Category: Digital Marketing Resources

If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, it follows that one of the most important aspects of branding is imagery. Whenever your customers interact with your brand, their brains relay sensory information from your visuals to develop a perception of your company. Everything from your color palette to choice of fonts affects your target audience’s perception of your brand.

And that’s only your static visuals.

Visuals are an integral part of any marketing strategy. Your target audience will engage with visual content more readily than written content because the human ability to process visual information is substantially more streamlined. The Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) found that “the human brain can process entire images that the eyes see for as little as 13 milliseconds,” which means that well-worn cliché isn’t as ridiculous as you might believe.

If your brand is already running a successful marketing campaign utilizing a combination of SEO and PPC reinforced by original visual content, intelligent web design, and a dedicated social media presence, you should consider taking your visual content to the next level with video.

The idea of entering the audio-visual space can seem imposing and unrealistic, but with the help of our award-winning digital marketing agency, you can produce trendy video content on a budget that demonstrates its worth with measurable results.

Video Stories

A video story is usually comprised of a series of short clips that combine to tell a story, deliver a message, entertain your audience, or explain a product, promotion, or service. Generally, video stories expire after 24 hours, which means there’s no time to get lost in pre- and post-production. Your story is meant to be timely and spontaneous. It should give your target audience more insight into your brand. Fortunately, video stories are inexpensive, customizable, and easily branded:

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Creating a unique graphic to introduce your story will grab your customer’s attention. Since video stories are primed for mobile, you’ll always be shooting in 1080px by 1920px.

Although you can start posting stories on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat at anytime, you want to be wary of what you post and always post with intent. It only takes a few minutes to shoot and post a story, which gives your brand the freedom to supplement your content output frequently, but posting for the sake of posting isn’t advised. Your brand should always aim to provide value for your target audience.

Another feature of video stories is the ability to broadcast live and engage in real-time chats with your target audience. Perhaps you’re hosting a birthday party in the office and want to let your customers be a part of the celebration, or maybe you need a platform to disseminate timely information about a new piece of legislation that will affect your brand; either way, live stories create active engagement for virtually zero investment.

Nonetheless, these easy to use but powerful tools are best utilized in conjunction with a veritable marketing strategy. Shooting your own video stories is fun and easy, but if you want to maintain the identity of your brand, consult with a digital marketing agency before proceeding with any haphazard video content.

Interviews and Testimonials

Shooting your own commercial is a costly endeavor. Video production companies usually bill by the hour, and the time it takes to brainstorm a concept, shoot a commercial, and edit it in post-production can take a substantial amount of time. The goal of any commercial is to attract new customers by showcasing your value, but we often find that a utilitarian approach is more suitable for our clients.

Interviews and testimonials are a powerful tool for growing your brand and demonstrating your company’s value to its clients and prospective customers. There’s no need for special effects and the post-production work is minimal because interviews and testimonials focus on clearly communicating your brand’s message directly without the unnecessary foofaraw commonly found in television commercials.

In addition, since interviews and testimonials aren’t technically TV-friendly — since they usually stretch past the 15- to 60-second length associated with commercials — there’s no need to pay for advertising space. Instead, you can boost your ad spend online to increase engagement with your target audience. Promoting your interview or testimonial through these digital channels allows for a much greater degree of customization than television ads that target a general demographic during a specific time slot.

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Interviews allow your team to showcase their expertise, while testimonials offer your clients a chance to talk about their experience with your company.

Presentations and Tutorials

Whereas interviews and testimonials are designed to introduce your brand and encourage prospective customers to utilize your services, presentations and tutorials are a tool for educating your target audience about relevant topics that can have a direct effect on your professional relationship.

Although the quality of presentations and tutorials largely depend on your budget, the most important aspect of this type of video content is your information. Is your information clearly stated for your target audience? Is the audio and visual quality of your video sufficient for users on mobile? Have you developed a clear, attractive title for your video that will entice users outside of your target audience?

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Presentations and tutorials show that you’re actively working to help your industry grow and prosper by contributing valuable resources to your customers and the world beyond.

It only takes a few minutes to create an account and start posting videos on Youtube using your existing Google account. Your videos can be shared across social media or embedded on web pages as a resource for visitors. Once you have proven your value to enough users, you will start to amass subscribers and establish your case as a bonafide thought leader in your industry. Youtube has expanded their default upload size to 15 minutes, but you can upload videos up to 12 hours long once you verify your Google account. This allows for virtually endless flexibility, so post as much or as little as you desire, but always remember to stay on brand!

Are you ready to start publishing content that outshines your competition and provides more value for your customers? Video content allows you to connect with your customers on a more personal level to express your ideas and proliferate your brand’s message. You can start shooting promotional video content for your brand today. Our videographer has all the tips and tools to help you round out your marketing efforts with professional video content that resonates with your target audience and delivers more traffic to your website.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

There’s nothing quite like seeing the business you’ve poured your life into gracing the front page of the newspaper. Newspapers and magazines seem to be disappearing from the newstands, but they’ve gained renewed support online; and now, digital issues are even more common than the real thing.

People interact with the news more closely than they did in the past. Smartphones chirp every time a news story breaks, and apps like News deliver curated content tailored specifically to our reading and search habits. While some experts claim that print media is dead, the truth is that it packed its bags and moved to a boundless format with endless possibilities.

The news media is still alive and well; and for businesses looking to spread their name and reach new customers, media coverage is still an effective, cost-free mechanism for increasing your brand’s visibility in the physical and digital world.

However, it’s impossible to advertise your brand in the media without a story. If you want to advertise for the sake of advertising, you’ll have to purchase ad space from a publication. If you want the opportunity to grow your brand organically using media coverage, you will need to do something newsworthy, write a press release, and contact multiple publications or media companies.

Making Your Brand Newsworthy

Similar to the way your brand is vying for visibility on search and social, news stories battle for prime real estate on the first page of the newspaper or homepage of a publication’s website. If you want your brand to stand a chance against breaking news from the White House and your local area, your brand will need to find a way to attach itself to a big scoop.

