Key Information You Need To Know On Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing is a growing trend which involves marketing a product or a service through experiences that engage the customers and create emotional attachment to the product/service. Experiential marketing veers off course from traditional strategies that broadcast brand and product benefits to a wide audience. Also referred to as engagement marketing experiential marketing may be comprised of a variety of marketing strategies geared toward immersing customers within the product by engaging them in as many ways as possible. Ultimately, companies utilizing this strategy want to help customers form memorable, emotional connections with a brand to foster customer loyalty and improve customer lifetime value (CLV). Experiential marketing has its practices.

Experiential Marketing Best Practices

Companies that succeed with this strategy go beyond giving consumers attractive offers and samples. True magic happens when brands put individual customers or groups of consumers in an immersive branded experience. Thus, brands must go beyond PR stunts, display ads, and promoted social media ads to stir positive emotions in people and foster brand loyalty. Successful campaigns encourage customers to repeatedly come back in order to influence their customer lifetime value. As with any other type of marketing strategy, companies should make use of best practices. One of the most important aspects of this immersive marketing approach is putting the consumer first (aka being customer centric).This means you must put yourself in the mind of the consumer at all times to successfully engage your audience; doing so will foster brand ambassadors – brand warriors who promote your brand just as well as (sometimes even better than) your top salespeople. The easiest way to increase brand loyalty among your customers is to put yourself in their shoes.

Marketers also understand the power of storytelling, and experiential marketing lends itself to storytelling extremely well. Consumers who identify with a story make stronger connections to brands and have the emotional responses marketers strive to create. We experience well-told stories rather than simply listening to them, and we are more apt to repeat a brand’s story when we identify strongly with it, particularly on a deep emotional level. The best stories are truthful, are infused with personalities, involve characters the audience feels compelled to root for, and include a beginning, middle, and end. Something to remember.

Additional best practices include:

• Set clear goals and outcomes
• Determine ways to measure those goals and outcomes
• Identify and exhaustively research your target market
• Remember why experiential marketing works
• Devise a creative, exciting, and impactful activation
• Find ways to maximize online engagement through social media and other channels
• Give people something of value

BENEFITS OF EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING

1. Experiential marketing integrates with content marketing, social media and PR.

A research discovered that 98% of consumers create digital or social content at events and experiences, and 100% of those attendees share the content. When you consider the nature of creating experiences, you can see how media attention can be earned. Experiences can also be leveraged for content marketing, everything from social media posts to filming your next TV commercial on-spot. Experiential really does feed your brand’s content factory.

2. Experiential marketing is effective and measurable.

According to research, 80% of experiential marketers saw a return on investment of 3:1 or more, and 16% realized an ROI of 20:1 or more. Whether you are looking to entice immediate sales, increase your awareness, improve customer favorability or perception, rank higher on satisfaction scores or generate new leads, experiential marketing can address a specific challenge or drive overall marketing goals. We will identify the KPIs on campaign, and ensure that the campaign delivers on measurable metrics. Using just this one channel, a brand has the power to generate awareness, engage, inform, create interest, encourage trial, promote consideration and prompt purchase, moving a consumer the entire way through the sales funnel. That’s why 31% of marketers believe that event marketing is the single-most effective channel, above content, email, social media and traditional.

3. Experiential marketing builds reputation and credibility, and it can change perception.

When your prospects and customers trust you, they are more likely to buy from you. When you have their trust, you can also command a higher price and boost the lifetime value of each customer.

4. Experiential marketing offers consumers interactive, engaging experiences.

In today’s increasingly digital world, 95% of marketers agree that live events provide a valuable way to form in-person connections. Experiences, especially those on the exclusivity side, are added value to your audiences and allow consumers to connect with a brand in new ways, using all five physical senses. Experiences can also provide a value-exchange for generating new leads:

• Event registrations to attend on-site experiences
• Exclusive opportunities in exchange for personal data
• Photos at events, sent directly to the participant providing a name and email, with social media sharing capabilities
• Opportunities to win instant prizes by registering with RFID

Following the experience, use the data you collected to responsibly remarket to participants. Chances are, they’ll be looking for experiences in every piece of communication you deliver.

5. Experiential marketing grabs attention in a memorable way.

We live with information overload every day; there is so much noise and channel proliferation in the advertising space. Experiences are a way to breakthrough that clutter and really stand out. When done right, experiential creates a lasting memory – not just an impression – that will be recalled, and more importantly felt, for years whenever a participant sees your brand name.

Brand Activation

What is Brand Activation?

Brand Activation is an art of bringing the brand to life by designing various innovative experiences that drive consumer action. It is one of the best processes to make the brand known to the market and the target audience resulting in an increase in awareness and customer engagement.

Examples and Types of Brand Activation

Type of Brand activation 1 – Product Sampling Campaign

In this method, brands reach out directly to the target audience at the desired locations and distribute free samples of the product that is yet to be launched or has been newly launched in the market. It is one of the best ways to promote the product and gather the firsthand feedback from the consumers.

Red Bull that is one of the renowned non-alcoholic beverage had undertaken the product sampling campaign at various corporate offices especially call centers and KPO’s by distributing free cans of the drink to the employees as the drink is known for boosting the energy levels that is the specific requirement of the call center employees working long hours and night shifts.

Going further, the beverage giant also sponsors various sports events in and around the world targeting sportsmen who are in a constant requirement for energy booster non-alcoholic beverages.

Type of Brand activation 2 – Experiential Marketing

With the latest and modern technological advancements, the technique of experiential marketing and branding has come into the picture and has worked wonders for the brands to showcase their products and services through virtual and augmented reality.

Many of the real estate developers showcase their project along with amenities, facilities, and other features by displaying 3D walkthroughs, virtual videos that takes the viewers on the interesting journey of the show and sample apartment, and setting up innovative stalls and kiosks at various trade shows and exhibitions on the national and international level, making the experience quite a memorable one for the consumers that results in sales growth and overall brand awareness.

Type of Brand activation 3 – In-Store or Mall Brand Activation

This marketing measure is followed by luxury car giants by hiring an open space at a famous mall and displays the newly launched actual car to the consumers. This activity is undertaken over the weekends or during the sale period at the mall as it results in major footfall. The consumers can actually experience all the features of the car, run a test drive, and gather all the information on the product to necessitate their purchase decision.

Features of Brand Activation

• The main objective of Brand Activation is not to provide impetus to the sales growth but is to create brand awareness and customer engagement that arises the brand consciousness in the minds of the customers resulting in the loyalty.
• It is not a one man’s job but teamwork; hence, it is also important for the brand to hire a great agency onboard that specializes in the Brand Activation ways and techniques taking due care every minute intricacy driving the success of the campaign.
• It is a vital part of the marketing mixthat comprises of product, price, promotion, and place; hence, it is essential to plan and strategize the Brand Activation campaign by working out the available resources and budgets in hand for the optimum returns on the investment.
• It is always viable to test the campaign before the final roll-out as its core fundamental is working in the live environment with the live audience. It is prudent for the campaign to be cohesive with the changing dynamics of the market and the taste of the consumers.
• Importance of Brand Activation

Brand activation that fosters engagement helps in:

• Boosting brand loyalty
• Fulfilling buyer needs
• Appealing to senses
• Satisfying market needs and demands
• Enhances sales
• However, the goal of brand activation shouldn’t necessarily be focused on the buying process like most authorities and academics would tell you. Instead, it should focus on fostering engagement. In this article, we would be taking a very practical look at how we can activate a brand to foster engagement.
• What a good brand activation routine looks like
• A good brand activation program follows a multi-channel approach. You will need to combine social, digital and real life engagement in order to activate emotions and behaviors that are desired. In other words, brand activation ensures that certain behaviors and emotions are activated each time a prospect encounters your brand.

Brand activation comes in many forms and is delivered through multiple channels. Brand activation that resonates with customers and achieves results calls for strategic planning that starts with “why.” Why will your target audiences care? Why would they engage? Then focus on the “how.”

• Whether the objective is to move products off the shelf, sign up new customers, increase subscriptions to an email newsletter or raise support for a cause through donations or fundraising, brand activation is not just about gaining affinity — it’s about inspiring consumers to act.
• By starting with “why” and developing an activation model through a multichannel approach — think social, experiential, digital — you can foster engagement and emotion that creates face-to face engagement with your audience and sells products. Personalizing and layering the experience will get you further than a strict awareness campaign implemented in a silo. Here are five steps for creating brand activation programs that inspire consumers to act:

1. Decide what action you want your consumers to take. Start by articulating your goals. They must be quantifiable. The costs of your approach will most likely dictate that you accomplish more than raising awareness.
2. Determine how you will know your audiences actually care. Don’t just plan to show off. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, people don’t care how much you know ’til they know how much you care”.
3. When you’ve determined your objectives, formulate your idea for activation. Consider how it will embody your brand attributes. If you are leveraging an event in your activation strategy, think beyond the photo booth and customized tchotchkes to visualize what would create a lasting impression and influence consumers to take the next steps — to transition them from acquaintances of your brand to advocates for it. This requires thinking outside the silo to leverage cross-channel tactics.

             Branding Essence

What is Brand Essence ?

Brand Essence is the heart soul and major characteristic of a brand. It is also referred to as the brand mantra. It defines a brand. It is emotional and based on feelings. It is an intangible attribute that separates your brand from your competition’s brand by your audience

A brand essence is intangible for your audience, unique to your brand and, most importantly, reliable.

It is not a commodity, nor is it product related. It is the essential feeling evoked in your audience when they hear your brand name. It combines the attributes and benefits of your brand succinctly. Therefore, your brand essence should be boiled down to one or maybe two words.

Lets look at some well known brand examples

• Visa = Everywhere
• FedEx = Safe
• Disney = Magical
• REI = Adventurous
• XINI = Your Walking Imagination

A brand essence is meant to be authentic. Likewise, it must be scalable to your overall brand’s growth.

For example, a brand may want to choose the word “personal” because your customer service is direct and individualized. However, examine the essence in relationship to the growth of your brand.

• Will you be able to keep that feeling consistent if you were to increase your client load tenfold?
• Do you want your audience to feel like they are dealing with someone on personal level for all their needs indefinitely?
• Does “personal” relate to your products, both current and future?
• Is this a reliable and sustainable claim?
• Will your brand personality match “personal” as your brand essence?

Make sure your brand management team helps you pick an essence that doesn’t just feel right in the moment but also asks long-term strategic questions to help you define your brand essence for the goals of your company, small business, or nonprofit.

Brands have a natural lifecycle moving around this matrix. When new brands are launched, they have low awareness and sales. You need to find other leading indicators to judge their success. The degree of differentiation, as perceived by customers, is a great leading indicator. Brands with high differentiation but low awareness are your emerging stars – they may have low sales now, but as awareness and sales distribution increase, they will become your power brands. If customers do not perceive a new product as differentiated, cut it – there is no point fighting an uphill battle to build awareness and distribution without a product edge.

All Thanks to Strategictool for the piece.

http://strategictoolkits.com/strategic-concepts/brand-awareness-differentiation-framework/

Power brands are your current performers – fully mature, they are both differentiated and with high awareness. Marketers invest to keep their brands in this position. Maintaining Differentiation is a continuous competitive battle however, and brands sometimes lose their edge.

t takes longer for them to lose their awareness, so the brands that lose differentiation slip to become “has-been”. Their sales are high, but they are driven by high awareness and high weighted distribution. These brands are living on borrowed time however, they are living off their historical equity. If they cannot innovate to recover differentiation, they will slide slowly down to irrelevance, losing awareness and distribution since they no longer recruit new customer champions to end their lives as weak brands.

When is it useful?

This portfolio framework is useful when analysing a brand portfolio. It immediately shows the health of the portfolio, looking beyond short term sales numbers to highlight the expected future. For brands, it works better than the BCG Matrix in resource allocation decisions, giving top-down guidance on what to focus on in the brand plan.

The emphasis for Emerging Stars should be investment to boost awareness and distribution, expanding channels and customer reach. For has-been brands, it should be on innovation to restore differentiation. Weak brands have not earned investment.

How do you do the analysis?

You need to apply it intelligently. For example, your target market might change from brand-to-brand – there is no point measuring awareness and perceived differentiation in young men of a product aimed at older women.

Once you have identified the right target customers to measure, awareness (either aided or unaided) and differentiation metrics come directly from your brand tracking market research.

Plotting movement over a number of years on this map can give a dynamic picture of the portfolio health.

For global brands, the position on this matrix represents a weighted average across all their markets. If you are analysing a global brand, plotting the position of every country on this matrix will help your resource allocation

How can you adapt this concept?

Another way to look at the brand health is to analyze the demographics of loyal customers. Vibrant brands will have strong equity in young people – you need to be differentiated in order to recruit. Dying brand sales and equity will be concentrated in older consumers – these customers will continue to buy the brand if it is still in distribution purely on loyalty and habit, even if there are better products available.

The Main Consideration in Brand Essence

And this brings us to the second step to ensure that your product is preferred over its competitors.

All the experiences of your target market that can influence their perception of your product are communications.

A communication is any experience we develop for another or others, which experience results in a specific perception in their mind/s. Which perception would not have occurred without that experience.

So in order to ensure that your products are preferred over those of your competitors, you must regard all the experiences that your target market will have. Those that they might attribute to your product, as communications. As communications that will contribute toward the development or consolidation of the right perception in their minds.

All Brand Essence is Communications

As these experiences are really communications, they must be designed and managed specifically. Managed to generate the perceptual residues that will form or affirm the right perception for your product.

To put it more obviously, you must regard every kind of experience that your target market might have. Everything which can contribute to their perception of your product. As a different communications medium. And that you must manage and design for maximum impact toward the delivery and formation of the right product perception.

Beside the Obvious, Think about your Brand Essence

Aside from the communications media that you already think of as such, like advertising, promotions, merchandising and packaging. You must now focus on those target market experiences. Experiences that you have so far not thought of as communications media. But, which have already been influencing your target market’s perception of your product.

The actual performance of your product. And, the behavior of the people or methods for product support. These are probably the most important communications media toward generating the right perception for your product.

Brand Essence is a type of media

And these communications media involve not just the performance of your product in use.

It also includes how easy it is to access. How convenient it is to use. How effortlessly it prevents waste. And how it looks in their home, the demeanor of your support people. Their actual behavior, their effectiveness at solving actual customer problems. And, the consistency between the things they say and what actually happens for customers.

Some of these hitherto unknown communications media are therefore your product design. Your product research, your product manufacturing, your product components and your product reliability. It also includes your sales people, processes and methods, your billing people, processes and methods, your collections people and methods. And your customer service people, processes and methods.

Bottom line, it’s high time you think of your business as a communications company as well.

It’s high time you think of all of the experiences that your target market might have that might influence their perception. The perception of your product as communications media.

And it’s high time that you design and manage all these experiences. Just as you already design and manage your more ‘obvious’ communications media. Remember, to NOT  think of and treat all the kinds of experiences your target market will have of your product as communications. Will inevitably result in unintended perceptual residues. Feelings in the minds of your target market that might dilute, diffuse or even prevent the formation of the right product perception. And thus reduce your product’s preference among your target markets. Thus reducing your revenues as well.

Your business is already also a communications company, whether you know it or not.

Every brand needs a Pyramid

What is a Brand Pyramid?

A brand pyramid is a tool that answers the fundamental questions outlined above in a pyramid like diagram that can be easily shared and communicated across your company. The only thing it doesn’t tackle directly are questions related to the company’s mission and vision (although the brand essence is a direct result of what the company wants to be when it grows up or its vision).

Why it matters?

Developing a brand pyramid might seem like a trivial exercise but it’s important because it does 4 essential things for your business:

1. Forces consensus among senior management on what the company wants to be, who it serves, why, how it should make customers feel and what the company’s core values are.
2. Clarifies some of the brands fundamentals — such as what is the essence of the brand.
3. Sets the strategic foundation of the brand.
4. Provides all this information in an easy-to-use diagram that can be quickly shared with other founders and employees in a way that’s easy to share and understand.

What it’s made up of?

The brand pyramid is made up of 5 components going from bottom to top:

​Product features and attributes: This section explains what the different features of the products are (for example — a messaging app might also have emoji, video chat and group chat functionality).

Functional benefits: This section helps provide clarity around “what problem are we solving? Why would a customer use our product and what is the expectation once they’ve used it?” (in our above example, the messaging app helps you communicate with others via text, voice and video in a way that’s free).

Emotional benefits: Beyond just solving the customer’s need this component helps answer “How does the customer feel after using our product?” If you recall one of my previous posts on why startups should focus on “slaying dragons not in talking tech”, customers aren’t just interested in your product features, they want you to tell them a story. They want to be able to look at themselves in the mirror and feel just a little bit better that morning simply because they are using your product. That’s where the emotional benefits comes in. (in our messaging app example, maybe the app helps users feel “close”, “secure”, “needed”. These are the emotional needs the app can provide.) Why do emotions matter? Because consumers who feel a certain emotional to a product are less likely to churn than those who don’t! — that reduces your marketing costs and keeps your keeps consumers coming, using and, hopefully, paying.

Brand Persona and/or Core Values: If your brand were a person, how would you describe him or her? What are the values that are important to this person and to your company? How does everything you do from product development to marketing to customer service reinforce these core values? Think of Geico’s Gecko for example. The Gecko is friendly, approachable and curious. These are attributes which users can relate to and it makes them feel closer to Geico as an insurance product.

Brand Essence / Idea: The brand essence is the underlying idea and answers the “why” customers should care about your brand. For example, Apple’s brand essence is “empowering people through technology”. Brand essence is essentially your brand’s DNA. What you stand for and what differentiates you from your competition. It’s the core about makes you “you”.

Practical implications and what it means for your business

The ultimate goal of your company and especially your marketing team, is to get customers to understand, believe and evangelize your product or service to others. The more closely a consumer actually really gets your brand’s essence and is willing and eager to share this with others, the more loyal they are, the stronger the relationship, and the less likely that customer is to switch to a competitor’s product. They are also more likely through word of mouth (WOM) to recommend your product to a friend. Establishing a brand’s essence in the mind of a customer is the “holy grail” of marketing and a goal rarely achieved by most brands. I discussed the benefits of a strong brand in another post so let’s talk about “how” you actually build your brand pyramid.

Developing your brand pyramid

The first step is really understanding whether you need to develop a brand pyramid or how solid your current one really is. That’s where a brand “review” comes into play. The simplest way to do this is to interview all the key people in your company and ask them the list of questions I mentioned at the beginning of this post. If the answers are very consistent and aligned then you’re doing a good job. If not, you’ve got some work to do. You might also want to interview a few of your customers and/or potential customers to see what they think. The answers may surprise you.

For an early stage or mid sized company (10–200 or so) I would suggest the following:

1. Create a list of questions like the ones I mentioned at the top of the article. Expand on those if you need to.
2. Interview your key employees / founders and some customers. It’s preferable to actually interview each one of them 1–1 for at least 45–60 minutes and to send them a list of key questions and themes so they come well prepared to the meeting.
3. Gather all the feedback and input it into a “current state” document that you can present to relevant stakeholders.
4. Set up an initial meeting where you highlight:

• What a brand pyramid is and why it matters
• A snapshot of your audit and what it reveals
• A calendar and overview of what’s needed to develop your brand pyramid

5. Conduct a brainstorm meeting with the same key stakeholders. The aim is really to get them all aligned in terms of what each core component of the brand pyramid is.
6. Develop your first draft based on the brainstorm and present this to the same group of stakeholders.
7. Get input and adjust the brand pyramid as needed.
8. Once you’ve gotten key people to sign off you should present the brand pyramid to the wider company (sales, engineers, customer support, HR etc.). Depending on the size of your business you’ll want to either do this at an all hands and possibly have members of the marketing team present this to all relevant customer facing teams and team leads.
9. With the brand pyramid finished and presented you should add it to your Brand Bible(if you already have one), upload it to the marketing page of your intranet and ensure everyone knows where it is.

How to keep the Brand Pyramid Alive

Congratulations! You’ve developed your brand pyramid. But to keep it going and make it a reality as opposed to just a pretty diagram and management exercise, founders and/or senior management should continuously reinforce your brand essence and core values publicly whenever they have the opportunity.

One way to do that would be to start off each all hands with a 2 minute recap of your brand essence and values. Another way I’ve seen this successfully implemented is to institute quarterly rewards for employees who exemplify your brand values and brand essence through actions and initiatives of their own. At Course Hero, the company where I used to work, they took this a step farther and actually developed Slack emoticons that people would use in conversations whenever someone did something that furthered the company’s core values. Pretty cool if you ask me!

Hope this helps. Building a great brand pyramid is essential in getting your senior management on the same page. The brand pyramid is a great tool to set the foundation for your company’s brand strategy and can become vital, when used properly, for consistently living up to your brand’s promise. But remember, it’s just a tool and building a great brand is all about consistency, focus and patience.

XINI as a brand management agency in Lagos Nigeria, We ensure that our clients stay peak through all the needed brand experience that converts to them daily. Think XINI think Brand think Value.

Have Your  Read About Printing In Lagos Nigeria?

What of Digital PageScore?

Lastly to keep you updated have you read on The Future Of Printing

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Tips to Avoid Getting Burnt Out Thinking of Marketing Ideas

Most businesses are looking to have an online presence. They also want to reap from it by looking for strategies to implement to achieve their desired sales goals. Having your site optimized through SEO is one of the strategies that can help improve your site’s visibility, ranking, and traffic. There is vast information on how to implement SEO for your site on your own, but this is not recommended. You can assign that task to an SEOtool provider and utilize that time carrying out different tasks.

To choose the best provider for your site, there are things you need to consider. They include:

1) Objectives for Your Site

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You need to know exactly what you want for your site before reaching out to an SEO tool provider for their services. There are different SEO services, and they all differ in application and results.

They are also applicable to different platforms, and you need to choose the most suitable for your site. When in the dark about what you want, look for a firm that offers all SEO services such as eCrawl to ensure that you get exactly what you are looking for. Talk to them and get into an agreement on the changes and achievements you are looking for.

2) Techniques and Tools Used

You can choose a provider depending on the tools, activities, and approaches they use for SEO. Ensure they are legit as illegal techniques such as black hat SEO as they might get your site penalized for unscrupulous tactics leaving you with a poorly ranked site.

Have the provider list all the techniques they will implement for your site. They should also inform you of the key performance indicators you need to look for when keeping an eye on your site. Some can use one or several tools to help you achieve your targets.

3) Cost

Providers have different rates for their services. Once you determine what you need, compare prices charged by different firms to ensure you get services from firms that fit within your price range. Some firms can offer packages for services they offer or customize the prices depending on your needs.

4) Communication

Consider how the firms communicate to their clients before making your investment, as this will apply to you too. Choose firms that constantly keep updating you on changes on your site. You can establish a channel of communication to use for your firm in case you operate on a different schedule.

5) Recommendations

To spot a reputable firm, get recommendations from friends, family, or other businesses that have used similar services. You can also review recommendations about each provider by strangers and choose the one with the best reviews. These reviews can be found on the service provider’s site or on other platforms that people have room to offer honest opinions.

6) Performance

In each industry, there are oversight firms that reward their key players with exemplary performance. You can observe and follow up on this and go for firms who receive the awards. This is a sign that their activities are valid and can work for you too. Additionally, this helps you choose legitimate companies as some out there are scams.

Conclusion-

These were all about some of the tips while choosing seo tool provider. While selecting this, you should take care of both on-page seo optimization techniques and off-page seo optimization techniques and ensure that the tool provides both. Do let me know what you think while selecting the tool.

The Ultimate Startup Marketing Strategy For Incredible Growth

We live in the era of start-ups. Thousands of them were burnt just after a short period of existence, while others, however, have succeeded and now represent serious business players.

Let’s revise such advertising platform as Twitter as an example. It was used for communication between several colleagues and co-workers. The idea was not treated seriously for quite a long time. But now it is a new standard for communication on the Internet. What is their secret?

First of all we should start with two universal truths:

1. Having a good product doesn’t mean you will be successful.
2. Good marketing will not help you if your product is nothing, but rubbish.

Basics

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Become viral

Hotmail, Dropbox and some their soul friends have won the audience with almost investment to marketing, their secret is in installing viral element to the product. It means that your product should be worth recommendation to a friend.

Communicate with your clients

You may have oceans of traffics, but low conversion rates. No time for guessing – ask your clients what frightens or dissatisfies them in your offer. There are thousands of ways to start opinion polls, Survey Monkey as a variant.

Note: users will be reluctant to spend their time for no compensation. You may offer your master class available for a specific audience or a trial period with full facilities.

Get feedbacks

New start-ups should be interested in the clients’ feedbacks. They are very short of time to react and improve the product until it is not too late. To be honest, people are quite lazy to fill all the questionnaires, think how you can motivate them.

Start with small audiences

Become mass market is good idea, but public is very reluctant and suspicious about changes. Being a new product, you’d better earn confidence from newbies and innovators. After positive experience with your products, being praised, you can attack mass markets. Try to use different channels to attract your customers – RTB advertising network, social media, video content, PPC ads etc

Paid marketing

It is silly to think that start-ups should use only free means for promotion. It is certainly wise if you spend $1 for attracting one user and he brings you 5 more. The most popular variants are the following:

Paid Search Marketing

If you have a treatment for a common human’s problem – they are very likely to google it. Paid search results are displayed over natural query. Some people may not even notice that small mark “ads”. The principle based on laziness as searching the answer on the 10th page is really long and if your snippet is attractive and likely to offer what your client need – why hesitate?

Main disadvantage is that it will be stopped as soon as you finish fueling it with money.

Affiliate Marketing

This strategy shouldn’t be considered as a main way out, but will suit as an addition. There are good rates at such places like ClickBank.

Earned marketing

Here we refer any type of advertising that was created by your followers, colleagues or partners – anyone who share your ideas and want to help.

One of main ideas here is to show that you are unique from others. It is difficult to say what you should exactly do, but people should understand why they should choose you instead of your competitors.

