Tag: Digital Media

Get your Marketing Score Report and Assessment

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Get your Marketing Score Report and Assessment

Advertising

It’s time to assess how your marketing department performed in 2015, and how you are going to achieve your marketing goals for 2016.

I was at the Fuel Lines conference in Nashville last week and heard a fantastic presentation from Paul Roetzer, president of PR 20/20. His agency published the Marketing Score Report which provides some valuable insights on how companies rate their marketing performance.

The report evaluates marketing areas including:

  • Audiences
  • Social media marketing
  • Content marketing
  • Marketing technology utilization
  • Marketing team strength

and so much more.

As you develop your 2016 plans, this could be a useful resource in helping justify investments in technology, creating realistic and defendable budgets, and aligning measurable objectives with strategies that will produce the desired results.

One of the key findings that Geile/Leon has observed with many clients is that the majority of organizations have aggressive growth goals and conservative budgets, creating a potential misalignment of expectations. 

Another key finding is that despite lead generation and lead-to-sale conversions being the two highest priority goals, organizations are failing to tap into the power of social media to achieve those goals. Many companies don’t have a cohesive content marketing plan which supports their lead generation and branding efforts.

How does your organization’s marketing efforts stack up?

PR 20/20 has developed an online assessment tool to help marketers rate their marketing programs and identify weaknesses. Check out this valuable tool by clicking here: What’s Your Marketing ScoreTM?

Marketing Score

This report and assessment tool gives you plenty to think about as you evaluate 2015 and plan for next year, such as:

  • Does your organization have the right marketing talent and technology in place to achieve desired performance goals?
  • Are your expectations for growth aligned with your potential?
  • What can large enterprises do to stay on top when nimble organizations develop more modern marketing teams and quickly adapt to marketing technology advancements?
  • Do you have the right agency partners to fill internal marketing team gaps, and provide the skills/expertise needed for critical growth areas?

Fill out the assessment or just review the report. I have found them extremely beneficial for our agency and clients.

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Display Advertising on the Decline? Well, yes and no.

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Display Advertising on the Decline? Well, yes and no.

Branding

As marketers, we have the occasional tendency to overreact. Whether it’s a particular news story, an emerging trend or a new platform to try, we want to immediately immerse ourselves in the new info. It’s in our curious nature.

In the excitement, though, that “next big thing” can overshadow what’s currently working. So instead of taking a previous approach and adapting it for the current landscape, we can end up opting for completely new solutions. And with so many digital marketing avenues to choose from, it’s definitely easy to feel overwhelmed.

So when a number of people make the claim that display advertising is dead, or at the very least, is sharply losing its effectiveness, it’s bound to grab some attention:

“The banner ad is now (two decades old). It has become a symbol of all that’s wrong with online advertising. It is more often than not devoid of creativity; it stands out as an intruder on webpages; and it is mostly ignored by readers.”

While it’s true that banner ads from the 90s probably wouldn’t be all that effective if they ran today, it doesn’t mean that display isn’t still incredibly effective:

“Even with these predictions of doom and gloom from some marketers the investment in display advertising continues to grow. Ad blocking software isn’t slowing that down. One of the reasons why is simple — targeting, retargeting, machine learning, and programmatic approaches to serving up ad units is creating a much more efficient system. This helps increase brands’ return on investment.”

At the same time, a number of marketers are diversifying their digital advertising with a combination of site-direct buys; programmatic opportunities, social media distribution as well as a strong push from sponsored content and native advertising.

This is even before considering different types of mediums, including images, video, infographics and other digital properties and how they plan to continue adapting to reach a wider, yet more targeted audience.

If you’re trying to figure out the best digital marketing mix for your brand, we’d be happy to chat and share what we know. Just drop us a line anytime.

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Does subtlety work in LinkedIn marketing?

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Does subtlety work in LinkedIn marketing?

Branding

Ask professionals for their opinion of LinkedIn and you’ll likely get a wide range of responses. Some see it as an invaluable tool for connecting with their peers. Others may simply not use it all that much. Some find it profoundly creepy (and with good reasons).

That being said, LinkedIn marketing presents an interesting challenge. The site already has a member of “freemium” offerings to begin with, such as paid memberships, online learning and a whole suite of other sales-based solutions. While posting regularly on the platform is a good strategy, the reach of specific posts varies wildly.

