the insight and data you need to optimise your organic marketing campaigns. For example, you can see which keywords customers are using to trigger your PPC campaigns and adopt these words and phrases for search engine optimisation purposes
• Paid marketing can be affected by your organic marketing. For example, high-quality, relevant copy on your website can increase your ‘quality score’ in Google Ads, meaning you pay less when people click on your ads

Think of both marketing channels as two halves of the same whole. For example, let’s say you operate an eCommerce website and want to encourage more people to buy your products. You can use organic marketing to boost brand awareness and inform prospective customers of your store.

When these people visit your website, you can use a retargeting campaign on social media, as well as the Google Ads display network. These ads remind them of your brand, encouraging them to return to your site and make a purchase when they’re ready.

By combining organic and paid marketing, you can expand your reach and grow your audience faster than you would with either approach on its own.

Air Marketing: experts in organic and paid marketing

At Air Marketing, we specialise in both organic marketing and paid marketing, meaning you can have the best of both worlds!

Our digital marketing experts will create a strategy that focuses on the needs of your target audience and delivers the right messages at the right time. This means you get more leads and sales, all while getting a fantastic return on investment.

Contact us today to see how you can use organic and paid marketing in perfect harmony.

To me, LinkedIn is my ‘go-to’ for advertising. Many business owners are extremely successful in using LinkedIn ads to generate more leads and sales, and they do absolutely work if they are done right. Here’s how:

It’s unique

LinkedIn is different from other social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as it’s designed specifically with business networking in mind.

Options

As well as setting your objectives, whether it’s brand awareness, website, or a lead generation campaign, there are also different options for which format you want your campaign to run as. This is an ‘ad format’ which could be a single image ad, a carousel ad, an InMail, a conversational ad, a video ad and much more! I personally am a fan of single-image ads and carousel ads – anything ‘visual’ gets great results.

Targeting abilities

LinkedIn targeting capabilities are granular, allowing you to target specific industries, company sizes, job titles and more. This makes it easier for businesses to reach their ideal audience.

Trust

LinkedIn is a reliable and trustworthy platform that promotes user engagement with informative content. It stands out as a professional networking platform that prioritises business networking and professional content sharing, in contrast to other social networking platforms that emphasise personal connections, entertainment, and social content sharing.

Reporting at its finest

I recommend producing a weekly report for your campaign. This enables you to make edits to how your campaign is running. For example, you can pull a demographics report and see who is interacting with your ad (job titles/location/industry and so on), and if you’re not happy with who is engaging with your ad, you can easily make adjustments based on the data.

How to create engaging ad content that resonates with your target audience

As a marketer, you’re always on the lookout for new ways to connect with your target audience and drive results. One strategy that has proven to be highly effective is using first-party email data. In this article, we’ll explore what first-party email data is, why it’s valuable, and how you can use it to improve your marketing strategy.

What is First-Party Email Data?

First-party email data refers to the information that you collect from your own customers and prospects, such as their email addresses, names, and other demographic or behavioural data. This data is collected through a variety of channels, such as your website, social media, and online/in-store purchases.

Why is First-Party Email Data Valuable?

There are several reasons why first-party email data is valuable for marketers:

Targeted Messaging: First-party email data allows you to create highly targeted and personalised messaging for your audience. By knowing more about their demographics, behaviours, and preferences, you can tailor your messages to their specific needs and interests.

Improved ROI: Because you’re targeting a highly specific audience with your messages, you’re likely to see improved ROI on your marketing efforts. You’ll be reaching people who are more likely to be interested in your products or services, which can lead to higher conversion rates.

Deeper Insights: First-party email data provides deeper insights into your audience and their behaviours. By analysing this data, you can identify trends, preferences, and areas of opportunity for your business.

How to Use First-Party Email Data in Your Marketing Strategy

Now that you understand the value of first-party email data, let’s explore how you can use it to improve your marketing strategy:

Segment Your Audience: Use your first-party email data to segment your audience into specific groups based on demographics, behaviours, and interests. This will allow you to create targeted messaging that resonates with each group.

Personalise Your Messages: Use the data you’ve collected to personalise your email messages for each recipient. Address them by name, use their past purchase history to recommend similar products, and offer promotions that are tailored to their interests.

Optimise Your Timing: Use your first-party email data to identify the best times to send your messages. Analyse the data to see when your audience is most likely to open and engage with your emails, and adjust your send times accordingly.

Test and Refine: Continuously test and refine your messaging and tactics based on the data you collect. Experiment with different subject lines, calls-to-action, and messaging to see what resonates best with your audience.

Conclusion

Using first-party email data is a highly effective way to improve your marketing strategy. By collecting and analysing data about your own customers and prospects, you can create highly targeted and personalised messaging that resonates with your audience. Use the tips outlined in this article to optimise your strategy and see improved results from your email marketing efforts.

