Well, it’s hard to believe, but it’s that time of year again. It’s New Year’s resolution time.
Granted, most resolutions are personal – to travel or read more, lose weight, to be more vocal at work. But companies can have resolutions too. And here at Evolved Media, we’ve already looked back at what we learned in 2016, and now we want to look forward and to lay down some resolutions including what we hope to get better at so that we can provide even better service for clients. Here are our four resolutions for 2017.
1. Express our values as marketers
Recently, the concept of “true marketing” has been on our mind a lot. True marketing is the idea of marketing as a positive force, rather than a commercial one.
It’s marketing spent to educate people about what products do, why they exist, what features they offer, and their potential impact and value for customers. It’s a way of viewing marketing as a service to clients, rather than as something entirely transactional. We truly believe that marketing shouldn’t be about deception but about education. We need to express this clearly as one of our core values.
We also believe in positioning ourselves as effective educators who understand the nature of the products we’re writing about. Our goal is to help people understand the value of products, offering use cases as examples. While every business is different, we should take the time to explain how use cases are adaptable and can fit into an individual set of circumstances at almost any company. This is the type of marketing we want to practice.
2. A comic success
One challenge that we’ve continually dealt with is how to make comics work for marketing. Through Evolved Media’s history, we’ve worked with successful comic artists. They have produced incredible work for us and our clients. But we want comics to become a bigger success and a more central focus of our work.
Our goal is to use comics to draw attention, shed some light on a particular topic, and guide customers to other content that offers further depth. Comics can generate attention using the power of story with characters, dialogue, and plot to explain the general anatomy of a complex topic. Comic content provides a lead-in to more complete explanations in longer form content.
In 2017 we will work hard to emphasize comics as more pivotal aspect of our marketing portfolio.
3. Create moving pictures
At Evolved Media, we’re word people. Our roots are in journalism. We love books and the written word. But by and large, people are visual thinkers. We’ve made great strides in the last few years creating impactful infographics. But what we haven’t done is utilize the full power of video to make our marketing more powerful.
There’s no denying that the world is moving towards video as a preferred form of media. We want to be a part of that evolution, and leverage video to get content across effectively. So in 2017, we want to develop a strategy for various levels and forms of video marketing. It will include everything from how to use short videos to convey one idea as a lead-in to longer content, to highly-produced longer explanatory videos that go in-depth on a topic. In the year ahead we want to offer our clients the right type of video for whatever their needs may be.
4. Finding the right mix
We all use FaceBook and Twitter in a way that blends our personal and professional lives. Our identities, both social and business-related, become blurred. We have connections from both worlds in a single place. We share personal information publicly. Regardless of how you feel about this development, it’s a reality.
And so our goal at Evolved Media is to learn how to become more effective on social platforms where people are generally more engaged in personal activities. Since these are consumer platforms, our work has to be personal, addressing our customers as individuals. And the tone should be light-hearted and fun. We also plan to fully ramp up our use of Pinterest and Instagram so that our work reaches as many people as possible.
So while we don’t plan on exercising more or eating less, we do plan on working harder and smarter to delight our clients. Have a great new year and we look forward to working with you in 2017.
Become a content marketing master in 2017
