Proliferation

Apr 25
0

How Facebook Marketed “Straight Outta Compton” for Crossover Success

By | content marketing, Utah | No Comments

The power of content marketing has never been stronger nor more successful than in the case of Universal’s decision to create customized racial marketing for the film “Straight Outta Compton.” The film tells the story of the rise of the hip-hop group N.W.A. — a group that most white Americans were unfamiliar with. Facebook successfully helped Universal Pictures create custom advertising contingent upon race — whether in Utah or on the West Coast — that proved to be surprisingly successful.

“Straight Outta Compton” Received Wide Crossover Appeal

Universal Pictures’ EVP of digital marketing, Doug Neil, had an initial hunch that the film would be popular with African American audiences; however, he was surprised to discover that “Straight Outta Compton” also received a wide crossover appeal. The film grossed over $160 million at the U.S. box office; a feat that Neil credited in part to Facebook’s specialized content marketing. By creating custom trailers for different demographics of the population — whether in Salt Lake City, Utah or on the East Coast — the film reached a broader audience and experienced a higher success rate at the box office.

Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and N.W.A. Were All Marketed Differently

Part of the marketing challenge that the movie faced was the fact that although many non-African Americans and non-Hispanics knew what N.W.A. was, or knew that Ice Cube and Dr. Dre actually made music, most of this general population identified Ice Cube only as an actor and Dr. Dre as the name behind the unnecessarily expensive line of Beats headphones. The solution to this dilemma was easily solved: the movie was marketed to white audiences on Facebook as a tale of the advancement of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, as opposed to a story about N.W.A. The trailer marketed to African Americans was much different, and capitalized on the population’s familiarity with N.W.A.

The bottom line? Content marketing works, especially when attempting to target a particular demographic — whether in small-town Utah or a large East Coast city. The marketing experiment of “Straight Outta Compton” has paved the way for future successes in the realm of content marketing to different audiences.

Apr 25
0

The Key Components of Mobile SEO

By | SEO, Utah, Utah SEO | No Comments

Google is always working to improve its user search experience — and the company’s latest target is mobile. Google has already made the pushed for app indexing, making it easier for Google users to find a company’s app among their desired search results. Now with SEO incorporating mobile more than ever, here are a few things businesses in Utah and elsewhere need to know about mobile SEO.

Focus on Rankings

Mobile SEO and traditional desktop SEO really aren’t really that different, but it’s important that businesses maintain a focus on rankings for core keywords. Mobile search is growing significantly faster than traditional search; if your company website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s unlikely your site will rank at the top of the search rankings for your target keywords. As you can see, having a mobile-friendly website is easily the most important component of good mobile SEO.

Fix Any Mobile Errors

Mobile search experts in Utah and elsewhere have looked at various different website designs, from websites with a separate mobile design to sites with multi-modal desktop and mobile designs. According to the research, there isn’t a significant difference between websites that use mobile-specific designs and those that don’t — instead, webmasters should focus on fixing any errors. This will help increase traffic to your website, as the mobile user will feel more comfortable using it.

Get an App

App Store Optimization is another key component of mobile SEO. Making your app stand out in the App Store will not only help your SEO, but boost your app indexing as well. App indexing is basically like SEO for your app content; keeping all pages of the app indexed and incorporating relevant keywords will help increase downloads of your app.

Use AMP

Google has also recently incorporated AMPs (accelerated mobile pages). AMPs are pages that show up on the right side of a Google search, usually with a link to Wikipedia. On your mobile, AMPs are often at the top of search results. Unfortunately for companies in Utah and elsewhere, Google AMPs are currently for publishers only.

Mobile is the new frontier for companies everywhere — with these four key components, anyone can become a mobile SEO professional.

Apr 25
0

Fusion 360: Masters of Web Design

By | web development, website design | No Comments

Here at Fusion 360, we do website design better than Martha Stewart does tax evasion. Here are some of the various awards and accolades we’ve won over the years for our sleek and classy Web design.

