October 19, 2022
The fierce market competition poses a threat to the brands we build today. The market is full of choices, which often confuses the consumer and denies businesses a fair opportunity to connect with and capture the attention of their intended audience. A logo or visual style is only one aspect of branding. Your audience’s impression of you is what matters. While expanding your business, it is imperative to be conscious of your brand and its effect on your ability to sell. But more crucially, it makes you recognizable to the people and offers you the chance to gradually forge a relationship with them that results in genuine brand loyalty. That is why hiring a professional agency for your success makes sense. Guild Creative is a reputed branding agency in Fort Collins. Here’s why you should hire a professional company for branding.
Boosts business’s success
Launching a new brand and rebranding an existing one or giving it a new visual identity can be challenging. Consumer engagement with brands has changed, which makes it difficult for businesses to stay ahead of the competition and reach their target audience. Your logo, website, social media profiles, ads, and any other means customers can interact with you are all part of your brand. Constantly developing new strategies to maintain competition and the company’s branding across all channels is no easy task for a firm. A professional agency understands your objectives and creates strategies to promote your business’s success.
Lasting credibility
A branding agency creates a professional appearance, which is crucial for long-term reputation and loyalty. Businesses that look legitimate always build a client base of recurring consumers who voluntarily become the best brand ambassadors. You can find exceptional services for branding in Fort Collins.
Fresh perspective
It can be challenging to brand or rebrand some organizations, especially established ones, as they tend to get locked in specific habits. Although you may be familiar with your brand, a professional branding firm may be more familiar with your target audience. An effective branding strategy is adaptable to the needs of consumers. To make your brand stand out in a competitive market, a branding agency assists you in changing your perspective and pointing you in fresh directions. An agency plays a crucial role in encouraging a unique and creative branding approach. Guild Creative, a leading advertising agency in Fort Collins, offers excellent solutions to promote your business.
Impressive ROI
Any business must devote enough time and resources to brand its goods and services. Hiring a branding agency offers a wider skill and better opportunities to expand the company and increase income.
Guild Creative is a reputed digital advertising agency in Boulder. They offer remarkable branding services, among others. To know more, call 262-573-3714 or write to steve@guildcreative.com.
September 21, 2022
There is no doubt that good advertising is vital to most businesses. Attractive, meaningful ads can leave a great impact, whether a start-up or a large, prominent firm. Therefore, it is crucial to create relevant, valuable, and unique content to make your advertising campaign successful. But what role does a marketing agency play in this situation? You may have questioned the necessity of outsourcing your advertising altogether. Creative brains may be working for your company after all. Then, why is there a necessity to hire experts for the same? Guild Creative is a top-notch marketing company in Fort Collins that can help you grow your business in many ways.
Here are the top 6 benefits of working with an advertising agency for your company.
Saves time
In the business world, time is money. This statement also holds true in marketing and digital advertising. Brand promotion does not happen in a day. It takes a substantial amount of time to plan it thoroughly, which often leaves little time for a business to focus on other aspects such as lead generation or brand creation. Advertising companies are experts at conceptualizing and carrying out campaigns with specialized teams for each marketing niche. That is why employing one for your campaign makes sense because it frees you up to handle daily tasks and work on other things like building and boosting your brand.
Improved strategy
Consistency is one of the essential principles of a successful campaign. An advertising campaign, like any other marketing approach, focuses on promoting the correct message across all media to build brand recognition. As a result, it becomes crucial to implement a proper plan of action for successful outcomes. A marketing company takes into different factors and prioritizes your company goals to put the plan in place.
Better resources
Another significant benefit of hiring an advertising firm is the large pool of resources. You get the whole package, consisting of experts who are skilled in different marketing and advertising aspects. It results in improved tactics and campaigns. You can find such digital advertising services in Fort Collins at Guild Creative.
Proficiency
Your life will be considerably better if you hire an advertising firm. There are numerous departments inside advertising companies, each focusing on a particular area of the marketing mix. As a result, agencies have a thorough understanding of what the consumer wants and how to arrange their items to meet their needs, which is essential for developing successful campaigns.
