The Power of Visual Storytelling: Video Scripting, Direction, and Production Tips

Visual storytelling is a tool in the realm of video production, breathing life into narratives and enhancing audience engagement. In the digital age, where video content is above all, mastering the art of visual storytelling is key. This involves a deep understanding of the elements that constitute a compelling visual story and the techniques that bring it to life.

Understanding Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling relies on a harmonious blend of visual components and a well-crafted narrative structure. The visuals, including images, colors, and composition, play a pivotal role in conveying the story. These elements serve not just as aesthetic choices but as crucial storytelling devices.

To truly connect with the audience, it’s essential to appreciate the emotional impact visuals can have. A well-crafted visual story has the power to evoke emotions, creating a lasting and meaningful connection.

Video Scripting Techniques

Crafting a compelling script is the cornerstone of effective visual storytelling. Start by identifying a clear message, the backbone of your story. Develop relatable characters and engaging narratives to draw viewers in.

When structuring the script, follow a logical flow: a captivating introduction, a well-defined body, and a powerful conclusion. Pay attention to dialogue and voiceovers – they are the vehicles through which your story is conveyed, and their effectiveness is paramount.

Directing Visuals for Impact

In the director’s chair, understanding visual composition is non-negotiable. The rule of thirds serves as a guiding principle for balanced composition, and various framing techniques can enhance storytelling.

Dynamic shots inject energy into the narrative, while thoughtful camera movements, like panning and zooming, contribute to the story’s rhythm. Lighting, often overlooked, can profoundly influence the mood of a scene, adding depth and nuance to your visual storytelling.

Production Tips for Visual Storytelling

Pre-production planning lays the foundation for a successful visual story. Storyboarding is a visual roadmap, aiding in the visualization of your script. Thoughtful location scouting ensures that your chosen settings complement and enhance your narrative.

Collaboration and communication within the production team are imperative, fostering a creative environment where ideas can flourish. When it comes to editing, view it as the final brushstroke on your canvas – a tool to refine and elevate the narrative flow.

Crafting Compelling Narratives Through Visual Storytelling Mastery

In wrapping up our exploration of visual storytelling in video production, let’s recap the key elements and techniques that contribute to crafting compelling narratives. The power of visual storytelling lies in its ability to create a lasting impact on the audience, forging a connection that transcends the screen.

Mastering the art of visual storytelling requires a keen understanding of the elements at play – from visual components and narrative structure to the emotional resonance that visuals can evoke. In the scripting phase, clarity in messaging, well-developed characters, and a structured script are the building blocks of a compelling story. Directors play a crucial role in translating the script into visuals that captivate and resonate.

Visual composition, camera movements, and lighting are the director’s tools for creating impactful scenes. The rule of thirds, framing techniques, dynamic shots, and thoughtful camera movements contribute to the visual language that communicates the story. Lighting, often underestimated, can set the mood and tone, enhancing the overall viewing experience.

Pre-production planning ensures a smooth execution of the visual storytelling process. Storyboarding and location scouting provide the roadmap and backdrop, respectively, for your narrative to unfold. Effective collaboration and communication within the production team are essential, fostering an environment where creativity can thrive. The editing process is the final polish, refining the narrative flow and ensuring a seamless and engaging viewing experience.

In conclusion, the power of visual storytelling is not just in its technical aspect but in its ability to stir emotions and create a connection with the audience. As you embark on your storytelling journey, remember the importance of a well-crafted script, thoughtful direction, and meticulous production planning. Through mastery of these elements, you can unlock the true potential of visual storytelling and leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Boost Your Brand with Expert Video Storytelling

Ready to elevate your brand with compelling visual storytelling? Our San Diego branding agency specializes in digital media planning and high-impact video production to bring your brand’s story to life. Contact us today to create engaging, strategy-driven videos that captivate your audience and set you apart from the competition.

Elevate Your Brand with CMS Development Services

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, shaping your brand’s online identity requires more than just a tool—it demands a tailored approach. CMS development services, specifically designed for your brand, offer the key to unlocking a dynamic and distinctive online presence.

Crafting a Unique Digital Presence with CMS Development Services

Imagine a digital world where your brand’s voice resonates distinctly, where every pixel on your website aligns perfectly with your identity, and where every click steers your audience closer to your vision.

This is not a distant dream but an achievable reality with CMS development services. Unlike off-the-shelf solutions, these services provide a bespoke platform that caters to your brand’s specific needs and objectives. It’s akin to having a suit tailor-made for you—ensuring every aspect fits your brand’s personality and goals seamlessly.

Understanding CMS Development Services

CMS development services encompass the creation of a customized platform that manages your website’s content. Unlike standard CMS platforms, tailored solutions address the unique nuances of your business. This personalized approach guarantees that your website isn’t merely functional but is also an authentic reflection of your brand.

Advantages of CMS Development Services

Enhanced User Experience

A CMS offers unparalleled flexibility in creating an intuitive, engaging, and brand-centric user interface. By providing a seamless user journey, you encourage longer visits, higher engagement, and, ultimately, a deeper connection with your audience.

Scalability and Flexibility

Designed with scalability in mind, a CMS allows your website to evolve with the growth of your brand. This flexibility is crucial in navigating the ever-changing digital landscape, ensuring that your website remains effective and relevant over time.

Efficiency in Content Handling

Tailored workflows and user roles streamline the content creation, approval, and publishing process, enabling your team to operate more efficiently and focus on creating quality content.

