You know your business like the back of your hand, but how about your ideal customer? Do you know your target audience, a.k.a. the demographic most likely to use your product or service?Honing your audience is essential for creating an effective marketing strategy and growing your business. We’ve outlined three...
4 Excellent Reasons to Keep Marketing On Your P&L
When companies are looking to cut costs, marketing is often one of the first areas on the chopping block. However, this can be a detrimental move for businesses in the long run. Strategic marketing is an essential component of your business, just like your employees, storefront, or uniforms. It's how...
4 Amazing Tips to Make a Killer Marketing Strategy
No matter the size of your business, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to your brand. From your logo and collateral material to your website, social media, and everything in between, the details are enough to make your head spin. That’s why it’s essential to have a solid,...
How to Determine the Best Marketing Budget for Your Business
Why do you need a marketing budget for your business? How do you determine what it should be? We hear this a lot from companies of all industries and sizes. Figuring out the sweet spot is a challenge for many businesses, but we can help. Continue reading to learn how...
Why Your Marketing Should Be Better than “Good Enough”
“Eh, it’s good enough.” Have you ever uttered these words when creating your own marketing materials for your business? If so, you may have a case of “good enough syndrome,” as we like to call it. Good enough syndrome is the acceptance of something that is lower quality or does...
Visual Marketing: How Video and Images Impact Your Strategy
You’re scrolling through a newsfeed and a video catches your attention. You pause to see what it is, and then you’re drawn in. You go from intrigued to learning more. When you think about the video, you realize you remember a significant amount of the message. Before you know it,...
Five Steps to Build a Better Business Blog
You’ve seen them on countless websites: brief yet substantive articles pertaining in some way to the websites’ respective business or area of expertise. These articles – or blog posts – are an engaging feature of many websites, ideally with several benefits to both the business and the consumer. What are...
Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Their Marketing
It’s happened more times than we can count – a well-intentioned friend with a modicum of experience building the occasional website as a hobby has offered to help with your business’s website. A cousin who seems to post frequently on social media got voluntold to set up and monitor a...
Target Audience: What It Is and How to Define Yours for Improved Marketing Results
Just like consumers can’t possibly buy from every business, businesses can’t possibly capture every consumer’s attention. Instead of spending your money and resources trying to market to every consumer, you can define a demographic of people that are most likely to be interested in your company’s product or service. By...
Brand Fingerprint – Does Yours Leave a Lasting Impression?
The millions of businesses in the world are as unique as the fingerprints of the billions of people on Earth. Why do some stand out more vividly than the rest? It all comes down to brand identity. Let’s first clear up some terms that can be confusing: brand vs. brand...
How to Market Your Business on a Budget
Building a strategy that works for your business and budget is an essential, yet challenging, part of marketing your business successfully. Your marketing strategy must be as unique as your business, and molded according to what you can afford, while ensuring you’re hitting all the crucial components you need to grow. How can...
5 Email Marketing Tips for Business
A great way to engage your audience, establish brand awareness, increase your revenue, and build relationships with customers and prospects is through email marketing. You can also see real-time analytics that help you find what works based on your audience behaviors and fine-tune your approach to generate a higher ROI.Finding...
How and What to Advertise Right Now – Google, Facebook and Marketing Experts Weigh In
Times have changed. Customer behaviors are rapidly changing along with them.So much, in fact, that AI doesn’t know who we are as humans anymore, analytic insights from last week should be considered 2-3 months old, and algorithms for search engines are basically ancient because they weren’t built for this rapid...
Marketing Through a Crisis: How Strategizing (Not Cutting) Will Help Your Business
There is no doubt that we’re going through some tough times right now. In the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re all experiencing the challenges this worldwide crisis has inflicted on our daily lives, businesses and the global economy.A question that’s on many business owners’ minds: What is the right...
Outbound vs. Inbound Marketing: What You Need to Know
Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing – what is the difference and when should you use them in your strategy?To start off, let’s think of outbound and inbound as the technical term for traditional and modern marketing tactics. Outbound and inbound marketing are both important, however, the difference between the two is how your brand’s message is often...
Why Blogs Are Important for Growing Your Business
Does every business website really need a blog? What kinds of topics should you be writing about to attract a larger audience? How can blogs help increase traffic to your website? These are all valid questions to ask about business blogging. When it comes to growing your business, there are...
Social Media How-To: What Your Business Needs to Succeed
Feel like your business’s social media game needs some work? While every business is different and should have a social game plan as unique as its products and services, there are a handful of tips that every business owner can do to boost their social efforts. Strategy Having a plan...
Blog How-To: Choosing Blog Topics Viewers Want to Read
Picking a blog topic – easy, right? Not necessarily. The process of writing a thorough blog that hits all the proper check marks – captures your audience, answers questions, provides value, positions you as an expert – requires many layers of work. Where to begin? Here is a cheat-sheet for...
Marketing Strategies – Essentials from the Experts
The many facets of marketing can be daunting. What does your business’s marketing strategy actually need? How much should you be spending on a marketing? How do you get potential customers to connect with your brand? The answer is there is no ‘one size fits all’ method when it comes...
Content is King and Typography is its Crown
The importance of content to your marketing is incredible. Well-written and eye-catching copy attracts and sustains your audience. “Content is king” is undoubtedly true in the world of marketing, serving as one of the most essential components to a solid marketing and SEO strategy for your company. So what will...
Marketing Smack Down: Traditional vs. Digital
When it comes to your marketing strategy, how do you know where your efforts and budget will be best spent? With countless options available in both the traditional and digital marketing worlds, it’s best to weigh the pros and cons of each to determine what will be best for your...
