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The innate power of social media is that it’s the common thread between all the disparate elements of a fully formed marketing strategy. It brings everything together and provides audiences with opportunity to interact with all of your material. Your social media marketing plan should intersect with all other mediums.
Your social media accounts are a nexus for promotions, public relations, customer retention, and new customer acquisition. It is however, easy to forget that social media is the tool, rather than the end. You still need other types of digital marketing, and even if you’re a digital agency, you still need physical marketing.
There’s a reason that Amazon prints their logo on delivery boxes, there’s a reason Dollar Shave Club sends branded swag with their shipments, and there’s a reason why so many successful brands run physical giveaways on social media.
Brand recognition is an ongoing task that continues after customers have engaged. Today we’re going to look at the ways you can leverage a combination of physical and digital logo placement to re-orient the attention of existing customers and cultivate new ones.
Designing a Logo People Want to Show Off
Your logo isn’t just representative of your brand, but of the unique preferences and feelings of your target audience. A logo design should be part of the process of connecting with the mindset of the audience group you serve. With that, ShieldCo Art will be a big help to make your brand stand out!
Logo designs incorporate a dizzying number of elements of design and psychology including colors, font, negative space, and require difficult decisions. Should you use your full company name, initials, or go with a representative image? Is the name itself the logo or is it combined with an image? What color palette best expresses the values of your company? Should the logo evoke a modern style, a grungy hip-hop vibe, an artsy sweeping feeling, or any number of other artistic directions?
All of these questions will depend on your target audience, but there are a few general principles to apply. Generally, unless you’re already an iconic brand, it’s a good idea to incorporate your business name into a logo. People are less likely to discuss an image if they don’t immediately associate it with a business or product, and that immediate association is pretty much the whole point of logos. If you do choose to use an image and no words, make the image evocative of your name or business in a unique way, like Apple’s logo. Don’t be afraid, however, to make your name the logo. It’s good enough for Coca Cola and Amazon.
Remember that if you’re putting your logo out there in the physical world, it’s because you want people to display it proudly. The best value for your money in marketing is in interaction — so maybe skip passive ads and posters, and get people wearing, using, and thinking about company branded swag. If anyone is going to do that, they need to personally like your logo, and feel good about using it to represent themselves before they’ll represent you.
Raffles and Giveaways on Social Media
Connecting your logos between the real world and social media is about creating a continuous engagement loop driven by positive experience. People recieve a physical advantage to interacting with you on social media, which reminds them to come back, and gets them talking about it with their friends and family. This is a step in the process of creating brand ambassadors.
The key here is swag. Not just swag, however. Swag that people want. There’s no sense in giving away branded gear if people are going to throw it away because it just clutters up their life.
When you offer someone value, it has to be real value that they see an immediate point in. No one is going to enter a raffle for a few branded cards and pens. The good news is that it isn’t hard to find ways to drop your brand into people’s everyday lives, it’s just about offering some function. It’s a good idea to spend the giveaway budget on a few more expensive items than a lot of cheap ones. More winners doesn’t help you if none of them actually want to use their prize. So invest in something unique, bespoke (or at least make it least feel that way), and attractive to your audience. It might even be worth your while to partner with a company that creates a unique product and see if they will do a limited run of gear with your branding.
Securing Leads at Trade Shows
Trade shows are fantastic business opportunities, but the problem is that everyone attending is looking for those connections and leads. Making an impact at a trade show is about more than having a cool booth, it’s about giving people something to go home with that they will actually use and that will remind them of you. Business cards and brochures are likely to get lost in the mass of other pieces of card given out by all the other exhibitors.
The swag doesn’t have to be nearly as expensive as with a raffle, but it’s still important to make sure you’re giving people things they are likely to look at again. Replacing your business cards with fridge magnets is one great way to turn a piece of card that usually gets thrown away into an item people are likely to want to keep. In fact, you can get your logo printed on pretty much anything these days, so something as simple as a bulk order of water bottles, lanyards, or any other useful item you can think of could significantly improve your trade show game.
Freebies For Employees and Documenting Company Spirit!
Even if you’re a small sized company, employees themselves can be great ambassadors. If you’re great to work for, often times employees want everyone to know it! Bragging about jobs is a relatively common go-to for smalltalk. Most people like to appear successful, and wearing or using company branded gear with pride can help to motivate some of those conversations. If you’ve got a great culture, enable your employees to show it off!
A company event or get-together with everyone sporting your logo makes for great photos on social media. Combining these events with specific social media campaigns helps connect your online presence with your local community presence, especially if you do company volunteering days!
On volunteer days: The key here is to make the most of opportunities to grab some name recognition. No one likes cynical marketing, but if you’re doing good work, it’s not unfair to want people to know about it. Just make sure you put a focus on the work and the cause, and signal boost the people you’re helping alongside your own company. Give people interested in the charity or issue a reason to follow you on social media by providing good information there, and then engage them in the world by displaying your logo with pride while you do good work.
The fact is that social media can be as integrated or separated from your other marketing and PR efforts as you make it. A great way to generate and secure leads is to make sure your brand identity is shared across all mediums. Logos in and of themselves don’t create sales. They do, however, jog memory, create recognition, and bring up associated experiences. Make sure the logos are well placed, and that the real world situations surrounding them are positive, and you’re on your way to smarter marketing.
Guest Post: Ben Steele writes stuff: anecdotes, motivation, real talk about the freelance life and marketing
