Sustainability is top of mind with consumers. They have more choice than ever on where to spend their money. So more than ever, companies are focusing on sharing their sustainability efforts with their customers. Does sustainability affect consumer buying? The data says yes.

ESG (Environmental, social and Governance) are the criteria used by companies to build value. They organize business objectives around sustainability-focused risks and opportunities. Initiatives can include customers, supply chain, and even employees of a company. So get started! Basically, start by tracking your company’s impact on the environment. Then, measure your sustainability. Finally, share the results. This process can influence consumer interest in your company, your products, and your services.

Sustainability: What is ESG?

The environmental, social, and corporate governance framework highlights three areas where companies can track their sustainability. This can illustrate their impact on the environment.

• Environmental: Does your company strive to preserve the natural world? Chiefly, talk to your consumers about how you are addressing climate change, pollution, water management or greenhouse gas emissions. This information could take the form of a Sustainability Report at the end of the year. We do this for our client Acme Brick every year. You might apply content marketing on your website. Or use social media posts to highlight specific places where your company has excelled.
• Social: Does your company focus on including and supporting a diverse community? Referred to as DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), this set of actions enhances employee engagement and retention. Firstly, this could look like employee spotlight blog posts. Or you can engage the public with PR. Additionally, you might establish and promote programs to broaden your talent pool. Or you could support employees by offering training programs, like our client Diamond Brand Gear does.
• Governance: This aspect of ESG covers topics like cybersecurity practices, corruption prevention and management structure. Indeed, talking about your company’s efforts in these areas reassures clients that your company is solid. It can highlight innovation. Generally, you can share posts on LinkedIn touting an advance your company has made in one of these areas, as an example.

Consumers Want to Buy From Companies That Support Sustainability

As 83% of consumers demand more ESG best practices from companies, 91% of business leaders now believe that their company has a responsibility to act on ESG issues. Conclusion? Obviously, consumers want to follow, buy from, and visit these companies more readily than ever before. And it’s not just consumers that want brands to take on these initiatives. 86% of employees say they’d prefer to work for companies that care about these issues. Sustainability has become one of the top issues that people care about.

Sustainability as a business goal is not a trend. Certainly, it is key to creating meaningful relationships with your customers and your employees. First, make sustainability your company’s business goal. Next, set up programs that support sustainability. Then, track and talk about your success. Therefore, this process is a fountain of content that you can share with your customers. Grow meaningful relationships with them centered on sustainability. And in turn, grow your sales based on your customers’ desire to make financial decisions tied to the social good your company is doing.

Is your brand looking dated or tired? Is it still representing your business the way it needs to? One of our new clients came to us for a social strategy and execution. That is what they thought they needed. But, upon initial discovery, we altogether realized that would be shooting money into the wind. What they needed was really a brand refresh.

How Do You Know When You Need a Brand Refresh?

Examine your brand! This is what we did as a team with this new client. First, we did a deep dive discovery process that included several steps:

• A brand audit laid out all the brand’s existing materials like their website, collateral and social, to see if their branding is still relevant and representative of their current business.
• Internal and external stakeholder interviews uncovered brand insights and allowed everyone to see the business through other’s eyes
• A competitive analysis was conducted of the industry that the brand operates in, and who their competitors are.

The Conclusion? The Brand Needed a Refresh.

There are specific and necessary steps to take in a brand refresh to be thorough. We like to follow this tried-and-true plan when we undertake a company’s very important branding!

1. Project timeline – Stick to it and hold each other accountable. This will keep moving things forward with all eyes on the prize.
2. Brand pillars – Define your vision plus three other very important things. Want to know what those things are? We are happy to share them with you! And our process as well. Just call us!
3. Solicit feedback beyond the leadership team – The more internal buy-in throughout the entire process the more successful an initiative and brand your company will become. Your greatest ambassadors are your employees, so make them part of your branding process.
4. Testing of concepts – Your refreshed brand should connect with both internal and external audiences. So testing the concepts is important to find the clear choice.
5. Roll out plan – A disciplined execution of the branding roll-out plan will make your new brand refresh a success. Whether it’s a new logo, tagline, website, collateral or PR, timing is everything and having a plan is key to making the big splash you want to make.

