tips-n-tricks

BANG! creative Named a Constant Contact Certified Partner

David O'Connell marketing thoughts, thought you should know, tips-n-tricks

BANG! creative Named a Constant Contact Certified Partner

Milton ON, 19/07/ 2022 — BANG! creative, an award-winning creative marketing agency, has been named a Certified Partner by Constant Contact, a digital marketing platform trusted by millions of small businesses.

As a Certified Partner, the BANG! creative team has demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the Constant Contact digital marketing platform and best practices. This ensures program participants and the clients they serve will realize meaningful results from their investments in email and online marketing.

Indirect-2301-Certification-Badges-white-300x74

“We are always looking at ways to improve our skillset and offering for our clients.” said David O’Connell RGD, Creative Director and founder of BANG! creative. “By earning Certified Partner status, is another token that shows we are your marketing expert to help small businesses and nonprofits achieve meaningful marketing results.”

“The Certification Program ensures customers that our Partners have proven, in-depth knowledge of online marketing and Constant Contact’s offerings,” said Mark Allen, VP of Customer Growth at Constant Contact. “By earning Certified Partner status, BANG! creative has demonstrated their commitment to helping clients succeed by taking proactive steps to grow the BANG! creative teams marketing skillset.”’

About Constant Contact

Constant Contact delivers for small businesses and nonprofits with powerful tools that simplify and amplify digital marketing. Whether it’s driving sales, growing a customer base or engaging an audience, we deliver the performance and guidance to build strong connections and generate powerful results. For more information, visit www.constantcontact.com.

About BANG! creative – Strategy by Design

BANG! Creative, an award-winning creative marketing agency, specializes in brand strategy, design, and digital marketing. With a reputation for creating impactful brand identities and strategies, BANG! Creative helps brands evolve and thrive in today’s dynamic market environment.

For more information contact:

BANG! creative
224 Main Street E., 2nd Flr
Milton, ON L9T 1N8
Canada
+1.905.636.9393
learnmore@creativitygoesbang.com
www.creativitygoesbang.com

Connect with us on:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Build A Strategic Foundation

Athena O'Connell design thoughts, marketing thoughts, tips-n-tricks

Build A Strategic Foundation

Building a solid strategic foundation for any brand is of utmost importance! Like laying the foundation for a house, the strategy designed at the beginning of launching or re-branding a business venture will determine how stable the brand’s market presence will be as it grows and evolves, and how successful it will be in forming impactful and memorable impressions over the long-term.

You could have a personal brand, or a business brand – either way, marketing it to the world in an effective and engaging way starts with creating a thorough understanding of just who and what your brand is, and how it fits into the existing marketplace. This analysis uncovers what makes you truly shine as a unique product of service.

That means first things first, market research is needed! Create an analysis of what makes you or your business unique, what competitors in the same space are doing, and how to highlight your unique competitive advantage. Use it to assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and develop a strategy to integrate this data into an action plan.

Having a marketing department on your side can really help to set your brand off on the right foot. Whether we’re talking about a new business venture or a complete re-brand of an existing company, hiring professionals to uncover what makes your brand truly shine and set those first foundational blueprints into motion can have a huge impact on your marketing efforts over time. The strategy is where the magic happens – once the groundwork is set, we can continue to build out from there indefinitely.

Take your business from run-of-the-mill to one-of-a-kind by building a strategic foundation!

The Best Marketing of All is Happy Customers

David O'Connell marketing thoughts, tips-n-tricks

The Best Marketing of All is Happy Customers

Keeping your customers and clients happy seems like simple advice, but it’s critical to your marketing strategy. Its great to be able to bring new people through your door with heightened awareness of your brand, but the truth is that customer retention is a lot more cost effective than acquisition. Marketing may bring people into your business, but making them happy will keep them coming back again and again, so take the opportunity to wow them everywhere you can!

Today’s customer is an empowered one – they have more choice than ever. Trust is increasingly important. An amazing customer experience with above and beyond service can be the deciding factor.

In fact, great service is so crucial that 98% of respondents in a recent Kissmetric survey said that customer experience is in the top 3 factors to decide whether or not to buy from you.