Consistency and Quality Control

Integrated templates and style guides maintain consistency across your website, aligning your content with your brand voice and adhering to high-quality standards. This consistency builds trust and recognition with your audience.

Optimized for Search Engines

CMS development allows for SEO optimization tailored to your brand’s specific needs. From faster loading times to cleaner code and better content organization, every aspect can be optimized for search engines, leading to better rankings and increased visibility.

Enhanced Security Measures

A CMS offers advanced security features tailored to your specific requirements, safeguarding your website against vulnerabilities and ensuring the protection of your data and user information.

Reliable and Dedicated Support

With a CMS, you receive dedicated support tailored to your system, ensuring quick and efficient resolution of any issues and minimizing downtime.

Integrating Brand Identity

CMS development goes beyond functionality, embedding your brand’s identity into every aspect of your digital presence. This integration ensures a unique digital experience that sets you apart from competitors.

Transform Your Online Presence with CMS Development Services

Your website is the embodiment of your brand, and CMS development services offer a path not just to compete but to excel in the digital space. By tailoring every aspect of your content management system to your brand’s unique identity and needs, you create an online presence that is as dynamic and distinctive as your brand itself.

At Jacob Tyler, we understand the power of CMS development services in bringing your brand’s vision to life. Our team of experts specializes in crafting digital experiences that not only meet but exceed your expectations. We’re here to partner with you, blending creativity with technology to elevate your brand to new heights.

Connect with us today, and let’s transform your online presence into a vibrant and engaging platform that truly represents your brand. Together, we can create something extraordinary—because your brand deserves nothing less.

Why Branding Matters When Marketing for Builders

Branding extends beyond mere aesthetics; it’s the essence of a company. In the construction industry, it becomes the symbolic foundation upon which businesses are built and recognized. For builders, branding isn’t an afterthought—it’s a proactive strategy that influences customer choices, sets expectations, and fosters trust.

The concrete and steel of the construction world are tangible and definite. Yet, it’s the intangible—trust, reputation, and perception—that often sways decisions. That’s where branding steps in, shaping those crucial intangibles and setting builders apart in a sea of competitors.

Customers will not remember every case study or portfolio item you showcase on your website. However, they will remember how they felt about your company and whether or not it inspired their confidence to convert. That’s the power of branding.

Today, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about branding for your construction business and why it matters when marketing for builders. First, before we dive in, let’s cover what branding actually means.

Setting the Foundation: What is Branding?

Branding isn’t merely about visual elements like logos or company colors. It is the process of building a unique identity, telling a consistent story, and establishing a clear company voice. For builders, this means crafting a narrative around their values, strengths, and the unique benefits they offer.

In the construction industry, where every project is a testament to a builder’s capability, branding reinforces a company’s promise. It serves as a reminder of a builder’s commitment to quality, innovation, and customer satisfaction, setting the stage for fruitful and lasting client relationships.

Establishing Credibility in a Competitive Landscape

In the crowded construction sector, companies need an edge. Well-honed construction company branding becomes that edge, differentiating a business and showcasing it as a credible choice. Branding is more than just surface-level marketing; it’s a strategic tool to position a company as the expert, the innovator, or the reliable partner.

Clients are drawn to confidence. A strong brand exudes that confidence, making promises about quality, timeliness, and expertise. By aligning every touchpoint—from business cards to site banners—with this brand promise, builders can instill a sense of trust and assurance even before a project begins.

Furthermore, the ripple effect of a well-established brand in the construction industry goes beyond immediate client interactions. It facilitates partnerships, attracts skilled professionals, and opens doors to larger, more lucrative projects. The cumulative impact of these elements contributes to a builder’s long-term viability and success in an ever-evolving market.

Communication and Perception: Defining Value

Branding serves as one of your most powerful communication channels. Through consistent messaging, and visual elements someone can recall, it informs potential clients about a builder’s unique offerings.It’s not just about broadcasting features like design or sustainable practices; it’s about conveying benefits and value.

In today’s information-saturated world, it’s easy for messages to get lost in the shuffle. People are swamped with ads, offers, and pitches from every corner.

But a strong, coherent brand? That stands out. It’s like a lighthouse on a foggy night. When clients rummage through their memories for a trustworthy construction company, a solid brand ensures that a particular builder’s name springs to mind. This instinctive connection between quality construction and a specific builder is invaluable—it’s like having an inside track in the race for a client’s attention.

But there’s another layer to this. While strong branding certainly plants the seeds of recognition, it also plays a role in fostering deeper relationships. Let’s say you meet someone new, and they are wearing a shirt with your favorite baseball team’s logo on it. You are likely to remember them from them wearing that logo, even if you might forget their name or specific details of your conversation.

Similarly, when a client is already familiar with a builder’s brand, starting a project feels less like venturing into the unknown and more like teaming up with a known ally. It’s this sense of familiarity and trust that transforms casual interactions into long-lasting business partnerships.

Building Recognition: The Key to Recall and Loyalty

A recognizable brand becomes a builder’s calling card. It ensures that among what seems like an endless list of choices, a particular builder stands out, fostering both recognition and recall. Recognition isn’t merely about visibility; it’s about creating a memorable impact.

Loyalty in the construction industry is gold. Repeat business and referrals can form the backbone of a company’s revenue. By consistently delivering on brand promises and ensuring every touchpoint—from marketing materials to project execution—aligns with the brand, builders can foster an unparalleled sense of loyalty among clients.