Whether you’re seeking local or national coverage, there’s one common thread that connects most new stories — they all feature news that has an effect on people. When you introduce a new product or service for your customers, your primary goal is to grow your business. Unfortunately, growing your brand doesn’t constitute news without incorporating your community. Most news outlets are willing to let you spotlight your brand during a feature as long as you showcase something compelling for general readers.

Does your business engage in social outreach programs that benefit your community? Have you thrown events that welcome your community and aim to improve the lives of the less fortunate? Are you introducing a product or service that will have groundbreaking implications on customers and non-customers alike? These are types of stories the news press considers ‘newsworthy’.

Hosting fundraisers, social gatherings, and contests are a few ways you can get involved with your community in a newsworthy way. Partnering with other local businesses is also an effective tactic for helping your brand get featured in print or digital media. Charitable contributions are almost always worth talking about, too. If you want your brand to be featured in the media, you need to show that your company is more than just a business.

Write a Press Release

Once you’ve confirmed that your brand is involved in a newsworthy story that will captivate readers, it’s time to write a press release. Depending on the intent of your story, you will choose whether to send your press release before or after your news.

For instance, if the story involves your brand hosting a community picnic, you will want to send out the press release ahead of time so the story can be published before the event to boost attendance. Conversely, if your business already engaged in a newsworthy act (e.g., donated textbooks to underserved children, paid for a community member’s chemotherapy and recovery) you will want the press release sent out afterwards to tell the story in its entirety.

Regardless of when you send the press release, it’s imperative that your press release contains a few vital components:

First and foremost, consult a public relations specialist who can write a compelling press release that immediately hooks reporters. At Leverage Digital, our content strategists have worked in public relations and the news media, so drafting successful press releases is second nature. Regrettably, writing your own press release can be a fruitless time sink. Outside of the stringent formatting requirements, deciding what content is pertinent to the press release can be tough. If a reporter picks up a press release from the newswire, but finds it to be incorrectly formatted or lacking clarity, they will ditch it instantly in favor of a press release written with a higher degree of professionalism.

Second, your press release should include direct quotes from relevant sources. If you want to have a story about a fundraiser published in the newspaper, you will need to collect quotes from important members of your organization as well as people who attended the fundraiser. Provide full quotes so the reporter can edit them for publication as needed. If your quotes are too short or fail to illustrate why your story is newsworthy, the reporter will likely dump them and scrap your story.

Finally, no press release is complete without images. Stories are thrown out regularly because they lack visuals. News stories always benefit from pictures and photographs that grab the reader’s attention. If you supply your own visuals, the reporter won’t have to submit a photo request form thereby saving time and money. Our digital marketing agency can improve your press release by supplying you with professional-quality photographs that capture your brand at its best.

Contact Multiple Publications

Sending out your first press release can be nerve-wracking. You spent a lot of time (or money) ensuring that your press release was well-written, so you don’t want to be rejected; but, more often than not, you will be. And that’s perfectly normal.

There are numerous publications on the local level in most areas, and your options expand significantly when you start reaching out to national publications. Plus, specialized, online-only publications give your brand the ability to reach users you might have never considered in the past. Once you’ve decided which type of news platform is best for your brand, send out as many press releases to as many credible publications as possible to increase your chances of landing coverage.

Your story could get picked up by one publication, zero publications, or ten publications. Regardless of the outcome, you’re taking the necessary steps to expand your brand’s visibility thereby generating new leads and improving your brand recognition. Best of all? This process is essentially free. You pay for advertising. You don’t pay for news coverage.

Growing your brand organically starts with SEO, but what comes next? There are countless ways to promote your brand without a significant investment of capital, but these methods often require the expertise of a talented digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital. Whether you want your brand positioned on the front page of Google or the front page of your local newspaper, our team is ready to help you elevate your business and enhance your brand. With over $100 million in revenue generated for our clients, our fearless approach to marketing is sure to deliver the measurable results you’ve been waiting for.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

One of the common misconceptions in digital marketing is that SEO and paid search are mutually exclusive. If search visibility is achieved through SEO, why invest in paid search? Although it might seem unnecessary, running a paid search campaign using AdWords can bolster your SEO strategy and ensure that your brand has a commanding presence on search engine results pages. Here are four reasons why using AdWords strengthens your SEO strategy.

Reason #1: Organic Rankings are Volatile; Ad Rank is Not

Organic rankings can be volatile. Unless you work with a proven team of digital marketing professionals and skilled content strategists to continuously produce high-quality content, your rankings could fluctuate unpredictably. One day you’re in the top five for a high-priority keyword, and the next day you’re nowhere to be found. With Google’s constant algorithm updates and user-interface changes, organic rankings have grown increasingly volatile. Tackling these issues alone can be a daunting task.

This is not the case with AdWords. Once you have the right mix of quality score and budget, your Ad Rank (your ad position relative to other ads) is fairly consistent. However, reaching this point can be challenging without the insight of a designated Google Partner like Leverage Digital. Paid search campaigns require a fair amount of work to achieve the right Ad Rank for the right price, but you have far more control over the ranking of your ads than you do over your organic search rankings.

Reason #2: Earn Twice the Visibility

The Google search results pages contain a lot of information, all of which competes for searchers’ attention. So, while being listed on the first page is great, being listed twice is even better, particularly if both your organic search ranking and ad are listed in the top three organic and paid positions.

Furthermore, if your competitors are listed once on the first page for a priority keyword, while you’re listed twice, you have double the visibility and thus a clear advantage if the rankings are comparable.

Reason #3: Increase Click-Throughs

A natural byproduct of increasing search visibility is increasing clicks to your website. Even though clicks are not a measurement of success, they are a prerequisite for conversions.

Google conducted a study in 2012, which concluded that 50 percent of clicks generated by paid ads are not replaced by organic clicks when the ads are absent and the website has a first position organic search ranking. The study also shows that as the organic search ranking decreases, the percentage of clicks not replaced by the paid ad increases. This implies that organic search alone cannot drive as much traffic to a website as organic search combined with paid search.