The Webby Awards – 1x Winner

One of the oldest and most prestigious awards for Internet excellence, since 1996 the annual Webby Awards have honored the best and brightest in the world of digital marketing and website design. Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the Webby Awards cover everything from social media and video content to outstanding website design.

To win such an award is considered “the Internet’s highest honor,” and Fusion 360 is proud to have been a recipient.

The Davey Awards – 3x Winner

The Davey Awards are designed for the small advertising agencies with big ideas. Offering awards for all kinds of creative content from both digital agencies and ones that work in traditional print, the Davey Awards honor those that take an exceptionally creative approach to the challenges marketing and design companies face everyday.

With three different wins for our characteristically creative, user-friendly website design, Fusion 360 stands up tall against the big ad agencies — just like how David stood up against Goliath.

The W3 Awards – 1x Winner

Presented by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, the W3 Awards honor everything in creative excellence on the World Wide Web. The W3 Awards honor advertising agencies big and small — and everyone in between. With awards in marketing programs, videos, website design, mobile features and social media, the W3 Awards truly feature all of the Internet’s best content.

As a one-time winner of the W3 Award for our outstanding website design, Fusion 360 joins the ranks of the Internet’s best and brightest. When it comes to Web design, why would you go with anyone else?

Creative Excellence, Quantified

As one of Utah’s top advertising agencies, our clients don’t just trust we’ll deliver the best results — they count on it. While our current stash of awards may be nice and shiny, we’re always looking to bring home as many as we can.

For the agency of the future with the awards to back it up, count on Fusion 360 to bring you the best website design money can buy. We guarantee it.

Apr 25
0

How Do Good Slogans Influence Public Perception?

By | advertising, content marketing | No Comments

Good slogans are a mainstay of any successful marketing campaign. Since the dawn of advertising, these short, often simple phrases have been used to promote everything from diamonds to drain cleaner, cereal to cell phones, fast food chains and car insurance.

From digital marketing firms to old-school ad agencies, everyone in the industry knows the power of a good slogan. But how, exactly, do slogans work to influence public perception of your brand?

In essence, a slogan works by building a link between your brand and a higher purpose — whether that be a call to action, a broader concept or a far-reaching cultural norm. Through a powerful slogan, your brand transforms into something greater than the sum of its products; instead of selling a mere physical object, you are selling an idea. The more unforgettable the idea the better — as The Atlantic wrote in 2011, “The best slogans capture higher purpose in a memorable way.”

While it’s tempting to appeal to some grand, lofty purpose, a brand’s slogan still needs to have something to do with the brand itself. Stray too far from your brand’s original purpose and you’ll likely succeed only in confusing your target audience and digital marketing companies alike. Without a clear link to your brand’s identity, your slogan will bomb as badly as Dr Pepper’s “It’s Not for Women” (yes, that really existed).

A good slogan can also appeal to consumers subconsciously. Any digital marketing firms can tell you the importance of a call to action, but where slogans really shine is through call to actions that don’t have any specific endpoint. Consider the well-known Subway slogan, “Eat Fresh.”

The slogan itself is a clear call to action, but to what, exactly? “Eating fresh” is a rather vague concept; at what point has someone “eaten fresh?” In creating a slogan that primes customers for an unattainable goal, Subway ensures its consumers will always keep the sandwich company in some deep recesses of their minds, in endless subconscious pursuit of the elusive goal of “eating fresh.”

From digital marketing firms to multinational corporations, everyone relies on slogans to get their brand message across in one way or another. Whether your slogan speaks to family values, personal success or maintaining a healthy lifestyle, a company mantra that resonates well with consumers is one with staying power.

Apr 22
0

Fostering Engagement With Content Marketing on Social Media

By | content marketing | No Comments

Have you found recently that while on Facebook, a website that you were recently looking at has now been showing up on your feed and on the ads? With this new way of content marketing, it’s hard for a person to not notice your business.

