Warren Buffet said ‘do not save what is left after spending but spend what is left after saving.’ And who are we to argue with Warren?
If you find yourself at the tail end of this financial year with some leftover pennies in the marketing piggybank, here are some ideas to consider investing in that will put a spring in your spreadsheet and boost business for the new financial year.
Video and animation
No matter what kind of business you run, video or animation is perhaps the most powerful way in which to engage, inform or entertain your audience. Whether it’s been on your wish list for years (but keeps getting pushed to the bottom) or something you haven’t considered before, here are some ways that video can elevate your brand and business.
Promotional/Brand videos
All businesses have a story to tell – of how they began, their purpose, of who they seek to serve and how. Such videos help bring brands to life because we humans connect with video more than any other medium (just ask YouTube).
Since the pandemic hit, we increasingly seek services online aiming to discover as much as we can through clicks and web pages. Video provides potential customers with an easy, engaging (and nowadays essential) way to discover and connect.
Explainer videos or animations
People are also looking online to do or learn things we previously didn’t – how to fix the dishwasher, how to play the piano, how to make pasta sauce (thanks Nat).
If your business has programs or processes that you need to communicate to your customers, video is your best friend. It could be an induction video for new employees, an instructive clip on how your services work, or an explainer animation to better communicate a complicated aspect of your business.
In this example, we look at how renewable energy is stored and dispatched for global consultants Entura.
Check out this and other videos here.
Photography
Do you and your management team have a nice, consistent suite of head shots? Or is it more of a cut and paste scenario from previous positions and outdated linked-in profiles? If it’s the latter, now might be a good time to book in that photoshoot. As a business that designs annual reports, we see our fair share of dated and mismatched exec photos and we’ll be honest, there’s only so much photoshop can achieve 😉
Photography isn’t of course limited to corporate profiles and office environment. If you’ve got new products to feature, campaigns to run or would love to have a library of pics at your disposal for social media, use this time to create those assets.
Your designers will love you for it and you’ll feel better about updating that iPhone profile snap Carol took at last year’s AGM.
Get some inspiration here for some new portraits, event and product photography.
Brand Collateral
From social media assets and style guides to Microsoft templates, there are often tools that Marketing and Comms Managers would love to have at their disposal but which are forever bumped off the list due to greater priorities, lack of time or more recently, pandemic pivoting.
Templates
If you work in an organisation where multiple teams or departments are frequently issuing papers, newsletters, briefs, or memorandums – templates can not only make light work of this but also provide you with the knowledge that they adhere to brand requirements.
Templates take many shapes and forms and should be properly formatted to whatever systems your business uses – Microsoft Office, Adobe suite or your preferred eNews platform (i.e Campaign Monitor).
Social Media Assets and Style Guide
Social media is now a huge aspect of some businesses, regularly sending out branded content across different channels. Interestingly, while most business have a style guide for their core brand and more traditional forms of communication, this does not usually encompass socials.
Similar to a regular Brand Style Guide, a Social Media Style Guide is a set of guiding principles that helps employees tasked with posting content understand the brand and execute it in a way that ensures consistency and integrity. It specifically speaks to the social channels the organisation is active on and can cover categories like captioning, tone of voice, use of imagery, hashtags, all in an overarching strategy that speaks to the purpose of each channel and type of content.
Check out our latest Brand Identity project to see how it came to life.
When it comes to spending that EOFY surplus, the options are endless. It’s a great time to think about those wish list items that don’t always make the cut but would be such a useful tool in your artillery for executing marketing and communications material in the year ahead.
If something in the above list takes your fancy or there’s a design project you’d like to discuss, we’re only a click away.
But for now, god spend – I mean speed 😉