Developing a strategy to optimize your Facebook page for your business is an important component to your digital marketing efforts. You should approach each element thoughtfully and take advantage of features that best align with your digital marketing strategy. Incorporate keywords for a fully integrated SEO strategy across platforms to ensure alignment between your keywords and business. In addition, you should accurately fill out all page info elements, so they appear accurate in organic search results. You should also utilize features to align with digital marketing objectives from brand awareness, engagement, or lead generation. Lastly, you should be engaging with consumers by utilizing features like comments, reviews, and Messenger. Making efforts to optimize your Facebook page and maximizing your usage of Facebook’s features will help you achieve your marketing goals, whether that be ranking higher in Facebook search results, increasing website traffic, lead generation, and more. Join us in exploring the areas on your Facebook page that could benefit from optimization efforts. 

Search Results

Before we dive into how to optimize your Facebook page, it is important to understand how the information on your page impacts search results, both within Facebook and search engines. In Facebook search results, Facebook displays your Page Name, Category, Address, Business Hours, Profile Picture, Rating, and Description. In Facebook search, Facebook utilizes user location to generate results based on the user’s proximity. That being said, don’t be surprised if your business in Portsmouth doesn’t show up if you’re searching while in Boston. If you want to show up for a specific keyword, it must be incorporated in your profile. If you want to show up for a keyword in a certain location, it’s important to include geo-targeted keywords.

Facebook Search Results

In Google search results, Google interacts with Facebook to pull in information like Page Name, Location, Likes, Description, Reviews, and more to display in organic search results. Your Google My Business profile can be updated to include links to your Facebook Profile and your Facebook Reviews may be pulled into GMB profile. It is important that this information is accurate on your Facebook page and consistent with across platforms and your Google My Business profile so that Google can recognize all of them as the same entity.

Google interacts with Facebook to pull in information like Page Name, Location, Likes, Description, and more to display in organic search results.

Keywords

Just as you would with any Search Engine Optimization campaign, your process should start with keyword research. You should identify important phrases and terminology to include in your profile based on your organization’s goals and key performance indicators. You should use your regular keyword research tool to find keywords most appropriate for your business. Then, select keywords based on the goal of optimization efforts for your organization. For example, if your goal is higher brand visibility, consider including keywords with a higher search volume. Or if your goal is to attract a certain audience, consider including more specific keywords and don’t be afraid of those with a lower search volume as they are often less competitive, easier to rank for and often attract a more qualified audience. In addition, select keywords that align with your branding and you are comfortable including in customer facing assets. Be sure to check your keywords by performing a quick search within Facebook. Lastly, confirm that the search results returned present a relevant and valuable mix of content that you would want to see your organization appear within.

Page Info

Your ‘About’ section includes page info such as your Page Name, Description, Categories, Contact info, Location, and Hours. These pieces of information are critical to your optimization strategy. This information feeds into Facebook search results, so it is important that this info is accurate, up-to-date, and consistent across all listings and channels. In addition, elements like Page Name, Location, Description, Rating, and Likes can show up in Google Search Results and in your Google My Business Profile. It is important to include keywords where applicable, so your page appears for non-branded searches. 

Your ‘About’ section includes page info such as your Page Name, Description, Categories, Contact info, Location, and Hours.

Your Page Name should simply be your business/brand name, or the name that users will likely search to find your business. Your Description should be a maximum of 255 characters and will serve as the description that shows up in search results. It is important to include keywords here because this will help your page show up in search results, and ultimately help you reach your audience. Your Categories should be most relevant to your business, and you should keep keywords in mind when choosing your categories as well. Under the Contact section, you will add all the contact info you wish to be public including phone number, email, and website. Here, you will decide whether you’d like to turn on the Messenger feature. Only turn this feature on if you have the bandwidth to respond to incoming messages. If your business has a physical storefront or location, be sure to include your address under the Location section and ensure that it is displaying correctly on the map. Lastly, if your business has specific operating hours, include them under the Hours section. This info will also appear in Facebook search results and will say either “Open Now” or “Closed Now” depending on the time of the search. 

In terms of posting strategy, you should utilize the Pinned Post feature on your page to pin important posts/content at the top of your page so that it is the first thing users see when they land on your profile. This post should align with any current campaigns you have running or any current promotions you may have. 

See how Starbucks utilizes the Pinned Post feature on its own Facebook page.

Images

You should take advantage of images on your Facebook page to create brand consistency and showcase your business’s personality. Your profile picture displays at 170 x 170 pixels on computers and 128 x 128 pixels on smartphones. Choose an image for your profile picture that is easily recognizable as your business and is consistent with your brand. Your cover photo displays at 820 x 312 pixels on computers and 640 x 360 pixels on smartphones. Your cover photo should also be consistent with your brand, but this is also a place to showcase a certain promotion, current campaign or just more of your brand’s personality. 

View Saltwater’s page to see where your profile image and cover photo live on the page.

You can take advantage of the video or slideshow cover options. The video feature can be a great option for companies who want to showcase a short video or animation. Your video should be at least 1250 x 312 pixels and between 20-90 seconds long. For best results, choose a video that’s 1250 x 463, with a 2.7 aspect ratio. The slideshow option is another way to showcase more of your brand’s personality, and you can choose up to 5 images for your cover slideshow.

Along with your images, be sure to take advantage of descriptions and alt text for both your profile photo, cover photos, and shared photos. These are two great ways to include keywords onto your page which will help surface your photos in Facebook photos search results. In addition, Alt text ensures that your page is accessible to every viewer. You have the option to set your Alt text to be the same as your description. To change your Alt text, click on either your profile photo or cover photo. Then, click the three horizontal dots at the top right of your screen. When you see the drop-down menu, click “Change Alt Text” To edit your description, click on either your profile photo or cover photo and then click the little square “Edit” button at the top right of your screen.

Custom Username

It is important to create a custom username specific to your business so users can easily find your Facebook profile. This custom username also serves as your vanity URL and should include your brand’s name. Your custom username must be at least 5 characters long and can only contain alphanumeric characters and periods. However, periods and capitalization cannot be used to differentiate usernames.

See how Target’s username shows up in its vanity URL.
See how Target’s username shows up on its Facebook page.
Example Custom Username/Vanity URL

You should be wary of changing your custom username because once you’ve set a vanity URL, changing it will mean that all current links to your page will no longer function. This will create a lot of extra work for you because you will have to go through every webpage, email, deliverable, piece of content, etc., that links to your current username and update it to your new one. If you don’t search out and update the old links, they will lead to an error message that reads, “Sorry, this page isn’t available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.” Currently, Facebook will not redirect from one URL to another. In addition, there is a ton of SEO value through a URL based on how long it has existed. Therefore, the longer it has been living, the more authority it holds, so constantly changing your username/URL can negatively affect your SEO value.

Call to Action

Your Call to Action (CTA) button is located right below your cover photo. Your CTA should align with the goal of your business. For example, if your goal is to increase traffic to your website, you may want a CTA that links to the homepage of your website. If you want an increase in people booking an appointment with you, you may want a CTA that links to your phone number or other contact information. You can update your CTA as often as you’d like to ensure it is always up to date in aligning with your goals. See our table below to see how your goal should align with your CTA:

GoalTacticCTACTA Button Link
Increase website trafficIncrease visits to desired webpage“Learn More”Link to your website hompage
Lead generationIncrease lead capture through webinar sign-ups“Sign Up”Link to webinar sign-up page
Increase social visibilityIncrease follows on Facebook page“Follow”Link to your Facebook page
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)Increase appointments made“Book Now”Link to your phone number, email, form, or other contact info
Customer service responsivenessIncrease responsiveness rate“Contact Us”or “Send Message”Link to contact info or Facebook Messenger

Accessibility & Amplification

It is now time to publish and share your page. You should also share your page on other social channels like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. to promote it further. You can also share your Facebook page on your website and blog. In addition, your Facebook page should be easily accessible from all digital platforms where linking to social channels is applicable to promote traffic and engagement.

Reviews, Recommendations & Ratings

Managing reviews and recommendations on your Facebook page is a great way to interact with users and discover ways to improve your business with consumer input. By responding to comments or reviews, it shows users that you care about their experience with your brand, and you are open to receiving input to help better your business. Reviews/Rating can be pulled into Google Search Results on your Google My Business profile. Recommendations can elevate awareness of your business as they can be shared in users’ feed.

A Page’s rating is determined by multiple sources, such as the Reviews and Recommendations that people share. Only Pages that allow Recommendations show a rating, and Pages that don’t have a sufficient amount of Recommendations may not display a rating. When someone recommends a business, they can select a certain audience to share it with. Only Recommendations that are shared publicly are included in a Page’s overall rating. To see a Page’s rating, click Recommendations or Reviews in the left menu. 

Recommendations is a new feature added to replace Reviews. If your Page previously had reviews, Recommendations have been automatically turned on for your Page. To turn Reviews/Recommendations on or off, click Page Settings in the bottom left of your Page. Then, click Templates and Tabs in the left menu and click to the right of Review to turn the tab on or off.

See how reviews/recommendations appear on your Facebook Page.

Facebook Insights

The more insight you have into your audience, the better your Facebook engagement will be. You should utilize the Facebook Insights tool to learn more about your audience and how users engage with your page. This tool gives you a glimpse into overall page performance including data on audience demographics and engagement, metrics on how many people your posts are reaching, how many comments and reactions you receive on specific posts, and how many people have clicked on your CTA button, website, phone number, and address. To access your page insights, click “Insights” in the top menu of your Facebook business page. By accessing these insights, you will be able to see what kind is and isn’t working on your page, and you can optimize your Facebook page accordingly.

See all the features you can assess in the Insights tool.

Optimizing your Facebook page can prove beneficial to your digital marketing efforts by improving Facebook user experience and how your Facebook page informs Google. By taking advantage of all these Facebook features and making an effort to optimize your Facebook page with these guidelines in mind, you should be one step closer to achieving your overall marketing goals. From ranking higher in Facebook search results to increasing website traffic and lead generation, optimizing your Facebook page will help your business reach its full online potential.

Interested in learning how Saltwater can help optimize your Facebook page? Contact us to learn more.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, what was once a luxury to the modern marketing professional is now the new norm. Like many businesses in the digital economy, Saltwater has been fully remote since mid-March. While working remotely has long been a part of life at Saltwater, going 100% remote was new for us.  And while it can be a treat, working from home can take a toll on your productivity, and this is especially true in an industry that thrives off collaboration and face-to-face communication. With the help of some of our Salties, we gathered a list of our 8 Essential Working from Home Tips to increase the productivity of your team.

Designate a workspace.

In the office, it’s easy to get into the work mindset when you sit at the same desk every day to get your tasks done. At home, it’s important to create a designated space where you work each day, whether that be the kitchen counter, dining room table, or desk in your bedroom. Similarly to your desk at the office, this will tell your brain that when you’re in your designated space, you’re ready to buckle down and get working.

“I have found what keeps me really centered and productive is keeping my workspace separate from the rest of my living space. This allows me to keep my mind focused on business ‘as usual’ during working hours, and equally important, at the end of the day I can mentally and physically step away.”

Diane LaPorte, Creative Director

Adapt your tools.

When we were working in the office, plenty of tools and software weren’t necessary because face-to-face communication ruled the kingdom. Now, we utilize certain tools daily to facilitate communication both internally and with clients. It is important to analyze areas where your team may be lacking communication or efficiency while working from home and research tools that may be able to help your employees in these areas. For example, Slack allows us to communicate with team members more quickly than email and organize our conversations within channels based on department, client, or campaign. Zoom allows us to get as close as we can to face-to-face communication in the era of social distancing and take advantage of the screen-share feature to effectively share ideas and collaborate on projects.

“Slack has been my main platform for internal communication and Zoom has been primarily for client calls. I would like to start using the Share features in our Adobe Creative programs more, which allows you to share your artwork with other team members for review/feedback.”

Kristin Burke, Designer

Dress the part.

Your attire when working from home can really affect your productivity levels. It’s tempting to wear your pajamas all day, and I’m sure we’ve all been there, but dressing up like you would if you were going to the office has a positive effect on your confidence and motivation. “Dress for success”, though cliché, rings true in today’s work from home culture.

