Digital Marketing

An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets. But what exactly does “branding” mean? How does it affect a business like yours?

Why is Branding Important?

Branding refers to how companies develop marketing campaigns in order to widely associate certain images, words, designs, etc. with their specific brand. Designing a logo image or coming up with a catchy slogan for your company are both examples of branding. For example, one of the first things that comes to mind for most people when they think of big-box retail giant Target is the iconic bright red circular target symbol that is emblazoned on the front of every Target building and has become synonymous with the Target brand.

Branding is something that almost every company utilizes, but why? Why is successful branding so important to building and maintaining effective marketing campaigns and building a large and loyal base of customers for your company? Keep reading to find out some of the top reasons why it is definitely worth it to devote a substantial portion of your marketing resources toward successfully branding your company.

Branding Makes Your Brand Unique

There’s a reason why any symbols, images, and slogans that you want to associate with your company and include in your advertisements need to be copyrighted as soon as possible. Copywriting allows your company to take ownership of anything you design to associate with your brand in order to help you avoid legal issues and prevent other brands from using the designs that belong to your company in their advertisements and marketing campaigns.

Branding helps set your company apart from other companies—especially companies that offer products and services that are similar to the ones your company offers. It can be hard to keep your brand afloat in the face of competition from similar brands, but branding helps make your company unique and memorable. It allows your company to create a distinct, recognizable identity and carve out its own space alongside other companies within the industry.

Branding is Attention-Grabbing

Another reason why branding is so important to the success of your company is that branding helps attract attention to your brand. Successful branding generally involves designing symbols and slogans that are interesting, highly engaging, memorable, and overall attract attention.

To return to the example of Target, the retail giant has two main symbols that are widely associated with their brand: the bright red target symbol and Bullseye, the white dog with the Target symbol around its eye that serves as Target’s official mascot. Designing an adorable dog to associate with their brand and using that dog in their marketing campaigns makes Target more memorable and keeps their brand at the forefront of shoppers’ minds, which in turn encourages more shoppers to shop at Target rather than buying from one of Target’s competitors.

Branding Gives Your Company a Personality

Modern consumers prefer to buy from companies that they feel are trustworthy, consistent, and compassionate. Developing a unique, attention-grabbing brand for your company gives your company a personality and sets it apart from huge, faceless corporations that are cold and impersonal in their interactions with their customers.

Developing a specific logo, slogan, mascot, etc. and continuously incorporating those unique designs into your marketing campaigns helps make your company more recognizable to potential customers. Branding gives your company a personalized voice and consistent personality—which can go a long way toward encouraging customers to trust your company and remain loyal to your brand even when presented with other options.

Branding Creates More Marketing Opportunities

One of the best things about branding is that, once you have established a clear brand for your company with recognizable symbols that are widely associated with your company and your company alone, you can use those symbols to create more marketing opportunities and in turn increase your customer base and boost your profits.

For example, if you develop a cute animal mascot for your company, you can design T-shirts, tote bags, stickers, and other merchandise that are emblazoned with that recognizable mascot. Customers are much more likely to feel inclined to purchase branded merchandise from your company and rep your brand in public if doing so involves wearing a T-shirt that features a cute animal mascot or a colorful, aesthetically-pleasing logo on the front. On the other hand, stickers and T-shirts that just feature your company’s name by itself with no attention-grabbing symbols or slogans are unlikely to sell very well. Over time, successfully branding your company can create additional opportunities for you to expand your company’s reach and allow you to take advantage of profitable marketing strategies such as selling branded T-shirts.

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT (SMM)

Showing up on search engines is only the first step in getting your business’ brand into the minds of customers. In today’s digital world, social media usage is second only to SEO in online importance. The overwhelming majority of Americans using Facebook, Instagram or Twitter on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis. If your brand isn’t building momentum on these social media platforms, you’ll be left in the dust by competitors.

At Think Creative, we understand how hard it can be to keep up with social media. There’s just so many platforms to produce content and trends to try and follow. Let our team handle the hassle so you can focus on making money.

Community Building

Our team of social media mavericks will take time to build your online presence every day. Armed with the latest in industry information, we’ll put our expertise to work wowing your customers. If you already have a social media page on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, we can take over control and work out magic. We can also create profiles from scratch if you aren’t already online.

Positive Posting

Keeping in contact with your customers online is extremely important. Think Creative specializes in cutting-edge, eye-catching content that will get you the followers you need. We offer a variety of plans that feature different tiers of weekly posts tailored to your business’ needs. We’ll also keep up with comments and questions from customers to make sure consumers care about your business. We’ve got you covered whether your a car dealership that needs help promoting your hot new car, a local restaurant struggling to get the word out about your latest dish, or anywhere in between.

Ad Campaigns

Profiles and posting offer great avenues for organic growth, but sometimes your business needs a little extra push. With so many eyes on social media, there’s no better place to run advertisements than on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Our expert advertisers will create innovative, interesting advertisements for your business and run them on various social media platforms perfectly targeted to take your message to the masses.

