Vertical Video Works for Marketing

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Smartphones never leave the hands of their consumers and rarely do you see people scrolling through their social media horizontally. When video ads first appeared on apps like YouTube, viewers could only watch them if they flipped their phone. When Snapchat tested out vertical video, advertisers saw “up to nine times more engagement!”

Take Advantage of Instagram’s Creative Shop for Video ideas

With over 250 million daily users, Instagram understands the importance of engagement when it comes to social media marketing. With help from their Creative Shop, Instagram shows marketers how to create vertical videos that engage users and consumers.

Answer Questions Using Google Maps

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Google Maps is now allowing you to interact with your consumers when they search for your address. Their new program allows you to answer questions using google maps from mobile users who are using the app.

Outdoor marketers can respond to questions about their business location or other FAQ’s before customers even walk through the door.

How does it work:

1. Search a location on Google Maps
2. scroll down to the “questions and answers” section
3. ask a question or answer one

Do you usually get calls about how to find your business? Google allows business owners to add to the questions and answers to help out your customers. You can even move a frequently asked question toward the top of the thread by clicking the thumbs up icon.

Learn more about Google Maps update here!

Facebook Helps Marketers Amplify Influencers Posts

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Facebook is making things easier for marketers by adding the ability to amplify their influencer’s post. Now when influencers promote your brand on their page or blog, marketers are able to boost that exact post. Marketers can then customize their audience with Facebook’s precise targeting so you can reach your ideal customer for maximum results!

Here’s how it works:

  • A marketing influencer creates a post about a product
  • The creator will check a box allowing the business partner to boost the post
  • Once boosted, the target audience will see that the post originated from the creator, even though the marketer boosted it

Take control of word-of-mouth marketing with brand ambassadors and influencer marketing and let Facebook provide the tools!

The Marketing Undercurrent: Relevant Digital News for Outdoor Marketers

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We’re super excited to launch the Marketing Undercurrent here on the blog.

Our goal is to keep you quickly informed through short videos on new tools and techniques to boost your business and drive leads to your website.

We want to make things simple and Marketing Undercurrent is here to keep you in the know with what’s happening online.

You can read our blog posts at Sage Lion Media or you can check our YouTube channel.

Googles New Feature Will Jumpstart Your Journey of Visual Discovery

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Google image search is a bit of a mess. You’re not really sure where an image will take you when browsing on your phone. Google recently updated their search algorithm to address this problem. Google is now adding badges to some images in their mobile app to help users find exactly what they want.

“These badges will help you uncover images where next steps or more in-depth information is available,”

NOW IN THE BOTTOM LEFTHAND CORNER OF THE IMAGE. YOU’LL SEE A BADGE THAT CATEGROIZES THE IMAGE YOU’RE VIEWING, AS WELL AS TEXT TO HELP CLARIFY THE ACTION YOU CAN TAKE.

So what does this mean for an outdoor marketer?

If you have images on your site, you can help mobile users identify the type of content associated with the image by using appropriate structured data on your pages. According to Google, this helps users find relevant content quickly and sends better-targeted traffic to your site.

For Example:

Click on the badge in the lower left corner of the image to be taken directly to your website where you can learn more about the rod, its features, and most importantly buy it.

How to get started

If you’re publishing products, add Product markup, and for videos, add Video markup. Google’s algorithms will automatically badge GIFs, without the need of any markup. While they can’t guarantee that badges will always be shown, adding the recommended structured data fields in addition to the required fields may increase the chance of adding a badge to your image search results.

Share Your Next Outdoor Video in One Dedicated Space: YouTube

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This mobile-only feature works like a text message thread or email. The plus side, once the video is shared with a contact, you can message directly without leaving the YouTube app. And who doesn’t want to share a video without receiving one? When responding to a video thread the user can press the reel icon and send a video in return.

The feature will be built into YouTube’s share button and lets you select from your phones contact list. You can also get a direct link to share and add new friends to discuss the video with.

The cool thing about this new feature is that instead of copying and pasting links to YouTube videos via text message of Facebook Messanger it does all the sharing in one App.