Reason #4: Increase the Probability of Conversion

By increasing traffic to your site, you also increase the probability of conversions. We have seen increases in conversions as high as 200 percent as a result of combining SEO and paid search. While your conversions may not necessarily increase 200 percent, it is logical that they will increase as a result of higher search visibility and an influx of traffic to your site.

Conclusion

With the right execution, a paid search campaign combined with an already successful SEO strategy can deliver traffic and conversions that you would otherwise miss by relying solely on organic search.

If you want to dominate the search engine results pages, you need to implement a digital marketing campaign that goes above and beyond your competition. At Leverage Digital, we employ innovative digital marketing strategies to help you engineer your own success. Our award-winning agency combines industry-leading design with thorough statistics tracking to ensure your objectives are met with measurable results.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

You’ve spent years investing in SEO, and now your brand dominates the rankings, but you’ve neglected your website and now your customers are stuck interfacing with an outdated platform that isn’t even mobile friendly.

It’s time for a redesign.

You’ve probably heard all of the horror stories that tell of disastrous site redesigns killing your search rankings and negatively influencing all the progress you’ve made with your SEO strategy, when in fact, your reluctance to embrace an updated design is the true culprit.

Don’t believe the ghost stories. Let a team of dedicated marketing specialists show you how powerful a well-executed site redesign can be for your brand. Here are five steps to ensure that you are able to successfully execute your site redesign without compromising months or possibly years of investment in SEO.

Step 1: Evaluate Your SEO Strategy

A site redesign is the perfect time to evaluate your SEO strategy and figure out which keywords and landing pages are providing the most value, and which ones are providing the least. This will allow you to assess which keywords and landing pages to prioritize during the redesign.

During this process, you may find keywords that rank well, but perform poorly at delivering quality traffic. These keywords may not be worth including in your post-redesign SEO efforts, which presents a great opportunity to refine the keywords you’re targeting to ones that will drive higher quality traffic to the site.

When evaluating your SEO strategy, you may also find that certain landing pages fail to engage visitors and convert them into leads or sales. We believe a site redesign presents the perfect opportunity to address page level engagement and conversion issues, too.

Ironically, by evaluating your SEO efforts prior to a site redesign, and addressing issues that you may have otherwise overlooked, you can actually end up with a superior SEO campaign once your redesign is complete.

Step 2: Keep the Same URL Structure or Implement 301 Redirects

As it pertains to SEO, it is ideal to maintain the same URL structure when executing a site redesign, but this not always practical. You may be moving the site to a new platform that has different requirements, or you may have reorganized your content, which resulted in changes to the URL structure. In any case, when you change your URL structure, it is imperative that you implement a page level 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. It helps retain rankings by guiding search engines from the old URL to the new URL where the requested content now lives. 301 redirects also preserve inbound links and internal links, both of which help retain rankings.

Retaining a positive user-experience is just as important as retaining good rankings. By preserving inbound links and internal links, 301 redirects prevent visitors from being greeted with a “404 Not Found” error message when accessing the site through inbound links or navigating the site through internal links that point to defunct URLs.

Step 3: Maintain On-Page Optimization

Maintaining on-page optimization might seem like an obvious step, but a site redesign can often involve moving, revising, and adding new content. All these moving parts can make it easy to forget the basics.

Use this as an opportunity to not only maintain, but to improve, on-page optimization. Start by making sure any keyword changes are incorporated into the appropriate pages. Then, review each title and description tag. Make sure they’re unique for each page, incorporate the target keyword(s) for that page, and accurately describe the content they’re associated with.

Once this has been accomplished, review the site’s URLs and make sure they’re optimized for each page. Finally, check for broken internal links and review all anchor text to make sure it is consistent with any keyword changes that were made in step 1.

Step 4: Create HTML and XML Sitemaps

Create HTML and XML sitemaps to help search engines discover any new or existing content that has moved to new URLs. HTML sitemaps are also useful to site visitors because they help them discover new and existing content that has been relocated.

After creating an XML sitemap, be sure to submit it to the major search engines to expedite the crawling of any new or moved content. This step, combined with page level 301 redirects, will ensure efficient crawling and indexing of your content.

Step 5: Monitor, Measure, Improve

Once the redesigned site goes live, carefully monitor your rankings and traffic data. You can determine whether or not your site redesign was successful and meets your goals by asking yourself questions like:

A site redesign should not be a one-and-done project. Just like any other marketing initiative, the results of your redesign should be monitored, measured, and improved over time, preferably with the help of a dedicated digital marketing agency that is ready to stick with your brand over the long haul. Our agency can help you execute a flawless site redesign without compromising SEO.

Is your website old and outdated? You might be driving traffic to your site, but if the user experience is lacking, you will face a significant challenge when trying to retain the interest of your target audience. At Leverage Digital, we utilize a comprehensive approach to SEO that deftly handles the technical side of SEO while facilitating organic growth by improving the user experience. Your brand is ready to grow. We can help.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

Your burgeoning SEO campaign is finally seeing the results you’ve been hoping for and you’re noticing a surge in traffic, increased engagement, and superior SERPs. Now, your goal is to maintain your forward progress and continue raising the bar for your brand.

Our creatives and web developers have teamed up to provide you with a best-in-class website, our content strategists are publishing SEO content that your target audience finds compelling, and our digital marketing director is providing you with real-time updates every step of the way.

What’s next?

Once you launch an SEO campaign, there’s really no telling when it will end. SEO is fluid and continuous. If you spent the better part of the last few years building your case for Google’s search algorithm, you don’t want to have your headway undone by apathy or an inability to continuously produce spellbinding content.

Meeting your SEO objectives is just the beginning. You already have resources invested in an ongoing content campaign; why not invest in repurposing your content to boost your brand’s strengths in other areas? Existing content can be utilized in creative ways to produce captivating visuals for your site and interactive resources for your target audience while simultaneously filling out your social media and email marketing campaigns with more substance.