Targeted Engagement: Attracting the Right Audience

Not all projects are the same, and neither are all clients. A precise brand helps builders appeal to their core demographic—whether it’s luxury home clients, commercial businesses, or sustainable construction enthusiasts. By sending clear brand signals, builders can ensure their marketing efforts resonate with the right audience.

This focused approach not only enhances engagement but also improves conversion rates. When a brand message aligns perfectly with a client’s needs and values, it creates a synergy that’s hard to resist. It ensures that a builder’s efforts attract not just any clients, but the right clients.

The Amplified Benefits of Digital Branding

Digital platforms have revolutionized how builders showcase their work. An effective digital brand strategy goes beyond having an online presence; it’s about creating a cohesive, compelling narrative across all digital touchpoints. Whether it’s a website, social media, or online portfolios, each platform should echo the brand’s core message.

With clients increasingly turning to online platforms to research, vet, and select builders, a consistent digital brand has become indispensable. It allows builders to reach a wider audience, showcase their expertise through content and projects, and engage with potential clients in meaningful ways. In essence, digital branding amplifies the brand’s voice, ensuring it resonates far and wide.

In the end, a brand that looks stylish and eye-catching will also draw attention on its own. A compelling logo, color combinations, and message come together to attract interest independently of the rest of a strategy. Some people will look deeper into what you have to offer because they simply think your business looks “cooler” or more sophisticated than your competitors.

Get Better Branding and Marketing for Builders

Branding is no longer a luxury or an add-on; it’s a necessity. It forms the bedrock of a builder’s reputation, directly influencing client decisions and market positioning. A brand is more than a logo or a tagline; it’s a builder’s promise, a testament to their capabilities, and a beacon of their values.

For builders, investing in branding isn’t just about staying relevant. It’s about paving a path to sustained growth, heightened recognition, and enduring success. As the construction landscape continues to evolve, one thing remains clear: builders who prioritize branding are the ones poised for success, especially in highly competitive markets.

At Jacob Tyler, we specialize in branding construction companies to attract their ideal audience, showcase their expertise, and communicate credibility and trust. If you’re looking for a way to revitalize the way that you connect with your customers before the first interaction and well after, contact us today to learn more.

5 Reasons Why Content Marketing Should be an Integral Part of Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways for B2B brands to establish a strong online presence and reach out to potential customers—and it’s become a necessity for B2B brands. By creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and engaging content, B2B brands can build trust and credibility with their audience, generate leads, and ultimately, drive more sales. Let’s explore the benefits of content marketing for B2B brands in more detail:

Builds Brand Awareness

Creating high-quality and pertinent content that resonates with your target audience is an excellent way to increase your brand’s visibility and establish it as a thought leader in your industry. By consistently creating and sharing valuable content, you can attract and retain the attention of your target audience, which will help to increase brand awareness and recognition. It also gives you a chance to “speak” at length to your audience, educating them on your offering before they become a warm lead.

Pro Tip: Create a brand messaging guide to ensure your tone and messaging are consistent to get the most impact out of your content. Get in touch if you need help creating your brand messaging

Increases Website Traffic

By creating high-quality content that is optimized for search engines, you can attract more organic traffic to your website. Search engines reward websites that provide valuable and relevant content to their users. By incorporating keywords, optimizing headlines, and using meta descriptions, you will boost your website’s search engine rankings, attract more traffic, and ultimately, generate more leads.

Pro Tip: Chat GPT is all the rage right now—but be cautious when using AI generated content. Search engines like Google can detect fully AI-written content and can potentially rank it lower than human-written content. You can use AI to help get the structure of an article in place, but make sure you rewrite it in your brand’s voice

Generates Leads

One of the most significant benefits of content marketing for B2B brands—and really, the main benefit—is that it can generate leads. By creating valuable content that addresses the pain points and challenges of your target audience, you can attract potential customers who are searching for solutions to their problems. By capturing their contact information through gated content, such as whitepapers, webinars, or eBooks, B2B brands can generate high-quality leads that are more likely to convert.

Nurtures Leads

Content marketing isn’t just about generating leads—it’s about nurturing them too. By creating content that addresses the specific needs and pain points of your leads, you can build trust and credibility which will help move the leads down through the sales funnel. By providing relevant and valuable content at each stage of the buyer’s journey, B2B brands can nurture leads and build long-term relationships with their customers.

Pro Tip: Install a chat feature or a way for potential customers to easily reach out to you and get answers they are looking for. Allowing customers to reach out to you increases your chances of conversion by 14.6%

Improves Customer Retention

Content marketing is an effective tool for improving customer retention. B2B brands can build stronger relationships with their customers and encourage them to stay loyal through a consistent stream of valuable content. This ongoing education and support will help your customers achieve their goals and stay engaged with your brand.

The Bottom Line:

Content marketing is a powerful tool for B2B brands looking to establish a strong online presence, generate leads, and drive more sales. So, if you are a B2B brand looking to grow your business, content marketing is something you should consider—and Jacob Tyler can help.

Get in touch today to learn about how we can help your B2B brand boost its content marketing—and its sales.