Check it out yourself at:

And while you’re there check out our YouTube Channel: Sage Lion Media.

Start Talking To Customers With Facebook Messenger

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With more than 1.2 billion people using Messenger every day, the social media powerhouse has decided to take their messenger ads out of beta and launch to the mainstream.

According to Facebook:  “People will see Messenger ads in the home tab of their Messenger mobile app. When they tap on an ad, they will be sent to the destination chosen during ads creation. This can be your website or a Messenger conversation.”

So why is this ad placement useful to outdoor marketers?

Facebook sees this as a way for users to find relevant businesses that are active in the app. At this time, businesses can not directly message users but they can continue a conversation if the user clicks on the ad.

Start a conversation, don’t serve an ad.

To really see the benefits of this new service think about creative ways to start conversations not serve ads. For example, engage your target audience by understanding what they would be curious enough to start a discussion. Draw your audience in by showing a photo of the fish you caught on a trip and ask your audience. Want to know how we caught this fish, shoot us a message.
facebook messenger ad example

Getting started with Messenger Ads:

For more details about creative options and availability, visit the Advertiser Help Center.

How To Identify And Organize Your IFTD Trade Show Attendees Before The Show Starts

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It doesn’t matter how good your product is if no one knows it exists. IFTD/ICAST are massive trade shows with lots of shiny doodads begging for attention and lots of qualified trade show attendees. Your success is heavily dependent on pre-event marketing. The more planning and work you do ahead of the show the more attention your product is going to get at the show.

Before we do any major marketing efforts we need to know who is going to be there. Here are some tips for identifying who will be at the show this year:

1) Use a CRM to organize your leads into personas

Prior to any touch points, we need a way to organize our contacts into a CRM. Hopefully, you’ve got a good CRM in place already. If not, we use and love the HubSpot sales CRM. Whichever CRM you use it should do the following:

Segment your audience into personas or segments.

The segments you’d probably want to target for IFTD are:

  • Flyshops
  • Manufacturers
  • Buyers
  • Blog/Media
  • Ambassadors

The big reason we need to segment our audience is so that we can send different content to different audiences. Stat after stat shows the power of personalization on email opens and click-throughs. For example, the tone and content of an email to an Instagram ambassador are going to be different than an email to a buyer from a fly shop.

Track your interactions automatically.


When sending emails or making calls during your pre-marketing phase, you need to keep a record of who you’ve talked to and when. Any good CRM should do this for you automatically.

2) Utilize your existing network

The simplest list to put together is your existing list of clients and contacts. You’re looking for present clients, prospects, and ambassadors. If your sales team has it’s own list of contact consolidate them into one central location.

Don’t start spraying emails to the attendee list. You need to cut it down and plug it into your persona list

3) Trade show attendee registration list

Your second audience is the trade show pre-show registration list. If you’ve never received this information from the show organizers, contact them about receiving or purchasing it. The registration list is an essential source of information for your pre-show marketing efforts.

It’s important not to blast out an email to all these registrations. You need to cut it down and plug it into your persona list above. This way you can deliver specific content to those that match your personas.

So far we’ve relied on existing resources to gather emails. The following two options require a little more legwork to identify attendees.

4) Use Social Media

Another creative way to identify trade show attendees is to monitor social media.

  • Search for hashtags on social networks. Popular tags in the past are #IFTD2016, #ICAST2016 etc.
  • Join groups on LinkedIn (Angling Trade posts a lot of good info on the show)

5) Web Tracking tools

Use tools to monitor mentions on the web like the Moz Fresh Web Explorer. This tool will search the web over the last 4 weeks and look for mentions of the search terms like IFTD.

Once you’ve found a potential contact you will need to try and gather their email. If you can avoid sending an email to info@company.com or something similar. Also, contact forms are often black holes. If you need to find a real person, tools like Hunter.io are perfect for reaching out to small sites and one-person blogs.

Simply enter a site into the tool…

And you’ll get some of the emails associated with the domain. It’s not always perfect, but it’s a good starting point.

Putting the time and effort into your pre-marketing is essential in any trade show marketing plan. Hopefully, these tools and ideas can help you find success at this year’s IFTD show.