Implement your own channels

There are thousands of ideas like:

• email marketing;
• blogging;
• create videos about your product;
• content marketing;
• join social networks where your clients hang out.
• Online advertising network

Bottom line

You may get surprised, but all you have read just now is not a universal truth. Nobody can exclude human factor or a wonderful stroke of luck, sometimes perfect solutions for your main competitor can be absolutely not applicable for you. What to do? Test, experiment, take examples and tune them to your situation.

Want to Learn Social Media Marketing Tricks? Read This

Social media may have come to us more than twenty years ago and evolving into more as technology advances. Social media marketing is just one of those additions that are being used by businesses to advertise their company and BroadVision Media can show you just how you can use these platforms to take your business to the next level in the way of marketing.

Businesses have been turning to social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter as a new way to reach more demographics but also because today’s population seems to have less of an attention span than previously so businesses have had to adjust from using traditional ways of marketing such as radio, television and direct mail to incorporating social media in their advertising campaigns.

If you’re a business owner you know that the time it takes to put together an effective marketing campaign is the time you don’t have, that is why you have a marketing team or outsource to a marketing agency.

Today marketing is more effective when sharing content, staying updated with the latest trends in your field as a way to gain new clients while keeping current ones engaged enough to come back.

I don’t know how to use anything but Facebook and I can’t do more than like posts and comment on pictures.

BroadVision Media is a perfect example of a company who has the 411 on using social media marketing to increase your business awareness and clientele. BroadVision Media’s main focus is on inbound marketing a smart way to get your business up and running by redesigning your website and increasing your followers on social media platforms an that is exactly what BroadVision Media does for you, step by step.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Contents [show]

An example of inbound marketing is using HubSpot’s methodology; Attract, Engage, Delight. This method is used by uploading videos, relevant content and social media posts to attract hot leads.

The second step is to engage the potential client using marketing automation, lead management, and conversational bots. Those who remain, become engaged and are happy to receive email marketing, emails that start a conversation and smart content from the business without feeling solicited.

Followers who don’t unfollow.

In the present day of phishing, scams, and bots using social media company’s like BroadVision Media who use keywords and Social Mediamarketing in addition to their inbound marketing is a new type of service to businesses especially to those who may not be as tech savvy or educated in the way of different social media platforms so BroadVision Media has designed a business to help business owners to use these tools with guidance that will, in turn, increase brand awareness and clientele.

So how does one gain followers?

Chose interesting content that is relevant to your business and use hashtags beyond the obvious. Upload videos and pictures of employee’s, the office, people at work and post on a regular basis using relevant hashtags such as #businessnameanniversary #workinghardorharlyworking #yolo #lovemyjob #alwayscreating.

The Website That Makes Instagram Followers on Sale at the Cheapest Price

You must have heard the phrase “A Picture is worth a Thousand Words”. Instagram is a social media platform for photos sharing and networking and the phrase is the best caption or tagline for Instagram. With so many social media platforms available today, Instagram is the #1. Everybody who uses a smartphone has an account on Instagram, with thousands of new users registering daily.

Social media has become a game changer in the field of marketing. If anyone wants to run a business or get recognized, then Instagram is the platform with a lot of potential. Getting noticed on such a platform is always helpful in establishing or expanding the business, getting recognized, and many more individual goals.

The first thing you want to do on Instagram is to get some followers to follow your content. Now, people think that this is the easiest part but it is not. In fact, this is the most difficult part of Instagram.

It takes determination, peace, skill, and commitment to gain followers. Let me ask you a question, what is the first thing you notice on someone’s profile? The answer is the number of followers.

The Second thing you do is to look at the likes or comments on any of the picture of the profile. Following someone is easy but liking the content takes time. You have to build a profile that can attract the target audience that will spread the word about your profile.

Advantages of Instagram to any business or individual:

• Posting a picture or a video about the company’s product, office culture, and behind the scene operations on Instagram brings the people closest to you. If people like your content they will spread it like an epidemic. Using lucrative hashtags regarding the product you can speak to a large part of society.
• Instagram helps in getting reviews of the customers. If someone is following you on Instagram, that means he/she is interested in your content. If your business appeals to your followers, they will surely leave positive feedbacks and bring more and more people to your profile. It is the human psychology if someone sees that some profile has a few million followers, odds are he/she will look up the profile and follow it.
• Instagram can be used to endorse your products. People follow celebrities from Hollywood, footballers, and various famous personalities. These celebrities can promote your brand/product on Instagram. It saves a lot amount of money compared to tele-promoting.
• Posting stories daily or posting pictures/videos from time to time keeps your followers engaged. People can always connect with you through the personal chat option. You can also share live video with your followers whenever you launch something new. This builds the trust and sometimes you get to feature in the search/trending section.
• Unlike some social media platforms, Instagram does not have any character limit describing your image (captioning) as well as the number of posts limit. You can post any number of posts daily or in total.
• For a talented individual with a certain skill set, Instagram will surely bring recognition, fame, money, and what not. You just have to keep your audience close to your Instagram page and make them like you.

Looking at these advantages you must be tempted to create new accounts and start your journey on the platform of Instagram. But managing a business is not easy. It takes time, energy and determination to manage the business. Running an Instagram is a similarly challenging task. An easy way to manage Instagram is to buy Instagram followers.

By buying the followers, you can save your precious time and money. Let us look at this step logically, if you buy a certain number of followers. This will ultimately increase the number of people who see your business. You might know that phrase people attract people, the more people see your products, more is the sales, and you will get more profits.

There are some companies which provide services like providing followers, likes, comments, tweets, etc. Instafollowers.co is one of the leading companies in this growing market. With the cheapest rates and 24/7 customer support, Instafollowers.co is making a difference. Instafollowers.co is equipped with social media advisors.

Every client is treated with respect and every promotional demand is studied with utmost priority. If clients need any suggestions or one to one sessions with the advisors, it can be arranged. You can get 1000 regular (bot) followers for $4 and 1000 real followers for $5. They also provide discounts and special offers if you buy in large quantities.

Merits of Instafollowers.co

• Provides both active and regular followers to your account within minutes of the payment.
• A fast and efficient payment method like Paypal is used. As soon as you make the payment, the service that was bought is brought to the user.
• You do not need to provide the password of your account. Just give them your Instagram username and you will get the service.
• Support team works hand in hand with the designer team. If you have any problem regarding anything Contact them, support will reply with a quick response.
• In addition to the followers, they also sell likes, comments for your pictures. You just need to take a leap of faith and register with them.
• It is absolutely legal to buy Instagram followers. Active followers will interact with your content and they will share more and more.

About our branding and printing services

As soon as you register with Instafollowers.co and buy the followers, traffic will increase to your account. Keep posting appealing content and the followers will bring more real followers. Everyone wants to gain more and more likes and comments on the pictures, so reach out to Instafollowers.co and register now. A recent study has revealed that the number of local businesses which uses Instagram is limited. So grab this opportunity and enter this area of low competition and grow your business with Instafollowers.co. you can also get an updated business scope with https://nationalviews.com

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What is Advertising?

Advertising is a marketing tactic involving paying for space to promote a product, service, or cause. The actual promotional messages are called advertisements, or ads for short. The goal of advertising is to reach people most likely to be willing to pay for a company’s products or services and entice them to buy.

Finding Your Ideal Customer

When trying to zero in on the types of people who are more likely to need or want your goods or services, and be willing to shell out hard-earned cash for it, you might look at demographic characteristics, such as:

• Gender
• Age
• Education level
• Income level
• Zip code

By more precisely defining who your target customer is, you can better choose advertising vehicles that will reach more of your target customers for less money. Sure, you can buy an expensive ad in the Wall Street Journal, for example, but if your best customers live in the western Boston suburbs, you can buy ads in local papers there for far less.

Where to Advertise

Traditional advertising outlets include newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations. Today, however, advertisements are placed nearly everywhere and anywhere, including:

• Roadside billboards
• Sides of buildings
• Websites
• Electronic newsletters
• Print newsletters
• Inside bills
• Product packaging
• Restaurant placemats
• Event bulletins
• Store windows
• The sides of cars and trucks
• Subway car walls
• Airport kiosks
• Sporting arenas
• YouTube videos

Even if you are the best small shop in your area you still need Advertising as key.

Creating Effective Ads

Advertising messages themselves are designed to persuade an individual to buy a company’s goods or services. Even in business-to-business transactions, individuals have to first be convinced to choose one product over another. To accomplish this, ads have five main components:

1. Headline – This is the key attention-getting message. “Got milk?” is a perfect headline. Or Wendy’s old, “Where’s the beef?”
2. Subhead – Some ad headlines need clarification, much like a book’s subtitle.
3. Body copy – The meat of the advertising message occurs in the main section where the product or service’s features and benefits are highlighted.
4. Image – Unless you’re advertising on the radio, including a product photo, or image illustrating a key benefit is critical.
5. Call-to-action – At the end of the ad you want to invite the consumer to take a step towards doing business with you, such as calling a toll-free number, visiting a website, texting a certain number, or pulling into the drive-thru window.

While advertising is the only way to guarantee that your message will be seen or heard, it is expensive by comparison to other marketing methods. For that reason, it is more popular with large corporations and brands than small businesses.

At the time of this post shopify was the number one ranking website for the word Advertising but however, we would check through what other platforms offer.

Let check wiki from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising

Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea.^[1]:465 Sponsors of advertising are typically businesses wishing to promote their products or services. Advertising is differentiated from public relations in that an advertiser pays for and has control over the message. It differs from personal selling in that the message is non-personal, i.e., not directed to a particular individual.^[1]:661,672 Advertising is communicated through various mass media,^[2] including traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, outdoor advertising or direct mail; and new media such as search results, blogs, social media, websites or text messages. The actual presentation of the message in a medium is referred to as an advertisement, or “ad” or advert for short.

Commercial ads often seek to generate increased consumption of their products or services through “branding“, which associates a product name or image with certain qualities in the minds of consumers. On the other hand, ads that intend to elicit an immediate sale are known as direct-response advertising. Non-commercial entities that advertise more than consumer products or services include political parties, interest groups, religious organizations and governmental agencies. Non-profit organizations may use free modes of persuasion, such as a public service announcement. Advertising may also help to reassure employees or shareholders that a company is viable or successful.

Modern advertising originated with the techniques introduced with tobacco advertising in the 1920s, most significantly with the campaigns of Edward Bernays, considered the founder of modern, “Madison Avenue” advertising.^[3][4]

Worldwide spending on advertising in 2015 amounted to an estimated US$529.43 billion.^[5] Advertising’s projected distribution for 2017 was 40.4% on TV, 33.3% on digital, 9% on newspapers, 6.9% on magazines, 5.8% on outdoor and 4.3% on radio.^[6] Internationally, the largest (“Big Five”) advertising-agency groups are Dentsu, Interpublic, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP.^[7]

In Latin, advertere means “to turn towards”.^[8]

History

Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters.^[9] Commercial messages and political campaign displays have been found in the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Arabia. Lost and found advertising on papyrus was common in ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Wall or rock painting for commercial advertising is another manifestation of an ancient advertising form, which is present to this day in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. The tradition of wall painting can be traced back to Indian rock art paintings that date back to 4000 BC.^[10]

In ancient China, the earliest advertising known was oral, as recorded in the Classic of Poetry (11th to 7th centuries BC) of bamboo flutes played to sell confectionery. Advertisement usually takes in the form of calligraphic signboards and inked papers. A copper printing plate dated back to the Song dynasty used to print posters in the form of a square sheet of paper with a rabbit logo with “Jinan Liu’s Fine Needle Shop” and “We buy high-quality steel rods and make fine-quality needles, to be ready for use at home in no time” written above and below^[11]is considered the world’s earliest identified printed advertising medium.^[12]

In Europe, as the towns and cities of the Middle Ages began to grow, and the general population was unable to read, instead of signs that read “cobbler”, “miller”, “tailor”, or “blacksmith”, images associated with their trade would be used such as a boot, a suit, a hat, a clock, a diamond, a horseshoe, a candle or even a bag of flour. Fruits and vegetables were sold in the city square from the backs of carts and wagons and their proprietors used street callers (town criers) to announce their whereabouts. The first compilation of such advertisements was gathered in “Les Crieries de Paris”, a thirteenth-century poem by Guillaume de la Villeneuve.^[13]

In the 18th century advertisements started to appear in weekly newspapers in England. These early print advertisements were used mainly to promote books and newspapers, which became increasingly affordable with advances in the printing press; and medicines, which were increasingly sought after. However, false advertising and so-called “quack” advertisements became a problem, which ushered in the regulation of advertising content.

19th century

Thomas J. Barratt of London has been called “the father of modern advertising”.^[14][15][16] Working for the Pears Soap company, Barratt created an effective advertising campaign for the company products, which involved the use of targeted slogans, images and phrases. One of his slogans, “Good morning. Have you used Pears’ soap?” was famous in its day and into the 20th century.^[17][18]

Barratt introduced many of the crucial ideas that lie behind successful advertising and these were widely circulated in his day. He constantly stressed the importance of a strong and exclusive brand image for Pears and of emphasizing the product’s availability through saturation campaigns. He also understood the importance of constantly reevaluating the market for changing tastes and mores, stating in 1907 that “tastes change, fashions change, and the advertiser has to change with them. An idea that was effective a generation ago would fall flat, stale, and unprofitable if presented to the public today. Not that the idea of today is always better than the older idea, but it is different – it hits the present taste.”^[15]

As the economy expanded across the world during the 19th century, advertising grew alongside. In the United States, the success of this advertising format eventually led to the growth of mail-order advertising.

In June 1836, French newspaper La Presse was the first to include paid advertising in its pages, allowing it to lower its price, extend its readership and increase its profitability and the formula was soon copied by all titles. Around 1840, Volney B. Palmer established the roots of the modern day advertising agency in Philadelphia. In 1842 Palmer bought large amounts of space in various newspapers at a discounted rate then resold the space at higher rates to advertisers. The actual ad – the copy, layout, and artwork – was still prepared by the company wishing to advertise; in effect, Palmer was a space broker. The situation changed when the first full-service advertising agency of N.W. Ayer & Son was founded in 1869 in Philadelphia. Ayer & Son offered to plan, create, and execute complete advertising campaigns for its customers. By 1900 the advertising agency had become the focal point of creative planning, and advertising was firmly established as a profession. ^[19] Around the same time, in France, Charles-Louis Havas extended the services of his news agency, Havas to include advertisement brokerage, making it the first French group to organize. At first, agencies were brokers for advertisement space in newspapers.^[19]

20th century

Advertising increased dramatically in the United States as industrialization expanded the supply of manufactured products. In 1919 it was 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the US, and it averaged 2.2 percent of GDP between then and at least 2007, though it may have declined dramatically since the Great Recession.

Industry could not benefit from its increased productivity without a substantial increase in consumer spending. This contributed to the development of mass marketing designed to influence the population’s economic behavior on a larger scale.^[20] In the 1910s and 1920s, advertisers in the U.S. adopted the doctrine that human instincts could be targeted and harnessed – “sublimated” into the desire to purchase commodities.^[21] Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, became associated with the method and is sometimes called the founder of modern advertising and public relations.^[22] Bernays claimed that:

“[The] general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology. It is evident that the successful propagandist must understand the true motives and not be content to accept the reasons which men give for what they do.”^[23]

In other words, selling products by appealing to the rational minds of customers (the main method used prior to Bernays) was much less effective than selling products based on the unconscious desires that Bernays felt were the true motivators of human action. “Sex sells” became a controversial issue, with techniques for titillating and enlarging the audience posing a challenge to conventional morality.^[24][25]

In the 1920s, under Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, the American government promoted advertising. Hoover himself delivered an address to the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World in 1925 called ‘Advertising Is a Vital Force in Our National Life.”^[26] In October 1929, the head of the U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Julius Klein, stated “Advertising is the key to world prosperity.”^[27]This was part of the “unparalleled” collaboration between business and government in the 1920s, according to a 1933 European economic journal.^[28]

The tobacco companies became major advertisers in order to sell packaged cigarettes.^[29] The tobacco companies pioneered the new advertising techniques when they hired Bernays to create positive associations with tobacco smoking.^[3][4]

Advertising was also used as a vehicle for cultural assimilation, encouraging workers to exchange their traditional habits and community structure in favor of a shared “modern” lifestyle.^[30] An important tool for influencing immigrant workers was the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers (AAFLN). The AAFLN was primarily an advertising agency but also gained heavily centralized control over much of the immigrant press.^[31][32]

At the turn of the 20th century, advertising was one of the few career choices for women. Since women were responsible for most household purchasing done, advertisers and agencies recognized the value of women’s insight during the creative process. In fact, the first American advertising to use a sexual sell was created by a woman – for a soap product. Although tame by today’s standards, the advertisement featured a couple with the message “A skin you love to touch”.^[33]

In the 1920s psychologists Walter D. Scott and John B. Watson contributed applied psychological theory to the field of advertising. Scott said, “Man has been called the reasoning animal but he could with greater truthfulness be called the creature of suggestion. He is reasonable, but he is to a greater extent suggestible”.^[34] He demonstrated this through his advertising technique of a direct command to the consumer.

On the radio from the 1920s

In the early 1920s, the first radio stations were established by radio equipment manufacturers, followed by non-profit organizations such as schools, clubs and civic groups who also set up their own stations.^[35] Retailer and consumer goods manufacturers quickly recognised radio’s potential to reach consumers in their home and soon adopted advertising techniques that would allow their messages to stand out; slogans, mascots, and jingles began to appear on radio in the 1920s and early television in the 1930s.^[36]

The rise of mass media communications allowed manufacturers of branded goods to bypass retailers by advertising directly to consumers. This was a major paradigm shift which forced manufacturers to focus on the brand and stimulated the need for superior insights into consumer purchasing, consumption and usage behaviour; their needs, wants and aspirations.^[37] The earliest radio drama series were sponsored by soap manufacturers and the genre became known as a soap opera.^[38] Before long, radio station owners realized they could increase advertising revenue by selling ‘air-time’ in small time allocations which could be sold to multiple businesses. By the 1930s, these advertising spots, as the packets of time became known, were being sold by the station’s geographical sales representatives, ushering in an era of national radio advertising.^[39]

By the 1940s, manufacturers began to recognize the way in which consumers were developing personal relationships with their brands in a social/psychological/anthropological sense.^[40] Advertisers began to use motivational research and consumer research to gather insights into consumer purchasing. Strong branded campaigns for Chrysler and Exxon/Esso, using insights drawn research methods from psychology and cultural anthropology, led to some of most enduring campaigns of the 20th-century.^[41]

Commercial television in the 1950s

In the early 1950s, the DuMont Television Network began the modern practice of selling advertisement time to multiple sponsors. Previously, DuMont had trouble finding sponsors for many of their programs and compensated by selling smaller blocks of advertising time to several businesses. This eventually became the standard for the commercial television industry in the United States. However, it was still a common practice to have single sponsor shows, such as The United States Steel Hour. In some instances the sponsors exercised great control over the content of the show – up to and including having one’s advertising agency actually writing the show.^{[citation needed]} The single sponsor model is much less prevalent now, a notable exception being the Hallmark Hall of Fame.^{[citation needed]}

Cable television from the 1980s

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the introduction of cable television and particularly MTV. Pioneering the concept of the music video, MTV ushered in a new type of advertising: the consumer tunes in for the advertising message, rather than it being a by-product or afterthought. As cable and satellite television became increasingly prevalent, specialty channels emerged, including channels entirely devoted to advertising, such as QVC, Home Shopping Network, and ShopTV Canada.^[42]

On the Internet from the 1990s

With the advent of the ad server, online advertising grew, contributing to the “dot-com” boom of the 1990s.^[43] Entire corporations operated solely on advertising revenue, offering everything from coupons to free Internet access. At the turn of the 21st century, some websites, including the search engine Google, changed online advertising by personalizing ads based on web browsing behavior. This has led to other similar efforts and an increase in interactive advertising.^[44]

The share of advertising spending relative to GDP has changed little across large changes in media since 1925. In 1925, the main advertising media in America were newspapers, magazines, signs on streetcars, and outdoor posters. Advertising spending as a share of GDP was about 2.9 percent. By 1998, television and radio had become major advertising media; by 2017, the balance between broadcast and online advertising had shifted, with online spending exceeding broadcast.^[45] Nonetheless, advertising spending as a share of GDP was slightly lower – about 2.4 percent.^[46]

Guerrilla marketing involves unusual approaches such as staged encounters in public places, giveaways of products such as cars that are covered with brand messages, and interactive advertising where the viewer can respond to become part of the advertising message. This type of advertising is unpredictable, which causes consumers to buy the product or idea.^[47] This reflects an increasing trend of interactive and “embedded” ads, such as via product placement, having consumers vote through text messages, and various campaigns utilizing social network services such as Facebook or Twitter.^[48]

The advertising business model has also been adapted in recent years.^{[when?][clarification needed]} In media for equity, advertising is not sold, but provided to start-up companies in return for equity. If the company grows and is sold, the media companies receive cash for their shares.

Domain name registrants (usually those who register and renew domains as an investment) sometimes “park” their domains and allow advertising companies to place ads on their sites in return for per-click payments. These ads are typically driven by pay per click search engines like Google or Yahoo, but ads can sometimes be placed directly on targeted domain names through a domain lease or by making contact with the registrant of a domain name that describes a product. Domain name registrants are generally easy to identify through WHOIS records that are publicly available at registrar websites.^[49]

Classification

An advertisement for the Wikimedia Foundation

Advertising may be categorized in a variety of ways, including by style, target audience, geographic scope, medium, or purpose.^[2]:9–15 For example, in print advertising, classification by style can include display advertising (ads with design elements sold by size) vs. classified advertising (ads without design elements sold by the word or line). Advertising may be local, national or global. An ad campaign may be directed toward consumers or to businesses. The purpose of an ad may be to raise awareness (brand advertising), or to elicit an immediate sale (direct response advertising). The term above the line (ATL) is used for advertising involving mass media; more targeted forms of advertising and promotion are referred to as below the line (BTL).^[50][51] The two terms date back to 1954 when Procter & Gamble began paying their advertising agencies differently from other promotional agencies.^[52] In the 2010s, as advertising technology developed, a new term, through the line (TTL) began to come into use, referring to integrated advertising campaigns.^[53][54]

Traditional media

Virtually any medium can be used for advertising. Commercial advertising media can include wall paintings, billboards, street furniturecomponents, printed flyers and rack cards, radio, cinema and television adverts, web banners, mobile telephone screens, shopping carts, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, human billboards and forehead advertising, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, banners attached to or sides of airplanes (“logojets“), in-flight advertisements on seatback tray tables or overhead storage bins, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers, doors of bathroom stalls, stickers on apples in supermarkets, shopping cart handles (grabertising), the opening section of streaming audio and video, posters, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts. Any situation in which an “identified” sponsor pays to deliver their message through a medium is advertising.^[55]

Television

Television advertising is one of the most expensive types of advertising; networks charge large amounts for commercial airtime during popular events. The annual Super Bowl football game in the United States is known as the most prominent advertising event on television – with an audience of over 108 million and studies showing that 50% of those only tuned in to see the advertisements.^[57][58] During the 2014 edition of this game, the average thirty-second ad cost US$4 million, and $8 million was charged for a 60-second spot.^[57] Virtual advertisements may be inserted into regular programming through computer graphics. It is typically inserted into otherwise blank backdrops^[59] or used to replace local billboards that are not relevant to the remote broadcast audience.^[60] More controversially, virtual billboards may be inserted into the background where none exist in real-life. This technique is especially used in televised sporting events. Virtual product placement is also possible.^[61][62] An infomercial is a long-format television commercial, typically five minutes or longer. The word “infomercial” is a portmanteau of the words “information” and “commercial”. The main objective in an infomercial is to create an impulse purchase, so that the target sees the presentation and then immediately buys the product through the advertised toll-free telephone number or website. Infomercials describe, display, and often demonstrate products and their features, and commonly have testimonials from customers and industry professionals.^{[citation needed]}

Radio

Radio advertisements are broadcast as radio waves to the air from a transmitter to an antenna and a thus to a receiving device. Airtime is purchased from a station or network in exchange for airing the commercials. While radio has the limitation of being restricted to sound, proponents of radio advertising often cite this as an advantage. Radio is an expanding medium that can be found on air, and also online. According to Arbitron, radio has approximately 241.6 million weekly listeners, or more than 93 percent of the U.S. population.^{[citation needed]}

Online

Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers. Online ads are delivered by an ad server. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads that appear on search engine results pages, banner ads, in pay per click text ads, rich media ads, Social network advertising, online classified advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam.^{[citation needed]} A newer form of online advertising is Native Ads; they go in a website’s news feed and are supposed to improve user experience by being less intrusive. However, some people argue this practice is deceptive.^[63]

Domain names

Domain name advertising is most commonly done through pay per click web search engines, however, advertisers often lease space directly on domain names that generically describe their products. When an Internet user visits a website by typing a domain name directly into their web browser, this is known as “direct navigation”, or “type in” web traffic. Although many Internet users search for ideas and products using search engines and mobile phones, a large number of users around the world still use the address bar. They will type a keyword into the address bar such as “geraniums” and add “.com” to the end of it. Sometimes they will do the same with “.org” or a country-code Top Level Domain (TLD such as “.co.uk” for the United Kingdom or “.ca” for Canada). When Internet users type in a generic keyword and add .com or another top-level domain (TLD) ending, it produces a targeted sales lead.^[64] Domain name advertising was originally developed by Oingo (later known as Applied Semantics), one of Google‘s early acquisitions.^[65]

Product placements

Covert advertising is when a product or brand is embedded in entertainment and media. For example, in a film, the main character can use an item or other of a definite brand, as in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise‘s character John Anderton owns a phone with the Nokia logo clearly written in the top corner, or his watch engraved with the Bulgari logo. Another example of advertising in film is in I, Robot, where main character played by Will Smith mentions his Converse shoes several times, calling them “classics”, because the film is set far in the future. I, Robot and Spaceballs also showcase futuristic cars with the Audi and Mercedes-Benz logos clearly displayed on the front of the vehicles. Cadillac chose to advertise in the movie The Matrix Reloaded, which as a result contained many scenes in which Cadillac cars were used. Similarly, product placement for Omega Watches, Ford, VAIO, BMW and Aston Martin cars are featured in recent James Bond films, most notably Casino Royale. In “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer“, the main transport vehicle shows a large Dodge logo on the front. Blade Runner includes some of the most obvious product placement; the whole film stops to show a Coca-Cola billboard.^{[citation needed]}

