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Blogs, Marketing Plan

Avis’ “We Try Harder”: Branding For Underdogs

It must be easy when you’re at the top. Those big companies have household brand names, with instant recognition, even with just their logo. The three stripes of Adidas. The silhouette of an apple with a bite out of it? Obviously Apple. The golden double arches of McDonald’s. The list goes on and on.

These multinational firms have the marketing budgets to hire the biggest and best advertising and marketing executives, placing their flashy, expensive ads in prime positions and prime-time TV slots.

But what if you’re not number one? How do you compete with these gargantuan companies?

It’s something that car rental firm Avis needed to consider back in the early 1960s and became a masterclass in humblebrag marketing. We wanted to take a look at the story of what happened and see what lessons can be learned, and how to turn being an underdog to your advantage.

We’re Number Two!

Avis is one of the oldest and most well-known car rental companies in the world, but in the early 1960s, they were seriously lagging behind their major competitor Hertz.

Avis and Hertz had a rivalry that dated back to the 1940s when US Air Force officer Warren Avis spotted an unexpected opportunity for the car rental industry as he travelled around America. What if he put car rental offices inside airports?

At this time, most car rental firm locations, including Hertz were in the downtown areas of cities, but Avis thought it would appeal to the ever-growing numbers of business travellers who wanted to fly into cities, drive to meetings, and be able to drive back and fly out the same day.

“Even as we grew by leaps and bounds, the Hertz people vowed up and down that our approach wouldn’t work,” Avis recalled in his 1986 autobiography, Take a Chance to Be First. However, that all changed. “They jumped in and began to copy everything that we had pioneered. I honestly don’t think that Hertz has come up with an original idea yet in the airport car rental field.”

In 1962, Robert C. Townsend, the president of Avis began looking for ways to increase the company’s market share, starting by hiring famed Madison Avenue ad men Doyle Dane Bernbach.

What did Avis have that could set it apart? Newer cars than Hertz? More rental locations? Lower rates? No, none of that.

DDB spent months learning all about Avis’ business by interviewing employees, and reduced their research down to one question – Why would anyone want to hire a car from the number two rental agency?

The answer became a world-famous ad slogan: We Try Harder.

Instead of putting all the focus of the new campaign into claiming to be the best or undermining the competition, DBB highlighted Avis’ position as the second-best car rental firm, and as such, knew it always tried harder, strongly implying that the number one firm Hertz was resting on its laurels, too big to care about its customers.

The ads cleverly played on the fact that Avis was not the biggest in the world, but it was determined to be the best, always striving to provide the best service and value to its customers.

Taking A Risk

The idea of promoting a brand’s weakness would have been a most unthinkable tactic for the ad men of Madison Avenue. Why on earth ask customers to think about why you’re the runner-up? It seemed more logical to project unflappable confidence in your business.

It was DBB copywriter Paula Green, a real-life Mad Men Peggy Olsen, who devised the ‘When you’re only No. 2’ tagline, which was a revolutionary move, and as she later said in interviews, “It went against the notion that you had to brag.” Green also said, likely in reference to her workplace obstacles, that “We Try Harder” was also the story of her life.

According to famed ad man David Ogilvy, the ‘Father of Advertising’, Green’s ads were a feat of ‘diabolical positioning’, and DBB became the masters of the humblebrag advertising campaign.

While American cars were being marketed with massive flashy campaigns – much like the cars themselves – DBB pitched a now legendary 1961 print ad for the Volkswagen Beetle. The copy simply stated ‘Think Small’ and featured a tiny image of the car floating in an expanse of white space. Another ad stated ‘It’s ugly but it gets you there’.

DBB seized up the cultural moment, as Americans were becoming weary of the bigger-is-better, 1950s consumerism, and were receptive to a humble message that threw shade at authority.

We Try Harder

Hertz made a point of ignoring Avis’ campaign, likely furthering the notion that they were too big to care. However, they couldn’t ignore the fact that the company’s market share dropped from 61 to 49 per cent. Meanwhile, the market share for Avis grew from 29 to 36 per cent.

By 1966, Hertz fired back, with a series of ads wanting to explain why they were (still) number one. But the damage had been done, and Avis had considerably closed the gap on their competition.

While Avis dropped the ‘We Try Harder’ slogan in 2012, 60 years after it was coined, the company still retains that ethic and has been an innovator in the car rental industry, such as being the first company to introduce computerised reservations, the first company to introduce a frequent-renter program, and the first to offer a wide variety of speciality vehicles, like luxury cars, SUVs and vans.

Underdog Brand Biography

Green’s campaign established what is now known as an underdog brand biography, a rhetorical device used by marketers to chronicle a brand’s humble origins and life experiences, its evolution, its hopes and dreams, and noble strategies against adversaries.

It’s a strategy used by many companies since, such as the, albeit apocryphal, Apple ‘We started in a garage’ story, or Adidas’ ‘Impossible is Nothing’ campaign telling the story of a ‘simple shoemaker from a small town.’

So what is your underdog brand biography? Can not being the top dog help you find a way to better market your brand?

Why not come and talk to the team at Tonic? We’re not number one, but we always try harder.

Christmas clock countdown
Blogs, Marketing Plan

The Final Christmas Countdown For Your Brand

It might only be October, but no one can deny that it’s that time of year when Christmas starts showing its festive face everywhere you turn. The perfume adverts are back on TV, shops are slowly filling with gifts and decorations, and it won’t be long until Mariah Carey is revived from her deep slumber to announce all she wants for Christmas is you.

For many brands, all the festive marketing will be well underway, and, no judgment, some of you might even have the office Christmas tree up and decorated already. But while many employees are already looking forward to and planning their Christmas breaks, for brands and marketers, there’s still a long way to go and lots to get sorted.

We thought we’d have a look at some tips and advice to help get you organised for the final Christmas countdown, as a little preparation will make sure that you can enjoy the Christmas break and keep your business on top of the festive fury!

Prepare

Taking time out from work is important, as we all need time to recharge, relax, and spend precious time with loved ones, and there’s no better time to do all of that than at Christmas. A good first step is to decide when your business is going to shut down and reopen, and it’s important to make sure that’s clearly communicated to everyone who needs to know, from employees and clients to customers and suppliers. It allows everyone to know when you will be available, and for you to prepare.

Think about when you will be able to take some time out from work and consider any temporary cover you might need to keep your business ticking over if it doesn’t shut down completely over the festive period, or if you can operate with a skeleton crew of staff.

If you have children, will you need to organise childcare over the school holidays? While you might able to work at home and look after the kids, keep in mind that balancing work and parenting might prove tricky at this busy time of year. Maybe get extra cover at work so you can truly enjoy the spirit of Christmas with the family instead of trying to juggle everything!

Communicate

Once you know your shutdown period for the end of the year, you will need to make sure it is communicated thoroughly. Update your website and social media so that all of your current and potential customers know when you will be available.

If your brand sells products, then ensure you clearly communicate the last order date to customers for a pre-Christmas delivery, as well as letting them know when any orders placed over the festive period will be processed, if your business is shutting down completely.