What’s So Smart About SMART Goals?

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When we are in the Discover phase of a website build or a Growth Driven Design project one of the first things we do is try to discover a few smart goals. SMART goals are critical for long-term marketing success.

A SMART goal stands for:

  • Specific – Your goal should be unambiguous and communicate what is expected, why it is important, who’s involved, where it is going to happen and which constraints are in place
  • Measurable – Your goal should have concrete criteria for measuring progress and reaching the goal
  • Attainable – Your goal should be realistic and possible for your team to reach
  • Relevant – Your goal should matter to your business and address a core initiative
  • Timely – You should have an expected date that you will reach the goal

Example of NOT a Smart goal

A good set of SMART Goals helps us stay focused on specific tasks we need to complete to reach project milestones.

We looked at a bad SMART Goal above, here are a few good examples from recent projects we worked on:

  • Increase total number of online donors by 15 percent in six months 1,652 in 18 months
  • Double our user session duration from 1:07 (average of combined domains) to 2:14 in three months
  • Increase new and returning web visitors to site by 45 percent in five months- Target by end of May- 26,000 per month

Typically, marketers might have goals for Visits, Contacts, and Customers for the year, quarter, or month and the numbers are closely related to each other. We’ve found that focusing on one of these specific segments gives the clearest vision of success.

  • Visits – You should focus on visits if you are just getting started with your website, or if you already have good conversion rates for visits to leads and leads to customer, but need additional traffic to add some fuel to the fire
  • Contacts – You’ll want to focus on Contacts if you are satisfied with the amount of traffic to your content, but you are not getting enough leads for sales. This is the segment that most HubSpot users focus on
  • Customers – Focus on this If you are getting a healthy amount of traffic to your content, visitors are converting on forms, but the leads just aren’t ready to close into customers

Goals are an essential part of a marketer’s success. Marketing goals are like personal goals you set for yourself. Meeting them makes you feel on top of the world. Effective. Inspired. However, missing your goal by a few customers, contacts or visits can incite just the opposite.

If you’d like to learn how Sage Lion Media can help you get started with an effective inbound marketing strategy, contact us today.

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5 Photography Trends for 2017

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We are well into 2017 and trends for the rest of the year are starting to manifest in unique ways. We have seen trends appear and disappear on Instagram, the same is true with photography.

Color is back

With the rise in Instagram’s popularity over the years, it’s easy to see how filters have become equally popular. Filters that have a vintage look and feel leave a lot to be desired in the realm of color and depth.  Customers are searching for the term color surge specifically looking for images high in color and dynamic range. With this rise in interest in color schemes, color is no longer a component of a picture; it becomes the star.

No Filter

Speaking of Instagram’s readymade filters, Another trend we are likely to see in 2017 is the No Filter trend.  Brands are now taking aspects of photojournalism to utilize in their marketing to relate to a younger audience. The goal of these images is to portray products or a lifestyle in such a way that the audience connects with the brand. This transparent approach to visual marketing allows consumers to connect with brands that best reflect their lifestyle and ideals.

Film is making a comeback

As someone who owns 12 film cameras, I am excited about this trend. Earlier this year, Kodak announced that they would bring a favorite slide film that consumers loved, Ektachrome. The creative process that comes with using film forces the user to understand the fundamentals of their shot from all aspects. When you shoot with film, you don’t have the instant gratification of reviewing your shot and making adjustments.

Virtuality

While new technologies are becoming more and more readily available, it’s easy to see how users will adapt this technology to create new visual trends. A popular trend quickly on the rise are fully immersive photos with 360-degree capabilities. Stitching panoramas together, users can now use their headsets to view these images as if they were right in the environment with the shooter. This trend allows the shooter creative freedom to utilize everything around them, instead of only what the camera lens could see.

There’s still room for new photographers

With visual content consumption always on the rise, there is a need for new photographers. Photography equipment is becoming more and more user-friendly which allows consumers an opportunity to capture the moments in their life that are important to them. With travel also becoming more affordable, photographers can venture out and see more of the world while focusing on their photography skills. If you haven’t already done so, check out our technical guide on shooting resort photos.