Remember: happy customers and increased revenues go hand in hand! $\"\"$ ? $\"\"$ ✅

#StrategyByDesign #ThinkFirstDesignSecond #BANGcreative www.creativitygoesbang.com

HIALOSCA – Here is a List of Some Common Acronyms

David O'Connell marketing thoughts, tips-n-tricks

HIALOSCA – Here is a List of Some Common Acronyms

Digital communication has changed the way we talk. Starting with text messages some years back and becoming especially important with the need to condense rambling sentences on platforms like Twitter (where we used to only have 120 characters to express our thoughts), we have become a society surrounded by everyday acronyms.

You have to think twice about the meaning of some of them, but others have become so intertwined into the way we communicate, that they are now a part of our everyday speech (so much so that it’s not unheard of to hear somebody say “LOL” instead of actually laughing!)

With popular hashtags jumping on the acronym trend as well, more and more shortcuts have sprung up over time and will undoubtedly continue to do so as we come up with new clever ways to express what we need to say. Does this modern vocabulary have you feeling a confused and a little out of touch?

Here are 25 common acronyms you may find across the interwebs on a daily basis and their corresponding explanations:

DYK – Did You Know?

JSYK – Just So You Know

TBA – To Be Announced

TY – Thank You

LMK – Let Me Know

RN – Right Now

MCM – Man Crush Monday

WCW – Woman Crush Wednesday

TBT – Throwback Thursday

FBF – Flashback Friday

TBH – To Be Honest

SMH – Shake My Head

ICYMI – In Case You Missed It

IMO – In My Opinion (IMHO – In My Humble Opinion)

IRL – In Real Life

IDK – I Don’t Know

ISO – In Search of

FTW – For the Win

JK – Jut Kidding

NSFW – Not Safe for Work

WTH – What the Hell

WTF – What the Fu@k

THX – Thanks

LOL – Laugh Out Loud

ROTFL – Rolling On The Floor Laughing

Hire The Right Creative Agency by BANG! creative strategy by design

7 Tips to Help You Find the Right Creative Agency

David O'Connell marketing thoughts, thought you should know, tips-n-tricks

7 Tips to Help You Find the Right Creative Agency

Finding the right creative agency is essential to creating an effective marketing campaign to promote your brand and products. However, due to the sheer volume of creative agencies in the market, it can be hard to sort out the good from the mediocre and unfortunately the bad. Thankfully, there are a few simple things to look for to help determine which creative agency is the best fit for your business’ needs.

I am often asked \”what makes us different?\” and I usually respond with, when looking, do not focus on the tool, focus on the house your trying to build. Don\’t think of the brochure or website as what you\’re buying but the process to develop the right solution to promote your brand, product or service. Sometimes you may not end up with the brochure or website you thought you wanted but something you needed. A good creative agency will take you down this path, work with you, and not just try to sell you a \”cookie-cutter\” solution.

Here are 7 other tips to help you narrow down the choice:

Strong Portfolio

It is imperative that you ask to see each respective creative agency’s past work. While some work is naturally going to be protected by legal agreements, you should still be able to gain access to a few samples that provide a clear demonstration of the standard that each creative agency works towards. Usually, the agency will have an online portfolio, but you should look deeper than if it looks good. Some companies rely heavily on templated pieces that they just insert the next client’s info into. We will cover what to look for in a portfolio in a later article.

Digital Presence

Considering the amount of penetration that technology has in people’s everyday lives, a creative agency needs to have a noticeable online presence that is characterized by a well-designed website that consistently posts high quality content to interact with.

Social Media

In a similar vein to the above point, you should look for a creative agency with well-made and established social media profiles. This can provide you with a rough idea of the online size and reach of the agency, and serves to highlight the agency’s skills in online marketing techniques. Just because they have more followers does not mean they are better. Social is about engaging and informing not just vanity clicks and likes. We have a saying in our studio “it’s better to have 20 followers that we engage with than 2000 that we don’t”.

Awards and Associations

Check to see if the creative agencies that you are looking at have won any marketing or design awards, either at a local or national level. While these are not a guarantee of a good marketing campaign, they are a good indication of high quality work and original ideas. See if they also belong to industry associations and professional groups.