If you provide a service, then it’s more about managing expectations, and letting your clients know when you will be available. Make sure you are crystal clear about this, and don’t leave things open to assumptions.

Call your clients to have a wrap-up of the year, and do a review on how the past 12 months have gone for them and you, as well as chat about their plans for the next year.

Christmas Marketing

Regardless of whether your business is busy or quiet during the Christmas period, it’s always a good idea to plan some well-thought-out festive marketing to help give your brand a boost. Christmas provides a great opportunity to develop a festive theme for your marketing, no matter what your niche or industry.

If your brand deals with B2B, then keep in mind that while many companies will also be closed over the holidays, they will still be spending time online, so make sure you are still visible to them with your marketing. If you sell to consumers, then you know they will always be spending time online too, so make sure you keep visible on the socials.

If you’re planning on sending Christmas cards and/or gifts to clients, plan well in advance and don’t leave it to the last minute.

Scheduling

It’s always important to plan and create marketing content well in advance, but even more so for Christmas, as well as getting things planned for the new year to get you back up and running as quickly as possible on a cold January morning.

Consider any blog posts, email marketing, and social media posts that you will want to send in line with any specific or special Christmas products, services, or offers. Create your content well in advance, and be as inventive as you can be!

Why not share some behind-the-scenes content of your office preparing for the season, such as staff in Christmas jumpers, or decorating the office Christmas tree? You can then schedule your content to go out via your email marketing or cosily media scheduler, and make sure you keep your online presence while you wrap your Christmas presents!

Prepare for the New Year

Part of your plan to take some time out for yourself is to make sure you’re prepared for the return to work in January. Your customers and clients will be expecting business as usual, so plan ahead to ensure you don’t find yourself snowed under.

If you think you may find yourself neck-deep in emails or an influx of orders, then think about outsourcing some of the work to help ease you back in. A little extra support in January will help everyone get back in the swing of things while maintaining your clients and customers’ expectations.

2024 Planning

It’s not just the Christmas countdown to think about, there’s the countdown to the new year to consider too.

The festive period is a great time to start thinking and planning for the year ahead, and if you get to December and haven’t yet thought about your or your brand’s goals and budgets for the coming 12 months, try to find time to put thoughts on paper about the direction you want to take your business, instead of losing clarity and time thinking about it in January.

Think about any new products or services you want to launch and develop a framework for 2024 that includes key dates, events you may be attending, and the goals that you have set yourself.

Winter Clear Out

Good preparation for the new year should include a good clear-out for your business. Tidy your desk, delete any unnecessary emails, update your filing system, or cull your social media groups and platforms to help you hit the ground running after the new year.

Take Time Out After The Christmas Countdown

Even if it’s just for a short break, it’s important to take time out from your business. It will help you reset, give your body a break, and help adjust your focus. But most of all, it allows you to spend time with those closest to you.

Coming back to work in the new year with a clear mind and feeling refreshed will be a big step in helping you achieve your goals in 2024, so make the most of your festivities and enjoy!

TV remote control
Audience research, Blogs

Broadcast TV Audiences Decline – What Does This Mean For Advertising?

According to a new report from Ofcom, the number of people watching broadcast TV each week has had the sharpest fall since records first began. With streaming services growing in popularity daily, public service broadcasters have seen the number of viewers each week decline from 83 percent in 2021 to 79 per cent in 2022, according to the UK’s communications regulatory body.

Ofcom’s Media Nations 2023 report also revealed that the average time spent watching broadcast TV per person per day fell from 2 hours 59 minutes in 2021 to 2 hours 38 minutes in 2022.

Public service broadcasters (PSBs) such as BBC One and ITV1 remained dominant in the most-watched list, with the research suggesting that the public recognises these channels deliver ‘broadcast events that bring the nation together for a shared viewing experience’, with England’s quarter-final match in the FIFA World Cup, the State Funeral of the Queen and the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee being the most watched programmes in the UK in 2022.

The broadcast TV watchdog’s report also noted a major shift in the broadcast TV landscape, with the decline in the number of TV programmes that attract mass audiences, and the number of shows that gained over four million viewers has more than halved in the last decade, demonstrating that there are far fewer people watching early and late evening TV news bulletins, as well as a decline in viewer figures for the UK’s most popular soaps.

According to the report, a mere 48 programmes managed to find an average audience of over four million on streaming platforms in 2022, with Netflix having the vast majority of those.

Yih-Choung Teh, group director of strategy and research at Ofcom, said: “Today’s viewers and listeners have an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet of broadcasting and online content to choose from, and there’s more competition for our attention than ever.”

Teh said that the UK’s traditional broadcasters have had steep declines in viewing numbers for their scheduled live programmes, particularly among what were typically loyal older audiences but he added that despite this, PSBs are still unrivalled in bringing the nation together during important cultural and sporting events.

But what does this mean for advertisers?

Declining viewing figures might sound more like a reason to start thinking about advertising elsewhere, and getting your advert aired during peak viewing times seems like an impossible task, never mind an expensive investment.

But with the average viewer watching over 2 and a half hours of commercial broadcast TV every day, broadcast TV accounts for 84 per cent of all video advertising, dominating the audio-visual market, and TV advertising is by far and away the most trusted medium, with 35 per cent of UK survey respondents placing it at the top, followed by newspaper advertising with 19 per cent.

Brands looking to advertise regionally can also leverage SkySmart to help target audiences in different locations, different ages, lifestyles, and many other demographics, by using marketing data to advertise to smaller, targeted audiences in cities, towns, or even specific postcodes.

Platforms such as Sky and Channel 4 even provide a bespoke service that can allow smaller brands to gain access to premium viewing environments, and not only broadcast television but video-on-demand (VoD) services too.

Broadcast TV adverts can’t be skipped, they run full screen, aren’t fighting for attention on a busy webpage, and aren’t subject to internet ad-blockers. TV advertising has been creating viral sensations since long before the internet age coined the term viral video and still creates discussion among people as we ask each other if we’ve seen the latest advert for a particular brand or product.

TV advertising can deliver a huge advantage to your brand, driving market share, building trust, and providing scale and reach. Brands can buy the exact number of ratings/viewers they need, and target specific audiences, whether it’s Love Island fans, or families gathered around the TV to watch Saturday evening entertainment.

The advantages of TV advertising

Reach – No other kind of media is able to provide the same reach with a single advertisement. TV advertising can reach huge audiences frequently and quickly, as much as 70 per cent of the UK population in one day. While there is a growth in people watching TV and film via tablets, computers and smartphones, none are as ubiquitous as the living room TV, and with many UK households owning more than one TV, that reach increases.
Influence – Television, compared to other video marketing platforms, has one of the highest engagement rates. According to data from the websites of organisations that use TV advertising, TV ads contribute to around 35 per cent of all visits to the number of all website visitors. TV advertising has retained an air of prestige and quality that other channels are unable to meet.
Audience targeting – Targeting a specific audience has been utilised by TV advertising for a long time. TV ads are shown at certain times of day, on certain channels, and during certain shows to ensure they are being shown to the right audience. This has become even more sophisticated with the advent of Sky AdSmart and targeted advertising has become even more integral to TV advertising.
Captive Audiences – While there is a certain amount of ad-skipping in VoD and recorded TV, and viewers are free to get up and pop the kettle on or visit the bathroom during ad breaks, the majority will stay in their seats, and even if only passively, they will be exposed to your adverts. In the case of recorded TV, if adverts are skipped, the brand will not be charged. Many VoD platforms are now including adverts before the show or film they want to watch, and some have now implanted unskippable ads that have to be watched in order to view the on-demand content.
Building trust and Legitimacy – It can take time, effort, and cost to develop a TV advert that is suitable for a wide audience, but the engagement and trust inferred by TV over other platforms provide a great ROI. TV also can establish a greater sense of legitimacy, trust, and recognition of your brand than other platforms.