We look forward to sharing the results of three brand refreshes we are currently working on. Coming to you this fall, y’all.

Successful email marketing can be a cost-effective way to market your business. When done right, you’ll be keeping your brand top-of-mind and become a trusted resource for your customers. They’ll look forward to your emails because you’ll be sharing your knowledge and solving their challenges.

Keeping your audience engaged with email marketing, as a part of your overall marketing strategy, is an excellent way to introduce new products, solve an on-going pain-point for customers, give a tutorial, keep your customers up-to-date about the industry, and more.

How Do You Do Successful Email Marketing?

There is a lot to designing an effective and efficient email campaign to be successful. The most important question to ask yourself: Are you leading with the audience in mind? Everything you do should be from THEIR perspective. It’s for them. Help them. Guide them. Solve their problems.

Then ask yourself: Are you overselling? Your brand and your products do not always need to be the hero in email marketing. Afterall, this is an on-going dialogue you’re having with your customers. Establishing a relationship is a longer-term proposition. Don’t oversell. Again, be helpful. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself: What do I need? What will make my life easier or better?

Getting Started With Email Marketing: Do This Not That

Your email marketing is a fail if it doesn’t contain these four elements. Set yourself up for success by making sure these four things are included thoughtfully in each email you send:

1. Look professional — Make sure the email platform template is set for your brand fonts and colors. Design is key to successful email marketing as well — design a nice header and footer. Link to your social channels in your footer. Stay consistent from month to month with this template and your customers will start to recognize your email and your brand, and look forward to your next email.
2. Have a call to action — What can readers do to learn more? Use a button in your email that links back to your website where the reader will read more, download something, watch a video, contact you for more information or order a product. For instance, if you are linking to a blog post, tease them in the email, but don’t reveal the real scoop…ask them to “Read More” and click the button to go to your website for the rest of the insight.
3. Date and time — When do users want to engage and not unsubscribe? Many email programs like Mailchimp will tell you when the best time is to send emails to be successful. Statistically, Tuesday mornings are the day most people open their emails.
4. Don’t try too hard to sell — Engage your audience and don’t make the email be all your company. Again, be helpful: share hints, tips, tricks. Give away your knowledge and they’ll see you as the industry leader and come to you to solve their problems (with your products or your service.

Most Importantly: Be consistent.

Successful email marketing campaigns provide content to make readers’ lives better. They are informative, not sales-y. Email marketing campaigns provide value, real value, to customers’ lives consistently. Create a schedule using Google Sheets and plan each month’s topic, date, and assign responsibilities. After a while, it becomes easier and easier to stick to your schedule and create smart, thoughtful, nicely designed emails that make your brand the one that customers turn to again and again.

What is an influencer?

Who hasn’t scrolled through an Instagram or TikTok feed and stumbled upon a random person on an amazing vacation, eating a mouth-watering meal, or wearing a fabulous outfit and thought to themselves, “I wish that were me”? As social media has risen in popularity, internet celebrities and influencers in the marketing world have learned to use their influence and followers to promote products and lifestyles. Influencers are content creators who have the power to influence or alter the decisions of others. These trendsetters have become experts at producing effective “subliminal” ads reminding us that we “need” those shoes or we have yet to visit that vacation destination.

Finding your niche

The first step to becoming an influencer is to find your niche. My mother follows other mom influencers, I follow account that are more popular and targeted to teens, and my little brother is obsessed with the guys who do cool trick shots on YouTube. There are a multitude of niches on social media from health/beauty to fashion to travel to lifestyle/relationships. The cosmetic and fashion industry alone is worth more than five hundred billion dollars annually and frequently pays content creators to offer tutorials and testimonials. Companies often compensate travel influencers’ flights, cruises, and hotels in exchange for featuring them in their feed. Influencers are also eager to offer advice to anxious new parents in exchange for compensation and merchandise.  

