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Creating a strong, memorable brand is about far more than picking a logo or a set of colours. Your branding reflects who you are as a company, how you speak to your customers and what they think about you.

It’s a big project, one that can be difficult to start from scratch. This is where a set of carefully considered brand guidelines can be a huge help. Brand guidelines are a kind of style guide, which sets out tone, personality, colours, fonts, logos, imagery, audience and much, much more.

All businesses should have a set of brand guidelines, and they should be reviewed regularly. Here are just five of the many reasons why it’s so important to get your brand guidelines down on paper:

  1. They help you define who you are

The act of writing down your brand guidelines can help you explore and define who you are as a brand, or who you’d like to be. Making decisions on the simple things like colour palettes all the way through to defining a personality for the tone of your communications will make your brand image clearer in-house. Until you know who you are, you’ll find it hard to communicate to others.

  1. They ensure consistency

Customers crave consistency. It builds (or damages) the credibility of a company and affects how much they trust your brand, as well as remember it. Your brand guidelines will make sure that every leaflet, website, email campaign and social post is on message, all working together to project a clear and consistent brand image.

  1. They make it easier to work with partners

If you ever need to outsource any design work or brief a communications team on a campaign, your branding guidelines will make it much easier. They are the instruction manual for everything from how to talk about your brand to what colours and fonts should be used. A comprehensive set of guidelines will help partners and collaborators to understand your business, all in one easy-to-refer-to document.

  1. They can save a lot of time and effort

If you need to get on with a project on a tight timescale, you’ll find it really useful to have your brand guidelines to refer to. You don’t need to query what size font or what colour you should be using, or agonise over the decision yourself – the brand guidelines tell you it all.

  1. They’re essential for new starters

Having a clear set of rules for your brand is crucial, especially if you have new people coming into the business. Brand guidelines helps to prevent confusion. When a new person starts, they can immediately become familiar with the brand – its imagery, tone of voice, audience – through the brand guidelines. Everyone knows exactly what to do, as it’s all there in the guidelines.

Need more help establishing your brand, or perhaps it’s time for a re-brand? The experts here at Ambos Digital are on-hand to assist with everything from brand guidelines to logo design. Give us a call on 0800 774 7025 or email [email protected] to discuss your project.

A new global study has revealed that the amount of money being spent by marketers on campaigns involving influencers has nearly doubled in the last two years.

Unlike some other digital marketing trends, which come and go, influencer marketing still seems to be a big hit with brands. They are spending around 40% of their overall marketing budgets on campaigns involving work with influencers. In the UK alone, this amounts to around £800,000 a year spent on influencer campaigns.

Marketers are investing this budget in new ways

According to researchers at Rakuten Marketing, there has been a change in the way that marketing managers are spending money on influencer campaigns. Back in 2017, they were very happy paying £75,000 or even more to a celebrity influencer for a single Facebook post. This year, this figure is dropped by a huge £50,000 to just £25,000 a post, presumably as marketers fail to convince those in charge of the purse strings that this spend represents good value for money.

Other findings from the study included:

Micro-influencers on the rise

One important trend that emerged in the study, which involved 900 influencer marketers (including 200 in the UK) along with 3,500 consumers, was that marketers are moving away from celebrity endorsements. Instead, they prefer to spend their money on micro-influencer campaigns.

Micro-influencers tend to have smaller communities of followers but have greater credibility and trust when it comes to their recommendations. According to the research, they are receiving up to £26,000 a campaign from marketers.

The Managing Director at Rakuten Marketing, Anthony Capano, commented on this particular finding, saying:

“Knowing that consumers are going to influencers for trusted recommendations on new products may explain the shift from celebrity to micro-influencers. Micro-influencers tend to be typically more engaged, as are their audience who feel like their friends.”

Does influencer marketing really work?

This is the crucial question – is it worth spending a good chunk of your marketing budget on? This piece of research is extremely useful as it includes consumers as well as marketers in its surveys. It found that a huge 80% of consumers said that they had purchased something recommended by an influencer by clicking on an image or link in a post they had shared.