“Make sure “going to work” is treated the same whether you’re going to the office or staying home: wake up early, eat breakfast, shower, and get dressed … as if you were headed out the door. (And yes, that means real pants.)”

Jack Callahan, Marketing Manager

Communicate at home. 

If you are working in a noisy, busy household, communicating effectively with your family or your roommates is essential in ensuring you have an environment where you can be productive. Be transparent about your workload and plan ahead of time where you will take calls and work on time intensive tasks to ensure you have peace, quiet and privacy for your important meetings and projects.

“With lots of noise at our house throughout the week, I’ve worked to over-communicate to my family when I have meetings throughout the week so we can try to find a quiet place for calls.”

David Roy, Digital Marketing Specialist

Schedule breaks.

When you’re working in the same place you relax and rewind, it can be challenging to separate your life from your work. We’ve found that taking breaks is essential to our team’s wellbeing, which in turn, affects productivity. Scheduling breaks into your day can help you manage your time around those breaks and ensure you get tasks done before you reward yourself with some ‘me time’. Whether that be going for a walk, doing laundry, writing in a journal, or cooking a new lunch recipe, scheduling time for yourself will help you produce more meaningful work.

“[It is] important to remember that we are “working from home” and not “living at work.” I find scheduling a daily 30-minute walk keeps me productive the whole day.”

Kristen Walters, Director of Production

Understand when you are most productive.

Some of us are more productive early in the morning, while some of us peak late at night. Understanding at which point of the day you can perform better will help you manage your time and better organize and prioritize your tasks throughout the day. If you are more creative in the morning, schedule time in the morning for your more creative tasks, like writing or developing campaign concepts. If you’re not a morning person, schedule your important meetings in the afternoon to give yourself more time to better present yourself. While working from home, it is important to be aware of your time and structure your schedule, so you stay on track throughout the day.

“For me, being creative has to be separate from being administrative. There needs to be a clear divide in order to find creative inspiration.”

Adam Flaherty, Executive Producer

Schedule weekly meetings and catch-up frequently.

It is important to schedule weekly status meetings with your team to catch up on each other’s workload, client updates, company updates and any personal news. This allows for that face-to-face communication that we are lacking in our everyday work lives. These interactions are so important in keeping open communication with your team and staying up to date in each other’s lives both inside and outside of work. For example, our Digital Experience team here at Saltwater has scheduled our weekly status meetings for every Monday morning. We have found that this sets the tone for the rest of our week and gets us into a productive mode to start the week.

Be transparent about your time and availability.

Over communication to your team about your workload, when you are taking breaks, and your availability. For me, I like to fill out my Google Calendar as much as possible so that my team is aware of how I am structuring my day and can get a feel for my workload. This helps to communicate if a need more on my plate, if I’m stepping away for a bit, or if I’m super busy and need to focus on higher-priority tasks before jumping into something new.

Working from home can be a challenge, but it’s important to adapt in today’s ever-changing work culture. We hope that these 8 working from home tips will help your marketing agency remain productive in these unprecedented times.

Branding is as much a science as it is an art. The video above is an overview of part of the branding process at Saltwater: determining a brand’s color opportunity. There’s much more to determining a brand’s color palette than picking colors that work well together. There’s strategy involved in finding the color gaps in a market, psychology behind how people respond to certain colors, and creativity in building a way to own a brand’s chosen colors. 

Below, members of our creative team discuss brands that leverage their colors well and others that don’t. 

Which brands use their brand colors most effectively or creatively?

Diane LaPorte, Creative Director: Some of my favorites are the Tour de France, Target, John Deere, Tiffany Co., and Chanel, since absence of “color” can be more powerful

Dunkin’ is a good example. I’m not a fan of the colors, but you definitely recognize the brand.

Kristin Burke, Designer: Google. They do an excellent job owning their four main colors. They use all three primary colors (red, yellow, blue), with the addition of one secondary color, green. No matter what the application, whether it’s a department logo, application, platform, they use these four colors as a mix within their sub brands so viewers can immediately identify them as part of the Google family.

Kyle Mooers, Sr. Art Director: Coca-Cola, Ferrari, FedEx. Coca Cola and Ferrari are synonymous with the color red.

Jen Rygiel, Sr. Art Director: Coca Cola and Target. Also, Apple & Nike both use a colorless brand with great success.

What is a brand that could stand out more if it used a different color?

DL: Just about any insurance company. Also, Holiday Inn. In the mid-range hotel market, logos run the full spectrum of colors, so it’s not so much that Holiday Inn would stand out more as it would greatly benefit from having a slightly more upscale corporate color that better reflected the level of their accommodations.

KB: Speedway, the gas stations chain. They utilize the color red, which makes them invisible next to their larger competitors like Citgo, Texaco, Mobile, Chevron and Shell, who also use red. The only gas station competitor of theirs that doesn’t use red is BP (green and yellow). However, Speedway may have a chance to rise above their competitors as they were just purchased by 7-Eleven, the top convenience store operator in Japan. Whether the Speedway name stays or 7-Eleven decides to bring gas services under their belt, is yet to be determined. If the name stays, it would be nice to see some renewed branding efforts from their new owners. Article here.

KM: It’s a tough question because not all brands rely on 1-2 colors. Technically any brand could stand out more by switching colors—if Coca-Cola was pink tomorrow I think that would be highly noticed.

What is one thing brands should do more of when it comes to brand colors?

JR: I think consistency is most important. If a brand wants to depend on one color, then they need to stick to that color. Even if a brand wants to be colorless, then truly make it colorless and make sure one color doesn’t out-weigh the others because that focus color will become the brand color in the mind of the consumer.

DL: Brands should look at things in a slightly different way. An example of this is IndiGo, an Indian airline. Not only a clever name, their logo color is indigo (yes, the color is spelled the same as the name of the company). Even though it falls into the established “blue” category symbolizing the usual: air, sky, trust, safety (which you definitely want in an airline), it’s the twist of the name of the airline and the choice of color that makes this brand effort stand out creatively. It is one logo that actually made me step back and say “Wow, someone actually did some serious thinking here”, and a big part of that is the color.

KB: Brands should ideally stick to their brand guidelines and color palettes. Once that is established, then they can choose to evolve their brand colors and guidelines from there. If they do a complete overhaul then they risk killing their brand’s recognition. The last statement depends on the size of the brand. If you are small, stick with your colors and guidelines. If you’re big, like New Balance, go ahead and venture beyond your color palette, because your logo speaks for itself, no matter what colors you choose.

What is your favorite part of determining a brand’s color palette?

KM: Uncovering the story that gives reason to the specific color(s) used.

DL: Getting immersed in researching the company and its competitors and seeing where that leads, then developing a personality for the brand based on color. For me, watching how a color palette emerges and ties the brand together is one of the most satisfying parts of a branding effort.

JR:  I love when there is a true meaning behind the color palette chosen for a brand to make it have a story.

Marketing strategy should always come back to one question: does this idea forge a connection with our audience? This question is so important because, each and every time, it’s difficult to achieve that connection. Plenty of clever tactics and flashy content mask the fact that, when pushed, the brand doesn’t have a good answer to this all important question.

Connecting with an audience can be hard enough on a good day, but it’s even more difficult when you’re breaking into a new market: trying to get the consumer’s attention for the first time, competing with an established industry leader, or looking to change preconceived notions. Below, we examine 3 winning strategies (and some failed tactics) that companies used to market their way into the hearts and minds of new audiences.

Indirect assault on the competition

Going after a major competitor? No matter how many resources you can leverage, you’d be wise not to go after them head on. Instead, identify a niche audience that presents an opportunity for your product or service and build up strong brand affinity with them before expanding into a broader demographic.

In the late 1990’s, two different soft drink companies tried to move into the market, which was (and still is) dominated by Coca Cola and Pepsi. One was Virgin Drinks, a subsidiary of Richard Branson’s conglomerate Virgin Group. With a billion dollar holding company and an internationally renowned CEO behind it, Virgin Drinks went ahead and tried to steal market share, and shelf space, from Coke and Pepsi. PR stunts included Branson driving a tank through a wall of soda cans in Times Square, a “top heavy” soda bottle design named the “Pammy” (after model Pamela Anderson), and product placement on era’s most popular TV show, Friends. And the result? Some sales, sure, but Virgin Drinks was defunct by 2007.

Around the same time, another European soft drink company was also working its way into the market. It saw the choke hold that Coke and Pepsi had on shelf space in supermarkets and decided to chart its own path into people’s preferences. It found a niche audience in bars, where it was used as a mixer, and then in nightclubs where it was a caffeinated solution for after-hours fatigue. Any guesses what this soda might be? If you said, Mr. Pibb… you’d be wrong. This is the origin story of Red Bull in the United States. After cultivating a fan base amongst nightlife enthusiasts, it worked its way to corner stores and gas stations (where its small cans didn’t take up as much shelf space as other sodas) and finally into the hearts, minds, and grocery stores of the caffeine-loving, sugar-addicted population of the United States at large.

Walk the walk, don’t talk the talk

Sometimes your biggest challenge isn’t the competition, but preconceived ideas that a consumer may have about your brand after observing it from afar. Huawei, the Chinese technology company, had just this problem in 2000 when it expanded into India. While the Indian telecommunications market was crowded, Huawei’s biggest hurdles were brand-related: it was a B2B supplier trying to connect directly with consumers, Indians often perceive Chinese companies as being closed off and impersonal and thus hard to develop brand affinity for, and in general the sour relations between the two countries (including disputed borders, unsavory diplomatic relations, and armed conflict as recently as the 1970’s) stoked the Indian opinion that Chinese goods in general, and Huawei products in particular, were low-quality.

Huawei did have a card it could play, however: its $3 billion annual research and development budget. The company’s commitment and investment in making great products was not widely known in India, but Huawei had the bonafides to push back on the perception that it made cheap products. How they did it is the interesting part.

A typical approach would have been to advertise the fact that Huawei spent heavily in R&D, showcase some of their innovations, and flood the market with this messaging. Instead, the company made its R&D operations, and by extension its people more visible in India and let the company’s actions speak for themselves. Huawei established R&D facilities in Chennai and hired local Indians to fill 90% of the positions and worked with local companies to source materials. It took the same approach with the service centers it established in India. Overtime, instead of being converted via advertising, more and more Indians knew someone working at Huawei and had personal experience hearing about the company’s innovative operations and commitment to making good products.

Do your research

There are 4,300 Starbucks locations in China, and they’ve all opened in the last 20 years since Starbucks entered China in 1999. In case you hadn’t heard, the Chinese prefer tea. In fact, even up until 2006, it was hard to find a cup of coffee in China outside of a Western hotel chain. So, how did Starbucks see so much success? And how did they sustain it to the point of, by the summer of 2018, opening a new location every 15 hours?

Research told Starbucks that an advertising blitz could be seen as culturally insensitive, a Western affront to China’s traditional tea culture. Stores were opened in high traffic, high visibility areas and, most crucially, tea-based products were added to the menu. Additionally, there was concern that the Chinese market would not respond well to a brand like Starbucks, a high profile capitalist institution. More research showed that by the late 1990’s, a significant portion of China’s population was open to “Western style” as an indicator of modernity and status, and saw consuming Western products as a way to communicate a higher quality of life. In the years since, the success Starbucks has seen since has proven the credibility of these insights.

It’s easy to get distracted by Starbucks’ rapid expansion in China, but how did the brand initially convert tea drinkers into cosmopolitan Starbucks fans? It wasn’t the coffee. The brand’s success in other parts of the world had been based on providing a “third place” between home and work for people to meet and spend time together. In America, that meant replicating (and adapting) a café culture prevalent in Italy. As it turns out, China was also looking for a way to revitalize its own third place: the tea house. Starbucks understood what it was providing its customers, beyond coffee, and then did the research necessary to see how to apply that to a new market.