Guild Creative is a reputed marketing agency in Fort Collins. Their expert team understands your requirements and delivers turnkey solutions to match and fulfill your needs. For more, call 262-573-3714 or write to steve@guildcreative.com.
August 25, 2022
An essential aspect of your business is the topic of brand development. Logo design and brand identity development go hand-in-hand. They both provide the face, look, and feel for your product and overall company. Your logo and brand identity is the first impression you give your customers, and it is what they will remember about you.
In today’s world of information overload, it’s imperative that your identity design is a distinct representation of your business and its products or services and helps you stand out from your competition. In addition, your logo and brand identity should reflect trust, credibility, and lasting value.
It is also essential when creating your brand identity that not only must your brand help identify who you or your company is, but you also want your brand to be “identifiable” with your target audience. So, you must remember to create your brand identity with your customers in mind.
A good brand marketing manager will consider all this and more to help you establish your niche, provide a differentiating factor, make you stand out in the crowd, and make your brand memorable. We know a great person at Guild Creative who can help you do just that!
Contact steve@guildcreative.com
August 25, 2022
Most individuals first consider logos and colors when they think of branding. However, a business logo for brand recognition is only one aspect of branding. It is also about how you make an impression on a consumer and the message you convey. First impressions speak volumes about your business, values, and positioning. Business owners need to consider branding’s unexpected consequences. However, branding can be both time-consuming and a complicated process. So how can we simplify things? Guild Creative is a remarkable branding agency in Fort Collins. Here are 4 tips to efficiently build a strong brand for your business.
Create a clear identification
Although catchy names and graphics may seem interesting, they may not be ideal for expressing your company’s story. Your brand should be clear about what you do and the goods or services you offer through your name, logo, and tagline. Failing to do that may cause a waste of time and effort in explaining the fundamentals. Instead, you can utilize that time to build a relationship with potential audiences.
Know your audience
Launching a new service or product comes with many risks. Understanding the market environment and knowing how to minimize risk will make your brand’s marketing initiatives more cost-effective. The key to successful marketing is understanding your target audience and how to reach them. A specialized market group should be the first focus rather than general objectives. Therefore, identifying your target audience is a crucial first step before you start marketing your company. Are you looking for branding services in Fort Collins? You can find reliable solutions at Guild Creative.
Build a good online presence
Every business, big or small, should have a well-designed website. It is an effective means of creating and building an online presence. A website helps establish credibility.
Plan for the long-term
Even if short-term outcomes are successful, you shouldn’t sacrifice long-term brand growth for them. You can build strong brands by investing a lot of time and effort. It can be easy to lose sight of your long-term objectives when you notice other businesses utilizing branding strategies that seem to be effective. Guild Creative is a well-known advertising agency in Fort Collins. They can help your business to maintain brand consistency for the long run.
Are you looking for a branding agency in Fort Collins? Guild Creative has over 20 years of experience in the business. They can establish a unique corporate identity for your company to differentiate you from the competition, captivate your audience, and build brand recognition with the customers you want. For more, write to steve@guildcreative.com.
March 15, 2022
It’s not too late for 2022 marketing planning. It’s easy to create a plan based on goals, data and statistics from the marketing tactics from last year. It will be a little more challenging if this is your first plan, but these tips will help in both instances.
6 steps:
1) Establish Marketing Goals
A marketing plan needs to be rooted in goals. The goals become your focus for all marketing-related activities. You’ve likely heard of SMART goals, and this is definitely one of the times to implement the SMART goal approach. For example, instead of jotting down a goal of increasing website traffic, think instead of a goal structured like this: Increase net new visitors to the company website by 8% (compared to 2021) by October 2022.
If your business is focused on a specific product or service in 2020, then your goal might change to focus on increasing net new visitors to that product or service page instead. The point is that the goals should have parameters and a way to determine whether or not the goal has been achieved.