Why a Good Logo is So Important

First off, let’s define terms: Your logo is not your brand. As we’ve written before, your brand is the reflection of your products and services, your workplace culture and the totality of your values. Your logo, meanwhile, is the imprimatur of your brand. Think of it as your professional coat of arms—the seal that guarantees the quality that you provide to your customers, the emblem perched at the apex of your brand architecture. Need a few more reasons why a logo is so important? Let’s get granular with it.

A Logo Gets You Noticed

Never forget how busy your consumers are. We’re all sending emails on our tablets, jumping on work calls on our laptops, hopping around between twenty apps on our phones. All that shuttling between tabs and devices tends to obliterate our attention spans into fruitflyish units of a few seconds that your digital marketing has to capture an audience’s interest.

Enter your logo, which amounts to a 1,000-words snapshot of your brand. If an ad pops up on your consumers’ screens and they get the vibe that even the logo isn’t for them—it’s too posh, not posh enough, perfectly posh but more (or less) than they wanted to spend—they’re going to keep on clicking on. Rest assured, this is judge-a-book-by-its-cover territory, and the cover of your book needs to scream, “Buy me. Because this experience, my target audience, is tailored to you.”

A Logo Imparts Legitimacy

Since your logo is the summation of your visual identity, a sloppy logo is akin to a restaurant buffet swarming with flies—that first-impressions moment when a customer thinks, ‘Definitely not spending my money here.’ And even a good product without a logo might seem scammy. Microsoft is an established brand, but if someone tries to sell you a Microsoft laptop that doesn’t have the Microsoft logo on it, would you trust it?

If your answer to that is ‘definitely not,’ then you’ve pinpointed the importance of a logo, which rubber-stamps legitimacy onto a brand—and onto all the collateral that your brand produces. Dedicate some time to perfecting your logo design, because it’s gonna live front and center on your website, tucked in the corner of your business cards and peppered throughout your social media feeds. As the North Star of your brand’s aesthetic, your logo ensures the consistency that consumers need in order to be confident that the same company is talking to them across a medley of platforms and campaigns.

A Logo Communicates Your Brand Personality

A good logo should be eye-catching, but it also needs to hint at what your brand does or convey who you are. For that reason, banks or life insurance companies opt for typography that looks sturdy and reliable. Whereas a business that delivers beauty and wellness products might draw from a palette of yellows and greens and pinks—and throw in a few monstera leaves while they’re at it—to send out vibes of optimism, health, joy.

Position your logo so that it acts as a harbinger of the experience that consumers are about to receive, be it financial advice or a box of hand lotions and jade rollers. At the same time, bear in mind that some of the most famous logos toe the line between functionality and artistry—getting across what a business does in more subtle messaging. In the Gillete logo, the “G” and the “i” look sliced open, as if by a razor. The yellow arrow in the Amazon logo connects the letters “a” and “z,” implying that Amazon sells and ships everything from A–Z. The ultramodern Apple symbol nods to the Biblical story of the fruits of knowledge (with the bite—or byte—in it representing the tasting of that knowledge).

Because a strong logo should err on the side of coherency and precision, making even one of its design features too abstract can befuddle people. Take the Apple logo again. The bite-of-knowledge motif is clever, but Steve Jobs & Co. were allegedly worried that, without that bite, customers would think the fruit was a cherry tomato. Point taken. If you’re on a mission to build the most urbane tech company in the world, the last thing you want is to overhear someone saying, “Does this thing look like a tomato to you?”

A Logo Welcomes You into the Club

One of the truisms you often hear in marketing is that your customers need to see themselves in your branding. Which means that your logo should tell your audience, on some level, “You’re in the club.”

Imagine that you own a gym and your logo is a bodybuilder lifting a ponderous barbell above his head. That logo is going to do wonders to attract lunkish fitness fanatics rather than the just-making-a-change crowd, because an effective logo has its own personality and it talks to the personality of its clientele. The Mercedes-Benz logo is refined, silver, sleek. The Nike logo is on a swift upward-and-onward trajectory. The Coca-Cola logo is energetic and bouncy. The iconography of each of these brands tells you what the brands stand for, but it also fulfills a blank-canvas effect of absorbing meaning that customers pour back into them.

One of the most original recent examples of this in-the-club blank canvas may be Disney. The Disney logo is Walt Disney’s signature written against the backdrop of a fairytale castle, but it’s sometimes abbreviated to the silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head, which is three black circles resembling a Venn diagram that’s drifting apart. Think about that: Three black circles can stir up memories of watching movies and reading books about adventure and friendship. Those memories, in turn, are powerful enough to sway people to subscribe to Disney+, get married at the Happiest Place on Earth, and become annual passholders who fill closets upon closets with Disney merch—which are stamped all over with three black circles.

That’s the power of a logo.

A Logo Champions Your Individuality

Your logo design should be the crowning symbol of your values and beliefs, the shield or flag that your company rallies behind, the signpost that guides consumers along their journey into your fold. All true—but stay flexible enough to change it. Case in point: Check out Apple’s ye olde logo from 1976, a landscape portrait of Isaac Newton reading under an apple tree (with a William Wordsworth quote decorating the frame, to top it off). Pivoting to the minimalist apple with the bite taken out of it was the right move, because Apple is all about sophistication and simplicity. So be honest about who you are and what you want your logo to say about you. Otherwise, you may end up contriving an image rather than consolidating an identity.