Few brands have a CEO like Richard Branson, or a $3 billion research and development budget, or the capacity to take advantage of growing demand like Starbucks has in China. However, every brand looking to break into a market and connect with a new audience can learn from these examples. Whether that means cultivating brand affinity with a niche audience before looking to expand (like Red Bull), showing your differentiator through your actions rather than telling about it in your advertising (like Huawei), or doing the necessary research to understand how to approach a new audience (like Starbucks), these strategies can be leveraged by any organization.

The mission of Women in Film & Video New England (WIFVNE) is to offer mentorship, education, and community to women looking to advance their careers as storytellers. As part of that mission, Katie Shine-Young and Tom Adjemian, two studio producers from our Motion & Sound Department, Anchor Line, are leading a panel designed to give female filmmakers the chance to see how the pre-production process comes together based on a script.

The panel will take place on July 14th form 4:30pm – 5:30pm EST. You can sign up for the event on the WIFVNE website. Katie and Tom will be joined on the panel by Kristen Kearns, COO & Executive Producer at Element.

Q: WIFVNE has a great mission. Tell us a little bit about why it is important to you both to be a part of that. 

Katie: If you are exposed to different cultures, people, and practices that are different from your own either on set or on screen then you are more likely to learn better communication skills and understand concepts that you may not necessarily be exposed to otherwise. The film industry is generally made up of caucasian males, that is just one voice we are hearing. WIFVNE allows for more diversity to be heard and that is something we are always striving to achieve.

Tom: It is profoundly shocking, disturbing, disappointing, and dozens of other adjectives that our industry isn’t more diverse. Creative benefits from diversity of thought. Not only because our audience is made up of different genders and ethnicities and beliefs and, yes, even Yankee fans, but also because without the inclusion of additional view points, creative becomes dull. That our industry doesn’t seek out diversity from the start is a remarkable shortcoming. I fully support balancing the industry, to ensure all views can be included and shared in the creative we produce.

Q: This event is focused on discussing the pre-production plan for a script that you wrote. What’s the script about?

Katie: The script is promoting a turkey delivery company. The script involves all the things that would give any producer stress heartburn; A-list celebrities, multilingual talent, animation, explosives, travel, a large cast, and so on.

Tom: This script is designed to discompose producers. It’s an amalgamation of the most time consuming, budget breaking, stress inducing scenarios producers face on the job. And it includes frozen turkey.

Q: What aspects of the script, from a pre-production perspective, do you think are crucial for the audience to understand. What are some of the things you want people to take away from the event?

Tom: The ultimate goal was to provide a unique look into the mind of a producer, both to give creatives and non-creatives a better idea of our process, but also to (hopefully) positively influence future productions. And to be clear, this isn’t about making the production easier. It’s about making the production better.

Q: How did you get your start in production? What were some lessons you learned the hard way?

Katie: I started out as a production assistant on set. My aunt had a friend who worked in hair and make up and wardrobe, and she helped me get my first job. I proved on-set that I was a hard worker and reliable, and the rest is history. One of the hardest lessons I learned is that complaining on set is extremely frowned upon. If a problem arises? Fix it. If you are uncomfortable, talk about it in a productive way. Don’t understand something? Ask for help. One day I was young, and dumb, and complaining that we had to work late and I was doing all the crappy production assistant tasks (I was a production assistant so of course I had to do those tasks), I overheard the AD say, “She either stops complaining and stays or continues to complain and leaves.” And that was it, I kept my mouth shut, showed up early, stayed late.

Tom: I have always loved making short movies and must have at one point bothered my neighbor with one of them. Although I’m uncertain as to what she saw in me, she suggested I could be a good fit at an ad agency in Philadelphia and graciously set up an informational interview for me. After I graduated from college, they hired me as a production assistant and assistant editor. I was an assistant to the Director of Production and to our agency editor. I was able to live and breathe broadcast commercial pre-production, production, and post-production on a daily basis. It was an incredible foundation that I still rely upon today.

Q: What is your advice for aspiring producers on how to improve their craft and get the jobs they want?

Tom: If you’re looking to add to your reel, don’t be afraid to get involved in productions in which you have little experience. Although it seems to run counter to the job, not knowing the typical stress points sometimes can allow you to move more freely on the job. Where others may stall, your unique perspective and experience may help push the production forward. As for getting projects you want, I recommend finding great production crews and sticking with them. You’re not always in control of the work you get to produce, but you certainly have more control in selecting those with whom you’ll share a 10 to 12 hour shoot day. If you like the people you work with, those shoot days won’t feel as long.

Katie: Learn about every department. You don’t need to be an expert in lighting or camera but knowing the basics of the craft is important. As a producer, you are in charge of making the creative come to fruition and understanding how that all comes together is crucial to achieving an ideal outcome. I agree with Tom, finding a good team to work with is important. You are spending a lot of time with your crew, you learn from them, they learn from you, and if you prove yourself you keep getting hired. As you learn more, you move up, you get more work.

Register here to hear more from Katie and Tom with WIFVNE on July 14th from 4:30 – 5:30pm EST.

As everyone struggles to find a new “normal” in a world suddenly far from it, advertisers are watching closely to see how consumer behavior continues to evolve. There’s been an abundance of information about some of the small things we can all do to support local businesses (buy a gift card!) and appropriate behaviors for shopping for necessities (buy what you require!) during this uncertain time. Beyond that, though, what are the subtler effects that the coronavirus pandemic will have on consumer culture? Below, we run through some of the online behavioral changes we have seen, expect to see, and suspect might stick around long-term. 

Search Behavior Will Change

The spread of COVID-19 and the necessarily lifestyle adaptations that many of us are and will continue to experience will alter our online search behavior. People are going online to search for things they typically don’t, as more and more people turn to online shopping instead of going to their local stores. Conversely, the things we were typically searching for may become less of a priority over the next few months. 

In general, volumes are up with increased time being spent on websites and social media while people are staying home and turning to online resources for daily needs, news, and as a social outlet. Businesses will be impacted differently by this change in behaviors, but there is something every organization can do: utilize online channels to share updated, useful information for your customers. Keep your operating hours updated on Google, Facebook, and online directories. If the COVID-19 response is causing changes in business practices (to-go only, limited volumes, etc), let your audience know and provide a timetable for your next update. 

Be sure to communicate the following: 

Additionally, encourage your leadership to step out from behind your brand. If your organization has an important update to share, encourage your leadership to be the ones to provide it. If possible, use video to share the message and give your community a chance to make a connection with the decision makers at your organization.

Around the world, people’s lives will be different over the coming months. The role that brands and businesses play in their lives will also be different, at least  for the time being, and that’s beyond anyone’s control. The best thing any brand can do is to stay up to date on how events are unfolding in your location and your industry, stay transparent and update your customers as your business makes changes and decisions, and listen to the feedback your community is providing.

That’s what Saltwater will be doing as well. You can watch this space, as well as our social channels, for updates. And feel free to get in touch on social media or by emailing us at info@saltwaterco.com.

Just like all of you, the team at Saltwater is currently working in real time to figure out the best way to handle the effects of COVID-19 on our organization, our clients, and our communities. In this post, we are providing an update for our clients on how we’ll be working the next few weeks and a reminder of some of the tools at our disposal to help you communicate effectively with your customers. 

The majority of the Saltwater team will be working from home for at least the next two weeks. If you are looking to speak with a member of the team while we’re away from our desk phones, contact them via email first. If it’s urgent, indicate that in the email’s subject line. As always, we’re available to our clients via cell phone as well. If you don’t have the cell phone number for your Producer or another member of the team, we’d be happy to provide it. As of March 30th, we’ll reassess the need to work remotely and we’ll provide an update to our clients and here on our blog as needed. 

In the meantime, Saltwater Collective is fully operational.

We’re here to help you reach your customers and your communities with the messages and updates they need from you. As your marketing and advertising partner, we are here to help.

And one way we can do that right now is by facilitating any Creative changes you need for current ad campaigns.

We can handle quick changes in messaging. If your organization is looking to change the creative you have in market, whether that is due to updates in your offerings relative to COVID-19 or just a new message to your consumers in this uncertain time, we can do that. 

The exact timeline and process for updating creative will depend on multiple factors, and changing out a digital ad will be a lot faster than swapping out a billboard. But here are some standard creative update timelines for typical placements:

If you’re a Saltwater client and have questions about any creative changes, contact us today.

Places have personality.

Try this: compare the perceptions and emotions you have towards places that you like to visit against those you have towards the products you buy or the services you use. Do you have a bit more affinity towards your next vacation destination than your next pair of shoes? Places may in fact be some of the most important brands in a consumer’s life.

Tuck that thought away. We’ll come back to it.

Successful tourism marketing relies on a few key ingredients in the age of social media:

While executing this is of course harder than it sounds, do you see the problem here? 

Everything relies on content, and the production of this content is largely out of the destination’s control. (This is not unique to the tourism industry, but that’s where we’ll focus today.) 

UGC is totally outside of a brand’s creative control, for obvious reasons. And even if Influencers or Press trips have a strict itinerary and perfectly crafted experiences to take part in, the content they are shooting, writing, publishing, and sharing is still coming through the lens of their brand (in the case of an Influencer) or the voice of their publication (in the case of Press). While that is a crucial part of the success of those partnerships, it doesn’t give the destination the chance to speak for itself. These two streams of content are not enough. 

Places have a personality, but most tourism boards don’t let those personalities come through.

So, while these ingredients are key parts of any social media strategy, they don’t give you all the control you should have over your messaging.

The most effective destination marketers have already added another ingredient into the mix; they are producing their own content that aligns stylistically with the UCG and influencer content users are used to seeing. Here are some examples of this in the wild.

TOURISM IRELAND:

A leader in this space, Tourism Ireland has been at the forefront of social media marketing for years. There current brand hashtag, #loveireland, has a strong presence with 658,000 tags on Instagram and lots of very high-quality content. And having worked with some of the biggest names in the influencer space (like @bokehm0n, @lilyrose, and @thechrishau to name a few) they’re working in owned photography to feature the places that UGC and influencers just haven’t delivered on yet.

Take the screenshot below, can you find the owned photos?       

We’ll help you out:

While all the other photos credit a the user who took the imagery (best practice when using UCG or influencer-contributed content), these posts don’t contain photo credit. That’s our hint that they are owned content.

Taken all together, you can see that the same photographer probably took these images pretty close together, but scattered amongst the feed they enable the brand to feature the places they want to, when they want to, regardless of whether a recent influencer trip included that destination. And no endless scrolling through the UGC means that the social team has more time to engage with the community. A few owned assets mixed into the publication schedule makes for a more efficient strategy overall.

VISIT CALIFORNIA 

VisitCalifornia takes things a bit further and has been relaying pretty heavily on branded videos in their feed lately. Branded animations and content series (like the #California 101 posts you see below) set the expectation with the viewer that they are going to see high-quality content and that if they follow the account, they see more of it in the future.

While Tourism Ireland’s tactic allows it to casually insert imagery about destinations it wants included in its social promotion, what Visit California is doing allows it to draw a lot of attention to exactly the locations, experiences, and messaging that it wants to. For high profile events, seasonal features, or important local partners, this is a way to ensure that the content going out is just right and keeps all parties happy, without relying on sourcing UGC to hit all the right notes or boxing in an influencer with a restrictive brief. When supplemental video assets let the brand tell it’s key storylines in line with exciting UGC and high quality influencer activations, a destination is primed for serious growth and expansion into new audiences.

PURE NEW ZEALAND

Always ahead of the curve, Pure New Zealand shows us the exception to this rule. Every now and then they’ll post a contributed photo, whether from an influencer or UGC, but for the last 235 days they’ve mostly posted owned video content as part of their Good Morning World campaign on their main Instagram account.

The video below sets the mood for the campaign. And after a million views, we’d say it made for a pretty effective launch.

Then, with the video for Day 1 of the series, we see the format they’ve stuck to ever since.

With over 1.3 million instances of their #NZMustDo hashtag, they don’t need to produce their own content to have something high quality to post. But the Good Morning World campaign goes to show that what works best on social media is simply good content, well executed, that aligns with the medium. Waking up to a new message from a beautiful place like New Zealand each morning? That’s a great use of Instagram.

