Categories
Branding Services

7 Things every graphic designer wishes they knew when they were starting out

The human brain is hardwired for visual content. We can process visual data 60000 times faster than text or audio. From shapes, colours, lines, to textures every element leaves an impact. Visual storytellers or simply put graphic designers play a very important role in a brand’s journey, making a splash (pun intended, sure sure) with their creativity and art.

We asked the creative minds at one of the best digital marketing companies in Ahmedabad, about the 10 things they wish they knew when they started their journey as professional graphic designers in Ahmedabad.

Master the “tools”

When it comes to designing, it’s not just about thinking creatively. It is very important to have in-depth knowledge about the software and tools required to edit, design and create.

Budding designers can learn the ropes of designing from Adobe’s design tutorials, and online courses on SkillShare polish their skills on tools of the trade like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.

Sketching skills come in handy

A graphic designer needs to think creatively, and nothing stimulates creative thinking like sketching does. Even the National Center of Biotechnology Information agrees. Sketching brings forth clarity to ideas and thoughts.

These rough drawings allow the designers to play around with their ideas, usage of elements, the flow of colours and placement of content. These sketches also aid in showcase an idea to the clients for approval before digital designing begins. This way it can help save time.

ALWAYS have a backup

One of the most important things to be mindful of as a designer and content creator. While this point may be a subject of many jokes, it is painful when you’re not able to retrieve something beautiful, created with much passion and hard work, just because you forgot to take a backup of the file.

Always keep a copy of your work, downloaded fonts, elements, and other content on a hard drive or any form of detachable digital storage device. Even storing it on cloud is a great option and increases accessibility, but also brings along with it the risk of lack of data privacy.

Creative block is a thing!

There will be days when you wake up and just can’t find the same mojo and inspiration with which you create designs every day. It is completely OKAY to feel this way, and it is called a creative block.

Getting out of this phase may look difficult, but it’s not the end of the road. Go back to your previous work, look at what you have created and to reignite that lost spark.

Sometimes, even looking at the work of other fellow designers, can inspire you to break the block.

Build a portfolio

As a digital marketing company in Ahmedabad, we always ask for a portfolio of work from candidates who wish to work with us.

Every designer must have a well-presented and updated portfolio consisting of their best works, adding any testimonials they’ve received from their clients. A portfolio is a sneak peek into a designer’s brain and an overview of his/her design style and language. A beautiful and thought-out portfolio makes you stand out and increases your chance of getting the job or project.

Be open to criticism

You cannot make everyone happy. No matter how much thought, hard work and creativity you’ve poured into a project, there will be naysayers.

But not all feedback is negative. In Fact we believe that all feedback has at least 1% truth in it. Some of this can be constructive and help you grow as a designer. Instead of blanket rejecting all feedback, accept, listen, and take in the bits that can help you improve. It also helps one show their intent to grow, ego-lessnes regarding their own work and a willingness to try new things in their profession.

Always seek an advance while freelancing

Graphic designing is one of the many jobs which has the benefit of working from home. But with remote jobs, there comes along with it challenges of not being paid in full for the job done.

Clients may offer you tasks, assignments or even seek samples of your work before green lighting the project.

But it is important to be assertive and inform the other party about your terms and conditions. One of which should be to get paid at least 50% of the total project cost in advance. Genuine clients who appreciate your work will agree, and it ensures both the parties fulfil their part of the contract, now that a monetary transaction has taken place.

ALWAYS Stay curious!

Never shy away from asking questions, trying to find new things, and learning new skills. Because curiosity may have killed the cat but it definitely helped the designer become better one day.

Before working on the design, the designer should always go back to the client to clarify any doubts he/she has in their mind. It’s true sometimes it feels like only a NASA scientist can decipher what the client wants, but asking as many questions will always help.

BONUS TIP : Don’t be afraid to push yourself outside of your comfort zone! Keep learning!

If you are a budding graphic designer who’s looking to work on some elevated ideas with a bunch of cool folks and cooler clients, drop us your work portfolio and CV at hr.florafountain@gmail.com. And if you’re among the ones looking for such creative minds and professional graphic designers in Ahmedabad to work for your brand, drop us a hola on hello@flora.ffteam.in.