How is being an influencer a career?

Influencers have to be active and consistent. There are very few days off for content creators. The more popular accounts often post multiple times per day. Companies will pay to have these influencers on Instagram to do giveaways, OOTDs (outfit of the day), or short videos using the product. YouTubers will typically have unboxing videos or use the product somewhere in the video. Anytime you see a product in a video, the person is most likely being compensated for it. 

Why is using an influencer a good marketing strategy?

People like to do what is popular or “trending”. If a TikTok star starts doing something new, chances are good that their fans will follow. Whether that is doing a TikTok dance or buying a pair of jeans that are “the most comfortable pants ever”. Consumers also trust a third party over the company that is producing the product. Social media users choose to follow accounts because they identify and trust the creators. When an influencer recommends a product, it often feels like a friend is recommending it.

Let’s be honest: we used to roll our eyes at influencers dancing on the beach and constantly filming videos in restaurants before we recognized their genius. These creators have a massive effect on modern society through social media platforms. Virtually all companies have begun to use influencers, making them major players in the marketing world.

I get asked what it’s like to work with my mom, the boss of Front Porch Marketing, Chief Rocker Julie Porter. Well, let me tell you. It’s a lot harder than you would expect. Why? Because she expects so much more out of me and she knows that I’m capable of doing almost anything and everything.

Is work easier when your mom is the boss?

A lot of people usually say “oh she definitely lets you slack off” or “oh I bet it’s so easy”, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It adds a lot of pressure on me when I do work for my mom’s company, because I want to do my absolute best in order to impress my mom. I want to live up to her expectations of me. But, it is also very comforting to know that my mom is the boss and CEO. 

The boss always has your back

While she is always challenging and expecting the most out of me I know that she will always have my back and be the most understanding when it comes to work. No matter what, there will always be someone in my corner. She also tends to have a great support system.

She surrounds herself with the very best team members which makes my situation a lot more comforting. Seeing her support all of her employees, and create a successful remote working environment makes it a lot easier and more fun for me to do work for her, and the other Front Porch Marketing team members. I don’t say it a lot but when it comes to working with and for her sometimes, I can be a little excited. While she has taught me a lot about marketing, she’s also taught me about running a business. Because she is good at this.

Takeaways from a summer internship with a parent

All in all, this summer has been great so far and it has been a pleasure to heighten my business relationship with my mother. I’ve learned so much from my mom the boss, that I can apply to college and my future job endeavors. I owe it all to her and I love her so much. Thanks mom!

Disney Revolutionizes the Vacation Industry

Approximately 52 million people visit Walt Disney World each year and its annual profit comes to about $12.6 billion. How did Walt Disney transform his amusement park into a bucket list vacation destination for families from all over the world? The simple answer… marketing.

Disney has revolutionized the vacation industry as it broadens its marketing strategies to include almost any activity you can imagine. Disney has magical amusement parks, thrilling water rides, gourmet restaurants, five-star hotels, luxurious cruise lines, private islands, collectible merchandise, and so much more. Whether it is the walking foods-of-the-world tour in Epcot, opportunities to meet your favorite Disney characters, or thrilling rollercoasters that will have people shouting: “We HAVE to do that again!”, there is surely something for everyone at the parks. Most importantly, Disney gives the assurance of a trip filled with memories that are sure to last a lifetime.

Disney acknowledges that the amusement park experience might not be for everyone, so they have introduced a variety of activities that attract a more diverse customer base using a myriad of marketing strategies. Some people love all the fanciful facades and creative foods. However, others prefer a nice massage or relaxing by the hotel pools. My family is up at the crack of dawn to beat the crowd to the gates when the park opens. We are the first in line for the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and we stay until the park closes. We go every year and find an experience that keeps each trip interesting and unique.