References or Recommendations

While this may not be immediately noticeable, you should read around through marketing publications and online blogs to see if there are any references to the agencies you are looking at. Accomplished and well-established agencies will have produced work that has created discussion within the marketing community. Ask friends and colleagues in similar industries to your own to see if they have any recommendations or referrals. This can help you find a creative agency that has worked in your field before, and can bring that experience to the table. Alternatively, you can ask for client contact information from creative agencies and give past clients a call to hear their thoughts firsthand.

Costs

Once you have narrowed down the list of potential creative agencies, you should develop a detailed budget for your potential project and communicate clearly with the agency you have chosen to prevent surprises later. Campaign budgets can range from $5000 – $150,000 you should know and be honest about how much you are willing to invest in your marketing. Creative marketing services are not a commodity and should not be bought as such. There is a process that is followed and one of the main factors to determine the right solution is budget.

Personality

While it may seem like a minor consideration, you need to make sure that you get along well with the people working in the creative agency you wish to hire. Having personalities that meld well together can help strengthen communication and ensure a better working relationship in the long term.

Overall, we hope these tips will simplify your search for a creative, brand marketing, and design agency. The most important thing is to make sure your company, or marketing department is ready to use an agency. If you are, you will be well on your way to executing effective marketing campaigns to promote your brand and products.

Bonus Tip, Just call us BANG! creative – Strategy by design

BANG! creative®, a multi-disciplined, award winning brand marketing and corporate communications design studio. BANG! creative® specializes in the development and complete execution of brand strategies for local, national and international clients. Since 2005, the team at BANG! creative® have successfully developed thoughtful, well-designed solutions from healthcare to manufacturing to consumer goods, within the public and private sector. BANG! creative® has successfully established brand awareness, driving customer engagement and sales through a full range of creative & strategic services on-line, in-hand and in-mind utilizing traditional and new media. Our goal? Make it meaningful. Make it memorable. Make it simple. It’s what we do.

Let\’s work together and grow your business:

BANG! creative | 16 Hugh Street Milton, ON L9T 2C6 Canada | +1.905.636.9393

learnmore@creativitygoesbang.com | www.creativitygoesbang.com

Connect with us online:

Facebook: facebook.com/BangCreativeCommunications
Twitter: @BangCreativeCom
Instagram: @bangcreative

Hashtag Tips by BANG! creative strategy by design

Hashtag Do’s & Dont’s.

Athena O'Connell marketing thoughts, thought you should know, tips-n-tricks

#This #Blog #Article #Post will #teachyou about proper #Hashtag use. First tip…Don’t do that. Using hashtags solely for the purpose of using hashtags will not, and I repeat: WILL NOT make your message more appealing. It’s 2016, and almost everyone on earth knows what a ‘hashtag’ is…that being said…there are definitely a lot of people that still have no idea how to use it.

DO
• Be specific: the more specific your hashtags, the more targeted your messages will be. A highly targeted message will have a much better impact with your desired audience, leading to more authentic, and more frequent engagement.
• Be relevant: your location, the size of your audience, and the type of content you post has a heavy influence on which hashtags are most relevant to them. It is always important to track and analyze the response to your hashtags in order to alter them effectively.
• Be consistent: try to make sure that you use your selected hashtags across all of your marketing mediums. Hashtag consistency is a great way to make sure your campaign is fully integrated and will help it resonate most effectively with your target audience.
• Be SOCIAL: This one might be a little obvious…as we’ve said before time and time again, Social media is just that; Social. Make sure you are starting and participating in conversations with your hashtags, not just shameless self-promotion. This is very important to the process of giving your brand its own voice. One that your customers can enjoy connecting with.