While the platform has some reasonably priced sponsored post options, many of the more enterprise advertising and recruiting solutions on LinkedIn can be incredibly pricey. They know they have a deep pool of profiles that others want to connect with and they leverage that data effectively. Their game, their rules.

Some marketers have tried to work around some of the advertising restrictions inherent in the LinkedIn platform. Men’s clothing company Bonobos created a personal profile for a shirt, which was positively received. It didn’t last long, however, as the profile went afoul of LinkedIn’s rules.

Another cool spin comes from well-regarded airline Virgin Atlantic. The company has always prided themselves on having an outgoing brand personality. They’ve taken that playfulness to LinkedIn to the form of a contest disguised as a job posting:

Virgin claims to be the first brand to leverage LinkedIn’s job search feature for promotional purposes. And its VP of marketing for the Americas, Simon Bradley, says the response has been quite positive to date, with nearly 200 applicants at the time of this posting. Bradley has bigger plans for the campaign; he tells AdFreak that the work is “very exciting for us, and we’ll be starting to seed it in our social campaigns very soon.”

Unlike the Bonobos campaign, this seems to have been approved in some fashion by LinkedIn. Which is good because it’d be a shame to work so hard on a campaign idea to have it shot down by the platform. And it looks like the prize of a round-trip to London has garnered some significant interest.

LinkedIn Marketing

Which is probably good news for LinkedIn, which is now in the middle of a slightly embarrassing class-action lawsuit.

We’re always looking for innovative ways to help brands cut through the clutter. Want to find out how yours can push the envelope? Let us know your thoughts.

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Trending from G/L: Will You Be My Emoji Marketing Brand Bae?

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: Will You Be My Emoji Marketing Brand Bae?

Advertising

In the advertising and marketing world, we speak constantly about our desire to connect with our target audience. We strive to create words, videos and experience that resonate with the people we’re trying to reach. We make every effort to make it mean something.

But in this quest to communicate with people, some brands end up missing the mark. The message comes off as forced. They use the wrong emoji (gasp!).

Ah yes, emojis. Our trusted friend and mortal enemy rolled into one crying sleeping smile…or something.

A recent article expresses some of the biggest concerns with emoji marketing:

But, you know what I see? Desperate brands.

Brands looking at the short-term game instead of the long-term play.

Brand that are so desperate to connect with younger audiences they’ll do virtually anything.

Like creating an entire news release out of emojis.

So yeah, like with any trend, some brands took it too far. But does that mean that the entire “trend” is dead? Nope.

The biggest issue with emoji marketing is how they’re used. If you’re a consumer-facing brand with a younger digitally savvy audience, then it might make sense. If you’re a more business-to-business brand communicating through traditional marketing channels, then there may be other options to consider.

Here’s a good overview of how emoji marketing works and some more in-depth insights:

We all want authentic communication from those we speak to both online and off.

Defining your social media voice and tone—then staying true to it no matter what communication changes come and go—can help keep that authenticity strong.

And, like with any kind of marketing, when it’s done well, it can make a splash. Domino’s tweet ordering is one example that definitely makes sense for their brand.

Emoji Marketing

What are some examples of emoji marketing that hit the mark? Or, in your opinion, what are some icons that fell flat? Feel free to send us a note with your thoughts!

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Trending from G/L: The Future of YouTube Advertising

Luke Smith
Senior Account Executive

Trending from G/L: The Future of YouTube Advertising

Branding

We have all seen the pre-video commercials on Google’s YouTube that play before your chosen content starts up. And we all probably wait for the very moment that we can click the “Skip Ad” button . While YouTube has been around for over 10 years, commercials have only really been prevalent for 5 years or so.

With anything relatively new, there is a learning curve and marketers are beginning to understand that this format should not be treated like a normal TV spot. It requires a different thought process.

“Storytelling has changed. With television, there is a beginning, middle and end. A digital campaign- there is no real end. Once you put it out there, what it becomes is another part of the idea…” stated David Droga, Creative Chairman of Droga5.

Emily Anderson, Creative Director at Ogilvy added, “The number one thing would be, who do you want to watch it? And then start there and work backwards.”

As the storytelling aspect of YouTube advertising is refined, it should be noted that the formats are ever evolving and marketers will need to adapt as new technologies emerge.

