Facts about Instagram. What you should already know in 2017.

Posted On January 27, 2017 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Social Media /

When a brand contacts an advertising agency to start doing some work on social media, they almost always want to have a presence on Facebook and Instagram. Then, they’ll analyze if being on Snapchat is worth it or not. But Instagram is definitely on the scene, for sure. That’s because brands know it’s kind of a big deal due to its super high engagement rate. Of course, that level of engagement is only reserved for brands that actually know what they are doing. Aren’t sure you are one of them? Here’s a little piece of advice for you to crack it down.

Hacks to crack Instagram in 2017

Always keep in mind your brand identity and concept. As in any other social media platform, your brand spirit should be your bible. Based on your communication strategy, decide what concepts are you going to spread this month, and then work on your creativity and your pictures.

Instagram is not for crappy pictures. Bad ones won’t even stand a chance, they’ll be ignored. Work on your composition, on the structure, and on your color palette. Try innovative formats like triptychs.

Hashtags should be relevant. There are people who use tons of hashtags with no meaning or common sense at all. You can try several hashtags to see which of them are suggested by Instagram for achieving a higher reach.

As we said before, crappy pictures are not allowed if you want to succeed. So quality matters a lot. Trying to make your pictures more appealing by using filters or frames is easy if you use apps like Afterlight, that provides you with more options than Instagram.

Posts should be regular. It’s not going to be effective if you post just once in a while, or when you feel inspired enough. You should work on your calendar to cover at least 3 times a week.

Get out of your box. Forget about the old advertising way, when you just showed your products and models using them. Content should be relevant and likely to be shared by your followers. Quotes, drawings, videos, and gifs are more than welcome.

Follow your followers. If you want your followers to be engaged, you should be engaged too. Follow some of your followers, perform searches, like, comment and share what’s matching your brand identity and your followers’ interests.

Of course, inspiration and focused creativity are a must to Instagram. When you have a lack of those, just browse a little bit through your favorite brands and competitors, to open your mind and take note of some great successful ideas.

The different levels of online communication. Creating your own maze at a new Westworld.

Posted On January 24, 2017 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Online Marketing Tips, Social Media, Strategy /

Robert Ford creates this strange fictional world when people can do anything at all, with no judgments, and no law. Finding who we really are is the objective. And Westworld allows people to solve their maze in life. This also happens in the real world. It happens to you, to us, to everybody. We are all looking to find our path. But what happens when we live more in the online world than in the real one? At Lis7o, we think everybody starts walking through their online maze too. So creating different online mazes for different targets must be the key to making content relevant and engaging nowadays, right?

When the mysterious man dressed in black wants to find the maze, he tries to go deeper in the Westworld game. Well, in our world we don’t really have to because we are already swimming in the game. The game is all around us. It’s like a matrix, but a real one. And we are all blinded, searching the internet and the networks for our true meaning.

Just a few are searching for their way out, but they continue to fall in the same matrix all over again. Our lives pass by day after day navigating on social media, collecting likes, and giving away all of our personal data and our private moments, and so on. So, why won’t brands take advantage of it?

The new communications paraphernalia opens a lot of opportunities for creating mazes in different channels. A Facebook maze, an Instagram maze, a Snapchat maze, and so on. And of course, they should all be interconnected. Social media is substituting real life, so the digital experience should be that real. We need to become the masters of the game, we have to play our role of creative directors of this Westworld, like Anthony Hopkins’ character does.

So what does all of this mean? How do we become the masters of this game? There are at least two levels in online communications. If you just publish content but you don’t have a real strategy you’re playing on the first level. If you assign a more profound meaning to online communications, creating a “real life experience” for your clients, then you’ve solved your own maze.

You’ll have an army of content managers, online strategists, and marketers available to fight, but you’ll have to keep them up to date and trending, or the story will be old and nonsense and nobody will want to play with your brand anymore. They’ll just choose another story, another maze.

Create appealing and compelling stories that engage your customers like if they were in real life, get real life insights and work on them until you’ve turned them into an online experience. Sometimes, like Dolores, we’ll have some blanks, but nevermind, on the next day, we’ll continue to play again the same game, with a happy smile on our faces.