Categories
Digital Marketing Agency

Tap into your loyal customer base & boost sales with remarketing in digital marketing

The smooth & delicious Cold Brew is back.
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No, we haven’t pivoted into selling coffee from being a creative advertising agency in Ahmedabad or a digital marketing agency!

But, we’re sure that the above text did remind you of having seen something familiar, either as a text message, email or push notification on the phone. This is an example of a brand trying to lure back its existing customers to keep shopping with them regularly.

This is the brand ‘remarketing’ itself to stay relevant, maintain a loyal customer base and keep the sales going. The example here is of a prominent Indian coffee brand pitching one of its popular summer brews as soon as the weather started getting hotter.

Sleepy Owl is celebrating summer with Cold Brew on discount

BUT, WHAT IS REMARKETING?

Remarketing is a type of marketing activity that focuses on consumers who have previously shown interest in the brand. This interest could be in the form of a visit to the brand’s website, following it on social media marketing, or clicking on any of its ads online.

The idea behind remarketing is to reach out to the most receptive audience and utilize that interest towards the company’s goal like boosting sales with digital marketing. At the core, rekindling the audience’s interest and drawing them back, has more chances of conversions and helps the brand build a loyal audience base.

And before unravelling how to increase sales through digital remarketing, it is important to talk about retargeting.

REMARKETING VS RETARGETING

Remarketing is sometimes considered retargeting. Yes, they do sound eerily similar and both help to boost sales with digital marketing, but there is a slight difference.

Retargeting is usually done to serve ads across various platforms, such as social media and Google Ads Network, to potential customers based on their past interactions on digital mediums with the brand.

Remarketing is reaching out to users and website visitors through messages and emails, by making a sales pitch, with the help of the contact information shared by them while subscribing or while making a purchase earlier.

However, over the years, remarketing has become an umbrella term, of which retargeting is a part alongside the many other marketing activities which engage existing customers and previous visitors.

So how to increase sales through digital marketing targeted to the present customer base?

How to increase sales through digital remarketing

Let us understand this using an example of a remarketing activity that Flora Fountain performed to boost sales with digital marketing as the top digital marketing agency in Ahmedabad for one of our ecommerce clients.

Suppose, Sujith visited www.falguni.shop, the ecommerce website of Falguni Gruh Udhyog, a well-known farsan and snack store in Ahmedabad. He made some purchases and chose to get them delivered to his friend living in New Delhi.

Now, to complete the purchase, Sujith is required to create a profile on the website, hence providing his email ID and contact number. Secondly, for the delivery to be successful, he will be required to provide his friend’s information, like name, address, email ID and contact number.

Jump to a week later. Both Sujith, who is a direct customer for www.falguni.shop, and his friend, an indirect consumer, receive an email that looked something like the one below:

 Falguni Gruh Udhyog, a famous farsan and snack store in Ahmedabad

While Sujith ignored the email, it piqued his friend’s interest and later that day, the indirect consumer, ended up visiting the ecommerce website and making a purchase.

And that is how to increase sales through digital marketing or remarketing to be specific! This way you too can boost your sales from digital remarketing.

TYPES OF REMARKETING

You can increase sales through digital marketing with any of the following strategies:

EMail and SMS Remarketing

Customers who have previously purchased anything from the brand’s website or subscribed to the newsletter are the target of this strategy. The brand reaches out to them through tailored text messages or emails with specific offers relevant to them, such as promotions or discounts comparable to what they purchased or showed interest in the past.

This list of customers/users can be segmented too. They can be grouped as:

  • Customers who bought a similar product in the past
  • Customers who added products but abandoned their cart before checkout
  • Customers who looked at a product that wasn’t in stock at the time

This type of focused remarketing increases the chances of conversion.

Display Ads on third-party sites

The most prevalent way to boost sales with digital marketing to previously existing customers is by displaying third-party ads.

It entails reaching out through paid marketing, notably display ads on third-party websites, to users who have visited the brand’s website.

Display Ads on third party sites

There are many platforms to run such display remarketing campaigns, and Google Ads is one of the top and most used platforms.

These platforms track the traffic to the brand’s website using cookies and then target users who visited the site with ads for the products and services of the brand.