The rules we outlined above are what have worked in the past for destination marketers, but Pure New Zealand is an example of new and innovative ways to push these mediums to the next level. As social platforms and the audiences on them continue to evolve, so will the strategies we see gaining traction. But, one thing that will never change is the need to have the content at your fingertips to activate that strategy.

Without the content or the means to produce it, even the best tourism marketing strategies die on the whiteboard.

Contact us today to start creating the content you need to reach your goals. 

More and more, brands are getting their messaging across through subtler, less-direct means. Over the past few months, REI has replaced its catalogue with an editorially-focused magazine, Wistia has launched its own talk show, and Barbie has created an Airbnb account and rented out her Malibu Dream House.

None of these tactics present the customer with a clear path to purchase. Yes, there are some products highlighted at the end of Uncommon Path and Wistia has a video service where brands can produce similar shows. But if you were the marketer in charge of any of these ideas and your CEO asked you, “Remind me why we are doing this,” you wouldn’t be able to answer, “To drive sales.”

So, what is going on here? Why are brands doing this? We gathered a group of Salties to discuss this shift in brand strategy. Below, we dive into these three examples and discuss how brands are entertaining their audiences rather than selling to them; valuing brand affinity above brand awareness; and whether the quick viral tactic is better than the long-term content strategy.

On REI’s Uncommon Path


Brands are increasingly trying to entertain their audiences rather than just convert them. Does this work?

David Roy, Digital Marketing Coordinator: I think brands entertaining their audiences is working in a lot of cases. Today, we see a lot of ads on every platform we take to as users. Feeding our timelines with ads isn’t unique so brands are trying to differentiate.

I want to feel like I can relate to a brand, their mission, and their products before I am likely to buy from them. Creating entertaining content for the brand’s audience allows the audience to relate to the brand. I think this type of approach works especially well with ecommerce brands. The products help to create an entertaining story whereas a service may not be able to create such relatable content.

Mike Bjork, Copywriter & Content Specialist: I think it’s a great shift, because we’re reaching a point now where everybody is doing a little bit of content marketing. It’s no longer a differentiator; it’s expected. So, if you want your brand to stand out in the deluge of content that’s already out there, your content needs to offer more value, which comes in two forms: entertainment and usefulness. If you can create content that’s both, you’ll be sure to stand out, form deeper relationships with your audience, and fuel conversions over the long-term.

This type of strategy, I think, can work for most types of brands, but I’d say it’s a particularly effective tactic for brands that are capable of “owning” a lifestyle or mindset. REI, for example, can create such a variety of entertaining content because it helps build out this responsible, engaged outdoor lifestyle they epitomize. That type of approach would be harder for, say, a B2B organization that sells medical supplies. Content marketing still has a place in those spaces, but “entertainment” may not be as primary of a focus in that case.

Kristin Burke, Designer: I think rather than “entertaining” they are projecting their brand’s lifestyle. Trying to appeal to those who fit in with their overall aesthetic, as opposed to the masses. Jeep does this. When you buy a Jeep, you’re not just buying an SUV, you’re entering a secret club of sorts. Jeep owners wave to each other when driving down the road, highway, or trails. A simple nod to your fellow Jeep-er at the gas pump. You feel a level of honor, respect, and pride when driving one. And I truly believe you’re either a Jeep person, or you’re not. It’s that simple.

Christian Seeber, Director of Digital Experience: I can’t speak to if it’s working or not, but I know for me…if brands I interact with do stuff like this it goes a very long way toward brand loyalty (which I have a lot of once I am loyal to a brand).

Amanda Jonovski, Art Director: While I don’t have the evidence to say it is working, I want to believe it’s working. Building brand affinity causes brands to be more thoughtful and genuine in their messaging, as compared to solely building brand awareness. If brands are rewarded with increased revenue, then it’s a win-win situation. The strategy will work better for those brands that can easily tap into an existing lifestyle, activity, or interest (outdoor adventure, fashion, foodies, hygge, travel, etc.).

Mark Miller, Digital Marketing Specialist: I think it’s working. In my opinion, tactical entertainment leads to a positive association with the brand providing it. A more developed version of this feeling is sometimes called brand affinity, but it all starts with planting the seed. I think there are some brands doing this well – the first example that comes to mind is Red Bull. Their sponsored extreme sport events have built an energetic and fun perception of their brand which keeps them top of mind for me when considering choices for caffeinated beverages.

On Wistia’s Brandwagon

Brand Affinity is the feeling you get when you identify with a brand based on shared values. Brand Awareness is when a consumer has been introduced to, and recalls, a brand and its value proposition.


Can brands build awareness without developing affinity with their audience?

MB: Yes and no. The moment you become aware of a brand, you develop the smallest affinity for it; you have certain assumptions and ideas about the brand even if they’re vague and largely subconscious. That being said, after that initial introduction, brand awareness campaigns alone aren’t enough to build strong brand affinity, because knowing about a brand isn’t the same as having a deep relationship with a brand. The former is passive, while the latter is active and intimate. So to summarize: brand awareness campaigns do build a small amount of brand affinity, but to build valuable, actionable brand affinity efficiently, you need to do more than just make people aware of you.

KB: Absolutely. Let’s take Apple vs. Android for example. Everyone is aware of their options with both companies when it comes to choosing a cell phone. We see the commercials, the ads, the not-so-subtle marketing within Netflix shows now. We are aware. However, based off your individual lifestyle, you will likely choose one over the other and become a full believer in your chosen brand.

DR: I think brands can build awareness without developing affinity with their audience. However, I do not think this is a successful approach to getting conversions. Posting ads across social platforms, TV, and radio can be effective ways to extend brand awareness, but if the content in these ads isn’t engaging or entertaining it won’t build affinity. Brand awareness is a great first step to getting your brand in front of consumers, but brand affinity is needed to drive home a conversion and create a relationship with the consumer.

MM: Yes – I think it’s possible to build brand awareness without affinity. A good example of this are tobacco companies like Marlboro. I know of them and what they do but it doesn’t make me identify with their values or want to smoke their cigarettes.

AJ: Yes, brands can build awareness without developing affinity. But then the question becomes: how useful is that brand awareness if your audience isn’t making an emotional connection with it? Efforts put towards developing affinity will do nothing but increase, and more clearly define, brand awareness.

On Airbnb’s newest host, Barbie.


What is something that REI, Wistia, or Barbie should make sure they do in order to see success from their respective campaigns?

KB: Create a hashtag, Barbie! No, seriously. I wish Barbie had followed through on their dream house “giveaway” and made a branded video of the guests coming into the house to show their reactions to the house and all the perks. As a former owner of many Barbie’s I wanted some sort of resolution, or end story to this amazing experience. I truly would have loved to live the experience through the “winner’s” eyes. #bummedbybarbie, if you will.

AJ: Draw parallels, visual or messaging, between the content and viral tactics and the more traditional approach.


For brands just starting out with a content-first approach, what should they keep in mind to ensure their content leads to brand affinity?

DR: Brands using a content-first approach should put a focus on creating relatable and unique content. Storytelling allows the consumer to put themselves in the story your brand is telling. Let the consumers feel involved in your content. Let the consumers picture themselves in your brand and using your products. If the consumer can picture themselves in your Instagram post, affinity will start to build. The more relatable content you put out, the more that consumer is seeing themselves as part of your brand.

CS: Position themselves as unique and make themselves impactful (positively) in the world somehow.

MB: They should start with the story of their brand. What does their brand stand for, and what’s the purpose that drives their actions? Their content should then all funnel through purpose and should be written with strong voice and personality.

AJ: Stay consistent. Whether it’s your messaging, visual content, or grass roots approach everything should feel like it belongs. It doesn’t have to match. And really, it shouldn’t, or your audience is going to get bored, fast. But it should all feel like it could reasonably go together. Have some variety but set some boundaries at the beginning and stick to them.

MM: Quality over quantity. A well planned and thought out content strategy will always out perform a more frequent and lower quality content approach. There isn’t always something new and great to share and forcing it can have negative results.

What do you think about REI, Wistia, and Barbie focusing on building their brand affinity? And who do you think is doing it best? Let us know on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter

If you’ve ever worked in a marketing agency, you know what’s coming in the next few weeks: gifts. A whole boat load of them. 

The client gifts your team has planned will arrive; need to be organized, wrapped, and packaged; and shipped out to your clients. Certain team members will begin leaving the office with wine bottles they didn’t have when they arrived that morning. And if your office is anything like ours, buffets of chocolate, candy, and edible arrangements will develop in common spaces. Some enterprising staff member might even try sorting Lindt stock. 

It’s a season of giving, sure, but it doesn’t have to be a sea of sameness. After all, who is excited to get another package of oh-so-seasonal peanut brittle?

At Saltwater, we’ve committed to sending gifts that have a story and a purpose. While our organizational values of sustainability and empowering an active lifestyle always provide us a place to start, each year our gift ideas go in a slightly different direction. They all have a few key attributes though:

Below, we run through some of our recent holiday gifts to provide other agencies with proof that there is life beyond the chocolate sampler.

2015:

Surfboard-shaped, bamboo cutting boards.

2016:

Hand-crafted candy sushi (custom made for Saltwater clients), stainless steel chopsticks, Saltwater-branded tea towel.

2017:

Saltwater-branded Turkish beach towels with 100% of proceeds benefitting the Surfrider Foundation.

2018:

Reusable branded shopping bags and stainless-steel straw kit with cleaning brush and carrying case.

2019:

Something sustainably awesome!

Once you have your gift ideas picked out, here are some other things to consider:

Have you given any great client gifts lately? Tell us about it on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!

It seems like social media platforms are the only channel consumers are paying attention to. Ever feel like posting into the void and no one is there to hear you?

Too often, brands use advertising assets to fill their social media feeds and then wonder why they aren’t seeing the results they were expecting from their social marketing efforts. Well, this is because brands using advertising assets in place of social media content are using a square peg to fill a round hole.

The reason that social content and advertising need to be different is the difference in their application. Advertising content is designed to get across a single message, be seen multiple times, and drive towards a specific action. Sounds like a lot of the boring social media accounts you unfollow, right?

Social content, in contrast, needs to convey a range of messages and brand characteristics, be entertaining and inspiring but not necessarily requiring action, and crucially, must always be new and fresh. So, not only would advertising content be counterproductive when used as social content, but it would be prohibitively expensive to produce considering most social media strategies call for 4 or 5 or more posts each week. But no one reading this has tried that, have they?

So, now that we have established the practical difference between social media content and advertising content, and therefore understand that good social media content cannot be defined by the same criteria as good advertising content, let’s look at what makes good social content.

1. Entertaining
2. Aspirational
3. Actionable
4. Joinable
5. Pay Off

For more specifics on each of these criteria, read our blog post 5 Characteristics of Good Social Media Content.

With those attributes in mind, let’s take a look at a few different types of brands and why their social media marketing is so effective.

A Service App: Hipcamp

Hipcamp is an app that provides a directory of private and public campgrounds available to book around the country. You can find their Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts at these links.

A Consumer Products Brand: Tom Beckbe

Tom Beckbe is an Alabama-based clothing company for outdoor enthusiasts. You can find their Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts at these links. 

A Hospitality Brand: The Fife Arms

The Fife Arms is a 46-room hotel in Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park. You can see their Facebook and Instagram accounts at these links.

What do you think makes for great social media content? And who do you think is doing it best? Tell us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

In the ever-shifting landscape of social media marketing, content strategists and content creators are always striving to make effective content that will engage users. Any user of social media will have a different definition of what makes content engaging, but there will always be certain consistencies:

But for anyone who has gone behind the curtain to create social media content knows, those stipulations don’t provide a lot of guidance when your boss or your client asks you, “So what are we going to post on social media today?”

Looking for more social media tips? Try these blog posts:


1. Video Marketing Checklist: Tactics to Maximize Your Investment
2. Be Heard: How to Make Effective Social Media Content
3. How to Optimize Your Facebook Page: A Guide by Saltwater Collective

Below, we go through the five characteristics that we use to craft social media content. Applicable to any brand or industry, these are the characteristics of effective social media content.