As William once said: “this world is exactly like the one outside. A game, one to be fought, taken, won.”

5 keys to success with content marketing: the power of a good story.

Posted On January 20, 2017 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Online Marketing Tips, SEO, Social Media, Strategy /

Surely you’d prefer to follow a story, rather than the same classic advertising email marketing or “call now” ad. At least, we do. That’s the main reason why content continuum is the key to acquiring some marketplace advantages. And what if that content is generated just by a regular user like you? The power of a good story is so much stronger than any other traditional content. Great content with which the reader can connect is even better than the generic one generated by brands. If you can achieve that, you’re all set up.

Compelling stories told by great brands serve both readers and marketing departments. If you read about content marketing you’ll find out that the 5 keys to success are the following ones.

The 5 keys to content marketing success

Relevant and useful content, easy to share and deploy across social channels, email marketing, blogs, etc. Your strategy should be 360°, a holistic way is required.
Customer-centric personalized content. Personalization will make your audience feel they’re being valued by your brand, and to get an experience that will not equal any other content at all, ever. At least if you do it well!
User-generated content. We talked about this previously. If you see a friend of yours, or a friend of a friend, or even someone to whom you will likely feel identified, you’ll be more impacted than with any other content.
Effective trending publishing techniques. That means you have to consider what’s positioning better for each channel in which you’re sharing your content. For instance, videos and streaming perform better on Facebook and Instagram. Same happens with a gif format. New innovative formats are also welcome, like triptychs on Instagram (content that is divided between three pictures and posted individually, getting as a result just one complex image).
Content should be continuous. We talked about a continuum because you have to build a relationship with your clients. If you stop talking to them, they’ll forget about you, or worse, they’ll feel betrayed.

A good content strategy will also help you in many other aspects, like performing better on SEO, in order to gain more traffic and better position on Google or to reach more new prospects. We’ve seen statistics that talk about content generation as the most successful strategy to improve SEO (57% of the brands that took the survey).
The goal is engaging your consumers so badly that they’ll be looking forward to hearing from your brand, not as much as from their friends, but at least more than from your competitors. It’s all about taking care of the digital experience they’ll get, that finally will be far more important than the product itself, or even its price.

2017 UX trends. What’s the scenario for this new year?

Posted On January 19, 2017 By l7copro In Strategy, Web Design /

AI, VR, and Chatbots will be the next trending technologies this year. We’ve been digging dipper to find out how they are going to impact on UX designs, so here’s a list of what we’ve found out.

2017 UX Design Trends

1 – Design for mobile. Mobile will still be trending, so every interface is going to be designed with mobile devices in mind. This is no news, but what will be new in 2017 is thatthe old web interfaces will be evolving into mobile, because no one wants their users to learn different interfaces for each device they use.

2 – Conversational UX. With the rise of chatbots and messengers, design will be oriented to learn new stuff for their needs. Based on a study run by Statista, we use 5 apps per day in average, and at least one of them is a messenger app. As there are endless opportunities and new ways of interaction with users, this kind of artificial intelligence will become the norm. This is a designer’s new field to explore and innovate with.

3 – Users ID and conventional passwords will be extinguished. We don’t know for sure if this year, but they’ll start abating. Taking advantage of geolocalization, voice recognition, biometrics and many other technologies, authentication will become easier and faster.

4 – VR has a great potential. Not only in gaming and traveling fields, but also in many others like the medicine industry. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are on the trend for 2017, with a big impact on visual design and interaction.

5 – Autonomous vehicles. Most people will feel safer if they have to cross the street while there are autonomous vehicles, instead of human drivers. It seems even drivers will want their cars to have autonomy. So, we’ll start to see some brand new autonomous designs this year.

6 – Beyond screens. Designing for speech (in the case of conversational UX), or designing for any other new technology without screens, is a challenge. We’ll start going beyond visual, so what we should have into account, is that no matter the channel, we are designing for people. As Golden Krishna says “The best interface is no interface”.