Are you convinced about the power of TV advertising yet?

When it comes to video advertising, TV is the most widely viewed medium and has become home to many small and medium-sized brands, who are easily able to find a place among the traditional TV advertisers and larger brands.

If you’re looking to take advantage of TV advertising to promote your brand, product, or services, and looking for expert advice and help, talk to Tonic today!

Blogs, Digital

Trying To Get Your Head Around Facebook Ads?

It might appear to smaller brands that Facebook Ads are the preserve of the larger, international brands with the massive marketing budgets needed for that kind of advertising. However, that is not the case, as Facebook Ads can be a huge benefit to any business looking to increase sales and grow its profitability.

We wanted to have a look at the lessons, tips, and tricks of the trade we’ve gained over the years, and tell you just what Facebook Ads might just be the thing your marketing efforts could be lacking.

The Importance Of Facebooks Ads

Simply put, Facebook Ads can transform your sales pipeline and boost your profits, if implemented properly. The global reach, power, and intelligence of the behemoth that is Facebook and Meta means that the Facebook Ads tool could be the most important asset in your marketing toolbox.

Consider this: The average Facebook user spends around 20 per cent of their Facebook screen time looking at various Facebook Ads, and regardless of whether your business is B2B or B2C, they will be an overwhelming success for the majority of businesses.
But this is dependent on one thing, and that is ensuring that Facebook Ads is set up correctly and optimised so that your brand can achieve the best possible ROI.

A lot of businesses claim that Facebook Ads is not appropriate because they don’t believe their target audience will see their posts, but this isn’t the case.

Let’s have a look at a few Facebook user demographics

In the UK, there are 44.8 million Facebook users, and 44 per cent of the population use Facebook on a daily basis with the average user spending 23 minutes a day browsing Facebook. The most active is the 25 to 34 age group, with 11.2 million users and 52 per cent of all users in the UK are women.

Globally, 18.1 per cent of Facebook users are aged between 18 to 24, 25.7 per cent between 25 to 34, 18.1 per cent between 35 to 44, 13.6 per cent between 45-54, and 11 per cent between 55-64.

For B2B brands and businesses, Facebook Ads can be very successful, and data has demonstrated that running Facebook Ads for B2B businesses can result in an ROI of three times the investment. This is because the key decision-makers for the majority of businesses are also consumers, and also use Facebook in their free time.

How Can You Make Facebook Ads Successful?

It might seem daunting initially, as initial costs may appear steep, and there is no guarantee of an instant ROI, but as with all marketing, it should be viewed as an investment and something that will take time to find traction and generate leads.

One common mistake made frequently by businesses when looking to boost their Facebook presence is to use the ‘Boost Post’ button to increase the visibility of their organic content, but this is largely an inefficient choice as it almost always only amplifies your content to people who have already seen it. Facebook Ads allows you to target your audience for a greater reach.

Sometimes, a negative experience with Facebook Ads can deter businesses from spending more money with Facebook Ads, but when done properly, an ad should consistently deliver a great ROI. But the key to achieving this is knowing how to get it done correctly, and what to consider when building a Facebook Ad.

Determine What You Want To Achieve With Facebook Ads

You will be presented with a range of campaign objectives when creating a Facebook Ad: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversation, each of which has its own options.

Knowing what you want to get out of Facebook Ads will help you determine which campaign is best suited for you, and how to best spend your money.

If you are a smaller business looking to establish your brand and find an audience that will be more receptive to your organic content, then you should look at the Awareness campaign options. Larger businesses that are already established might be better off skipping this step.

However, larger businesses and brands might want to take a look at the Lead Generation option included in the Consideration campaign objective. This would be a beneficial option as it can help develop the sales pipeline and boost the flow of incoming leads from Facebook.

Selecting the Conversion option within the Conversion campaign objective can achieve the same results, but this is a little more of a risk because of the lack of pre-existing data that helps inform the Facebook Ad.

Getting The Most Out Of Facebook Ads

It is not overly difficult to get Facebook Ads up and running, but it does need time and patience to make it a success by optimising it. The key is choosing your audience and making sure you have the targeting done correctly. No matter how beautifully crafted your Facebook Ad is, if the targeting is off, it will result in a very poor ROI as it will not reach the right audience.

When Meta users are scrolling through their apps, the algorithm constantly makes notes of what the user is doing and the content that they engage with the most. This means you can optimise your Facebook Ad to target users that fall into three categories: Demographics, Interests, and Behaviour.

Using all three categories in your targeting means that you ensure your Facebook Ad is reaching the users who are more likely to care about your advertised product or service.

For example, if you are selling a video game then you would want to target men aged between 18 to 24, who have demonstrated an interest in video gaming, as well as a pattern of previously clicking on a Facebook Ad and making a purchase, combining all three targeting options. The options for targeting are advanced and very in-depth, and if you wanted, you could target users based on their birth year, or even if they have a child of a certain age. The sheer amount of data that users willingly share online means that there is the potential for businesses to target very specific users who are likely to engage with your Facebook Ad.

Facebook also offers a more advanced feature for businesses where they can upload customer email addresses so that it can make a search for any connected accounts and generate a recommended Facebook Ad tailored to target the common Demographic, Interest, and Behavioural patterns – called a ‘Lookalike Audience’.

Formatting The Perfect Facebook Ad

Knowing what your Facebook Ad will look like once posted is the key to developing an ad that will encourage users to engage with it. All Facebook Ads contain:

Primary Text – Attention-grabbing copy with an intriguing hook
Creative – A scroll-stopping image or video
Headline – Copy that highlights your USP and encourages action
Description – Extra content that helps reinforce your headline
Call To Action – A button to drive clicks and conversions with a strong CTA

Fine-tune the copy

The primary text is the core body of text that users will first read, and typically contains the key message and value proposition, demonstrating to the user why they will benefit from clicking on the Facebook Ad and their next action. This advertising copy needs to be snappy and concise.

Selecting the perfect creative

Without a doubt, the image or video used is the most important part of the Facebook Ad, being what the user sees first. Getting this right is important, and you should choose an image that isn’t generic and doesn’t immediately look like just another Facebook Ad. Take time to choose an image that looks natural and organic.

Snappy headline

This is likely the last thing the user sees before clicking on the CTA. It needs to be crafted to grab the attention of the user and appeal to the audience the ad has been targeted towards.