How to Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

You know how the best time to get a job is when you have a job? Well, the best time to get new business is when you already have business. You can grow your bottom line in two ways: Acquiring new clients, or retaining the clients you already have and increasing their customer lifetime value (or CLV), which is the amount of revenue that you’ll earn off a consumer in the period that they’re using your service or product. Calculating this metric can get complex, but a simple scenario might run like this:

Imagine that you’re a paper-shredding service that cleans out veritable garbage cans full of old documents for a law firm that pays you $100 a month. You’ve been working with said law firm for a year now. Ergo, this customer’s lifetime value is $1,200. If you continue working with them, their CLV only goes up. Some studies have even found that a 5% uptick in retention can increase profits up to 95%, which is one reason that boosting your CLV is a more effective strategy in turning on the spigot of revenue than always being on the hunt for new business. So here are a few tips on how to extend your portfolio’s CLV.

Perfect the Process of Client and Customer Onboarding

Your employees need to be onboarded to understand the parameters of their roles, where to access the server, how everyone takes the fish-in-the-microwave policy seriously no matter where you go. The same process of providing clarification applies to your clients, as well. Even in the top-of-the-funnel stages, take the opportunity to wow your prospective customers with tutorials, leave-behinds, how-to videos, and walkthrough guides that communicate what you do and why your product is worth their money.

Personalizing all of that collateral to the needs of your user personas can help your sales team ace this vital first-impressions moment and ward off the scourge of customer churn. Plus, open communication helps people on both sides of the contract. Research indicates that 8 out of 10 consumers will pay more for a better customer experience, while businesses that know their customers’ motivations and interests can craft digital marketing messages tailored to them, develop precise upselling and cross-selling tactics, and — what often follows — deliver higher ecommerce conversions and a stronger ROI. Which makes sense: Customers who feel courted from the outset are more likely to seek your services for the long-term.

Stay in Touch with Your Customers

All that presale work you’ve done to charm your clients may not result in a sale unless you stay in touch with them. Keep in mind, though, the follow-up is a fine art: You want to pique people’s interest, but you don’t want to bug them. A careful email marketing strategy may be your solution, since it’s one of the most effective ways to maintain your customers’ attention — so long as those emails are worth the read.

So communicate the benefits of your product or service in a way that doesn’t feel like a one-size-fits-all promotion. Let people know you’re here to help. Send them a birthday hello. You’ve already segmented off your user personas, now be prepared for those personas to change. And when they do, the tone of your messaging should change right along with them — that is, if you want to maintain a relationship with them for the long term.

Switch to an Annual Billing Cycle

One of the foundational questions that any business must ask itself is how to price their services. An equally weighty question is how to bill those services. Those questions overlap, but they’re not exactly the same. Let’s go back to those attorneys who paid you $1,200 for a year of paper-shredding. Whether they fork over the whole amount upfront or $100 on the first of every month hardly matters, right? Wrong. A lump sum of cash allows businesses to forecast revenue, reinvest in operations, and do away with those awkward check-ins meant to chivvy customers across the renewal deadline.

With that said, few of us enjoy handing over a bullfrog of bills to anyone. So incentivize the switch to a yearly payment with a discount — 10–20% off, or a few months of free usage — and talk up the perks of a subscription model (instant access to new product features, multi-tiered offerings tailored to what the customer wants). Annual billing may seem like a lot to ask for, but if you establish a fee structure with a longer lifespan that benefits both merchant and client, you’re almost automatically extending your portfolio’s CLV.

Embrace Upselling and Cross-Selling Tactics

Upselling is the strategy of bumping up the price of a service or a product — a barista asking if you’d like an extra pump of caramel in your latte for $0.30 more, for instance. Cross-selling is offering services or products that complement something that a customer has already bought. Let’s say that you order a hanging planter off Amazon for your newborn’s nursery. Once you’ve filled up your virtual shopping cart, Amazon will cross-sell you with other items related to your purchase. (Wait a minute now, don’t you want a self-watering midcentury bamboo stand to go along with that hanging planter?)

Bundling products, or offering temporary upgrades and free shipping, also help boost revenue. And those tactics can be as beneficial for the company as they are for the customer, since sometimes you need someone to say “Do you need a bike lock?” when you buy a new bike. Just keep your recommendations to a tasteful minimum. Asking customers if they need a new bike lock is one thing. Pressuring them to buy tires and a helmet and a cycling bodysuit may overwhelm them — and cause them to abandon the transaction altogether.

Up Your Prices

Ever hear the old saw about the accountant who audits a business’ books and tells the owner, “I suggest you double your prices”? The owner says, “I can’t do that — I’d lose half my clients.” To which the accountant says: “Then I insist you double your prices.”

We’re not (necessarily) suggesting that you double your prices, but you do need to give yourself a raise as your company matures. Businesses, like professionals, tend to undersell themselves when they start out. As your operations scale up, however — offering new product options, adding more sophisticated clients, shoring up your clients’ bottom lines — you should reexamine how much you’re charging.

Now, a few things: You gotta earn your raise. (Don’t make your services more expensive if those services aren’t adding value for your consumers.) And let’s say you’ve got an old customer who took a chance on you when you had nada in your portfolio. Maybe don’t stun them with a gargantuan fee hike. Instead, build your pricing models to be flexible: Give them a downgraded service plan at their current price with the option of upgrading for a higher fee. Karma doesn’t always factor into business, but when tinkering around with your prices, you should also keep in mind the old saw about burning bridges.