There is no doubt that there is enormous power in influencer marketing, but allocating budget to it can be a balancing act. As with everything in marketing, there’s no one magic formula for success, and many methods are best used when running alongside other complementary campaigns and strategies.

For more advice on influencer marketing and to get your campaigns off the ground, contact the experts here at Ambos Digital.

Ever feel like you’re teetering on the edge of a social media rabbit hole? There’s always more that could be done, and it’s easy to lose a huge amount of time to social media without realising it. You can even end up stuck in a cycle of churning out content without stopping to think about its effectiveness.

The following are 7 of the best social media marketing tools that can help you work smarter on social media, make more impact and save you huge amounts of time…

  1. Bannersnack

Some brands either spend a lot of money having their graphic designer create banners and graphics for social media, or they do a poor job of it themselves in Photoshop. The solution is to use a tool that creates graphics for you, quickly and easily. Bannersnack offers up to 10 banners free of charge before you need to upgrade to a Premium membership, but there are also other options out there.

  1. Hootsuite or Buffer

If you aren’t yet using a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer, you absolutely need to get this sorted. These crucial tools help you to save time, plan ahead and be consistent, as well as making posting manageable and giving you valuable analytics data on how your posts are performing.

  1. Buzzsumo or Social Animal

Stuck for things to talk about on your social accounts? If the unthinkable does happen and you do get writer’s block, tools like Buzzsumo and Social Animal can help. They are content researching tools, designed to give you topic ideas and inspiration. Crucially, they can tell you which content performs best for your closest competitors.

  1. Mention

Mention, and similar tools like Awario, are designed to help you keep tabs on how people are talking about your brand online. They monitor and collect mentions of your brand on all social platforms and online, using crawlers that scan millions of pages every day. You can also set up alerts for mentions of your competitors or keywords related to your industry.

  1. Tagboard

Thinking of jumping on a popular hashtag but want to make sure you fully understand it? Social listening tools like Tagboard can help, as offer an insight into how a topic is being discussed in the social sphere. You can see how your audience tends to engage and how you can best approach a trending hashtag or topic.

  1. Followerwonk

Not sure who to follow on Twitter or how to best grow your audience? A tool like Followerwonk will help you to analyse your existing audience and suggest relevant people and influencers who can grow your follower numbers. It’s all based on optimisation and choosing the right accounts to follow, not just gobbling up extra followers to make up the numbers.

  1. Everypost

As recommended by OptinMonster, this is a content curation tool that helps you to optimise your content for the platform and for its audience. This is more advanced than the limited customising options available on many social media scheduling tools, and it can help to personalise and enhance every post with its target audience in mind.

For more tips and tools to help reinvigorate your social media campaigns, contact the experts at Ambos Digital.

A new report has revealed a discrepancy between what social media marketers are posting on the channels they use, and what customers actually want to see on those channels.

The Sprout Social 2018 Index, published by the social media management developer Sprout Social over in the US, looked at whether online marketers were focusing on the right content. What the research produced was a chart listing the top kinds of content for each group – marketers and consumers.

What are marketers posting about?

At the top of the list of what marketers are posting about are ‘posts that teach something’, which 61% of marketers believe is a top content priority. Just below this were:

What do consumers want to see on social?

The research then turned away from what kind of content is being supplied on social media to look at demand. What are customers really interested in, and what are they taking the time to seek out and read? The list of priorities for customers was quite different, with posts featuring sales and discounts favoured by a massive 72% of people at the very top of the list. The remaining priorities were:

Interestingly, both groups rated posts that teach something at around the same level. There was just 2% difference between marketers and consumers, demonstrating the obvious value of this kind of content. Inspiring posts were also equalled valued by both groups.

Both groups also named posts by influencers as the least most important content type, with just 12% of consumers saying they wanted to see this kind of post. While marketers continue to place importance and spend money on influencer posts, consumers don’t seem to be directly interested in this content. Perhaps further research analysing the level of consumer interest based on the nature and type of influencer post (as not all consumers will realise that certain posts are from influencers) could shine a brighter light on this statistic.