Resources

Your greatest resource is your own Facebook Ad history. Once you have run several Facebook Ads you will be able to analyse what has worked and what hasn’t so you can fine-tune and optimise your Facebook Ads moving forward. Even ads that did not perform well at all should be taken as a learning opportunity.

There will be Facebook Ads that do work well and some that won’t perform as intended, which is why you need to include testing as part of your Facebook Ad strategy. Testing might not provide the result you expect, and it does sometimes return results that do not always make sense!

If you’re looking for help and advice with getting started with your marketing, growing your brand, and advertising, come and talk to the experts at Tonic, where we have years of experience with clients large and small.

Self care habits (journalling and coffee)
Blogs, Marketing Plan

Three Steps To Help Create Consumer Buying Habits

Whether you’re trying to get fit or learn a new skill, forming new habits doesn’t happen overnight, and the same goes for forming buying habits. However, they can be developed through a systematic application of prompts, rewards, and repeat behaviour.

Our modern lives can be hectic, with so many choices and decisions to make every day, from trivial matters such as what to have for lunch or which shoes to put on in the morning, to deeply profound matters that can have lasting consequences. But if we agonised over every single decision we had to make in our day-to-day lives, we’d never get anything done.

When it comes to the more trivial choices we face, such as what to buy, we are more likely to rely on the habits we have formed, and simply do what we did last time when in the same situation. Do you tend to grab the same sandwich from the shop every lunchtime, stick to the same brand of coffee at the supermarket, or make other trivial purchases simply out of habit?

The Importance Of Habits

In 2002, psychologist Wendy Wood, the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science Of Making Positive Changes That Stick, conducted a study that involved 209 participants who were promoted by an alarm every hour to write down what they were doing, where they were, and what they were thinking about.

The study found that if people were repeating the same action in the same place while thinking about something different, then their behaviour was characterised as habitual, and by that criteria, 43 per cent of behaviour was habitual.

Marketing And Forming Habits

With habits accounting for a significant proportion of consumer behaviour, marketers need to know how to leverage this, as well as how to successfully create buying habits.

Most psychologists concur that to form successful habits, there are three basic elements required: a cue, prompt, or trigger, a reward, and repetition.

These three elements are often used to help form habits in other areas too, such as prompts to exercise or workout to help build up streaks, for example, on the Peloton app, or the infamous slightly threatening aura of the Duolingo Owl, reminding you to keep up with your Spanish lessons.

However, passive-aggressive multi-lingual birds aside, let’s have a look at the three aforementioned elements for successful habit forming.

The Trigger

To develop habitual behaviour, motivation alone will not be sufficient, and successful habit forming needs a prompt or cue, whether that’s a place, mood, or time that will trigger the behaviour.

In a study at the University of Bath in 2002, psychologist Sarah Milne recruited 248 volunteers, who were then divided into three groups. A control group were instructed to record their levels of exercise over a two-week period, of which 35 per cent recorded 20 minutes of activity at least once a week.

The second group were also asked to record their levels of exercise in the same period but to also read a motivational leaflet about the benefits of exercise. Only 38 per cent exercised at least once a week, despite the leaflet providing motivation, barely changing their behaviour.

To demonstrate the importance of triggers in habitual behaviour, the third group had the same conditions set as the second group but were also asked to state when and where they would exercise. This was termed by Milne as an implementation-intention, a trigger to remind them to exercise.

The third group received the same levels of motivation as the second, but their behaviour was significantly changed, with 91 per cent recording exercise at least once a week.

To develop habitual buying behaviours in consumers, there needs to be more focus than solely on providing motivation, with a trigger that will prompt the desired behaviour.

An excellent example of this is when Claude Hopkins, the creative ad genius behind Pepsodent toothpaste, encouraged better dental hygiene in the US in the early 1900s, instead of suggesting brushing your teeth twice a day, his adverts recommended brushing in the morning after breakfast, and again before going to bed, creating one of the most successful public health campaigns in over 100 years.

The Reward

Following the trigger is the reward, which of the three elements in forming habitual behaviour is the broadest. Here we will look at the most relevant area, the power of uncertain rewards.

In 2014, an experiment by Luxi Shen asked if a reward of an uncertain magnitude can be more motivating than a reward of a certain magnitude. Shen recruited 87 volunteers, who were then set a challenge. Some of the participants were incentivised with a reward of $2 – a certain condition – while the others were offered a 50:50 chance of winning either $1 or $2 – an uncertain condition.

It was found that 70 per cent of the participants completed the challenge in the uncertain condition, while a mere 43 per cent completed the task in the certain condition scenario.

The participants in the uncertain condition reward scenario were motivated by the excitement of the uncertainty, which had a higher value than the actual reward of the money.

Marketers can learn from this when seeking to shape consumer behaviour by harnessing uncertainty. For example, if your brand has a loyalty scheme, instead of offering every customer that same incentive, try adding a random element.

This can be seen in action at the coffee and sandwich chain Pret-a-Manger, which doesn’t have a requirement for its customers to collect stamps to earn a free coffee, instead, allowing baristas to randomly award customers with a free drink at random.

The Routine

As stated at the very beginning of this article, habits are not formed overnight, whether that’s going to the gym or placating the Duolingo owl by practising your Japanese every day. To truly embed habitual behaviour, it needs repetition.

How long it takes to form a habit is a widely discussed and studied area of psychology, with 21 days being a commonly quoted figure, and others saying much longer.

According to a study by Philippa Lally at University College London, it takes 66 days to form a habit. In 2009 she recruited 82 participants, who were tasked to form a simple new habit, for example, drinking a glass of water every day with their lunch or doing a press-up after they brushed their teeth.

The results demonstrated that it took 66 days until these new behaviours were completed without needing to be thought about, Lally’s definition of a habit. However, there was a significant variation, with 95 per cent of participants forming the new habit somewhere between 18 and 254 days.

To reshape human behaviour and develop lasting habits, there is more needed than short bursts of activity, and sustained repetition is required.

In Conclusion

Marketers can find a lot of help and evidence-based advice from behavioural science, especially when it comes to developing consumer buying habits. To successfully alter your customer’s buying habits, do not forget the three essential key ingredients – a trigger, a reward, and sustained repetition.

If you’re looking for help developing new consumer habits with your marketing, then get in touch with Tonic today.

Phone with TikTok logo
Blogs, Digital

Why You Should Consider Advertising On TikTok

It might be more well-known as the procrastination tool of teens, taking up viral dancing and lip-synching challenges, but if you’re considering leveraging the exceptionally popular video creation and sharing app TikTok for your business or organisation, you’re certainly not alone!

Since the launch of TikTok in 2016, the app has been downloaded 3.5 billion times worldwide, and was the most downloaded app of 2021, beating rivals Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.

We have a look at why you should be taking a closer look at the TikTok revolution, which has made a profound impact on culture in the modern world, and why savvy businesses are looking to get a piece of the action! But first…

What is TikTok Marketing?

TikTok marketing is a form of social media marketing that uses the popular app to promote your brand, product or service, incorporating a variety of tactics, for example, influencer marketing, TikTok advertising, and creating organic viral content.

TikTok marketing can help build brand awareness, develop and build engaged communities, advertise and sell your products and/or services to targeted audiences, and generate feedback from audiences and customers.