Marketing Disney Plus

With the recently increased popularity of streaming services, Disney entered the game strong with Disney Plus. In addition to the plethora of nostalgic movies and shows aimed at younger audiences, they also market their platform to a variety of demographics utilizing some of the most popular movie franchises in history like Marvel, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Using these marketing strategies, Disney Plus has become one of the most successful streaming service as people looking to escape the stress of the pandemic can find relief in uplifting films and tv series.

Online Marketing Strategies

Disney has been at the forefront of online marketing which has enabled them to subliminally reach the 16-24-year-old crowd that, on average, spends 3+ hours a day online. Disney has over 72 million followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter combined. That’s a lot of potential customers who might not regularly watch TV or read print that Disney can influence daily. Through magical commercials, Disney is able to interact with starry-eyed children without access to social media who beg their parents for the trips they see on TV.

Targeting the interests of Children

Disney’s marketing strategies were also revolutionary as they began to target the interests of children as well as adults. Children make up 22% of the US population and have an increased impact on family decisions than previously recognized. Through movies, TV shows, stuffed animals, and apparel, Disney has built brand loyalty starting with infants and continuing through adulthood.

“The Happiest Place on Earth”

The Happiest Place on Earth” is Disney’s well-known slogan which basically encapsulates everything that Disney is and tries to be. Who doesn’t want to go to the happiest place on earth? Disney evokes this happiness through nostalgia, happy stories with happy endings, and wholesome characters. Marketing “happiness” is what keeps visitors flooding through their gates every year. Including my family, and Julie’s family!

Everyone knows your business needs to be on social media. We see all the big and even smaller players doing it. If your company isn’t on social media, you’re late to the game. We often see companies jump in with no real strategy, plan or goal. That’s where audits come in! I know that word sounds a bit threatening, but it’s not as scary as it may seem. A social media audit is simply a way to measure your strategy and success by tracking metrics consistently across your social media accounts. This way you can see what’s working and what needs to be improved in your social media campaigns. Let’s go step by step on how to create one.

Track Down All Your Accounts

The first step in creating an audit is to track down all of your existing social media accounts. Make sure when you are following these step that you are doing in this in an Excel spreadsheet. Once you have all the accounts typed in, try to decide which ones you primarily want to focus on.

Have Consistent Branding

Now that you have all your accounts make sure that the branding is consistent across all of your platforms. This means your bio needs to be consistent, your banners need to be the same, consistent landing page links, and the hashtags that you use. Try to stick to certain color palette and theme in your content. Look at any major corporation and you’ll see that their branding is consistent.

Find The Best Content For Your Audit

Go into each of your accounts and find the top five best posts. Track their performance by using metrics such as, engagement, or impressions. Engagement is the number of interactions your post had such as (likes, comments, shares, link clicks) and impressions are the amount of times your content was viewed. I recommend first focusing on impressions to build brand awarness, and then switching to engagement. Also if you want to save time, I recommend using a social media management tool such as Buffer or Hootsuite. while they do come at a price, they help plan out your posts and measure data all in one place.

Know the Audience on Each Platform

The next step is to understand and document the demographics on each platform. Facebook is mainly where people 35-44 hangout. For Instagram ages 16-24 is the sweet spot. Track down each of these for your accounts and type them in your audit.

Set Your Goals and How to Take Action

You’re almost done! At this point all you have left to do is is set your goals for each of your accounts. Is it to build followers and brand awareness? Or are you trying to get to more people to click on your landing page. Once you have established your goals now just document how you are going to take action. What direction are you going to go in? Do you need to create a marketing budget? Decide what’s going to work best for you.

Time to Execute!

Now that you know how to create an audit. What’s slowing you down? Marketing is all about staying on top of trends and strategizing how to move forward. Take this time to build your audit, you’ll be one step closer to having a successful marketing campaign!

