And, beyond perception, colour can improve the functionality of your marketing. Consider this research curated by colorcom.com: Read More
When keywords are used correctly on your website, the people who are most likely to use your services and convert have an easier time discovering your company. Don’t believe us? Google “marketing company” and see if our marketing company shows up.
Now you may be asking yourself “what keywords should I use?” Don’t worry! Our digital marketing agency will explain: Read More
However, when branding goes wrong, it can go really wrong and have severe consequences for your company. Read More
Ok, so you’ve decided you need to create or refresh your company’s brand. But how do you know if you’ve picked the best branding company to do the work?
And if the work they give you is any good?
After all, branding is VERY subjective. Yet your brand is one of your company’s most valuable assets. How do you, as a professional, steer your company and your management to making the best decision? Based on over 30 years of experience as a brand mechanic overseeing the transformation of brands from inside companies and inside agencies (had to oversee the redesign of the Yellow Pages walking fingers logo at one point – egad!), here’s my 7 point checklist to picking the best branding company and the best work:
You can print the 7 points above out as a checklist to keep in your drawer to evaluate any work. Here’s the details:
When you are first selecting a branding company, they are going to show you their best work. Don’t fall for it. Ask to see the last 10 projects they completed. This way, you’ll get a better feel of whether they have a process to deliver good work consistently vs just get creatively lucky every once in a while. After all, all that great work they put up on their walls is going to be no help to you if your project fails.
Branding isn’t (just) a fashion show. It’s a fairly mechanical business process designed to deliver an impression of your company in your target customer’s mind. Having a solid, clear branding strategy is the most critical element to achieving success.
So what is a branding strategy? Read More
We find digital marketing agencies design banners in a vacuum and as if they were magazine ads, failing to recognize that these banners are an interruptive form of advertising trying to divert your attention from the very website they are on. Don’t forget, people don’t visit websites to look at ads, they’re there for the content. Whether people are reading an article about the latest album release, or catching up on their favourite teams, they are not necessarily looking to make a purchase. Display banner advertising is interruptive in nature, making it especially important to stand out from everything else. In fact, only 14% of users can recall the last display ad they saw and the content it promoted.
As a digital marketing agency, we like to view digital banner ads like billboards; in fact, we often refer to them as billboards on the information highway. Imagine you’re driving in your car, look up, and see a billboard. That billboard has seconds to catch your eye before you drive away. It needs to make sense at first glance while giving you all the information you need to peak your interest. This is how to think of a banner ad.
We have a few handy tips to help you create the best banner ad that will get clicks:
This post provides a very cool example of small ways to build big brands.
What do you guess the following packaging contains?
Some jewelry?
A decorative item for your house?
Would you be surprised to know it’s a chain ring for a bike?
The Marketing Garage was recently interviewed by the Business News Network about advertising campaigns for Canada’s 150th anniversary. The article reviews numerous marketing campaigns that did well and nailed it, along with campaigns that didn’t meet up to the rest and failed it.
In the article, our owner and digital marketing consultant Bob Nunn, provides his expert opinion as a brand mechanic and explains “If a brand is going to ‘rent the interest’ of a cultural event, the campaign needs to match what the brand promise is all about.”
Read the full article here:
Did an interview with Canadian Business magazine that hit the newstands last week (do they still have newstands?). They asked three smart people and me how to make sure your new brand offering doesn’t go up in flames like the Samsung Galaxy 7. Here’s the piece followed by an interesting observation on how Google launches brands that they didn’t include:
Here’s what they didn’t print:
I’m a big fan of Google’s forever beta approach as they say in the piece. I’ve been an early adopter of things like GMail, Google Docs and Google Photos and AdWords itself and seen how they invite you in early as a beta-tester and then make it better and better. But the ONE time when they ignored this and failed consequently was Google Glass.
The first problem is Read More
It’s easy to get carried away with exciting projects and neglect your own brand. Your brand is not only important for attracting new customers, it’s also important for your business culture. This internal branding is known as your employer brand.
Employer brand is how your company is perceived by your current and potential employees. Having a clear employer brand can be a powerful recruiting tool, motivator, and creates a culture of success. Some best practices to have your employees “live your brand” include:
We know how important it is to keep up a company’s brand, and at the Marketing Garage, we work hard as a team to tune up our employer brand. In this blog, you will learn how an employer brand is important, and 4 ways we developed and tuned our employer brand that you might find helpful.
It’s important to align the external brand, which is your company’s promise to customers, with your employer brand in order to present your company consistently and effectively. As Forbes mentioned, “fewer than 50% of employees believe in their company’s brand idea, and even less are actually equipped to deliver on it.” If your employees are not engaged, then the strength of your external brand doesn’t matter. Read More
We put a new fascia on a Toronto area marketing company today. The Marketing Garage is based just north of Toronto in the lovely town of Aurora. It’s been co-founded by Brian Larter, of the long-standing Aurora ad agency Larter Marketing & Communications and Bob Nunn, founder of the internet marketing consultancy Brand Mechanics.
Together, they’ve been instrumental in the success of an impressive roster of blue-chip clients including Harley-Davidson, 3M, Unilock, M&M Meat Shops, AutoTrader and more. Along the way, they’ve won over 40 marketing awards from everyone from the Canadian Marketing Association to Cannes. With a core set of beliefs that are almost identical, their two roads – branding and internet diagnostics – have intersected at precisely the right moment in time.
We help companies tune-up their marketing for the online era. With a series of proven diagnostic processes that use over 90 benchmarks and 25 tools we do a bumper-to-bumper evaluation to assess your online and offline marketing performance and identify the quickest opportunities for improvement. After the initial pop of the hood, we get to work fixing the problems. With our unique business model (more about that later) we have a full set of tools including but not limited to:
Along the way, we provide coaching for your team to help them take your marketing into the digital revolution with confidence.
We’re for clients who believe that all marketing is measurable. For those who are a little tired of marketing programs that failed to move the needle and don’t really think advertising should be a faith-based initiative. We’re for companies who may not know what’s working and what’s not working but need someone who can cut to the chase using ruthless analytics that sometimes challenge the status quo. We’re for people who want quick wins and believe in keeping the best and fixing the rest. We’re for companies who suspect that the future of marketing is both on and offline but appreciate that this new era of marketing measurement provides the absolute clarity needed to fuel business growth.
We’ve been busy merging the time-honoured principles of brand-building with the latest in online testing & learning. Recent client successes include:
We’ll be re-doing our own site (see Shoemaker’s children) while maintaining our own top search engine rankings. You? Well if your brand is out of gas or your marketing needs a kick start to get it roaring down the information highway, just give us a call.
We’d love to hear about your business.
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