There’ll be plenty of progress going on in 2017 so if you don’t want to miss out on anything, there’s something you should definitely do (besides following Lis7o) – attend tech conferences! If that’s your thing, then we’ve found an article by Fabricio Teixeira, that names some of them. Here’s a list of the ones that already scheduled for this year:

Interaction 17, February 3–8, New York, NY, United States ✈
World Information Architecture Day 2017, February 18, 65 locations ✈
Convey UX 2017, February 28 — March 2, Seattle, United States ✈
UX Australia, Design Research 2017, March 9, Sydney, Australia ✈
iA An Event Apart:
- April 3–5, Seattle, United States ✈
- May 15–17, Boston, United States ✈
- July 10–12, Washington DC, United States ✈
- August 28–30, Chicago, United States ✈
- October 30–November 1, San Francisco, United States ✈
- December 11–13, Denver, United States ✈Summit 2017, March 22–26, Vancouver, Canada ✈
UX Immersion: Interactions, May 1–3, Portland, OR, United States ✈
UXLX: User Experience Lisbon 2017, May 23–26, Lisbon, Portugal ✈
UX London 2017, May 24–25, London, United Kingdom ✈
UX Scotland 2017, June 7–9, Edinburgh, Scotland ✈
UX Strat 2017, June 15–16, Amsterdam, Netherlands ✈
Design & Content 2017, July 17–19, Vancouver, Canada ✈
UX Week 2017, August 29 — September 01, San Francisco, CA, United States ✈
Interact 2017, September 25–29, Mumbai, India ✈
EuroIA 2017, September 28–30, Stockholm, Sweden ✈
Interaction South America 2017, November, Florianópolis, Brazil ✈

2017 will be the year where will see new features and solutions for enterprise users and consumers of the mobile experience. It’s up to you to be on the trend and to plan your strategy to take advantage of this clues on the following twelve months.

5 types of social media content that will perform perfectly

Posted On December 5, 2016 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Online Marketing Tips, Social Media, Strategy /

If you manage your own social media, you’ll surely run out of ideas at some point. Of course, if you check your insights you’ll find out some posts are performing better than others, and you’ll realize some types of content are better than others. But when it comes to really crack social media, you need to renew your content at every step.

Drivers to sales will not remain always the same, and innovative content will guarantee your engagement rate powers remain up.

So here are some ideas for you to try next time:

Snapchat stories. We’ve already talked about Snapchat tactics in a previous post. Your aim should be user generated content. And how could you start working towards that objective? Filters, stickers, and of course real-time video. If you’re not already working on Snapchat, take into account maybe you’ll have an advantage being one of the first in your field to get into. According to a New york-based research firm, L2, only 70% of businesses have Snapchats accounts. Just picture your strategy and start trying. Geo-targeted filters, drawings, behind the scenes content, the blend you like the most. It’s all matter of trying in a new social media network.

GIFs. They are a fun alternative to static content. Performing very well, they’ll allow you to easily tell a story, educate your clients about anything, and add some dynamic to your brand image. You can take a look at some of the brands that are already using a .gif strategy, like https://twitter.com/trello. If you want to create your own GIFs (and that’s our suggestion) you can do it using lots of web tools, like http://giphy.com/create/gifmaker.
Infographics. Less is more. If you want to publish lots of data, you’d better don’t post just text. You know the saying: “An image is worth a thousand words”. Sometimes an image is not enough either. But you can mix them together, and you’ll get more attention. Images + text = infographics! Try canva.com to build your own.

Cinemagraphs. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find this kind of GIFs, that will show a static image with only some part of it moving. It’s a more artistic kind of media, that will require a more experimented designer, but it’s worth the effort.
Streaming. Everyone is streaming right now! At least many, many users are, so we are positive it will work for brands too. It’s a more intimate experience and people we’ll feel they are getting exclusive content. Also, people spend more than 3x more time watching a live video compared to a traditional uploaded video. And of course, Facebook is rewarding this by prioritizing streaming on their feed. So isn’t it worth trying? Streaming via Facebook or Instagram. Try it out!

Let us hear your experience when you give a chance to these 5 types of social media content. Try – measure – and retry with something else. You know this is an ever evolving context. It would be good if you follow the wind and evolve yourself, right? No more BS!

For marijuana businesses. How to market your cannabis brand?