Print

Print advertising describes advertising in a printed medium such as a newspaper, magazine, or trade journal. This encompasses everything from media with a very broad readership base, such as a major national newspaper or magazine, to more narrowly targeted media such as local newspapers and trade journals on very specialized topics. One form of print advertising is classified advertising, which allows private individuals or companies to purchase a small, narrowly targeted ad paid by the word or line. Another form of print advertising is the display ad, which is generally a larger ad with design elements that typically run in an article section of a newspaper.^[2]:14

Outdoor

Billboards, also known as hoardings in some parts of the world, are large structures located in public places which display advertisements to passing pedestrians and motorists. Most often, they are located on main roads with a large amount of passing motor and pedestrian traffic; however, they can be placed in any location with large numbers of viewers, such as on mass transit vehicles and in stations, in shopping malls or office buildings, and in stadiums. The form known as street advertising first came to prominence in the UK by Street Advertising Services to create outdoor advertising on street furniture and pavements. Working with products such as Reverse Graffiti, air dancers and 3D pavement advertising, for getting brand messages out into public spaces.^{[citation needed]} Sheltered outdoor advertising combines outdoor with indoor advertisement by placing large mobile, structures (tents) in public places on temporary bases. The large outer advertising space aims to exert a strong pull on the observer, the product is promoted indoors, where the creative decor can intensify the impression.^{[citation needed]} Mobile billboards are generally vehicle mounted billboards or digital screens. These can be on dedicated vehicles built solely for carrying advertisements along routes preselected by clients, they can also be specially equipped cargo trucks or, in some cases, large banners strewn from planes. The billboards are often lighted; some being backlit, and others employing spotlights. Some billboard displays are static, while others change; for example, continuously or periodically rotating among a set of advertisements. Mobile displays are used for various situations in metropolitan areas throughout the world, including: target advertising, one-day and long-term campaigns, conventions, sporting events, store openings and similar promotional events, and big advertisements from smaller companies.^{[citation needed]}

Point-of-sale

In-store advertising is any advertisement placed in a retail store. It includes placement of a product in visible locations in a store, such as at eye level, at the ends of aisles and near checkout counters (a.k.a. POP – point of purchase display), eye-catching displays promoting a specific product, and advertisements in such places as shopping carts and in-store video displays.^{[citation needed]}

Novelties

Advertising printed on small tangible items such as coffee mugs, T-shirts, pens, bags, and such is known as novelty advertising. Some printers specialize in printing novelty items, which can then be distributed directly by the advertiser, or items may be distributed as part of a cross-promotion, such as ads on fast food containers.^{[citation needed]}

Celebrity endorsements

Advertising in which a celebrity endorses a product or brand leverages celebrity power, fame, money, popularity to gain recognition for their products or to promote specific stores’ or products. Advertisers often advertise their products, for example, when celebrities share their favorite products or wear clothes by specific brands or designers. Celebrities are often involved in advertising campaigns such as television or print adverts to advertise specific or general products. The use of celebrities to endorse a brand can have its downsides, however; one mistake by a celebrity can be detrimental to the public relations of a brand. For example, following his performance of eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China, swimmer Michael Phelps‘ contract with Kellogg’s was terminated, as Kellogg’s did not want to associate with him after he was photographed smoking marijuana.^{[citation needed]} Celebrities such as Britney Spears have advertised for multiple products including Pepsi, Candies from Kohl’s, Twister, NASCAR, and Toyota.^{[citation needed]}

Aerial

Using aircraft, balloons or airships to create or display advertising media. Skywriting is a notable example.^{[citation needed]}

New media and advertising approaches

A new advertising approach is known as advanced advertising, which is data-driven advertising, using large quantities of data, precise measuring tools and precise targeting.^[66] Advanced advertising also makes it easier for companies which sell ad-space to attribute customer purchases to the ads they display or broadcast.^[67]

Increasingly, other media are overtaking many of the “traditional” media such as television, radio and newspaper because of a shift toward the usage of the Internet for news and music as well as devices like digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo.^[68]

Online advertising began with unsolicited bulk e-mail advertising known as “e-mail spam“. Spam has been a problem for e-mail users since 1978.^[69] As new online communication channels became available, advertising followed. The first banner ad appeared on the World Wide Web in 1994.^[70] Prices of Web-based advertising space are dependent on the “relevance” of the surrounding web content and the traffic that the website receives.^{[citation needed]}

In online display advertising, display ads generate awareness quickly. Unlike search, which requires someone to be aware of a need, display advertising can drive awareness of something new and without previous knowledge. Display works well for direct response. Display is not only used for generating awareness, it’s used for direct response campaigns that link to a landing page with a clear ‘call to action’.^{[citation needed]}

As the mobile phone became a new mass medium in 1998 when the first paid downloadable content appeared on mobile phones in Finland,^{[71][citation needed]} mobile advertisingfollowed, also first launched in Finland in 2000.^{[citation needed]} By 2007 the value of mobile advertising had reached $2 billion and providers such as Admob delivered billions of mobile ads.^{[citation needed]}

More advanced mobile ads include banner ads, coupons, Multimedia Messaging Service picture and video messages, advergames and various engagement marketing campaigns. A particular feature driving mobile ads is the 2D barcode, which replaces the need to do any typing of web addresses, and uses the camera feature of modern phones to gain immediate access to web content. 83 percent of Japanese mobile phone users already are active users of 2D barcodes.^{[citation needed]}

Some companies have proposed placing messages or corporate logos on the side of booster rockets and the International Space Station.^{[citation needed]}

Unpaid advertising (also called “publicity advertising”), can include personal recommendations (“bring a friend”, “sell it”), spreading buzz, or achieving the feat of equating a brand with a common noun (in the United States, “Xerox” = “photocopier“, “Kleenex” = tissue, “Vaseline” = petroleum jelly, “Hoover” = vacuum cleaner, and “Band-Aid” = adhesive bandage). However, some companies^[which?] oppose the use of their brand name to label an object. Equating a brand with a common noun also risks turning that brand into a generic trademark – turning it into a generic term which means that its legal protection as a trademark is lost.^{[72][disputed – discuss]}

From time to time, The CW Television Network airs short programming breaks called “Content Wraps”, to advertise one company’s product during an entire commercial break. The CW pioneered “content wraps” and some products featured were Herbal Essences, Crest, Guitar Hero II, CoverGirl, and recently Toyota.^{[citation needed]}

A new promotion concept has appeared, “ARvertising”, advertising on augmented reality technology.^[73]

Controversy exists on the effectiveness of subliminal advertising (see mind control), and the pervasiveness of mass messages (propaganda).

Rise in new media

With the Internet came many new advertising opportunities. Pop-up, Flash, banner, pop-under, advergaming, and email advertisements (all of which are often unwanted or spam in the case of email) are now commonplace. Particularly since the rise of “entertaining” advertising, some people may like an advertisement enough to wish to watch it later or show a friend.^{[citation needed]}In general, the advertising community has not yet made this easy, although some have used the Internet to widely distribute their ads to anyone willing to see or hear them. In the last three quarters of 2009, mobile and Internet advertising grew by 18% and 9% respectively, while older media advertising saw declines: −10.1% (TV), −11.7% (radio), −14.8% (magazines) and −18.7% (newspapers).^{[citation needed]} Between 2008 and 2014, U.S. newspapers lost more than half their print advertising revenue.^[75]

Niche marketing

Another significant trend regarding future of advertising is the growing importance of the niche market using niche or targeted ads. Also brought about by the Internet and the theory of the long tail, advertisers will have an increasing ability to reach specific audiences. In the past, the most efficient way to deliver a message was to blanket the largest mass market audience possible.^{[citation needed]} However, usage tracking, customer profiles and the growing popularity of niche content brought about by everything from blogs to social networking sites, provide advertisers with audiences that are smaller but much better defined,^{[citation needed]} leading to ads that are more relevant to viewers and more effective for companies’ marketing products. Among others, Comcast Spotlight is one such advertiser employing this method in their video on demand menus. These advertisements are targeted to a specific group and can be viewed by anyone wishing to find out more about a particular business or practice, from their home. This causes the viewer to become proactive and actually choose what advertisements they want to view.^[76] Niche marketing could also be helped by bringing the issue of colour into advertisements. Different colours play major roles when it comes to marketing strategies, for example, seeing the blue can promote a sense of calmness and gives a sense of security which is why many social networks such as Facebook use blue in their logos. Google AdSense is an example of niche marketing. Google calculates the primary purpose of a website and adjusts ads accordingly; it uses keywords on the page (or even in emails) to find the general ideas of topics disused and places ads that will most likely be clicked on by viewers of the email account or website visitors.

Crowdsourcing

The concept of crowdsourcing has given way to the trend of user-generated advertisements. User-generated ads are created by people, as opposed to an advertising agency or the company themselves, often resulting from brand sponsored advertising competitions. For the 2007 Super Bowl, the Frito-Lays division of PepsiCo held the “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, allowing people to create their own Doritos commercials.^[77] Chevrolet held a similar competition for their Tahoe line of SUVs.^[77] Due to the success of the Doritos user-generated ads in the 2007 Super Bowl, Frito-Lays relaunched the competition for the 2009 and 2010 Super Bowl. The resulting ads were among the most-watched and most-liked Super Bowl ads. In fact, the winning ad that aired in the 2009 Super Bowl was ranked by the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter as the top ad for the year while the winning ads that aired in the 2010 Super Bowl were found by Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics to be the “most buzzed-about”.^[78][79] Another example of companies using crowdsourcing successfully is the beverage company Jones Soda that encourages consumers to participate in the label design themselves.^[80]

This trend has given rise to several online platforms that host user-generated advertising competitions on behalf of a company. Founded in 2007, Zooppa has launched ad competitions for brands such as Google, Nike, Hershey’s, General Mills, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Zinio, and Mini Cooper.^[81] Crowdsourcing remains controversial, as the long-term impact on the advertising industry is still unclear.^[82]

Global advertising

Advertising has gone through five major stages of development: domestic, export, international, multi-national, and global. For global advertisers, there are four, potentially competing, business objectives that must be balanced when developing worldwide advertising: building a brand while speaking with one voice, developing economies of scale in the creative process, maximising local effectiveness of ads, and increasing the company’s speed of implementation. Born from the evolutionary stages of global marketing are the three primary and fundamentally different approaches to the development of global advertising executions: exporting executions, producing local executions, and importing ideas that travel.^[83]

Advertising research is key to determining the success of an ad in any country or region. The ability to identify which elements and/or moments of an ad contribute to its success is how economies of scale are maximized. Once one knows what works in an ad, that idea or ideas can be imported by any other market. Market research measures, such as Flow of Attention, Flow of Emotion and branding moments provide insight into what is working in an ad in any country or region because the measures are based on the visual, not verbal, elements of the ad.^[84]

Foreign public messaging

Foreign governments,^[which?] particularly those that own marketable commercial products or services, often promote their interests and positions through the advertising of those goods because the target audience is not only largely unaware of the forum as a vehicle for foreign messaging but also willing to receive the message while in a mental state of absorbing information from advertisements during television commercial breaks, while reading a periodical, or while passing by billboards in public spaces. A prime example of this messaging technique is advertising campaigns to promote international travel. While advertising foreign destinations and services may stem from the typical goal of increasing revenue by drawing more tourism, some travel campaigns carry the additional or alternative intended purpose of promoting good sentiments or improving existing ones among the target audience towards a given nation or region. It is common for advertising promoting foreign countries to be produced and distributed by the tourism ministries of those countries, so these ads often carry political statements and/or depictions of the foreign government’s desired international public perception. Additionally, a wide range of foreign airlines and travel-related services which advertise separately from the destinations, themselves, are owned by their respective governments; examples include, though are not limited to, the Emirates airline (Dubai), Singapore Airlines (Singapore), Qatar Airways (Qatar), China Airlines (Taiwan/Republic of China), and Air China (People’s Republic of China). By depicting their destinations, airlines, and other services in a favorable and pleasant light, countries market themselves to populations abroad in a manner that could mitigate prior public impressions.

Diversification

In the realm of advertising agencies, continued industry diversification has seen observers note that “big global clients don’t need big global agencies any more”.^[85] This is reflected by the growth of non-traditional agencies in various global markets, such as Canadian business TAXI and SMART in Australia and has been referred to as “a revolution in the ad world”.^[86]

New technology

The ability to record shows on digital video recorders (such as TiVo) allow watchers to record the programs for later viewing, enabling them to fast forward through commercials. Additionally, as more seasons of pre-recorded box sets are offered for sale of television programs; fewer people watch the shows on TV. However, the fact that these sets are sold, means the company will receive additional profits from these sets.

To counter this effect, a variety of strategies have been employed. Many advertisers have opted for product placement on TV shows like Survivor. Other strategies include integrating advertising with internet-connected program guidess (EPGs), advertising on companion devices (like smartphones and tablets) during the show, and creating mobile apps for TV programs. Additionally, some like brands have opted for social television sponsorship.^[87]

The emerging technology of drone displays has recently been used for advertising purposes.^[88]

Advertising education

In recent years there have been several media literacy initiatives, and more specifically concerning advertising, that seek to empower citizens in the face of media advertising campaigns.^[89]

Advertising education has become popular with bachelor, master and doctorate degrees becoming available in the emphasis.^{[citation needed]} A surge in advertising interest is typically attributed to the strong relationship advertising plays in cultural and technological changes, such as the advance of online social networking.^{[citation needed]} A unique model for teaching advertising is the student-run advertising agency, where advertising students create campaigns for real companies.^[90] Organizations such as the American Advertising Federation establish companies with students to create these campaigns.^{[citation needed]}

Purposes

Advertising is at the front of delivering the proper message to customers and prospective customers. The purpose of advertising is to inform the consumers about their product and convince customers that a company’s services or products are the best, enhance the image of the company, point out and create a need for products or services, demonstrate new uses for established products, announce new products and programs, reinforce the salespeople’s individual messages, draw customers to the business, and to hold existing customers.^[91]

Sales promotions and brand loyalty

Sales promotions are another way to advertise. Sales promotions are double purposed because they are used to gather information about what type of customers one draws in and where they are, and to jump start sales. Sales promotions include things like contests and games, sweepstakes, product giveaways, samples coupons, loyalty programs, and discounts. The ultimate goal of sales promotions is to stimulate potential customers to action.^[92]

Criticisms

While advertising can be seen as necessary for economic growth,^[27] it is not without social costs. Unsolicited commercial e-mail and other forms of spam have become so prevalent as to have become a major nuisance to users of these services, as well as being a financial burden on internet service providers.^[93] Advertising is increasingly invading public spaces, such as schools, which some critics argue is a form of child exploitation.^[94] This increasing difficulty in limiting exposure to specific audiences can result in negative backlash for advertisers.^[95] In tandem with these criticisms, the advertising industry has seen low approval rates in surveys and negative cultural portrayals.^[96]

One of the most controversial criticisms of advertisement in the present day is that of the predominance of advertising of foods high in sugar, fat, and salt specifically to children. Critics claim that food advertisements targeting children are exploitive and are not sufficiently balanced with proper nutritional education to help children understand the consequences of their food choices. Additionally, children may not understand that they are being sold something, and are therefore more impressionable.^[97] Michelle Obama has criticized large food companies for advertising unhealthy foods largely towards children and has requested that food companies either limit their advertising to children or advertise foods that are more in line with dietary guidelines.^[98] The other criticisms include the change that are brought by those advertisements on the society and also the deceiving ads that are aired and published by the corporations. Cosmetic and health industry are the ones which exploited the highest and created reasons of concern.^[99]

Regulation

There have been increasing efforts to protect the public interest by regulating the content and the influence of advertising. Some examples include restrictions for advertising alcohol, tobacco or gambling imposed in many countries, as well as the bans around advertising to children, which exist in parts of Europe. Advertising regulation focuses heavily on the veracity of the claims and as such, there are often tighter restrictions placed around advertisements for food and healthcare products.^[100]

The advertising industries within some countries rely less on laws and more on systems of self-regulation.^{[100][101][102]} Advertisers and the media agree on a code of advertising standards that they attempt to uphold. The general aim of such codes is to ensure that any advertising is ‘legal, decent, honest and truthful’. Some self-regulatory organizations are funded by the industry, but remain independent, with the intent of upholding the standards or codes like the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK.^[103]

In the UK, most forms of outdoor advertising such as the display of billboards is regulated by the UK Town and County Planning system. Currently, the display of an advertisement without consent from the Planning Authority is a criminal offense liable to a fine of £2,500 per offense.^[104] In the US, many communities believe that many forms of outdoor advertising blight the public realm.^[105] As long ago as the 1960s in the US there were attempts to ban billboard advertising in the open countryside.^[106] Cities such as São Paulohave introduced an outright ban^[107] with London also having specific legislation to control unlawful displays.

Some governments restrict the languages that can be used in advertisements, but advertisers may employ tricks to try avoiding them. In France for instance, advertisers sometimes print English words in bold and French translations in fine print to deal with Article 120 of the 1994 Toubon Law limiting the use of English.^[108]

The advertising of pricing information is another topic of concern for governments. In the United States for instance, it is common for businesses to only mention the existence and amount of applicable taxes at a later stage of a transaction.^[109] In Canada and New Zealand, taxes can be listed as separate items, as long as they are quoted up-front.^[110][111] In most other countries, the advertised price must include all applicable taxes, enabling customers to easily know how much it will cost them.^{[112][113][114]}

Theory

Hierarchy-of-effects models

Various competing models of hierarchies of effects attempt to provide a theoretical underpinning to advertising practice.^{[clarification needed][115]}

• The model of Clow and Baack^[116] clarifies the objectives of an advertising campaign and for each individual advertisement. The model postulates six steps a buyer moves through when making a purchase:
  1. Awareness
  2. Knowledge
  3. Liking
  4. Preference
  5. Conviction
  6. Purchase
• Means-end theory suggests that an advertisement should contain a message or means that leads the consumer to a desired end-state.^[117]
• Leverage points aim to move the consumer from understanding a product’s benefits to linking those benefits with personal values.^{[citation needed]}

Marketing mix

The marketing mix was proposed by professor E. Jerome McCarthy in the 1960s.^[118] It consists of four basic elements called the “four Ps“. Product is the first P representing the actual product. Price represents the process of determining the value of a product. Place represents the variables of getting the product to the consumer such as distribution channels, market coverage and movement organization. The last P stands for Promotion which is the process of reaching the target market and convincing them to buy the product.

In the 1990s, the concept of four Cs was introduced as a more customer-driven replacement of four P’s.^[119] There are two theories based on four Cs: Lauterborn’s four Cs (consumer, cost, communication, convenience) ^[120] and Shimizu’s four Cs (commodity, cost, communication, channel) in the 7Cs Compass Model (Co-marketing). Communicationscan include advertising, sales promotion, public relations, publicity, personal selling, corporate identity, internal communication, SNS, and MIS.^{[121][122][123][124]}

Advertising research

Advertising research is a specialized form of research that works to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of advertising. It entails numerous forms of research which employ different methodologies. Advertising research includes pre-testing (also known as copy testing) and post-testing of ads and/or campaigns.

Pre-testing includes a wide range of qualitative and quantitative techniques, including: focus groups, in-depth target audience interviews (one-on-one interviews), small-scale quantitative studies and physiological measurement. The goal of these investigations is to better understand how different groups respond to various messages and visual prompts, thereby providing an assessment of how well the advertisement meets its communications goals.^[125]

Post-testing employs many of the same techniques as pre-testing, usually with a focus on understanding the change in awareness or attitude attributable to the advertisement. With the emergence of digital advertising technologies, many firms have begun to continuously post-test ads using real-time data. This may take the form of A/B split-testing or multivariate testing.

Continuous ad tracking and the Communicus System are competing examples of post-testing advertising research types.^[126]

Semiotics

Meanings between consumers and marketers depict signs and symbols that are encoded in everyday objects.^[127] Semiotics is the study of signs and how they are interpreted. Advertising has many hidden signs and meanings within brand names, logos, package designs, print advertisements, and television advertisements. Semiotics aims to study and interpret the message being conveyed in (for example) advertisements. Logos and advertisements can be interpreted at two levels – known as the surface level and the underlying level. The surface level uses signs creatively to create an image or personality for a product.^{[citation needed]} These signs can be images, words, fonts, colors, or slogans. The underlying level is made up of hidden meanings. The combination of images, words, colors, and slogans must be interpreted by the audience or consumer.^[128] The “key to advertising analysis” is the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the object and the signified is the mental concept.^[129] A product has a signifier and a signified. The signifier is the color, brand name, logo design, and technology. The signified has two meanings known as denotative and connotative. The denotative meaning is the meaning of the product. A television’s denotative meaning might be that it is high definition. The connotative meaning is the product’s deep and hidden meaning. A connotative meaning of a television would be that it is top-of-the-line.^[130]

Apple’s commercials^[when?] used a black silhouette of a person that was the age of Apple’s target market. They placed the silhouette in front of a blue screen so that the picture behind the silhouette could be constantly changing. However, the one thing that stays the same in these ads is that there is music in the background and the silhouette is listening to that music on a white iPod through white headphones. Through advertising, the white color on a set of earphones now signifies that the music device is an iPod. The white color signifies almost all of Apple’s products.^[131]

The semiotics of gender plays a key influence on the way in which signs are interpreted. When considering gender roles in advertising, individuals are influenced by three categories. Certain characteristics of stimuli may enhance or decrease the elaboration of the message (if the product is perceived as feminine or masculine). Second, the characteristics of individuals can affect attention and elaboration of the message (traditional or non-traditional gender role orientation). Lastly, situational factors may be important to influence the elaboration of the message.^[132]

There are two types of marketing communication claims-objective and subjective.^[133] Objective claims stem from the extent to which the claim associates the brand with a tangible product or service feature. For instance, a camera may have auto-focus features. Subjective claims convey emotional, subjective, impressions of intangible aspects of a product or service. They are non-physical features of a product or service that cannot be directly perceived, as they have no physical reality. For instance the brochure has a beautiful design.^[134] Males tend to respond better to objective marketing-communications claims while females tend to respond better to subjective marketing communications claims.^[135]

Voiceovers are commonly used in advertising. Most voiceovers are done by men, with figures of up to 94% having been reported.^[136] There have been more female voiceovers in recent years,^[when?] but mainly for food, household products, and feminine-care products.^[137]

Gender effects in the processing of advertising

According to a 1977 study by David Statt, females process information comprehensively, while males process information through heuristic devices such as procedures, methods or strategies for solving problems, which could have an effect on how they interpret advertising.^{[138][need quotation to verify]} According to this study, men prefer to have available and apparent cues to interpret the message, whereas females engage in more creative, associative, imagery-laced interpretation. Later research by a Danish team^[139] found that advertising attempts to persuade men to improve their appearance or performance, whereas its approach to women aims at transformation toward an impossible ideal of female presentation. In Paul Suggett’s article “The Objectification of Women in Advertising”^[140] he discusses the negative impact that these women in advertisements, who are too perfect to be real, have on women, as well as men, in real life. Advertising’s manipulation of women’s aspiration to these ideal types as portrayed in film, in erotic art, in advertising, on stage, within music videos, and through other media exposures requires at least a conditioned rejection of female reality, and thereby takes on a highly ideological cast. Studies show that these expectations of women and young girls negatively impact their views about their bodies and appearances. These advertisements are directed towards men. Not everyone agrees: one critic viewed this monologic, gender-specific interpretation of advertising as excessively skewed and politicized.^{[141][need quotation to verify]} There are some companies, however, like Dove and Aerie that are creating commercials to portray more natural women, with less post production manipulation, so more women and young girls are able to relate to them.^{[citation needed]}

More recent research by Martin (2003) reveals that males and females differ in how they react to advertising depending on their mood at the time of exposure to the ads, and on the affective tone of the advertising. When feeling sad, males prefer happy ads to boost their mood. In contrast, females prefer happy ads when they are feeling happy. The television programs in which ads are embedded influence a viewer’s mood state.^[142] Susan Wojcicki, author of the article “Ads that Empower Women don’t just Break Stereotypes—They’re also Effective”^[143] discusses how advertising to women has changed since the first Barbie commercial where a little girl tells the doll that, she wants to be just like her. Little girls grow up watching advertisements of scantily clad women advertising things from trucks to burgers, and Wojcicki states that this shows girls that they are either arm candy or eye candy.

Alternatives

Other approaches to revenue include donations, paid subscriptions and microtransactions. Websites and applications are “ad-free” when not using ads at all for revenue. For example, the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia provides free access to its content by receiving funding from charitable donations.^[144]

See also

Influential thinkers in advertising theory and practice

Branding In Marketing from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branding

• Brand, a name, logo, slogan, and/or design scheme associated with a product or service
  • Branding (promotional), the distribution of merchandise with a brand name or symbol imprinted
  • Brand management, the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand
  • Employer branding, the application of brand management to recruitment marketing and internal brand engagement
  • Internet branding, brand management on the Internet
  • Nation branding, the application of marketing techniques for the advancement of a country
    • Place branding, the application of marketing techniques for the advancement of country subdivisions
  • Personal branding, people and their careers marketed as brands
  • Co-branding, two companies or brands partnering on a product or service
  • Branding agency, a type of marketing agency which specializes in creating brands
  • Faith branding, the application of marketing techniques to religious institutions or individual

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A report exclusively for Kommando

It’s not an oncoming alien invasion but a mixture of soap, foam, helium and novelty which creates our newest road show offerings that can be of good help to the environment, taking your brand to the skies.