Why does this gap exist?

Sprout Social’s experts posit that the reason that marketers are missing the mark when it comes to posting what consumers want to see on social media is because of the blinkered pursuit of return on investment (ROI). With a need to demonstrate tangible results and value for money, marketers are pushing too hard on clicks and conversions and losing sight of the need to develop stronger relationships between brand and consumer.

For help producing a social media strategy and content that will really reach and engage your target audience, please feel free to get in touch with the experts at Ambos Digital.

According to research by Kantar, the majority of UK consumers are getting fed up with repetition in the online ads they see. A survey showed that while 57% are happier at the ways in which advertisers communicate with them, 77% are bored of seeing the same content time and time again.

Relevancy is key

The Kantar research also found that over half (55%) of people surveyed found the ads on websites not at all relevant to them. This statistic is very important, as it offers an insight into how online marketers can avoid repetition and target consumers more effectively.

Consumers are less likely to mind if they’ve seen a particular ad a few times if they perceive it as offering some level of value to them. It will provide value if it is relevant to their interests, shopping habits or needs. For example, offering a lower price version of a product they’ve been searching online for, or solving a particular problem they may have at that moment.

In some cases, consumers will ignore irrelevant ads. They simply won’t notice them. However, the same irrelevant ad with seemingly no value or interest to the consumer can soon become annoying if it pops up too many times.

Relevancy is important across all online marketing platforms, including social media. Indeed, Facebook now delivers its ads based on relevancy and provides relevance scores as metrics to marketers.

Targeting and personalisation

To add value to the consumer and make online marketing content as relevant as possible, marketers need to invest more time and energy into personalisation. Targeting tools are now widely available on online marketing platforms such as social media, where marketers can test ads aimed at different demographics.

Understanding your ideal customer demographic and using insight into shopping habits, interests, pain points and other information can help you deliver ads that are relevant. As for avoiding repetition, there are some other things you can do:

For help, support and expert advice to develop or improve your own digital marketing strategy, get in touch with the talented team here at Ambos Digital.

One of the biggest worries for any marketing department when it comes to social media marketing is – where is the return on investment? Why are we spending so much on social when it doesn’t clearly show tangible results or seem to generate ROI?

It can sometimes be tricky to track and demonstrate ROI with digital and social marketing. This is why social media marketers need clear, achievable and measurable goals which have been set in line with overall business objectives. If you are regularly disappointed at your results or just don’t seem to be making progress (or you’ve got the marketing department on your back), here’s a few pointers as to where you could be going wrong…

You aren’t tracking results in the right way

A recent survey by Manifest named tracking results as one of the six main challenges facing social media marketers at the moment, with 17% of respondents reporting struggling with tracking and analytics. If you can’t access the data you need, or you don’t know how to make sense of the data you do have, how can you hope to get a sense of where you are in reaching your goals?

Your goals aren’t measurable

In order to achieve a goal on a platform such as a social networking site, you need to choose something tangible to track. You can’t base an objective on a vague concept or idea, such as a ‘general improvement in engagement’ or a ‘more positive impression of the brand among customers’. You can make a case for progress in these areas using anecdotal evidence, but this isn’t enough. You need hard data. You need to set a goal and say to your team “here is exactly how we will measure it and here are the metrics we will use to do so”.

Your goals aren’t realistic

Many social media marketers are ambitious, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if your goals are so stratospheric that you never reach them, you’ll always end up disappointed. This is not just demotivating, it can also be bad for the brand as you never have a sense of what you are actually achieving.

You don’t have a proper strategy in place

The Manifest research showed that 24% of social media marketers don’t have a proper strategy in place. This is a serious mistake. A proper social media marketing strategy helps to guide the development and running of social campaigns. It clarifies what you’re aiming to do, who you’re aiming to reach and what you hope to achieve. Crucially though, it lays out a plan for how you’ll get there. This plan is detailed, with bench markers at every step of the way. If you’re following the strategy closely, you’re more likely to achieve your goals.

