annies@amsinclv.com

Best Practices for Visually Rebranding Your Business

The visuals you use need to go beyond a tagline and words.

There are many reasons you might be considering a strategic rebrand. It could be due to a change in your competitive landscape that’s impacting your growth, corporate restructuring or maybe you have an evolving customer demographic.

When it comes time to rebrand your business, part of the process involves developing a new visual identity system that represents the values and attributes that reflect the new brand. While you may know your audience and what message you now want to transmit, the challenge may be creating that visual to showcase what you represent. Here are some best practices for visually rebranding your business.

  1. Put the Compelling Story into the Visuals
    Along with the logo changes, include a new tagline that also represented your story. The tagline focuses on telling the story of the customer, the self-made owner who does whatever it takes to succeed. With the customer central to everything the company does, it makes sense for it to tell a compelling story that reflects that positioning.
  2. Keep It Simple and Consistent
    Whatever you do, don’t complicate the new visuals with too many components as if you need to explain every aspect of why it’s different. Let your audience figure out some of it and stick to a basic visual display of the symbolic attributes it represents. Less is more when it comes to your brand’s visual identity system.

    Wherever you share that rebrand, make sure the color, spacing, and overall design, including any textual components, are the same no matter the platform or channel. Anything slightly different will be instantly noticed and questioned. Because some places may display only black-and-white brand logos and identities, ensure that the elements are aligned and reflect the color version.

  3. Create a Brand Guidebook
    To help your team deliver the new brand visual within its marketing work or through any other use, make sure you have developed a brand guidebook on how to display it. You can make this a digital guidebook so it can be shared easily and accessed in your cloud library.
  4. Tie your brand strategy to your business strategy
    A new brand strategy or a rebrand should always consider the business. Brand strategy and business strategy should always be linked together. Focused brands make the intertwining of brand and business strategy a top priority because they know it will deliver bottom line results.
  5. Align internal disciplines
    Related to our first point: Branding and rebranding don’t happen in a vacuum. Branding is more than marketing it is a key lever you can use to move the company forward. Done right, it is the foundation for everything you say and everything you do across all disciplines, from marketing and sales. Therefore, to ensure success, all parts of the business must be aligned. The experience, the people, the products, and the systems, the brand represents all of those. So, line them up and sign them up. They are all an important part of your rebranding.
  6. Involve senior decision makers
    Speaking of signing up, if you are rebranding is going to be a success, all senior executives need to buy into it and be invested in its outcome from the beginning. A clear process with clearly defined deliverables will help. Ensure a cross-discipline senior leadership group is at the table and use their valuable time judiciously. They should hear the insights captured in research and be able to put their hypotheticals on the table. This allows them to make smart decisions and be vested in the outcomes. To guide key decision makers through the rebranding journey, it’s important to discuss customer insights, business realities, trends, and the competitive landscape upfront, so together, you can agree on a direction and be prepared to re-align along the way.
  7. Conduct deep research
    We’re the first to admit that deep research can have varying definitions of deep depending on the company or person that’s using the word. So, let’s be clear; to us, deep research will discover who your brand is and what it should focus on for greatest impact. Deep research means a carefully considered process that is designed to answer critical questions that will drive your brand forward. Questions like:

    • What’s our brand reputation today?
    • What do we want it to be tomorrow?
    • How do our customers make buying decisions?
    • How should we position ourselves to drive competitive advantage?
    • Where do we perform well today?

    In other words, our version of deep research is research that will lead to actionable insights specific to the brand-building process.

  8. Consider art & science
    Research is both an art and a science. Yes, there may be a lot of statistics involved, but there should also be magic. The secret to creating this magic is to dare data to delight your customers. You can do this by looking at your quantitative and qualitative research from many different angles. In doing so, you’ll find unique insights that challenge the status quo.
  9. Execute for success
    A brand promise, once determined, is not just words on a page. It’s not just an excuse for a quick party where you say, “Let’s take the brand live!” A brand promise is just what it sounds like, a promise. It’s a promise you’re making to the outside world and everyone in the company must be inspired and motivated to keep it. In order to do so, they must understand how to deliver it no matter their responsibilities.

    They must understand and believe in the brand before they can live the brand. When you bring a brand to life in the right way, your team members will make focused, on-brand decisions in their day-to-day responsibilities. And when that happens, your brand will achieve its strategic, financial and growth goals, and truly be ready to make a difference in the world.

  10. Share the New Brand Everywhere and Often
    There is nothing wrong with sharing this visual rebrand everywhere and as often as possible. Use the narrative as a story to help the audience remember it, get attached, and share it with their social circles.


Social Media Trends to Watch for in 2019

As social media continues to grow across all markets, it’s important to be socially aware of the changes taking place on a global scale and by each market. Each social media network comes in a different shape and size, with its own content strategy and user base, so there’s no one size fits all technique. You don’t want to waste your time creating content for a platform where your audience doesn’t have a large presence.