2) Look At The Data
Now that goals have been established, it’s time to look at the data from past marketing activities. For example, if email marketing is part of your 2021 plan, it’s time to review the stats from email campaigns. If social media is part of your marketing, analyze the data. The idea here is to understand what worked and what didn’t in 2021. What worked means that it helped your business achieve its marketing goals!
If your business didn’t set marketing goals, last year or data is not available, that is something to work on this year. Meaning one of your goals may be to implement email marketing analytics for all emails deployed in 2022 by leveraging an email marketing tool with built-in analytics before sending the first email. You get the idea. Analytics are essential because they help to show success with complex numbers. These hard numbers enable you to determine where to focus your time and budget.
3) Determine The Budget
Yep, it’s the budget question. It may make people squeamish about talking about budget, but it is a necessary question. Without a budget, it is hard to know where to spend and how much to spend. Without a budget, your business may be out of marketing cash in June or have a surplus in November…neither one of these scenarios is good.
Identify the marketing budget, and have a clear understanding of what comes out of that budget. Once there is a clear understanding of the available budget, you’ll be able to allot that budget appropriately by aligning it with your goals and data. Also read about our marketing budget rule of thumb.
If we go back to our original SMART goal of increasing net new web visitors, we know the budget should be spent on driving traffic. However, if we bump that goal up against our analytics, we may find that email marketing drove most traffic to our website. Knowing these two components enables us to earmark a good portion of our budget for email marketing and to grow our email marketing lists.
It’s a logical approach, which is helpful when it comes to spending marketing dollars.
4) Talk To Sales
Marketing and sales need to work together, and the best way to begin the process of working together is to understand the goals of the sales team, and how marketing can support them. This also gives you an opportunity to pick their brains! What are they hearing from customers and prospects, what has helped them close a sale faster or start a conversation, what do they know about the competition? The sales team has insights, and it is vital to understand them and create a unified front.
5) Draft The Plan
You’ve collected all of the details, and now comes the fun part, developing the marketing plan! The format of the plan is not as important as the content of the plan. The marketing plan should include your marketing goals, strategies, tactics, forms of measurement, and budget allocation. It should also highlight how often the plan will be reviewed. A marketing plan should be a bit fluid and enable you to reallocate the budget if a tactic is not performing IE., not helping to reach the SMART goals). If the plan needs to be adjusted, don’t sweat it; embrace it. It’s better to change mid-way through the year than look back after 12 months and realize goals were not met.
6) Incorporate Testing
Testing marketing tactics is a critical component that must not be forgotten. Testing enables you to try new tactics within your marketing plan/budget with minimal risk. For example, let’s say you are starting to see a decline in email marketing metrics mid-way through the year. Rather than stay the course, use some of the budgets you allocated for testing to try Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or another form of marketing that is not currently in your plan. And since it is a test, you are leveraging a small portion of the budget within a specific time frame to gauge whether or not it is worth investing more time and potentially reallocating the budget to the “new” tactic.
As you can tell, we believe in marketing planning. It provides a road map and a clear approach to the coming year.
Learn more about our Strategic Marketing Services. Need any help with your 2022 small business marketing planning? Contact us and let’s start the conversation. Happy planning!
This is a guest post from Kristen Davis, CEO & Founder of Athenian Marketing.
February 24, 2022
Guest post: Kristen Davis, CEO & Founder of Athenian Marketing.
Marketing is an investment in your business and is not an expense. So how much should an organization invest in marketing? Unfortunately, there isn’t a hard and fast number that every business should adhere to because each company is different, and every business is in a different marketing stage. But, if you need a “rule of thumb,” we recommend allocating 5-10% of your gross revenue to marketing. The range is in place because there are several factors to consider when determining a marketing budget, so a hard and fast number is a challenge. Let’s look at the factors that impact how much your business should allocate for marketing.
Foundational Elements
Foundational marketing elements include your brand, website, a marketing plan, literature & social media platforms. Think of foundational elements as the basis of your marketing plan. Without them, it will be hard for your marketing to be consistent and won’t provide your customers, or potential customers, with a focused view of your business.
If you do not have your foundational marketing elements in place, plan to allocate additional funds to marketing to establish those foundational elements.