Let’s have a closer look at the three main types of marketing used by brands on TikTok.

TikTok Influencer Marketing

TikTok influencer marketing has become a major part of the app, with mega-stars such as former competitive dancer Charli D’Amelio and her viral dance videos, actress and social media personality Addison Rae , and Zach King with his videos of magic tricks, all making a huge impact on the success of businesses with their tens of millions of viewers.

However, you don’t need a high-profile and highly-paid influencer for a successful marketing campaign. There are always rising stars and influencers who better fit your niche.

Some of the biggest viral successes have been accidental, such as when TikTok user Nathan Apodaca aka @420doggface208 posted a video of himself riding his longboard, sipping Ocean Spray cran-raspberry juice to a soundtrack of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, kick-starting the #Dreamschallenge hashtag, and significantly boosting sales of Ocean Spray and streams of Fleetwood Mac.

Creating Your Own TikToks

Creating your own TikTok videos can give you the most freedom. Simply create your own Business TikTok account and profile, and start creating and posting your own organic content, whether it’s demonstrating your products, day-to-day life in the office, or taking up the many dance challenges.

You can always find a wealth of inspiration on the app by browsing the For You section. Just remember you’re supposed to be working and looking for inspiration, not getting lost in procrastination! Well, maybe a little, for research!

TikTok Advertising

TikTok advertising is typically promoted, full-screen video content that a brand pays to show to a targeted audience. TikTok ads are another form of social media marketing used to help increase awareness about the advertiser, or to help sell a product or service.
TikTok advertising can potentially put your brand, service, or product in front of almost 900 million people over the age of 18, a whopping 18 per cent of all adult internet users.

The average TikTok user spends around 20 hours per month browsing the app, opening it an average of 19 times per day, and 64.4 per cent of users are aged between 20 and 49, according to the latest TikTok user demographics and statistics.

It can be an incredibly lucrative platform to leverage, particularly if you are marketing to females, who make up 57 per cent of all users.

TikTok for Business

The app launched its TikTok for Business hub in 2020, and business users can add more information to their profiles and access real-time metrics and audience insights.

Once you have created an account, it can be switched to a business account in the settings (Settings and Privacy > Manage Account > Account Control > Switch To Business Account), then choose the category that best describes your business, and then add your website and business email address to your profile.

Advertising on TikTok

Paying for advertising on TikTok is a great way to get your brand, product or service in front of a growing audience, without taking any risks with an influencer that may or may not provide a good ROI.

There are various types of ads available on the app:
In-feed ads: Adverts created by the user, including image ads, video ads, and spark ads, which boost the content you already have. There are also pangle ads and carousel ads, which are only available through the app’s Audience Network and News Feed Apps respectively.
Ads for managed brands: similar to in-feed ads, but with additional formatting after consulting with a TikTok sales representative.
Top View ads: unskippable ads that appear when the app is opened, similar to YouTube.
Branded Hashtag Challenges: actionable hashtags connected to your brand.
Branded effects: stickers and filters connected to your brand.

If you plan on advertising on TikTok, you will need an ad account for TikTok Ads Manager by visiting ads.tiktok.com and clicking Create Now and filling in the necessary information.

Top Tips for TikTok Marketing

Trends on TikTok can often appear random, with some never taking off at all, while others seem to run and run. Sadly, there’s no guaranteed marketing strategy to aim for, but there are some legitimate tips that can help your brand make an impact on the app.

Familiarise yourself with TikTok

TikTok is a different social network with unique trends, behaviours and features than Instagram or Facebook, so it would be wrong to approach marking on the platform as you would with others.

Do allow yourself to fall down the rabbit hole of TikTok videos to help explore all the different features available, make note of the currently trending filters, effects, and songs, and keep an eye out for the Branded hashtag Challenges, usually involving a song, a dance, or a task that users are challenged to recreate.

Study up on the TikTok algorithm, as understanding how the app ranks and displays videos can help inform your content, hashtag, and engagement strategies. You can learn all about this and more at the TikTok Business Learning Center.

Define your target audience

Before you begin creating and posting content, you need to determine who you are hoping to reach. Take some time to research the TikTok demographics to help to identify who would be interested in learning more about your brand.

The app is very popular with teens, but it’s far from a teens-only app, as they only make up a quarter of all users. The 20-29 age group are not far behind them, and the 30-39 and 40-49 age groups make up a significant percentage of users too.

Once you have found your potential audience, it’s time to research what content they are more likely to engage with and start developing content ideas for your brand.

Check out the competition

Whether or not you have competitors on TikTok, seek out four or five similar brands to see what they are up to. Learn from what works and what doesn’t work for them, and it might be helpful to use the SWOT framework to determine their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Keep in mind that TikTok is first and foremost a creator-led platform, so don’t forget to include the app’s stars and influencers in this exercise, especially any who fit your niche.

Set goals

It’s perfectly fine to create content for TikTok that’s purely for fun, but it would be beneficial to set goals that can be aligned with your overall business objectives. This could include reaching a new audience, boosting brand or product awareness, and developing stronger bonds with customers.

It may be helpful to use the SMART goal framework, and set goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. You can access the analytics on TikTok via the Creator Tools to find the metrics to help measure your goals and track your progress.

Post regularly

Develop a content posting calendar and stick to it for a successful social media marketing strategy.

Feel free to experiment

There’s no magic formula for creating content that will go viral, but make sure you have space to have fun, go with the flow and be experimental with your creativity.

If something doesn’t work, learn from it and move on to the next, but if something goes viral by accident, whether you’re riding a skateboard, singing, and enjoying a refreshing beverage or not, roll with it, get in on the joke, and make the most of it.

TikTok is not a platform to take yourself seriously, so have fun!

Looking for help with TikTok marketing?

If you’re looking for help with your social media marketing, content creation, or strategy, then reach out to Tonic today for help, advice, and tips!

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Blogs, Company, News from Tonic

Why Big Businesses Are Using Micro Agencies

It’s fairly logical to think that it’s the big-name marketing agencies that secure all the big contracts with the famous big brands. With offices around the country, if not around the world, procurement teams ready to impress household name clients, and a portfolio of global marketing, surely they’re the go-to for big brands and businesses?

However, all is not as cut and dry as it may seem, as more and more brands are taking their business to smaller, micro-agencies, less bloated by bureaucracy and huge departments.

Some brands have been actively searching for these leaner micro agencies, small collectives of marketing experts and creatives, and disparate and diverse remote-working colleagues who are looking to disrupt the normal order of things by providing something quite different.

Small, But Scrappy!

These micro agencies are unconventional in their organisational hierarchy and how they operate, which gives them the freedom to seek out new ways of working, explore different approaches and processes, and with a smaller core team, faster and more efficiently.

A micro-agency is typically a small group of leaders, veterans of the larger national/multinational agencies, with all the right connections to freelancers and contractors of all the necessary disciplines – a little black book of the go-to people with the right skills and experience to get the job done fast.