Display ads appear on websites that are connected to the ad network the brand is using. If a brand uses Google Ads, then its display ads will appear to users when they visit sites that are part of the Google Display Network.

Push notifications

Push notifications

The take on push notifications on ‘how to increase sales through digital marketing’ is the most interesting and perhaps the most personalised one.

These messages exist for both mobile and desktop devices and can be sent either manually or automatically to contact website or app visitors, whose personal information the brand may not have access to.

For instance, if someone who visited a site or opened an app leaves it halfway, a message can be sent to the user’s browser or device encouraging him/her to return to the site and finish the purchase or revisit the site.

Mobile apps even use this method to create recall, engage with users and pitch offers to the user with the idea of drawing them back to the app and making a purchase.

The best part about it is that no matter what the user is doing on the computer or mobile phone, the message will appear as a pop-up notification on the screen, until he/she either clicks it away or opens it, hence there is no ignoring it.

FAQs

Q1 How Does Remarketing Work?
Remarketing works by using cookies, which are small text files that are stored on a user’s computer or device when they visit a website. These cookies allow brands to track a user’s browsing behaviour and target them with ads as they continue to browse the web.

Q2 What are some benefits of Remarketing?
Boosting sales with digital marketing, increasing conversions, enhancing brand awareness, and improving targeting, are a few benefits of Remarketing.

Q3 How does remarketing impact consumer privacy?
Remarketing relies on the use of cookies to track user behaviour, which has raised concerns about consumer privacy. However, most remarketing platforms allow users to opt out of seeing targeted ads or delete their cookie data if they choose to do so. Additionally, many remarketing platforms adhere to industry standards for data privacy and provide transparency around their data collection practices.

Q4 What are the best ways to increase sales through digital remarketing?
Some of the best practices for remarketing include:

  • Defining your target audience
  • Creating targeted messaging and ads
  • Using compelling ad creative
  • Highlighting your USPs and encouraging CTAs
  • Setting a frequency to avoid overexposure and ad fatigue
  • monitoring and optimising your campaign performance

In Conclusion

Remarketing can be a powerful tool for brands looking to boost sales with digital marketing strategies targeted at previous customers.

Sounds interesting? Getting ideas about how your brand can benefit from remarketing? Get started by dropping us a “hi” at hello@florafountain.in.

Get the best digital marketing company in Ahmedabad, India to back you and your brand in this crowded marketplace that is the Internet.

Categories
Social Media

5 Lesser Known Features Of Instagram to Make Any Business Stand Out

Everybody is on Instagram! With 1.386 billion people actively using the platform every day, it is the 4th most used social media platform in the world. According to us at Flora Fountain, one of India’s top digital marketing companies, Instagram is no longer just a social media platform to post pictures and videos, but an ever evolving people’s platform where people can connect, interact, stream and even shop.

And for a business to make the most out of it, here are 5 interesting but lesser known features that Instagram’s product team came up with in 2020-2021.

The Audio search tab

Everyone is reeling aka scrolling through reels. It’s true! Close to 100 million daily active users in India consume content on reels every day. It has also brought back into limelight many musical classics and become a deciding factor in new songs trending.

But the challenge was that people couldn’t recall the actual names of the songs. Now with a new search feature called Audio in the search tabs of the Explore section, anyone can simply type in either the lyrics of the song or the name of the artist and find the audio clip and its many variants on Instagram.

Instagram Audio Search Tab Reels Feat

Further, users can also see the many reels made using this specific audio clip and even use them for their own content. How does this help businesses and professional pages? The social media experts at Flora Fountain, the best digital marketing agency in Ahmedabad, say that by using popular or viral song clips on the reels, the chances of the reel ranking higher on the explore pages of people consuming similar content increases, and it becomes easily discoverable to more people on the platform.

Text translation in stories

As per Statista figures from October 2021, India has 201.1 million active users on Instagram. Instagram supports 9 Indian languages on the app for posts, stories, etc.

Now, to ensure all its viewers get to explore, see and understand what people around the world are talking about on the platform, no matter which language they use, Instagram had launched Text Translation on Stories in July 2021.

