This year, one of the biggest digital stories to shock the global business community is the shakeup at corporate giant Coca-Cola Company. For the marketing landscape in particular, Coke made waves when it decided to remove the role of the Chief Marketing Officer, until recently held by marketing legend Marcos de Quinto.

As one of the top corporations in the world, Coke is likely to influence millions of other companies across the globe with this move, which clearly presents the trajectory of marketing in today’s age. What can it mean for today’s marketing professionals?

Pundits are quick to note that de Quinto was among the rare voices in the industry to push against bigger digital spending, claiming that the space is under-delivering on its promises, and might be an overrated domain.

Time will tell whether he is right, or whether he judged the channel too early, and from the framework of someone who is simplyused to the old ways. In particular, de Quinto insisted the continuing dominance of TV when it comes to delivering ROI, citing figures to support his argument.He said that every dollar spent on TV generates $2.13, while only $1.26 comes from every dollar of digital spend.

However, there is another angle here that must be looked at: is it possible that Coke’s digital marketing strategies are the problem, and not the domain itself? As years pass, we know that more customers are using digital platforms to connect with brands, and it is a foolish marketer who would choose not to respond to this pattern. Small and/or new companies, in particular, find digital to be the more accessible and affordable platform, and with unlimited space for all brands, too – as opposed to TV and other traditional media, which tend to favor the more established names, have requirements regarding length, content, and costs, and offer lock-out options.

Too, this new space should not be considered a replacement for these old avenues, which did take many decades to develop. As in any business decision, it is going to be a matter of the expectations set by the company when they start a marketing campaign, and when dealing with something new, these expectations should be adjusted.

But the bottom line is, digital is here to stay, and embracing it is a must – whether by a small family restaurant, or a big company like Coca Cola.

Check out the next entry for more on this topic.

The past half-decade witnessed how businesses have integrated social media into their marketing strategy. Many have formed routines, some of which are effective, some, not so.

This article discusses some of the mistakes social media managers are making:

Doing automation wrong. While there are existing automation tools that serve to simplify our tasks, we should know when and how to use them. We should make sure that automated posts still look timely, and that when there are pressing issues or breaking news relevant to our products and services, we are able to respond accordingly – say, with new hashtags based on trending topics of the day. Today’s customers are perceptive: They might, for example, figure out automation practices if you make such mistakes as posting at exactly the same time each day.

Sounding too formal. Social media is the chance to be a little more casual in your tone, especially when you are directly conversing with a customer. If you speak a little too formally, they might not see the difference in just receiving an email from you, or visiting your website. Every marketing platform is different, and you should be able to adapt, especially by tapping people who understand its language and rules.

Being too self-indulgent. Nobody likes people who keep talking only about themselves, and the same is true for companies. On your social media pages, it is more important to understand what your customers are looking for, which may not always be about you, but is still relevant to your brand. Perhaps a product or service offered by a company that can be your affiliate? Or news on developments about your industry? Or a feature about emerging social issues in the communities where you operate?

Focusing so much on selling. In relation to the previous point, it helps to shift from a sales mode from time to time. Materials should also be informative and entertaining, and not just explicitly asking to buy an item. In the end, customers would be looking for value, and there is a way to offer it besides talking about what you sell.

If you would like to adopt better social media marketing habits, get in touch with us at GBX Digital. We draw from decades of combined experience in conceptualizing and implementing digital marketing solutions, and will be ready to walk you through the arduous but ultimately fulfilling process of social media management.

If you have put up a business, among the first things to work on is your corporate identity, where you develop how you would like to be known by your target market. It may not be a smooth journey, but it is the necessary first stage that should guide future marketing actions.

This article outlines the steps to take in corporate identity system development:

Start with the basics. First, you should be able to answer the basic questions. What do you offer? Who is your target market? What are your values and principles? What do you intend to achieve as a business? How do you see yourself in the short-, medium- and long-term? The answers to these would be what will compose your mission-vision statement, which is standard in any organization that’s introducing itself to the market.

Study the competition and landscape. Sometimes, the basic questions are easier to answer by describing your organization in relation to others. What makes you different from the competition? Among the current set of industry players, which ones do you aspire to be like, or have the same target market as? Which ones do you wish to be distinguished from?