Whatever it is you need – copy, graphic design, photography, marketing strategies and campaigns, advertising, digital or print – they’ll know the right person for the job, someone they trust to get it done right, on time and budget. Most of the time, these contacts would not be available via the larger agencies; it’s about making the right connections for the job in hand, not keeping everything in-house.

There’s little complacency in a small agency, not only do they want your work, they’ll fight hard for it, they’ll stake their reputation on it, and they know you’ll be back for their services again.

Pandemic Positives

Pre-pandemic, brands wanted to see the big agencies, with their football and pool tables, beers on a Friday afternoon in the open plan, brightly coloured office, with bean bags, quiz nights, and the trendy office ‘culture’ fostered by all the big name agencies, eager to stand apart from the rest while doing just the same as the next big agency down the road.

In the post-Covid landscape, the industry has changed and adapted. Clients are not as impressed by all the fancy office culture culture, or even the need to have to travel for meetings when it could be easily done on Zoom, and there is far less importance on how or where you work.

This became a huge levelling-up moment for the smaller brands, placing them on the same playing field as the big names.

The micro-agencies are still happy to see global brands go to the full-service big global agencies, with an army of corporate copywriters and campaign planners. Many of the smaller agencies provide a scaled-back service, narrowing down their specialisms and positioning themselves as experts in their particular niche, giving themselves an edge over the bigger firms.

Work With The People Who DO The Work

With a smaller agency, brands find they are working directly with the people who do the work, not a senior partner in the firm who essentially acts as a go-between. It makes it easier for micro-agencies to become involved deeper with the brand, with enhanced access and agility.
While many big agencies are still trying to navigate the post-pandemic world and remote and hybrid work, micro-agencies are already up to speed, already conjuring ideas and strategies on the fly, their inherent stripped-down hierarchy giving them speed and agility while some big brands are still trying to find their place in the ‘new normal’.

It all leads to a greater level of collaboration between brands and micro-agencies, more meaningful communication, and stronger relationships, instead of confusion and lack of context as the message gets passed from the client to client services to managers to the drones that do the work.

The brand gains access to the senior leadership of the agency and the people who perform the job at hand in one swoop; they’re not simply talking to the senior team who gets the credit for the hard work done by unseen juniors, and it’s this transparency that can be highly appealing to big brands.

An agency could have 200+ people working for it, and the brand communicates with up to 10 directors, sales personnel, and client services, but there’s only a small handful of unseen people who are actually working on the project.

With a micro-agency, there might be a core leadership of three or four people, but they’re also the ones with their hands on the controls. A simple project could take weeks with a large agency, as the gears of bureaucracy grind ever slowly, whereas your project is given directly to those who will get on the job ASAP with a micro-agency.

More Committed To Their Clients

A micro-agency will above and beyond with their clients, regardless of their size, while big agencies can often concentrate on their bigger clients, sometimes unfairly treating small to medium businesses as mere options.

Micro-agencies are always passionate about helping their clients succeed and providing a level of dedication and immediacy that can be lacking from larger agencies which are handling hundreds of accounts, all fighting for attention.

A micro may have as little as four or five clients that they work with consistently to produce fantastic results. Your success actually matters to a micro-agency on a personal level, not just on a business level.

Reasonable Costs

A big agency has more staff, more payroll, overheads, resources, and office costs, which inevitably leads to charging higher prices for everything. But there’s little, if any, added value to that; you’re not getting any additional focus, any more specialised expertise, if anything, you’re paying for the prestige of working with a named, branded agency.

With a micro-agency, you know who is working on your project, and they will be more upfront and transparent about their pricing. This transparency and familiarity can provide confidence about the work being done and the knowledge you’re not simply paying over the odds for a fancy office and the ‘culture’ employee perks.

Is It Time You Looked At A Micro-Agency?

Looking for a fresh approach to your marketing needs? A micro-agency could prove to be a leaner, meaner, and more efficient way of handling your projects and campaigns, with increased collaboration, and a personal and bespoke approach designed to meet any business’s needs.

If you’d like to know more about how a smaller agency could be of greater benefit than becoming tangled in the machinations of a large agency, then come and talk to us at Tonic today!

Blogs, Digital, Technology

Rise Of The Machines! Will AI Replace Human Marketers?

There has been a lot of buzz around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing recently and in many other industries. There’s talk about how AI bots such as ChatGPT will revolutionise marketing and sales, and even how AI could replace digital marketers.

But while the use of AI in marketing has been increasing, there is not a lot of information or data about how it could impact digital marketing in the coming years, as well as tech industry leaders calling for a slowing down in the development of AI.

So Why Is AI Looking Attractive To The Marketing Industry?

Marketing can involve collecting and analysing massive amounts of data, and AI can mine this data and better apply it to advertising and marketing. As many organisations gather more specialists in data science, the concept of using AI for marketing automation becomes increasingly appealing.

But will AI replace human marketers? Before any marketers begin throwing their virtual clogs into the machinery of AI like the 15th-century Dutch textile workers fearing automated looms would cost them their jobs, let’s take a closer look.

What Is Marketing Automation?

One of the immediate benefits of using AI is its ability to automate certain tasks, thus streamlining certain processes and more effectively measuring the outcomes faster and with less effort.

AI can identify patterns faster, leading to more accurate predictions to help with marketing strategy planning, better use of marketing staff, and saving time and resources.

But as to whether AI will replace real human marketers? The short answer is no. Certainly not yet, and it maybe never will.

AI certainly will prove to be useful, but marketing will always rely on creativeness, inventiveness, and originality when it comes to finding ways to better connect with audiences and customers.

Digital marketing will always need that human touch. Marketing requires storytelling and emotion, which AI will never be able to master or emulate. But despite a reliance on the human element, it may be a fact that we will all have to accept that roles in digital marketing will change over time, just as marketing roles changed with the digital revolution.

AI will lead to an evolution in marketing roles as we begin to understand it better and how to better utilise it to provide better digital experiences.

What Can AI Currently Do?

AI can be used to enhance and simplify aspects of marketing campaigns, as well as help reduce mistakes and promote productivity. Some of the tasks that AI can currently do include:

Automate routine and repetitive tasks – AI can be used to partially replace humans in some everyday repetitive tasks and processes, such as content curation (not creation), PPC as management, and replying to certain emails.

Compilation and analysis of large data sets – AI can be programmed to learn from experience and then more easily tackle large data sets which is typically a laborious task for humans. AI can recognise patterns quickly across data sets, provide predictions based on detected patterns, provide valuable insights about your customer base, and even predict future customer behaviour.

Create digital assistants – Many websites now use digital assistants, such as chatbots which can help give 24/7 customer service, albeit with limited capabilities.

Save time and increase productivity – The implementation of AI can save marketing departments valuable time and resources, which then leads to higher productivity, as marketers have more time to spend on creative tasks and more difficult tasks that need a human touch.

Allow for experimental pilot schemes – some marketing companies have been experimenting with AI by letting it write advertisement copy, banner ads, and email subject lines, conduct digital ad buying, and create buyer personas.

It shows that there is a lot of potential for AI in digital marketing, as long as it is seen as a beneficial tool and not the T-800 Terminator sent back from the future by Skynet to take your job.

What Can’t AI Currently Do?