Text-Translation-on-Storie

How does this work? Every time someone sees a story with an overlayed text in a language that is different from the one set in their app, Instagram will show a “See translation” notification on the top left corner. Once users tap on the option, they will be presented with a translated panel. This feature currently supports 90 languages.

This update can be useful for brands operating in global markets. Instagram users all around the globe can now translate and understand the written text in the Instagram stories of their favorite brands. It already had this feature for its post captions, profile bios and even comments, but not many might have noticed or talked about it.

Words to Text Subtitle Sticker

Okay, now this one feature has us very excited! The words to text feature sticker on Instagram stories changes the way stories and reels are viewed. Known as caption stickers, this feature turns verbal speech into text and displays it on the screen as the video and audio plays along.

Think about it. People who can watch reels in public! Just by turning off the sound! And still not miss much of the action. Of course it is also super helpful for people who have hearing disabilities, who can also enjoy reels without any audio cues.

IG-Stories-Captions

Businesses and professional pages can reach out and engage with more people through this feature, and make their content more interesting. While this feature is officially available in all English-speaking countries, it is still being beta-tested in India and other big, non-English speaking markets.

Instagram Keyword Search

One of the subtlest, low-key yet important features to have launched on Instagram is the Keyword Search.

Now this feature is going to revolutionise the way people look for and consume content on Instagram. Earlier, if someone wanted to look for content on bridal jewellery, they’d have to search for content with hashtags such as #bridaljewellery. Due to this, a lot of interesting content that may not have used the right hashtag stood the chance of missing out.

Instagram-keyword-Search

But with Keyword Search (yes yes, very much like Google Search), people can simply search for the content they wish to see using the key words or phrases and the results show everything from posts, reels, videos, even if they don’t have the specific search phrase as a hashtag in their caption.

Instagram Guides

What are Guides? Exactly… This feature didn’t create much of a flutter, despite having a huge potential in changing and improving the engagement game on the platform.

Guides are article-like posts, which include various Instagram posts or captions, products or photos, and videos. It’s a creative functionality for accounts and creators wanting to recommend a food, products, services, tips etc. to their followers.

Instagram-Guides

Businesses can curate a complete range of their products and promote it in the form of recommendations. Brands can promote their services or products by smartly embedding them with well written descriptions and titles.

Now, these guides do not have any new piece of content, but are just existing posts curated into a structure.

Further, when an account posts a guide, it doesn’t get featured on the timeline of its followers like Reels or IGTV used to do. Instead, these guides needed to be promoted via stories and DMs for people to click on it and open.

But with our experience as one of the best social media agencies in Ahmedabad, we say WHAT’S THE LOSS IN DOING IT anyway?

Now that you have ‘DISCOVERED’ these interesting features of Instagram, which could help your business grow online, get started now! Or, you can get the experts at Flora Fountain to do the job efficiently and effectively. Drop us a hello on hello@flora.ffteam.in today to know how.

Categories
Social Media

Advertising on Social Media: Why you need a separate game plan

Who would have thought that the platforms created to let people share stories from their lives through pictures and videos would turn out to be such great tools for audiences to discover new products and services and for brands to find these new audiences. And the pandemic has only made it more so!

It is time to go deeper into the social media rabbit hole.

Social media marketing and social media advertising. Always knew they were different, but didn’t know who to ask? Read below for some insights from Ahmedabad’s best digital marketing agency!

First things first, social media marketing is purely organic activity, which involves posting pictures, publishing stories, responding to comments and inquiries on messages and sharing the posts in various groups and communication channels.

While social media advertising comprises all paid marketing activity on various social media platforms through the means of sponsored posts and boosts, done over and above the usual social media marketing activity such as posting and creating stories.

While there is an overlap between the two in terms of results and goals, advertising on social media is a different ball game altogether, with targeted budgets, a keener understanding of target audiences, and a smart selection of the content that should be boosted.

Because of the difference in strategy and skills required for the two, the top advertising agency in Ahmedabad suggests that a mere social media strategy or calendar does not cut it for a brand. Serious brands must have a separate game plan for the two. Read on to know why and everything else about social media advertising.

