Marketing collaterals and content design for Applause Applause.
Plan with patience, but execute with impatience. The percentage of campaigns falling flat on their faces is more than we’d like them to be. But one thing is certain, they all suffer from the hare-symptom. The gut wrenching need to be first. First to put out a tweet, first to own a hashtag, first to go viral. None of that will happen, if you don’t sit back and invest in strategy. Discuss your best ideas, then argue for why they suck. Put your best foot forward, only to criticize how the best foot could be even better. Use your colleagues, interns and creative consultants to fail-proof your brand’s upcoming digital campaign! You'll see the difference in impact, when the execution is tight. 🐣
So, your brand's going through a stage of metamorphosis? Revamping a brand isn’t a creative joyride. Your brand’s image and tonality has obviously reached a stage of stagnation or some form of limitation since you’re thinking of revamping it. Now that you have the strategic and creative urge to embark upon this crazy journey with your creative agency/design studio, divide your timeline in a way that a lot of time is given to the purpose of brand building - the business objectives you’d like the creatives to meet through the exercise, okay? 🦋
Trust us, we know how easy it is to go with a flow of a unique and ambitious idea just because the team is amped up. But this is when you need to take a step back, and use that hawk-eye vision of yours to get a better perspective of the idea. The last thing you want is to confuse your existing customers to the extent that they don’t understand what your brand stands for anymore. That choice is totally yours though - to capitalize on the product you sell, or the brand you portray.
Well, not necessarily a song - but opinions. If you're stuck on the same set of opinions about your business, things that you and your trusted team feel, you're in for a surprise. What your brand stands for internally, and what it communicates to your potential customer can be as far apart as night and day. Use Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence to your advantage here - this tool is here to stay anyway. Study, and absorb what your audience is craving for - what clicks with them, and what makes them click. This time, literally. You've been playing the same song in an infinite loop for a while now - time for a track change. 💿
Could you imagine all of human intelligence - throughout centuries - as one collective consciousness? Think of ALL that you would know - intricate information on countless inventions, discoveries and thought processes. Like, anytime we wanted a piece of knowledge, we could just tap into this giant brain in the clouds. That would be something isn't it? Well, the internet can come pretty close. So to bring it down to how this is relevant for you - a business owner - think of all the ways your brand could go wrong - and find every possible way to prevent those instances. Because no matter how unique you think your product/service is, chances are that someone's already travelled the path you're embarking on today. Use the resources available to you to study up. We call it 'acquired experience'. When you live vicariously through the generations before you - minus the reality of pitfalls and hardships. They turned a wrong corner, so that you don't have to. 🎢
While creating content for your brand, start with issues that are close to your heart. Or your business' heart, if you please. It's easier to talk about things that actually interest you, bother you or are of concern to you. Don't overthink about how this reflects on your brand's image - because no one cares. Just start creating. It's not an expensive billboard near the highway, it's just social media. You are allowed to make mistakes here. And take your own sweet time to learn from them. 🥩
Surely, there’s nothing good about a clickbait - yeah? Well, not exactly. The term ‘clickbait’ gets a bad rep because we tend to throw the word around every time we get sucked into an article or a post that lists out the “7 best signs he/she is falling for you.” But think about it - something surely is working here!
The idea is to not confuse “compelling headlines” with clickbaits. A bait is something that fools you into believing it to be something else - for instance, you click on a seemingly neutral article but it ends up being an obvious ad. If you’re a brand trying to build a presence online, by engaging through interesting articles with your audience - try to make the headline crisp, clear and fun! Then follow it up with content that genuinely adds some value to the viewer’s life. Don’t ‘bait’ them into reading something that they don’t want. That’s just bad marketing. You can be as clever and Buzzfeed-y as you want - as long as you back it up with an equally compelling content. That’s when you convert a random reader, to a regular one. 🚤
It's easy to diss a rat-race without analyzing why we end up going with the flow. Just because the phrase has 'rat' in it, doesn't implicitly make it silly. There's a sense of comfort brands feel when they replicate the formula that worked for someone else - be it a design trick, pun intended copy or a marketing gimmick.
There's a sense of safety knowing that someone's been there, and done that. But that someone isn't you. Creative solutions that are just clones of other solutions are neither being creative - nor solving anything. The purpose of an ad campaign is to convert to actual sales - not just to add a feather in the cap of your agency's portfolio. 🐀
Often, what your brand really needs is right in front of you. It's so apparent, that we feel that's not it. That it needs something extra. And in this misdirected hunt to create something unique, we end up trying things like adding pineapple to the pizza topping. 🍕
Well, we all know how that turned out. 🙄
Well, we all know how that turned out. 🙄
