Lisa

July 31, 2023 by Lisa

In marketing, the font you choose makes a huge difference in your brand image. Whether it’s the logo or the content you are putting out, a font can change something from having a professional look to a casual one, simply by the way the letters look. This is why it is so important to understand the different kinds of fonts and when to use them to convey the message you want for your business.

Font Categories

When beginning the process of choosing a font, it is essential to narrow down the category of font you want to use. There are four main font categories to choose from: serif, sans serif, script, and decorative.

Serif → These fonts have “feet” on the edges of the letters which are the swoops or lines letters end with. This look conveys formality and tradition when it comes to designs.

Sans Serif → These fonts have no feet on the edges of the letters. This look conveys simplicity and modernism in designs.

Script → These fonts are similar to cursive but are a little more fancy including more swoops and character to the ends of letters. This look conveys elegance when it comes to designs.

Decorative → These fonts are meant to stand out and are often the focal point of a design. These looks convey style and creativity in designs.

Choosing a Font

It is quite daunting when choosing a font because of all the different styles there are in each category! The best way to start deciding what font you want is to focus on the feeling you want to evoke from your audience when they’re thinking about your business or coming into your company’s space.

An example of this would be a traditional business logo. Some of the largest companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple use simple and clean fonts for their logos. They give the look of sophistication and give the enterprise a sense of professionalism. In this case, it would be the best choice to choose a font that is serif or sans serif.

Another way is to choose a font for a space. For example, a cafe would not use a serif or sans serif font as it is not necessarily the most professional and traditional space. Instead, it’s a great idea to choose a font that has a personality and invites the customer into the relaxing space. In this instance, it would be the best choice to choose a font that is script or decorative to be the focal point.

Overall, the font you choose to represent your brand leaves an impression on your audience and represents the feel of that company. It is crucial to not leave the wrong message and instead use fonts to your advantage depending on the feeling you want to convey.

If you’d like some guidance or advice on implementing these techniques into your marketing plans, call us at TwoFold Marketing: Monday-Friday at 608-225-2448

Image Source

Lauren. “How to Choose the Right Fonts for Your Website.” The Events Calendar, 7 May 2019, https://theeventscalendar.com/blog/learning/how-to-choose-the-right-fonts-for-your-website/. Accessed 26 June 2023.

July 10, 2023 by Lisa

When it comes to marketing, colors play a large role in how a business or product is perceived. Why do we associate red as bold and strong, while yellow seems warm and positive? When creating a brand color palette in marketing, it is important to know how color psychology sets the tone for the logo, content, and overall message that is sent to your target audience.

What is Color Psychology?

Color psychology is the theory that colors create an emotional or physical reaction and affect human behavior. Color plays a role in someone’s initial reactions and can send a message about the value of a product or company itself. This is important in marketing as it is essential to grab the viewer’s attention and in the long run, create brand recognition. In fact, a research study found that about 62-90 percent of a person’s initial assessment is based on colors alone. If colors matter this much to a person’s judgment, then it is crucial that the ones used are carefully considered.

Color Meanings

Different colors send different messages. When marketing, it is helpful to take into account the meaning of the colors you are planning to use and how they will influence the message you want to send about your company or product.

Image Source

Notice that each color has different emotions that it can evoke. Even though different colors can mean different things, there are similarities between many. For example, both orange and yellow can mean joy, positivity, and fun. When creating a brand color palette, using multiple colors together can enhance a message further. For example, using multiple warm colors (yellow, orange, red) together can create youthful and enthusiastic emotions as a whole.

Color Combinations

As much as it is important to use single colors that surround the feeling you want to convey, it is just as valuable to make the logo or content look appealing by using color combinations such as complementary, analogous, or tertiary.

Complementary → Colors found across from one another on the color wheel. Examples of complementary colors include yellow and purple; red and green; orange and blue.

Analogous → Colors found next to one another on the color wheel. Examples of analogous colors include blue, blue-green, and green; yellow, yellow-orange, and orange; blue, blue-violet, and violet.

Tertiary → Colors created by combining primary and secondary colors. Examples of tertiary colors include red-orange; yellow-green; blue-violet.