Posted On November 22, 2016 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Online Marketing Tips, Strategy /

Everyone knows the news about marijuana for recreational use, that has been recently legalized in 8 states + DC in the US. And even when marijuana for medical use has already traveled a long journey since it’s healing abilities were discovered in ancient China, there’s still the stoner stigma. That prejudice implies that if someone uses marijuana, then he or she is a stoner, or a junky. Most of us are already beyond that stereotype, but lots of people aren’t.

In a now easier-to-navigate environment, overturning those stereotypes shouldn’t be that hard for marketers. In fact, every brand in the USA is thinking of the advantages they could get from the new regulations. Marijuana has been legalized for recreational use in California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada, and we believe that if you’re selling to people in those states, whether you are a marijuana business or not, you should be wondering what to do, how to make the most of this.

Take Constellation Brands (Corona beer and Svedka vodka) and what they are doing as the perfect example. They are thinking of including cannabis in their alcohol beverages, trying to jump in an industry that’s about to explode.

So let’s see some tips so you too can make the most of all the buzz:

Make negative associations to marijuana go away. Don’t you ever use marijuana slang. Words like “weed” and “pot”, or phrases like “getting stoned” or “getting high” are not suggested. If you’re marketing cannabis products for recreational use, build your message around a certain type of lifestyle, not about slang.
It’s not necessary to show a leaf. Perhaps you’d be more likely to share an image that reminds of the experience that you could get consuming your marijuana product. There’s no need to show the old image we are all used to. A more sophisticated approach can go a long way.
Participating in conferences and expos in the field. You’ll learn a lot and you’ll be able to exchange practices with other businesses like yours.

Of course, you should be careful when it comes to marketing cannabis. As we said before, marijuana has been legalized in most states, but not at a federal level. We’ve come a long way, but up to date only 59.3% of people in the US lives in a state where cannabis has been legalized, according to MJBizDaily. So certain laws and regulations against marijuana selling and advertising still apply.

Here are our suggestions:

Focus your communication on adults. Segment your target for 21+.
Don’t target people out of the states that are pro marijuana.
Be aware of Google, Facebook, and Instagram regulations.

Whether you are a marijuana grower, dispensary, distributor, or if you are part of the bigger ecosystem created by marijuana, (that involves lighting, fertilizers, hydroponic, etc), we are sure you have to make the most of the new regulations, and begin right away ramping up your efforts in marketing. So start your engines, and go!

Pic copyright: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/16343004819/

When you know you are targeting Millennials, and you don’t know anything about them.

Posted On November 8, 2016 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Strategy /

Everyone talks about the Millennials, but they hardly know anything about them. “Millenials” is a marketing category that usually covers young people from a certain age (20 to 35), who use the internet a lot, and that’s it, that’s all the knowledge we have. There are myths, there are assumptions, but really, who are they? Perhaps we should dig a little deeper to understand what hides behind this blurry term. First, let’s look into what most of us already know, and then we’ll dive a little more in their minds.

What we already knew:

Digital

They are all in in the digital world. They see more movies through the internet or Netflix than on TV. They are addicted to their phones and apps. Most of them can’t live without their cell phone for a whole day, and if they do, they’d for sure feel very weird.

Multi-device / Multi-tasking

The center of attention for them is not just one. They can follow up and be updated about lots of things, and this trait reflects on to every other aspects of their lives. They can multi task at everything, including work.

Social

Of course social life is important. Have you seen the first episode of Black Mirror? Ney Ney? That for sure sums this item up.

Diving a little more

All of the above is what usually said about the Millenials. But those traits are so generic that can be applied to practically anyone today (I mean, who can live without smartphone?) That’s why we need to dive in a Millennial’s mind where we’ll probably find a lot more.

These people have seen their parents struggling to get a good job, to earn an acceptable salary, to keep their job for a long time, and finally to retire and start their real life (and at that point most of them didn’t know what to do, or what they wanted anymore, or they didn’t had the strength). So they don’t want to be 9 to 5 in a cubicle, feeling they are spending their lives in that way. For them, now it’s all about experimenting, sharing, living, it’s all about the “now”.