1. Entertaining
First things first, content needs to catch a user’s attention. It needs to stand out on busy and competitive online content platforms. Whether they leverage beautiful content, humor, vulnerability, beauty, great design, important information or something else, the brands that earn user attention online are, at minimum, entertaining their audiences.

2. Aspirational
It’s important to differentiate between Inspirational and Aspirational. Providing inspiration, creating the urge within your consumer to do something, is nice. But it’s also fleeting. Providing your audience with that initial inspiration as well as the long-term aspirations to back it up is how to grow an engaged community. Your brand’s content should inspire your consumers to aspire to a goal.

That goal will be different for different brands. Some brands should motivate their customers to have all the gear they need to be prepared for their next great adventure. Others should inspire their customers to become better stewards of the environment. Still others should push their customers to get outside to reconnect with themselves or loved ones away from the day’s distractions. Whatever aspiration your brand provides should align with your brand’s organizing principle.

3. Actionable
When a consumer decides to follow along with a brand, via social media, newsletters, or catalogues, they are committing their time and attention. For that commitment to have real staying power, the brand needs to go beyond entertainment and aspirations. Providing actionable content is key. For most brands, this can simply be updates on new products, sales, maintenance recommendations, or curated accessory suggestions. But there are tactics beyond the basics, whether that means highlighting worthy causes they can support, producing educational content so they can get the most out of your products, or sharing curated information the brand has gleaned from being an authority in the space. A brand should provide consumers with everything they need to take action, to ensure they’ll keep coming back for more.

4. Joinable
Brand loyalty in today’s world is based on people feeling like they are participating in a community rather than yelling into the void. Whether it’s through events and causes, or a shared mission, or simply a hashtag that consumers can identify with, creating a feeling of belonging and community is key.

5. Pay Off
Whether it’s promotions, giveaways, or freebies, consumers want an incentive above and beyond the prior points to let a brand occupy the real estate on their social feeds and in their inbox. It takes time and attention to follow a brand, even passively, and brands need to offer something in exchange for that.

One important thing to note is that not every post you publish to a social media channel will do every one of these things, and especially not in equal measure. Overall, your profile (and more specifically your communications strategy) needs to deliver all of these characteristics. Sometimes your content will be entertaining or actionable, sometimes it will focus on making your brand joinable, and other times it will be exclusively about the payoff. It’s the job of the skilled social media marketer to keep all of these attributes in mind when planning social media content to ensure your brand’s followers keep coming back for more.

If you’re looking for some support in your social media content strategy or content production, get in touch. We have a few social media marketing solutions that can help.

Monday to Friday. From the 1st of the month through to the end. From January all the way to December. Time really does fly.

It flies even faster when you’re having fun, something we’ve had a ton of since opening Saltwater’s doors in 2009. But something special has happened over the past three years.

During that time, we’ve experienced some incredible growth. We’ve expanded our capabilities, our headcount, our client roster, and, as our inclusion on Inc. Magazine’s list of the 5000 fastest growing companies points out, our bottom line.

We’re proud of that. We’re proud of the team that’s been here to help Saltwater become what it is today. And we’re proud to say that we did all this our way.

Our way is a bit different. We’re proud to receive the recognition we have because we’ve done good work for good clients, because we develop unique, research-driven strategies and creative for each of our clients, and because we believe that success comes, for both Saltwater and our clients, from taking the longview. 

At Saltwater, we’re playing the long game. Our average client relationship runs 5 years, which is the same length of time as the average tenure of the Salties who work here. So, the same people and clients who drove our growth since 2016 are poised to do it again this year, and again by 2022.

So, thanks. Thanks to the team here at Saltwater that makes all this possible, and to the clients who keep giving us the opportunity to do what we love. We’re excited to keep doing good work for good people.

And Inc., we’ll see you again next year.

– The Execs


Too often we don’t see change until it’s already happened. If you had polled a thousand marketers a few years ago and asked the following questions, you wouldn’t have gotten a lot of “Yes” responses:

Looking back now, the fact that all of those things happened seems like the logical course of events. But very few people got out ahead of them and most of us are still playing catch up.

So, what other change is happening around us that we are too sure of ourselves to notice? Here’s one:

Anyone else notice how prominent the Thread has become on Twitter? (Also called a Tweetstorm, if you’re one of those people who fully embraces the technological degradation of our language.)

It’s everywhere. Like any tactic, some are using it to sketchy ends like spreading misinformation. But plenty of professors, political scientists, entrepreneurs, developers, and journalists, among others, are regularly using Threads to tweet out bite-sized but connected content that, when read one after another, reads a lot like…a blog post. This begs the question, is this the end of the blog post as we know it?

Because identifying change is only valuable if you can predict what the effects of that change will be, here is our theory: the increasing prevalence of Twitter Threads is going to cannibalize enough of the blogging world that blogging is going to become a less effective tactic for SEO.

Somewhere, Rand Fishkin’s mustache furrows in dismay

Here are some parameters for this future digital marketing hellscape:

 

First, the Tweet Thread won’t reduce the importance that Google and other search engines place on fresh, authoritative content on your website. People are going to just stop reading it. 

We’ve seen this happen repeatedly as new platforms come online or develop new features. There’s nothing preventing you from looking up photos on Tumblr instead of Pinterest, from posting your own photos to Flickr instead of Instagram, from reading news on the Boston Globe’s website instead of on Facebook or listing your resume and publications on a website instead of LinkedIn. People just don’t do those things anymore, so if you want anyone to look at what you’re posting online, you’ll need to post it where the attention is.

We’re not going so far to say anything will change in the way Google ranks content on search results pages (we are, after all, writing a blog post about the death of blogging for SEO marketing value). But if most brands compare the delta of their blog traffic from now versus a few years ago to their social followings now versus a few years ago, we bet they’ll be able to validate our hunch on this one. Here’s a highly scientific model of those trends:

Line graph explaining the effect of increased social media followings on seo marketing and blogs.

The user behavior of going to a blog to read information is going to be replaced with the impulse to go to Twitter for a thread.

What are the indicators that will tell us when this starts happening?

 

Second, the US will not be the leader in this shift. It will come from the developing world.

According to Hootsuite, 80% of Twitter’s user are from outside of the United States. Twitter is embracing this international growth with Twitter Lite, which is data friendly and geared towards the 2 billion people around the world whose smartphones are their only connection to the internet. The low barrier of entry inherent in posting a Thread on Twitter, compared to blogging on a website, points to quick adoption in places less internet-literate than the United States.

From a consumption perspective, Threads, if they catch on, could spread rapidly in places where social media platforms play an extremely prominent role in people’s digital experience. Currently West Africa and Oceania are places “where many Facebook users don’t know the app is on the internet, or have no idea there is an internet beyond Facebook.” (Yes, we linked to a Twitter thread. But so did the New York Times.) Quartz has a detailed article on these misconceptions also.

 

No, you aren’t going to see Twitter Threads (Threading?) everywhere the same way blogging took off in its heyday.

The content landscape is different than it was when blogging had its heyday. Social platforms in general have matured from syndication outlets to become content hosting environments themselves. In fact, the idea that Twitter threads will eat away at blogging is just a continuation of this general trend. Therefore, it’s a struggle within an ever-shrinking corner of the internet.

Twitter is not seeing the same growth as the other platforms in its cohort. While more people use the platform daily than ever before, monthly user growth waxes and wanes and overall growth for 2019 is predicted to be only 1%. One way to look at this is: the people already using the app are using it more than ever before, but Twitter isn’t bringing in new users. Various competing channels (IG Stories and Live, YouTube channels, newsletters, etc.) are still taking more and more of the online content pie every year.

 

Brands will be bad at it, and it will drive most brands further away from peer status on social media. 

Various factors such as platform changes, privacy concerns and the shift to messaging, and the rise of influencers and brand ambassadors that speak on behalf of brands, have driven brands further from the peer status they enjoyed with their consumers early on social media.

But one of the biggest factors ushering most brands back up to interrupter status online is the growing level of difficulty in sharing the same types of content as their consumers. It’s harder and harder for a brand to blend in on your feeds as aesthetics have shifted away from the light-hearted community feeling and curated authenticity of early- and mid-stage social media towards the detached, meme-driven irony of Gen-Y content. Twitter threads are just another arrow in the content quiver that brands will have a hard time emulating.

 

You’ll have to pay for it.

As Facebook leads the privacy and group-focused Social 2.0, expect to see your favorite tweeters go private and use Patreon or other means to get a subscription fee out of you.

That’s enough crystal ball gazing for now. Check back in 2 years and see if we were right.

Stock images are typically an unacknowledged part of marketing. Whether you’re looking for inspiration for a concept, an example of what something could look like, or creative for a campaign on a limited budget, stock images are often a part of the marketing process. And a good image is a good image, regardless of whether it comes from a stock image site or not.

iStock. Getty. Shutterstock. Adobe Stock. Whatever your site of preference, the experience is the same: keyword-driven searches with a lot of smiling heads and contextless photos littering the results. Every couple pages, an image sticks out that aligns with what you’re looking for.

But, on the stock photo site Unsplash, there’s something new lurking in those search pages: Ads.

They don’t look like ads. They look just like the other images returned for your query. But sometimes, when you scroll over a particularly moody kitchen scene, or an Instagram-ready flatlay, a simple “Sponsored” tag becomes visible in the image’s upper-left hand corner. When you scroll off of the image, and the “sponsored” tag disappears, you realize the account name and profile photo don’t disappear like on the other photos.

As we go to press on this blog post, Unsplash is the only stock image site that appears to be doing this, though if there are others that you’re aware of, let us know. The current advertisers appear to be Le Creuset, Curology, Square, and Boxed Water Is Better. Other brands and companies are putting their images on the site, like Haupes Co., Balkan Campers, Perfect Snacks, and Crook and Maker, but don’t display the “Sponsored” tags.

Our question, then, is this: is this a good avenue for marketing your brand? On Unsplash, people are scrolling through image feeds just like they do on Instagram and Google Images, and it’s become second nature to advertise your brand there. Where a stock image site goes one step further, though, is that other companies are then using your images in their advertising campaigns or branded content. With their advertising dollars! (Speaking of advertising dollars, we weren’t able to discern whether Unsplash is using a pay-per-click model or a cost-per-impression model. If you know, let us know on Twitter.)

For a brief moment, we thought these 4 brands, and Unsplash before them, had developed a great new idea. Then, we thought a bit harder about it. Below, we are going to walk through two potential outcomes (the extreme positive and the extreme negative) that any brand considering this tactic should think through. 

 

The Best Case Scenario

Let’s take Le Creuset as our example. In an ideal world, they flood stock image sites with beautiful imagery featuring their pots and pans in a subtle way, and appliance companies begin using the imagery in their Facebook ads, recipe sites post them on their Instagram feeds, and real estate developers begin using them in their marketing campaigns. An image with a Le Creuset pot shows up on a billboard promoting how a regional bank can help your happy family get a mortgage for a new home. Pinterest boards everywhere are full of images of beautiful kitchens with Le Creuset pots. It becomes so expected than any modern kitchen portrayed in advertising needs some classic cookware that provides a pop of color that counter top manufacturers, cabinetmakers, and interior designers are using the pots in the imagery they are producing for themselves. The pages of your favorite home magazines are littered with Le Creuset. Real estate agents and interior designers treat the pots as must-haves when they stage a home for sale.

Eventually, you walk into a friend’s house one day and see stainless steel Cuisinart pots on their stove and have the same judgmental reaction you do when a green text bubble pops up on your iPhone.

This is of course the best case scenario. A series of stock images are produced and become so effective when released that they establish your brand as a ubiquitous part of your niche. It’s like inception for branding.

 

The Worst Case Scenario

Now, the other end of the spectrum. Let’s say Le Creuset didn’t have the sweeping success described above, but their images do get picked up by a few brands to be used in their advertising. Among those brands, there are some unsavory ones: The White Supremacist Cookbook, a few suspicious mortgage companies, and a number of poorly written food blogs that rank very highly in search but offer little to no value to someone looking for a recipe beyond the degree of difficulty of Hamburger Helper. In other words, these photos are being used in places that are off brand.