As the title states: written content is worth more than its word count. Our agency understands how valuable every piece of content is to your SEO campaign. Our content strategists spend extra time researching the best resources and tailoring their writing to your target audience’s preferences and needs. When you produce top-tier content, you can adapt it to other mediums to spread your brand’s message. If you want to get the most out of your content, you should consider doubling down on your commitment to SEO by expanding your campaign to include content repurposing.

Give Your Old Content a New Purpose

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” – John F. Kennedy

When you read the quotation above, was your first thought: “This is outdated. Who cares what John F. Kennedy said in 1961?” Of course not! Sure, the quote might be over a half-century old, but President Kennedy’s content is still relevant.

How was JFK able to future-proof his content for more than 50 years post-mortem? As a president, the things he said were substantive and important, not to mention well-researched and backed by the academic community. At Leverage Digital, every piece of SEO content we produce is subjected to the same rigorous standards. We never publish without verifying our sources and we don’t make assumptions.

If you want your brand to succeed in the future, you will need content that can outlast your competitors and remain relevant for years to come. However, this is only possible if your ongoing content campaign is producing high-quality content from the beginning.

Are you dedicated to establishing your brand as a thought leader in your respective industry? Our content strategists work with our creatives to enhance your brand’s SEO strategy with SEO content that drives creativity across an array of platforms and applications.

Promoting Written Content with Curated Visuals on Social Media

The goal of your SEO campaign was to improve your brand’s SERP visibility thereby increasing traffic to your site, but your auxiliary marketing campaigns, like social media, will influence your site’s traffic, too. Promoting your SEO content through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest can help drive engagement with your target audience. This can help increase traffic to your website as users follow backlinks to interact with your content.

There’s only one caveat — these platforms largely rely on visuals to attract your target audience. How can you promote your written content without relying on boring stock images that fail to charm users? The trick is to create visuals that tie back to your article in an interesting way. In other words, promote the information from your SEO content that is the most valuable to your target audience.

We’ll use one of our own articles, “How To Create A Content Marketing Strategy From Your Existing SEO Content” to briefly illustrate how written SEO content can be repurposed into visual content to promote itself.

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You can utilize interesting quotations from your SEO content to create a compelling visual that connects directly to the information from your content. Alternatively, you can propose a question or call to action that links to your article or generates buzz about your topic.

Boost Your Presence in Other Campaigns

You can utilize visual content inspired by your written SEO content as a promotional vehicle for your content, but that’s only useful when you’re publishing new content. What about your older SEO content?

Have you ever noticed that the most successful social media accounts post compelling content regularly? You’re probably wondering how they manage to upload high-quality content so frequently. Here’s the secret: plan ahead and plan smart.

At the most basic level, recalling old content using hashtag campaigns like “Throwback Thursday” (#tbt) or “Flashback Friday” (#fbf) gives you a legitimate reason to reuse old content. Similarly, by focusing on certain themes during a designated time period (e.g., Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Easter) you can funnel existing SEO content into your ongoing content campaign to fill it out and provide more value for your existing and prospective customers.

Ideally, you will outfit your existing SEO content with new promotional materials to prime it for social media, an email marketing campaign, or a featured position on your website’s homepage or blog.

For example, you can beef up a weekly or monthly newsletter with existing, relevant SEO content. Similarly, if your brand has a tendency to go dark on social media because you lack content, consider utilizing existing SEO content to give your target audience a reason to return to your website.

Embrace Thought Leadership with Leverage Digital

At Leverage Digital, we know that your brand’s success depends on your SEO strategy and ability to optimize your digital imprint, but we also understand the value of intangibles like consistency, design, and most importantly, thought leadership.

Being a thought leader helps raise your brand to the next level. Once you have achieved success in this area, your brand will be providing the blueprint for your rivals which means every move you make will inspire others and direct users to your brand.

However, the only way to become a thought leader in your respective industry is to become the authority on all matters pertaining to your brand. In other words, you have to remain vigilant of industry-related news and continuously produce content that pushes the envelope.

Whether you focus on publishing new content, repurposing old content, or combining both strategies to pump up your overall output, to be considered a thought leader, you need the capacity to develop and publish enough content to outperform your competition. For most brands, this idealistic goal is impossible without partnering with a reputable digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital.

A successful SEO strategy is built around a handful of established principles — ongoing content, thoroughly researched keywords, etc. — but there’s always room for creativity and innovation in the world of digital marketing. One-and-done publishing ensures that your SEO content is giving you the organic growth you desire, but on a B2C level, you want to be certain that your target audience is engaged. Our award-winning digital marketing agency combines comprehensive statistics tracking and thoughtful, creative design to provide measurable results that look as good as they perform.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

Your favorite color says a lot about you. Colors are an effective tool for translating your thoughts, feelings, ideas, and interests into a visual format. Our relationship with color stretches back to the dawn of time (long before branding), when we started to develop stronger biological tools to recognize colors visually. This ability enhanced our ability to spot things like brightly colored foods and blood, which greatly increased our ancestors’ chances of survival.

And the rest is history. The ability to recognize colors helped our ancestors grow and prosper for millions of years. Eventually, our frontal cortex developed advanced cognitive functions and Neanderthals were replaced by the comparably more advanced Homo sapiens. Fast forward to the 15th century and artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo began to utilize colors to push the boundaries of art. Thus, an important component of our survival became irreversibly ingrained in our culture.

Although this summary is oversimplified, it does highlight our close kinship with color. Human beings don’t just process color, they communicate with it and experience it. As a result, the colors you chose to represent your brand are vital to spreading your message the way you intended. Iconic American brands like McDonald’s, Walmart, and Publix deftly utilize color to express their values, represent their services, and attract clients. What do your company’s colors say about your brand?

Red

The color red is dynamic, attention-grabbing, and exciting. As one of the three primary colors, people tend to have a strong connection with the color red. Scientifically, the color red enhances our appetite, which is why successful fast food chains like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Chick-fil-A, and Arby’s have stuck with red for the better part of the modern era.