All integrated marketing strategy for brands are gradually boiling down to the fix insight around the brands goal for every year. Going back to our roots said by Kommando … In 1996 they created the world’s first ever “Skyjack” guerrilla stunt for a movie premier using giant laser projections and high-powered searchlights bounced onto low cloud cover, creating the special effects of an oncoming Alien Invasion, a stirring in the skies…

It’s not an oncoming alien invasion but a mixture of soap, foam, helium and novelty which creates their newest Kommando offering in the marketing world, taking your brand to the skies. BLOGOS can be shaped into logos or badges of any shape, created to soar hundreds or thousands of feet.

Their BLOGOS are created using a specialized machine which produces a 3 foot logo/shape at the rate of 1 every 15-20 seconds and the best bit is they are completely biodegradable, dissolving in the sky after a matter of hours.

Launched inside, outside or over your main competitors event, we can’t think of anything more exciting than a cheeky BLOGO lifting the heads of everyone around is very important in building a global appeal with the right audience that can benefit from a brands market aim.

Boardwalk Empire Experiential Campaign  And Experiential Marketing

An NYC subway is transported back to the 1920’s to promote Boardwalk Empire… which seems to be an amazing idea spanning various location in the world. Through experiential marketing strategy a client can get to the forefront of his market without having to incur cost afterwards. Through Letter Head Printing | Sticker

We love this idea to promote HBO’s Boardwalk Empire; a subway train was replaced with a vintage 1920s train to recreate to mood and atmosphere of the era that the show is set in.

A great experiential campaign if ever we saw one!

Biggest Ever Lipton Iced Tea Sampling

Britvic aims to reach at least 1million UK consumers this summer with its largest ever sampling campaign.

The campaign follows the rapid growth in the value – up 92.7% – of the “cold hot drinks” sector and will be rolled out across nine major UK cities.

Firework displays will illuminate the skies tomorrow while gamers’ screens are lit up by the new zombie video game, Dead Island, which was at the centre of this year’s most talked about and effective video game trailer.

This year, the first trailer for Dead Island caused a stir on the web: The story, told in reverse, of the death of a young girl, through a zombie attack and her parents’ attempt to save her life. The trailer was jaw dropping, raw with emotion, and captured the eyes of millions (over 1 million in the first 24 hours alone) around the world.

Publishers of the game didn’t expect the trailer to receive such a following and coverage through social media channel YouTube. The shocking yet realistic images made entertaining visuals coupled with a gripping soundtrack and daring concept, leaving viewers wanting more and gamers anticipating the release.

The brand used a concept many would be aware of combined with compelling music to create an emotional connection with the viewer. It is no surprise that the original video has had nearly 8 million hits and inspired makers to release other versions. The musical accompaniment proved to be such a hit that the artist gave permission for its release and download on iTunes.

Some critics were worried that the game wouldn’t live up to all its hype but recently this rumor has been squashed as Dead Island entered in at No.1 in the UK Video Game Chart managing to beat off competition and maintain its popularity. Deep Silver used a marketing company to create the initial teaser trailer which was amplified through various social media channels.

The success in the US has sparked a bidding war amongst Hollywood studios eager to get their hands on adaptation rights. Lionsgate recently announced their acquisition of film rights, which they hope to expand to a potential franchise, and had the following to say:

“This is exactly the type of property we’re looking to adapt at Lionsgate: it’s sophisticated, edgy, and a true elevation of a genre that we know and love. It also has built in brand recognition around the world, and franchise potential.”

What a great example of how social media can benefit your brand and getting the right connection with your target market can provide endless opportunities! Maybe this footage could be a contender for Youtube’s Ad of the Year?

Britvic research shows that that when people try Lipton Ice Tea, 80% go on to buy the drink. Jon Evans, head of seed brands at Britvic, says Lipton Ice Tea is set to be “the next Innocent Smoothie” of the drinks sector.

He adds: “We are reinvesting in Lipton Ice Tea every year and this summer’s sampling campaign should reach 3 million people with word of mouth.”

Sampling stations will encourage consumer engagement with the Lipton brand through the game of “knokkers” – a mixture between pool and bowls. The campaign will also be supported by a social media marketing campaign to amplify the message and ensure consumers continue to engage with the campaign even after the summer sampling has finished.

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Reverse Graffiti has been doing the rounds for a few years now, yet there is still a grey area over its legality.

Also known as Clean Graffiti, the temporary and environmentally friendly effect is achieved by removing dirt from a surface to create an advertisement. So, can people really be charged for what is effectively cleaning?Many companies have employed this format of advertising with no legal action, yet a Yorkshire Reverse Graffiti artist known as “Moose” was faced with prosecution by Leeds City Council who insisted his work for Smirnoff was illegal because all advertisers need a permit.

In some locations reverse graffiti is against the law, covered by the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, but it can be difficult to find accurate information and research on the internet fails to “clean” up the issue.

These graphic scenes aren’t for the launch of a new movie or reality show. A performance artiste is undergoing animal laboratory tests in the window of Lush Regent Street London, to raise awareness of the worldwide ‘Fighting Animal Testing’ campaign and EU petition.

The stunt is part of a campaign by Lush Cosmetics and The Humane Society.

Hundreds of horrified shoppers watched a young woman endure 10 hours of experiments, being restrained, force-fed and injected with cosmetics in a high street shop window.

Some of the experiments on the model included hair removal, squirting irritants in the eyes, injecting solution via needles and lotions/ creams smeared across the face.

The model appeared genuinely terrified as she was pinned down on a bench and had her mouth stretched open with two metal hooks while a man in a white coat force-fed her until she choked and gagged.

The gruesome spectacle aimed to highlight the cruelty inflicted on animals during cosmetic laboratory tests and raise awareness that animal testing is still a common practise.

The Humane Society International and Lush Cosmetics have joined forces to launch the largest-ever global campaign to end animal testing for cosmetics.

The campaign, launched to coincide with World Week for Animals in Laboratories, is being rolled out simultaneously in over 700 Lush Ltd. shops across forty-seven countries including the United States, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Russia.

Lush campaign manager Tamsin Omond commented: “The ironic thing is that if it was a beagle in the window and we were doing all these things to it, we’d have the police and RSPCA here in minutes.

Somewhere in the world, this kind of thing is happening to an animal every few seconds on average. The difference is, it’s normally hidden. We need to remind people it is still going on.”

THE STUNT

In total, 70 ft peace signs have appeared in over ten cities across the UK on behalf of Lynx.

The brands Make Love Not War campaign saw London’s iconic Tower Bridge adorned with a giant peace sign, while further down the river a huge water projection in front of The London Eye created a beacon of peace, shining out for all to see.

Over ten cities including Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, Brighton and Sheffield saw the symbol projected onto key iconic buildings.

Jeremy Gilley, founder of Peace One Day, said of the campaign: “Through our partnership with Lynx, we hope to raise awareness in an astonishing amount of young people, and awareness of peace is everything.”

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The stunning display was part of a nationwide publicity campaign called Make Love Not War organised by the deodorant brand, Lynx, which has made use of many of the country’s best known and best loved buildings.

Similar stunts have been organised at other famous buildings across the country, including Leeds Corn Exchange and Glastonbury Festival.

Inspiring a new world peace?

THE STUNT

In total, 70 ft peace signs have appeared in over ten cities across the UK on behalf of Lynx.

The brands Make Love Not War campaign saw London’s iconic Tower Bridge adorned with a giant peace sign, while further down the river a huge water projection in front of The London Eye created a beacon of peace, shining out for all to see

Over ten cities including Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, Brighton and Sheffield saw the symbol projected onto key iconic buildings.

Jeremy Gilley, founder of Peace One Day, said of the campaign: “Through our partnership with Lynx, we hope to raise awareness in an astonishing amount of young people, and awareness of peace is everything.”

<iframe width=”600″ height=”320″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/YBrX7fBkjv8″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

The stunning display was part of a nationwide publicity campaign called Make Love Not War organised by the deodorant brand, Lynx, which has made use of many of the country’s best known and best loved buildings.

Similar stunts have been organised at other famous buildings across the country, including Leeds Corn Exchange and Glastonbury Festival.

Responsible Drinking Experiment

Heineken teamed up with DJ Armin van Buuren to undertake a social ‘experiment’ across two separate nights in the same club.

The test, named ‘Dance More, Drink Slow’, was used to demonstrate that a good DJ can encourage people to limit their drinking in order to enjoy the music. The stunt was able to successfully influence the drinking behaviour of revellers.

The beer giant will soon launch its global campaign which encourages drinkers to make the most of their nights out in a responsible way. The campaign message is being amplified through “The Experiment.”

“The Experiment” video accompanied by a new music track, ‘Save My Night’ will also be backed by a series of experiential stunts targeting young adults during their nights out in more than 20 countries.

Heineken’s latest drive is part of an ongoing “responsibility to make moderate drinking aspirational,” (Heineken, 2014) and builds on the brands “Sunrise” campaign, which launched in 2012, to provide a contrast to the negative anti-drinking ads pushed by other companies.

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Digital & Social Media

In a world where attention is the holy grail for marketers – where online engagement and social media chatter are the new return on investment – it’s vital to connect Brand Experiences to the digital landscape for amplification and measurement..

By understanding the full spectrum of social media channels available, we tailor authentic, targeted and memorable brand experiences for your consumers.

DIGITAL EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING

With so many elements that make up an effective digital Experiential strategy, sometimes it can be difficult to keep up. That’s where we come in.

We combine Experiential Marketing techniques and Technology to bring digitally connected audiences together through the power of digital.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Explosive Thinking To Grow Your Brand!

We know how to turn your event into a fully discoverable social machine. Ultimately, it is about amplifying your brand message by keeping the conversation going!

We can even throw in some out-of-the-box thinking to ensure you get the best exposure possible in a landscape where originality thrives.

BRINGING BRANDS TO LIFE

77% of marketers use experiential marketing as a vital part of a brand’s advertising strategies.

LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES

Authentic and immersive brand experiences, give consumers a better ‘feeling’ for the brand. Utilising the senses to engage audiences can emotionally define it from it’s competitors. Building that exciting feeling around your brand story is what we do.

Our creativity and immersive experiential event technology, provide the elements of surpirse and delight, bringing people and brands closer together.

For the best Experiential Marketing results, you need the most experienced team.

Product Sampling

Understanding the myriad of challenges that come with nationwide product sampling is a skill, perfected over time and through experience.

Since 2000 our team of product sampling expertshave planned, moved and distributed an estimated 8 million product samples accross the UK with military precision.

Highly effective and results orientated, our product sampling delivers results.

GET YOUR PRODUCTS OUT THERE

GET YOUR PRODUCTS OUT THERE

We provide effective planning, tools and resource that drive hassle-free product sampling across the UK. Mobilising samples safely to the frontline and into the hands of any target audience where they are most responsive…It’s what we do. We treat each product sample as valuable currency, ensuring that it’s not just received as a “freebie” but a powerful marketing trigger that generates the highest possible returns for our clients

WE’LL TAKE CARE OF EVERYTHING

We’ve been providing all manner of product sampling services to clients for 18 years. Whether you require food, & drink sampling, in store, city centre or festival sampling, we have the support staff and experience to pull it off. Rest assured that your product sampling campaign and reputation is in the safest hands with Kommando.

• UK wide coverage
• Fast Turnaround
• Guaranteed customer engagement
• We’ll plan and enact your campaign
• All quotes free of charge
• We’re the go to agency for big brands

Promotional Staffing

Our vast experience in the industry, and having a network of 3000+ staff means you can rely on Kommando to get the job done.

Whether you need 1 member of staff or 100 across the entire UK, we can fulfil all of your staffing requirements.

Leading the industry through innovative technology that improves staffing efficiency and client satisfaction is what makes us one of the leading promotional staffing agencies. Our Klockwork Staffing System really pays dividends and our military precision becomes Kommando’s watchword. We apply that same rigour to each and every campaign the length and breadth of the country.

KLOCKWORK^TM

All of our staffing and sampling projects are underpinned by Klockwork, our unique field force process which recruits, monitors, evaluates & mobilises.

You can rely on our promotional ambassadors to complete the project efficiently and effectively. We understand that sourcing the right face and personality for your brand and campaign is top priority. Get in touch with us.

At the XINI all our hopes is to  to become your campaign marketing partner for your successful political campaign.

The Apple Experience

A new report from the Wall Street Journal reveals details of just how seriously Apple takes its consumer experience.From the way the employees speak to people to the more minor details such as the security cables holding the products to the tables, every last factor has been engineered to give the best possible consumer experience.

SOME OF THE DETAILS ARE:

To put a positive spin on bad news, employees at the Genius Bar are asked to say “as it turns out” rather than “unfortunately”.New employees are forbidden to talk to customers and instead shadow more experience colleagues until they are ready – often taking a few weeks or more.To keep things busy its common for Genius appointments to be triple booked.

With Apple’s sales per square foot now at $4,406 (higher than luxury jeweller Tiffany’s and Co) they must be getting something right.

LOCOGs on Mobile Marketing

Are LOCOGs efforts to control mobile marketing wasted?

The news that LOCOG is aiming to prevent non-sponsors from using virtual space surrounding the Olympics by making official location based check-in available only to sponsors has sparked some debate in Kommando HQ.

LOCOG plans to take advantage of Foursquare by offering a range of check-in points relevant to the Games. A deal with Foursquare could not be confirmed as yet but they are in talks to offer official check-in platforms open only to sponsors.

A spokesman for LOCOG said ‘We will be working with a range of location-based services at Games-time on a non-exclusive basis. We will announce more details in due course.’

Following the warning from digital experts that there will be a barrage of social media marketing ahead of London 2012 we wonder if LOCOGs efforts will be wasted due to the other opportunities available for non-sponsors to get in on the act.

If social media can bring down governments and change regimes then how much of a chance does LOCOG have of controlling and managing social media in and around the Games? Which brings us to the point that if you want to reach and target this audience but don’t have the privilege of being an official sponsor, mobile, digital and social coupled with guerrilla tactics is your best option!

Ariel Fashion Shoot

This is a fun experiential marketing campaign with a nice social media tie in from Ariel…

Appearing for one week (from 29th August – 3rd September) a specially built glass box was constructed in the waiting hall of Stockholm Central Station. Passers by could watch as clothes, which were hung on a washing line, moved around the box and were hit with ketchup, drinking chocolate and lingonberry jam.

The clever part becomes clear when it is revealed that the industrial robot responsible for firing the condiments is controlled by Facebook users, in real time. Participants who visited the bespoke custom Facebook page were invited to aim, stain and win whatever they hit. The stained garment was then sent to the player once it was washed on-site with Ariel Actilift.

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Crop Art

Take a closer look at the images below and you’ll notice that this is not just painted, ink stained grass or a large image placed in a field, it is the result of months of planning and precise execution. It is Large Scale Crop Art.

Also known as landscape art and is essentially coloured rice crops which can only be seen from an Ariel view and take months to grow. The canvas is the size of the fields that it occupies.Images are created on large areas of land, beginning with planning and design commencing many months in advance. Planting, mowing and on occasions burning or plowing is carried out in the latter stages.

Crop Art used by marketers falls under Guerrilla Marketing because these creations make for engaging experiences, generating buzz and publicity. The artistic Guerrilla stunt uses experts in the field (literally), who are equip with the relevant knowledge and use highly specialised techniques and tools. They Crop Art also utilises highly specialised equipment and intelligent ideas and design.

The impressive photos and video above display ‘murals’ grown by farmers in Japan, Inakadate, using different coloured rice plants. The crops were produced in summer months after they had a chance to grow and are created by planting purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety.

These japanese pieces of art cover 15,000 square metres and anyone interested in seeing it either can view it from the air or locals can climb the village’s castle tower.

Using computers, farmers can draw the design and calculate a precise layout and plan for planting rice. Many coloured variations of rice were used for this particular project and the village’s Crop Art attracts more than 15,000 visitors to the area every summer (Inakadate is only home to around 8,700 people).

Creating enormous images and placing them upon the earth is not novel. The Nazca people of ancient Peru created vast geoglyphs of animals and geometric shapes by scratching lines into the Earth’s surface as did other ancient peoples.

Crop Art is a creative Guerrilla Marketing technique which has inspired many brands and musicians to produce similar large scale artwork on areas of land, across the world. Although these imitations of Crop Art use less specialised techniques and equipment they still make impressive Guerrilla Marketing stunts. See ‘The Streets’ creation within the images above.

What Does Virtual Reality Feel Like?

In the video below a consumer decides to take part in virtual reality. He soon shows spectators how real the experience can feel.

The man enters a world of virtual reality through a specialised headset and headphones attached to a computer system running the virtual reality program. He finds himself hundreds of meters above a city riding what looks like the scariest rollercoaster in the world but he is then pushed by a friend as he endures the first plummet.

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Remember when Volkswagen cleverly used Star Wars for their Super Bowl commercial? After achieving great success with this memorable advert they have created another attention grabbing ad for the 2012 Super Bowl.

So far VW’s post has generated: 62,830 likes and been viewed by 9,316,007.

This year’s Super Bowl sees New York Giants compete against New England Patriots and Volkswagen is bringing Star Wars back into the limelight for their big Super Bowl spot. The brand has released a teaser commercial which features a ‘canine choir’ centre stage and barking a familiar tune. The teaser has been named “The Bark Side 2012 Volkswagen Super Bowl Commercial Teaser” and the barks follow the melody of ‘The Imperial March’ from The Empire Strikes Back. Aside from singing the canines are quite amusing to watch while they are on the set, a set which has been created to resemble the Rebel Blockade Runner that Princess Leia used to escape from the Empire with the Death Star plans.

Some of the dogs have been transformed into Star Wars characters and dressed as Wicket the Ewok, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, and lastly the great Darth Vader.

Volkswagen has said ‘The Bark Side’ will air during the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 5.

Volkswagen have commented about the release of the video: “A canine chorus barks a familiar tune. Keep an eye out for our 2012 Game Day commercial—it will all make sense. Love Star Wars and Volkswagen?

NEXT

Local Printing To Digital Printing Steps

Printing: The main brand purpose of this article is to help you understand how detailed and complex the print process truly is, and the value of working with someone who has the expertise to ensure your job is handled correctly. There is an enormous difference between a quality print job and simply sending your files to a local franchise print shop. Today, we open the doors of our Art/Production Department to give you an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of what the print process looks like at .

Series 1 Exposition

Graphic Design

Graphic design is defined as the arrangement of type and visual elements along with specifications for paper, ink colors, and printing processes that, when combined, convey a visual message.[1] The graphic design stage includes concepting, page layout, typography, illustration, photography selection, color decisions, and producing final computer files.

Note: While it is tempting to hire a freelance graphic designer to create materials that can be sent directly to a low-cost printer, not all graphic designers know how to properly prepare files for printing. Once a design is approved, the files must be “packaged”. Unless the graphic designer is trained in production management, the odds increase substantially for a less than satisfactory print job. The reasons vary from missing fonts and/or images, to the use of incompatible software, for example. This generates delays, cost overruns, unanticipated proofing rounds, late-stage design changes, and sometimes disappointment over the finished job. Meticulous attention to detail at each step of the process is necessary to avoid these kinds of issues.

Creation of artwork – Important facts

Creating artwork requires taking multiple factors into account. Here are some of the most important elements to consider:

Proper design software

Art must be prepared in the software that is best suited for the particular task, and in a version that is compatible with the selected print shop. If the print shop uses a newer or older version than what the art file was created with, you can run into problems. Some of the industry’s standard applications include: Illustrator, a drawing program to create logos or illustration; Photoshop, a pixel-based program to manipulate photos; and In Design, a page layout program to create a single or multi-page document.

Accurate layout

Usually, files need to be built at actual size and use bleed space when appropriate. (This eliminates room for errors with the printing estimate and final printed result). If a file is not built correctly, the printer will have to spend time (and therefore charge you a fee) to readjust files to fit the correct specifications of the job.

Approved fonts

The fonts should be consistent with your brand standard and must be included with the files sent to the printer. If the printer does not have the font used in the artwork, and it has not been included with the packaged files, the printer may simply choose to substitute the fonts, producing something that is probably similar but not what you actually approved.

Suitable image resolution

Images need to be high-resolution and large enough to fit within the assigned space. The resolution should be 300 dpi (dots per inch). Anything smaller than that might result in a loss of quality.

Precise color

As with the fonts, the colors and general tone of the piece should be consistent with your brand. That said, never trust the colors of a piece being designed on a computer as the actual colors that will turn out once printed! The reason is because a computer screen and paper printing use 2 different types of processes, RGB and CMYK, to create actual colors:

• RGB (Red, Green, Blue) is an “additive coloration” mode. Think of a computer screen with a black background. In order to see the colors, some lights of red, green, and blue are “added” to the black background. RGB is typically used to render colors on monitors and computer screens.
• CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) is a “subtractive coloration” mode. It is intended to be applied to print on white or colored paper, and calculates the correct hues by “subtracting” from the initial brightness of the paper. The CMYK coloration mode is intended for use in paper printing applications and printing specific, exact colors.

CMYK is also referred to as “process colors,” which is different than spot colors (also called PMS – Pantone Matching System). CMYK uses four different color inks (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) overlapping each other to achieve the full color spectrum. To print any multicolor image, the same four color inks are used. The press runs four imes to apply each ink individually.

Spot colors are pre-mixed inks that are applied only to the area assigned for each particular color. For example, to print a blue, brown, and red image, pre-mixed blue, brown, and red inks are used. In this case, the printing press runs only three times, which reduces printing costs. Click here to read more about spot colors.

We work on-site with the printer to ensure that the final printed product matches your brand colors as closely as possible and we advise on color corrections along the way if necessary.

File naming

Files must be named to allow printers to work more efficiently. For example, make sure there are no unusual characters in the file’s name or it may cause a printer’s computer to crash. They should be labeled with the correct extension: .ai for Illustrator, .indd for InDesign, digital marketing etc. Perhaps this sounds elementary to some, but we have learned that this simple step significantly expedites the process.

File preparation to release for print

Before the artwork can be sent to the printer, here are a few steps we use to ensure the files are prepared correctly:

• Use of preflight software: Preflight software helps collect all the fonts and images, search for missing items, and avoid mistakes.
• Verification of page size settings and bleeds : Incorrect page settings cannot be fixed by simply scaling up or down, so make sure the document size is the final trim size. Bleed photos and other graphics that extend to the edge of a page must be set up to overlap the trim margins by an 1/8th inch to avoid white along the edge.
• File cleanup: Cluttered files not only confuse and frustrate printers, they compound the possibility of errors. Make sure to remove unnecessary artwork, delete unused colors, and verify that all the color names match exactly across all programs. An oversight such as not specifying whether a color is CMYK or PMS (or spot colors) might change the overall colors of a piece or even turn a four-color job into a more expensive five-color job by mistake.

The Quote Process – Communication with vendors is key

We always communicate with our vendors early in the process and negotiate the best prices for our clients without sacrificing quality. We discuss topics covering the purpose of the materials we will be printing, the final size, the quantity needed, the deadline, etc. All of this information is essential to determine the best type of press to be used (digital or offset), schedule press time, order paper, etc. Here are some of the elements we take into consideration:

• Size: dimensions of the piece (flat and final size)
• Stock: weight, finish, grade name, and color of the paper
• Inks: number and types of inks and varnishes (four-color process, PMS colors)
• Bleed: an 1/8th inch extension to the edge of a page
• Proofs: review of PDF and hard-copy versions
• File format: this information is very important to make sure the print shop can support our software/application and can open the files
• Finishing: type of trim, score, fold, assembly, and seal if applicable
• Printing and mailing or shipping date: this step is very important to determine which vendor and what kind of budget best suits the project

Prepress and the proofing process

Prepress refers to all the print production functions that take place from the moment the files are sent to the printer to the actual printing. These functions might include some of the following: receiving media files, creating proofs for review and approval, making any final changes/edits, creating the plates for the offset press, etc. At XINI, we use a 3-step final proofing process:

• Step 1: PDF proof (review copy/elements/fonts) – We request a PDF proof of the artwork from our vendors. This allows us to proofread the content one last time and make sure the piece contains no mistakes. It also lets us make sure the text hasn’t shifted or the images haven’t moved while the printer processed the files.
• Step 2: Hard-copy proof (review color match/paper) – We then receive a hard-copy printout, which lets us see the final document, check for discrepancies, and clarify how the layout is intended to look.
• Step 3: On-location press-check – Upon approval of the hard-copy proof, we go to the print shop for a final press-check in order to approve the paper, inks, varnishes, colors, etc.

Printing (offset vs. digital)

Printing is the mechanical process of applying ink to paper using an offset or digital press. The offset press is the most cost effective way of producing large volumes of printed materials, while the digital press is more commonly used for smaller volume and lower production cost. It is important to understand that the final product will look slightly different when printed digitally vs. offset, as well as from printer to printer. Proper and consistent paper selection is also a critical component of the process because color appears distinctively on different  paper stocks and with or without finishes (varnish, aqueous coating, etc.). So when you need to reprint, it is best to use the same methodology, on the same paper, with the same finishes, at the same printer to match the original run as closely as possible. As part of our service, we have skilled production managers who oversee the process to ensure great and consistent outcomes.

Bindery/Finish

After a job is printed, the next stage includes one or many steps depending on the end product: cutting/trimming, folding, laminating, scoring, perforating, stitching, and binding. The last step in the bindery stage includes packaging for delivery.

Delivery

Most jobs are shipped to our clients directly or delivered to a specialized facility called a mail-house or “letter-shop” when materials are to be mailed on behalf of the client. In this stage, the addresses are computer-imprinted from the customer’s mailing list database onto the printed piece, then sorted and prepared for delivery to the post office.

As you can see, the print production process is very detailed and requires a certain level of experience and expertise. Most importantly, at  , we monitor the jobs in person, from start to finish, to ensure that the highest standards are met, your brand is represented through quality materials, and that you always receive the utmost value for your investment.

 

Series 2 Exposition

Book production

Book production is a complex process that begins with detailed planning. Together with the printer, the paper, printing process and number of copies are specified; then, together with the graphic designer, the cover, binding and layout are developed. The prepress process concerns itself with the print data to ensure that the finished printed book should correspond exactly to your conception.

It is vital in book production for there to be a seamless interlinking of processes, know-how and commitment on the part of all XINI employees and a constant control of individual work procedures, which requires teamwork at all levels.

