Category: Digital Marketing Resources

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.

Leverage Digital is proud to have held the esteemed Google Partner designation for over two years. Being a Google Partner is an achievement that only the most elite agencies reach, as the requirements are rigorous and multifaceted.

To be awarded this designation, agencies must pass Google-administered certification exams every 12 months, use industry best practices to manage their campaigns, have AdWords Certified individuals on staff, and manage over $10,000 in ad spend over a 90 day period. The agency must also demonstrate that their clients are happy, their business is healthy, and that they adhere to Google’s high standards.

“It is an honor to receive the Google Partner designation, and further differentiates Leverage Digital as a top tier digital agency in the marketplace. More importantly, this designation provides our clients with peace of mind knowing that they work with an agency which has been endorsed by Google,” said Jay Taylor, Managing Director at Leverage Digital, upon attaining the qualification in February of 2016.

Google uses their coveted certification to ensure that businesses work with vetted agencies that follow best practices in search, display, video, and mobile advertising. Essentially, they do the heavy lifting so you can spot a quality agency at first glance.

To learn more about what it means to be a Google Partner, you can check out what Google itself has to say. To learn more about working with Leverage Digital, you can browse our recent projects or get in touch.

With the holidays on the horizon and so many people taking their final vacation days, it’s easy to coast until the ball drops and the fireworks go up. However, you would be missing a key opportunity to get ahead of your competition and, perhaps, stay ahead of them. Now is the perfect time to start preparing your marketing strategy for 2017. Doing this will allow you to start engaging customers the minute you open for business on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2017.

We’ve provided a few steps for building your marketing strategy along with several tactics that will lead to success in 2017.

Steps for Building a Marketing Strategy for 2017

Review Everything

The best way to determine where to go is to know where you’ve been. Take some time to review all aspects of your 2016 marketing efforts. Did you run an SEO campaign? Paid search? Email marketing? How effective were they in bringing in leads? Did those leads convert to customers? Examine your customer profile. Does it need to be adjusted in any way? Are there untapped markets that you can pursue? What about strategic partnerships? This should be balanced against the budget that you used for your marketing efforts. Are you spending your money smartly? Were there setbacks in 2016? How can they be avoided in the future? This may seem like an overwhelming amount of questions, but they must be answered earnestly to make the most of the opportunity to build an effective 2017 marketing strategy.

SET GOALS

Once you’ve answered the major questions and have a clear picture of your 2016 marketing efforts, it’s time to set your goals for 2017. It may be cliche, but it is critical that your goals are “SMART,” meaning they are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. The first two are the most important. Whatever you want to do in 2017, you need to be specific about it. Abstract goals lead to abstract victories, but what’s not abstract is payroll. If your goals are specific, you’ll be able to measure them and see progress.

DETERMINE THE KEY MESSAGES

What messages do you want to convey to consumers? Much of that will have to do with what you have to offer and, most importantly, what they want from you. With a revised customer profile (including how they make buying decisions) and your goals in mind, you can devise your key messages. These messages will be a part of all your 2017 marketing efforts and should be continuously monitored for effectiveness.

Tactics to Consider in 2017

Now that you have clear goals and messages in place, it’s time to examine a few tactics for engaging consumers.

WEBSITE REDESIGN

Among the items that you should focus on when examining your 2016 efforts is your website. Along with general questions about its look and feel, you need to know if it’s mobile-friendly. We live in a mobile-first world with 80 percent of all Internet users owning a smartphone. You do not want to lose customers because of an ineffective mobile experience with your website. Also customers expect a fast experience. Google describes these experiences as micro-moments, moments when consumers conduct a quick search to answer a question, solve a problem, or make a purchase.

SEO STRATEGY

You don’t want to have the best looking website that no one can find. According to Search Engine Watch, 93 percent of online experiences begin with search. Employing this tactic effectively is vital to your business success. In 2017, it’s important to consider tactics to help search engines more easily read your web page, content strategy, connections between SEO and SEM, and landing pages.

PAID SEARCH

With so many people searching online for information and items, paid search is a worthwhile investment of marketing dollars. To be effective in this arena, it’s critical to understand where your customers spend their time. Once again, reviewing customer profiles are a big part of your efforts.