WHY ADVERTISE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media advertising is an all-encompassing format of marketing for a brand. Since social media is a place where the people are a bit chilled out, it gives marketers the opportunity to go out of their way with creativity to make their brand stand out.

The regular advertising in the digital world includes the usual suspects, like pay-per-click ads, website display ads, video popup ads, digital billboards, etc. But social media has promotions and boosts, which offers them great flexibility in tweaking the audience, its reach perimeter, the budgets, and putting a pause or restart as per the brands requirements.

Even the best digital marketing agencies in India believe that organic reach is hard to achieve, hence if a brand has the bandwidth and resources to spend, they must consider social media advertising for quick win and turn around.

HOW TO ADVERTISE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Different platforms have different ways to let businesses and individuals promote themselves and their services to a large swathe of potential customers with interests that align with what they sell.

Listed below are the various kinds of paid promotions a brand can run on different platforms.

Twitter Promotions

With Twitter Promote, the Twitter algorithm automatically promotes Tweets to the brand’s specified audience. It promotes the first 10 daily organic Tweets that pass the Twitter quality filter. It also promotes the brand account to attract new followers.

Marketeers can focus on up to 5 interests or metro locations, and let Twitter do the rest. Unfortunately, with this feature, marketers can’t choose which Tweets to promote. (That’s why creating great content on a regular basis for every platform is important).

Facebook Ads


Facebook Ads
With over 2.45 billion monthly active users, Facebook is popular across many demographics. Just as many teenagers use Facebook as their parents—and seniors are quickly catching up. With ads, brands can direct users to its Facebook Page or the website as a part of the sales funnel. One such great form of advertising is Carousel ads on Facebook timelines.

Carousel ads work well to showcase different features of a product, or to explain a step-by-step process. They’re also a great way to present multiple products or services.


Showcase a Variety of Products
Sometimes, brands can showcase a variety of products in a single carousel chain, and every picture can have a customised purchase or inquiry link. This way, it can not only be a great sales and data collection tool too.

Instagram Promotions

Instagram is most popular with millennials, they say. Well, this platform is popular with people of all generations. Instagram has millions of Gen Z and GenX too, who create and consume content in the form of posts, reels, videos and stories.

Instagram currently has over 1 billion active users, a large majority of them using the app on their mobile phones. What’s interesting is that 71% of their demographic are users who are under the age of 35, who spend an average 53 minutes per day.

And what more, post the pandemic, where online sales have taken off and crossed the stratosphere already, it was found out that 80% of consumers use Instagram to help them decide on a purchase.

Just like Facebook, brands can target their ideal viewers with customised targeting options. Create lookalike audiences, define the audience’s behaviors and activities, interests, and demographics.

Seen above is a great example of a carousel ad on Instagram, that blends in smartly with the other content on the feed of the Instagram users.

Instagram Promotions

YouTube Promotions

Let us start by sharing a startling fact about this video streaming giant. YouTube is the second most visited site on the internet, and netizens consume close to 6 hours of video content every day.

Advertising on YouTube requires a Google Ads account, using which it uniformly helps brands create ads on multiple spots on the YouTube streaming page.


YouTube Promotions
The different types of ads on YouTube include short clips that play before the actual video, banner ads that get displayed on top of the playlist and clickable links that display in the corners of the screen.

Brands can set their budget and target the desired audience on specific YouTube channels. There’s no minimum price to run an ad – and brands can change their ads, targeting and budgets at any time.

LinkedIn Boosts

LinkedIn is much more business-oriented than other social networks in this post. It offers targeting options based on professional qualifications like job title and seniority.

Single images, videos, or carousel ads are all different options for sponsored content advertising on LinkedIn.


LinkedIn Boosts
Brands that are looking to target talented individuals to join their workforce, hiring agencies that have a large number of positions to fill, or companies who wish to talk about their achievements and attract more followers whose interests align with their brand, ideally choose LinkedIn Boosts. It has been noted that boosting on LinkedIn costs way more than its peers.

Get started with Flora Fountain

The team of experienced digital advertising and social media marketing experts at Flora Fountain have paved the path to success for many local and national brands to tap into a large swathe of unexplored audiences online, especially on social media.

Drop us a line here and let us invite you over for a cup of coffee and a riveting conversation on your brand’s future online.