However, it will be a relief to know that there is still so much that AI cannot do, particularly when it comes to marketing and the human touch. Let’s have a look at what AI is incapable of doing:

Operate individually – AI is a machine, and it requires programming by humans, as well as needing to be continuously updated, and just like the everyday tech in your office, AI systems will need to be replaced when they become obsolete or the needs of the industry change and evolve.

Be creative – No technology can replace the human capacity for creativity or creative problem-solving. AI will always be limited to the data with which it is provided, and only able to draw conclusions from that data. It can’t properly edit photos, write original music, invent anything, or come up with fresh ideas.

Have emotions – AI cannot perform, show, or transmit emotions, meaning it can’t turn emotions into meaningful content that your customers can relate to along their buyer’s journey.

Make human connections – without emotions, AI cannot form genuine human connections. AI cannot be programmed to show empathy or be able to understand cultural and moral concerns.

Critical thinking – AI can excel in gathering and analysing data, but when it comes to developing strategies, it lacks the critical thinking that all humans possess.

How Can Marketers Evolve With The Introduction Of AI?

There is much that marketers can do to grow and evolve alongside the introduction of AI and make sure they keep one step ahead of the impending robot threat know how to utilise AI to their advantage.

Keep up-to-date with AI news and trends – keeping abreast of the latest development in AI in digital marketing will mean you will best know how to leverage it to your advantage. Knowledge is power, and power is knowledge.

Recognise the replaceable skill sets – Identify the skill sets that could be replaced in the future by AI, such as those routine and repetitive tasks and processes that are inevitably time-consuming and boring.

Determine which skill sets will never be replaced – Recognise which skill sets AI will not take over, such as non-repetitive, creative, and critical thinking skills. If you have experience in these, then turn your focus towards them.

Be prepared to adapt – You won’t be able to stop the impending wave of changes due to AI, but you can determine how they may affect you and how to adapt.

Be versatile – Ensure you keep your skill set up to date, and train on new technology and the latest strategies as they become available to remain versatile.

In Conclusion

AI isn’t coming for your job, but even without AI, industries and jobs evolve and change, and it’s important to remain aware and involved. Ensure you create value in yourself and your marketing skills.

At Tonic, we know the importance of the human element in marketing, so if you’re looking for the personal touch, outstanding client services, and a passion for results, talk to us today.

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Blogs, Digital

What is Content Marketing?

In recent years, you may have heard more and more people talking about Content Marketing, and how it has become a game-changer for marketing for businesses.

But what exactly is content marketing, and how is it different from other tried and tested marketing methods? Let’s have a look at both what content marketing is, and what it isn’t, and how you can leverage it for your business.

What are the benefits of content marketing?

First, let’s have a look at how content marketing can benefit your business.

Attract a new audience and grow your website traffic – helping potential customers find your brand can be a big challenge, but content marketing can help you become more discoverable to search engines, and help attract attention on social media

Create value for your audience – Content provided to your audience is not only useful, it can provide a message to the right people at a time when they need it most, which will make you an authority on that subject and create value for your audience.

Engage with your audience – Content that your audience finds relevant and useful will likely be shared with their friends and followers, and help develop further interactions such as comments and reactions.

Generate positive brand perception – Increased engagement with your content will help boost the awareness and perception of your brand, and people are more likely to make business with a brand they know than one they don’t.

Educate the market about your products and services – People are likely unaware they have a problem that can be solved by your product or service, and content marketing can help show them that such a solution exists and how it works.

Generate new leads – Visitors to your blog may be encouraged to leave some information about themselves, such as an email address, which can be a potential lead. The more you invest in content marketing, the more likely you will generate potential leads, and increase the chances to sell.

Increase the customer’s lifetime value – The lifetime value is the total value spent by your customer on your business. The more they buy and the longer they remain a customer, the bigger their lifetime value. By providing relevant and useful content, you can encourage a customer to remain a loyal customer for longer.

Content marketing is not a strategy

There are two main aspects of content marketing: To provide valuable content, and to persuade your audience to take a certain course of action, determined in advance by the marketer. Of course, there are various ways of measuring whether the content is ‘valuable’, and actions could range from signing up for an email subscription to buying a product or service, or much more.

But content marketing is not in itself a viable strategy. It would impossible to produce effective content marketing without first having a marketing strategy in place. You should only be producing content that is relevant to your business, that will interest your audience, and that you can write about from a position of experience and authority.

This means you need to know what your brand is, its values, who your audience is and what they want. Content marketing is used to further your marketing and business objectives, and is not a strategy.

How does content marketing fit in?

Content marketing is an essential component of any business’s marketing efforts, as it is key to maintaining contact with the target audience and generating the right results.

It is typically a set of multi-platform techniques that encompasses blogs, email, social media, and video, and is a key component of digital marketing.

How content marketing is used will vary from business to business. If your company has a focus on B2B, then some social media, for example, Facebook or Instagram, may not be suitable. But for other businesses, it might be where they can find their audience.

There will always be some platforms and channels that are right, and some that are not.

You will also need to consider your objectives. Are you trying to grow your audience, or use your existing audience better? In either case, content marketing can provide the solution, but how it is applied will differ.

Content marketing can make it possible to create an immersive environment in which potential customers can learn all about your brand, its values, your products, your services and how they will help solve their problems.

It can also create a similar environment where you can build your reputation and engage with your existing audience.

While it might not always be the case, content marketing is best suited to the ‘inbound’ approach.

What is content marketing for?

Content marketing is for more than increasing your SEO rankings, attracting new customers, or boosting your conversion rates, it’s also about developing a lasting relationship with an audience who will consume and look forward to your content.

It can be used for a variety of purposes, depending on what would be best for your company and your business objectives, such as building initial awareness and augmenting your brand’s reputation, or for more specific objectives such as driving and growing traffic to your website. What sets content marketing apart from other forms of communication is that it is generally longer- term, multi-channel, and involves two-way communication. It can encourage the reader to submit their contact details, sign up for something, or become more engaged with your brand regularly.

What is it not for?

Content marketing should not be used for sales messages, and it’s important to avoid blogging about special offers and such, as this can destroy the trust you have been fostering with your audience.

It isn’t necessarily about selling content. Most content will be free, while some may be for subscribers only, and some might be paid for. It’s important to know when to utilise each type and how to monetise it if you decide to do so, which will depend on your business model and your current situation in terms of brand awareness and engagement.

It’s not really about SEO and keywords. There is a lot of value in having SEO-friendly digital content, but it’s important to avoid pushing the boundaries. One of the key parts of content marketing is building trust, and you cannot write for robots and expect humans to be excited about it.

Never underestimate your audience, they will know when an article or web page is there simply to game the system.

It’s not for converting every single lead. It might be debated that each sign-up you achieve through your content is a potential lead, and while it is true that they have shown they are interested in your content, it does not necessarily mean they are interested in your other services or products.

If you start trying to close each contact immediately, then your inbound marketing approach becomes outbound, and once again, can erode the trust you have been developing.

Where to start with content marketing?

If you’re looking to develop a well-planned and considered content marketing programme for your business, then talk to the team at Tonic today!