These color combinations create interest for the viewer by creating harmony or contrast. It is essential to grab the attention of the viewer with these combinations in a logo or in other content to stand out against competitors and inform your audience what your company is all about.

All in all, color psychology is essential to understand when creating a brand color palette in order to evoke the right connotation when it comes to your brand and what you’re putting out to your audience. So, before you create that logo or put out your next pieces of content, consider the emotions you want to convey and the color combinations you can make to put out the next best thing.

If you’d like some guidance or advice on implementing these techniques into your marketing plans, call us at TwoFold Marketing: Monday-Friday at 608-225-2448

Sources:

Singh, S. (2006). Impact of color on marketing. Management Decision, 44(6), 783–789. https://doi.org/10.1108/00251740610673332

March 15, 2021 by Lisa

We know what you are thinking “Marketing on TikTok… Really”? The answer is yes, but it may not be the best fit for every brand. To make sure you should be marketing on TikTok your customers and the TikTok demographic should overlap. Many businesses large and small have found success marketing on TikTok. Don’t throw your TikTok marketing strategy out the window just yet. Let’s teach you how to set TikTok up for business and how to tackle TikTok influencer marketing.

Set Up Account:

After creating your account, switch to a pro account, then select Business or Creator. This will allow you to add a website and contact email to your profile. If you plan to run ads on TikTok you will need to create an ad account for TikTok Ads Manager. Your TikTok marketing should not be the same approach as Instagram or Facebook marketing. TikTok is an entirely different social network, with unique trends, features, and behaviors. You can create your TikTok business profile here, https://www.tiktok.com/business/en-US/.

Explore the App:

Once you have set up your business account and ads account, you should take some time to get used to TikTok. Explore the different features available on the app. Take notes on what filters, effects, songs, and hashtags are trending.

Read About the Algorithm:

Now that you are familiar with the app time to read up on the TikTok algorithm. Here is a great article that breaks it down for you https://blog.hootsuite.com/tiktok-algorithm/. You will want to read up on it because the algorithm is different than any other social media platform. Also take some time to find rising stars or influencers in your niche. Influencer marketing is a big part of TikTok’s ecosystem.

Define Your Target Audience:

Who do you hope to reach on TikTok? Yes, TikTok is most popular with teens, but TikTok is not a teen app. The 20 -29 age group is almost 30% of the users as of June 2020. You can see this in the chart below. Once you have picked a potential audience, research what types of content they like and engage with.

Perform a Competitive Audit:

Check to see if your competitors are on TikTok. If they are you could be missing out on the action but, if they aren’t TikTok may be a way to gain a competitive advantage. Even if your competitors are not on TikTok you should try to find at least three to five similar brands and see what they are doing on the app. If you find it helpful use the S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weaknesses Opportunities, and Threats) framework to learn what’s worked and hasn’t worked for them. Keep in mind that TikTok is a creator-led platform, also analyze TikTok stars and influencers when evaluating strengths and weaknesses.

Align Your TikTok Goal with Business Goals:

No matter if you are trying to reach a new audience, promote awareness for a product/service, improve brand image, or develop stronger customer relationship, it is important to have rationale to back it up. To set these goals try to make them S.M.A.R.T. goals. S.M.A.R.T. goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. If you want to learn more about S.M.A.R.T. goals we have a blog post about it here (internal blog link). TikTok provides analytics for pro accounts, which allows you to track your goals. You can explore the dashboard and find the metric you can use to measure your goals.

Start to Experiment:

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a formula for going viral on TikTok. With that being said you should leave room in your TikTok strategy to be creative and go with the flow. If a video that you thought was going to perform well flops, learn from it and move on to the next experiment. If your brand ends up accidentally trending like Ocean Spray, or others make the most of it and join in on the joke.

Keeping up with all the different social media platforms and their separate algorithms can be a lot of work. Add on creating the content and engaging with customers on social media it is even more work. If you need some help, we would love to help you through it! Contact us now to schedule a consultation.