They want to live where they want
They want to work from where they want
They want to be free to go wherever and whenever they want
They want to be free
They are positive about success. They’ve seen lots of people who succeed working from home or doing what they really love.
They are always opened to better suggestions, new products and services. That is a key factor if you are considering launching something new. Also something to keep in mind if you haven’t launched anything new in a long time (someone else will).
Critic and demanding. Results oriented. They want to get results, not promises because they live today, not tomorrow. They are always willing to provide feedback or reviews, so you should ask them to talk.
They demand customization. They want to be able to have options, and to choose.

If you want to connect with Millennials, as with any other segment, you should dive in their minds as we did. That’s the only way in which you may have success. You should apply this methodology to baby boomers, generation x and z. It’s always a matter of embracing their thoughts and feelings.

Pic copyright: https://www.flickr.com/photos/128185330@N03/17705922131/

Snapchat is not for everyone

Posted On November 1, 2016 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Mobile, Online Marketing Tips, Social Media, Strategy /

Gone are the days when Snapchat was the go-to platform for teen running away from prying eyes. Now, more and more people are interested in the platform’s marketing capabilities – and its developers are working to make it easy for those people to get in. Last month, the company has changed its name to Snap.Inc, and launched their first physical product to the market: a pair of sunglasses with a camera that allows to capture video for 10 minutes, in order to publish it later on Snapchat.

The app now has almost 60 million of active users in US and Canada each day, and that amount is expected to grow by 27% this year. That quantity places it on top of Twitter, with a projected revenue for 2018 of $1.76 billion, according to a forecast from eMarketer.

Yet, even with such an increasing popularity, Snapchat can be tricky and confusing, even for its own users. And although Snapchat has been in the market since 2011, it’s still hard to crack by marketers. They see this social media network as a gold mine, because of it’s large millennial and Gen Z users database, but also as a very tough one, due to its interface and logic. In fact brand stories that only last 24 hours are a challenge for marketers.

So, Snapchat is trying to make it easier for marketers like us to use the platform for our marketing efforts. But how? The platform was not offering lots of advertising and measurement options as other social media networks do. This has all changed now:

They’ve opened and shared their API for programmatic buying, which includes targeting via email matching, performance analytics tools and A/B testing for ads, among other features.
They’ve launched three ad targeting tools: Snap Audience Match, Snapchat Lifestyle Categories, and Lookalike Audiences.
Although at first Snapchat was over protecting users from “creepy ads”, they are now about to cross the fine line, by introducing behavioral targeting, based on user’s activity on the app.

We want to join forces, and so we leave here a piece of advice and some clues for you to solve the puzzle:

Focus on filters. As tags on twitter, Snapchat users are crazy about filters. Special dates in the year and events could be a hint.
Engage users with polls or contests. Just try the traditional A/B screen that we’ve been using for Facebook and you’ll be fine.
Drive traffic into your profile. This could be done by adding your Snapchat account to your Instagram, or by email marketing with a QR code (that’s just an example, you can figure out your own way).
Get users to create your content. Of course user generated content is always better, on every social media network.

No one has really figured Snapchat out, and so leading brands are trying to market on the platform, because as always, the first ones will be the ones to get more revenues. And that’s what this article is about. It’s a matter of deciding if you’re between the leading ones, or if you’ll just wait for them to crack this. What will it be?

Pic copyright: https://www.flickr.com/photos/67683836@N02/16910572286/

The miracles we expect from digital marketing

Posted On October 6, 2016 By l7copro In Online Marketing Tips, Strategy / 1

As we work with different clients, we realize everyone is making the same mistake. They all wait for miracles. And cheap miracles. It’s weird to experience a miracle, and it’s even more weird to get a digital miracle.

Our clients are pursuing digital transformation, and that’s the first step. But when they assign a budget to digital, they automatically set an expectation for ROI. They hope each dollar they invest in marketing will be counted back in a while and will come back with lots of earnings, and they feel disappointed if that doesn’t happen quickly.

They complain to their digital agencies, they fire their CMOs, and they continue to expect miracles from the next ones. Well, buddies, that’s not the key to success. Miracles won’t happen this way. In fact, you shouldn’t be waiting for a miracle at all.

We are tired of explaining that, when you invest in digital, you have to think on your brand’s health on the long term and not just on your sales results for the next period. It’s an old paradigm that has been thrown away by the greatest advertising gurus: promotions vs branding. The lack of a true customer-centered strategy can’t take you to your gold mine. If you don’t care about the perceptions and attitudes the public is experimenting with your brand, you won’t be successful.