The color red will help your brand get noticed because people’s relationship with this color is deeply rooted in society. For example, our daily interactions with stop lights strengthens our perception of the color red because we perceive red as meaning “stop.” This can be useful for retailers who want passersby to “stop” and take a look at their products or services. In fact, red has been scientifically proven to stimulate blood pressure and raise the heart rate to evoke feelings of passion, excitement, and even love.

Blue

When your brand wants to demonstrate intelligence, trustworthiness, and liberalism, there’s no better color than blue. Although once thought to be a color representing masculinity, the color blue has grown increasingly inclusive over the years. Brands in the technology and social networking sectors, like Facebook, Intel, Twitter, Skype, and Hewlett Packard, are especially keen on blue.

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the color blue? Your answer is likely one of two things: the sky or water. So it makes sense when you consider the fact that blue is a color that boosts our feelings of tranquility and reliability. The color blue also communicates safety and security. If you want to enhance your target audience’s trust in your brand, try incorporating more blue into your branding.

Green

You know what it means to “go green,” and many of these sentiments translate into how green is perceived in advertising. The color green has strong ties to the environment, peace, and health, but it is also irrevocably tied to money. Considering this alarming distinction, brands must carefully plan their application of this powerful color. Ironically, figuring out the balance between these contrary perceptions helps illustrate another feeling that green simulates — harmony, stability, and equilibrium.

Grocery stores like Whole Foods and Publix use green to enhance our perception of how fresh their meats and produce are. On the other hand, banks like Regions, TD Bank, and Citizens Bank utilize green to represent their skill and efficiency when handling money. When we work with businesses to revitalize their brand or perform an all-out rebranding, we are cognizant of how a color like green, which can be utilized in a number of ways, can affect the way your brand’s message is conveyed to your target audience.

Purple

Throughout history, the rarity of the purple hue has made it a hallmark of royalty, and the wisdom and respect that is associated with kings and queen. Today, purple is as common as any other color, but it still leaves a strong impression on the viewer, whether intended to glamorize a brand or promote creative thinking. Purple is frequently utilized in the branding of beauty and anti-aging products, too.

We often find that brands that choose the color purple plan to utilize creative advertising strategies that incorporate youthfulness and humor into their branding. Yahoo, T-Mobile, and Taco Bell are three examples of companies that utilize purple (T-Mobile uses an aggressive shade of fuschia) in their branding and have executed advertising campaigns that focused primarily on grabbing their target audience’s attention with quirkiness.

Orange

Orange is a welcoming, friendly color that promotes a cheerful disposition and inspires confidence, but it is also synonymous with caution. This color can be utilized to draw in apprehensive shoppers and indicate sales and clearances. Like the color green, orange has been utilized to help represent brands across an array of industries.

Harley Davidson and Nickelodeon both prescribe to the color orange, but they accomplish vastly different goals by doing so. Nickelodeon wants to appeal to children, so orange, often considered one of the friendliest colors, is a perfect selection. Conversely, Harley Davidson wants to inspire confidence and ensure their target audience that there is no better product on the market.

Yellow

The color yellow shares a close kinship with the color orange. Similar to orange, yellow is associated with warmth, optimism, and conversely, caution. Yellow also has the unfortunate distinction of being the color that is most likely to trigger crying in babies, so if you plan on investing in a Gymboree franchise, stay clear of this color (and go with orange).

However, optimism seems to be the central thread linking brands that utilize the color yellow. Consider these brands that all opted for yellow when choosing their color palette from the unlimited spectrum of colors: Subway, Best Buy, Nikon, Sprint, and National Geographic. What do these brands have in common? Very little. Nevertheless, they are all brands that provide important services that help you unlock your creativity or become the best version of yourself.

Gray

Gray is a calming color that is often used to symbolize feelings of functionalism, old age, and solidarity. You will know if your brand benefits from this color almost immediately. Currently, there are very few brands using gray as the primary color in their branding, and the brands that are using it, like Apple, Nissan, Lexus, and Swarovski, are really opting for a silver tone which can be perceived very differently from gray.

Be careful when you use gray. Too much gray tends to make people feel apathetic and depressed. Our innate association of the color gray with fog means your brand can easily get lost in a haze of gray if you don’t consult a talented digital marketing agency like Leverage Digital.

Black and White

While the color black is incorporated into nearly every brand in some form or another (balancing light and dark is an integral component of nearly every design plan), we rarely characterize a brand as using black to represent their goals and initiatives. Black is commonly associated with authority, power, and stability. It’s a no-nonsense color that can effectively communicate your ardent dedication to your work and depthless wisdom, just don’t use too much of it. Applying too much black to your brand’s color palette can transform your brand from “Gap” to “Hot Topic” in a matter of seconds.

On the contrary, if you want your brand to feel sterile, pure, and safe, you should consider using white. Sure, the color white can be bland and boring, but it can also be classy, tasteful, and neutral. Sometimes, utilizing extra white space can help you say more by giving the viewer space to populate your brand with their own ideas. Furthermore, the color white can be an effective color in your rebranding efforts, as we perceive the color white as being unaltered and true.

Avoid Favoritism When Selecting Colors

Your favorite color means a lot to you, but your experience with a color is unique to your own perceptions and feelings. Choosing colors based solely on favoritism can lead to a poorly executed creative design that confuses your target audience. To illustrate this, imagine if the CEO of Fifth Third Bank decided to use their “favorite” colors — gold, purple, and black— when developing their brand. Here’s the result:

Would you trust this bank with keeping your money secure? If Fifth Third Bank was an ironically named night club, you might be interested in seeing what’s beyond their purple and gold doors. Unfortunately, color favoritism can lead to ineffective branding, an unclear message, and a lack of customers. Fifth Third Bank’s normal color palette, which utilizes blue, green, and white, is a significant upgrade from this ill-conceived concept:

In this rendition, each color has a purpose. The use of blue inspires confidence in the customer, who will perceive this brand as a seasoned institution for banking, and the green convinces the customer that the bank will handle their money wisely. Here are a few more examples of how pairing your brand with the wrong color palette can instantly throw off your target audience:

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Conclusion

Your company’s colors help tell the story of your brand. When people are first introduced to your branding, they will immediately form a mental connection between your company’s name and color palette. This connection can last a lifetime. Are you making a first impression that instantly converts curiosity into a customer? At Leverage Digital, our creatives are dedicated to strengthening your brand’s identity and increasing your visibility amongst the competition. Whether you’re a new business just entering the fray, or an established business looking for a rebrand, we’re here to help you meet all of your branding objectives.