Book production – the way to your book begins with the book design

The manuscript is finished: now you want to see the book in print. As the author, publisher or client you may already have a concrete idea of how the book is to look. Our specialists help you realise your ideas for book design. They know which layout, cover and configuration is right for your book and will appeal to readers.

The cover is an important publicity and information medium: it is designed at XINI Prints by experienced graphic designers. The book cover represents the first visible reference to the book in any advertising effort as well as the first contact between the reader and the book, conveying far more than simply the author’s name and title. If you wish to have books printed, we will be pleased to offer you comprehensive advice on the design of the book cover as well as on the choice of the correct format, binding and paper.

Prepress and planning – your book goes to print

The individual steps in the production of a book are closely connected at LONGO. Smooth collaboration between our various departments, from pre-press to print logistics, is a major factor contributing to our high print quality, punctual delivery and costing accuracy.

Small and mini print runs are perfectly suited to digital printing, thanks to digital printing, book production is now an affordable, costable option, and not just for self publishers. If a large print run is required, the speed and precision of offset printing make it the appropriate process.

After the book has been printed it must be bound. The raw printed sheets come from the printworks and are folded, bound, cut and provided with a binding. Whether for threadless binding or thread stitching, a book for the mass-market or the coffee-table, we can also comprehensively advise you on this production step.

Books are frequently shrink-wrapped in plastic foil and bundled with booklets or magazines, and thus prepared for dispatch. We also support you in all the steps that follow the print run!

The end of the book production process results in what the XINI team always delighted to hold in their hands: a finished book! Contact us for more details. or send an email to info@xinicomms.com for our quote or simply call 07082709871, 07015883269 today.

 

Going forward, We Have The Multi Step Printing Exposition

We have mentioned that printing is both a dirty business and one in which “printers” use the technical nature of the process to extract extra costs. Lithosphere’s philosophy has always been to be very open about processes and costs involved. Clearly defining the roles, input and expectations of all the parties concerned.

The following diagram and list of pre-press, printing and finishing process serves to demonstrate our commitment to smoothly fulfilling our clients expectations and our experience in managing all aspects of the print production process.

The Process in detail

Pre-press index: Bar code supply CAD/CAM facility Colour scanning Computer-to-plate Data/disk conversion	Design Desktop publishing Electronic make-up Engraving Forme and diemaking	Litho platemaking Proofing Remote data transmission Stochastic screening Typesetting
Printing process: Copperplate Diestamping Digital printing Flexography Gravure sheet Gravure web	Ink-jet printing Letterpress – sheet Letterpress – web Litho on plastic printing Litho sheet-fed Litho web – cold set	Litho web – heat set On-demand B/W publishing Screen printing Shortrun digital colour printing Thermography Variable data printing
Finishing index: Binding Bronzing Carbonising Card folding Collating Crimping Cutting and creasing Drilling Embossing Encapsulating Envelopeoverprinting	Eyeletting Foil blocking Folding Gilding Gluing Guillotining Index cutting Laminating Latexing Numbering Perforating	Ram bundling Round cornering Ruling Showcard make up Shrink wrapping Stringing Tabbing Varnishing Washering Window patching Wire binding

All of the multi step as supplied by Lithosphere may look simple but the professionalism required is more complicated than any activity in any industry but thanks to our super team put clear structure in the print/ printing communications industry in Lagos, Nigeria with super creative and innovative concept put in place.

Printing Steps

There are a wide variety of technologies that are used to print stuff. The main industrial printing processes are:

• Offset lithography
• Flexography
• Digital printing: inkjet & xerography
• Gravure
• Screen printing

Additional printing techniques were developed for very specific applications. These include flock printing, letterpress, intaglio, pad printing, and thermography.

Why a certain job is better printed using one of these processes mentioned can be read on this page about choosing a printing process.

Offset

Prepressure explained to there team that In offset lithography a printing plate, which is most often made from aluminum, contains an image of the content that needs to be printed. When the plate is inked, only this image part holds ink. That inked image is subsequently transferred (or offset) from the plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface. The process can be used to print on paper, cardboard, plastic or other materials, but these have to have a flat surface.

Below is a picture of a 4 color sheetfed printing press. At the far end is the intake where individual sheets of paper are automatically fed into the press. The 4 towers or printing units each print one color, typically black get printedfirst, followed by cyan, magenta and yellow. The stack of printed sheets is visible on the front of the machine, underneath the press console & monitor which the press operator uses to control the press.

For higher volume work offset presses use rolls of paper. The picture below shows such a much larger web press. It is so fast that the printed paper needs to be force dried. The black unit at the end of the press is an oven.

Offset is nowadays the most widely used printing technique for an extensive range of products such as books, newspapers, stationery, corrugated board, posters, etc.

There is a trend that printing promotional material is gradually migrating to digital printing while some packaging printing is moving to flexo.

You can find more information on the page dedicated to offset printing.

Flexo

In flexography the content that needs to be printed is on a relief of a printing plate, which is made from rubber. This plate is inked and that inked image is subsequently transferred to the printing surface.  The process can be used to print on paper as well as plastics, metals, cellophane and other materials. Flexo is mainly used for packaging and labels and to a lesser extent also for newspapers.

Some packaging printing is moving from flexo to digital.

Digital printing

Digital printing can be done in various ways. Two technologies dominate the industry:

• Inkjet – In an inkjet printer the image that needs to be printed is created by small droplets of ink that are propelled from the nozzles of one or more print heads. Inkjet devices can print on a wide range of substrates such as paper, plastic, canvas or even doors and floor tiles. Inkjet printing is used a lot for posters and signage. It is also economical for short run publications such as photo books or small runs of books. In-line inkjet printers are sometimes combined with other types of presses to print variable data, such as the mailing addresses on direct mail pieces.  The press shown below is the HP PageWide C500, meant for printing on corrugated board.
  
• Xerography – In xerographic printers, such as laser printers, the image that needs to be printed is formed by selectively applying a charge to a metal cylinder called a drum. The electrical charge is used to attract toner particles. These particles are transferred to the media that is being printed on. To make sure the toner is fixed properly, the substrate passes through a fuser that melts the toner into the medium. Laser printers are not only used in offices but also for small run printing of books, brochures and other types of document. These printers are also used for transactional printing (bills, bank documents, etc) and direct mail.

In 2009 both techniques jointly accounted for around 15% of the total volume of print.

Digital printing is increasingly utilized for print jobs that were previously printing using offset, flexo or screen printing.

• In short run small format (A3 size) printing, digital is taking over from offset for both color and B&W printing. Quick printers and copy shops print digitally on presses from vendors like Xerox, HP, Canon, and Konica Minolta.
• Labels are also increasingly being printed digitally.
• Billboard and point-of-sale or point-of-purchase jobs are being done by wide-format inkjet devices.
• There is a wide range of small format printers used to print on phone cases, mugs and other products.
• In book printing publishing companies start to rely more on print-on-demand. The Espresso Book Machine pictured below is well suited for that job.

There are a number of other digital printing processes that are geared towards specific niche markets:

• Dye-sublimation is a printing process in which heat is used to transfer a dye onto the substrate. Dye-sub printers are mainly used for printing on textiles, for proofing and for producing photographic prints. Some printers can print on a variety of materials such as paper, plastic, and fabric.
• In the direct thermal printing process heat is used to change the color of a special coating that has been applied to paper. This process is used in cash registers but also to add markings, such as serial numbers, to products. For this a transparent ink is used that changes color when a laser applies heat to it.
• In the thermal ink transfer printing process heat is used to melt print off a ribbon and onto the substrate. It is used in some proofing devices but seems to be gradually disappearing off the market.

Gravure

Also known as rotogravure, this is a technique in which an image is engraved into a printing cylinder. That cylinder is inked and this ink subsequently transfers to the paper.  Gravure is used for high volume work such as newspapers,  magazines, and packaging.

Gravure is gradually losing market share to offset for publication printing and to flexo for packaging applications.

Screen printing

As its name implies, this printing technique relies on a screen, which is a woven piece of fabric. Certain areas of this mesh are coated with a non-permeable material. In the remaining open spaces ink can be pushed through the mesh onto a substrate. The advantage of screen printing is that the surface of the recipient does not have to be flat and that the ink can adhere to a wide range of materials, such as paper, textiles, glass, ceramics, wood, and metal.

The image below shows a screen printing press that is used to print t-shirts.

Increasingly screen printing is being replaced by digital printing.

Additional printing processes

• Letterpress – Once a dominant printing technique, letterpress is now used for business cards, wedding invitations,…
• Flocking – used to add a (colored) velvet-like texture to paper, textiles, etc.
• Pad printing – used to print on 3-dimensional surfaces.
• Intaglio – nowadays mainly used for used stamps and paper currency.
• Thermography – This is more of a finishing process than an actual printing process. It produces raised lettering on the printed side of the paper and is used for wedding invitations, letterheads, business cards,…

Read about

Best Digital Branding Printing Arrangements To Know

 

Brochure – Magazine Printing

Feel Free To Always Contact Us Here At Our Head Office In Lagos, Nigeria.

 

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Letter Head Printing In Lagos

1: Designing Letterhead for Lasting Impact

Even in our digital age, companies still rely on printed letterhead for professional communications. Contracts, client or fundraising letters, internal memos and other company documentation still make their best impression on commercially-printed letterhead, especially with matching envelopes.

Letterhead Design Tips

Your letterhead reflects your organization’s image, personality and quality. Express who you are on paper through the different design elements on your letterhead or your letterhead and envelope sets. Keeping the look and feel consistent with your other marketing materials is also important for reinforcing a professional identity. Follow these tips to dress up your letters:

• Overall design: How do you want to come across? Solid and steady, quirky and creative, or stylish and sophisticated? A simple design with your logo and contact info may be appropriate for the type of business you have, or you may need a stronger dose of graphics to create the right image.
• Letterhead Content: Baseline is your company name, address, phone numbers and email address. Also include your logo, company website and slogan, if you have them, on your personal or corporate letterhead. Be creative on where you put the info, you’re not limited to the top of the page!
• Fonts: What fonts or typestyles best reflect your business? Fonts can be formal or fun, classy or cool – try a few and see what fits with your logo and your style. Or, use what you already have on your other marketing materials. Make sure the fonts you use are readable and not too small – generally stay between 9 pt. and 12 pt.
• Color: If your company logo is usually black and white, printing your letterhead in black ink only may suit your image just fine. Otherwise, use color to grab attention and reinforce your brand identity. Even the background can include some color, if it’s light enough for the text of your letter to be read whether printed or handwritten.

And don’t forget companion printed envelopes to make a great impression! You’ll generally want to keep your return address at the top left for postal use, but you can be just as creative as on the letterhead in look and feel with fonts and colors on your envelopes. Letter head printing and Designing envelopes in tandem creates a unified brand image for best impact.

How do you look on paper?

A great design is only one half of the blueprint for sensational stationery printing. The paper you choose for your letterhead printing is just as important. Look for the following characteristics:

• Finish: Smooth or textured, you’ll want a quality uncoated stock that you can run through your laser or desktop printer without smudging. Smooth stocks show off your color designs the best and are less expensive and more commonly available and cost effective, while textured stocks such as linen or laid offer a nice tactile, high-end feel. If you want to match your letterhead more closely to your business cards or brochures printed on glossy or dull/matte coated stocks, go for smooth stock.
• Weight: Don’t settle for less than premium-weight paper for your letterhead and envelopes – the standard bond paper most offices use for copying and printing won’t give you the sense of quality you want to convey in your official letters. Look for 70 lb text or 24 lb bond. You can feel the difference!
• Color: While plenty of options are out there for colored paper, you can get the same effect by using a colored background in your design that’s printed on often less-expensive white paper. Be aware that ink prints differently on colored paper than on white, so determine what you’re trying to achieve before deciding on a colored stock for your letterhead.
• Sustainability: You don’t have to sacrifice quality for environmental responsibility. Choose environmentally responsible papers, or ask about fine writing papers that include recycled content which may help you for the best letter head printing materials

Work with your designer or favorite graphic design software to put your ideas in motion and create unique letterhead printing that beautifully shows off your business for just pennies a piece.

No. Sticker label printing is not just for children’s craft books. It’s actually an effective business tool! Although an often overlooked marketing method, sticker label printing is an amazing way to foster brand awareness without breaking the bank on costly advertising channels. In this post, We help highlights the benefits of sticker label printing and provides some practical advice on how to use stickers and labels to promote your business.

What are the benefits of sticker label printing?

• Versatility – Business stickers and labels can be placed just about anywhere and are resistant to weather damage.
• Affordability – The one-off cost of printing business stickers and labels is far less than the recurring costs associated with the likes of TV and social media advertising.
• Targetted – Business stickers and labels can be strategically placed in busy areas in which your target audience are likely to conjugate.
• Consistency – Carefully designed business stickers and labels will lead to a consistent brand experience and accelerate customer purchasing decisions.
• Complementary – Sticker label printing is the perfect accompaniment to robust advertising campaigns.
• Referability – By supplying customers and clients with business stickers and labels, they can gift them to members of your target audience that have not yet initiated a relationship with your brand.

How to use sticker label printing in your business

• Address labels – Printed address labels are the cost-effective alternative to envelopes, enabling eCommerce business to add their branding, contact information and returns address to their online delivery packages with ease.
• Client gifts – Stickers and labels can spruce up client gifts by adding a personalised message, thus reinforcing your appreciation for their custom.
• Window decals – Business stickers and labels can elevate your presence on the high street by grabbing the attention of passers-by and sparking interest into the products or services that you have to offer.
• Promotional possessions – Creating branded stickers and labels for the likes of mobile phone cases, laptops, CDs and water bottles is great for turning your customers into brand advocates and fostering awareness.

Sticker label printing at XINI

We offer a wide range of sticker label printing options, including A sized stickers, round stickers, square stickers and rectangular stickers. What’s more, we supply CD and DVD adhesive labels with a 17mm hole. At XINI Prints we let you add artwork such as business logos and marketing messages to help you create the perfect marketing tool. All of our round, square and rectangular printed stickers are kiss cut to ensure easy peeling and are supplied on handy A4 sheets. Our A-sized printed stickers are available from A7 right through to A3 and are printed on quality white 170gsm silk or gloss permanent adhesive, with a Marine Grade waterproof adhesive option for outdoor use. Visit us to find out more about sticker label printing.

Always be free to contact us for all you printing cost including your letter head printing

Local Printing To Digital Printing Steps

Brochure – Magazine Printing

Branding | Printing | Showing In Cinemas Now In Lagos

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Printing: The main brand purpose of this article is to help you understand how detailed and complex the print process truly is, and the value of working with someone who has the expertise to ensure your job is handled correctly. There is an enormous difference between a quality print job and simply sending your files to a local franchise print shop. Today, we open the doors of our Art/Production Department to give you an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of what the print process looks like at .

Series 1 Exposition

Graphic Design

Graphic design is defined as the arrangement of type and visual elements along with specifications for paper, ink colors, and printing processes that, when combined, convey a visual message.[1] The graphic design stage includes concepting, page layout, typography, illustration, photography selection, color decisions, and producing final computer files.

Note: While it is tempting to hire a freelance graphic designer to create materials that can be sent directly to a low-cost printer, not all graphic designers know how to properly prepare files for printing. Once a design is approved, the files must be “packaged”. Unless the graphic designer is trained in production management, the odds increase substantially for a less than satisfactory print job. The reasons vary from missing fonts and/or images, to the use of incompatible software, for example. This generates delays, cost overruns, unanticipated proofing rounds, late-stage design changes, and sometimes disappointment over the finished job. Meticulous attention to detail at each step of the process is necessary to avoid these kinds of issues.

Creation of artwork – Important facts

Creating artwork requires taking multiple factors into account. Here are some of the most important elements to consider:

Proper design software

Art must be prepared in the software that is best suited for the particular task, and in a version that is compatible with the selected print shop. If the print shop uses a newer or older version than what the art file was created with, you can run into problems. Some of the industry’s standard applications include: Illustrator, a drawing program to create logos or illustration; Photoshop, a pixel-based program to manipulate photos; and In Design, a page layout program to create a single or multi-page document.

Accurate layout

Usually, files need to be built at actual size and use bleed space when appropriate. (This eliminates room for errors with the printing estimate and final printed result). If a file is not built correctly, the printer will have to spend time (and therefore charge you a fee) to readjust files to fit the correct specifications of the job.

Approved fonts

The fonts should be consistent with your brand standard and must be included with the files sent to the printer. If the printer does not have the font used in the artwork, and it has not been included with the packaged files, the printer may simply choose to substitute the fonts, producing something that is probably similar but not what you actually approved.

Suitable image resolution

Images need to be high-resolution and large enough to fit within the assigned space. The resolution should be 300 dpi (dots per inch). Anything smaller than that might result in a loss of quality.

Precise color

As with the fonts, the colors and general tone of the piece should be consistent with your brand. That said, never trust the colors of a piece being designed on a computer as the actual colors that will turn out once printed! The reason is because a computer screen and paper printing use 2 different types of processes, RGB and CMYK, to create actual colors:

• RGB (Red, Green, Blue) is an “additive coloration” mode. Think of a computer screen with a black background. In order to see the colors, some lights of red, green, and blue are “added” to the black background. RGB is typically used to render colors on monitors and computer screens.
• CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) is a “subtractive coloration” mode. It is intended to be applied to print on white or colored paper, and calculates the correct hues by “subtracting” from the initial brightness of the paper. The CMYK coloration mode is intended for use in paper printing applications and printing specific, exact colors.

CMYK is also referred to as “process colors,” which is different than spot colors (also called PMS – Pantone Matching System). CMYK uses four different color inks (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) overlapping each other to achieve the full color spectrum. To print any multicolor image, the same four color inks are used. The press runs four imes to apply each ink individually.

Spot colors are pre-mixed inks that are applied only to the area assigned for each particular color. For example, to print a blue, brown, and red image, pre-mixed blue, brown, and red inks are used. In this case, the printing press runs only three times, which reduces printing costs. Click here to read more about spot colors.

We work on-site with the printer to ensure that the final printed product matches your brand colors as closely as possible and we advise on color corrections along the way if necessary.

File naming

Files must be named to allow printers to work more efficiently. For example, make sure there are no unusual characters in the file’s name or it may cause a printer’s computer to crash. They should be labeled with the correct extension: .ai for Illustrator, .indd for InDesign, etc. Perhaps this sounds elementary to some, but we have learned that this simple step significantly expedites the process.

File preparation to release for print

Before the artwork can be sent to the printer, here are a few steps we use to ensure the files are prepared correctly:

• Use of preflight software: Preflight software helps collect all the fonts and images, search for missing items, and avoid mistakes.
• Verification of page size settings and bleeds : Incorrect page settings cannot be fixed by simply scaling up or down, so make sure the document size is the final trim size. Bleed photos and other graphics that extend to the edge of a page must be set up to overlap the trim margins by an 1/8th inch to avoid white along the edge.
• File cleanup: Cluttered files not only confuse and frustrate printers, they compound the possibility of errors. Make sure to remove unnecessary artwork, delete unused colors, and verify that all the color names match exactly across all programs. An oversight such as not specifying whether a color is CMYK or PMS (or spot colors) might change the overall colors of a piece or even turn a four-color job into a more expensive five-color job by mistake.

The Quote Process – Communication with vendors is key

We always communicate with our vendors early in the process and negotiate the best prices for our clients without sacrificing quality. We discuss topics covering the purpose of the materials we will be printing, the final size, the quantity needed, the deadline, etc. All of this information is essential to determine the best type of press to be used (digital or offset), schedule press time, order paper, etc. Here are some of the elements we take into consideration:

• Size: dimensions of the piece (flat and final size)
• Stock: weight, finish, grade name, and color of the paper
• Inks: number and types of inks and varnishes (four-color process, PMS colors)
• Bleed: an 1/8th inch extension to the edge of a page
• Proofs: review of PDF and hard-copy versions
• File format: this information is very important to make sure the print shop can support our software/application and can open the files
• Finishing: type of trim, score, fold, assembly, and seal if applicable
• Printing and mailing or shipping date: this step is very important to determine which vendor and what kind of budget best suits the project

Prepress and the proofing process

Prepress refers to all the print production functions that take place from the moment the files are sent to the printer to the actual printing. These functions might include some of the following: receiving media files, creating proofs for review and approval, making any final changes/edits, creating the plates for the offset press, etc. At XINI, we use a 3-step final proofing process:

• Step 1: PDF proof (review copy/elements/fonts) – We request a PDF proof of the artwork from our vendors. This allows us to proofread the content one last time and make sure the piece contains no mistakes. It also lets us make sure the text hasn’t shifted or the images haven’t moved while the printer processed the files.
• Step 2: Hard-copy proof (review color match/paper) – We then receive a hard-copy printout, which lets us see the final document, check for discrepancies, and clarify how the layout is intended to look.
• Step 3: On-location press-check – Upon approval of the hard-copy proof, we go to the print shop for a final press-check in order to approve the paper, inks, varnishes, colors, etc.

Printing (offset vs. digital)

Printing is the mechanical process of applying ink to paper using an offset or digital press. The offset press is the most cost effective way of producing large volumes of printed materials, while the digital press is more commonly used for smaller volume and lower production cost. It is important to understand that the final product will look slightly different when printed digitally vs. offset, as well as from printer to printer. Proper and consistent paper selection is also a critical component of the process because color appears distinctively on different  paper stocks and with or without finishes (varnish, aqueous coating, etc.). So when you need to reprint, it is best to use the same methodology, on the same paper, with the same finishes, at the same printer to match the original run as closely as possible. As part of our service, we have skilled production managers who oversee the process to ensure great and consistent outcomes.

Bindery/Finish

After a job is printed, the next stage includes one or many steps depending on the end product: cutting/trimming, folding, laminating, scoring, perforating, stitching, and binding. The last step in the bindery stage includes packaging for delivery.

Delivery

Most jobs are shipped to our clients directly or delivered to a specialized facility called a mail-house or “letter-shop” when materials are to be mailed on behalf of the client. In this stage, the addresses are computer-imprinted from the customer’s mailing list database onto the printed piece, then sorted and prepared for delivery to the post office.

As you can see, the print production process is very detailed and requires a certain level of experience and expertise. Most importantly, at  , we monitor the jobs in person, from start to finish, to ensure that the highest standards are met, your brand is represented through quality materials, and that you always receive the utmost value for your investment.

Series 2 Exposition

The manuscript is finished: now you want to see the book in print. As the author, publisher or client you may already have a concrete idea of how the book is to look. Our specialists help you realise your ideas for book design. They know which layout, cover and configuration is right for your book and will appeal to readers.

The cover is an important publicity and information medium: it is designed at XINI Prints by experienced graphic designers. The book cover represents the first visible reference to the book in any advertising effort as well as the first contact between the reader and the book, conveying far more than simply the author’s name and title. If you wish to have books printed, we will be pleased to offer you comprehensive advice on the design of the book cover as well as on the choice of the correct format, binding and paper.

Prepress and planning – your book goes to print

The individual steps in the production of a book are closely connected at LONGO. Smooth collaboration between our various departments, from pre-press to print logistics, is a major factor contributing to our high print quality, punctual delivery and costing accuracy.

Small and mini print runs are perfectly suited to digital printing, thanks to digital printing, book production is now an affordable, costable option, and not just for self publishers. If a large print run is required, the speed and precision of offset printing make it the appropriate process.

After the book has been printed it must be bound. The raw printed sheets come from the printworks and are folded, bound, cut and provided with a binding. Whether for threadless binding or thread stitching, a book for the mass-market or the coffee-table, we can also comprehensively advise you on this production step.

Books are frequently shrink-wrapped in plastic foil and bundled with booklets or magazines, and thus prepared for dispatch. We also support you in all the steps that follow the print run!

The end of the book production process results in what the XINI team always delighted to hold in their hands: a finished book! Contact us for more details. or send an email to info@xinicomms.com for our quote or simply call 07082709871, 07015883269 today.

 

Going forward, We Have The Multi Step Printing Exposition

We have mentioned that printing is both a dirty business and one in which “printers” use the technical nature of the process to extract extra costs. Lithosphere’s philosophy has always been to be very open about processes and costs involved. Clearly defining the roles, input and expectations of all the parties concerned.

The following diagram and list of pre-press, printing and finishing process serves to demonstrate our commitment to smoothly fulfilling our clients expectations and our experience in managing all aspects of the print production process.

The Process in detail

Pre-press index: Bar code supply CAD/CAM facility Colour scanning Computer-to-plate Data/disk conversion	Design Desktop publishing Electronic make-up Engraving Forme and diemaking	Litho platemaking Proofing Remote data transmission Stochastic screening Typesetting
Printing process: Copperplate Diestamping Digital printing Flexography Gravure sheet Gravure web	Ink-jet printing Letterpress – sheet Letterpress – web Litho on plastic printing Litho sheet-fed Litho web – cold set	Litho web – heat set On-demand B/W publishing Screen printing Shortrun digital colour printing Thermography Variable data printing
Finishing index: Binding Bronzing Carbonising Card folding Collating Crimping Cutting and creasing Drilling Embossing Encapsulating Envelopeoverprinting	Eyeletting Foil blocking Folding Gilding Gluing Guillotining Index cutting Laminating Latexing Numbering Perforating	Ram bundling Round cornering Ruling Showcard make up Shrink wrapping Stringing Tabbing Varnishing Washering Window patching Wire binding

All of the multi step as supplied by Lithosphere may look simple but the professionalism required is more complicated than any activity in any industry but thanks to our super team put clear structure in the print/ printing communications industry in Lagos, Nigeria with super creative and innovative concept put in place.

Printing Steps

There are a wide variety of technologies that are used to print stuff. The main industrial printing processes are:

• Offset lithography
• Flexography
• Digital printing: inkjet & xerography
• Gravure
• Screen printing

Additional printing techniques were developed for very specific applications. These include flock printing, letterpress, intaglio, pad printing, and thermography.

Why a certain job is better printed using one of these processes mentioned can be read on this page about choosing a printing process.