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

In recent years, social media has been passed off as mere window dressing or the stuff that you give to interns. However, you get out of it what you put in. One of the keys to social media success is establishing the proper tone for your messaging. It’s also important to streamline the research, posting, and interaction processes. This way, your social media posts are consistent, time is saved, and customers are engaged.

We can’t express the importance of creating your 2017 marketing strategy enough. If you need guidance with this process, the digital marketing specialists at Leverage Digital can help. We have the tools and expertise to help you kick start your 2017 marketing campaign.

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The beauty and the curse of digital marketing lies in the amount of data you have to analyze to figure out what’s working and what isn’t for your business. No other medium is held to a higher standard than the Internet. With all of the traffic numbers and conversion numbers, how do you know where to start? Split testing isn’t a new concept but because of digital analytics, it’s a great way to test what your audience responds best to.

WHAT IS SPLIT TESTING?

Split or A/B testing is a way to test any one variable within your marketing messages. The important thing to remember with A/B testing is that you can only change one variable at a time. Let’s use email as an example. If you want to see what factors lead to a higher open rate, you need to keep the same creative and email copy; then split your email list in half randomly (randomly is important!) and send the same email to these groups with different subject lines. Then you can analyze open rates and see which subject line performed better. You can perform this task with many different types of digital media (Google AdWords, retargeting, email, PPC, and the list goes on and on) to analyze what works best. Also try changing out photos and copy, as well.

BENEFITS OF SPLIT TESTING

Put simply, split testing makes you a smarter marketer. It helps you understand what your customers respond to in messaging and ultimately lowers your cost per acquisition. Lowering your cost to acquire a new customer will increase your revenue. It helps you create better content, period. The ability to split test copy, images, creative, etc. digitally also affords  you the opportunity to transfer those messages that worked into other various forms of media. Traditional media (TV, Radio, Billboard) are still effective at reaching your audience, imagine how much better it could work for you if you had spent some time split testing you message to see what gets a response.

 

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Give People a Reason To Click

Remember, most people are not visiting social media sites to shop, they’re doing it to engage with their friends and family. There’s a lot of clutter on social media which makes it very difficult to break through the noise. You must provide something of value to get people to click on your content. Content for the sake of content is useless, you must be putting out your BEST stuff and being helpful in order to drive more traffic.

Stop Trying to “Sell” On Facebook

As I mentioned before, people aren’t going to social media (specifically Facebook) to shop so stop trying to sell them while they’re trying to engage with their friends and family members! This is a great way for you to get in the heads of your potential customers before they know they need you. Use Facebook as a way to build awareness of your company not as the final tool in your sales funnel. It’s the best way for you to get in the heads of your potential customers before they know they need you.

Use Hashtags To Expand Your Reach

One of the greatest powers in social media is the breadth it provides for your content to be seen. Hashtags expand the reach of your posts beyond your immediate followers and help you reach new audiences. If you’re creating great content but no one is engaging with it, try using some different hashtags to gain some traction. Look at what’s trending and latch onto it. Not only is this a good way to get new followers, it also provides a wider potential reach for your content.

Create Content Your Audience Wants To Share

I can’t stress enough how important it is to create QUALITY content. By creating really awesome content, your audience will want to share it with their followers. Sharing creates a wider reach that inevitably drives new visitors to your website.

 

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As technology continues to evolve and encompass much of what we do, it’s important to think about how augmented reality can be used to drive awareness and increase revenue for your business.

First, let’s start with defining augmented reality:

aug·men·ted re·al·i·ty

noun

1. a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.

Pretty clear? The most recent successful execution of this theory is Pokemon GO! According to Forbes, “Pokemon GO users spent 75 minutes per day playing.” Augmented reality has been around for a long time, but mainly just as a gimmick. It isn’t until Pokemon Go that there has been such a noticeable use and popularity of augmented reality and in turn, a good way to drive awareness to your business.

HOW BUSINESSES ARE BENEFITTING

Do you know where the closest Pokestop is to your business? If not, then you probably should because you could be missing out on opportunities to increase your revenue. With the recent explosion of Pokemon GO, businesses have quickly adapted to the trend and are taking advantage of having a Pokestop near their business. By offering specials to Pokemon GO players, you draw in a new crowd. Bonus points if you devise a plan to capture their email address so you can market to them later!

Being aware of current trends is extremely important for getting your business noticed and for driving traffic.

 

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