For help and advice with social media marketing strategy, tracking and analytics, get in touch with the experts here at Ambos Digital. We’ll be happy to help.

According to recent research by RadiumOne, around 84% of outbound sharing online happens through a medium known as ‘dark social’. But what is this mysterious dark social and is it something that marketers need to know about?

Dark social in a nutshell

You’ll be relieved to learn that dark social is not something shady or illicit. It is simply a term to describe when web users take to private online communication methods to share social media content. For example, someone wanting to share an article with a friend may copy and paste the link in a private instant message or email, rather than using the ‘share’ button on a social media site.

So, what’s wrong with this? The crucial point for marketers is that this dark social activity isn’t trackable. It represents meaningful engagement between the user and your content, which could even lead to conversions, but it won’t appear in any of your analytics data. If you’ve ever wondered where all the ‘direct’ traffic in your analytics data is coming from, dark social could be the culprit.

This gives marketers an incomplete picture of the effectiveness of their campaigns, means they are potentially measuring the wrong things, and could also lead to missing out on a spectacular marketing opportunity.

What should marketers be doing about dark social?

Despite the prevalence of dark social, hardly any online marketers seem to be particularly concerned about it.  Econsultancy’s research found that just 4% considered the rise of dark social as a barrier when trying to “build a joined-up view of the customer journey”.

Despite this, there are many persuasive reasons why digital marketing professional may want to take a minute to look into the dark social phenomenon. For example:

Practical tips to harness dark social

One of the possible reasons why digital marketers aren’t paying much attention to dark social is that they think there isn’t anything they can do about it, but this isn’t strictly true. Hootsuite has a few helpful tips, including:

For more help with social media marketing, contact the experts at Ambos Digital.

For some, influencer marketing is just another trend. For others, it could be worth looking into but they lack the time, resources and expertise to make a real impact with this strategy.

Those who do try influencer marketing with the full clout of their resources, and backed by a proper strategy, are seeing results. Ecommerce Week found that half of young UK adults bought items in 2017 that had been promoted by influencers, while separate research by Experticity revealed that 82% of online shoppers take recommendations for purchases from micro-influencers that they follow.

It’s easy to see why influencer marketing has taken off, as word of mouth recommendation has always been one of the most powerful weapons in any brand’s marketing arsenal.

If you’re getting started with influencer marketing, here are the crucial dos and don’ts to remember…

Do familiarise yourself with the rules

Not only could you end up in hot water if you fall foul of Advertising Standards Agency regulations around influencer marketing, but you can also destroy the trust of potential and existing customers. Research has found that while consumers may not be very well informed about the regulations surrounding the advertising of promoted or recommended products by influencers, they do care about it.

88% of 2,000 members of the public included in a recent Prizeology survey agreed that they should be informed if people are paid to promote products. A further 60% said that their perception of a brand would be improved if product promotion was upfront and transparent.

You need to do your homework on how brands are supposed to indicate a commercial relationship or clearly communicate a promoted product post to consumers.

Do choose the right influencer

While reach and follower numbers are important when choosing an influencer to work with, it would be unwise to make your choice based on these stats alone. A good influencer is one who has the ear of your target customers – the people who are most likely to buy your products, and most likely to listen to the recommendation of this particular influencer.

You also need someone who understands the relationship between brand, influencer and customer, preferably with experience of this marketing technique. Don’t forget to give your influencer goals and incentives too.

Don’t put words in your influencer’s mouth

You can provide guidelines by all means, but a script provided by the brand is a bad idea. This is because influencer marketing only works when the recommendation feels authentic and genuine. Advertising copy written by your marketing department will come across as just that, and it may not resonate with your influencer’s audience.

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket

Be careful when relying too heavily on one influencer, or letting them dictate the terms or tone of the campaign. You may also want to avoid making your influencer the face of the brand, just in case they become embroiled in a scandal or be spotted with a competitor’s product.

