Fix your eyes on Jesus

"You and I need friends who, instead of trying to fix us, help us fix our eyes more firmly on Jesus."

Jennie Allen

As humans, we all have our fair share of flaws and imperfections. It can be easy to fall into the trap of wanting to fix ourselves, but we need friends to help us fix our gaze on something more extraordinary. That's where Jesus comes in.

Jennie Allen's quote reminds us that we need friends who won't judge or try to change us but will support us in our pursuit of a deeper connection with God. It's not about becoming perfect but seeking growth and guidance from the ultimate source of love and wisdom.

In a world that often tells us we're not enough, knowing we can rely on God's unwavering love and support is comforting. And with the help of friends who share our faith and values, we can find the strength and encouragement we need to stay focused on what truly matters.

So let's strive to be that kind of friend to others and seek out those who can do the same for us. Together, we can fix our eyes on Jesus and find the peace and fulfillment we've been searching for.

You need a marketing strategy that wins brand advocates

Greetings Creatives!

Today’s communications mediums span a myriad of tools, applications, and devices our audience members use to keep in touch. As marketers and small business leaders we need to develop strategies that connect us with those potential brand advocates who’ll do the marketing for us.

In this way we’re personally connecting with them on those applications they’re already communicating with family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

The juggernaut? Facebook. If your brand, whether it be for business or personal, must have a Facebook if you hope to have a voice in the crowded space that is the internet. An emerging tool gaining traction is Instagram, which just happens to be owned by Facebook. With Instagram, you can connect with your audience members in a truly personal form of communication and it’s all thanks to the medium’s focus on visual content.

Just like we talked about in the last post, your brand’s visual content is the key strategyfor making the connection. Amy Schmittauer (@Schmittastic) in her “Vlog Like a Boss” book says, “The key is to focus on what makes you great and keep doing the work.” So if you’re a baker, and you love what you do, keep on baking and share that passion with the world. If you’re a butcher, you love what you do, share some insight into your work and your passion for your career. If you’re a handyman, and, again, you got it, you’re passionate about your craft, then share with others that passion and they’ll come to you for advice because they can visually see just how connected you are to the craft and them.

Amy continues with, “If your audience feels closer to you by being part of your journey, that’s a win for you no matter what you teach or sell.”

She hits the nail right on the nose encouraging all of us to reach out and really connect with our audiences. That’s a winning strategy that builds a community of trust around the content you’re sharing.

Finally, use your website or blog as the hub for everything you’re doing. Link back to this site and make it your central repository for all your efforts online, whether that be on social media or elsewhere, you want this website to ooze with your personality and shine through the crowded space of your subject matter expertise.

Stay creative!Ben

How to connect with your millennial audience, customers

Greetings creatives!

Scrolling through your feed on your favorite social media platform, what catches your eye? What causes you to stop scrolling and really pay attention to the content you’re consuming? Visually appealing content. It’s the lifeblood of every marketer’s marketing campaign plan.

How do different forms of visual content rack and stack for most social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter? Video first and always followed by photos, graphics and links with visual components. It’s all about those algorithms. A recent(ish) news article released by Facebook itself explained how your newsfeed’s algorithms determine what graces your feed and which posts it avoids altogether. Video remains the king of content.

So many of us considered among the millennial generation may be cord-cutters, but that doesn’t mean we’ve completely dropped the need for video content. We may not be receiving our content from originally-aired television, but we are accessing it on social platforms. Today’s digital marketing leaders could go on and on explaining the importance of visual content in a marketing campaign and it’s warranted. Most social network profile feeds populate based on our interests, past likes, comments and other forms of engagement. What does this mean for you? Be visual.

Small business owners and non-profit leaders need to understand the best way to connect with your audience and potential customer base is where they’re at. Meet with them on the device they carry around in their pocket daily. We’re on it on work breaks, during work, in the bathroom (yes, I know you, you’re on Facebook while sitting down in the stall—I don’t blame you, we’ve all been there), at the dinner table and sadly the list gets too long that I’m worried for society as a whole, but that’s not the point of this post. We’re here to talk about how you should be connecting with your audience.

Visual content comes in the form of videos, photos, and graphics. All which are very easily accomplished by anyone wishing to connect with their target audience with nothing more than the camera you carry in your pocket every day, just like your audience.

This is the reality, in order to connect with today’s networked audience, we have to jump into that same space. Evaluate your audience, figure out where they spend most of their time, whether it’s on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, etc., and produce the content they’re looking for. Poll the people who come into your shop. They’re your community. But that’s a topic for another post.

Be visually appealing and you can do that with your smartphone. Stay tuned for a post on the applications I like to use on my iPhone. Simple, effective, engaging—free marketing that doesn’t impact your bottom line.

Stay creative!Ben

How I Can Help You Succeed

Greetings Creatives!

Hello and welcome to my very first post in a renewed focus where I’m sharing my experiences from more than a decade researching and discovering social marketing strategies for creatives.

As a public affairs photo and broadcast journalist in the U.S. Air Force, I’ve worked side-by-side with other creatives as we came up with no-cost solutions to every day marketing issues that plague the majority of our career field. Most of these strategies easily translate into the civilian sector. By combining sidebar research and analyses with numerous articles and books from various sources across the web, I’ve compiled tools and techniques you can use to further your marketing plans.I earned my bachelor’s degree in public relations and marketing with Ashford University online. The “Inspiration” page on this site outlines the books I’ve read and resources that have been extremely helpful as a leader, marketer, father and even in starting this blog. I’m always reading so this list is continuing to grow.My passion is you, the small business owners and non-profit leaders who are extraordinarily good at what you do but find marketing difficult at times. I’m here to help you and since I have a full time job, I’m not looking for significant monetary gain as your consultant, what I’d really like to see is for you to succeed at whatever it is you do in your community. We’re here as a combined workforce building toward the same goal:

“Developing social marketing strategies for creatives while engineering a community of trust and support across borders and backgrounds.”

The topics I’ll cover all relate to digital marketing in some fashion or another. I’ll evaluate each topic based on three categories:

SOCIAL

We live in a world full of opportunities to reach out and connect with others in our communities at home or around the world. Our task as marketers is to help others engage in activities that improve quality of life, welfare, and relations with the our neighbors, friends, and complete strangers.

STRATEGY

Digital marketing requires employing a series of well-planned techniques or maneuvers specifically designed to connect an organization with their audience. Marketing is about combining all aspects of of the digital world with the tangible in a cohesive strategy for obtaining a specific goal or result.

CREATIVE

Always think outside the box, be original, imaginative, engaging, relatable, consistent, and accessible across all mediums and avenues of connecting with your target audience. Never stop communicating, researching, analyzing, and developing new and improved ways of reaching across the digital divide in an effort to build a community around your product or service.Hold me accountable, but I’d like to bring you these three blog posts weekly followed up by a video blog posts further explaining each written post in an engaging, face-to-face, approach that shares the information in a relatable format for all viewers.

Thanks for joining me on this journey! Feel free to reach out at any time with your questions and I’ll be more than happy to help you as we work together to figure out the best strategies for connecting your organization with the community in which you serve.