At Fusion 360 in Utah, we have been popping up on Facebook pages and are up to date on our content marking and know how to promote it.

With as many people as there are on Facebook in Utah and across the country, putting your business and logo out there will create a stronger audience for the company, making people aware that you exist and you’re the company they need to succeed. Many may already have a Facebook page and Twitter account with many followers and likes, but many of those likes could be considered fake likes, meaning they may have liked your page but they’re not here to look at it.

How to Use Content Marketing

Posting your content on Facebook daily will create an interaction with you and your customers. Many ways to do this include posting a blog, video or an image. Even if your images and videos aren’t always consistent with your company, the meme you post could create likes for your page, creating an audience that will see your marketing content.

Other Sources of Media

Besides Facebook, get accounts on Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube; these social websites can also help push your content marketing over the edge and can be shared between different social media platforms.

If you’re trying to figure out if your content marketing is building that traction, there are different websites including Facebook that can help you see what demographic is visiting your Facebook page and their location among other things.

With social media on the rise here in Utah and around the globe (while being a main source of marketing for your company), learn to utilize social media for yourself and your content marketing — it’ll help grown and make your business aware among the numbers.

Apr 22
0

Slaying Your Content Marketing Challenges

By | content marketing, marketing, Utah | No Comments

By now, most companies are starting to get the message that content marketing isn’t a fad. In the information age, content marketing is marketing. Even still, businesses in Utah and beyond build long lists of reasons why they can’t make it happen. They make small problems seem like massive dragons ready to burn their careers to the ground. But by adopting some new ways of thinking about content, there are really no dragons you can’t slay.

Here are some of the biggest content challenges we hear about and why they’re not so bad.

I Don’t Have Enough Time

This is one we’re sick of hearing. Anyone can make time for priorities — and if you’re doing marketing at all, content marketing is definitely going to be one of your primary areas of focus. A quick 30 minutes of unfettered typing can lead to a bunch of different content types, whether it’s a blog article, some social media posts or even quick, low-production instructional videos. Not only that, but who’s to say you have to be the one creating the content? Many companies have had success inviting their clients to write blog articles for them, and still more have hired marketing agencies in Utah to fill their content gaps.

I Don’t Have Any Ideas 

Ten minutes with a pen, a pad and a few people is all it takes to get a huge list of ideas ready for local markets like the state of Utah, or bigger markets like the whole country. Ask yourself questions like:

  • What makes our company different from others in Utah or the world?
  • What expert knowledge about our industry can we share?
  • What about our manufacturing or development process might be compelling to talk about?
  • What is happening in our industry now and how can we comment on it intelligently?
  • What are our clients struggling with and how can we ease some of their burdens with content?
  • At what times has the client been satisfied, and what are their stories?

Among the answers to these questions is a huge list of potential videos, articles and more.

My Brand Doesn’t Lend Itself to That Kind of Marketing

Given what we already discussed above, you should begin to see that even a boring product or company has compelling stories, whether they involve internal processes or client success. The home appliance market in particular might seem boring until you think of what Utah-based company Blendtec has done. Just by using one of their blenders to destroy various things, Blendtec has become a YouTube sensation and a household name, all while selling a ton of blenders.

I Can’t Get the Execs to Sign Off

For many, gaining executive approval is the biggest challenge they’ll face. Executives will wonder why their employees are spending time writing a bunch of articles, and making a bunch of videos that might not even discuss their product directly. Those still stuck in the always-be-closing mentality, won’t like the idea of slowly building trust and authority with prospects. Your job will be showing them how much success other companies have had with content marketing. You’ll need to reveal a detailed plan of how content marketing applies to your company, and what gains you can hope to get from it. You strategy might focus on a local market, like Utah in our case, or it could cast a wider net across the country or world. With a compelling plan in place and a clear picture of the potential ROI, most execs will give you a shot.