Brand Awareness
Once your foundational elements are in place, take a look at your brand awareness with your target audience. Does your prospective customer know about your business? If your answer is no, or you aren’t sure, you’ll want to allocate a more significant percentage of funds to your marketing budget. Building up your brand awareness paves the way for new customers to recognize your brand and your business and make the conscious decision to buy from you.
Think about some of the specific brands you know. They didn’t get there by shying away from spending on their brand awareness. They got there by marketing their brand to their target audience. Focusing on brand awareness is essential regardless of business size. Remember that you don’t need everyone to know about your business. You need your target audience to know about your business. That is where the focus should be. Check out our “Whats Your Brand Identity?” post.
Events and Tradeshows
If events and tradeshows are part of your marketing budget, be aware that they can eat up a large chunk of your budget and may not provide the dividends needed to reach your goals. Think booth costs, team travel, team hotels, shipping materials, and more.
Now that we’ve outlined factors that can impact your budget, how do you decide how to divvy up the budget? That’s where your marketing goals come in. What are the marketing goals for the coming year? So before determining a budget, determine your goals. (If you need a little help, check out our Marketing Planning blog post!)
Once goals are determined, determine approaches to help your organization meet those goals, and then put numbers to the strategy.
But what if you misallocated the budget? Not to worry. Since marketing is trackable, scalable, and can be layered. Thus, effective strategies can constantly be enhanced or modified to capture new or different audiences. Isn’t marketing great!
If you face the budget conversation in your business and need a bit of help wading through the details, give us a call. We’d be happy to talk through the details and give you a few pointers.
This post is from Kristen Davis, CEO & Founder of Athenian Marketing.
February 22, 2022
Take a minute to count all of the electronic devices in your home, including phones, computers, and tablets. The digital age is booming. But is print marketing still effective and profitable? What are the benefits of promoting brands on the glossy pages of trade publications or with brochures, posters, and postcards? Even if print is still a viable option, how do you know if it is suitable for your company?
We strongly believe that many brands have a great deal to gain from print advertising. It can be a substantial complementary marketing channel to all digital and other traditional campaigns. So let’s take a look at how print can help you develop a strong relationship with your customers.
The Meet-Cute: Make a more tactile impactful introduction and first impression.
Anyone can find pretty much anything on the internet if they know how to look for it. An excellent digital campaign can put your brand in front of a customer even if they don’t type the exact words used to describe your company. However, those search result pages can be cluttered with a lot of images and information. Finding a perfect match in a noisy crowd can be very difficult. Print gives companies captive readers who spend longer looking at published pages than digital sites.
With print, a customer has a chance to meet your brand and get a more tangible feel for who you are for a company before they go online. Aligning your brand with trade information or special interests helps readers to identify with your products and services in a way that relates directly to their wants and needs. Also, studies have shown that a reader being able to feel a page in their hands provides a more lasting experience than viewing an article on a screen.
The scope and depth of all digital marketing opportunities can be overwhelming and confusing, especially if you’re a small business or new to the digital playing field. For companies wanting to keep things simple, print, in all its many avenues, can feel much more familiar. Having a sales executive or team dedicated to responding to inquiries and requests obtained from the print promotions can allow you to see immediate results.
Friends First: Take the opportunity to hang out with your customers for a while.
A website can be gone with one click, but we’ve all got those magazines and brochures that just seem to linger for a while before heading to the recycle bin. They pile up on a bookshelf, side table, or the corner of our desk. The pages within those publications are windows to potential customers; subtle, casual ways to reach readers with no pressure. Creating a “coffee table piece” puts you in the middle of that person’s life without an overwhelming attack of cold calling and emailing.
Developing your brand with a customer in an organic way can help that customer to feel more comfortable approaching your company for information and ultimately making a purchase. Sometimes, a brand can come on too strong with a barrage of digital ads and sponsored social media posts, causing a customer to block all of your promotional materials. Each time a reader flips through a magazine or publication, your ad will be right there in a reassuring way. They may choose to turn the page, but even a glimpse can leave an impact.