Listen and Learn

The key to nurturing lasting customer relationships may be to view yourself as a partner to your clients rather than a salesperson who’s got to close a deal, because the least glamorous aspect of a digital marketing strategy may be its most vital part: Listening to your audience.

Send out surveys to gauge their responses on how to improve your business. Compile the good feedback with the bad, and sift through it for recurring issues. Granted, this means that you’ll be paddling against streams of criticism for the rest of your career. But what you’ll learn from that criticism will help you solve your customers’ problems, which will likely improve their satisfaction, and which, in turn, tends to do wonders for your profitability in the long-term.

Why Branding Matters

What’s In a Brand?

Companies are the sum of their products and services, but they’re also made up of the tesserae of insights and perspectives of the employees who work for them and the audience who buys from them. Those tesserae, taken together, form the mosaic that is your brand — the reflection of your workplace culture and the totality of your values, a beacon of familiarity for consumers who know you and a handshake extending to consumers who don’t. To put it mildly: Branding matters. Here are just a few reasons why.

Branding Tells Your Story

The word “unique” gets overused a lot in these everyone’s-a-winner days, but each person on the planet really is unique from the other 7.8 billion humans we live among. The same goes for your company. Imagine that you’re a coffee roastery. Even if your dark roast has the same lovely arrangement of smoky-chocolate-marshmallow notes as your competitors’ dark roasts, ask yourself: What is it about your coffee company that’s different from Peet’s or Starbucks or Juan Valdez?

Maybe you had a revelation that you wanted to open your own roastery the moment you took a sip of vintage Colombian coffee in a cobbled plaza in the La Calera hills east of Bogotá. Maybe part of your revenue siphons off into a fund that helps prevent the acidification of coral reefs. Whatever is unique — and true — about your brand will feel likeable to someone who shares your values. That “someone” is your customer base, and one of your first orders of business is to communicate your you-ness to them with a brand design and a number of quick-hitting descriptors that they can absorb in seconds and then somehow work up a hankering for a cup of dark roast.

Branding Establishes Trust

‘Wait a minute,’ you might be thinking. ‘Isn’t branding just a ploy for companies to buddy-buddy up to their consumers, when all those companies really want is to make a buck off us?’ Here’s our answer to that: It can be. But we’d recommend that companies drill into their values and establish trust with their audience rather than regard them as floating dollars to be netted. If a business talks about itself in a way that feels inauthentic, people are going to sniff out its phoniness. So figure out who you are and what you stand for, and hire a brand agency to mold tactics and campaigns that position your brand in a way that people will relate to it.

Let’s say you’re that roastery again. First things first: You’ll get people to trust you if you brew a high-quality cup of coffee every time. But you have to deliver on other articles of faith, as well. If you support Fair Trade to raise the standard of living for coffee farmers in equatorial latitudes, don’t limit your own employees to 29 hours and pay them starvation wages. Live up to your principles in every aspect of your operations and your audience will trust you. Which means you’ve got a shot at establishing brand loyalty with them, so that they’re buying into you as much as they’re buying from you.

Branding Keeps Things Bold

A funny thing often happens on the way to the formation of a brand identity: Companies know they need to say something that’ll help them stand out, so in the final hours before launch, they decide it’s best to say something that’ll help them blend in. Why? Because real is risky.

Don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of cautionary tales out there about how taking risks in the ad world can flop. (Burger King’s “Women belong in the kitchen” tweet, which was phrased ironically to attract attention to their support for a scholarship that helps aspiring female chefs — but which people didn’t find all that appetizing — is only a recent example of cringeworthy chutzpah.) By “risky,” though, we mean embarking on a campaign that’s perhaps even edgier than coming up with a head-swiveling statement: Being yourself.

If you did have a cup of coffee in Bogotá that was so rich and deep that it transported you into visions of opening up your own cafe, tell that story. The last thing you want to do when talking about yourself is to adopt the tone of a corporate comms manual, because no one wants to read that stuff, anyway. Be sensitive to others, yes, but be you. Authenticity and honesty will probably always seem bold, and so long as you mix those two fine traits in with empathy, your branding will feel more genuine and enduring than anyone else’s blanding.

Branding Brings Value

Price is perspective. If you’ve ever given your work away for free, you may have noticed — with horror — that your clients tend to undervalue the thing they’re not paying for. We often trick ourselves into assuming that something’s worth more if it’s more expensive, and the same psychological acrobatics are at play with branding.

The world’s most influential brands are pricetagged in the billions, and even a logo can cost hundreds of millions of dollars anymore. All of that valuation imparts legitimacy, legitimacy imparts familiarity, and familiarity is the quintessence of a successful brand, since consumers generally feel more at ease parking their money with people or products they know and trust.

Think about it: If a guy on the street handed you a latte, you might pour it out on the curb. (You don’t know this dude, and the fact that he’s giving away this thing gratis seems suspect.) Whereas if you pass by a Starbucks, the store’s aura of legitimacy assures you that paying five or six dollars for a latte is worth it, because that latte’s been approved through a certain global vetting process. The quality of the latte is important, for sure, but the guy on the street’s latte may be even tastier. What’s the difference? The legitimacy of the branding, which often commands a higher price-point on the market than the quality of the product alone.