 

While these are both intentionally dramatized scenarios, unfortunately your photos are more likely to end up being used by brands that are misaligned, or in subpar executions, or on websites that you’d rather not have your product appear on. It brings to mind brands that were receiving complaints that their ads were appearing on, and therefore supporting, fake news websites over the last few years.

Overall, while this is a very clever tactic and one we will be keeping an eye on, it appears to be less of an opportunity for subliminal messaging and more likely a chance for your brand to be weakened through what consumers will see as poor co-branding.

 

Have you noticed this paid advertising trend within your stock image search? Check out more from the Saltwater Collective Blog to learn more about industry trends and how they affect your business.

Google recently announced that it will be sunsetting one of the original Google Ads metrics: Average Position. This decision is in line with Google’s overall initiative to automate as much of the marketing process as possible. Although Google continues to prioritize optimization, will information be lost with the retirement of the average position metric?

Average position is now an outdated metric due to Google’s updated algorithm. Average position no longer indicates the physical position in which the ad was shown, but the position of the ad in comparison to the other ads being shown. For example, the average position of an ad may be one but that only indicates that it was the first ad shown based on the search terms. This does not necessarily indicate that the ad was shown at the top of the page and above organic results. Google’s algorithm only awards ads the absolute top position if it meets a certain relevance threshold. As you can see in the screenshot below, there is only one ad on the SERP before the organic results. This means that the ad shown at the bottom of the page is still considered to be in the second position, but is not seen immediately by users. Holding the second position above the organic search results is much different from holding the second position below the organic results. Unfortunately, the Average Position metric does not indicate the difference between the two.

An example of paid search marketing in google search results.

In reality, the only aspect that average position indicates is your auction rank. Because average position does not necessarily indicate position on the search engine results page, it can mislead clients and cause inaccurate reporting.

Although average position is being retired, Google isn’t hanging us out to dry. Multiple metrics have been designed to better inform marketers on what they are truly interested in, which is whether their ads are being shown in places that could drive more business. Four new paid search marketing metrics will be supporting this goal:

So how do these metrics replace and improve the average position metric?

Impression (Absolute Top) % indicates the percent of ad impressions in which the ad is shown in the first position on the results page. Absolute Top is the first ad shown above the organic search results.

Impression (Top) % calculates the percent of impressions when the ad is shown in any position above the organic search results.

Search Absolute Top Impression Share is the number of impressions shown in the absolute first position of the results page divided by the impressions for which the ad could have been shown in the absolute top position.

Search (Top) Impression Share indicates the number of impressions shown in any position above the organic search results divided by the impressions in which the ad could have been shown above the organic search results.

While much of this change may seem like semantics, the important takeaway for clients and business owners is data accuracy in an increasingly obscure digital world. These four new metrics will provide businesses with greater insight into which ads had priority visibility whereas which may have fallen short. This will help businesses create more informed decisions on which keywords to optimize for and which to pause.

While we’ll be sad to see the Google Average Position metric go, you can rest easy knowing that we won’t be losing any information in our reports and analyses due to Google sunsetting it.

Will your campaigns be impacted by this? Will there be a void where Google’s Average Position used to be? Learn how Saltwater Collective can help.

Furniture companies are opening their own hotels, luggage companies are publishing their own magazines, and sneaker companies are starting their own bars. Celebrities left and right are creating ecommerce sites selling clothes or home goods or both. Meanwhile, every time you refresh Instagram another lifestyle blog now has products for sale. And they can’t all be lifestyle brands, even though that’s how they are being categorized. Can they?

We’re going to figure that out, because it’s time to develop a stricter working definition of the term “Lifestyle Brand.” As we work through what that definition is, we’ll place ourselves in the imaginary board room of a fictitious hotel chain, Rose Garden Hotel & Suites, as they craft their plan to transition from a mere hotel chain to… (drum roll please)… a lifestyle brand.

It’s important to develop a clear understanding of what a lifestyle brand really is because, based on the wide array of products and services being marketed as lifestyle offerings in 2019, a company like Rose Garden Hotel & Suites looking to make this transition could start out with a cohesive plan and end up way out in left-field developing plushier bedroom slippers and a sub-branded e-commerce site selling mail order produce from their locations.

We’re actually kind of into that last idea, but to make sure we stay focused we’re going to outline some Lifestyle Brand Commandments. Without further ado, let’s get to it.

 

Traveler lifestyle brand marketing blog image

1. A Lifestyle Brand Does Not Lead with Product

(Hint: It leads with lifestyle)

While this might sound obvious, most brands will struggle with a shift in messaging like this. There will always be pushback when the suggestion is made to focus less on the products that a company sells and talk more about what inspires and motivates consumers in a broader sense.

But a lifestyle brand needs to communicate with its customers when they are buying a product or service and when they are not buying a product or a service. Let’s check in with the team at Rose Garden, who are in a meeting where the marketing team is walking the board through their 2 Year Plan to become a lifestyle company.

Board Member 1: “So, you’re suggesting we stop focusing our ads on our affordable rates, our convenient locations, and our indulgent amenities. Instead, you want us to tell people to come relax on beaches we don’t own, go to little local restaurants we don’t own, and explore the local area on their own without the help of the rental car, tour agency, and translator services that we partner with.”

Marketing Manager: “We still want to make our consumers aware of all those things when they want to buy. But what about right after they buy? The last thing we want to do is try to keep selling them once they’ve made their reservation, but we don’t want to lose them either. That’s when we can suggest things to do once they arrive, offer some information about food options in the airports they’ll have layovers in, or suggest some things to pack that they may not have thought of.

“And what about before they are ready to buy? We know that going straight for the sale is an easy way to lose a customer. So, before we can sell a room we need to sell the location! We can do that through inspiring their curiosity about the location on social media, discussing the best times to visit on our blog, or showing why visiting our location ensures a better connection with, and impact on, the local community than those big resorts outside of town.”

 

2. A Lifestyle Brand Focuses on its Community

As you might have gleaned from the first commandment, Rose Garden Hotel & Suites caters to a particular kind of traveler. Rather than the people looking for an all-inclusive experience, they target those individuals looking to visit local restaurants, explore the back streets, and immerse themselves in a new place. Obviously, Rose Garden Hotel & Suites didn’t create this type of customer, it’s just the segment of their audience that they are focused on.

This is important to remember when a brand is thinking about becoming a lifestyle brand, because the lifestyle that the brand will exemplify is not being created out of thin air. It already exists, and your customers are already living it. This is why the lifestyle brand must focus on the community that they cater to. The lifestyle brand doesn’t create a lifestyle, it reflects and amplifies one that already has a community living it.

3. A Lifestyle Brand Empowers its Community

Ok, let’s assume the meeting at Rose Garden Hotel & Suites’ office has gotten more productive, and they’ve identified the community they are targeted towards and have identified how the hotel can reflect that community’s lifestyle. It’s not enough to stock the rooms with the right magazines, have an appropriate social media strategy, and offer a tablet with preloaded maps and experiences a guest can seek out.

For Rose Garden Hotel & Suites to be a true lifestyle brand, they need to empower their community. How can a brand do this? Well, if Commandment 2 is talking the talk, this is about walking the walk.

First, rather than simply being a vessel for the community to pass through, they should become an active participant in the community. Basically, be more than the hotel that people stay in when they visit a location. Whether that is elevating their food to compete with local restaurants, elevating their events to rival what’s on offer elsewhere in the destination, or providing the gear for guests to take advantage of local activities. A beach hotel chain catering to a surfing audience would have a hard time becoming a lifestyle brand without a surf shop in each of its locations, complete with board repair and rental services. And if they had free screenings of surf movies in the lobby each night? We’re ready to book our rooms! Soho House is an example of a brand that has fleshed this experience out in great detail so that it’s customers can engage with different parts of the brand at different points in time.

The second aspect of this is to align with the community’s values and use the brand’s platform to stand up for the issues the community cares about. Are your customers strongly against the exploitation of local hospitality workers? Rose Garden could structure its operation differently and be transparent about who they hire, how much they earn, and what their working conditions are. Starbucks is a high profile example of this, with the higher education support they give their employees. Soho House is committed to addressing the gender pay gap, a noble goal and one that is close to home for their audience of creative professionals.

The support of the community lifestyle is not a means to an end. It is an end goal in parallel with, not as a precursor of, profit.

 

4. No Purchase Necessary: A Lifestyle Brand is Joinable

Being a lifestyle brand in the social media age has added a new commandment: be joinable. Whether it’s through purpose-driven hashtags or the brand’s aesthetic, the most engrossing lifestyle brands in 2019 will allow their potential customers to take part in their lifestyle before becoming customers.

We can argue about the effect this strategy has on the bottom line in a different post, but the fact that brands that have developed joinability have captured the imagination of their audiences is inarguable. Outside of the hospitality industry, REI (epitomized in their #optoutside hashtag) and Kinfolk Magazine and their “#authentic millennial minimalism” are examples of this joinability, online and off.

In terms of who Rose Garden Hotel & Suites could look to emulate, it’d be hard to do better than Ace Hotel. Geared towards young digital nomads, the Ace has rooms in major cities starting around $200 a night and the lobby typically doubles as a co-working space (for hotels guests and passers-by). You can book a room with bunk beds, or splurge (in the New York City location) the “Loft Suite” for $1,000/night, with a bunch of options in between. The Ace Hotel customer (think 26 year old digital nomad with more social media followers than dollars in their hotel budget) wants it all: an affordable room with a modern look and feel, located in a cool neighborhood, a place to work in between meetings, and some exciting ways to unwind after a long day on their laptop.

Whether you’re a guest or not, the Ace delivers. Hotel bars and restaurants are on par with those around town, and typically beat the competition when it comes to interior design. High quality coffee shops, photo booths, concerts and ample table space in the lobby can be used whether you’re staying in the hotel or not. Even the wi-fi is free, as long as you provide an email address.

 

 

We started this post by asking whether all the disparate business models currently being described as lifestyle brands are, in fact, lifestyle brands. The answer? According to our above commandments, yes. It remains to be seen whether all of these different organizations can turn their lifestyle brands into profit generators, but what we can take away from the vast array of lifestyle brands is that it’s more about the lifestyle a company supports and represents than any trick of branding. What do all the lifestyle brands we’ve discussed here have in common? What can Rose Garden Hotel & Suites take away as they begin their very of-the-moment transition? It’s that to be successful, the lifestyle brand needs to feel real and honest to the individuals currently living that lifestyle.

And how would a brand go about that? That part is simple: talk to your customers, and actually listen to them. The same way you provide the products or services that they want, provide the experiences they’re looking for before, during, in between, and after their purchases.

 

What do you think? Let us know, we posted the blog post on Facebook here, and look forward to seeing you in the comments.

P.S. Pour one out for that Marketing Manager at Rose Garden Hotel & Suites for fighting the good fight.

New relationships with your marketing agency are always full of promise. You identified a need in your company’s marketing mix, then chose an agency to fill that need. You’re excited. Your agency is excited. And both of you are itching to get to work achieving your company’s marketing goals. (That’s how we always feel at Saltwater, anyway!)

But your client-agency relationship will inevitably run into obstacles—obstacles that can accumulate over time and hinder the results of your partnership. Luckily, there are steps you can take to minimize these problems, streamline project execution, and get better results.

Without further ado, here are our top 10 tips for getting the most out of your marketing agency.

Inside view of a marketing agency working on their marketing relationship.

 

1. Clearly communicate your expectations

When you and your agency discuss a project’s scope, it’s important to clearly outline and negotiate your expectations in terms of budget, deliverables, and responsibilities. That way you get what your company needs, everybody is clear on the type and extent of work expected, and nobody feels taken advantage of. Besides, “scope creep” is kind of awkward, right?

 

2. Provide clear direction

Marketing agencies operate most efficiently with clear directions and limited guesswork. So if you’d like your agency to work quickly, effectively, and with fewer rounds of revision, aim to:

 

3. Be transparent about your process

Whatever your internal process looks like, whether a single person on your team needs to review a deliverable or the entire leadership team, be sure to tell your agency. In fact, the more insight you provide into your process the better! That makes it easier for the agency to plan ahead, schedule a realistic timeline, and help facilitate approval at every stage of the project.