Determine what makes you different. The next step is to differentiate oneself from the rest. You need to be able to present a value proposition to your target market, and this entails knowing what you can offer that your competition cannot. You are trying to nurture an idea of how the customers can experience your products or services, and persuade them to choose you over the others. At this point, you need to say more about the range of your prices, the quality of your offerings, customer service, facilities, and the benefits of using your products.

Articulate your identity. After the key persons in the management team have gone through the past steps and deliberating on the pertinent questions, you are now ready to articulate your identity, in written and visual form. You need writers and artists who can work on the company logo, the corporate palette, the tagline, the boilerplate, among other visual materials. And then, you need to describe these visual identity elements clearly in a manual, complete with measurements and proportions, line details, as well as color specifications, so that they can be duplicated for all corporate marketing materials to be produced from hereon.

Call us today at GBX Digital, to take advantage of our expertise in corporate identity development and digital marketing strategy.

Creating pages on social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is just the start of the long journey that is social media marketing. If you would like to get ahead of the competition, then you need to take the extra mile.

Here are some ways to do it:

Educate your customers. Your customers are not just people to sell to. They are people with interests, who thirst from knowledge and who might benefit from more information that’s somehow related to your brand. Be the purveyor of this information, by commissioning the production of media that they will be able to download from your platforms. Perhaps a podcast that they can listen to, or an e-book written by an industry expert, or a step-by-step infographic tutorial. They will appreciate the material, and they will appreciate your brand.

Expressing gratitude for each action. Social media is about building active communities around your brand, and expanding them through time. You want these spaces to be full of positive vibes, where followers feel grateful and privileged to belong to, and where they feel they are actually being listened to. Key to this is acknowledging every action – a like or share on your Facebook post, a retweet on Twitter, a direct message to your Instagram, a new follow on Pinterest. Be thankful, and express your gratitude. Let your followers – as well as their network of friends – that you are a business that knows how to appreciate.

Send out freebies. Everybody likes freebies! You can hold games for these, but sometimes, you can do so randomly, too. In psychology, this is known to create even more excitement. Say, give free items to the first person to like your post, and announce this after the fact. Obviously, do spend time thinking about the best items for your target market. Ideally, they carry your brand, and are a great showcase of your product or service offerings. This is so they will actually be encouraged to make a purchase from your stores in the near future.

To know more about tricks in winning the social media marketing game, tap the assistance of our specialists here at GBX Digital. From our headquarters in New York, we will be ready to craft complete digital marketing strategy that’s aligned with your company goals, and respond to the demands of your market, of your industry, and of today’s business landscape in general.

Today, more and more consumers are becoming socially conscious, and are actively looking for ethical options when purchasing products and services. Many businesses have since been responding to the demand, and are now engaging in new brand development and marketing strategies to reflect the changes they have adopted in their production systems.

Here are a few tips in presenting your company and its offerings as the ethical choice:

Invest on your employees and their training. Paying and rewarding your employees well is the first step to being an ethical company. As a bonus, the company staff will always be your best ambassadors. If they are provided the right compensation and more benefits than the competition, you can expect them to speak well of your brand. Moreover, the employees should be informed about this shift in branding: They should be able to articulate your efforts to the customers, and also subscribe to the principles of corporate social responsibility as they perform their duties from day to day.

Showcase your practices. Ethical branding is about addressing the pressing issues of today – from animal rights, to poverty alleviation, to climate change. It is about making sure that the materials you pick for manufacturing your products are sustainably harvested, that the communities where these are sourced benefit from your operations, that your businesses somehow contributes to the betterment of the world. It would be a great practice to let your target market witness these firsthand: Implement an open-house day, where interested parties – from the consumer advocate groups, to journalists, to industry associations – can actually observe how your products are made, right in your production site.

Choose your partners well. “Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are” is an adage that also holds true when it comes to businesses. When you market yourself as the good brand, it is important to partner with reputable organizations. Actually devote time and resources to vetting the providers of your raw materials, of your laborers, of your distributors. Investigate their track record when it comes to working with the grassroots, and dealing with the community.

Talk to us today at GBX Digital to learn more about brand development. We are a team of New York-based marketing professionals who cater to a diverse range of clientele. We will be more than glad to present to you our full range of truly responsive traditional and online marketing solutions.