New Advertising Technology Coming to YouTube

Standard YouTube commercials may quickly become a thing of the past as new formats are developed. Jaunt is working with Bud Light to introduce experiential, 360-degree video ads to YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-Wl9jAB45Q

As Virtual Reality becomes mainstream, Google’s YouTube is at the front of the pack of early adopters. The new technology allows viewers to not only view the video but also interact and experience it by enabling them to drag and view the entire scene in a 360-degree radius.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79uA-gHvw18

YouTube Ads product manager JR Futrell states that the new 360-degree format is “a truly mobile-first video ad product,” – something worth noting considering half of YouTube’s views come directly from smartphones and tablets.

Major consumer brands are jumping on-board and gradually perfecting the art of storytelling through these new, unique formats. Nike, A-B InBev and Coca-Cola are examples of some of the brands leading the charge.

But what’s next? As VR headsets become more prevalent, brands, and content providers alike, will be able to provide even more immersive and interactive experiences. Google already has a cardboard VR headset that you can place your phone in to get the full experience and it costs next to nothing to obtain one.

As VR hardware like Oculus Rift becomes more readily available (and cheaper), the possibilities for delivering VR content are truly endless.

If you’re interested in learning more about the newest advertising technologies and how they can help your brand, shoot us a message.

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Find Your Why: Make It Mean Something

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Find Your Why: Make It Mean Something

Advertising

Those four words are really the credo of Geile/Leon. They didn’t exist until about four years ago. Our management and new business team had been discussing the Simon Sinek book Start With Why. We wanted to incorporate the G/L why into our culture and our brand offering. We wanted to discover the Why for ourselves, and develop a process for helping clients discover their “why”.

Make It Mean Something

As we discovered firsthand, finding your “why” requires some real introspection and looking hard at yourself in the mirror. The objective of our meetings were to fill out the golden circle that Sinek refers to in his book. And as we found out, it didn’t take us long to nail down the first two questions posed.

  • What do you do?
  • How do you do it differently?

But the most enlightening and satisfying part of the process was also the most challenging and it took some real brainpower. It was when we discovered and articulated the G/L Why. It took much discussion and we asked ourselves two questions.

  • Why do we exist?
  • Why do we come to work everyday?

Pretty thought-provoking questions, but they helped us dig deep to get to that important answer to why G/L does what it does. I guess I should share it with you.

The G/L Why: MAKE IT MEAN SOMETHING

G/L believes that every organization has a deeper purpose and it’s the agency’s role to help those clients discover it. By identifying, defining, and exposing that deeper sense of purpose, organizations can attract buyers that believe what they believe.

Once the organization’s purpose has been identified, G/L can create work that changes behaviors and builds relationships. Building relationships between brand and consumer that truly mean something, and cause buyers to make decisions that will benefit them, and ultimately, our clients.

Whatever we do, whatever we say, whatever media vehicle we choose, we make it mean something. The words, pictures, music, motion, emotion and opportunities we use to reach people need to mean something to them…something that will in some way benefit them…and enable them to do something, know something, be something, have something better than what they have now.

These six sentences drive everything we do here at Geile/Leon. They impact who we hire, clients we target, processes we put in place, our culture, our work, our decision –making, and our role in the community. It’s been inspiring and empowering in how we position ourselves. When I walk into a new business meeting or someone asks me about Geile Leon, I do what Simon Sinek’s book says and I start with why. You should try it and G/L can help you get started. When you come to our office, you’ll know exactly why you did.

Make It Mean Something

If you are looking for a more emotional way to communicate with your target audience and employees, contact us using the form below.

 

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Why Storytelling in Media Relations Matters

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Why Storytelling in Media Relations Matters

Advertising

As of January 2013, there were more than 600,000 restaurants in the United States. With so much competition, how does one stand out from the pack?

The first option is paid media or marketing.

Television spot during a Cardinals game – $500-$2,500

Radio spot during primetime commute – $1,000-$3,000

Prominent Highway Billboard (per month) – $1,500-$5,000

You get the idea.

Advertising is necessary, but expensive. And don’t think for a second the restaurant down the street isn’t looking into the same methods.

So how do you make your business different? How do you effectively reach your targets and make them remember you? That is where public relations, or earned media, comes into play.

When a public relations professional first approaches a pitch, they are focused on one thing: storytelling. There may be more than 600,000 restaurants in the United States, but each one has a brand story. The key is figuring out what that story is.

