Tag: Marketing Trends

These days, everyone with an up-to-date smartphone can create semi-decent photographs. They might be enough to take lovely family photos and food shots for the ‘gram’, but when it comes to your business photography, quality counts. So, are photos taken on a smartphone good enough for business use, or do you need to upgrade your game?

Website

Your website is your business’s shopfront. Giving a bad first impression can put a potential customer off forever, so making sure you’re putting your best foot forward is essential. Blurry, pixelated photos are an obvious no-no, but you might not have thought about optimising image sizes and dimensions to make sure they display responsively and don’t slow down the load speed of your site.

Not only that, but even the best amateur photographer is still just that: an amateur. Lighting, composition, and editing shouldn’t be neglected when the stakes are so high. When it comes to your website, professional photos are the best choice.

Print media

Online photos can be replaced or deleted if required, but once you commit to a print run you’re really committed. That means making sure everything, from the copy to the colours, the fonts to the photographs, are pitch perfect. A badly stretched image, poor colouration, or blurry photograph can be the difference between an impactful piece of print marketing and an embarrassing mistake.

While smartphone images might be good enough used sparingly, if you really have something to show off, a professional photoset is invaluable. Plus, an expert eye on the colour treatment of images being sent to print cannot be underestimated.

Social media

This is one area where smartphones come into their own. After all, social media thrives on images taken in one moment and uploaded in the next. That doesn’t mean the photos can be low-quality; they should still be thoughtfully composed, well-edited and relevant to the message you’re trying to convey.

That’s not to say that professional photography has no place on social media, far from it. Our recommendation is that stories (i.e. images that only last 24 hours, in portrait mode) are perfectly reasonable places to use smartphone photography. However, images that will stay on your feed for longer should be of higher quality, after all, you never know how far back a potential customer might browse in order to help them make a decision about your business.

Professional photography can really tip your business over the edge from slightly homely to glowing and engaging, so the services of a professional photographer should absolutely be something you consider.

2023 has now kicked off in earnest, and we’ve really thrown ourselves back into the swing of things after a busy festive period. As well as our usual projects, we’ve been looking forward at the year ahead, and considering how the landscape of marketing is likely to change and develop over the coming months. With the cost-of-living crisis becoming a global concern, and the battle between social media platforms forever ongoing, here are some of our predictions for 2023 marketing trends.

Shopping styles

Customers are tightening their belts all over the world, and naturally this is going to affect spending habits. There is likely to be a division between personae, which should be considered carefully when planning campaigns. For instance, some consumers will be seeking the best value so they can try to maintain their normal lifestyle and shopping habits, despite rising bills. They are most likely to respond positively to flash sales, bargains and bulk-buys that offer the biggest bang for the smallest buck.

Conversely, there will be some users who will cease impulse-buying and frivolous spending altogether, in favour of more quality-conscious, long-term purchases. These users won’t be easily swayed by low prices and enticing sale signs, they are looking for items that will last longer and/or serve multiple functions. Assurances of longevity and calibre will be of the utmost importance, and a longer consideration stage is more likely. While these customers will take longer to ultimately buy, they aren’t to be neglected.

Influencer marketing crackdown

The undeniable rise of the influencer has already changed marketing as we know it. Last year saw a huge increase in the deployment of the “micro-influencer” as big names began commanding bigger and bigger budgets. We expect micro-influencers to remain popular, as trust in more famous names declines. 2023 has already seen one influencer scandal, as TikTok’s Mikayla Noguiera was called on to apologise for a video that appeared to be misleading about the effects of a L’Oreal mascara. Consumers are becoming savvier about the kind of paydays commanded by influencers with large audiences, and have become less trusting of their reviews and feedback about products. This scrutiny may force influencers to change their approach to more lo-fi production styles to show a more realistic, genuine user experience of the products they promote. There are also calls for advertising standards agencies to take a renewed look at the rules and regulations surrounding transparency in influencer advertising, where loopholes and grey areas abound.

Redefining the identities of social media platforms

After a year where every platform seemed to be promoting video content above all else, Instagram seems to be reeling back this algorithm change (pun intended). Users have long complained that every social media site seems to be trying to merge into one another, and by all accounts Instagram is taking this feedback on board. They have announced a return to emphasis on photos, which is a welcome reversion to the app’s roots as an image-sharing platform. It’s fair to say that the astronomic success of TikTok left the more established social media sites slightly rattled, causing all of them to try and emulate TikTok’s success. Unfortunately, this resulted in a samey, frustrating experience for their users, and only made many of them more inclined to use TikTok in the first instance. While quality video will still be extremely valuable in 2023, a fresh interest in still imagery is not to be underestimated.

Written content – a thing of the past?

While visual content is in its heyday a lot of companies have been left wondering what place written content takes in modern marketing. The fact of the matter is that a lot of companies are neglecting their on-site written content and content marketing in favour of a focus on social media and video. In actuality this provides some great opportunities to be exploited by those with an eye on their content strategies. A regular output of quality blogs, articles and content outreach will be invaluable in 2023, especially while competitors are distracted by multimedia projects. While the best approach to social media will vary considerably from business to business, a strong website with a consistent and thoughtful content strategy is essential for every enterprise worth its salt. The Content Marketing Institute has reported that only around half of businesses have a documented content strategy in place – don’t let your website suffer from poor planning!

Marketing is of the utmost value to businesses, not least when the economy is facing challenges and households are being forced to review their habits. If you need expert assistance to level up your marketing in 2023, get in touch with our team to see how we can help you. We would love to help your business thrive, no matter what the future brings.