It’s Too Expensive

This is a pretty common misconception about content marketing. When you see long-form ebooks, highly stylized infographics and videos with stellar production, content marketing starts to look mighty expensive — but it doesn’t have to be. Audiences will forgive lower production values for information that helps them. How many times have you sat through a fuzzy YouTube video because it had the info you need? The real value you provide is in the quality of the information itself. Great packaging helps, but if you have solid information that’s useful for your target audience, your content will succeed — even on a budget.

Conclusion

Content marketers are always going to run into challenges, whether they’re a small Utah-based shop, or a huge national firm, but there are none too big for agile marketers handle. With a little know-how and a firm belief in successful content marketing, there’s no challenge too big for the knights of content to slay.

Apr 19
0

The Facebook Metrics You Should Care Most About

By | content marketing, digital marketing, Facebook, marketing agencies, Social Media, web development, website design | No Comments

Facebook boasts just over a billion daily active users, making it a huge storehouse of potential customers that businesses can pursue. Since most businesses and digital marketing firms are on board the Facebook train by now, the next step for them is understanding some of the metrics Facebook provides — and how those metrics can be used to improve posts.

Page Views

Page views refer to how many people have visited your Facebook page. This is useful because it can show you how many people were either curious enough about your brand to look you up, or wanted to interact with more of your posts after seeing them on their news feed.

Reach

For Facebook, reach refers to how many users viewed your post. This helps digital marketing firms because you can see which posts gather the most reach, compared to which aren’t doing so well. While this information is useful, it it’s not nearly as useful as seeing how many people engaged with a particular post.

Impressions

While reach refers to number of people who saw your post, impressions refer to how many times your post was seen. This is different, because the same user can see your post more than once if one of his or her friends shares the post. Impressions are a useful metric because they give you a clearer picture of how many times your message is appearing to your audience — and can be a good indicator of how shareable it is.

Engagement

For digital marketing firms in particular, the keyword for social media is, of course, “social.” Engagement measures the percentage of people who interacted with your posts, either through commenting, liking, sharing, etc. This is one of the most useful metrics — because the best type of content is the kind that’s interesting enough for people to share with their friends. The beauty of Facebook is that if you’re sharing something your audience likes, they will do a lot of the legwork for you.

Videos

A major focus for all digital marketing firms is video. If you’re posting videos to your Facebook page, you’ll want to know how many people are actually watching them, right? What’s more useful, though, is seeing how long people have watched your video. Facebook will provide you with the number of times your video has been viewed for at least ten seconds. If videos consistently under perform and people begin to watch but quickly bounce, that’s a solid indicator that your videos need some improvement.

In Summary

Facebook provides these statistics for a reason, so don’t forget to make studying them a regular part of your social media strategy. Only by analyzing stats and understanding how your posts are performing can you continually improve your digital marketing game.

Apr 18
0

The Importance of a Company-Wide Style Guide

By | web development, website design | No Comments

For any company or brand maintaining consistent style, branding and visuals are absolutely essential. No matter whether you’re working at a small startup company or a multi-national corporation, having a style guide to refer to is invaluable for anyone in the website design profession. Here’s why.

Let’s say you’re working as a Web designer for a small company. As the sole designer, you come up with all the company logos, fonts, colors and other miscellaneous elements yourself. Now say the company is expanding, acquiring new big clients, and now you’re working with a team of website designers and Web development professionals. Do you want to have to personally teach each new employee that comes in the specifics of your company’s style and branding? Of course not!

Enter the company style guide. With a handy style guide that covers everything a Web designer needs to know, from fonts and hex values to logo sizes and placement, you’ve just saved yourself a hell of a lot of time and effort.

So what does a style guide for company website design typically entail? A company style guide can include information regarding brand voice, company colors, brand logo, positioning and terms of use, typography, specific icons or icon sets and much more. You can even include information on brand history & vision, social media guidelines, copywriting guidelines, design layouts, grid standards and examples, depending on your company’s needs.

A comprehensive company-wide style not only ensures everyone at your company knows what they’re doing, it also ensures that some inexperienced designer doesn’t come along and ruin all your hard work. For freelance designers, a style guide can function as a great housekeeping tool, allowing you to return to work with an old client without too much hassle.