Also, unlike the never-ending search result pages of the internet, your brand will not be displayed next to a half dozen other companies. When a customer, potential or current, sees your marketing message in print, the images and words on the page get the final say in that interaction.
A Foundation of Trust: Add extra print marketing touches to campaigns to build a stronger relationship.
As of Q4 of 2018, Stanley Black & Decker had the largest portion of the market share for power tools. The next largest market shareholder sold almost an entire $1 Billion less than B&D. Despite being the top-selling and one of the most well-known brands within their industry, you can find ads for Black & Decker Power Tools within the pages of many different publications, in addition to their print marketing channels. A well-diversified marketing strategy keeps their brand and products at the top of mind with corporate buyers and retail customers.
Even after a customer has decided to work with your company, print can offer a sense of support to your brand image. While casually reading a magazine or other publication, their eyes are drawn to a familiar image, your logo. Maybe they even see a product they’ve already purchased or information about a service they’re already using. Seeing your company, those products or services, pop up in the middle of their everyday life can be so reassuring. The customers can see and feel that you are still present and still representing the values that lead them to choose you to begin with
You may not think that print is necessary or beneficial for your company and brand. However, you may be surprised to see how publication reader demographics overlap with your target audience. We can break down whom you want to reach and how to get in front of them across all channels in the most efficient way possible. With our expertise in graphic design, print advertising, and trade show displays, we have all the right tools for your small business to succeed.
Contact us today to discuss designing the perfect print marketing plan for you.
February 16, 2022
After two decades online, what have we learned about website design and development?
Web website design and development has come a long way in the past 20 years. Through trial-and-error, evaluation, experience and sophisticated research, experts have begun to get a grasp on what works. Website design and development need to be visually pleasing, engaging, and brand aware while instilling credibility.
While the appearance of a website is important, recent studies have concluded that 80% of users value function over aesthetics. The efficiency and flow of the site must engage a customer, pulling them along an organic journey with no speedbumps. The site also needs to be functional for your company as a brandingand marketing tool. What are your website goals? Do you want your site to help you acquire information, increase sales, or accumulate qualified leads? Let’s take a look at what we consider is the ideal mix of aesthetics and functionality for a successful website.
25%: Aesthetics—Easy on the eyes. Inviting to the brain. Effectively instilling brand confidence and recognition.
Let’s take a trip back in time to the dot-com boom; the early days of Yahoo! and eBay. Those were the days of cheesy clipart, textured backgrounds, ridiculously bright color schemes, and all the text. Oh, and let’s not forget the overuse of Comic Sans font. Maybe it was the simplicity of the structure of websites at the time, but the focus definitely seemed to be more on “cool” graphics than an engaging, welcoming, and pleasing user experience.
Here in the 21st century, we strive to ensure companies get a website that grabs the attention of users by communicating a compelling brand image. Using data-based marketing and branding, companies are able to target more specific audiences and appeal to them with a more personalized user experience. How a website looks
75%: Functionality—Navigation, Information Architecture, Graphic User Interface, and Marketing Objectives.
Internet users are somewhat picky when it comes to the navigation of websites. Most of the time, a user doesn’t want too much information on one page, but they also don’t want to have to do a lot of clicking to find what they are looking for. So, many companies struggle to organize their site in a way that allows customers to quickly locate the exact products or information they want, without overloading users with too many menus or too much text.
Insights taken from the data within your site, as well as the industry as a whole, can help to create a user experience that is easy and will keep them coming back. We can use SEO data to know how your customers are searching for and finding you, as well as how they interact with your site. Knowing what is important to potential customers not only allows you to set up pages efficiently, but can also provide some crucial information about your products and services from the customer perspective.
Conversions, Transactions, and Sales…Oh My!
A website is simply a hub for companies and customers to exchange resources. Your users come to your site in hopes of getting information, products, or services. You want to get the sale, an email address for future communication, or simply some data. A successful visit means everyone walks—err, clicks—away with something.