What’s inside the report? This blog is aimed at examining the biggest trends to help us understand the following dominating social media spaces:

  • Which demographics are engaging with social media?
  • How the users are spending their time on these platforms?
  • Which devices are being used for social networking?
  • 2019 trend predictions

To get started, let’s dive into each individual social network’s demographics. To quickly find the social media demographics you’re looking for, click on any of the anchor links below to jump to that specific network:

How to pull your own social demographics: Data tells us age, gender, and location information for the people who tend to use each website and social media platform, but why not take this a step further? With Sprout Social, you can pull data from your specific social media platforms to find out the demographics of the actual people following you to make sure this is in line with your target audience.

2019 trend predictions:

Rise of private groups and accounts: In 2018, Facebook invested new features into Facebook Groups, such as being able to participate as a business Page, updating with Stories, posting Live videos within the group and creating social learning units. These groups took off in 2018 as a way for brands to directly connect with fans without the algorithm affecting their posts.

Some influencer accounts also turned to creating private Instagram accounts to avoid the Instagram algorithm. Brands followed suit by creating private alternative accounts to drive up interest. In an article in the Atlantic, Sonny, who runs several meme accounts on Instagram, said he flipped four of his accounts to private.  With the addition of the “Close Friends” feature in Instagram Stories, brands could choose to create a more “insider look” feature for their accounts. New Stories features will likely include more friend groups, like Facebook’s own Friend Lists.

All the above features combine to create feelings of envy and fear of missing out rooted in human psychology. 2019 is the year that brands take advantage of this through private groups and accounts.

Conversational commerce: 2017 and 2018 were hot years for the chatbot. Companies scrambled to build messaging chatbots, Facebook Messenger became installable on websites. In their study of 1,000 trending B2B companies on Crunchbase, Relay found that 0.5% of the companies had a chatbot. Because the technology is still so new and adoption by companies has been slow, personal communication is still valued by consumers. As chatbots develop to go beyond simple prompts and adopt customer interactions in a more natural way, they might have the advantage in the current market. On Twitter or Facebook Messenger, this could mean something as little as remembering that they’ve purchased a shower curtain from you before and you following up on the purchase.

A Chatbot is a conversation agent software application that mimic written or spoken human speech for the purposes of simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person. You can use chatbot through web-based applications or standalone apps. Here is how a chatbot works

Cortana.

Transparency wins: 2018 was a landmark year for the major social media networks. Facebook battled privacy and data sharing concerns and Twitter struck down troll accounts while making it easier to report harassment. GDPR going into effect in 2018 also meant that many companies took note of what their customer data was being used in. If brands want to get ahead on this, they can start with what consumers want on social media. The top three desires are product/service changes, company values and business practices. For your company, this could mean publicizing product iterations or app updates, demonstrating your company values and giving more behind-the-scenes looks at your business.

New social media networks: Facebook has had a long reign at the top of the social media charts. But 2018 was not kind to it and its practices have led many, including the NAACP, to call for boycotts. In mid-2018, it “posted the largest one-day loss in market value by any company in US stock market history” at $119 billion, according to CNBC. Some users have quit Facebook altogether, which leaves marketers wondering what’s next for social media. It’s best to keep an eye out for new channels in case one of them could be useful for your brand. Best practice is to reserve your brand handles on emerging social networks just in case a network becomes big in the future.

Stories everywhere: Snapchat’s features of a disappearing post infiltrated almost every major network, sometimes more than once. Instagram Stories received major updates in 2018 with AR filters and interactive stickers. Facebook added Stories to personal accounts, Pages, Messenger and Groups. Both WhatsApp and YouTube also invested in Story-like features

As of May 2018, Stories across four platforms was approaching one billion uses every day. These snapshots have evolved from basic; behind-the-scene features to branded storytelling snippets. Integration with shopping features will only increase in 2019 to appeal to brands. There’s no sign of Stories stopping its rise, so it’s best to start incorporating it into your strategy if it isn’t there already. Take a look at our recommendations and guides for Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories.

Employees are the new trusted influencers: Influencer marketing has become so bloated an industry that accounts are faking their partnerships so they can become actual influencers. The Atlantic looked at a few accounts faking their influence. As one 15-year-old influencer commented, “People pretend to have brand deals to seem cool.”

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More time and money will be spent on influencer marketing in 2019, but not in the way you think. A chunk of it will go into deeply researching accounts and double checking that the brand partnerships they’ve posted are real.

Get ahead of this trend by examining your own internal communications and amplification procedures. What can you do better to allow for a more seamless employee sharing experience on social media?

Analytics dashboards become more important: The value of a great analytics dashboard should not go overlooked. While every network has its own native analytics, no social media manager wants to spend time every week, month or year gathering data and hand-in putting it into a spreadsheet. 2019 is the year to invest in a tool that syncs all your data for you and spits out a chart that you can take to the C-suite.