Reputation Management

As any business owner knows, social media can often be as harmful as it is helpful, especially in regards to reviews. Online ratings via Yelp and Google are almost always the first thing (and all too often the last thing) that new customers see about your business. Let our revolutionary reputation management team represent your business on these platforms. We’ll help clear up confusion, address concerns, answer questions and tackle troublesome negative reviews to help keep your score sky-high.

Our experienced team of data engineers can clean up your chaotic data, mix it with our own, and help you find leads you need to succeed!

Data-Driven Leads

Think Creative’s data management team can create a variety of different marketing counts and customer lists to help you answer important questions about your customers, such as:

• Who should I be targeting?
• Where do my customers come from?
• What are my customers looking for?
• When is the best time to reach out to my customers?
• Why do my customers come to my business?
• How can I get new customers?

Our databases can be used to create ad hoc target lists on the fly depending on whatever factors you want to focus on. We also offer a wide selection of common target lists. Using our automotive industry clients as an example, lists include:

• Service-based factors
  Recall lists
  Warranty expirations
  Customer loyalty rankings
• Sales-based factors
  Customers with good equity
  Customers in your principle market area
  Customer acquisition categories (New, Pre-Owned, Lease, etc.)
• Product-based factors
  Year of product purchased
  Make of product purchased
  Model of product purchased

Data Sourcing

At Think Creative, we devour data. Our leads generation takes in info from a variety of sources to create the perfect blend that best suits your business. We look at data from sources such as:

• Your own provided data, such as your inventory management vendor
• DealerTrack
• Advent
• CDK Dealer Management System
• R & R Dealer Management System
• Our own market share database

Data Quality

Not all data is created equally. How do you determine which numbers are useful and which are a waste? Simple: let us sort it out! We use a variety of methods, such as CASS address standardization, NCOA address forwarding, email validation and more to make sure your numbers make a difference. We also remove problematic data, such as emails and addresses tied to Do Not Mail listings, to make sure you don’t get into trouble.

Data Mining

Numbers without meaning aren’t very useful, so we dig through the digits to find what really matters. We handle typical statistics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that are standard to the automotive industry but also take things further. We monitor marketing campaign performance by looking at market share capture, return on investment, profits and opens/clicks to make sure our efforts in other areas are all earning you customers.

Data Delivery

Our custom-made ORBIS tool gives you access to a huge variety of information in a form that anyone can understand. From the dashboard, ORBIS gives you access to some or all of the following factors:

Email templates for automated marketing messages and campaigns
Sales and service KPIs/analytics
Sales and service database mining
Marketing campaign KPIs
SERP rankings
Incoming Traffic
User Engagement
and more!

Customers love to look up ideas when they’re shopping, so being on top of those search results, through the use of SEO is critical to sustained growth.

SEO

Think Creative’s precision-targeted SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services are designed to help you rocket up the charts and stay at the top. We utilized a mixture of both off- and on-site SEO techniques to get you the rankings you deserve. Our in-house content creators consistently produce top-tier blogs, videos and other materials that search engine algorithms can’t get enough of.

With Think Creative on your team, your web presence cannot be in better hands!

Online Auditing

The first step in stepping up your digital appeal is to run a full audit of your website and various social media accounts. Our custom-created process will point out every possible problem.

With that information in hand, we will sit down with you to go over our discoveries and let you know how we will handle these issues to take you to the top.

On-Site SEO

Quality content and an effortless user experience are the two biggest factors for a successful website. Our content, SEO and website teams will work together to improve any weaknesses your website has. Functionality, ease of use and accessibility will all be optimized.

Powerfully-performing blogs, photos, videos and more will be added to your website to make it more appealing to search engines and searching customers alike. We will continue to monitor your website and update it with fresh content and the latest industry tricks so you’ll stay above the competition.

Off-Site SEO

Your business’ website is just one part of your online picture. We know how hard it can be to keep up with all the latest social media trends and platforms. Let Think Creative handle that hassle, so you can focus on what is important: running your business.

Our custom-made, proprietary software allows our social media team to stay on top of the many different places your business appears online. From Facebook to Yelp, we’ll keep an eye out for any problematic posts and errors and address them promptly.

Content Creation

The most important factor to flying up the online rankings is providing customers the creative content they desire. Our various SEO packages offer many different pathways to producing top-tier content, such as:

Static web page optimization: more accurate information and pleasing wording goes a long way to ranking up your website.
Blogs: writing several interesting, eye-catching blogs every month keeps your content fresh and enticing for both customers and search engines.
Videos: regularly-released videos are one of the best ways to attract algorithms and customers alike.
Podcasts: producing podcast series, such as staff interviews and news updates, gives customers a way to stay informed about and feel more connected to your business.

Monthly Reports

While other SEO services try to hide the numbers, we believe in sharing information openly with our clients. You won’t be left in the dark about how your business is doing digitally.

Every month, you can expect a series of reports to arrive in your inbox to let you know how your online presence is performing in key areas such as :

SERP rankings
Incoming Traffic
User Engagement
and more!