In business, you want customers who will stick to your brand not because they are blind fanatics, but because they truly believe in what you offer, and trust your name more than they trust the competition. This is why, in the age of alternative facts, promoting truth in brand development has become so much more important than ever.

But what does it mean to be truthful in conceptualizing and promoting your brand? This article discusses that, and more.

Being truthful means depicting your company and your products and services based on what you can actually deliver. That might sound antithetical to the essence of marketing as practiced by many, but it will pay off, in the end.

When a company is truthful, it is simply doing the right thing. It will be able to avoid lawsuits, especially in a country like the United States, where consumers are very empowered and aware of their rights. It is something that our Constitution provides for, after all: They should be able to demand as much as you promised them you will.

This means that you should devote significant resources towards superior product development and customer service. You should regularly evaluate the quality of your offerings so that you fulfill what your advertising materials say about them. Be able to answer such questions as: How long can my product last? Or, how much is it really going to cost the customer to avail of a service package? Do we have available facilities and personnel to deliver on the terms of my return, exchange, or repair policy?

You should also listen to customer feedback, and integrate these information in your marketing materials. For instance, it may be the case that you have your own claims about your products that are not felt by the customers.

Furthermore, it serves to manage the expectations of your customers. As they say, the key to satisfying customers is to under-promise, and over-deliver. Through your promotional materials, you want them to have a taste of what you can offer. Going back to the goal of building trust in your brand, managing expectations is a crucial aspect of nurturing this relationship, and overtime, of the trust between the company and the customers. And when you have become a trustworthy, reliable brand in their book, customers will become your automatic endorsers, promoting your brand by word of mouth.

To learn more about brand development, talk to us here at GBX Digital.

Even with the phenomenal rise of social media and other communication platforms, the email continues to be the most reliable means to reach a customer these days. How email marketing would fare for a business, however, greatly depends on how well organizations design it to be responsive to their target market’s needs.

Below are some of the best practices to adopt when developing an email marketing strategy:

Make them freely provide their email. It is best when users do not feel as if they were hostaged to part with their personal information – and email is a closely guarded info for many users. One way to accomplish this is by rewarding users who do, perhaps with a free pass to your exclusive event, or a sample product from your business.Alternatively, you can make it the single requirement to a free download of a relevant and well-crafted resource material.

Be transparent with your intentions. Inform them exactly why their email is being requested, and what they can expect: Is it for them to be part of a database? Will they be receiving newsletters? How frequently can they expect one? Or will a sales agent contact them soon after? Whichever the case, they should feel that they are in control and can opt out anytime, and they must be assured that they will not be spammed.

Do not spam. When you promise not to spam your subscriber, do not break it. It takes just one click of a button to automatically relegate your email address to the spam folder, and there will your emails land forever.

Invest in email analytics software. Do monitor the performance of your email strategy. The software should be able to note whether your emails get opened, how long the user spends time viewing it, and what actions they do upon reading (Do they click on the links? Do they purchase your product or service? Or do they flag your email as spam?).

Always include a call to action. After reading your email, your reader should know what they actually need to do next. Should they visit your store? Or give you a call? If so, include the necessary details – in fact include a link that lets them do that. A smart functionality may allow them to talk to your sales agent instantly.

Learn more about effective email marketing by talking to digital marketing experts at GBX Digital today.

When you commit to doing email marketing right, you are bound to reap its rewards. After all, email remains at the core of most marketing practices in the world of business today.

Here are some of the better ways to reach out to your customers through their inbox.

Personalize. Make sure the email looks as personalized for every customer as possible. Greet them with their first name on the subject line, and in your email. If that is too time consuming – although there can be tools to systematically accomplish this – at least categorize your recipients according to gender, age, location, among other parameters, and send the corresponding messages accordingly. For instance, if you are sending features of your products or services, at least make sure that that is available where the recipient is located.

Timing is paramount. Take note of your target market’s lifestyles, and time your email release accordingly. Are they young professionals who tend to be online practically the whole day? Or are they working mothers who will only likely check their inbox at night? Or maybe you are targeting a niche market of investors in Asia, or Canada, or Europe. Whichever the case, be mindful of timing – and time zones.Automate your releases so they are received when they are awake and browsing!

