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Creating a Powerful Brand Experience Founded on Truth and Science - Rather Than Trends.
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Learn how this proven approach can inspire a more authentic, engaging and science-based brand experience.
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Brian Fallers
Chief Brand Officer
Alex Glukhov
Creative Director
Imagine you’re at the grocery store, rushing to buy everything you need for tomorrow’s dinner. Navigating the aisles, you instinctively reach for many of the products without much thought or deliberation.
While price is certainly a factor in some instances, it’s proven that consumers rely on their emotions much more than practical information. Today’s marketplace is filled with endless product and service options — and branding is more important than ever. We (irrationally) spend more for branded products versus much less expensive generic options, even during economically challenging times. And it’s not by happenstance. For decades, behavioral science has revolutionized brand and consumer marketing.
Four Simple Behavioral Science Principles to Use in Your Branding Efforts
Humans Are Emotionally Connected
At the heart of our brand reasoning are two traits that are inherent in all of us—humans love stories and are emotionally drawn to characters (people). Research tells us that consumers perceive the same type of personality characteristics in brands as they do in other people. We humanize products. This emotional and often irrational behavior trait leads people to be more attracted to some personality types than others. It’s the reason why you reach for Campbell’s, Amy’s Kitchen or Progresso soup versus any of the other readily available generic alternatives. Product branding comes in the form of a logo, image and color palette with each supporting a narrative that connects more with our hearts rather than our minds. Whether on a large billboard or a soup label, it’s important that your brand experience conveys your story and emotionally connects with your target consumer.
Keep It Simple: More Visuals, Fewer Words
When it comes to branding and evoking emotion, dense copy is your enemy. Less work for your audience means greater engagement. Visuals can stimulate positive emotions and allow for more immediate processing. This means craftily controlling color and incorporating icons to support your messaging more efficiently. By making the messaging and design as simple as possible, you empower the consumer to establish an immediate emotional connection and focus on what’s most important. In short, simplifying your brand identity will simplify the customer experience—and consumers like simplicity.
Shapes and Colors Matter
Have you ever noticed the impact of shape and color? Brain research shows that a brand’s use of shapes can subconsciously affect how it is perceived. Curves are typically seen as more inviting, while sharp edges and angles symbolize power (and potentially create aversion). Meanwhile, the power of color can’t be understated. A research study from Xerox and Loyola College found that seeing a logo in color made it 39% more memorable than viewing the same logo in black and white. We also know that adding color to your blog posts, product guides, print collateral and other brand materials can increase brand recognition by 80% (Reboot, 2018).
Our Brains Enjoy Simple Challenges
As humans, we like to be challenged. Research on problem solving tells us that we get emotional rewards in the form of dopamine boosts when we solve problems. This can best be seen in logo design incorporating negative space and layered symbolism. The world’s most renowned logos contain much more than initially meets the eye. They tell a story on their own and challenge the consumer to mentally fill in a few simple gaps. Most importantly, they capture the imagination and become forever entrenched in the mind of your audience. In FedEx’s logo, the negative space between the “E” and “X” form an arrow. Amazon’s smiling arrow subtly notes the company has it all by connecting “a” to “z.” Last but not least, our Truelio logo contains a smile in the negative space between the “i” and the dot above. The “i” is designed to appear as a person, representing our people-first partnership approach. Click here to learn more about our brand story.
Truelio is Here to Help
No matter your brand vision, we understand that telling your story and capturing the hearts and minds of customers and prospects can be a daunting challenge. We’re here to help and would love to learn how we can inspire a brand experience that’s memorable, dynamic and authentically represents your culture and people.
Reach out
How things have changed over the past decade. Remember those simpler times when there were only a handful of smartphones to choose from and social media was more about connecting better with friends and family. As technology continues to redefine people’s behaviors, the information pool grows deeper by the day making it more difficult than ever to keep your interactive marketing in step with the consumer experience. The days of siloed SEO, paid media, email marketing and social media marketing campaigns being haphazardly deployed just don’t cut it any longer. All digital channels have now combined into one integrated ecosystem — and it’s critical this ecosystem is founded on a cohesive and responsive strategy.
The goal of any interactive marketing strategy should be to integrate interactive storytelling through layered targeting with a customized creative design that’s based on end-user behavior. Sound complicated? Well, it doesn’t have to be. More simply stated, layered targeting is the application of incremental “filters” to drill down to smaller audiences with very specific attributes. Below are a few of the more common layered targeting filters.