Do you feel like your brand is being lost among your competitors? Failing to stand out could be the reason your brand is struggling to move forward and expand. Perhaps it’s time to rework your image. At Leverage Digital, our gifted team of creatives and marketers work hand-in-hand to ensure your brand is firing on all cylinders.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

Have you ever had an idea that was too big to squeeze into a 500-word article? A successful SEO strategy lives and dies by your ability to publish ongoing, meaningful content that provides value to your target audience and incentive to keep clicking again and again; however, when a trending topic is too complex or contains a large volume of relevant information, producing content that effectively simplifies information for the reader can be a serious challenge.

An infographic is a visual representation of text-based content like news stories, datasets, statistics, etc. Infographics are valuable for a variety of reasons, but their trademark feature is their ability to take complicated, sleep-inducing topics and present them as bright, flashy, exciting visuals for readers. Infographics are an ideal complement to your SEO strategy and offer you a chance to boldly spread awareness of your brand more effectively to your target audience as well as untapped markets.

Revitalize Your SEO Strategy

Before we really delve into why infographics can boost the success of your SEO strategy, let’s rewind for a second and refresh ourselves on the three main components of a typical SEO strategy:

• On-Site Optimization: the content, structure, and layout of your site should keep users engaged beyond their first click. Streamlined navigation, internal links, and unique content can keep users on your site longer.
• High Quality Content: your content should be valuable, timely, properly formatted, and published regularly to improve your SERP visibility. We perform comprehensive keyword audits to ensure that content is easily searchable.
• Off-Site Authority: if your brand is only represented on your website, your SEO objectives will flounder. Build off-site authority to generate inbound links from high-authority sources. This goal can be met in a variety of ways, but the key is to limit links that appear spammy or unrelated. Representing your brand on social media is one surefire way to build off-site authority.

If you can accomplish your SEO goals by focusing on these three SEO pillars alone, why should you incorporate infographics into your ongoing content? The answer is quite simple; infographics are infinitely shareable and more engaging for your target audience. Plus, they empower your brand by establishing you as a thought leader in your respective industry.

Infinitely Shareable

The information depicted in an infographic can be time-sensitive, but unlike written content, infographics have a tendency to outlive their information. This is because visual content (which is commonly evergreen) isn’t explicitly tied to a publishing date like written content. Skillfully designed infographics appear timeless, and as a result, they are shared more frequently and for longer periods of time than your traditional shared content. Visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content. That means the value of a single infographic can be worth 40 times the value of a single piece of written content.

Boost Engagement

The reason users prefer to engage with visual content is determined by the hardwiring in our brains — we process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. That means processing an infographic is 60,000 times easier than written content based on the same topic. Visual content produces more shares on social media and equalizes the playing field for people who want information but lack the time or patience to read an entire article. Although it’s imperative to maintain a strong ongoing content campaign utilizing written content to improve your SEO ranking, your customers are more likely to engage with visual content like infographics when browsing social media or visiting your site.

Empower Your Brand

At Leverage Digital, our main objective is to develop your brand’s image and improve your online visibility to help you connect with your target audience, but we’re also interested in helping your brand reach its potential. When you publish high-quality content, you empower your brand and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Branded content, especially infographics, have a tendency to trickle down the business hierarchy to be used as a resource in small businesses and startups. When this happens, you have effectively established your brand as a thought leader which bolsters your authority and the value of your services significantly.

If your brand is benefitting from a successful SEO strategy, it’s time to allocate resources into expanding your brand’s visibility with new forms of content. 45 percent of B2C marketers believe visual content, like infographics, is their most important type of content. Infographics are not only evergreen and infinitely shareable, they are more likely to provide real value to your target audience and help establish your brand as a pioneering force in your industry.

At Leverage Digital, our in-house team of content strategists can help you improve your brand’s online visibility through a comprehensive, ongoing content campaign. We create content that answers your target audience’s biggest questions to foster trust and dependence through well-researched, timely articles and compelling visual content. After all, the success of every SEO strategy depends on quality content and a dedicated team like Leverage Digital.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

The principles of search engine optimization (SEO) are the driving force behind a lot of what we do here at Leverage Digital. Online visibility is paramount for a successful digital marketing campaign, because without a strong foundation for your digital imprint, it’s increasingly difficult to plan effective cross-platform campaigns that truly unlock your brand’s potential.

Without a dedicated team of content strategists to produce consistent, compelling copy, it can be virtually impossible to truly nudge your Google search ranking in the right direction. A company with poor search rankings is similar to a person stranded in the middle of the ocean. You know that person is out there, splashing around helplessly waiting to be discovered, but no matter how much time you spend searching, you simply can’t find them.

Most businesses are familiar with the concept of SEO and possess a vague understanding of how this valuable metric is determined, but they don’t realize that creating effective content to drive web traffic is a multi-step process that requires a skilled team of experienced content strategists.

What is a Content Strategist?

Imagine a writer who not only possesses the verbal skills to clearly state the things you want to say, but also possesses a fundamental understanding of your target audience, what they want to read, and how to best deliver it to their digital display. Doesn’t sound like your typical writer, does it? That’s because a content strategist is more than writer, they are a vital cog in your SEO campaign.

While brainstorming topics for your SEO campaign, our content strategists discuss your brand and its objectives so every piece of content is relevant to your target audience while enriching the value of your website. When news related to your company or industry is published, our content team adjusts your content accordingly to ensure that users searching about these timely topics are directed to your website first. If you need a specific topic covered, our content strategists will research information about your topic and write an original thought piece supported by legitimate sources.