Do not send spam. Spamming your recipients’ inboxes will do your business no good. As a matter of fact, spamming will easily ruin your company name. Schedule to send emails perhaps only twice a month, and do not use spammy terms in your subject and body text.

Bring value to your customers’ lives. Nothing will keep you out of that spam folder like good old emails that bring true value to their lives. Send emails that are informative. Here are a few examples: Well-written reviews of products and services – that are not your competitors, a curated list of events in your community, or a link to a downloadable pdf or video tutorial about a task that involves your product.

Link in your emails with your social media accounts. Aside from email, you would want to engage with your customers on your social media accounts as well. The more points of contact, the merrier. So, do include links to your pages on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social networking platforms on your emails.

Get in touch with New York-based GBX Digital today to know more about the best way to do email marketing.

In email marketing, one of the goals is to be able to keep sending emails, without them landing in the spam folder. To avoid being tagged as a spammer, here are some pointers to keep in mind:

Try to secure permission to send emails. ISPs have become much more sophisticated when it comes to detecting whether marketers are sending unsolicited emails. The best strategy is to have potential recipients enter their own email addresses through your pages – your website, or your social media accounts. The text of your very first email you send is important: You can include a line or two about what they can do to allow you to reach the inbox: Maybe click on a confirmation link that you are an authorized sender.

Sound smart, creative, and authoritative in your title. Stand out in a world of articles and emails with clickbait titles. Instead, invest in the services of truly creative copywriters who can draft smart phrases for your subject line, without sounding spammy. A title has to be short, but also catchy. It must capture your message but not give it all away. It should be an effective invitation for them to open the email – without needing to be typed in all caps.

Invest in proper layout. A photo that does not load properly. Or lines or graphics that break up. Poor choice of font combination. These all make for a bad layout that can turn off the reader the moment they view the email body.To address this,hire good designers who know how to create good graphics for your message. Additionally, do a proper test viewing of each email. Make sure they show up the way you intended them – and on every device. That said, design and code the email so that it displays nicely wherever it is opened from.

Target and schedule strategically. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with the email itself, but your timing or targeting is off. It can be visually compelling, but if you are sending to the wrong person (product for women being sent to a man), or at the wrong time (when your target is asleep), it will not be opened. When this happens repeatedly, it will land you in the spam.

For more tips on email marketing, tap the services of GBX Digital – a New York-based online marketing agency that invests in the latest tools and some of the best people for digital marketing.

Your company website remains the most valuable digital marketing asset of your organization. To make sure that it stays useful to your business goals, it is important to take note of website development and maintenance principles that address the changing demands of today’s business landscape.

Here are some good practices to adopt, and elements to always integrate in your web dev process:

Reel every page visitor in. The circumstances that may have led the visitor to your page may never happen again. So, always take the opportunity to reel them in, and find ways to be able to get in touch with them on your terms. Get their email, for example.Or have them conveniently follow you on Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter. A creatively executed, and fast-loading pop-up can do this for you without being too disruptive to the viewer’s site navigation experience.

Install ‘smart’ functionalities.Has this particular page visitor been on your website before? It is a good idea to acknowledge that, and remind the user. The pop-up that conveys that information can even ask questions to learn how to serve the page visitor better, and know what exactly they need. Perhaps invite them to look at the new additions, or to a chat box with your sales representative. Another smart functionality would be location trackers, which should immediately update such details as product prices, language, or contact details based on where the website is being accessed from. Still another is exit intelligence, which can predict when a user is about to close the window, and offer content or an invitation that might encourage them to stay longer.

Invest in data security and privacy. Aside from securing the company data stored in your page – especially if yours is an e-commerce website – you should feel responsible for safeguarding every information that gets entered in your website’s fields. Cyber attacks are a serious threat to continuous website operation and the security of your company and client information, and so are malware spread and phishing. To address these and other threats, be meticulous about your web security privacy settings. And talk to your web development team about securing the contents of your website in the event of a disaster or a hacking incident.

To know more about effective website development and maintenance amid the marketing challenges of today’s business climate, get in touch with New York-based digital marketing experts GBX Digital.