Offset

Prepressure explained to there team that In offset lithography a printing plate, which is most often made from aluminum, contains an image of the content that needs to be printed. When the plate is inked, only this image part holds ink. That inked image is subsequently transferred (or offset) from the plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface. The process can be used to print on paper, cardboard, plastic or other materials, but these have to have a flat surface.

Below is a picture of a 4 color sheetfed printing press. At the far end is the intake where individual sheets of paper are automatically fed into the press. The 4 towers or printing units each print one color, typically black get printed first, followed by cyan, magenta and yellow. The stack of printed sheets is visible on the front of the machine, underneath the press console & monitor which the press operator uses to control the press.

For higher volume work offset presses use rolls of paper. The picture below shows such a much larger web press. It is so fast that the printed paper needs to be force dried. The black unit at the end of the press is an oven.

Offset is nowadays the most widely used printing technique for an extensive range of products such as books, newspapers, stationery, corrugated board, posters, etc.

There is a trend that printing promotional material is gradually migrating to digital printing while some packaging printing is moving to flexo.

You can find more information on the page dedicated to offset printing.

Flexo

In flexography the content that needs to be printed is on a relief of a printing plate, which is made from rubber. This plate is inked and that inked image is subsequently transferred to the printing surface.  The process can be used to print on paper as well as plastics, metals, cellophane and other materials. Flexo is mainly used for packaging and labels and to a lesser extent also for newspapers.

Some packaging printing is moving from flexo to digital.

Digital printing

Digital printing can be done in various ways. Two technologies dominate the industry:

• Inkjet – In an inkjet printer the image that needs to be printed is created by small droplets of ink that are propelled from the nozzles of one or more print heads. Inkjet devices can print on a wide range of substrates such as paper, plastic, canvas or even doors and floor tiles. Inkjet printing is used a lot for posters and signage. It is also economical for short run publications such as photo books or small runs of books. In-line inkjet printers are sometimes combined with other types of presses to print variable data, such as the mailing addresses on direct mail pieces.  The press shown below is the HP PageWide C500, meant for printing on corrugated board.
  
• Xerography – In xerographic printers, such as laser printers, the image that needs to be printed is formed by selectively applying a charge to a metal cylinder called a drum. The electrical charge is used to attract toner particles. These particles are transferred to the media that is being printed on. To make sure the toner is fixed properly, the substrate passes through a fuser that melts the toner into the medium. Laser printers are not only used in offices but also for small run printing of books, brochures and other types of document. These printers are also used for transactional printing (bills, bank documents, etc) and direct mail.

In 2009 both techniques jointly accounted for around 15% of the total volume of print.

Digital printing is increasingly utilized for print jobs that were previously printing using offset, flexo or screen printing.

• In short run small format (A3 size) printing, digital is taking over from offset for both color and B&W printing. Quick printers and copy shops print digitally on presses from vendors like Xerox, HP, Canon, and Konica Minolta.
• Labels are also increasingly being printed digitally.
• Billboard and point-of-sale or point-of-purchase jobs are being done by wide-format inkjet devices.
• There is a wide range of small format printers used to print on phone cases, mugs and other products.
• In book printing publishing companies start to rely more on print-on-demand. The Espresso Book Machine pictured below is well suited for that job.

There are a number of other digital printing processes that are geared towards specific niche markets:

• Dye-sublimation is a printing process in which heat is used to transfer a dye onto the substrate. Dye-sub printers are mainly used for printing on textiles, for proofing and for producing photographic prints. Some printers can print on a variety of materials such as paper, plastic, and fabric.
• In the direct thermal printing process heat is used to change the color of a special coating that has been applied to paper. This process is used in cash registers but also to add markings, such as serial numbers, to products. For this a transparent ink is used that changes color when a laser applies heat to it.
• In the thermal ink transfer printing process heat is used to melt print off a ribbon and onto the substrate. It is used in some proofing devices but seems to be gradually disappearing off the market.

Gravure

Also known as rotogravure, this is a technique in which an image is engraved into a printing cylinder. That cylinder is inked and this ink subsequently transfers to the paper.  Gravure is used for high volume work such as newspapers,  magazines, and packaging.

Gravure is gradually losing market share to offset for publication printing and to flexo for packaging applications.

Screen printing

As its name implies, this printing technique relies on a screen, which is a woven piece of fabric. Certain areas of this mesh are coated with a non-permeable material. In the remaining open spaces ink can be pushed through the mesh onto a substrate. The advantage of screen printing is that the surface of the recipient does not have to be flat and that the ink can adhere to a wide range of materials, such as paper, textiles, glass, ceramics, wood, and metal.

The image below shows a screen printing press that is used to print t-shirts.

Increasingly screen printing is being replaced by digital printing.

Additional printing processes

• Letterpress – Once a dominant printing technique, letterpress is now used for business cards, wedding invitations,…
• Flocking – used to add a (colored) velvet-like texture to paper, textiles, etc.
• Pad printing – used to print on 3-dimensional surfaces.
• Intaglio – nowadays mainly used for used stamps and paper currency.
• Thermography – This is more of a finishing process than an actual printing process. It produces raised lettering on the printed side of the paper and is used for wedding invitations, letterheads, business cards,…

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Best Digital Branding Printing Arrangements To Know

 

Brochure – Magazine Printing

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What do you ever think we mean when we say Digital Branding Printing? Let us go on a journey to brand exposition through branding.

Your brand identity speaks volumes with respect to leads and conversion for your company. It’s the face of your business and it’s essential that it portrays your brand’s ethos, messages and values in a way that is impactful and memorable.

Thanks to  for this amazing piece.

And in an increasing populated business world, it really is more important than ever before that you have an identity that your target market can instantly relate too!

After all, your target market should be able to take one look at your branding and know exactly who you are and what you are all about – this will instantly strengthen your reputation and optimise awareness.

Whether you’re a start up company, or an established business, it’s so important that you recognise the many benefits that come hand in hand with establishing an impactful brand identity.

Firstly we are going to look closely at why branding is so important for every business and branding: best printing arrangements to know is key to business growth

It creates an element of trust

Your branding will allow you to enjoy instant credibility, especially when it comes to showcasing your brand and creating a professional image, across all of your marketing materials.

But that’s not all, creating a strong brand identity will also allow you to create an element of trust, as your customers will feel as if they are buying a quality product or service.

Supports your marketing efforts

Branding is super important when it comes to supporting your marketing efforts across all print and digital platforms. For example, incorporating your branding on all your marketing materials will allow you to build your brand by ensuring that you’re logo gains maximum exposure.

Remember, your branding should be consistent and it should not alternate across different platforms. After all, the main focus needs to be on generating a definable impression in your customer’s minds.

Improve recognition

A brand without a face stands no chance of building an audience or improving recognition. This is because your brand should create a desired impression that will capture and engage your target market.

Motivate your team

Your employees should live and breathe your brand just as much as you, and branding that they are inspired by will allow them to feel part of a team.

After all, if your employees should feel proud of your branding and excited to carry your brand identity, wherever you go.

Generating sales

Believe it or not, your branding plays a huge role in generating revenue, and is one of the best ways to shout about your business and spread the word.

This is because your logo is a great way of positioning your brand in your customers’ minds and remember, if it is great branding, they are sure to rave about it.

Your brand value

Your digital branding printing is crucial when it comes to building a relationship with your target market.

Subconsciously adding value to your brand, your logo will instantly give you an identity and remember, the power that comes hand in hand with having a well-known brand certainly shouldn’t be underestimated or ignored.

Your brand image

 Building your brand image should constantly be at the forefront of your marketing efforts, especially when it comes to catching the eye of your target consumer.

And whether you’re starting a new company, launching a new product, or your brand simply needs a make over, it’s essential that your recognise the importance of a visual presence that will differentiate your brand.

Your brand strategy

Your brand’s visual identity is a core component of your brand strategy and it should not only look aesthetically pleasing, but it should also capture your brand’s core values and ethos.

But that’s not all, your brand identity should also have meaning, flexibility, coherence, and most importantly, it should set you apart from your competitors.

And finally, it should provoke an emotional connection with your customer; from the moment they set eyes on your logo.

We guide our clients on digital branding printing processes

How You Should Treat Your Physical Representation Through Your Digital Branding Printing Strategy

 Here at XINI Prints  , we specialise in creating high impact branding that will allow you to enjoy real results. Managing every stage of the production process, from design in the early stages, right through to full execution of the project, we take the time to get to know your brand inside out in order to deliver outstanding results.

We approach every project with endless enthusiasm, a fresh mind-set and an open mind. This allows us to adapt our service to meet your individual needs and objectives

A successful marketing campaign uses more than one strategy in order to optimise engagement, generate sales and build brand awareness.

It’s about utilizing all available tools, platforms and materials in order to make your presence known.

With this in mind, the power of print media should not be dismissed, just because the vast majority of people are now engaging with their favourite brands digitally.

Print media can still make a big impact, and depending on the nature of your brand, giving your customers marketing materials that they can physically handle can have a greater impact.

This is because print media allows you to instill a deeper, emotional message, helping your customers to bond with your brand, especially if you opt for something a little different.

There are many different types of print media to choose from. From newspapers, magazines, catalogues and brochures through to campaigns, business cards and postcards, there are a huge variety of print marketing materials that will allow you to build your brand.

However, whatever you choose, there are a number of basic principles you should follow in order to ensure that your print media campaign is a roaring success. These include:

• Consistent logos, fonts, colours, images and typography
• Use different examples of print media in order to maximise your reach
• Ensure that the quality of the ink and paper you use reflect your brand
• Make sure your logo appears on all marketing materials

 Is print still relevant in the digital world?

Yes! Although many of use tend to communicate via digital platforms, may people still see value in print.

Here are some advantages of print:

Personal

 Print can be easily personalised which is why it is ideal for adding copious amounts of value to your brand. This is because you can easily customise your printing materials to the specific needs of your audience.

From leaflets and business cards through to posters and stationary, there are a vast range of bespoke design solutions that can be used help communicate your brand messages, services and ethos to your target market.

Helping you to create a one to one relationship with your customers, print materials are also a great way of giving your customers something that they can keep and refer to when they need it.

Trusted

Although the digital world seems to have taken over when it comes to influencing the way we communicate and engage with our favourite brands, it’s still a relatively new phenomenon.

However, print has been around for hundreds of years, and is instantly recognisable universally.

Longevity

Due to the fast moving nature of the digital world, vast amounts of online content has a short shelf life, unless it goes viral!

However, print has the potential to stay around for much longer as it can be passed along and kept!

But that’s not all… print media is also extremely tangible, credible and it will allow you to truly establish your brand in a way that works for you. For example, your print media can really bring your brand to life, especially when it comes to experimenting with different colours, fonts, designs, textures and materials.

Engaging

Despite popular belief, print is far more engaging than digital content, especially as it can be physically held and used.

After all, the average visit to a website is around 15 seconds, whereas according to research, there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that consumers will spend up to 45 minutes reading through a magazine.

But can print and digital work together?

Of course, they both complement each other, especially if they are utilised as part of an integrated marketing campaign.

For example, there are lots of ways that you can make print media more engaging.

Infographics – This involves using graphs and statistics to create exciting infographcis that are capable of delivering often dull data in a more engaging and user-friendly format. This allows you to target your audience in a way that is more memorable.

QR Codes – These are a great way of directing your target audience to your social media pages or website, and can be used to reveal more information about your product or service. This functionality can also be customised to accommodate your bespoke needs.

Social Media – Make sure that all of your print media includes your social media icons on the bottom, as this will help to drive traffic to these platforms.

Here at EPS Media, we have vast experience in creating bespoke design solutions that have been designed to meet and exceed your expectations, breathing new life into your brand and positioning it at the forefront of your customers’ minds. Get in touch today to find out how we can help you to maximise your brand awareness.

Before We take you out on GREETING CARDs, we want to quickly let you know the synopsis of:

Digital branding printings

Announcements
Banners
Booklets
Booklet Envelopes
Bookmarks
Brochure Holders
Brochures
Buck Slips
Business Cards
Calendars
Campaign Printing
Carbonless Forms
Cards
Catalogs
CD Covers
Club Cards
Coil Bound Booklets

No lets take you to why greeting cards is important Continually every season

We’ve all sent and received greeting cards. Whether it’s to celebrate a special occasion, to get into the holiday spirit or to offer sentiments to friends and family, greeting cards have become a staple of modern life. So much so, in fact, that their importance in business has been somewhat diluted. Many overlook the effectiveness of greeting cards in marketing and fostering relationships with customers and clients. Therefore, in this post, www.xinicomms.com discusses the advantages of greeting cards in an attempt to shed light on their utility in business.

Fostering relationships & increasing brand loyalty

What’s the main advantage of business greeting cards? That’s easy: their ability to foster lasting relationships with customers and clients. When a customer receives a greeting card in the post, perhaps wishing them a happy birthday after having registered their personal information online, they will be stricken with a sense of appreciation. Greeting cards demonstrate just how much you care about your audience, which, in turn, enhances their loyalty to your brand and increases the likelihood of repeat business.

Seasonal direct mail campaigns

Businesses, especially those that sell online, can benefit massively from seasonal direct mail campaigns. By sending greeting cards with seasonal messages to customers and clients, perhaps detailing limited offers or upcoming product releases, businesses can further their brand awareness during peak holiday selling periods.

Segmentation & personalisation

The beauty of greeting cards is that they can be segmented and personalised based on the varying personas and buying behaviours of individual customers. As opposed to mass mailing generic cards, businesses can hone in on the likes and dislikes of customer subgroups, altering their messaging accordingly to facilitate faster purchasing decisions.

Customisability

At XINI Prints, you can customise our high-quality greeting cards to your heart’s content. We let you upload original artwork, perhaps consisting of your business logo and marketing message, on a variety of greeting cards, such as birthday cards, thank you cards, Christmas cards and more. Choose from a variety of paper stocks and styles, including luxury paper options to give a greater sense of opulence. Finally, choose your folding option and add professional finishes like matt or gloss lamination to enhance your business reputation and make your greeting cards more robust.

Brochure Printing Is King In The Race To Be Well Represented Anywhere

Before we proceed, we would love to appreciate creativemarket.com

Putting together a professional brochure involves much dedication and several steps within the process. Even though brochure printing is the last in line for the entire process, you need to know beforehand what decisions will be involved as they affect the design. Before you begin the layout, use this guide as a reference for your brochure printing decisions.

Size

Decide which size you want your brochure to be. If you change your mind, be sure to make the changes yourself rather than asking a printer to resize it for you. Designing on the wrong size causes the end result to be stretched or important information to be cut off. Standard brochures are 8.5×11 but other sizes include 11×17, 11×25, or you could go smaller with a 4.5×5.5.

Template

Using a template will insure that you design on the correct size and will also help with bleed specifications. Check with your printing company to see if they offer templates as this will make your digital branding printing process smoother and prevent important text and images from getting cut.

Artwork

Your graphics need to be the correct resolution to avoid a fuzzy appearance. Use a resolution of at least 300 dpi for the best results. When saving your brochure to a different file format, double check your resolutions to make sure that they remain the same.

Colors

The colors that you use can vary greatly from their appearance on your computer screen to the printed page. Purchasing a printed color chart for CMYK and PANTONE colors will help you know exactly the color tone you will get in your brochure. If this is not an option for you, calibrate your design program with your monitor using software available online.

Fold

Knowing the type of fold you want before beginning to design your brochure is an absolute necessity. The type of fold you choose changes the design layout. For instance, a tri-fold brochure when opened flat will contain flaps 3, 4, and 5 on one side and flaps 2, 6, and 1 on the other side. Other fold options may be the accordion or the double parallel.

Paper

Brochures are usually printed on heavy text or cardstock. Using a text paper, such as 80# provides durability but is also easily folded. This paper stock usually comes with an gloss coating for protection and shine. If you decide your brochure needs more protection, you may want to go with a 100 lb paper and a heavier gloss coating, such as UV Gloss for sheen or a matte.

Utility options

If you know that your brochures will be placed in a 3-ring binder, you will want to have them hold-punched. For brochures that include a removable panel, such as a mail order form or discount coupons, don’t forget to ask about perforation options.

Proof

The last consideration involved in brochure printing has to do with what type of proof you desire. A proof gives you the opportunity to check for typos and correct alignment of text and images. Many printers offer electronic proofs, which are the most cost-effective choice. A physical proof, though, shows you exactly what your brochure will look like when complete, something that a computer screen just can’t duplicate.

You can check more on Brochure Magazine Printing In Lagos

Can you design a flyer all by yourself? that’s a question to put in mind

Flyers are considered the jack-of-all-trades of marketing print design. They start as a blank canvas and are adaptable to be whatever they need to be – an advertisement, an invitation, or an announcement. They are used for whatever creative and marketing purpose you need to promote an event or announce a public message.

Flyers are everywhere. You see them on community bulletin boards, in your mailbox, and in shop windows. It’s also not uncommon to see them trampled on the street, in the trash, or buried under a pile of notes on a table. However, if the flyers do their job right, they can catch the attention of your intended market and get them to take action.

The adaptability of flyers works well in tailoring them for marketing purposes. For designers, having skills in flyer design is a handy tool to keep and master.

But, what makes an effective flyer? What tips and techniques should you implement to produce a well-designed one? Here are failsafe tips on making a flyer – from conceptualizing the design and copywriting the ad, to distributing the copies.

Creating and Designing Your Flyer

Creating an eye-catching and relevant flyer can be tough, especially if you’re new to the craft. Figuring out your design choices to fashion an attractive and informative end product requires keen attention and careful planning.

What fonts go together? Is the color combination you’re considering suitable for the theme? Questions like these are important to determine which fundamental design tools to use in designing your flyer.

1. Make the design distinctive.

Let’s say you’re on your way to work and stopped by your neighborhood café to get your morning caffeine fix. You navigate the line and shuffle on to get an extra pack of sugar when something catches your attention. It’s a flyer for a three-day sale at your favorite shopping mall pinned to the coffee shop’s bulletin board. You’re running late for work, you’ve yet to drink your coffee, but something about the flyer made you stop to give it a second look.

This “something” is most likely a visual element of the flyer. It can be the attractive typography or the striking color combination. It can be a compelling photo or a charming illustration.

At its core, a flyer is a visual form of advertisement, regardless if it’s for marketing or not. So if you wish for your flyers to serve their intended purpose, they need to be seen, before anything else.

To make a flyer’s design stand out, make sure to have:

An uncluttered focal point.

Every design requires a focal point. It is the part of the layout that lures the attention of viewers into the design. It can be anything – an image, a font, a headline – but it’s almost always the first thing people notice about the flyer. For this reason, it is smart thinking to ensure your focal point is uncluttered and directs viewers to the important message you want to convey.

Applicable imagery.

Most flyer designers use an image because, by nature, people are visual beings. The imagery can be as basic as shapes, as multifaceted as background photos, or as fancy as custom typography. A visual element that relates to the purpose of the flyer will help viewers to easily understand its content.

It’s considerably better to use an image you created yourself. It’s more tailored, unique and personalized. However, if it’s not possible, sourcing the imagery is another option. You just have to use a high-quality image in both form and function: the former to match the theme of the flyer, the latter for high-resolution digital branding printing.

Suitable fonts.

Typography is an important element in any piece of print and graphic design. It’s the character of the font that can convey the message using this imagery alone.

Choosing the right fonts for the flyer is similar to deciding which photo or illustration to use. The fonts must suit the purpose and theme of the flyer. Picking the right ones require careful consideration because the fonts provide the distinct mood and look of the flyer.

Readability also plays an important factor in choosing fonts. Unless the theme or purpose of the flyer calls for it, avoid fonts that are overly ornate or too intricate but with digital branding printing you should be able to proofread al you have been working on.

2. Pick the right colors.

Noting creates more impact than a splash of colors when it comes to visual design. This is because the colors go beyond what is seen. Colors are highly emotional elements that can easily engage a viewer’s feelings. This is a fact that you should take full advantage of when designing a flyer.

Every color represents a feeling or a mood. For instance, if you want your flyer to exude warmth and comfort, pick something from the blue family. If you want your design to convey excitement and energy, choose red or orange. If you want a nature-inspired shade, go for green. Use these representations to enhance the quality and improve the message of your flyer.

That being said, it’s also important to realize that colors don’t have to be quite literal all the time. Sometimes, the abstract approach works, especially if the purpose of the flyer has something to do with a creative event or an artsy product.

If the purpose of the flyer calls for a black and white, then use the classic color combination. Black ink on a white paper doesn’t have to be boring or uninspired. Instead, use the simplicity of the combination to pop up other elements of the flyers like its font or image.

3. Aim for a balanced design.

If you don’t want people to throw your flyer into the trash without even looking at it, then make sure it’s appealing to the eyes. People dislike a crowded layout. When too much information is presented and finding the most important details is a struggle, you defeat the purpose of the flyer. A well-balanced, well-spaced design makes the flyer pleasing to the eyes and easier to read.

Apart from editing your content to its core, finding the right balance requires putting the white space or blank area of the layout into good use. More often than not, this area is without any graphics or words. While you may want to use the space to cram up more information, this method won’t do you any favors. Don’t think of the blank area as wasted space. It isn’t. In reality, it allows viewers to focus on the flyer’s message or focal point.

Take advantage of the alignment settings and margin tools on your design software. These help in making a heavy-looking flyer more balanced.

Composing the Content of Your Flyer Is Important

For a flyer to do its job correctly, it must be both well-designed and well-written. The art of the flyer and its copy must work hand-in-hand to produce an effective print advertising tool. If you fail on either task, you’ve basically wasted your resources. You must have a well defined digital branding printing idea on your mind before making it real

Content is important to sustain the attention of the people enticed by the visual design of the flyer. What they see may be the first thing that catches their attention, but what they read will make or break the intent of the flyer. If you disregard your flyer’s content, then you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. That’s something you simply can’t afford.

Here are tips on how you can capitalize on the content of your flyer making its overall design more relevant and compelling.

1. Strategize your content.

Plan and write your content carefully. What are the details you must prioritize? If you have an extra space to fill, what sort of information would you like to impart to your readers?

Set aside some time to list and trim down your copywriting ideas. Pinpoint the pieces of information that must be included in the content, making sure that they will match the layout of the flyer. In this type of print ad, less is usually more.

The job of the flyer is to attract the viewer through the design and give them information in a straightforward manner. Overwhelming the readers with too much data will just make them walk away.

The best way to trim down your content is answering the five simple questions: who, what, when, where, and why?

2. Organize your content

Once you’ve prioritized which pieces of information must be part of your flyer’s content, it’s time to organize them correctly. In a designer’s world, this is known as typographic hierarchy. In this context, it’s basically arranging the texts on the flyer in a way that, at a glance, viewers know right away what info is most pertinent and where to find the additional details.

Typographical hierarchy is mainly about prioritizing the most important information. Whatever is important (ex. event title, the name of the product/company, promo codes, etc.) should have the most visual weight. Putting the information on the top part of the layout will make it more visible, too.

There are different ways to organize a flyer’s copy. These include font (style, weight, and size), bullet and number points, visual cues, text boxes, alignment, and proximity.

3. Have a clear purpose.

Even though flyers are adaptable by nature, each design must have a specific purpose. If you’re opening a new business and want to advertise it, create design and content that focuses on your products and your opening. If you’re using the flyer to promote a school or church concert, have a specific message explaining who will perform and when and where the event will happen.

Whatever is the main purpose of the flyer, it must be highly visible. Don’t make your viewers scour through your print ad just to find out what it’s all about. The clearer your copywriting is, the more likely you’ll get a positive response.

Also, if possible, offer an incentive to your audience. Magnet words like “discount” or “free” will boost your chances to achieve your goals. Make sure the incentives have a prominent place on the flyer to easily attract your market.

Getting Favorable Results from Your Flyer

The flyer is a great tool to reach out to your target audience. It’s an opportunity to introduce yourself to them. Here are tips to do just that:

1. Add your personal (or professional) brand.

If you already have a personal brand (or a professional brand for your business), incorporate it into the overall design of the flyer. This will help people recognize your name, product or service instantly. If you’re creating a flyer for an established individual or company, check their brand guidelines and work with their branding tools such as brand color, logos, and fonts.

Having a flyer that is cohesive to your brand will boost your marketing efforts. It will also show consistency and make it more memorable for your target audience.

2. Add a call to action.

You’ve done a great job on your design and you’ve nailed your copywriting. It’s time to seal the deal. More often than not, all you need to do is ask. The call-to-action approach is a tried-and-tested marketing concept. It’s easy to do yet often overlooked.

If you want the viewers of your flyer to do something, then simply ask them. Call-to-action words like “visit us today” go a long way in luring your audience into actually visiting your place or website.

It’s important to address your audience directly. It will make them feel like they are a part of something. The key here is to make the call to action friendly and conversational. You don’t want your readers to feel pressured to do what you ask.

3. Make and distribute digital copies.

There are traditional ways of distributing flyers such as mailing them out or pinning them on public bulletin boards. But if want wider reach, make and distribute your flyers digitally. You can send these e-flyers through emails, post them on your website, and share them on your social media sites.

Make sure the digital copies of your flyers are suitable for its online purpose. This means adjusting the colors and file type to look its best online. Flyers have long been used to advertise a product or promote an event. It’s a tried-and-tested marketing tool you should use. Your digital branding printing strategy must be accounted for always in order to get the best out of your branding.  XINI Prints as an established digital branding printing company in Lagos Nigeria is always set to blow the mind of its client through spotless digital branding printing to the best of time.

Read About  Brochure – Magazine Printing

Design the perfect pull up | Roll up banner

The importance of posters in advertising your business in Lagos

You Can Check Out Our Printing Rate

Now Lets Consider different types of printing and how you should keep up with digital

DIGITAL Printing vs Offset Printing Explained

What’s the REAL difference, and does it matter?

So, what’s the distinction between digital and offset printing? Printing is printing, right? Not exactly… Let’s take a look at these two printing methods, their differences, and where it makes sense to choose one or the other for your next print project.

What is Offset Printing?