Above all, a company-wide style guide ensures your work will stay consistent, and certifies an efficient, high-quality level of production. For website design professionals everywhere, your style guide is your instruction manual — don’t forget it!

Apr 15
0

How to Become a Video Marketing Master

By | advertising, Video | No Comments

In the current digital age, it’s become apparent that content marketing and video play a key role in the work of any advertising agency, from Utah to the East Coast. Video can easily capture someone’s attention — and video makes it increasingly easy to deliver a message. In advertising, things that are visual have been proven to be effective, helping to incorporate and engage your target viewership.

The Stats of Video Marketing

According to comScore, an American Internet analytics company, “just over 45 percent of Internet users viewed at least one video per month, and the average user is exposed to an average of 32 videos a month.” This is quite the amount of videos being watched. Imagine if your own video was being viewed that many times a month — it would make an incredible difference in your website’s traffic. Major retailers report that 90 percent of their shoppers find that video plays a critical role in a shopper’s purchasing experience.

Why Video?

In Utah and around the world, video is becoming a preferred form of marketing among consumers. A video is effective and can make the products or company more visible — rather than just the words on a page. According to a survey conducted by Internet marketing services Demand Metric and Ascend2, video is being used for brand awareness by 52 percent of marketers, and online engagement by 42 percent of marketers. The second largest distribution of channel usage by companies is through video sharing website like YouTube. The marketing services found that this was the second most effective distribution channel, just below the companies’ or brands’ own websites.

How to Make Engaging Videos

Any advertising agency would argue that most people aren’t excited to see the advertisements before their videos, but even so, this is a great way to market. As a Utah-based advertising agency with a video, you only have 10 seconds to grab the viewers’ attention. This is a critical thing to learn, because this will give you an idea of how long you want your video to be. Desktop users only have an attention span of approximately two minutes — so keep your videos short and to the point.

Make sure any video that your advertising agency produces is high quality — nothing makes your company look bad like a low-quality video. Your video should provide information that is both useful and informative. Also, making your videos user friendly can make it more appealing. Make the video interactive: have surveys your Utah consumer can take, make it engaging, but don’t get crazy.

Make sure you’re utilizing your videos for SEO purposes as well — include hashtags and your brand name. As an advertising agency in Utah, this will be critical to helping your client get the best of the best when it comes to their video marketing.

Apr 14
0

How Colors Affect Your Website

By | web development, website design | No Comments

Colors are very curious — they can make you feel something and change your mood. As a web designer, it’s important to pick the right colors for your clients’ websites. You wouldn’t want a yellow website for a funeral home, or a black website for children. As a web developer, it’s important to know what color schemes to use to help set the mood of the website. 

Color Theory

When it comes to picking colors, it’s important to understand three words: contrast, complementation and vibrancy. There are different shades to every color, so knowing what colors are going to contrast the colors you’ll be using will be important to you.

Complementation is similar, but these are colors that will accent each other such as blue and yellow.

Vibrancy is where mood setting comes in; picking a warm color will tend to energize the user, while a cooler color will be more relaxing. Knowing these basics will help you understand how the colors are going to work for you.

Design Principals

One easy design principal to remember in web design when picking colors, is to put a lighter color on your background, so that your text is easy to read. When designing around text, don’t get super creative — you want to keep the area simple.

If a web developer is looking to get a reader’s attention, make sure that you have colors that are contrasting, like using a gray background and lighter foreground. People’s eyes will usually look at the brightest color first — usually white, and that color will grab their attention. Using a variety of contrasting colors will help keep focus on certain page elements.

Color Scheme

Web designers can find a variety of color schemes, and picking that scheme can be a tough decision. Colors can bring out different feelings in people, like cool colors versus warm colors. As a web developer, there are different tools you can use to find schemes such as Adobe and Photoshop. These tools can help you find what color scheme and mood you’re trying to set.