DON’T
• Be longwinded: Keep your hashtags short and sweet. Nobody really enjoys writing or reading longwinded hashtags. You may be wondering “How can I remain specific without making my hashtags too long?” Well, thats up to you. Try to get clever…but not so clever that your audience won’t understand the message.
• Be shameless: When it comes to inserting your brand or product name, be classy. Like I mentioned above…if the hashtag is clever enough, there will be no need to shamelessly plug your company or product. As long as the brand promotes the hashtag, and vice-versa, your customers will make the connection, and you’ll be just fine.
• Be lazy: Continuing to use the same hashtags over and over, even if they are not working will just annoy and confuse your followers. Make sure you are always analyzing the response to your campaigns and altering your tags efficiently. Without a strong message, your tags have no ground to stand on. Make sure your campaign is simple, yet effective.
• HASHTAG EVERYTHING: Ahhh…the inspiration for this blog. If your hashtags are not adding any substance to the overall message of the post: don’t use them. Like I mentioned in the intro, #Hashtagging #every #other #word will never produce meaningful results for your brand.

Hopefully these tips will help you on your way to becoming a Social Media guru. Get creative, be smart, and most importantly…be SOCIAL. Please #HashtagResponsibly.

Kerning Tips by BANG! creative strategy by design

A Beginners Guide to Kerning.

David O'Connell design thoughts, tips-n-tricks

Imagine the awful, awkward feeling that you get when you are riding the subway during rush hour. People have filled the subway car and are invading your personal space. A little too close for comfort. Well, we are not the only ones who need just the right amount of space around us to be comfortable. This also applies to the characters in the words we read everyday, and is much more important than you might think.

When reading text, our eyes don’t actually process the shape of each character, but the negative space that surrounds it. This is why it is important for this space to be evenly distributed. Not only does this give the text a more polished look, but is more comfortable on the readers eyes, as it creates a consistent rhythm, increasing legibility. If this rhythm is broken, the readers’ eyes struggle to decipher the shapes, which now have an inconsistent structure, causing a negative experience for the reader. This is especially important in headlines, where bad spacing is that much more evident.

The practice of adjusting the space between the individual letterforms is referred to as kerning. Kerning can be a tricky task, due to the varying shapes of the characters, but can be successfully achieved by a professionally trained designer. In a well-kerned font, the spaces between each letterform will have a similar surface area. Most well-designed fonts have kerning that has been built in, to a certain degree, by the font designer. Additional kerning adjustments will need to be made, however, as all letterform combinations cannot be anticipated by the font designer.

Although subtle details, such as kerning, are not normally in the front of a client’s mind when having a project designed, it is these small details that separate good design from poor design. The objective of design is to communicate a message and create an experience for the viewer. Often, the less obvious elements are those that generate the most positive experience, and ensure the message resonates effectively with the audience. As in all good design, such as architecture, it is essential to begin with a strong structure, which will support the aesthetic.

This is the kind of quality you can always expect from the creative team at BANG! creative.

So remember… what is keming? bad kerning.

Case Study: Advertek.

David O'Connell thought you should know, tips-n-tricks

Advertek is a 14 year old printing company that has grown in-spite of a shrinking print industry. However, they recognized their look, message and brand was out of date. A strong brand will be the only thing that will set Advertek apart in an increasingly -and in many cases – an industry already considered a commodity. That’s where BANG! came in.

The re-brand of a print company in an increasing non-printer friendly market would not be an easy task. We could not come across as just another print company with a “me too” attitude jockeying for position in an increasingly competitive industry.

After a review we determined the objective was to re-position Advertek as a strategic partner in the communication industry, offering more than just “ink on paper” and that Advertek is able to meet the current challenges in the industry and be able to grow with it’s clients for the future.

With all the capabilities in both offset and digital press; we also did not want to sound another “me too” printer wanting to do everything from printing anything to designing marketing and web or like we do everything “Copy shop”. Advertek had the opportunity to show they are not just a printer but a printing company with strategic partnerships that provide the best-in-class services to their clients.

“Your message, your market” was the ‘brand line’ developed as the core message. “The Adverek Advantage” was developed listing twelve unique differentiators Advertek has over the leading competitor.

Once outfitted with the new look, logo brand and message the sales force hit the ground running. Clients were exstatic about the upgraded look and a new position Advertek gained in the market, resulting in a growth and opportunities to present to new clients and land more than just ‘ink on paper’ jobs.

With an increasingly volatile and competitive industry climate, we have positioned Advertek as a strong, stable print media supplier ready for the future.