For more advice on effective online marketing strategies, please don’t hesitate to contact the Ambos Digital team.

If your business is worried about whether you’re falling behind on the latest trends in social media and digital marketing, a new piece of research could help to alleviate your fears. A survey conducted by Code Computerlove has found that not all customers are looking for innovation in their digital experiences.

Integration and improvement most important to users

According to netimperative.com, just 17.7% of survey respondents said they were looking for “something they haven’t experienced before”. In comparison, 38% of consumers wanted brands to improve the customer experience and ensure better integration across a range of different devices.

The message is clear – consumers want websites and digital experiences that work, and in a way that fits with their lives, work and use of different devices, before they want a flashy new device or ground-breaking app. Without functionality that makes everyday tasks, searches and shopping easier, some of these trends can be seen simply as toys with limited novelty value.

2018 digital trends under the microscope

The survey also looked at what experts – particularly the key speakers and influencers at CES 2018 – are predicting will be the biggest digital marketing trends of the year. Researchers explored the consumer appetite for:

35% of those surveyed said they had encountered voice-activated assistants before, including Google Home and Alexa.

Only 20% of people had encountered a chatbot, and just 9% were interested in seeing more of the technology in 2018. Louis Georgiou from Code Computerlove said of this interesting finding: “This disconnect perhaps suggests that either customers don’t know they’re speaking to chatbots or the ones already in the market are not being met.”

VR has been on the top trends list for a year or two without really taking off. The number of people expressing an interest in this technology has dropped to just 15% from 24% in last year’s survey. This could suggest that the realities of the technology just don’t live up to sky high consumer expectations, or that brands haven’t found the right way to implement VR in their campaigns.

23% named this as the technology they would like to use more of in 2018. 26% of respondents used it in 2017 and three-quarters of this group reported having a good or very good experience.

So, what’s the message for brands? Focus on getting the essentials right first, before dabbling in the latest digital marketing innovations. As Louis Georgiou explains:

“Brands and businesses looking to develop voice skills and search have the most receptive audience it seems, and conversational UI is undoubtedly an exciting space, but the technology and application needs to be right for the service and brand – and not something that is undertaken at the expense of getting existing digital services and experiences right.”

For more advice on planning your digital marketing campaigns and strategy in 2018, contact the digital and social media experts here at Ambos Digital.

There are a thousand and one jobs to tackle when you first start a business, but branding is among the most important. Unless you have a professional and distinctive brand image that represents you accurately, you can’t start marketing your new company properly. This means a very slow or non-existent growth in brand awareness and no new customers, which could halt your plans before you even get going.

Getting it right the first time

Developing a brand from scratch is a hugely challenging process. Each major party in the company will have different views on which direction to take with brand image, and it takes time to create a coherent vision that everyone is happy with. Due to how time-intensive the process is, you’ll ideally only do it once. This means getting it right, or at least the core look and feel of the branding right, first time.

Step 1: Define your key differentiators

What are the key values or attributes of your brand that makes it stand out from its competitors? Start by creating a list of these attributes as a group and narrow it down to the top three most important ones. Examples include ‘eco-friendly’, ‘cutting-edge’ or ‘exceptional value’. Think about what your competitors are lacking or what customers criticise them for, and how you do the opposite. These are all things that can make you stand out if you can communicate them in your branding.

Step 2: Define your target audience

It’s no use designing a brand image that appeals just to you. Your branding needs to be optimised to appeal specifically to your target market – the people or organisations who will be buying your products. Do plenty of research and come up with a list of questions to help you to shape your branding around your ideal customer, such as these from Entrepreneur.com:

Step 2: Imagine your brand as a person

This is an excellent tip from entrepreneur Leslie Ziegler, speaking to First Round Review. Ziegler explains:

“The exercise initially feels silly, but makes internal brand identity very easy to scale,”

“I ask, ‘What celebrity or historical figure would this brand be? Is it George Clooney? Is it George Washington?’ Other people on your team can say, ‘Okay, what would George Washington say about this? What would he do? Would he put that ad there? Would he work with this partner? Does this feel right?’”

