Archive for tag: Digital

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dec 18

Augmented Reality: Where Physical Meets Digital

Whether your side of the fence includes Pokémons on the loose or it’s Pokémon-free, there’s still a game-changing point to consider. The phenomenon has proven something major: mass public acceptance of Augmented Reality. Marketers should invest some time and resources to get to know AR, and consider it’s potential business implications.

The quickest explanation of AR is that it’s a technology that allows marketers to superimpose digital content and interactivity over a real-world, real-time view seen through the camera lens on a mobile device. While the technology has been around for a while, lack of maturity and cost constraints have restricted use cases. By bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds, AR enables the creation of never before realized, location-driven, personalized consumer experiences at scale.

Consider your company’s on-the-go audience. What is their mobile need? What are they looking for you to offer or answer? This is a great place to start internal conversations with your marketing and digital teams, as well as your agency. In the post-digital era, your brand name doesn’t mean as much if the associated experience is poor.

Insights can be found in considering the way your brand goes to market. Today, it’s not about advertising your brand message  – it’s about building a world that represents your brand’s core values, a world that people want to explore and share. Inviting consumers to be part of something inventive and captivating can now solidify a long-term relationship.

We want to help you get started. In our most recent point of view paper, we’ve outlined 6 points for marketers to wrestle with in consideration of AR as part of a near term marketing mix.

With the right brand vision, audience insights, data and technology infrastructure, companies can leverage AR to deliver the kind of seamless experiences that today’s savvy (and demanding) consumers expect.

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dec 18

4 Tips For Choosing The Perfect Branding Agency

Branding is both a big topic and an inexact science. It’s no wonder that there are so many choices when it comes to choosing a creative team to help you share your story with the world.

From part-time web and graphic designers to experienced branding gurus, there is a lot to consider when selecting a branding agency.

So, how do you sift through your options and find the group that’s right for you? Here are a few tips to help you get started…

1. Start With The Visuals

Even though your brand strategy should be bigger than a simple logo (more on this in a second), it’s undeniable that the visuals of your brand need to be sharp and distinctive.

Or to put things another way, it’s not enough to choose a branding team that has good artistic instincts, but you shouldn’t ever turn your company’s identity over to a designer who can’t give you the look you’re after.

2. Look For The Perfect Fit

When a brand develops perfectly, it’s usually because there is an intersection between three important elements: the personalities of the business and its directors, the mindset of the creative team, and an understanding of the target market.

When any of these is in conflict – for instance, when stakeholders can’t get along or there is a lack of knowledge about the desired customer base – brands tend to go off track quickly.

3. Develop And Use A Brand Strategy

Even though the basics of your brand might begin with logos and color schemes, your overall approach should include a distinctive voice, consistent messaging themes, and even elements like the types and sizes of images that are used on your website and in printed collateral materials. That’s not going to happen by accident.

Work with your creative team to develop a written brand strategy that outlines who you want to be, what you want to say, how you want customers to feel. Then, refer back to it is you move forward with your marketing.

4. Let Your Brand Grow And Evolve

No matter how well you plan out your branding efforts, you are almost certainly going to come to a point where you’ll need to change the way you express yourself. Perhaps your business will get bigger, take on new products and services, or even change ownership.

When these kinds of shifts take place, you shouldn’t start over from a branding standpoint, but rather take advantage of the opportunity to tweak your identity and present a fresher face to the market.

The best brands are reinforced again and again over time, to the point that customers come to associate them with quality, value, or even happiness. But, establishing that kind of identity takes experience and a penchant for creative thinking.

So, follow these four tips and make sure you find the perfect branding agency for your business to work with.

Contact Avex Designs today to learn more about our branding and digital creative services.

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dec 18

Holiday 2016 looking good for Digital Marketers

The holiday shopping season is in full force, and if the headlines are any indication, things look super optimistic for digital marketers.  “Cyber Monday Sales Jump,” says a Fortune article posted on November 29th. “Black Friday Limps Toward Oblivion as Online Shopping Takes Over,” says a Bloomberg article posted the day after Turkey Day.  It’s no surprise that shoppers are getting savvier. After all, who wants to wait in long lines and fight for deals at brick-and-mortar locations? The chance to reduce the need for such inconveniences seems to be part of what’s driving the continued surge in online orders on Thanksgiving (the day before Black Friday). Some telling stats cited in the above articles include:

Now that Cyber Monday is behind us and the dust has settled, we wanted to look at some of our own data. Specifically, we wanted to review the year-over-year (YOY) changes in data for our larger retail clients over the period covering Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. Here’s what we found.

Total Site YOY stats comparing 2016 to 2015:

While these numbers are very positive, they don’t paint as precise a picture for marketers as we’d like to see, certainly not from a Performance Marketing perspective. To increase clarity and better understand the actionable implications, we need to drill down into the details. While we obviously can’t call out specific clients, we can share that the following stats are based on analysis of more than 900 million impressions and 23 million visits over the largest shopping weekend of the year.*

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