Use a dashboard that gives you varied reports and views from both a wide lens and a granular one. This way, you’ll know exactly what works in your strategy and you can simultaneously give the big picture to your CMO.

Conclusion: It’s fun to take a guess at what the next year will bring for social media. 2019 will only bring more new, interesting features that we hope will drive the social conversation forward for brands. The trust relationship between brands and consumers will be rebuilt through private groups, transparency reports and employees as influencers. Remember to always be socially responsible… #Measure #optimize, #succeed

Send us feedback at @amsinvlv and let us know what you think will be the 2019-2020 social media trend prediction!!

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A Few Things to Know Before Embarking into Non-Profit World!!

Nonprofit organizations were originally created for a public or mutual benefit other than generating profit for owners or investors. They can take a variety of forms from informal neighborhood associations, soup kitchens, local churches or traditional charities serving the poor to labor unions, self- help groups or museums, hospitals and large universities.

Though they may be different in size and form, all nonprofit organizations share five common characteristics:

  1. They must be organized
  2. They must be private (separate from the government)
  3. They must be self-governing
  4. They must be distributing which means they can generate profit, but they cannot distribute to the owns or directors of the organization.
  5. They must be voluntary.

All legal forms of nonprofits vary in one way or the other, however, the Internal Revenue Code differentiates two major types: the 501 (c) (3) and the 501 (c) (4) organizations. Although both types are exempt from taxation, only the 501 (c) (3)s or the so-called public benefit organizations are eligible for tax-deductible donations from individuals or corporations.

501 (c) (4)s are called social welfare organizations, many civic leagues and advocacy organizations which represent social and political causes belong to this group (Anheier 2014). Some nonprofits – like Planned Parenthood – have both types of 501 (c) organizations incorporated.

Its also important to note that nonprofit organizations make up the nonprofit sector which is often referred to as the philanthropic sector, the third sector, the independent or the voluntary sector. The sector fulfills crucial functions for modern societies. According to Payton and Moody (2008), the philanthropic sector’s five roles are:

  1. Service role: “providing services (especially when the other sectors fail to provide them) and meeting needs” (Payton and Moody 2008, 34).
  2. Advocacy role: representing and advocating for the interests of populations, for differing views of the public good and for reform.
  3. Cultural role: expressing and preserving values, traditions and other aspects of culture.
  4. Civic role: building community, fostering civic engagement.
  5. Vanguard role: providing opportunities for innovation, experimentation.

It’s also important to note that Nonprofits can be grouped based on their field of interest as well. The National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities Core Codes classifies 10 groups:  1. arts, culture and humanities 2. education 3. environment and animals 4. health 5. human services 6. international, foreign affairs 7. public, societal benefit 8. religion related 8. mutual/membership benefit 10. unknown, unclassified (Ott and Dicke 2016).

Until the 1930s, wealthy individuals and foundations provided most of the revenue for nonprofit organizations. After the Great Depression, the vast number of impoverished citizens made the federal government provide a wider range of social services such as public programs for the unemployed or benefits for the elderly and dependent children (Ott and Dicke 2016).

By the mid-twentieth century the growing endowments of private foundations – which are founded by individuals or corporations and not by the government – created a public need for greater regulation of foundations. The Tax Reform Act in 1969 created two new regulations: 1. foundations had to distribute at least 5 percent of their assets yearly (called payout) 2. and they had to report their income and expenses on the 990-tax form.

The twentieth century saw two more shifts regarding the role of federal government in providing social services. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency in the 1960s, the “Great Society” legislation created a wide range of support for community projects helping people in need (Ott and Dicke 2016). The Reagan administration in the 1980’s greatly cut federal support for such services and moved the responsibility to provide funding to these programs to state and local governments. Therefore, nonprofit organizations had to compete for a reduced pool of resources. This led to increased fundraising efforts and a growing public demand for accountability regarding nonprofit’s finances and operations.

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, in 2016, more than 1.5 million organizations were registered with the IRS. It is estimated that many smaller formal and informal associations exist that do not register because religious organizations and organizations with revenues of less than $5,000 per year are not required to do so (Payton and Moody, 2008). The nonprofit sector is a significant economic force, in 2013, it contributed to 5.4% of the country’s GDP and it accounted for 9.2% of all salaries and wages.

In 2013, more than a quarter of the adult population volunteered an estimated total of 8.1 billion hours (Giving USA 2016). Total charitable giving in 2015 reached $373.25 billion, making it America’s most generous year – although giving is steady as a percentage of GDP, at around 2%. Most of the giving came from individuals, who account for 71% of all donations. Giving by foundations followed by 16%, bequests contributed 9% and corporations by 5%. The most popular recipients are religious organizations, they received 32% of all charitable giving. Educational organizations are second by 15% while human service organizations were donated 12%.

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