Marketing items to high schoolers is very different than other age groups. High school means freedom. This includes the ability to get a job, drive, and buy things without asking parents.

Social Media

As the first generation born into technology, Gen Z has grown up with the internet. For high school students in particular, social media surrounds our daily lives, making it easy to access new products and reviews faster. When targeting a high school audience, the first thing you will want to do is create a social media presence, especially on Instagram and Tik Tok.

Marketing to High Schoolers with Trends

For products such as clothing or make up, it is important to follow trends. Stay up to date on the latest styles and aesthetics. In typical high school manner, everyone wants to fit in, this means providing products similar to the current high school style. In regard to social media, creating content that follows popular trends will increase the chances of your product being seen. For Tik Tok, use popular sounds with a unique idea, making the Tik Tok more likely to get on the for you page.

Accessibility and Inclusivity

High schoolers are cheap! Most income comes from a minimum wage job or allowance from parents. The price of a product can immediately deter consumers, especially if is not a well-known name brand. Make sure the price is reasonable for the product. It is also important to make products inclusive to all ethnicities, body types, and genders. Exclusion can create bad reviews and overall dislike for a company.

Visuals

Once the consumer has clicked on the website, visual organization is a key part of reliability and user attention span. As someone who frequently purchases products from Instagram or Tik Tok, the first thing I notice is the website’s aesthetic. If a website looks low quality, chances are the product is also low quality. By using attention grabbing visuals and colors, while also maintaining the clean look, users will trust the product more.  Secondly, in a world of 15 second Tik Toks, the average attention span is much shorter. When websites are difficult to navigate, most users will simply give up. By making products easy to find through a search bar or navigation tabs, people are more likely to stay on the site.

When Marketing to High Schoolers, Think Like One

Overall, when marketing to a younger audience, it is important to think like a high schooler. What you may like or dislike, could be completely different because high school is its own world. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I see a product that would be amazing if one little thing was changed, such as a childish image or an older print. Step outside of your world and think like you are 17 again!

Media relations results require more than luck.

As a public relations professional, there’s no better feeling than seeing a client featured in a news story. There’s an exhilaration when an idea you’ve pitched appears in a magazine, newspaper, radio or the coveted TV spot. An earned media placement will impact a client’s awareness — and hopefully — their bottom line.

However, pitching isn’t easy. With fewer journalists, swifter news cycles and an extraordinary number of media outlets, communicators need to be savvy and strategic about formulating and targeting pitches. Muck Rack reports that there are now nearly 6 PR pros for every one journalist.

A 2021 Muck Rack survey stated that 34% of PR pros said finding and interacting with journalists is one of their biggest challenges. And 59% of journalists view their relationship with PR pros as mutually beneficial, but not quite a partnership. This decreased from 64% in 2020. Only 6% view it as a partnership.

Why is there such an inequity between PR professionals and journalists?

It’s no mystery that PR pros can’t do their media relations jobs successfully without journalists. And journalists depend on Public Relations outreach, too.

“I get roughly 300 emails a day. Most of the time, I read a subject line and that’s it. There’s just simply too many emails every day from publicists to be replying to each one. I can probably count on one hand the amount of general PR pitches I’ve responded to over the past few years. What they all have in common is they were targeted at BuzzFeed and me specifically. The publicist knew who I was, what kind of stories I write and was able to speak to this and why their pitch fit in line with that. They also know what BuzzFeed News is (hint: it’s not the same as BuzzFeed!) and why their story was of interest to our readers. It’s all obvious stuff, but you have to tailor your pitch like you would a cover letter for a job application.”

—David Mack, deputy director for breaking news at BuzzFeed News (source Muck Rack)

Personalization is key to getting a reporter’s attention.

It’s important to remember that each reporter is unique. In order to successfully connect with members of the media, know who they are and what they prefer when it comes to pitching. In Muck Rack’s Annual Journalist Survey, reporters cited lack of personalization as the number one reason they immediately reject pitches.