Step 4: Imagine your brand in the future

Ask yourself – what will my brand be when it grows up? Every start-up has a dream of what they’d like their company to be, even if you aren’t there yet. Reflecting this in your branding gives it longevity, as it reflects the company now and in the future.

For advice from branding specialists, contact the experts at Ambos Digital.

New research has revealed that a whopping 98% of UK consumers think that brands are getting personalisation wrong. The survey by Sitecore and Vanson Bourne has found that the majority of consumers regularly encounter ‘bad personalisation’, where brands fail to deliver a relevant and personalised customer experience.

What is bad personalisation?

In an attempt to tailor digital and email marketing content to the individual user, brands may be missing the mark. If content is personalised based on the wrong information, it immediately becomes irrelevant to the consumer. Around 54% of brands, according to the research, are making assumptions about customers based solely on a single interaction or purchase, or due to bad or inaccurate data. Instead of increasing engagement and conversions with personalisation, businesses could be achieving the opposite – actively putting customers off.

Researchers also flagged up a problem with the frequency of online marketing messages, with 54% of customers saying that brands send too many.

It’s all about the data

Over 65% of consumers in the Sitecore study, which included 50 marketing and IT decision makers and 500 UK consumers, said that they believe brands are using out-of-date information about them. The survey found that 42% of brands don’t have the capability to integrate the data they collect, while just 18% are able to collect data on an individual level.

There is also a problem with data analysis. Having collected pages of stats about a customer, what does your company do with all of this information? How do you pick out the relevant stats and use them to target campaigns? Sitecore and Vanson Bourne found that only 31% have the in-house skills needed to analyse data and use it to effectively personalise campaigns. 15% of the brand surveyed do not even have the capacity to store data in the first place. Other highlights of the research included:

Commenting on the findings of the research, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Sitecore Scott Anderson said:

“Customers are openly providing insight for brands to understand their wants and needs, but brands are struggling to follow through on their end of the deal,”

“The level of expectation that today’s consumer has, coupled with the level of dissatisfaction brand marketers have with the tools and resources available to them, suggests brands must take urgent action to improve their ability to collect, connect, analyse, and act on customer data.”

Need help with collecting consumer data and applying it to your digital marketing strategy, or with personalising your campaigns for maximum engagement? Get in touch with the specialists here at Ambos Digital for expert advice and support.

To some, influencer marketing is a strategy that brands with million-pound digital marketing budgets can afford to employ. It isn’t for small brands, who can’t afford to pay an influential celebrity to endorse its products.

However, influencer marketing isn’t all about big brands and celebrity promotions. At its basic level, it’s just word of mouth marketing. This means that small brands can do it too, without having eye-watering marketing budgets or the right connections.

Smaller businesses can make use of micro-influencers, brand advocates with a decent number of followers and a passion for what you’re doing. It’s just like having an army of delighted customers telling everyone they know how great your brand is.

First of all, why try influencer marketing?

Before you can dip your toe into influencer marketing for the first time, it’s important to understand why the strategy works. Remember that influencer marketing is all based on word of mouth recommendations, which can be extraordinarily persuasive. It’s all about trust.

A recent study showed that an enormous 92% of consumers trust recommendations from individuals (even people they don’t know personally) over ads and other branded content. The same study revealed that 70% use reviews as their second most trusted source of information when choosing a product, while 47% take a look at blogs to gain an insight into products. Research from Twitter also showed that nearly 40% of Twitter users made a purchase as a direct result of a tweet from an influencer.

Getting started

The first thing to do in your quest to harness the power of influencer marketing is to put a strategy in place. It can take months if not years to cultivate the right kind of relationships between your brand and influencers, so you need a convincing plan in place.

The next steps:

Has your brand had any success with influencer marketing? What are your top tips? Please feel free to share your thoughts.

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