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Blogs, Digital, Marketing Plan, Out of home

A Guide To Marketing Terms For Beginners

Whether you’re getting your start-up venture off the ground or seeking to grow your established company, marketing is an essential part of every business. But if you’re not a marketing professional, there can be an awful lot of acronyms and terms flying around, and trying to keep up can make your head spin!

But don’t worry, if you don’t know your CTA from your CMS or your buyer persona from your brand awareness, we’re here to help! The number of terms and acronyms seems to grow every day, but we have compiled some of the most common terms, abbreviations, and concepts into a handy glossary for you.

Basic marketing terms

Lead

A lead is a potential buyer who has engaged with a brand previously and has a likelihood of making a purchase in the near future.

Content
Content refers to any piece of information that has been created to be seen by an audience, and typically includes blog posts, email newsletters, social media posts, videos, and direct mail.

Infographic

Infographics are a type of content (see above) that presents statistics, data, and other information
in an easy-to-understand and well-designed image.

Analytics

Analytics in marketing is the process of analysing data so that the ROI (return on investment – see below) of a specific marketing activity or campaign can be determined. Marketers also use the term analytics when referring to the dashboard or system they use to track and review this data.

Brand

A brand is how a company is perceived and experienced by an audience and customers. Branding – the elements of a brand – include its logo, design elements, and the tone of voice used when interacting with customers and its target audience.

Buyer persona

A buyer persona is an imaginary customer that marketers target when they are developing ads, campaigns, and content. Buyer personas are not actual people but are built from the data of real customers. Marketers use these buyer personas to help inform the audience, tactics, and tone of the message they are wanting to convey.

CTA (Call To Action)

A CTA is a prompt that aims to encourage website visitors to perform a certain action, whether that’s to subscribe to a newsletter, submit a contact form, or make a purchase. A CTA is typically used to help guide a customer to the next step in the sales funnel (see below).

Customer journey

Rather than it describing the bus ride into town to your retail outlet, in marketing, a customer journey is a phrase used to describe the process from when a customer first shows interest in a product or service to the point at which any interaction is completed.

B2B

B2B is marketing shorthand for business-to-business. A B2B company markets its products or services to other businesses.

B2C

B2C is marketing shorthand for business-to-customer. A B2C company markets its products or services directly to the end consumer.

Engagement

The relationship developed between marketers and customers is referred to as engagement. In digital marketing, engagement can be measured as actions a visitor makes online, for example, clicking on a link or posting a comment on a blog or social media post.

Qualified lead

This is the name given to an individual that marketers have decided is a viable prospect when it comes to marketing a product or service. This is determined when marketing efforts have found that this individual has shown interest in the product or service.

ROI (Return On Investment)

Marketing campaigns require an initial investment of time and/or money, and the ROI is the metric that measures whether marketing efforts have earned enough money to be worth the initial investment.

Sales Funnel

A sales funnel refers to the buying journey that potential customers take before they make a purchase. The sales funnel includes multiple steps, from the initial discovery of a brand right through to becoming a loyal repeat customer.


USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

Your USP refers to what exactly it is that makes your product or service stand out from the competition. This could be a unique feature of your brand or product, its superior quality, pricing, or more.

On-site content

This refers to all of the content that a company has produced and shared on its website. It is designed to provide a potential customer to your website with the best experience possible while visiting your website.

Off-site content

Conversely, off-site content is all the content that is shared away from a company’s home website and designed to be eye-catching and help draw a potential customer to the company’s website, product, or service.

Campaign

A campaign is a set of marketing activities that have been designed to achieve a specific goal, for example, increasing sales for a particular product or increasing awareness of a product or service.

Brand awareness

This refers to the extent to which a potential customer is familiar with your company, and the distinct images and qualities – the branding – that are associated with your company, products, and services.

Types of marketing

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing makes use of content and social media marketing to help attract new customers. This is the opposite of pursuing customers with the ‘hard sell’ or outbound marketing (see below), as inbound marketers develop relationships with an audience by meeting them where they are already in the purchase process, ideally, drawing them in to learn more about the brand.

Outbound marketing

This is the more traditional ‘hard sell’ type of marketing that tries to get the attention of potential customers by interrupting their daily lives with cold calling or direct mail campaigns.

Social media marketing

This is a digital marketing method that leverages various social media channels to help create brand awareness (see above) to help develop a relationship via regular interaction.

Email marketing

Content sent via email to current or potential customers who have subscribed to a marketing email list is email marketing. You’ll likely have received half a dozen of these by the time you’ve finished reading this article!

Content marketing

This is a marketing method that is centred on creating interesting, relevant, and consistent content to help attract new leads and convert them into becoming customers. See ‘content’ above for examples of what is used in content marketing.

Omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is the process of integrating all the different forms of marketing used by a company to make sure that a customer receives a consistent brand experience across all the various channels.

WOM (Word-of-mouth marketing)

Widely considered to be the most effective form of marketing, WOM is the oral or written testimony of a product or service from a satisfied customer to a potential customer.

Digital marketing terms
Landing page

A landing page is is a webpage optimised for lead generation. It is a stand-alone website page that will typically include a strong CTA (see above) or a lead magnet (see below) as part of a marketing campaign, such as offering a discount in return for providing customer information such as an email address.

Chatbot

Chatbots are automated tools now found on more and more websites and are usually used to address common customer questions. By scanning chat messages from customers, chatbots can identify potential keywords (see below) and topics of interest to be able to provide pre-populated messages. If needed, chatbots can escalate enquiries to a human representative.

Keyword

Keywords are words or short phrases that are entered by users into search engines to help find
relevant information. Digital marketers can then incorporate these keywords into web pages and
content to help boost their website’s visibility in search engines – see SEO below.

Bounce rate

This is a metric that shows the percentage of visitors who left the website after viewing only one
page. A high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be a sign for marketers to adjust
their websites so that visitors are enticed to stay longer and see more of the site.

CTR (Click-through rate)

The CTR is a metric that measures how many people click on an ad when they see it.

CMS (Content Management System)

A CMS is a type of web publishing tool that is designed to manage the content that marketers have created for their websites.

UX (User Experience)
UX is the design process of making a website or app easier for visitors to understand and navigate.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is an incentive for potential customers to provide their information, such as a discount code or a free eBook download.

Clickbait

We’ve all seen clickbait on social media, where content creators try to manipulate individuals to get them to click a link. It typically uses provocative titles to pique the interest of viewers. Marketers Use This One Weird Trick That Will Instantly Boost Your Engagement!

Social proof

This is a psychological phenomenon in which people are more likely to trust a brand or make purchases if they have seen positive reviews or news from their peers on social media.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

SEO is the process of using keywords and other strategies to help boost the visibility of a website to search engines and increase the likelihood of a website or specific web page being among the first shown in a list of each engine results.

An ever-growing list

As mentioned, the number of terms and acronyms in marketing continues to grow, and like many trends, some will stick around, while others may simply vanish before they gain any traction. But we hope we have helped clear up some of the most common forms of marketing lingo for you here.

If you’re looking for no-nonsense marketing and don’t want to feel left out of the loop when growing your business, then come and talk to Tonic today!