Offset printing technology uses plates, usually made from aluminum, which are used to transfer an image onto a rubber “blanket”, and then rolling that image onto a sheet of paper. It’s called offset because the ink is not transferred directly onto the paper. Because offset presses run so efficiently once they are set up, offset printing is the best choice when larger quantities are needed, and provides accurate color reproduction, and crisp, clean professional looking printing.

What is Digital Branding Printing?

Digital branding printing doesn’t use plates the way offset does, but instead uses options such as toner (like in laser printers) or larger printers that do use liquid ink. Digital printing shines when lower quantities are needed; think of a run of 20 greeting cards or 100 flyers. Another benefit of digital printing is it’s variable data capability. When each piece needs a unique code, name or address, digital is the only way to go. Offset printing cannot accommodate this need. Learn more about digital branding printing options and capabilities.

While offset printing is a fantastic way to produce great-looking print projects, many businesses or individuals do not need large runs of 500 or more, and the best solution is digital branding printing.

What are the Advantages of Digital Branding Printing:

• Setup costs are lower for short runs
• Print only the amount you need, when you need it
• Lower minimum quantities (as low as 1, 20 or 50 pieces)
• Inexpensive black and white digital branding printing
• Variable data capability (names, addresses, codes or numbering can be done easily)
• Improved technology has made digital quality acceptable for more uses

What are the Advantages of Offset Printing:

• Large quantities can be printed cost effectively
• The more you print, the cheaper the price per piece
• A large variety of paper types with custom finishes can be used
• Special custom inks such as metallic and Pantone colors are available
• Highest possible printing quality, with greater detail and color fidelity

Offset and digital branding printing are both useful printing methods. Each have particular benefits depending on your project’s requirements. When you need larger runs of a project, into the hundreds or thousands, or are using a specific, brand-centric Pantone color, offset printing is the only way to go. You can also use a much wider variety of custom papers and specialty inks, such as metallic or fluorescent inks in the offset process.

If a small run of less than 100 or the need for individual addresses or information is required, digital is your solution. The best part is that as a business, your needs can be met with either of these choices, and the high-level of quality means you get a printed product that will make you look great!

Printing Has left its earlier seats to a digital branding printing and everyone must need to catch up with the new insight so that you achieve more.

Feel free to write us or contact us for digital branding printing that fits your needs. Call 07082709871 or email us at info@xinicomms.com   and we would respond in less than an hour.

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STEP 3 – TEST MULTIPLE ADS TO FIND THE MESSAGE THAT RESONATES BEST WITH YOUR AUDIENCE

This step is crucial, and also one of the most overlooked. Most of the people simply create one ad and call it a day, but I wanted to discover the best ad possible for my ad campaign.

What I did was to craft 3 completely different messages that I thought would resonate with my audience… and I run them one against the other.

I did this because I’m applying a strategic approach to media buying.

I want data, not guesswork.

I want to be able to say “Ok I tested three messages and there’s a clear winner. Let’s do more of that and delete the underperforming ads.”

At this step I didn’t simply change the background image (that comes later) – I created three messages that are completely different one to the other. I used different words, different offers and, of course, different images.

After two weeks I started to understand what resonates with my audience. And only at that point, I created variations of the winning ads testing multiple backgrounds, AB testing headlines and CTAs.

At this point, organisation and clarity are crucial: write a very descriptive name for every ad and ad group you create.

Don’t write “ad 1” “ad 2” “ad 3”, write “winter collection white coat” “winter collection blonde girl” instead.

Now that my three ads were ready, I focused on defining multiple audiences-.
I came up with three different audiences, and I run my three ads for each audience. It’s a total of 9 ads that were running at the same time.

Do you see what I did here? I’m maximising my chance to find an ad that performs well because I’m running more AD concepts and show them to different niches of people.

Some ideas to get you started to find the perfect audience:

1. Test a lookalike audience based on previous customers;
2. Test a retargeting audience;
3. Test a contextual audience (based on your dream client interests).

Now that the ads and audiences are ready there’s one hot topic that needs to be addressed: price.

How much should I spend? How should I split my budget?

STEP 4 – DIVIDE YOUR BUDGET IN 3 MONTHS TO GET MORE OUT OF IT

It may seem counter intuitive, but spending less at the beginning of your ad campaign can lead to better results later.

Why?

Remember that in step 3 you just created several ads and several audiences, and you still don’t know which ones will perform better.

Give yourself minimum a week to run all your ads together and see if there are some clear losers (that you can turn off) and some clear winners (where you will invest more money).

If you have enough budget, you can do like me, and run extensive tests for eight weeks. After two full months, you’ll know exactly which ads are working or not, and you’ll have the key to scale and make even more out of your ads.

This is how I split my client’s budget.

MONTH 1

• Test phase – After researching my target audience and competitors, I put together my best ideas and made some educated guesses on the message that would resonate better with my audience. I tested 3 ad concepts one against another. Just by doing that, I was able to spot underperforming ads (0.7% of CTR) and disable them to get more of my budget, running only ads with 1.5% CTR or higher.

MONTH 2

• Verify – I kept looking at the data from my ads, and I verified that the ads running were still performing well. If the CTR of an ad was dropping compared to month one, I was disabling it.
• Optimize – In the middle of Month 2, I started to know which was the best message, which words to use, and which concepts were driving more interactions to my ads. At this point, I was duplicating my ads and tweaking them a bit to decrease even more the CPC and get a better CTR.

MONTH 3

• Scale – Now there’s nothing else to do apart from investing more! I knew what was working well, so we used a bigger budget to drive even more visits, for a lower cost, to the website.

The final question you may have for me is: I have all these great ads that are performing amazingly, but where should I drive traffic to maximise my ROI?

The answer is in the next and last step.

STEP 5 – MAXIMIZE LEADS WITH A HIGH-CONVERTING PAGE.

Mostly in the B2B world (but even for most every b2c offerings), a lead generation page can be everything you want it to be.

It can be a specific landing page, or article on your blog.

For my client, I used (and tweaked) one blog post that was deeply connected to his dream clients.

The key to generating leads was to insert a content upgrade: it’s a simple, locked, document that the reader can download filling up a form on the page.

It’s exactly what you see on this article. If you click this link, you can input your name and email and I’ll send you four additional media buying strategies for B2B companies.

An easy way to create a link like this is by using Sumo. It’s a great plugin and it’s completely free when you are starting out. After you install it, just head over “List Builder” and create a new popup. Alternatively, you can use OptinMonster.

An additional way to generate leads is by sending traffic to a simple (but effective) landing page.

Your page doesn’t need to have lots of elements or a fancy graphic, but it needs to have the right elements on it.

THE PERFECT LANDING PAGE.

First of all, remember that people that will land to your page have never been there before, so you should simplify the page as much possible and make it extremely easy for them to do what you want.

To do that, decide one single thing that you want your visitors to accomplish (for example, sign up for your newsletter, get a discount or download your white paper).

Second thing, the visitors need to see that the value of the offer is higher than the pain of leaving their email address on your website.

When you have these points clear in your mind, you can focus on the actual content of your landing page. Make sure to include as many of these elements:

1. Vital Business Info: Logo, privacy policy, and the name of the company.
2. Remove unnecessary, distracting elements like the navigation bar.
3. Visible call to action: Make it easy to find the sign-up/download button
4. Social proof: Has your company been featured somewhere important? Has your product been sold thousands of times? Write it to increase credibility.
5. Catchy headline: Your headline should be compelling enough to make the reader continue reading.
6. Relevant copy: It’s after the headline, it explains how you can solve the pain of your target customer. Use 2-3 short bullets points.
7. Bonus – Urgency: If you can add real urgency to your landing page (limited availability, or time-sensitive promotions), conversions will increase.

Next step: test. When your page is up and running, and you are getting data (like CTR and conversion rate), you can test more versions of your page. Create an entirely different page and compare the results.

NOW YOU KNOW HOW TO CREATE A HIGHLY EFFECTIVE MEDIA BUYING CAMPAIGN

You just learned my 5-step strategy to boost the performance of any media buying campaign.

The basic approach of creating a single ad, starting it and hoping for the best is a guarantee to fail. With my method, you’ll create a detailed strategy to minimize your risks and you’ll be sure to spend your ad budget better.

Get started, try your best and iterate based on the performance of previous ads! If you’d like us to help you implement an advertising strategy like this in your business, you can apply here.

And if you got some value from this post, let me know in the comments below.

A new Facebook study revealed that people spend 5 times longer watching video content than reading static content.

Gary Vaynerchuk, Larry Kim, and Neil Patel all used video ads to grow their audiences on every major social network, increase brand recall for their products and reach consumers at scale. But how can you take advantage of them?

In this guide, I’m going to show you:

• The 6 elements your video ads must have if you want to outperform your best static ads;
• The 6-second non-skippable video ad that won’t annoy your users;
• How to create a “thumb-stopping” effect that gets your target audience to watch your videos and buy from you.

Ready? Let’s do it!

BONUS MATERIALS: Get my Video Ads Swipe File & the PDF version of this article

Get my Video Ads Swipe file with 14 successful video ads you can take inspiration from, and a PDF copy of this article to read whenever you like.

Yes! Give me my PDFs

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

Why you need to use video ads in 2019

CHAPTER 2

How to create an highly effective video ad

CHAPTER 3

Spread your message like wildfire with Facebook Video Ads

CHAPTER 4

Reach your dream client with Instagram Video Ads

CHAPTER 5

Connect with B2B decision makers with Linkedin Video Ads

CHAPTER 6

Maximize your reach tapping into additional video platforms

CHAPTER 7

Take advantage of advanced targeting with Twitter Video Ads

CHAPTER 8

Get high CTR with Youtube Video Ads

CHAPTER 9

Target millennials with Snapchat Video Ads

CHAPTER 1

Why you need to use online video ads in 2019

With video ad spend to reach $20B by 2020, we know that more and more companies are investing in video advertising online.

Why? Because they work. From Lagos Nigeria to other parts of Africa we are sure that advertising is key

US Digital Video Ad Spending, 2017-2021 (billions)

PRINTS PRICE LIST

In fact, the average time viewers spent watching video ads in 2017 has grown by 19% compared to the year before.

On top of that, the Video Completion Rate (Videos Played All the Way Through) reached a staggering 69% in 2017.

Average video ads completion rate:

But if you want to succeed with digital video ads in 2019, there are some things you should know.

First, like for every digital marketing channel, also the video space starts to get saturated (the law of diminishing returns affects any kind of advertisement) and CTR is lower compared to previous years.

To win the video ad war, last year we saw more companies competing with shorter ads. To start, Snapchat limits ads to a max of 10 seconds, and also Facebook recommends video ads to be 15 seconds or shorter.

IAB released a great research and discovered that 10 second videos can help maximize impact among Millennials, who are particularly sensitive to mobile ad clutter. Mobile video ads for this audience should be well targeted, relevant and enjoyable to help maximize its potential impact.

An upside of shorter ads is that they allow more ab testing: it’s much easier to create four versions of a 10-second ad, than four versions of a 30-second ad, give the same budget and timeframe.

The last trend, of course, is about mobile.

In fact, mobile video viewing broke records in 2018.

But that’s not all:

Forrester discovered that mobile is forecast to account for 72% of the growth in spending on online video advertising in the next 5 years.

With a CTR higher than any other type of ad, you start to see why you should invest in video advertising.

But how do you plan and create an effective video ad?

Keep on reading, the answer is in chapter 2.

Video ads have the highest click-through rate (CTR) of all digital marketing ad formats.

Source: Ayat Shukairy, Invesp

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CHAPTER 2

How to Create an Highly Effective Online Video Advertisement

So you want to create a video ad. Where should you start?

It’s simple: from a detailed plan.

Who fails to plan, plans to fail, they say, and this is absolutely true for video ads, that require a good investment of time and money.

In this chapter, you’ll discover how to optimize your ad budget for maximum results, and the best practices to create an high-impact ad.

BONUS: Get my video ads swipe file with 14 successful video ads.

#1: Plan before you buy

The goal of media planning is to determine the best combination of media to achieve the marketing campaign objectives. In our case, we‘ll plan for the creation and the promotion of the best video ad possible.

The upside of media planning: you create a comprehensive strategy so you’ll know where you are going and you won’t waste your budget creating an ad that doesn’t convert.

The downsides? None. It’s a crucial step that should never be overlooked.

What I want you to do is to get to know your customer and write down everything you may need for your video ad: the exact words to use, the features of your product you should mention, which social networks to use to promote your web video ad.

You have several ways to gather this data:

 

MEDIA PLANNING STRATEGY N. 1 – CUSTOMERS INTERVIEWS

Find five previous customers willing to chat with you on the phone for 15-20 minutes, and understand why they bought from you.

Write down the exact words they are using to describe your product (you’ll use them later in your ad).

Understand where they hang out online: you’ll use this info to understand which channels use to promote your video.

 

MEDIA PLANNING STRATEGY 2 – GATHER AS MUCH DATA AS POSSIBLE

ASK AROUND – Talk with the CEO, VP of Strategy and anyone else from leadership that can give insights on who their dream client is.

TALK WITH SALES – What do prospective clients ask them?

CHECK THE CRM – What are people saying when they contact the company?

STALK CUSTOMERS ONLINE – Get the name and surname of 20 past clients and check them online. Discover which social networks they use every day, what content they share, and which pages they follow.

 

The interests box at the bottom of every Linkedin profile.

 

MEDIA PLANNING STRATEGY 3 – CHECK YOUR COMPETITORS

You should also check what your competitors are doing online.

By using Buzzsumo, you can understand which topics are getting the most shares (these can be useful ideas for your videos) and in which platforms they are being shared.

You see where I’m going with this?

You are making your life easier because with these three strategies you understand what your customers want to hear, and where they want to hear it.

PRO TIP: To get more insights and a real example of a detailed media planning and media buying strategy, you should check out Top Brand Management Company In Lagos Nigeria

#2: How to put together your video ad

Now that you know who you are talking to, and what your prospective customers want to listen, it’s time to put together your video ad.

Here some tips for a great ad.

 

1. Recording tips

If you are recording the video yourself, you should put together a script, understand how your camera works, how to set up a basic studio and how to cut and compose the video. Hubspot created the best guide I found online on the topic.

 

2. Create a video listicle

If you don’t have the resources to create a professional video with talking heads, you can create short listicles, precisely like Business Insider does.

A video listicle is a short video that features a list of interesting facts on a specific topic, and it’s quite straightforward to create. You can use it as a teaser for an in-depth article or show some key features of your product.

There are several tools you can use to easily create videos. With Magisto you can upload your single photo shots and images to Magisto, choose a theme, and the tool will put them together for you with AI.

 

 

If you want to create videos entirely from zero, I recommend Animoto or Wave.Video. I created the video above with Wave: it’s more expensive than Animoto, but it has more features than other online tools I tried. I liked it because it’s easy to resize a video for the different social networks with just a few clicks, and there’re lots of text effects.

 

 

And if you need completely free stock videos, I got you covered too with Pexels. You can thank me later!

 

3. Design with mobile in mind

From the moment of conception, you need to be thinking about your video in terms of mobile devices first, everything else second.

First, because most of the people will be seeing your video ad from mobile anyway, second because some apps (like Snapchat) are mobile only.

Some best practices to get mobile ads right:

1. Consumers are sensitive to mobile ad clutter: ads should be well targeted, relevant and enjoyable.
2. Brand logos, brand cues and product shots are large enough to be easily seen on smaller mobile screens.
3. Create ads that can still convey a message if shortened to 10-20 seconds.
4. The initial frames of an ad should be well branded and engage to capture consumers’ attention and still have an impact if closed or skipped.
5. 30-second ads can be considered for mobile if the goals are to communicate complex information, to increase persuasion among consumers ages 35+ or to drive consumers to take action.

 

4. Experiment with shorter ads

Ads shorter than 15 seconds (but that are usually around 6 sec) are gaining momentum because they are successful at capturing the attention via mobile.

When you can use a 30 sec ad to tell your full story, you can experiment with a 15 sec version to improve reach and frequency, reinforce your message, and reduce overall campaign costs.

Online advertising research by Google

 

There are three main ways you can take advantage of them.

 

Tease

You can use a short ad to seed an idea, and reveal the full story with a longer ad weeks later.

Example of a tease video ad made by KFC.

 

Amplify

Run your long and short ad together to increase ad recall.

 

Echo

When your primary campaign is finishing, you can connect short ads to retargeting (read here if you want to learn how to do effective retargeting video ads) to increase ad recall and convert more viewers, by showing your short ad only to people that saw your full-length video.

For any online video advertising platform you choose, just make sure to follow the guidelines below to create ads of the appropriate length.

 

 

5. Design with sound off

As part of your efforts to think about the mobile platform first, design videos that can be fully understood and enjoyed with the sound off. After all, the best sound for facebook video ads is silence.

Use text overlays to convey essential points and always use titles, captions and similar techniques so that people know what is going on.

Netflix is, of course, doing it right:

 

One nice exception is Snapchat that starts ads with the volume on by default.

 

6. Check your progress

As Kim Larson from Google points out, you should make sure to measure progress with the right metric.

Don’t simply track views, but use KPIs that make sense to your business goals.

The beauty of video advertising online is that, unlike with television, we actually can measure every different metric in real time, so follow Kim’s advice and make sure to track the ones most important to you.

 

Image from: Think With Google

 

Now that you know how to plan your video advertising strategy, how to create your video and how to track the results, we can finally start buying ads. The next chapters will guide you to create video ads in the most important advertising platforms online.

Let’s go!

CHAPTER 3

Spread your message like wildfire with Facebook Video Ads

Facebook provides incredible opportunities to target the perfect customer on granular levels.

With Facebook video ads, you can take advance of metrics like personal interests, locations, website visits, custom and lookalike audience.

Whether if you are a B2B or B2C marketer, you should have Facebook video ads as part of your digital marketing strategy.

BONUS: Get my Facebook Ads Swipe file.

How to make the most out of Facebook Video Ads

On Facebook, users aren’t forced to watch your video ad to get to the next thing in their newsfeed. 98% of the time they just scroll right past your video ad. So Larry Kim (CEO of MobileMonkey) tells people to make the ad’s pitch in reverse.

Make sure that the “explosions” are happening at the very beginning of your Facebook Ads, to capture attention immediately, and then later explain the why/how.

If you want to create a Facebook video ad that really stands out, I’ll share with you some advanced tactics in a bit.

But right now, let’s focus on the basics. Here some guidelines and best practices you should always follow for video ads on Facebook:

• Use square videos (1:1). They take up 78% more real estate in a person’s mobile newsfeed than landscape video (16:9). Studies show that 1:1 outperforms landscape videos by 30-35%
• Think silent. 85% of videos are viewed on Facebook without sound, so make sure to add captions.
• Facebook’s Autoplay will count 3 seconds as a “view”, so make the first 3 seconds count.
• Use high-resolution: 720p or 1080p HD.
• Facebook video ads recommended length: 15 seconds or shorter.
• Use as less text as possible in the ad image preview. Facebook may block your video ad if there is lots of text on top or around your video.

And now the advanced tactics you were all waiting for.

Use the combo video + Facebook lead generation forms

As Hope Horner from Lemonlight pointed out, if you use this strategy right, it can be a marketing goldmine. Lead ads allow users to share their contact info directly on Facebook, which can result in more subscribers than driving them to an external landing page.

You can later use the leads as you want: add them to your newsletter or use them to create custom and lookalike audiences.

The video comes in handy if you are promoting a physical location or a saas. For example, you can:

• Showcase your offering with video (like a coworking space or a gym) and offer a free day pass.
• Do you have a restaurant? Show videos of your food and offer a 2-for-1 voucher upon signing up.
• Do you run a saas? Show some features of your program and offer a free trial.

To create the best lead video ad of the whole internet, simply log into Facebook Ads manager and choose “Lead Generation”.

 

 

Define your audience like you would usually do for any facebook ad.

 

Upload your video.

 

 

Now you can finally create your form. Make sure to ask only for the essential info, if you want to maximise signups, or to add more fields if you’re looking for fewer but more qualified leads.

 

Create a custom audience from video views

Imagine being able to target only people that love your content so much that they watch your videos until the end.

Well, Facebook allows you to do precisely that (and much more) to re-engage users and drive more conversions.

In fact, it’s possible to create an engagement custom audience of people who’ve interacted with your video on Facebook:

• People who viewed at least 3 seconds of your video
• People who viewed at least 10 seconds of your video
• People who viewed at least 25% of your video
• People who viewed at least 50% of your video
• People who viewed at least 75% of your video
• People who viewed at least 95% of your video

With this strategy,  someone can view your video — with or without sound — and automatically be added to an audience to target later.

How you do it:

1 – Go to your Audiences, click the Create Audience drop-down and choose Custom Audience.

 

2 – Click Engagement

 

3 – Click video

 

4 – In the “Engagement” field, choose the amount of time you want people in your audience to have spent viewing your video.

 

 

5 – Click on “choose videos” and choose a video that you previously shared on your Facebook or Instagram page.

 

Congrats, you can now target this audience with a new ad!

Create perfect loop video

Perfect loops are like good GIFS: videos that seamlessly blend from end to beginning.

They are easy to make and great if you are on a budget, but you still want to create beautiful looking mini-videos.

They are ideal for social because the viewer can’t understand when the video finishes (it’s in a perfect loop), so they help to get more people to watch your videos till the end, or more.

One example:

 

 

If you want to create a perfect loop, you have several options.

 

1# strategy: Giphy

Go to Giphy, download a gif in MP4 video format. You are done.

Source: Gyphy

2# strategy – iMovie

Open a video you own in iMovie and cut a single scene that you can play on a loop.

Save.

Use as your video ad.

 

3# strategy – Specific software.

Flixel specialises in “cinemagraphs”, mini videos composed of a part (usually the main subject) that doesn’t move, and another part (usually the background) that moves. Exactly like in the Adidas example above.

There’s a free trial for iOS and MacOS.

Alternatively, try Animoto: upload a video you own to their website, choose a 5-second frame that would be nice in a loop, add filters and some copy, and you are done. It’s similar to the iMovie strategy but easier to use and with more available effects.

With this, we conclude Facebook video ads.

Next up: Instagram!

CHAPTER 4

Reach your dream client with Instagram Video Ads

Instagram video ads are ideal if you want to increase web traffic sales and drive awareness.

With the help of highly-visual content, you can get users to engage with your posts and show off your B2C offerings.

But why should you advertise on Instagram in the first place?

BONUS: Get my Instagram Ads Swipe file.

Overview

Let’s start with some stats:

1. A study by Instagram found that 60% of their users learn about products and services through the platform, and 75% of them took actions such as visiting sites, searching, or telling a friend after seeing an Instagram post.
2. Again, Instagram looked at more than 400 campaigns globally and found out that ad recall from their ads was 2.8 times higher than Nielsen’s norms for online advertising.

As you can see, Instagram is a great platform to advertise, but before starting your next media buying campaign you should ask yourself:

 

Is my target audience on instagram?

Let’s start with demographics.

According to Statista, in January 2018 the most active Instagram users were men and women, 18 to 34 years old (61%).

 

 

With this in mind, you should understand if your target audience talks about your industry/product/service on Instagram.

Facebook surveyed 11,000 young adults and, from their video advertising research, they discovered that some of the most popular topics on Instagram are the following:

Fashion/beauty, food, TV/films, hobbies, music.

Finally, ask yourself: can we create visual content that blends into our target audience’s Instagram feed?

According to the same Facebook study above, “Instagrammers appreciate aesthetic quality in visual content”. Instagram is a visual-first platform, where visual content, rather than text, is the primary form of communication.

If your product/service tick all the three boxes above, congratulations. Instagram is the perfect platform for your brand!

 

Let’s see some best practices to maximize the effectiveness of your ads.

• Use the right format: square format (1:1) works best if posting on the Instagram feed;  Buffer discovered that it costs 33% less than landscape. Use vertical format (9:16) for stories.
• Create videos with audio for stories, create videos without sound in the feed (more on this below)
• Since users will click on ads from the Instagram app, you should optimize your landing page for mobile first.
• Create content that blends in with the organic feed. To stand out, create videos that are beautiful, thoughtfully composed and artfully presented.

 

Facebook vs. Instagram video ads

Since the two platforms are considerably different, Marketing Land points out that long and conversion-centric content should live on Facebook, while you should leave Instagram to the artsy, visually appealing videos.

Instagram ads use the same advertising system as Facebook. You can specify your target audience’s location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. You can even target people who have bought from you or interacted with you and others like them.

As a result, you can use the same strategies that we discussed on the Facebook ads chapter, and apply them to the two types of Instagram video ads available to you: stories and native.

Stories Video Ads Best practices

Stories ads run in a full screen, vertical format. This means all your Stories video ads format must be portrait (9:16 aspect ratio).

With 60% of stories viewed with sound-on, be sure to share content that sounds as good as it looks.

You can also experiment with text overlays. Videos with text on top work very well compared to non-text videos to build brand awareness or to drive action through purchases and installs.

Why should you use story ads? Because the use of Instagram Stories is growing.

A lot:

 

 

Ad specifics:

• Resolution: 1080 x 1920 pixels
• File Size: 4GB Max
• Instagram Video Ads Duration: 1 to 15 seconds
• Maximum Video Ad Ratio : 9:16
• Sound: Optional but recommended
• Video thumbnail: images that consist of more than 20% text may experience reduced delivery

To create your first Instagram Story ad, simply head to Facebook Ads Manager and create a new ad. When it’s the moment to choose where to display your ad, disable every placement except for Instagram stories.

 

 

High impact, low budget Stories

If you don’t have a big budget, you can still create Instagram Stories of high impact, by using the stop motion feature of the instagram app.

Simply open the app and start creating a new story.

Select “stop motion” from the available options on bottom of the screen.

 

 

Now play with the product placement and take multiple pictures to show your product as if it’s moving.

Save and upload as an ad with the “Ads Manager” app.

Check the full tutorial here.

Native Video Ads best practices

You can post Instagram video ads in either landscape or square format. However, square videos have the edge over landscape videos.

Square videos consume more space on the user’s screen, meaning that your viewer is not distracted by other posts and the metrics (views, likes, comments, etc).