Here are five tips for identifying an effective brand story:

1) Stop trying to sell

You aren’t mining for the brand story behind your business simply to drive sales. Sure, that is the end goal, but with brand storytelling there is so much more that goes along with it. You want to engage customers. You want them to remember you. Next time they are thinking about going to an Italian restaurant for dinner, you want them to think of the restaurant they read about in the newspaper that has been run by the same family for three generations.

2) Know your client

This is a big one. Nothing is more frustrating for a client than hiring someone to work on PR that isn’t willing to put in the work to find out about your company. It is not enough for someone trying to write a pitch to simply know the basics. It takes digging and asking questions to find that story that is going to grab a journalist’s and the audience’s attention.

3) Know your audience

Just as important as knowing your client, you need to know your audience. Who does the client want to target? What publications are you pitching this to? There may be one story, but there is more than one way to tell it so that it hits the target.

4) Be relatable

What is the point of telling a story if it isn’t one that people are interested in? It is probably not advantageous to talk about the billionaire that added this restaurant to his portfolio. No. This is not a story that people are interested in. This is not a story that is going to make customers want to experience what you have to offer. Make it a personal, relatable story.

HINT: If the brand story that you create is something that customers can mention in casual conversation, you’ve nailed it.

5) Be newsworthy

This is more important in the drafting of a pitch than in the storytelling, but it is certainly still an element of effective storytelling. Create a story that makes sense in the world. Find out what your target audience is talking about, and mine for a story that aligns with that. This also makes it easier for a journalist to take what you are offering and turn it into something more than a mention on page 10.

Does brand storytelling sound a bit like journalism? Well, it should. Developing your story takes some digging, but once you find it, have some fun with it! Take advantage of the opportunity to give your customers an inside look at your business. Tell your story and I guarantee they will remember you.

We know your brand has a story to tell. Let us help you find it.

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Trending from G/L: Does YouTube have a legitimate online video competitor in Vessel?

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: Does YouTube have a legitimate online video competitor in Vessel?

Advertising

Since 2006, YouTube has been the go-to site for online video streaming and in the past decade, the attempt to throw YouTube from its streaming throne has been feeble at best. Sites such as Vimeo, yfrog (yeah, it does video, too) and Flickr exist, but simply can’t boast the multitude of traffic YouTube can. With high traffic comes a strong marketing presence, so how can anyone expect to compete with the ad-logged, Google-owned giant?

Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar believes he has an answer in Vessel, a new video hosting service that offers early access to new releases for just $3 per month. So how does Vessel gain early access to highly sought vids? By offering higher pay to top creators who agree to post to Vessel first.

YouTube stars make their cash from marketers that advertise before their videos. In turn, YouTube gets paid, and the video creator gets a cut.

Felix Kjellberg, also known by his YouTube moniker, PewDiePie, reportedly earned $7 million dollars making videos in 2014. The guy has nearly 38 million followers and 9 billion views—that’s more than Taylor Swift.

How’d Kjellberg get famous? Playing video games and hollering at the screen, of course. As it turns out, Kjellberg’s gamer-style antics attract the youth and young adult market. As young people watch less and less cable television, marketers have fewer and fewer qualms spending dough online.

So if Vessel officials could convince the likes of Kjellberg to transfer from YouTube, they’d pull a chunk of viewership as well, right? Theoretically, with each subscriber jumping the YouTube ship would bring $3 a month to Vessel.

That means if just half of Kjellberg’s subscribers were to sign up with Vessel and pay for early access, Vessel would gross close to $60,000,000 monthly from subscriptions alone. Accounting for outdated, underwhelmed, or accidental subscribers, bringing half of Kjellberg’s following is a lofty goal—maybe even unrealistic. But this example indicates the absurd amount of money that can be made by, with, and from these online video stars.

Anna Akana, a 25-year-old comedian with 1.2 million subscribers, is already on board with Vessel. According to an interview with NPR, YouTube takes about half of Akana’s revenue from advertisements.

“YouTube revenue has been tanking… I’m making 20 times more with Vessel for doing the same amount of work, if not less, than with YouTube,” Akana said.

It appears Vessel is doing exactly what needs to be done to compete with YouTube—headhunt top earners by offering a pay bump they can’t refuse.

While I find it hard to believe that Vessel, or anyone else, can replace YouTube entirely, I predict it’s only a matter of time before someone finds a comfortable spot in the “premium” online video hosting niche.

And yes, I realize “premium online video” is a bit of an oxymoron in itself, but that’s where we’re at these days.