Some interesting statistics

Do you know 90% of sales are influenced by digital? Maybe you knew. But do you also know that 80% of sales are performed in real life stores? That must be a statement. Digital should be expected to influence, to impact on evolving customer preferences and behaviors, not to perform sales. It must be a continuous hard work, not just some alternative promotional focus in sales actions. It’s like keeping up with your couple. If you stop communicating, everything between the both of you will die at some point.

Highest performance companies are measuring their digital marketing results in several ways: they take into account not just their revenue, but customer satisfaction, web traffic, content analytics and customer experience, among other statistics. Are you willing to open your mind and include all of those?
We could say digital is still new, and that it’s always changing. But as marketers, we know that advertising and marketing concepts are always changing. We can’t do anything else but suggest you to open your mind and try to think beyond that. If you can adjust your mindset to at least half the speed digital is changing, we’ll assure you’ll be a trending high-performance company in the long-term. And long-term nowadays means just about a year.

Pic copyright: https://www.flickr.com/photos/renaissancechambara/5408612857/

How to achieve Apple’s kind of user’s madness

Posted On September 24, 2016 By l7copro In Mobile, Strategy /

Though Apple has been taken offensives since Steve Jobs passed away, nobody can question it’s still the number 1 brand. At least that’s what millennials say when they rush to keep buying its products, as the launch of the iPhone 7 proved once again.

This feature-based excitement to find out what’s new on the last iPhone has already become a tradition, and we are sure Apple is taking advantage and already working on their next launch, although they have just presented a couple of days ago the new iPhone 7. And what’s new about this last one?

The new iPhone 7 has come with some improvements and new features:

Water resistant.
A dual lens camera system: two 12 mp cameras with a zoom of 10x.
A processor twice as fast as the Iphone 6’s.
Battery that lasts 2 hours more than its predecessor.
25% brighter screen than the previous model’s.
Compatible with Airpods. You can’t plug in your regular headphones, unless you have an adapter.
Bonus track: Super Mario Bros is now exclusive for iOS. Apple has partnered with Nintendo and will offer the game for a minimum price on the iOS store. We still haven’t quite figured out this move, but it must be something like “collecting votes” right?

But what called most of the public’s attention was the new Airpods. What about them?

Weird technology products with no sex appeal haven’t made their way to survival in the market. But Apple did. And we question ourselves. What is the key to what Apple has achieved? We’ve come to an answer: Apple has begun developing jewelry with technology. They build products with sex appeal, that turns technology into items for social acceptance.

Taking out the old headphone jack allowed designers to create a thinner phone with less breaches in performance when it comes to water resistance. But some users have started complaining, because they can’t use their regular favorite headphones, and they feel a little disappointed, as they realized they are becoming more dependable on Apple and their decisions if they want to keep playing on the “I have the last brand new Iphone” world. Apple’s New Airpods cost $160 more above your phone, but they are also a very sexy and stylish widget, right?

It’s a well known story that people have been saving for months, and waiting for hours or whole days in line to get the new iPhone in their hands. And that is not because of technology. Everybody knows that is not the best design Apple is capable of delivering. If there’s something in which Apple is the best, that has to be their iterative work. They’ll continue launching new better versions of the Iphone. And we’ll continue buying, not because of its tech advantages but for the social ritual that the company has built around their products.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” — Steve Jobs

If you are an average company owner you must be wondering: How can it be possible to achieve this kind of user’s madness? Some says it was all because of Steve Jobs and now Apple is going down. But we personally believe it’s all about strategy. Maybe you should start rethinking your product based on our analysis:

Apple’s taking fashion elements and strategy into their technology products. Maybe you can relate your field of work to another one. Look to the great companies, you might find some hints.
If you have a product that is not quite acceptable by society, you should think of a restart. What will be socially acceptable and how can you adapt your product to that matter?
What rituals or beliefs can you create on your product’s environment?

As we said, iterative work is a must, you won’t find the answer from night to day. If that happens, please let us know!

Pic copyright: — imore.com — http://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/larger_wm_blw/public/field/image/2014/09/iphone_6_history_stack_left.jpg