But don’t stop there: AB test a square video with a video with an aspect ratio of 4:5 to see what’s performing better for you.

Native videos specs:

• Resolution: at least 1080 x 1080 pixels
• File Size: 4GB Max
• Instagram Video Ads Duration: 1 to 60 seconds
• Minimum Video Ad Dimensions : 4:5
• Maximum Video Ad Dimensions : 1.91:1
• Text under the video: Two rows of text will display
• Video thumbnail: images that consist of more than 20% text may experience reduced delivery

 

How to set up an Instagram video campaign.

There are several ways to promote your video on Instagram.

Some of them offer you more options, while other are simpler and faster to use.

If you want to have access to as many options as possible and be in complete control of your ad, use Facebook Ads Manager or Facebook Power Editor. For a quick and easy way to promote your video, you can directly use the Instagram app (you’ll need to have a business Instagram account for that).

For a detailed tutorial on how to place ads, I recommend you to check out this great guide that Buffer put together on Instagram ads.

Anyway, to create Instagram or Facebook ads, I usually use Adespresso. It’s a great tool because it makes it extremely easy to test multiple variations of your ad: you can test various headlines, descriptions and videos. Here a great tutorial to set up an Instagram video ad campaign in Adespresso.

One strategy to test: User Generated Content in Ads

User-generated content is a form of content that was created by users, not by a brand.

The power of this kind of content is its trustworthiness: since it was created by real users, it appears more genuine.

In fact, according to Nielsen, 92 percent of consumers say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising.

 

Image source: Nielsen

 

User-generated content can help with conversions as well: customer product photos on a product page can increase conversion by 4.6%.

What’s more, many users have no objections against having their content used by brands. Iconosquare, for instance, found that 65% of users would feel honoured if a brand liked one of their posts.

If you have an active group of followers for your brand, scout for the best videos and ask them permission to repost them and promote them with ads. You may be amazed by the results.

CHAPTER 5

Connect with B2B decision makers with Linkedin Video Ads

Video ads are the brand new addition to Linkedin ads.

Currently available on mobile only, Linkedin video ads are auto-playing videos that can drive more visits to your website or more sign-ups to a LinkedIn lead generation form.

They are an excellent opportunity to target B2B companies, so let’s see why you need them and how to set them up.

BONUS: Get my Linkedin Ads Swipe file.

Overview – B2b video advertising done right

We can say that with a very peculiar demographic, LinkedIn is the best platform for business-to-business interactions.

Your LinkedIn campaigns can help you gain visibility for your brand, generate leads, and boost traffic to your web pages with thought-leadership content.

The most amazing part of LinkedIn ads is its audience creation. If you want to target b2b prospects, there’s no better way to do it.

 

Linkedin ads are way more expensive than Facebook ads (in my experience, I’m talking minimum 10 times more, after optimisation) but you’ll have the possibility to target Linkedin users by, among other things, their seniority, their job title, or the industry they work in.

If you are starting to see how powerful they can be, you’ll be happy to know that now you can also create custom audiences based on company names, and retarget your website visitors as well.

Linkedin rolled out video ads on March 18, so make sure to be among the first to take advantage of them!

 

Source: Linkedin Video Ads

 

Here some best practices for you to follow:

• Show what you want your audience to see in the first 10 seconds of the video (the viewer attention drops after that point).
• Think like a silent film director: a significant portion of LinkedIn members will watch your ad with the sound off. Consider adding video subtitles.
• Feature a clear CTA (call to action), so your audience knows the next steps to take after watching your video.
• Keep videos under 30 seconds for brand awareness and brand consideration goals; test longer videos for demand generation. The general guideline for top-of-funnel videos is 30-90 seconds, but content can be longer from the middle of the funnel.
• A/B test the same content with different lengths: short looped videos (5-15 sec) to encourage your audience to learn more; Medium (~30 sec) with quick product overviews; Long (1 min+) richer stories that make an emotional connection.
• Measure success with demographic reporting to understand which audience segments have the highest video view rates (example in the image below).

 

Source: Demographics for your ads

 

Essential components of a b2b video:

BlitzMetrics CEO Dennis Yu shared with Linkedin his tips to condense messages into quick-hitting 60-second videos that are more likely to be viewed in their entirety:

• Hook: Capture attention within the first 3 seconds
• Ignite Pain/Pleasure: Identify problem or opportunity in 3-15 seconds range
• Describe Solution: Explain what you offer and why it will help viewers from 15-50 seconds
• Call to Action: Leave with an actionable next step in the final 10 seconds

 

Linkedin video ads specs:

• Length: Three seconds to 30 minutes (Tip: most successful video ads are less than 15 seconds long)
• Layout: Horizontal (vertical videos are not supported)
• File size: Between 75 KB and 200 MB
• File format: MP4
• Pixel and aspect ratio requirements: up to 1080p
• You cannot upload more than 25 Videos in Campaign Manager within 24 hours.
• You can only upload videos from a desktop computer, not from your mobile device.

How to create a video ad campaign on Linkedin

Sign in to Campaign Manager, click on “Create new campaign” and choose “Sponsored Content”:

 

 

Choose any of the ad formats available. With any of them you’ll be able to use video as ad format:

 

 

Choose video as ad format:

 

 

Now upload your video based on the guidelines explained above in this chapter, and later click on “sponsor selected content”.

 

 

Now it’s only a matter of choosing the right audience for your video ad, your budget, and submit to Linkedin for approval.

The next step is to simply wait while you generate views and clicks on your ad.

After a couple of days, you can check your data to see how many people watched your video in full or until a certain point.

To do so:

1. Sign in to Campaign Manager.
2. Click account name for the account that contains your video ad campaign.
3. Scroll down to the Campaigns table and click the campaign that contains your Video Ad.
4. Scroll down to the Ads table and click the Video tab to see performance metrics for each of your creatives.

 

Source: Linkedin Help

CHAPTER 6

Maximise your reach tapping into additional video platforms

Social networks are not the only platforms where you can promote your video ad.

There are lots of additional networks that can allow you to reach more customers on more websites.

I’m gathering the most important ones in this chapter but be warned – some are really high level, and you’ll need a huge monthly ad spend to be accepted.

Taboola

Tabola places its ads on some of the greatest websites of the world – in 2017 they reached 1.4 billion people a month, which is around half of the global internet users.

Taboola Feed is a feed of promoted news that appears after an article on websites that are using Taboola, and it can display video ads as well.

You can learn more and register for Taboola here: https://www.taboola.com

Oath by Verizon

Oath is a subsidiary of Verizon that serves as the umbrella company of its digital content subdivisions, including AOL and Yahoo! Oath includes Brightroll and One by AOL.

To push your video ads to their websites, which include Huffington Post, TechCrunch and 40 more brands, you can contact them directly from here

SpotX

Spotx Is an online platform that focuses only on video ads.

On their website, they claim that they can provide a direct pipeline to premium supply and buy video through public, private and curated Marketplaces.

They work with Zynga, Spotify, and CBS Local among others, so it’s worth checking them out.

You can learn more and contact them here

Adobe Primetime

It’s a cloud-based service that helps broadcasters, cable networks, and service providers capitalise on their data and technology to increase advertising and subscription revenue.

They use machine learning, data and dynamic ad insertion to reduce ad waste and improve the targeting of your ad.

They have NBC and Comcast among their customers, and you can check them out here

Exponential

It’s an advertising platform that can connect your brand with more than 700 million users globally (on desktop and mobile).

They have a unique approach to audience modelling: they look for the ideal behaviour, the activities and interests that indicate if a person will convert, regardless of what their profile may look like as a whole.

Some of their partners: Microsoft, Mastercard, IBM, Kellog’s.

Learn more about them here

Videology

Videology is an online platform that provides advertising across both TV and digital video.

If you’d like to promote your video ad on television, check them out.

YuMe by RythmOne

It’s a provider of video and connected TV inventory, unique consumer insights, and cross-screen targeting technology. They claim they can help you reach and engage consumers wherever and however they consume video content.

Check them out here.

CHAPTER 7

Take advantage of advanced targeting with Twitter Video Ads

Twitter videos mirror the platform where they are hosted. To make an impact, they must be quick, personal and entertaining.

Mix them with the advanced advertising capabilities of Twitter ads, and you’ll have the perfect formula to gain new followers for your brand and drive conversions to your website.

BONUS: Get my Twitter Ads Swipe file.

Overview

Let’s start with some basics, and you’ll learn why you’ll love Twitter video ads.

First of all, Twitter’s ad targeting is insanely great.

You can target by keyword, hashtag or people that follow specific Twitter profiles: use these options if you are building your database or if you want to do some brand awareness.

You can also use “engager targeting”, which means to show your ad only to people that interacted with your tweets in the past – use this to drive more conversions to your website!

Finally, with “tailored audiences”, you can take advantage of retargeting your website visitors directly on Twitter and get highly relevant views for a very low cost.

So why choose video ads?

Well, tweets with video are 6x more likely to be retweeted than Tweets with photos, and you can use any of these targeting options we just discussed.

Here some best practices for scroll-stopping videos:

• Use a hook. Build in an intriguing set-up or dynamic set of actions to hook the viewer in the first few seconds.
• Show your logo. Feature your brand logo or product at the beginning of your video to drive brand association from the start.
• Humanize your videos. Videos showing people in the first few frames have been proven to increase view rates and drive 2x higher retention. (source)
• Tell a story. Videos with a clear beginning, middle and end can increase viewership (source)
• Videos that simply aim to entertain your audience can lead to a 15% higher intent to share (source)
• Include captions. Use captions and visual cues to pull the viewer through the video and make it easier to process.

And these are the specs for Twitter video ads:

• Title (under video): 70 characters.
• Description (under video): 200 characters.
• File type: MP4 or MOV.
• File size: 1GB Max
• Max time: 2 minutes and 20 seconds

Here below, some strategies to get the most out of Twitter video ads.

Strategy 1 – How to get more video views

Let’s create a campaign with the sole focus of maximising the views of your video.

To start, go to https://ads.twitter.com/ and choose “Promoted Video Views”.

 

 

Now decide your budget and, optionally, start and ending time.

 

 

Now it’s the tricky part, so pay attention because you’ll need to go back and forth between 3 separate tabs on your browser.

You’ll need to create a new sponsored tweet that contains your video, and to do that the first step is to create a new tweet by clicking on the blue icon on the right:

 

 

On the new tab of your browser, click on “Select Video” and “Media Library”.

 

 

From the new tab, click on “Upload Media” and on the blue button to compose a Tweet:

 

 

Now you can finally compose your tweet. If you want to can link back to your site but that’s optional. I recommend to “Edit media settings” to add a title and description to your video, and to click on “promoted only” to use this tweet only for your paid campaigns.

Click the blue button “tweet” and your tweet will be ready.

 

 

You now go back to the first tab (I told you this was going to be tricky) and:

1. Click on refresh
2. Choose “promoted-only tweets”
3. Write the first couple of words of your tweet to make it appear from the list
4. Click on the tweet to select it
5. Press “next” on the top right of the page.

 

 

Now that the tweet is ready, you can now define the right audience to promote it.

In my case, I wanted to target people in the UK that search for “Larry Kim” or that are following him (or similar accounts):

 

 

When you are happy with the settings, click next.

In the next page, you can change the bidding,  and clone the ad group you just created by clicking on “Clone Ad Group”.

If you click there, your “ad set” will be duplicated. Use that if you are testing multiple videos and multiple audiences.

 

 

When you are ready, click next, and you will arrive at the final page.

Review the details of your campaign and click “Launch campaign” to start your Twitter video ad campaign!

 

Strategy 2 – Drive targeted visitors to your website with a Video Website Card.

Video Website Cards are a creative format that combines the power of video with the ability to drive users back to a site to learn more or take action immediately.

With a Video Website Card, businesses can:

• Attract qualified consumers with an immersive auto-playing video showcasing their brand’s value, product, or service before a person clicks through.
• Extend brand engagement beyond the end of the video with creatives designed to drive consumers to your site to learn more or take action.
• Keep consumers’ attention as they move down the funnel.

How they work: when a user clicks on a video on mobile, the video anchors to the top of the screen and continues to play while the website loads below it.

 

 

To create a video website card, we’ll follow the strategy 1 explained above, but with a few differences.

First of all, our goal will be to generate website clicks or conversions:

 

 

Next, when you are creating your new tweet in compose mode, you’ll click on “select card” and “card library”.

 

 

From the new tab, click on “Create Card” and “Video Website Card”.

 

 

Fill up the card with your video, headline and URL and click on “create”.

 

 

Now head back to the previous tab of your browser (the Compose mode) and choose your video website card from the dropdown menus on bottom right (make sure you choose “video”):

 

 

Finally, head back to your first tab and search for the tweet you just created:

 

 

All the rest of the process stays the same: choose your targeting, your bidding method, and you’ll be ready to confirm and start your campaign!

CHAPTER 8

Get high CTR with Youtube Video Ads

YouTube processes more than 3 billion searches per month, and it’s the second largest search engine online right behind Google.

For most of its users, it serves a fundamental purpose: discovery.

Placing your video ad inside a youtube video, you are making sure to target a big audience that is willing to learn more about a specific topic or product, making it a fantastic platform to advertise on.

BONUS: Get my Youtube Ads Swipe file.

Overview – Your Guide to Youtube Advertising

Compared to Facebook, Youtube video ads are more “traditional”, since you can basically force users to watch your ad for 5 or even 15 seconds. That means you can take your time and tell your story, and ultimately build up to a punchline at the end, just like a normal TV commercial.

Another great thing you should know is that advertising on youtube is more affordable than you think.

The cost per view of your ad varies for several reasons, but mostly because of your target market. For a very competitive market in a country like the US, you can expect to spend 0.50$ or more, but for other markets the cost is much lower, ranging between 10 and 30 cents per view. Larry Kim points out that in the USA, a typical CPM for (Facebook or) YouTube ads is around $15.

Of course, more factors influence the cost per view. They are:

• Video quality. Make sure to have a professionally written script, high production and image quality (more on this in chapter 2)
• Targeting
• Ad placement

A great reason to choose Youtube to advertise your videos is that you only pay when people decide to watch your ad. For example, when someone chooses to view your ad for at least 30 seconds or engages with it – like clicking on a call-to-action overlay.

Youtube offers you four different video ad formats.

• Skippable video ads – the most common type of YouTube ad. These are the ads you see before during or after a video; a viewer can skip your ad after 5 seconds.
• Non-skippable video ads – Viewers must watch the entire 15+ second ad which may deter viewers who don’t know the value of your videos.
• Midroll ads – Currently available for videos over 10 minutes: the ads are spaced within the video, like TV commercials. Viewers must watch ads before continuing through the video.
• Bumper ads – these are non-skippable videos of max 6 seconds which a viewer must watch before seeing the main video.

 

Which advertising option should you choose on Youtube?

• Skippable video ads are the lowest risk ads, given that you pay only when a viewer watches 30 seconds or till the end of the video ad.
• Non-skippable video ads (midroll or before the video) may generate higher CPMs than other ad formats on YouTube, but they have higher video abandonment.
• Bumper ads are non-skippable but so short that the users won’t feel annoyed. Use them to keep your brand on top of mind. They help driving upper-funnel goals like ad recall and awareness.

Let’s see in detail how to optimise your next video ad campaign on youtube, step by step

How to create and optimise your Youtube video ad.

First, go over to Adwords and create a new campaign from the blue button.

 

 

From Campaign Type, click on Video, choose your main goal for this campaign and click continue:

 

 

The process from now on is very straightforward, so I want to focus only on a few points.

 

Networks

 

 

Youtube search results – This option allows you only to create a “video discovery ad” that appears on YouTube search results only. It’s a promoted search result (made of an image and some copy). By clicking on it, your video ad will open.

 

 

YouTube videos & Video partners on the display Network – This option allows you to create “video discovery ad”, “in-stream ads” and “bumper ads” that will appear on Youtube videos, channels, homepage and on a collections of sites part of the Google Display Network.

 

Targeting options

There are several targeting options to allow you to show your ad to the right people.

 

• Languages & Location – once set, these options will be the same for the whole campaign.

 

The following options can be different for every ad set so that you can easily ab test different segments:

 

• Demographics – Age, gender, parental status, household income
• Audiences – Target people based on their interests, or by the products they are actively looking for.
• Remarketing – You find this option inside “Audiences”, it allows you to target people who previously interacted with your business and create similar audiences. If you created lists of people that previously watched your videos, you’ll find them here as well.
• Keywords – Show your YouTube ads to people that searched specific keywords on YouTube.
• Topics – Show ads on content about specific topics. Topic targeting is a simple way to place your ads on many web pages, apps, and videos about a particular subject.
• Placements – You can decide exactly where you want your ad to run. On the Display Network, a placement can be an entire website, a specific page of a site, or a mobile app. On YouTube, a placement can be a specific channel or a video.

 

Ad Creation

 

 

Here you’ll be able to upload your video or link any video already hosted by youtube (it doesn’t need to be connected to your account).

One note: to choose a different thumbnail, you’ll need to edit the video from youtube and change the thumbnail there.

Make sure to choose the right type of ad (in-stream, video discovery or bumper ad) and after you write your headline and description you will be ready to confirm your campaign and start your ad.

With this, we concluded our chapter on Youtube ads.

Let’s move to the last chapter, which focuses on a fantastic platform to target millennials: SnapChat!

CHAPTER 9

Target Millennials with Snapchat Video Ads

If Millenials are part of your target audience, you should definitely run Snapchat video ads.

Snapchat has a young audience, but more than half of new users currently signing up are over the age of 25, making this a fantastic platform to advertise several B2C products.

Let’s see why Snapchat is different compared to other platforms, and how you can take advantage of that.

BONUS: Get my Snapchat Ads Swipe file.

Overview

Snapchat is growing – and growing fast.

To make a comparison, Snapchat’s daily active users grew by 5% in the last quarter of 2017, while Facebook grew only by 2.2% – with a total of 187 million average daily active Snapchatters globally.

 

 

And when users are active, it seems that they can’t live without Snapchat:

 

https://forbusiness.snapchat.com/blog/whos-on-snapchat-anyway/

 

The community spans a broad age range. A lot of people think it’s just teens who Snap on a regular basis, but the audience is ageing up.

They do have a large audience of teens and young adults, but more than 50% of daily new Snapchatters in the US are 25 or older, and nearly one-third of adult Snapchatters are parents.

Another thing that sets Snapchat apart is the amount of time users spend on the app each day –  daily active Snapchatters open Snapchat an average of over 18 times every day.

Crazy right?

If you want to reach any of the 185M active users with ads, you have several options: video ads, filters and lenses – but since the aim of this article is “video ads”, we’ll focus here only on the first category.

The Snap Video Ads

 

There are four advanced types of video ads, but they all start with a “snap ad”: a full-screen, 100% viewable video ad of max 10 seconds, with audio on by default.

Some specs:

• 32 MB max of file size
• Minimum size: 1080 x 1920 pixels
• Required Ratio: 9:16
• Length: 3 to 10 seconds
• More requirements here

After you create you snap ad, you can decide if you want to stick with it (usually to generate more awareness for your product) or if you’re going to drive action using one of the following:

• “Web View” to send the user to your website;
• “App Install” to drive more downloads of your app;
• “Deep Link” to re-engage users of your  app;
• “Long Form video” to show a video in full, after you showed a teaser with your snap ad.

 

How to choose the best audience possible for your video advertisements.

To create a new ad, simply head over to https://ads.snapchat.com/, log in with your Snapchat account and create a new campaign.

I recommend choosing “Advanced Create” to have the ability to create multiple ad sets and test your ads with different audiences.

 

 

In any case, you’ll have the possibility to choose the best objective for your campaign:

 

After this, you can define the audience for each of your ad sets.

One note here: the audience options will depend on the country you are targeting.

For example, if you target the United Kingdom, you will only be able to target users by “Lifestyle” (that are long-term interests of users), but if you target the US, you have three additional options:

• Shoppers – what people buy in stores or restaurants
• Viewers – what people watch on tv or online
• Visitors – where people usually go with their smartphone

 

https://forbusiness.snapchat.com/audiences/

 

One note on custom audiences

Snapchat, like other platforms, gives you the ability to create custom audiences: you can import a list of emails or device IDs to reach your customers and their lookalikes.

 

 

To create a new custom audience, click the arrow on the top left of any page and choose “Audiences”.

 

 

Ad creation

Going back to the creation of a new campaign, when you are ready with your audiences, you can move to the next and final step: ad creation.

Digital Video Ads Branding Marketing

Follow the guidelines explained at the beginning of the chapter to create a video that complains with Snapchat video specs and upload it to “Topsnap Media”.

 

 

Add the name of your brand, a headline and a call to action, and you will be ready.

Review your campaign and press “Publish Campaign” to submit your ads for publication!

 

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Posted by XINI  DigitalPrinting 

Effective brochures are synonymous with business success. They offer customers the ability to get a concise and engaging overview of the products or services that your business provides, making them the perfect digital printing solution for trade shows and exhibitions. With that said, underwhelming brochures that are lacking in vibrancy will almost-always fail to strike a chord with potential customers. Therefore, in this post, we’re going to lay out our top tips on how to prepare a brochure to spark interest in your brand.

What is a brochure?

As mentioned, printed brochures offer an effective way to highlight your business’s products, services, contact details and more! They’re highly versatile, perfect for use in trade shows, exhibitions, direct mails campaigns, no matter the industry in which your business operates.

Advantages of brochures

See below a list of some of the advantages of using business brochures:

• Easy distribution – after having conducted some persona research, your printed brochures can be strategically placed in the locations in which potential customers are likely to be.
• Enhanced brand trust – by taking the time to create an amazing brochure, you will elevate your brand reputation and establish yourself as an authority within your field.
• Cost-effectiveness – business brochures are a relatively low-cost marketing tool. Plus, when you buy in bulk, cost per unit will be decreased, thus saving money on overhead costs.

PRINTS PRICE LIST

How to make a brochure

See below our top tips on how to prepare a brochure:

• Brand-centric design – Remember, a printed brochure is an extension to your business. Therefore, it’s imperative that you demonstrate your brand’s core values and design it in such a way that is consistent with other channels, such as a website or social media page.
• Less is more – When designing a brochure, we recommend sticking to a simple layout using a clear, easy-to-read font. Overly artistic text crammed onto a confused and muddled page is a surefire way to dampen down customer interest.
• Quality matters – Incorporating high-resolution imagery on high-quality paper and finishes are essential for creating the perfect business brochure. When customers notice the time and effort you have put into your printed brochures, they’ll be convinced that you’ll put the same time and effort into them.

How to fold a brochure

There are multiple ways to fold a business brochure (or folded leaflet). Listed below are the most common, along with a brief description:

• Half fold – As the name suggests, half fold brochures are folded in half along the centre creating 4 separate pages, including a front-cover, back-cover, and two internal pages.
• Z fold – A ‘Z’ fold is creased twice, creating 6 individual pages that can be utilised as different sections within the printed brochure.
• Roll fold – The outer section of roll fold brochures fold over one another, creating three separate sections.
• Gatefold – An effective way to highlight popular products, gatefold brochures have their outer flaps folded to meet in the middle.

How are business cards made?

Brochure printing at XINI

XINI Printing Through Digital Printing offer high-quality brochure printing to all Lagos, Nigeria locations. Using only top-of-the-range  Digital Presses, you can rest assured that brochures will be vibrant with bold colours, sharp imagery and clear, easy-to-read text due to our visual printing analyst. Visit www.xinicomms.com for all the information you’ll ever need on printed brochures. How Best Does Your Current Brochure Printing Looks

Learn More On Best printing service company in the  Lagos Nigeria   And also catch the flight of staying as a global brand in advertising and marketing. The Best Advertising Agency/Agencies In Lagos Can actually be you from the basics of brand knowledge. 

Your management is key in achieving a global brand reputation. Always feel free to write us always.

All articles overseen by our CEO, Charles Ataghoma.

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In a recent interview with a business leader that markets high-end custom woodwork/millwork products to consumers, we came across a great story to share about how companies with high-end brands can achieve differentiation by investigating niche positioning and great branding.

As is the case for many companies starting out, the approach to business and branding can shift over time. When this company started out, they entered the market in direct competition with the great manufacturers who sold “custom design packages,” ready-made kits manufactured overseas at minimal cost, with free “design services” to sweeten the deal. Originally, this company tried to compete in this market category but ended up rethinking their strategy. As a company truly invested in quality, and with a deep concern for their customers’ needs, they saw an opportunity to differentiate through brand positioning.

The team started by agreeing on what made them excellent: an unapologetic commitment to quality. Next, they enhanced their brand and website to appeal to discerning clients and implemented a fee for design quotes and estimates, as well as scheduling appointments with prospective clients. These actions not only qualify invested prospects but also establish respect for services, and can give brand a sense of true value.

Brand management covers a whole lot which can not be left out from an operational part of any company.

In a display of true commitment to the brand, they even engaged the best Actors creating the sense of a truly world class establishment with modern sensibilities but with old world elegance. They stopped chasing smaller contracts with the understanding that their true goal was higher end work. This can be a difficult change in attitude at first, but the impact of this new position allowed them to carve out a specific niche in the marketplace and create differentiation where before there had been none.

As designers, builders and installers of luxury products, printing materials, letter heads, invoices, company seals, signage,  they sourced and obtained the rights to a unique product system that they built and produced. This helped draw crowds of admirers, and ultimately cultivate leads. They also invested in high quality print marketing, and even a handcrafted gift featuring each client’s name. A classic, clean website with a vast gallery of images told their brand story and promise, while search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click campaigns (i.e., Google AdWords) helped raise awareness among prospective customers. Throughout every tactic, the message was consistent: an investment in their product is an investment in distinguished craftsmanship of the highest caliber.

Committing to a luxury position can be intimidating at first, but can be ultimately beneficial. Your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells people what to expect from your products and services. If you aim to attract high-end customers, you need to create a brand experience the quality of which is commensurate with your promise.

By investing in your brand in a big way, a major edge can be gained in increasingly competitive markets and that is why a brand like Deborah Rise is amazing and globally raging.

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Have you read about how to grow your business 

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