Familiarity with Your Brand is Vital

Hiring writers to create content for your SEO campaign might help you produce articles and blog posts for your site, but if this content has no value to your target audience, it won’t matter. An effective content team is composed of content strategists who possess a fundamental understanding of SEO, strong writing skills, and the foresight to plan content that will cover topics and target keywords actively searched by your customers.

Moreover, a content team must be intimately familiar with the brand they are producing content for. This is one of the major benefits of using a trusted team of content strategists. Sometimes, when you outsource SEO copywriting to a third party, they turn around and flip your content again to a contracted remote employee or even worse, a random contractor from services like Fiverr or Upwork.

At Leverage Digital, our content strategists build familiarity with your brand over time, ensuring that your content grows increasingly relevant to your target audience with each passing day. How can a writer who is only just being introduced to your business compete with a seasoned writer who has spent months or even years getting to know and writing for your brand?

Writers are also researchers, but when your clients are in verticals like real estate and legal services, it can be difficult to find writers who can reliably take technical ideas, understand them, and then simplify them for readers. Our team meets every day to write for our clients. By sharing the burden of dense research and complementing each other’s skill set, our team ensures that your content aligns perfectly with your brand.

Multi-Step Editing Ensures Every Article is Worth Paying For

A thorough editing process that puts more than one set of eyes on a piece of content will help you avoid costly typos and errors. There’s a reason newspapers and magazines have editors to revise and polish articles before publication. Readers notice gaffes, and they love to point out errors for the rest of your audience. At Leverage Digital, we utilize a comprehensive editing process to ensure that every piece of content is checked for grammar, syntax, accuracy, format, and style multiple times before it is presented to your audience.

Marketing Your Brand Online Relies on A+ Content

Quality content is hard to find. In a world of clickbait articles and hastily thrown together SlideShare presentations, readers are actively searching for resources that answer their questions and teach them about relevant topics. If you truly care about your customers, you want to ensure that your content is rigorously researched, skillfully written, and thoroughly edited every time. This level of consistency is almost impossible to achieve without a dedicated team of content strategists.

Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and author of Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Ridiculously Good Content, understands that content needs to “be specific enough to be believable and universal enough to be relevant.”

Producing content that accomplishes these two goals requires a dedicated team who lives and breathes content; a team who knows your brand and possesses a personal understanding of your objectives. We don’t see how content production can be skillfully executed any other way.

Are you unable to meet your SEO goals because your website lacks content, or your content is inconsistent and poorly written? At Leverage Digital, our in-house team of professional content strategists can improve your search visibility, and position your company as an industry thought leader, resulting in more traffic, engagement, and conversions through your website.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

If your brand has a successful SEO strategy, you are most likely publishing engaging content that your customers find valuable. Have you ever stopped to consider that the same great content you’re using for SEO could be repurposed for social media, email marketing, white papers, and even e-books? Well, it can, and the content marketing experts at Leverage Digital can help you, but before we proceed an important point should be made: SEO is content marketing.

SEO is Content Marketing

In addition to increasing search engine visibility, SEO content should be relevant and valuable to your target audience, and provide solutions to their problems. The cumulative effect of this results in more traffic being driven to your website, better user engagement, increased conversions, and ultimately more customers. These are all goals of content marketing as well, but SEO and content marketing are often discussed in silos, when in actuality they work hand-in-hand to promote your brand.

To emphasize this disconnect, according to Sunil Rajaraman, the founder and chief executive (CEO) of Scripted.com, marketers are willing to pay $1.95 more per word for “thought leadership” content than they are willing to pay for “SEO” content.

One can assume this lack of perceived value for SEO content is a result of all the clickbait that has perpetuated as SEO over the years, but our approach to SEO is vastly different. At Leverage Digital, our SEO content provides your target audience with valuable, well-researched resources that help customers build familiarity with your brand and gain a firm grasp of your services. Google recognizes good content, and it rewards your site for hosting it with superior visibility that trumps your competitors.

When you consider the fact that SEO is content marketing with the added benefit of increased search visibility, it’s becomes clear that SEO content is an effective and valuable strategy for driving more traffic to your website, but that’s just the beginning. Our agency only writes SEO content with substance, content that you can derive value from again and again. Let’s look at the various ways your SEO content can be repurposed.

Share on Social Media

Since your brand is already publishing content that is relevant and valuable to your customers, share this same content across all social media platforms where your customers are active. Because your SEO content should be relevant and valuable to your target audience, posting to social media should naturally result in organic shares.

Your brand may already share curated content on social media, but that’s only helping other brands achieve their content marketing goals. We recommend that you scale down on sharing content that promotes other brands, and in its place, share content designed to drive visitors back to your brand’s website.

With this strategy, repurposed content not only increases your website’s search visibility, but also increases its social visibility, resulting in a twofold increase in traffic to your brand’s website.

Promote Through Email Marketing

In addition to social media, promote your SEO content through email marketing, but never include the whole article. Use a teaser with a compelling headline to entice your readers to click through to your brand’s website where they can finish reading the article. From here, they will be presented with targeted content aimed at driving further engagement with your website.

Many brands send out monthly or quarterly emails bogged down with too much information about recent accomplishments, such as awards won, projects completed, new hires made, and so on. The problem with this strategy is that it provides a lot of information that’s useless to customers. It’s good to let customers know how well your brand is doing every once in a while, but the bulk of your email marketing should provide customers with information they can actually learn from and use.

Keep in mind that content marketing is not only intended to drive new customers, but is also intended to encourage repeat customers as well — an area where email marketing is very effective.

Convert Content into White Papers and E-Books

Finally, downloadable white papers and e-books are great for generating leads from your brand’s website. So, take the last six months or more of SEO content from your ongoing campaign and repurpose it into downloadable white papers or compile it into an e-book.
Providing website visitors with free white papers and e-books not only allows you to generate leads, but also assists in positioning your brand as a thought leader in its respective industry.

We recommend promoting your white papers and e-books through social media and email marketing, too. Give readers just enough information to whet their appetites, followed by a call to action to visit your brand’s website where they can download the complete whitepaper or e-book. If you’re interested in developing white papers or e-books from your SEO content, our agency can help.