Writing the ideal pitch will not have “legs” if it is not strategically targeted. A political writer does not want to profile a new restaurant (unless the chef is a former president). An investigative journalist probably will not respond to a pitch about what’s trending in the fashion world. Educate yourself on a reporter’s areas of interest and get to know their point of view. Familiarize yourself with their writing style and how they communicate with their audience. Make each email distinctive to the individual. Remember that the ultimate goal is to establish or continue a relationship with the journalist.

Customize your pitch to their medium.

A wide-ranging PR campaign can be incredibly time consuming. Sending an initial mass email to all news outlets is, at times, the only course of action. However, this approach does not embolden coverage unless it is a very widely known product and/or personality. If possible, customize the pitch to the medium. When pitching a television producer, send clips or b-roll and include camera ready art to a print outlet. Reference the assets and describe how the visuals will enhance an interview or feature. If you want a reporter/editor/producer to accept your pitch, it needs to intrigue them — and contain something that that will engage their audience.

The media relations process — what happens next?

After sending a pitch, be respectful and allow the reporter enough time to decide if they are interested in covering the story. Give them a few days to review the pitch, and then follow up via email. If you don’t hear from them after a follow-up, assume they aren’t interested.

If a pitch is accepted, be sure to thank the reporter and share their story online. A share goes a long way, especially in a world where more reporters are being evaluated based on the success of their stories — 62% of journalists say they track how many times their stories are shared on social media.

Setting up and running a successful marketing internship program is an important step to the future success of both your company and the next generation of marketers. Bottom line: what’s in it for you as a company is the creation of a skilled employee pipeline. You’ve taught them, you’ve trained them, and they know your business. All of those attributes will most likely make these interns your best next employees.

How to start your internship program? Start small with the intention of hiring one intern for one semester. With a 5-6 month window for the internship, you can more easily structure what the intern will do during their tenure with you. Be sure to ask your intern what they want to learn, and what they would like to get out of the internship. Also, take the time to coordinate with their college if need be, so that they receive college credit for their internship if that is an option. And most importantly, pay your intern a fair hourly wage for their contribution to your business.

Marketing Internship 101 – Training.

Begin an intern’s employment with introductions and training. Have a blog and/or website? Add them to the team and write an introductory post so clients, customers and the general public can get to know your talented intern. This also gives the marketing intern a link that they can include on the LinkedIn profile, legitimatizing their career before they graduate. In turn, introduce the intern to each person in the company, and ask them to explain what they do and how it fits into the big picture.

Ideally you’ll want your marketing intern to spend some quality time shadowing different people in your company to get the full picture of marketing: PR, copywriting, design, social media, analytics, etc. Encourage the rest of your company to be supportive of your intern in their language and actions. Make sure their first experience in marketing is a positive one!

Interns learn by doing, so show them how to do it.

Then, help your intern get comfortable on the platforms you use to do business, whether that’s WordPress, Google Analytics, Buffer, or any of the social media platforms. For a marketing internship, shadow days can help with this learning. After initial shadow days, interns can be given compartmentalized parts of jobs to complete: image search on a stock site, compiling social media stats monthly on an Excel spreadsheet, and even writing blog posts on topics that they are learning in school. The more you teach them, the more they can run with something and help you!

Set them free and watch them succeed!

Once your intern has mastered some tasks, give them something that they can own: a specific client report, a research project, a white paper, or an organizational project. They could also own a role like proofreading or coordinating employee content for blog posts. Your intern could then teach everyone what they’ve learned at the end of the project.

When you help the next generation of marketing students gain access to a “real” job by offering them an internship, you are paying it forward for everyone that helped you in your early career. And at the end of the internship, you’ll most likely have a successful full-time employee ready to hire. At Front Porch Marketing, we regularly hire one or more college student interns all year long, and add high school student interns from Ursuline Academy of Dallas. We love working with interns and highly recommend adding them to your staff.