Search engines are the ideal way to connect with eager customers looking for your product or service, and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) efforts are designed to make sure that your company appears on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when specific keywords are used during those searches. Your website’s visibility, traffic, and influence with customers is driven by a variety of tactics including native advertising, programmatic, paid search, display advertising, and more.

What is SEM and Why Is It So Important For Marketing?

Digital marketing has skyrocketed in popularity and importance over the past decade. Within the first few years of the 21st century, online advertising and digital marketing campaigns were still very much optional for companies and did not usually have the ability to make or break the success of a business. Now, however, that reality has drastically changed. Two decades into the 21st century, the Internet has become incredibly influential in virtually every facet of modern life—including marketing and advertising.

In this modern, increasingly tech-focused world, it has become very, very difficult for small businesses and giant corporations alike to stay afloat and thrive without expanding their marketing campaigns to the digital world. Designing and maintaining effective digital marketing campaigns has become virtually imperative for businesses big and small. Digital marketing strategies are constantly changing and evolving, but SEM is currently one of the most popular and most effective practices underneath the umbrella of digital marketing.

What is SEM?

SEM’ is an acronym that stands for ‘Search Engine Marketing’, a phrase that is also commonly shortened to ‘Search Marketing’. There are many different marketing strategies and practices that are included under the umbrella of search engine marketing, and SEM is constantly changing as search engine algorithms change. These realities complicate the tasks of clearly defining and truly understanding the concept of SEM as a whole.

To put it simply, SEM refers to any digital marketing strategy that involves a company’s attempts to drive traffic to their website by making their website more visible to potential customers in the results pages of popular search engines. In reality, SEM is much more complicated than that simplistic description makes it out to be. Even with carefully constructed strategies and plenty of resources and effort, it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to raise the ranking of their websites in the results pages of popular search engines–especially Google. A high Google ranking is by far the most desirable outcome of SEM for most companies. Extremely complex algorithms determine how certain websites rank on Google’s results pages. These algorithms are constantly shifting and changing and becoming even more complex, which makes it very difficult for companies to keep up with these changing algorithms to elevate or even just maintain their websites’ Google ranking.

For many companies, building effective SEM strategies into their digital marketing campaigns is key to earning high search engine rankings for their websites and expanding their digital reach.

SEM vs. SEO

It’s easy to get confused about the difference—or lack thereof—between SEM and SEO. It’s important to understand the differences and similarities between SEM and SEO in order to gain a better understanding of what search marketing is, how it works, and what marketing strategies and practices it involves.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are both marketing practices that are included under the umbrella of search marketing as a whole. They share the same purpose of elevating the search engine rankings of companies’ websites and thereby driving more traffic to those websites.

The main difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO usually refers to marketing strategies that improve search engine rankings and drive traffic to certain websites organically, whereas SEM tends to refer to paid marketing strategies that involve the use of paid search tools such as Google Ads.

There are benefits and drawbacks to both SEM and SEO. SEM practices tend to be more effective more quickly and produce outcomes that are easier to measure, but they are also more expensive to execute. SEO practices, on the other hand, take a while to become effective and their outcomes are difficult to measure accurately, but they are much less costly to maintain. As such, many companies choose to incorporate both practices into their search marketing campaigns in order to maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of both SEM and SEO.

The Importance of SEM

How effective is SEM as a marketing strategy that helps ensure your company’s success? Are the outcomes of SEM profitable enough to be worth the time, effort, and money that is required to develop effective SEM strategies for your company? The short answer to this question is a resounding yes.

SEM drastically increases brand awareness in a very short period of time—even for small businesses that are just starting out and have a very limited digital reach. Although it requires a significant output of resources to get it started, SEM practices can lead to amazing short-term outcomes that can help you significantly expand your company’s reach, increase your customer base, and boost your profits almost instantly. Whether you’re struggling to get your small business off the ground or are just hoping to expand the reach of your company as it continues to grow, take search marketing seriously and start incorporating SEM practices into your company’s digital marketing campaigns.

Bring your marketing to life with authentic video testimonials, Model Specific Consumer Content, and much more captured by a powerful, browser-based recorder.

The power of video speaks for itself, and businesses are all ears

86% of Marketing Teams use video as a marketing tool
63% of HR Teams are using video for culture and recruiting efforts
32% of Sales Teams are using video for new prospects

The Problem

Thanks for offering to record a video for us. Please check my CALENDLY to schedule in an hour call, which we’ll record on ZOOM. Or, add LOOM to GOOGLE to record your own time with the notes in this G-MAIL I’ll then edit it and upload it to GOOGLE DRIVE or VIMEO which I will then share with my team on SLACK.
It’s powerful……. Authentic Engaging Effective
but painful to produce Expensive Time-Consuming Not Scalable

How It Works

Ask – Add your questions and send to one – or many – with a single link
Manage – Review your video responses and transcripts
Edit – Trim your videos or stitch them together to create a playlist
Share – Share your Kapchers via a link, embed code or an integration

Use Cases

Recruitment – Jump-start your hiring with video
Employer Brand – Bring your employer brand and onboarding experience to life
Video Testimonials – Let your customers tell your story

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