 

4. Streamline your internal processes

By streamlining your internal processes—such as how you review deliverables, provide feedback, get approval, or execute campaigns—you not only increase your own team’s efficiency, but also your agency’s. A streamlined process will remove unnecessary hurdles, minimize frustration, and prevent delays to project timelines.

 

5. Be responsive

Being responsive to your agency’s emails and calls can help save time and money. Your agency may have questions, need approval, or request a resource, and delayed responses could result in missed deadlines. Accidents inevitably happen, and correspondences fall through the cracks. We’ve all done it! But a general rule of responsiveness can keep the marketing machine running smoothly on both sides.

 

6. Share your goals and pain points

Your agency is your partner, which means they share your goals. They don’t just want the current project to succeed, they want your company to succeed as a whole—so tell your agency your overarching business goals and pain points. You’d be surprised how helpful they can be, taking action to mitigate challenges and to better tie campaigns to your overarching mission.

 

7. Address concerns with open dialogue

When issues arise and you feel your agency may be underperforming or causing problems, the most efficient way to figure out what’s happening is through open discussion. A private email is a great way to bring up the issue, but to really get to the heart of the matter, it’s important to set up a phone or video call. That way you and your agency can avoid misunderstandings, reaffirm expectations, find solutions, and continue working toward your company’s goals.

 

8. Trust your agency

The reason you hire an agency is to benefit from their expertise. But to get the most out of that expertise, it’s important to trust the agency and their process. Providing engaged feedback on projects is vital—a good agency always wants to know your concerns and wants—but micromanagement can impede, rather than facilitate, the creative process and prevent agencies from moving quickly and efficiently.

 

9. Ask for advice

Your agency is your partner, through and through. So if you’re working on other marketing projects and would like advice, tap your agency for answers! This will not only give them a better picture of your overarching marketing goals and strategy (see tip #6), but also provide you with expert advice and the chance to feel out the other services your agency offers.

 

10. Remember, you share a goal

Client-agency relationships always have challenges. The above tips will go a long way in minimizing and mitigating these challenges, but at the end of the day, it’s also important to remember that you and your agency share the same goal: the success of your company.

 

That’s how we operate with our clients at Saltwater, anyway — doing everything we can, on every project, to help achieve your company’s goals. That includes taking steps of our own as an agency to ensure you get the most out of our partnership.

What do you think? Are these conversations you’re having with your marketing agency? Here at Saltwater, your goals are our goals. If you’d like to hear more about our services or how we work to facilitate great relationships with our clients, give us a holler!

Three major brands are in the midst of brand rehabilitation campaigns: Facebook, Uber, and Wells Fargo. Each is cleaning up the mess after scandals rocked their organizations. After Fake News & data impropriety, toxic work culture & sexual harassment, and rampant fraud, we have just one question left about these brands as they pick themselves up from the mat: who is doing it best?

 

FACEBOOK: FACEBOOK HERE TOGETHER

Pros:

Cons:

Overall, the “Here Together” campaign relies on nostalgia to remind users why they liked the service in the first place, and to show that the company understands that and is working to recreate that.

 

UBER: MOVING FORWARD | UBER

Pros:

Con:

The “Moving Forward” idea makes a clear departure from Uber’s past, and shows users that they are a new, more accountable, more responsible company.

 

WELLS FARGO: EARNING BACK YOUR TRUST

Pros:

Cons:

The same week the ad rolled out, another scandal hit Wells Fargo after employees improperly altered documents about corporate customers. Their CMO, Jamie Moldafsky, came out and said that the internally-identified infraction was a great example of the new culture of trust and accountability that the ad illustrates. However, it’s an even better example of the fact that an ad campaign can’t reset an entire company culture. They’ve still got some work to do before they can live up to the campaign’s tagline: “Established 1852. Reestablished 2018.”

What do you think? Which company is running the best brand rehabilitation campaign?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Washington, D.C., today to address a growing list of concerns that have come up regarding data collection methods and security practice on Facebook. Here is Zuckerberg’s full testimony.

As advertisers, we spend a lot of time on Facebook. Building ad campaigns, designing social media strategy, targeting potential consumers, and implementing tracking codes are daily activities for our Digital Marketing team, as they are for any digital marketing agency in 2018. But the ubiquity of Facebook advertising, especially within an agency or marketing department, can make it easy to forget just how powerful the platform’s targeting options are. If advertisers are ignoring the specificity of the levers we pull, then we’re even less likely to go one step further and ask, “What data points is Facebook basing this targeting on?”

Let’s take a look at Zuckerberg’s testimony and what changes it might presage for the platform.

Zuckerberg starts by stating, “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company.” I think it’s important to remember this whenever we’re working on Facebook. Zuckerberg really believes this (see his note from Feb. 2017 for a detailed breakdown) and he sees Facebook as a positive set of tools to build, connect, and empower communities to do good in the world. At least, he did until recently.

Zuckerberg’s testimony reads like an admission of naivete: “For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring.” However, the recent string of crises that Facebook has endured seems to have wisened him up a bit:

“But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”

Now, we’re a creative agency, not a media outlet. I’m not a reporter, and while I’ve been working in Facebook for years I’ve hardly been tracking its CEO’s every move. There’s plenty of support for the theory that Zuckerberg is more self-serving than he appears. For the sake of this blog post, the takeaway is this: Facebook screwed up, they know it, and they’re doing some things about it.

Here are some changes, as described by Zuckerberg, that we need to be aware of as advertisers:

There is plenty in the testimony that can inform your strategies going forward. But beyond optimization tactics and platform updates, what should we, as advertisers, take away from Zuckerberg’s testimony and the tribulations of Facebook recently?

Facebook is, as described by to Nick Thompson, editor of Wired Magazine, “one of the most effective advertising mechanisms that has ever been built by mankind.” And that’s certainly true, because it allows us to know some pretty personal things about our potential customers. Think about some of the ways that we can target our ad campaigns on the platform:

Facebook’s business model is to gather as much data about its users as it can, and then sell it. While Zuckerberg’s mission may or may not be more humanitarian, the business model to get him there is clear and highly, highly, effective. It is focused on harvesting this type of personal data, and as advertisers we’re writing the checks. The more data available, the better ads perform. The better ads perform, the more advertising dollars get allocated to Facebook. For those keeping score at home, that puts advertisers firmly on the team of “People Who Should Reflect On Their Actions.”

In his testimony, Zuckerberg referenced the balancing act between security and profit: “I’ve directed our teams to invest so much in security — on top of the other investments we’re making — that it will significantly impact our profitability going forward. But I want to be clear about what our priority is: protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.”

Zuckerberg says Facebook will work with Congress to fix these issues, but won’t wait for legislation to act. He then lays out a list of things Facebook is doing now, unilaterally, to address problems that have been brought to light over the last 18 months. And as advertisers, we can take the same approach: we don’t have to wait for Facebook to remove targeting criteria that makes us feel like we’re invading people’s privacy. We can just stop using those criteria.

There is an often-quoted adage about free apps like Facebook: “If you’re not paying, you’re the product.” While Zuckerberg and Congress can debate that fact, another way we should be thinking about this issue is: If you are paying, they’re making it for you.

 

WHAT MARKETING AUTOMATION IS NOT

Tell us if you’ve heard this one before: An organization needs to do inbound marketing, so they choose a marketing automation platform (MAP) and install it. Ready to go, right? Wrong. Marketing automation services are important for executing your inbound marketing strategy, but it isn’t, in itself, inbound marketing — it’s just the start.

Let’s go back in time to traditional marketing. It was effective and, truth be told, still is in the right scenario. It was also disruptive. And that’s part of the beauty of an automation platform; it does all the dirty work and does it efficiently. Organizations can use an automation platform to continue these disruptive techniques. Just purchase a list of emails specific to your product offering, load the list into your MAP, draft an email about your product, and click send. Voila! All of these contacts (who may or may not be familiar with your brand) have now just received your promotional email. Imagine you were the recipient. What is your first move? I’m guessing it’s to hit delete or mark the email as SPAM. Bye, bye lead.

Is the above example marketing automation? Yes. You automated the delivery process of your list purchase emails. Is it inbound marketing? No. Why?

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality and targeted content to attract people to your company. By creating content that aligns with your customers’ interests, you attract inbound traffic to your website that you can then convert and close.

Today’s customer wants to be informed, educated, and entertained. They don’t want to be sold to. Inbound marketing allows you to provide your potential customers with educational information important to them via a multitude of channels. The end-goal is having your brand at the top of your customer’s mind when they finally make the decision to buy.

Marketing automation is a necessary part of your overall inbound strategy. Because inbound focuses heavily on content creation, you will need a lot of content. You’ll have to provide your inbound customers with blogs, social posts, white papers, webinars, eBooks, videos, etc. Your time should be focused on creating this content. Marketing automation allows you to streamline the delivery of this content to your prospective customers.

 

HERE’S ANOTHER SCENARIO FOR YOU

You’re an organization selling workout attire. Your end-goal is selling your product. Instead of spraying the market with promotional ads, you decide to start a weekly workout post. Each week, you post the workout to your blog and share as sponsored posts on social media. You’ve also partnered with some influential online personalities to do these workouts on their YouTube channel. A potential buyer sees this and starts following your posts. Now you’ve decided to host a webinar with let’s say, Michael Jordan. The potential buyer who follows your workout post now signs up for this webinar because honestly, who wouldn’t take advice from the greatest basketball player of all time and one of the world’s most successful marketers? You now have their contact information and can begin tracking their activity on your website via your MAP. Based on a set of lead-scoring rules you’ve created, your MAP sees this prospect spends a lot of time on your site—so much so that they might be ready to buy.

Maybe they’ve had multiple visits to a page for pieces of Jordan’s signature apparel line you sell. Your marketing automation fires off an email with a few more specifics around the shirt. Your prospective buyer reads this because, as we already know, they are interested in the product. A week later, our prospective buyer decides they need to purchase a new workout shirt. They find that email you sent them (which they just so happened to keep at the top of their inbox), return to your site, and purchase an athletic shirt.

Not once in the above scenario did you outright sell to your customer. You never had to because you’ve supplied them with enough information and enjoyable content that you remained top-of-mind when it came time to buy. This is inbound marketing.

Your marketing automation took care of tracking the prospects activity on your site, delivering the the social posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and delivering the promotional email when your prospect reached a high enough lead score to prompt doing so. All this allowed you to focus on spending your time creating the content for social, working with your brand influencers, creating the workout, and strategizing the educational email your customer received. This is marketing automation.

Inbound marketing is where the industry has headed. We can’t sell directly to our customers anymore—it just won’t work. We need to provide them with enough targeted content to carry them through the buying journey. Spend your time creating this content and let your MAP do the work of delivering it.

THERE’S A LOT OF CONTENT OUT THERE. A LOT.

The information overload experienced by consumers has become nauseating as new mediums have swelled in popularity, mobile has become an extension of our hands and content continues to multiply at an exponential rate. This has created obvious obstacles for businesses trying to sure-up a content strategy that resonates with their target audience and converts potential customers.

Content strategy needs to be applied to every piece of collateral leaving your marketing department. Whether that be website content, out-of-home advertising, media buys or social media posts, everything should be aligned with your overall content strategy.

So this beckons the question, how do you stand out? How you do you find a way to craft content that captivates, informs, and encourages action?

To create content that resonates it must be purposeful. Arbitrarily curating content and seeing what sticks is an inefficient and ineffective way to communicate with current and prospective customers. A strategic approach to content paired with exemplary creative is a formidable combination.

And while it would seem obvious to pair these two apex jungle cats all the time, most businesses only succeed at one or the other. Knowing your customer and how to reach them are paramount. Creative ideas and professional execution are essential. These two together will help attract new customers, support them on the path to purchase, and lead to more sales.

NUMBERS DON’T LIE

We marketing types love creating compelling content that is easy on the eyes. Let’s face it, though; if this content doesn’t generate any returns, your CEO won’t care how beautiful it is. Marketing needs to adapt as companies become more data-driven and results-oriented, and part of the answer may be marketing automation.