The online video landscape has been changing dramatically in recent years. Want to make sure you’re not falling behind? Contact us and we’ll be happy to chat.

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Trending from G/L: Twitter Ads Get More Personal

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: Twitter Ads Get More Personal

Advertising

If you asked me what my current favorite social media platform is, I’d probably have to go with Twitter. Once you find all the feeds you’re interested in, it makes finding info so incredibly easy. Plus, when it comes to breaking news, Twitter search is the best way to figure out what’s going on, in my opinion.

In fact, a cool story I heard recently about Twitter involved an awesome Father’s Day present. A friend’s dad lives in St. Louis, but is originally from the Pittsburgh area. As a present, my friend created a Twitter feed for him following all the media outlets and blogs related to Pittsburgh sports as an alternative to Google. Not going to lie, I kind of wish I had thought of that first.

One of the drawbacks to the platform, however (at least from an advertising perspective), is how it can be difficult to target an audience based on personalized data. You could target based on the accounts that those Twitter handles follow and narrow it down based on DMA info, but beyond that, the platform lacked some of the robust features available via Facebook. For that and other reasons, Twitter Ads haven’t always been seen as being as powerful as Facebook Ads.

Earlier this month, though, Twitter may have closed that advertising gap. On July 2, they introduced new audience insights for brands as well as new “personas” to target more effectively.

Twitter is able to do this by working with a pair of third-party data companies, presumably to reconcile profile info with that added information to create more precise targeting. The personas include college graduates, users with more than $100k in income and “business decision-makers” among others. Pretty cool stuff.

Of course, the flip side is, the more advertising there is on Twitter, the less of a direct “feed” users will have. By adding promoted content into the feed, the linear structure has started to change. And some users aren’t happy.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the old days of Facebook when news feed content was organized in an exclusively chronological order. With changes to Facebook’s algorithm as well as simply too much content between personal and brand accounts, the news feed changed to, in theory, highlight the most relevant content. Whether that’s truly the case or not is still up for debate.

Regardless, these new options from Twitter will definitely be a part of how the user experience for the platform will continue to evolve.

Interested in social media advertising or digital marketing in general? Feel free to contact us using the form below…or you can always tweet us at @GeileLeonSTL.

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Trending from G/L: Sponsored Content on Instagram keeps growing

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: Sponsored Content on Instagram keeps growing

Advertising

Remember Gary Turk’s “Look Up” – the viral video that bashed social media and millennials’ inattentiveness to their natural lives? I think I remember first seeing it on Twitter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3P7382VPtE

In sum, a sentimental narrator—British accent and all—reads a heartfelt poem that speaks to a millennial generation distracted by superficial intangibles like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat—all the while missing out on their true potential to find love and happiness and all of that good stuff.

“I have 422 friends, yet I’m lonely,” Turk coos in his opening line.

By 2014, this path was well trodden; nonetheless, “Look Up” inspired a circle of millennials to lay down their devices and live a peaceful life sans the social media.

Sure enough, social media’s role transcends tallying artificial friends and reading lists on Buzzfeed. Currently, there’s $1 billion dollars of sponsored content on Instagram alone.

Danielle Bernstein, a 22-year-old fashion blogger, for example, is paid anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 per Instagram post. What qualifies her? She has 992,000 followers.

An audience of 992,000 Instagremlins, most of them interested in fashion, attracts clothing brands to advertise products on Ms. Bernstein’s account.

Because fashion bloggers routinely post pictures of their outfits, Ms. Bernstein’s sponsored content appears particularly subtle. Her job: wear clothes provided by her hiring company, snap a few pictures wearing the rags, then blast them out to her massive following. Her personalized product placement utilizes the trust she’s gained as a “real person” in comparison to other product placement efforts on TV or in movies.

In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Ms. Bernstein noted that her annual income is in the mid-six figures range and that behind the curtain, so to speak, fashion brands negotiate stipulations preventing her from showcasing other brands for a specified amount of time.

Who knew social media could be so serious? Well, most of us by now.

Speaking of which, Gary Turk’s ode to offlinedness became viral as a result of social media, ironically enough. Regardless of the intended message, whether it’s endorsing clothes for money or vilifying the Internet for recognition, social will remain a valuable medium for making friends and money for a long time to come.

Not sure what’s the best way to showcase your brand to your target audience? Shoot us a note and we’ll get back to you quickly.

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