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March 5, 2021 by Lisa

Setting SMART goals in marketing is a great way to set effective marketing goals. Many times, when businesses are looking to get started with integrated marketing, they go straight to the tools. SEO, content, paid search, and social efforts are all building blocks to successful marketing approaches, but they are simply just tools. Those tools will be much more successful if you start with setting goals.

Setting SMART Marketing Goals:

When it comes to building communities and engaging an audience, we don’t always see immediate results. The lack of immediate results can be a struggle to prove that the efforts are actually going to provide a return on investment. As marketers we have become accustomed to these kind results. So we know the secret of truly spectacular marketing is well-founded and measurable goals. This is why we have the SMART marketing goals framework, to assist in our goal-setting efforts.

What are SMART Marketing Goals:

SMART marketing goals is a framework that stands for, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time Bound. Earning buy-in and winning over even the most skeptical executive, the SMART goal framework can have a huge impact. It also provides you the opportunity to define the purpose of your marketing efforts. Here is how to work through each step in the SMART goal framework.

Specific:

Your goal must focus on one clearly defined metric. Without defining exactly what you are trying to improve, it is difficult to map out the steps needed to make progress. A specific goal is one that you could share under a minute, clearly stating what you are trying to improve.

Measurable:

It is so important that your goal is trackable and numeric. Simply saying you want to grow your social media following, does not say specify be how much they would like to grow it by. By attaching a number to your goal, you will be able to track exactly how far you have come since you set the goal and how far you have until you reach the goal.

Attainable:

As much as we would all love to aim to break records it is important to keep the goals realistic. By setting unattainable goals your team members may feel discouraged by the huge goal and lose motivation. Instead set a goal that is realistic, so that it is a success when the goal is met. It is crucial to base your goals off of your own analytics, not industry benchmarks which may cause you to bit off more than you can chew.

Relevant:

The goal should be both relevant to your company’s overall business goals and account for current trends in your industry. To make sure your goal is relevant ask yourself why you are setting that goal. How is it going to contribute to the businesses bottom line? The goal should be tied back to business impact. If it is not consider how you can change or adjust your initial goal, so that it does.

Time Bound:

This is the final aspect of the framework, which is one of the most important. You need to set a timeline for meeting your goals. Without a timeline you will not be able to determine whether you are staying on track toward your ultimate goal, or if you need to make some small changes. With a timeline you also need a deadline that adds a healthy dose of pressure to accomplish the goal. This helps make consistent and significant progress in the long term.

Setting SMART goals is so important to marketing success and we understand that it can also be difficult. If you are looking to improve your marketing goals let’s talk!

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January 29, 2021 by Lisa

This blog is all about why you need to outline your initiatives to be successful. In your outline, you should answer the high-level questions an employee at your company might have about your campaign, like who you’re targeting, why you’re running this campaign, and what medium you’ll be advertising on.

Name of Campaign: The name of your campaign does not have to be anything extravagant. Example – Day of Giving Campaign

Description of Campaign: Provide a 1-3 paragraph description of the inspiration behind your campaign, answering the following questions:

How does this problem align with our product/service?
Why are we solving this problem?
What are the deliverables for this campaign?

Target Audience: Identify whom you’re targeting. This could be a description of the audience you’re targeting or one of your buyer personas like “Owner Owen” or “Employee Emily.” When defining your target audience make sure that you have as much information as possible. Having a lot of information on the target audience will help you later on in the process.

Advertising Platforms: Which platforms will you be utilizing in your advertisements? Don’t get too into timeline or budget just yet you can dive deeper into that after you complete the outline. If you are not sure with what platforms you are going to use this is the time to think about which suit the campaign best. Meet your target audience where they are, if they are on Facebook market on Facebook. This might require a little bit of research to figure out where your target market is best.

Goals: At the end of this campaign, what is your expected goal? Make sure your goals are quantifiable. You want to make sure that at the end of the campaign you are able to clearly see if you met your goal or not. The goals are what is driving the campaign so make sure that everyone knows what they are and how they can be met.

Do you need help getting your campaign off the ground? Let’s work together and outline your initiatives for a successful campaign. We would love to help you through it! Contact us today to for your marketing help!

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