The What, How, & Why of Cultivating Positive Company Culture
Culture seems to be the latest business buzzword and “must-have” in companies today. But what exactly is culture? How can you have a great one that recruits and retains an excellent workforce? How can a healthy, thriving culture impact your bottom line? We’ll cover the basics of cultivating an excellent...
Is Your Marketing on Fleek?
Is your marketing capitalizing on a fad, following a trend, or a tried-and-true method giving your business a step up among competitors? The first thing to know is that fads happen overnight, trends happen over time, and tried-and-true methods help to solve a problem, making them staples in a sound...
’Twas the night before…
Looking for a fun, out-of-the-box thinking team that loves marketing and can help you see the big picture to meet your goals? Look no further, because Stray Media Group is that team! We take our jobs just seriously enough to develop outstanding marketing plans, award-winning creative design pieces, and killer...
Holiday Marketing 101
‘Tis nearly the holiday season! From Halloween and Thanksgiving to Christmas and New Year’s, this festive time of year has a magical way of bringing people together. Fond memories of pastimes with friends and family, unique traditions and delicious recipes seem to flood the mind and evoke strong emotions in...
Creating Fresh Content – Tips and Tricks for Superior Results
Content marketing plays a huge role in business strategies across all industries. From providing customers with the information they want to growing your presence on the web, content is the king that rules the online world. In a world that is filled with countless other businesses trying to accomplish the...
As The Marketing World Turns
When it comes to marketing, staying in your comfort zone is no longer an option. Some things have stayed the same from the bygone era of Mad Men-esque marketing, such as standout and consistent branding, impeccable creative concepts, and truly understanding who your target customer is and what makes them...
Marketing Matchup: Innovative vs. Traditional
“Out with the old, in with the new” is the old saying, but is this really the best policy to have when it comes to your marketing plan? In this edition of Powered by Creativity we dig into the new business turf war – innovative vs. traditional marketing. When you...
When Brands Become Products
When a business is started, the dream is to gain so much word of mouth that the brand becomes a household name – or is it? For the companies that introduced us to Thermos, Cellophane, and Bubble Wrap, that dream became a nightmare. In this month’s ‘Powered by Creativity,’ we...
The Emotional Effects of Color on Your Brand – Part 2
Welcome back to the second installment of colors and what they mean to both your logo and brand image. Let’s start with green. Green On an international scale, brands tend to use green in their logos if they’re environmentally inclined, representing values of health, wellness, nature, growth, tranquility, and renewal. Green is commonplace in...
The Emotional Effects of Color on Your Brand – Part 1
Did you know color is one of the first things our brains see when registering an image? Since color is your brand’s nonverbal form of communication, it is vital to know how consumers will interpret different colors. This puts a lot of weight on your choice of colors when planning...
6 signs your brand needs to hit the refresh button
Fifteen years ago, if you needed a plumber or wanted to order a pizza, you’d pick up a phone book and search for the company you needed; today, you might use a phonebook to balance an uneven table. Times have changed, and if your brand hasn’t changed with them, you...
4 Ways Content Creates Customers
The bygone days of a majority of the nation listening to a radio broadcast or tuning into the nightly news are over. Now we have a thousand and one ways of finding information at the click of a button. Not only has the medium of communication changed, but also the...
3 Things Your Marketing Strategy Has to Have
Once upon a time, marketing was as simple as taking an ad out in the local newspaper, making sure your company was listed in the yellow pages, and having great word of mouth (and a radio ad or two), but that was twenty years ago. This type of outbound marketing...
Not Sure If Marketing Is In Your Budget? Think Again.
Thousands of new and developing companies are on a tight budget, a budget that does not allow them the same freedom and ability to experiment that established and larger reputable companies have. Marketing, a staple in practically all major brands and industries, is deemed a necessity to help gain and...
3 Best Marketing Practices for Your Growing Business
Inbound and outbound marketing are very different ways of engaging with your customers. One focuses on broadcasting a message while the other is a much more personalized experience, but both methods are necessary to succeed in today’s market. The best companies differentiate their marketing efforts, meaning that they use both...
Don’t Have a Marketing Strategy? Here’s Why You Need One.
In order for a brand to successfully market itself appropriately and effectively, a marketing strategy must, MUST, be in place. A marketing strategy is your brand’s master map to everything you want to do as far as sales, advertising, your budget, your promotions timeline, etc. It is also an essential...
Differentiated Marketing Strategy
Outbound and inbound marketing each have their place in a well-developed marketing strategy, but if you aren’t using a differentiated marketing strategy, you aren’t getting the full benefit. The problem is that while outbound and inbound marketing each serve their respective purpose, they aren’t nearly as personal. Smart marketers overcome...
The Top 3 Boards You Need on Pinterest This Season
If you are a small business owner, especially one that sells consumer products, it is our recommendation that you create a Pinterest account – stat. Already have one? Fantastic! Need a little Pinterest guidance? You’re at the right place. What’s the first step in optimizing your Pinterest page to create more...
The Importance of Evolving Your Brand
We can all name certain brands that have stood the incredibly hard test of time. Brands such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Chanel, Apple, and McDonald’s are household names across the globe, recognized by their products, slogans, logos, and much more. What has made these brands so successful? They are constantly...
5 Reasons Why We Love Marketing
Welcome to Powered By Creativity, a non-stuffy, non-agency feeling, marketing blog dedicated to sharing creativity, curiosity, and all that other really good stuff. We believe creativity is powerful. So why not share it? At Stray Media Group, we want to show you our own experiences and ideas in a way...