The modern-day marketer is expected to be both creative and data-driven. Truth is, every decision we make is scrutinized for how it affects business, so it’s important to create compelling content that drives leads and conversions. But — there’s always a “but” — we need to back up our efforts with numbers that prove ROI.

The awesome blog post you just wrote? How many times was it viewed? That eBook you created? How many new leads did that generate for sales? For good content marketing, everything we create needs to engage visitors and encourage them to stay on the site. Once on the site, let’s convert that customer to a lead and identify their business needs to generate a sale. Then, after all is said and done, we must be able to prove our marketing efforts translated to sales.

Marketing automation is a great tool to verify whether a strategy is successful. It allows you to not only automate many of your marketing functions, it enables you to report accurately on your efforts via whichever marketing automation platform (MAP) you’re using.

According to a recent study, automation gives marketers the ability to increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. Automation takes the targeted content we have produced and puts it in front of our prospective customers in an engaging and authentic way. It allows us to provide value to our leads, improve conversion rates, drive repeat buyers, and enhance the overall customer experience. All of which can be easily measured using our chosen marketing automation software.

IDC predicts the overall market for automated marketing will grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $4.8 billion in 2015, opening up vast opportunities for content marketers to attach metrics to their work. There are three core benefits* marketers can expect by instituting marketing automation in their organization.

  1. More revenue is sourced from marketing. Companies using automation report 45% of their sales pipeline is sourced from marketing, as opposed to 31% for companies that do not have an automation engine.
  2. Sales is able to focus more on what they do best—selling. Automation enables sales to spend 62% of their time selling. In those organizations not using automation, sales is able to spend only 51% of their time selling.
  3. Increased revenue attainment. Automation increases marketing’s efficiency, allowing more time to focus on creating great content. 84% of companies with an automation engine consistently hit their revenue goals, while only 67% of companies without automation do.

What does all of this mean for your compelling content? Marketing automation adds value to our marketing content and proves its value. Automation tracks a customer’s journey from their first interaction with a brand to their last.

And, what does it mean for you and your marketing department? The ability to work faster, save money and increase ROI.


*Statistics for these three core benefits pulled from Marketo’s  2012 report, “Marketo Benchmark on Revenue.”

ALEXA…

Turn the heat up to 71°.

Order me an Uber.

Play Van Halen.

Write me a blog post.

Okay, maybe writing a blog post is beyond the abilities of Alexa, the “wake word” for the artificial intelligence software inside the Amazon Echo smart-home device, but “she” does have more than 1,400 unique skills. Amazon took a gamble with the Echo in 2014, but today the e-commerce giant has a huge hit on its hands that will likely become one of the next big marketing trends.

Virtual assistants aren’t perfect (yet?!). Alexa is great with basic tasks like playing music, ordering products, and telling you what time the Boston Red Sox play, but she suffers from unreliable communication from time to time.

No Alexa, I wanted to listen to “American Pie,” not order an Apple Pie from Amazon Prime.

Still, consumers are growing more accustomed to having a personal assistant living on their kitchen counters and in their family rooms. With success comes competition, though, so Amazon is about to get a deep-pocketed competitor in the virtual assistant market.

Google Home has arrived, running its own version of Alexa, the Assistant. And while the Assistant didn’t exactly dig deep for an original or fun name, Google’s years of experience in natural language processing and machine learning should allow them to build “a smarter digital assistant that builds on its stronghold in search and years of research in artificial intelligence.”

VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS ARE NOT A FAD, ARE HERE TO STAY, AND YOU CAN CONSIDER THIS A HUGE OPPORTUNITY.

See, aside from ecomm connectivity, language processing, machine learning, and all of the nifty tech that makes these kittens purr, virtual assistants can help brands connect to consumers on an emotional level.

As Marketing 101 taught us all, creating a more intimate experience between brand and consumer builds loyalty while bridging the gap between arbitrary emotional connection and personal interaction.

Consumers watch videos, listen to podcasts, and read ad copy. But only virtual assistants allow brands to speak back, which creates addictive closure to the dopamine loop that other mediums cannot accomplish.

SO WHAT ARE SOME OF THE COOL WAYS BRANDS ARE CURRENTLY LEVERAGING ALEXA?

OH, AND DISNEY OF COURSE.

The key takeaway here is your brand has an opportunity to become part of the early adopter ecosystem. The dev team here at Saltwater recognizes the future opportunity in this space so we’re actively exploring the Alexa Skills Kit, looking for a brand ready to lunge at the opportunity.

It’s time to start thinking of how your brand might leverage this new technology.

WE LIKE BEER. THE BEER INDUSTRY IS CHANGING. CRAFT BEER IS THE “COOL THING TO DO.”

There it is. In three simple statements I just covered what you’ve probably either read or assumed about the beer industry (and Saltwater) so far. It’s no secret that the rise in craft beer is changing the competitive landscape, as made evident by Budweiser’s decision to ditch puppies and Clydesdales and instead fire a shot across the bow of micro-brewers everywhere in their most recent Super Bowl commercial. (Note: The original anti-craft beer commercial, “Brewed The Hard Way,” has been made private on Budweiser’s YouTube channel).

While the overall beer industry’s growth is generally stalling out compared to spirits, craft beer continues to slowly chip away at the macro-brewers’ massive market share. Consider this Google trends chart showing the increase in craft beer searches vs Budweiser searches since 2005:

It just so happens that they’re slowly but surely catching up to the King of Beers, and might have even overtaken them if the February Super Bowl spikes weren’t skewing the averages.

But make no mistake, large brewers are starting to feel the pinch. Just don’t consider them down for the count quite yet (or in the foreseeable future).

First off, 11 brewers still make almost 90% of all beer in the United States; Anheuser-Busch InBev, MillerCoors, Constellation Brands, Heineken USA, Pabst, Boston Beer Co., North American Breweries, Diageo North America, Craft Brew Alliance, Gambrinus, and Duvel Moortgat. Secondly, 4,269 craft breweries make up the other 12% of the market. Yes, that means the average microbrewery accounts for a whopping 0.0028% of the entire beer market.

When this blog was first conceptualized, the idea was that there must be a craft brew bubble and we should be talking about it. After all, how many IPA’s can be made before there are just too many options on the shelves? We asked Nick Garrison of Foolproof Brewing of Pawtucket, R.I., for his take on the potential of a brew bubble.

“I don’t know if there’s necessarily a craft beer ‘bubble’ since that implies something was popular and then all of a sudden it’s not,” Nick said. “I do think we’ll be looking at a craft beer ‘shake up’ eventually, where smaller, less experienced breweries really begin to feel the pinch of increased competition. Shelf space is limited, and everyone is vying with their distributors for mindshare since there are just so many craft beer options.”

While competition is fierce and making it difficult for some, Nick acknowledged that lack of effort or talent are definitely not issues.

“The issue isn’t that they aren’t talented brewers, it’s that you could create an amazing beer and still not succeed,” he said. “While obviously taste and flavor are important, many enthusiastic, talented breweries don’t understand the fundamental economic aspect of operating. Lack of experience creates issues when breweries fail to scale their business and make it sustainable over time.”

Enter marketing strategy.

Sam von Trapp, of von Trapp Brewing, believes communicating your brand’s story and remaining true to your brewery’s core values are also vital to success. In the case of von Trapp Brewing of Stowe, Vermont, Sam notes that the story about how his father, Johannes von Trapp, began the brewery resonates with fans of the beers and guests at the Trapp Family Lodge.

“We’ve been approached many times by people with suggestions for branding our family name on various products, but my father always wanted to keep it genuine, and was reticent to commercialize the family name,” Sam said. “Finally when we started brewing beer and received requests from people wanting to buy our beer in other states, we realized this a genuine way to bring our brand into new markets with a product we really believe in. My dad is an amazing guy. It’s been a lot of fun to work with him and I’m really proud of everything he’s done.”

Sam continued, “While the underlying quality of the liquid is most important, staying true to yourself and getting your story out there is extremely meaningful. If people like your brewmaster, your brewery, and the story behind your beer you can find success in this competitive market. Communicating this message and making people understand what makes you tick is essential to success.”

To Sam’s point, the Brewer’s Association has recognized that “instead of recognizing a brand by a name or a logo, millennials find true value in the experiences they co-create with the brand.”

Well, well, well. It might not be all doom and gloom for this crowded party! One significant reason is the demographic of the craft beer drinker and the rise of the millennials, arguably the most coveted and sought-after generation when it comes to marketing efforts. Millennials present a unique opportunity for craft beer since they are potentially the generation that will help grow the overall size of the craft beer market to accommodate the influx in breweries.

As it stands, yes, there might be a bubble. But the bursting of this bubble depends largely on whether the craft beer industry can continue to grow their overall market share. Consider this: in 2014 the largest age group by total population was 22-year-old’s. Second and third place went to 23 and 21-year-old’s. Oh, and the good news for craft brewers? Beginning in 2018 there will be steady growth in the number of 18 to 24-year-old’s in the United States.

Craft beer’s market share has also doubled since 2011, with a goal of 20% by 2020. Fortune also points out that “In other beverage markets, like spirits and coffee, high end drinks can generally command as much as 40% market share – implying there is a lot more room for the industry to grow.”

Despite all of this juicy quantitative data that will seemingly support the boom of craft breweries, the qualitative data is just as compelling. Millennials value experiences over ownership and that bodes well for craft brewers looking to stand out. Due to the many options, unique flavors, and social aspect of drinking, millennials are flocking to bars, pubs, and breweries for a unique tasting experience.

It directly caters to their creative needs as well as their adventurous tendencies. Foolproof Brewing takes pride in their “experience-based brewing,” in which they focus on where and when their customers will be drinking a particular type of beer. For instance, their Raincloud Porter “is the perfect stay at home brew; dark, smooth, and mysterious.” The bitterness of the Backyahd IPA pairs perfectly with spicy foods coming straight off the grill. Their new Queen Of The Yahd is brewed with real raspberries as a “refreshing, delicious, and totally crushable IPA.”

However, Garrison cautions that a lack of differentiators on the product and brand level can lead to problems once the initial buzz around a beer wears off. “It really is all about the experience for the customer, which obviously includes branding and packaging, but also the interactions you have through customer service, events and personal relationships with customers, retailers, and wholesalers.”

Millennials’ tendency to support local is another distinguishable trait that should bode well for craft breweries; 40% of millennials claimed to prefer buying local, a statistic in which Sam believes many smaller breweries will be able to capitalize on.

“I think the trend towards people shopping local is also supporting the rise of craft beer. I don’t think local agriculture is a fad, and I think people will always enjoy a craft beer brewed locally or regionally. As they say in Austria, “the best beer and bread come from around the corner,” Sam said. Obviously you have to scale your business to become profitable and sustain operation, but beer doesn’t need to travel across oceans. I also think there’s a good amount of room for those in the industry just interested in opening a restaurant with their brewery, distributing locally, and keeping costs down.”

So while fewer millennials are simply running into the store and picking up a 6-pack of Bud Light, increased browsing creates a different type of challenge as craft brewers grapple for limited shelf space. The convenience store channel has shown the largest amount of growth for craft beer sales, but they also have less room than grocery stores to stock a plethora of options.

Challenges certainly exist and competition is surely steepening, but if breweries can create not only good beer, but a good experience around their product, the millennial consumer base has the potential to support such a booming industry. The challenge lies in finding the right balance of good beer, solid business IQ, and the ability to create a brand experience that’s desirable for both consumers and distributors.

NOT QUITE SOLD YET? TAKE A LOOK AT THESE INTERESTING STATISTICS.

So what does the future hold? Will this prove to be a bubble that bursts, or are these breweries here to stay? It’s hard to tell. Were one to judge solely based on supply and demand, one would think the number of new breweries will begin to slow in the near future and many of the smaller, less competent ones will be weeded out by stiffer competition. It may all hinge on millennials and whether or not craft beer turns out to be a fad or a paradigm shift in how we consume alcoholic beverages. That’s a great responsibility, millennials. You know what you have to do.