Branding Focuses the Company Culture

Books need outlines, buildings need blueprints, and businesses need brands, because they don’t just drum up familiarity in customers — they also help center the employees who uphold those brands. If done right, your brand story and positioning statement should be the end-product of a lot of time spent thinking about your workplace’s vision and why it matters. What does any of this have to do with your employees? Well, if your brand standards faithfully represent your culture, you’re more likely to attract talented folks who thrive in that culture.

Branding that unites people with a purpose boosts morale, which may lead to employee advocacy, the power of which cannot be overstated. Companies that build excellent reputations often enjoy the perks of positive word-of-mouth. (When someone endorses you — which amounts to a free promotion — someone else is more likely to buy from you.) Glowing reviews, from customers and workers alike, can drive business referrals and increase your revenue. And it all starts with committing to a brand that everyone can rally behind.

Branding Provides Clarity

For people running a business, it’s tempting to sprint forward every day — taking meetings, putting out fires, patching cracks in the bottom line. But whenever you can, slow down and reassess your company’s identity. Branding may seem ephemeral, a feel-goody exercise that’ll end up on some poster about values in the lobby. Yet this process of introspection can help you foresee trends, map your growth patterns, pinpoint solutions to recurring problems, and better communicate your expertise to your clients. Stenciling forth the uniqueness of your brand may serve to guide you forward amid the gales of business cycles and market forces for years to come.

Advertising Trends for 2021

We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief: 2020 is over. About the best thing that can be said for 2020 is that she found her paramour, Satan. That spot, from Match.com, resonated with people because it did seem like a nightmare year and the Dark Lord was taking selfies in front of dumpster-fires while the rest of us huddled in our apartments. The upheavals of 2020 changed digital advertising — and not just in the sense that creative agencies worldwide were all working on the same cliche-of-the-century campaign: “in these uncertain times.”

No, 2020 pushed marketers to find new audiences in virtual channels. Companies reckoned with their intensifying proximity to politics. Consumer habits lurched within an economy that kept start-stopping in response to COVID safety measures. And through the smoldering haze of Lucifer and Lady Apocalypse’s love persisted innovations in digital marketing years in the making, contributing to the forecast that Jacob Tyler is calling here and now for the trends in advertising that lie ahead in 2021.

Thinking Virtual

Advertisers find audiences in their preferred channels, and our preferred channels are now more virtual than ever, since 2020 was the year that reality became virtual reality. Consumers will continue to quarantine through 2021, so they’ll want to go to virtual trade shows and virtual annual events, join online communities and download live streaming services. Yes, we’re all pushing through Zoom fatigue and hoping unmasked human interaction resumes on the sunny side of this century. But already it seems as if the days of the webinar — where the authorities on a subject present to their viewers — are numbered.

In its stead, we’ll see remote events and digital gatherings where hundreds or even thousands of people (or their beaming avatars) meet, network, and Q&A with the experts. The communications ecosystem has been reshaped, and we are interacting from around a globe that seems to have shrunk and also gotten much larger all at once.

Taking a Stand

As you may have noticed, the political climate of the US is (to put it mildly) charged. Similar dynamics are roiling other countries, as well, and since many brands are global, businesses have discovered that their response to polemics worldwide impacts their bottom line. Oatly, HSBC, L’Oreal, Soul Cycle, Jo Malone — these are all brands that, in 2020, consumers #cancelled. That doesn’t mean they’re out of business, but it does mean their business is effectively off-limits to many once-prospective clients because of a bevy of different factors. (According to one study, for instance, 29% of consumers are willing to switch brands if those brands don’t show enough diversity.)

Debate the merits of the cancel all you wish, but the underlying reasons for it trace back to issues once thought more or less outside the bailiwick of advertising: political association, accusations of racism, ties to unsavory businesses. Perhaps never before has PR been such a tightrope act, so it’s no wonder some brands are steering away from controversy altogether. Other brands, however, are embracing the polarization with their own “blanding backlash.” Staking a position amid all the lightning-rod issues, they’re paddling against what sometimes feels like a societal drift toward homogeneity and sameness.

What will prove to be the best crisis comms playbook for the near future? Only 2021 will tell.

Optimizing for People

Even before COVID, isolation was a hallmark feature of 21st century life — partly a result of the sensation a lot of us have that we’re beetling through mazes of automated inauthenticity. As a consequence, what many consumers crave when they interact with a brand is to feel like a human is somewhere on the other side of the digital marketing strategy.

Beyond just embracing the trend toward creating content that sounds relatable, brands will also seek out conversations with followers in 2021, responding to comments on their social channels and adopting a many-to-many model of communication (rather than assuming We the Business are addressing you the consumer). Remember: Isolation. People want to feel courted and listened to. And to that end, we’ll see brands infuse their content with a spirit of cultural inclusivity. The hitch? Because of how siloed consumer segments are today, brands may have to pick which culture(s) they speak to. But that’s a challenge they’ll likely learn to be even savvier about as this year unfolds.

Personalizing the Data Economy

With all that said about people just being people, today’s iteration of the Bernbach-Ogilvy schism in advertising has become a battle waged between those who think you should talk to your audience like humans, and those who think you should talk to your audience like humans … through data insights and algorithm-based feeds.

Here’s the case for the machine learning camp: Sure, personalized content is neighborly and all, but responding to every single comment on a brand’s social media is exhausting, and well nigh impossible. Isn’t it better to at least reach people with email campaigns rather than (metaphorical) notes handwritten on stationery?