Conclusion

While content written for SEO purposes is intended to increase a website’s search visibility, you can promote that same great content through other channels, such as social media and email, as well as repurpose it into downloadable whitepapers and e-books. The end result is less work, increased engagement, and a better overall content marketing strategy.

Are you failing to produce enough content to meet your SEO goals? At Leverage Digital, we understand that a successful SEO campaign depends on content, so we focus on creating valuable content that you can use in a variety of ways to drive web traffic, engagement, and conversions through your website.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.

In an increasingly visual world, it’s imperative that we never underestimate the power of typography. Designers have a virtually inexhaustible reservoir of fonts to choose from, so for inexperienced designers, choosing the “perfect” font to communicate a brand’s message can be a stress-inducing process.

Books on typography, like Simon Garfield’s Just My Type and Steven Heller’s Scripts, tell us that typography goes far beyond the litany of two-dimensional fonts occupying space in your Adobe Typekit. Typography includes photography and visuals that convey a message through language. After all, typography; whether you take a traditional or modern approach, is all about translating your message to your audience as clearly as possible.

Unfortunately, not all fonts are created equal. Certain fonts have been future-proofed through widespread adoption over time, like Times New Roman and Arial. These fonts are Typekit-essentials suitable for a wide breadth of tasks, but when selecting fonts for visual content, it’s important to consider adding these five timeless fonts to your repertoire.

Helvetica

Italicized Helvetica can be an alluring typeface, but as seen here, its standard form is a neat font for conveying your brand’s message in a variety of ways.

 

You can’t talk about typography without bringing up Helvetica. With a diverse array of applications for writing and advertising, Helvetica is arguably the most popular font in the world. Since its inception in 1957 by Swiss typeface designers Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman, Helvetica has a reached cult status among advertisers and marketers. Helvetica is notable for being inspired by the neo-grotesque typefaces designed in the 19th century by German and Swiss designers.

Today, Helvetica is an integral part of every designer’s Typekit. It has virtually unlimited uses and always manages to leave an immutable impression on the viewer. Helvetica’s popularity is universally recognized in the design community. In fact, there’s even a documentary film called Helvetica that chronicles the rise and sustained popularity of the iconic typeface.

Lato

In this faux indie film poster, Lato’s simplicity and readability was utilized for the slogan and the copyright information.

 

The typographic classification, Sans Serif, is reserved for casual, easy-going, and personable fonts. In Summer 2010, Warsaw-based designer Łukasz Dziedzic introduced the world to the Lato typeface family. The standard Lato font can be best described as a remix of Arial focused on leaning out each letter into a more elegant proportion. Lato fonts are open source and can be used without any limitations. It is a very neutral font that is well-suited to a variety of tasks including text overlays for visual content, infographics, brochures, and even business cards.

Roman Antique

In this shareable quote, Roman Antique makes for a compelling typeface whether accompanying an image or not.

 

Timeless fonts receive the namesake for one of two reasons:

Reason 1: they have been used regularly throughout time.

Many fonts have proven their efficacy in a variety of roles whether strictly as an appropriately stylized alphabet or to help immortalize a brand such as Coca Cola’s iconic Spencerian Script used by Frank Mason Robinson starting in 1885.

Reason 2: they transport the viewer to a past time.

Victorian and Gothic fonts are two classic examples of fonts that leave an invariably historic impression on the viewer. Typewriter fonts are equally effective when you want to leave an indelible imprint on the viewer. Roman Antique is one such font.

Roman Antique is a murky, typewriter-style font that maintains legibility regardless of scale. The further you increase the font size, the more intricate the detailing in this font becomes. Roman Antique is versatile among typewriter-style fonts, but it’s also effective when used in conjunction with visual content. This font possesses a unique sense of gravity that is readily apparent to the viewer. Whether you want to add depth to a quote aimed at inspiring your audience or need to dress up a piece of content with a classic aesthetic, Roman Antique is a flexible, typewriter-style font that can be used to satisfy an array of typographic objectives.

Bellfort

Bellfort was the perfect, attention-grabbing font for this employee introduction featuring a simple quote.

 

When you need a cohesive font family that spans an array of distinct styles and ideologies, Bellfort is your best option. The dense Bellfort family of fonts features 7 sub-families including regular, rough, press, shadow, press shadow, shadow only, and script which are also divided into four different weights.

The standard Bellfort font is characterized by thick lines and bold verticality. It is a caps-friendly font that looks attractive as informational text, a title, a quote, or something else entirely. When you need to get your message across clearly to a wide audience, Bellfort is a universally lauded font that can help you bring your brand closer to its target audience.

Raleway

Raleway is another versatile Sans Serif font. We used Raleway Heavy to create a bold, eye-catching message with a white drop shadow in the first image. In the second image, we reverted back to a single color version of Raleway Heavy and added a CTA using Raleway Standard.

 

Raleway is a striking font with a strong sense of symmetry and a few unexpected design nuances that help elevate your typography to the next level. Raleway is defined by its balance and boldness. This font is a treat for the eyes and has as many applications as you can imagine. Raleway helps enhance visual content on platforms like Instagram and Facebook by providing a dynamic typeface that is suitable for nearly any tone, motif, or message. Adding a drop shadow to Raleway fonts greatly increases their visual aesthetic and helps create a significant sense of depth to separate your image and typography.

Regardless of the platform, when you publish visual content, you want to be certain that you are conveying your brand’s message as clearly as possible. An in-depth understanding of typography can help you boost engagement with your target audience and convert prospective customers into dedicated followers. By building familiarity with a handful of timeless fonts, you can equip yourself for any future design projects on the horizon.

Are you concerned that your brand is failing to reach its target audience? Does your visual content fall by the wayside without any real engagement? At Leverage Digital, our in-house team of content strategists can help you reach your objectives by evaluating your brand’s goals, developing a personalized content strategy, and executing a 360-degree content campaign. Whether it’s compelling written copy, aesthetic visual content, witty social media posts, or informative videos, our team is equipped with all of the tools you need to boost your brand’s online visibility.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.