In the modern, digital age, a company can choose to track pretty much any kind of interaction to track in order to learn how their customers use a site and where they are possibly losing users. If a file download or form submission is faulty or even just inconvenient, that’s a common place for users to drop off and abandon one site in favor of something easier to use. If a cart checkout lags or appears to stall out, credibility comes into question. Once a user ends their session due to functional problems, both user and brand are left unsatisfied with the exchange.
Finding balance between design that is engaging while still being easy to use can seem like a daunting task. With a strong grasp on best practices and resources to create a winning strategy, we can help you rise to the top of the search results and the industry.
Website design and development.
Contact today to learn more about website design and development. 262-6573-3714..Ask for Steve!!!
January 10, 2022
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, instagram, snapchat, Tumblr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, blogs . . . the list of social media opportunities are endless. Which ones, how often, where, when, how do you get started. Is your head already spinning? No worries, we have a few suggestions to help ease your mind and make social media marketing sound much easier.
First, let’s look at what social media you should be using—no, you do not need to be on every network. In fact, unless you have a dedicated social media marketing team, it is not at all possible. You will be spreading yourself too thin and your marketing will simply not be at all effective. Take a look at the social networks that work best for your business. Know the target audience that uses each network—are they your target audience? Eliminate the ones that do not fit best with your target and we move on from there.
Now that you know what networks to focus in on, next step is to make social media a focus of your overall marketing strategy. It is important that you, your marketing team, and overall company embrace social media and make a commitment to engage in social media communications marketing. Social media is a key consideration in the new inbound marketing strategy. By using the social aspect of these media networks, you are reaching out to your consumers, engaging your customers to start conversations, providing information to help make purchase decisions, and building a relationship with your customers. Just as with any relationship, it takes time, it takes commitment and dedication, and an effort to keep the conversations going and stay connected.
We have a number of resources at Guild Creative to help take the guesswork out of developing your social media strategy.
November 11, 2019
CASE STUDY: Digital Marketing for Cretex Specialty Products
THE CHALLENGE:
When existing marketing efforts were becoming stagnate, Cretex teamed up with Guild Creative to revamp the company’s branding, website design and digital marketing. Cretex’s goals for annual company growth and net revenues were set at realistic yet ambitious levels for the short and medium terms. Strategic Marketing goals included brand recognition, increasing web traffic, acquiring new customers, a new responsive product friendly website and full integration all digital marketing channels.
THE SOLUTION:
The Creative Strategy
The website was rebuilt from scratch to reflect expertise and credibility of Cretex in this market space. The team laid out a blueprint to include an abundance of product and user information that is accessible in two clicks or less. A new graphical user interface and information architecture was developed in order to provide an engaging user experience. Designers developed a new look specifically focused on instilling brand recognition and driving performance to achieving all marketing goals. Product descriptions were updated to clearly define all the benefits each offered and how they can work for different customers.
The Integrated Digital Marketing Game Plan
A move away from traditional outbound (print ads etc).
Next, the Guild Creative team set up the digital marketing tactics based on our strategic analysis. They included, targeted display ads, e-newsletters, landing pages, and home page updates to drive web traffic to the website. An omnichannel, monthly themed base strategy was implemented to provide in-depth information on specific products, useful tips, and news about upcoming shows and events.
THE RESULTS:
Attention-Grabbing Results
“My boss called and asked me why our website traffic had increased so much. I told him that I asked the team at Guild Creative to implement their digital marketing recommendations.” -Lee H, General Manager for Cretex Specialty Products.
Guild Creative analyzed Targeted Display Campaign and E-Newsletter data from April 1 to October 31, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. Website sessions and page views skyrocketed, increasing 604% and 568% respectively. The Targeted Display campaign acquired over 20 thousand page sessions and more than 2 thousand completed actions. Retargeting and keyword marketing confirmed a total of 16,629 new users gained. In the same 7 months, the e-newsletter maintained an open rate of 33% (industry average is 24.79%) and click-through rate of 8% (national average is 4.19%). With the fully integrated marketing efforts, and double digit revenue increase.
See the detailed summary below.
GCI Cretex case study-draft-1
