Use these tools for creative connections with your target audience

Greetings Creatives!

Thanks again for joining me in this third iteration on the series highlighting social media in your community, importance of developing strategies and honing in your creative side.

In every one of us there’s an inherent need to be accepted by our peers, neighbors, friends, family, and in the case of many of you, your target audience. This acceptance especially becomes a necessity when we’re talking about the bottom line. How are you creatively connecting with your target audience on social when views and engagement matters to driving sales?

That’s a tricky question for many and isn’t all that hard to answer if you take the time to learn creative ways to craft your message. Enter your issue—you don’t have time to figure it out for yourself. Welcome! Glad you’re here!

“Creative marketing is essential in 2017’s fast paced social media reach and engagement age where the rules of marketing from the last century don’t apply anymore.”

For the most part anyway, we’re still here to connect, but now we have to be creative. There are a ton of free tools you can use to enhance your creativity. I know you’ve got it, we’re all creative in our own right, but here’s a list of just a few I’m always recommending folks take a look at because they really strip away the technical aspect of creative marketing and place it in your hands to knock it out for yourself.

• Wix.com (simple, intuitive content management system and web host)
• Weebly.com (similar to Wix.com in that it’s a simple, intuitive content management system and web host, but it also has education and non-profit pricing if your organization falls into that tax bracket)
• Canva.com (quick, easy way to creatively marketing your business through engaging graphics on social media or print—the free option is great, but they also have a business model that lets you setup custom logo and color palettes for continuity across posts)
• Adobe Spark (similar to Canva, but lacks the paid business model)

Here’s just a few to get you started on your path to a more creative and engaging content marketing strategy. Happy engaging!

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