Opinion piece by James Ollerhead, Senior Marketing Executive at Air Marketing

B2B (business-to-business) companies have traditionally shied away from consumer-focused social media platforms like TikTok. But in recent times, B2B companies have started to realise the potential of this app as a marketing tool to reach a wider audience and connect with their target customers. With eight new users joining the platform every second, it will come as no surprise that there are predicted to be 8 million TikTok users in the UK by 2024.

Here are some ways B2B companies are using TikTok for their marketing efforts:

Product Demonstrations and Tutorials:

TikTok’s short-form video format is ideal for showcasing products and services in an engaging and fun way. B2B companies can use this platform to give product demonstrations, tutorials, and how-to videos, which can help educate and inform potential customers.

Employee Engagement and Brand Promotion:

TikTok allows B2B companies to humanise their brand by showcasing their employees and their work culture. This helps to create a positive image of the company and fosters a strong connection with potential customers.

Customer Testimonials:

TikTok is a great platform for B2B companies to showcase customer testimonials and success stories. By showing the impact their products or services have had on real customers, B2B companies can build trust with potential customers.

Trending Topics:

TikTok’s algorithm is designed to promote trending topics, which makes it a great platform for B2B companies to join in on relevant conversations and share their expertise on industry-related topics.

Influencer Marketing:

TikTok has a large community of influencers who have built a following and can be leveraged by B2B companies to promote their products or services. By collaborating with the right influencer, B2B companies can reach a wider audience and increase brand awareness.

Still need some convincing? Don’t just take our word for it – B2B brands such as Adobe, Sage, Shopify, and Square have used TikTok effectively for their marketing…

Adobe Creative Software has leveraged TikTok for its marketing efforts introducing #LevelUpWithAdobe – a series of workshops and resources aimed at assisting TikTok creators improve their video editing and production abilities.

Sage Accounting Software made a big impact on TikTok with its #BOSSIT2021 campaign. The company celebrated small businesses in the UK by inviting them to share their experiences overcoming obstacles during a difficult year. With over 1 million entries, the challenge was a huge success and helped Sage connect with many businesses.

Shopify leverages TikTok to share tips on productivity, business, and of course, ways to use their eCommerce platform. With over 100,000 followers on the platform, Shopify continues to create value for its users and attract new ones.

Square, a leading player in fintech, has partnered with TikTok to allow merchants to create online stores on the social media platform. ‘Square x TikTok’ links TikTok video and ad viewers to products sold on merchants’ Square Online stores, offering a seamless shopping experience while preserving the merchants’ unique brand identity.

Overall, TikTok is a versatile platform that B2B companies can use for their marketing efforts. By leveraging the app’s unique features, B2B companies can reach a wider audience, promote their brand, and connect with potential customers in a fun and engaging way. Is TikTok on your 2023 B2B marketing plan?

Opinion piece by Content Manager, Tamara Rowley

The New Year. A time for resolutions, diets, gym memberships and planning what you want to achieve / see / do in the year ahead. For many UK businesses, it’s the start of Q4 – the final quarter of the financial year. Q4 is a deciding quarter – if you’re ahead, you need to keep momentum and stay head. If you’re behind, then this is your last chance to catch up and finish the financial year well.

From a marketing perspective, there will be two trains of thought coming into the New Year. What tactics need optimising, tweaking or revisiting this year to work harder. And it’s time to start strategising your next 12 month marketing plan for the next financial year.

For us, our marketing plan is so closely linked to our sales objectives that it makes sense to conduct the planning concurrently with the finalisation of our financial budgets. This also gives us roughly a 3 month window to analyse the data from the previous year’s activities, spend time meeting with key stakeholders to understand their focus for the year and come up with lots of new, exciting ideas to bring to the plan.

Your marketing plan should outline 3 key things: your goals, your budget and your tactics.

Start by understanding your goals. What do you want to achieve in the next year? For example, do you want to grow your business – and if so by how much? Are you looking to reach a new audience or a higher proportion of your current audience? Do you need to drive more traffic to your website or convert more of the existing traffic on your website?

Once you know your goals, you can start to put together your budget. How much are you willing to spend on marketing? This will help you determine what tactics you can afford to use.

And then crucially, you’ll need to choose your tactics. Your tactics will be dictated by several elements including your budget, your target market, and your goals. For example, if you’re looking for quick conversions for top of funnel leads, with clear cost per lead associated, you’re unlikely to tactically deploy a long-term for this goal. However, if one of your goals is to eventually be able to generate leads without spending money, consider implementing an SEO strategy in conjunction with your current tactics to quickly convert leads – so you are aligning to both goals.

The important thing? Step outside the everyday – dive into the data but don’t forget to get creative. And there are plenty of agencies, like us, here to help if you need it!

Opinion piece by Verity Studley-Wootton – Head of Marketing Services at Air Marketing