Think of an ad for a grill served to your phone right after you’ve texted your partner, “Let’s get a grill this summer.” That may feel invasive to some, but it’ll come across as time-saving to others. And the smarter the AI, the more interactive the content, engaging customers with polls and contests and giveaways. Don’t think of data marketing as a self-checkout kiosk — rather, it’s a series of tools that tailor campaigns to customers based on their preferences.

Or so the argument goes.

Going Green

“Sustainability” transcends simple trendiness because its entire premise is future-oriented, and we’re living through the effects of climate change every day. We did mention firebrand issues, didn’t we? Well, environmentalism is one of the fieriest, with swaths of California and Australia erupting into flames, back-to-back US administrations hopping in and out of the Paris Agreement, and businesses shifting their operations and messaging to address the threats of global warming. With studies showing that 81% of consumers believe companies should do their part in helping the environment, eco-friendly brands will seem even friendlier this year, especially as we navigate the perils of a world where we’ve all but trapped ourselves inside our own carbon emissions.

Forecasting trends in digital advertising is an uncertain science, at best, but it’s also not the same as placing bets or guessing at predictions. Rather, it’s an effort to analyze markets, listen to what customers are saying, and shape tools for businesses that need to anticipate how consumer behavior will pattern itself in coming years. No one can peer into the future — much less know when Satan will find his soulmate — but with some attention to the forces reinventing our culture, you can act on (rather than react to) the changes within your industry.

How Branding Can Build Better Customer Value

How Branding Can Build Better Customer Value

Businesses, for your own survival, remember this: Customers today have more choices than ever before. Drop into any grocery store and you’ll have to decide between, at minimum, 12 different brands — not bags, but brands — of rice. So to distinguish yourself from all the other metaphorical bags of rice on the shelf, your branding needs to demonstrate a record of reliability. In a word, you have to show that your business builds customer value.

CV=(B-C)

See that equation up there? That’s a rough-and-ready definition of customer value: The benefit of a product minus the cost. You’ve just bought a bag of scrumptious basmati rice for $4. Are you satisfied with it? You are? Then bask in the glow of high customer value. That purchase is one tesserae of the mosaic known as “brand equity,” or the social value of a brand. Calculating brand equity can get tricky, because it’s not based entirely on market capitalization, but also on intangibles like dependability. Once people trust you, they may be willing to pay more for your product if they enjoy the perks of your branding. Some marketers argue that branding benefits customers in at least three ways: making their lives easier, moving or inspiring them, or reinforcing their beliefs and bottom lines. Let’s go over each one.

Ease and Convenience

No matter how glitzy your brand design gets, many successful companies still follow the same customer service principles as Mom and Pop: They solve problems. Need a credit card? Call Visa. Want a bassinet delivered? Log onto Amazon. Gotta write a content article about how branding builds customer value? Open your Macbook Air.

Visa and Amazon and Apple have thrived in part because they provide “convenient customer service,” which is mostly a euphemism for easing people’s apprehensions or fears. Take a more visceral example: A tree branch falls on your roof and a home repair business removes it and patches up the damage before a hailstorm sets in. All that anxiety welling up inside you about replacing rotted wood and soaked furniture goes away, courtesy of this company. Afterwards, you’ll probably call them again — or even buy hammers and wood chippers from them, if they’re selling. Why, you ask? Because you trust their brand.

Inspiration and Identity

Brands don’t just fix problems for us. They also welcome us into the club. Remember the last time you went into the Mac store? You felt like you were entering a spaceship. Your floor was the Cloud. Everything looked like a vision from twenty years in the future. The glowing white layout enticed you — and your pocketbook. At a Mac store, you’re paying for a 27″ monitor with a desktop shot of Catalina Island, yes, but you’re also meshing your identity with the aura of simplicity and sophistication that you’re nimbused in. What’s the customer value of being enticed? Brand agencies will debate this point endlessly, but one could argue that, in Apple’s case, it currently amounts to $241 billion, making Apple a giant among other global tech giants today, with a near-perfect brand value rating of AAA.

Beliefs and Bottom Lines

Consumers have rewarded Apple with billions of their hard- (or otherwise-) earned dollars, in part because Apple enriches them right back. Your Macbook Air will cost you at least $1,000, but the ease with which it lets you work from anywhere or plug into LinkedIn communities will lead you to opportunities that recoup that initial fee in no time. Brands also typically find that they make more when they spend on side-projects that make their business look good. Take this page from Apple’s site: “How Apple Volunteers are Helping Transform Lives.” The more world-weary among us might point out that do-gooder companies give off a whiff of paradox, but this article does a convincing job highlighting how Apple employees help out at food banks or teach coding to high school students. The more Apple gives back, the better people feel about buying from them, especially when their outreach programs reinforce values that those consumers already hold.

A well-thought-out brand isn’t just a shinier logo on a bag of rice. Rather, it’s the culmination of all the research you’ve done on your customers — the surveys they filled out, the comments they left on Yelp!, the Google Analytics you pored over. Listen to what they’re saying. Track their spending patterns and adjust your pricing (if advisable). Segment off the clients you want to attract, then position your brand so that it speaks to them. A company without branding in today’s market has pretty much told their customers that they aren’t interested in providing value for them, which can get costly. After all, your very survival may depend on it.

Jacob Tyler Wins Gold!

Congratulations to Richard Truss for submitting his Fireside Restaurant Ad in the 2020 Graphis Advertising Competition! We always knew the ad was awesome!!