What is interactive marketing?
Interactive marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on one-to-one interaction and customer communication. It involves marketing efforts based on consumer behavior, which distinguishes it from traditional forms of marketing.
In-Market Audiences
Google’s pre-defined list of 508 verticals in which users have shown some intent to purchase or convert.
Affinity Audiences
Groups of customers who are likely to have a strong interest in your products and services. They can include a wide range of lists from “sports fans” to “luxury travelers.”
Contextual Keyword
A digital advertising targeting tactic that enables you to target URLs based on keywords that appear within website pages. The key with this type of targeting is to increase the likelihood that your digital ad will appear to those users who are most apt to purchase your product or service.
Analytics
Analytics is one, if not the most important component of your interactive marketing strategy. Long gone are the Mad Men days of the 1960s when decisions were largely based on a combination of creativity and guesswork. Today’s sophisticated reporting tools provide the ability to better understand audience behavior, improve strategies and overall delivery insights that lead to improved decision-making.
Our team assists CMOs and digital marketing coordinators, as well as business owners, by helping them determine the correct strategic partners, channels, tools and strategies for success. We know analytics, we know web-based analytics software, and we benchmark everything. We work with our partners to determine where the pearls of actionable data reside in their analytics and reporting. We then use this data to construct campaigns based on what the end user intelligence tells us works and doesn’t work. Testing is the secret sauce when it comes to analytics.
We actually love to do research and the opportunity to closely study your customer, competition, web presence, past SEO and paid efforts and goals for the future. We also help you determine offers or value propositions that attract, persuade and convert new business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
How important is SEO? About 93% of online experiences start with a search engine. While you may have some understanding of how SEO works, even some of the savviest marketers don’t have a firm understanding of its many complexities. Our analytics and SEO specialists will define a benchmark for how you perform across the search engine landscape. We then use this performance benchmark to establish an SEO strategy that includes content initiatives, SEO element creation and installation, structured data markups and proper site architecture for optimum crawl-ability. Once defined, we develop a plan for ongoing SEO maintenance to empower your quest for web domination. It’s important to keep in mind that there’s a big World Wide Web out there. That’s why we work to build local citations and ensure that your business information is streamlined in all available directories and aggregators.
Paid Media Expertise
There are endless opportunities to interject your message while your potential customer or client searches the Web. This can be accomplished at the keyword level or by contextual targeting. Is your customer in the market to buy a home, a car or a B2B enterprise software suite? We use interactive tools, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, AdRoll, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and GroundTruth as part of our paid media strategy. We also utilize a suite of additional demand-side platforms, or DSPs, which provide advertisers the ability to control and maximize the impact of multiple ads with a single interface. In short, all of these great tools enable us to optimally position your message to answer user searches and increase your online traffic.
One of our specialties is geofencing ad campaigns. Need to market to a company or a list of prospective customers? We use technology that helps us market your message to the right person, at the right time, in the right location, on the right device with the right offer or solution. Did your customer or client click an ad or visit your website? Well good! Let’s just add them into a retargeting list and continue to speak to them online about the product or service they engaged with.
Email and Marketing Automation
Any successful interactive marketing strategy begins with delivering highly relevant and timely messaging. Leveraging the best email automation tool for your needs can make or break your success. We use marketing automation and CRM software to help you drive more leads, convert leads to sales and prove ROI. We work with HubSpot, Emma, Cheetah, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Klaviyo and other email and marketing automation software providers to drive revenue through intelligent campaigns. We can provide you with the CRM and marketing automation software that works best for your operating environment.
Social Media Advertising
As a culture, we tend to share a lot about ourselves through social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. Have you ever wondered what they do with the data? While a hot political topic of conversation over the years, there is one important reality to understand. The collection of all this data provides advertising agencies and brands the ability to market based on audience segmentation, interest categories, affinity categories and geography, all combined with basic demographics. This helps marketers present their brand in front of potential customers or clients where they already spend a good deal of their time.
Why Truelio?
We understand that advertising on the internet can be overwhelming. Our team of digital experts has worked with Fortune 500 companies, as well as B2C, e-commerce and B2B companies in the small and midsize business market. We conceptualize amazing creative, drive technology to benchmark, and deliver campaigns that produce multiple customer touch points. Most importantly, our campaigns deliver powerful results. Contact us today to learn how we can help you develop and manage your interactive marketing strategy.
