These days people talk a lot about influencer marketing and how it is so important in brand strategy. But what is influencer marketing?
The rise of social media marketing has led to digitally savvy influencers who are being used as marketeers.
They function as key leaders to drive a brands message to the market sphere.
Influencer marketing targets a leader who in turn has a large number of consumers who believe and follow them on various social platforms like YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram etc. These marketeers are paid to promote a certain brand for them. Used effectively they are instrumental in seducing a large target audience.
Influencer marketing goes hand in hand with social media and content marketing. Similar to word of mouth marketing but not not quite influencer marketing is said to be 2017’s top marketing strategy.

If you want your readers to continue to read
what you’ve written,
or want a certain message to come across,
good typography stands as one of the
most important ways of doing so.
Typography is how text appears visually.
It could be engaging or distracting.
Choosing a proper typeface affects largely
how a piece is understood.
It sets the tone and mood of what message
is being conveyed.
Whether serious or playful.
It also ensures that a person keeps
reading what is written without being distracted.

Whether you’re a startup or a seasoned company,
getting the most out of your buck is everybody’s priority.
Listed below are surefire ways to reduce your marketing spend:
1. By getting to know your customer: Sometimes even before you market your product it is better to know your customers needs and requirements. Getting to know their target audience becomes a prerogative. When you know these hard facts wastage is cut to a minimal. Finding out customer problems and providing specific solutions reduces expenses.
2. Instead of appointing a PR manager become one yourself: Pitching to newspapers and bloggers by being the owner of a company would more likely get more attention than being PR rep. Start locally ,so your articles would be more likely to be picked up later by larger media houses.
3. Maintaining an Email list: and make the most of email campaigning. Write or make excellent email campaigns that call for eyeballing headlines. Make a subscribers list and add offers and discounts for people who sign up. Sign up on service provers like Mailchimp that let you send mails to over 12000 subscribers at one time.
4. Co sponsor events: Get together with like minded companies or those that share your interests and co sponsor events around your vicinity.
5. Zero in on target demographics: While running campaign on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn narrow down your target reach to specific audiences to make sure you make the most out of your ad spend and avoid pilferage.

Current times make it challenging for startups to market their brand. But with a few strategic steps startups can successfully engage in marketing.

1. Pay attention to your target audience: Initial marketing strategies call for target of everyone at a given time. Instead pay attention to a targeted audience, that will be keen on promoting your business.
2.List yourself on business awards: If you’re completing an experimental piece of work for your own company or selling an innovative product, try and list yourself in awards of that genre. This gives an edge over media and press. And a little press goes a long way for businesses.
3.Make the most of Social Media: When you’re a startup it’s a given that you must use social media for marketing. It is one of the most economically viable means of marketing. While doing so, make sure that you’re not just promoting promotional content of your business but be sure to add relevant posts that are intriguing and shareable. Engage in social media by being social, not just posting regularly.
4. Invite people to share and like: Give incentives to people for talking about or hash tagging your product or service on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. Offer gifts or discou nts to them for liking your page. This ensures more exposure to your company’s page.
5. Blog with original content: Come up with topics that are genuine and original. Come up with ideas and convey social research experiments and analysis’. Do surveys and generate content based on them.

Cost effective marketing has to be carefully planned. You cannot carry it out in a haphazard manner. Here’s where Zero Budget Agency comes in . We work at minimal costs in the following ways. We call it Zero’ism. 1. We blog: A surefire way to driving traffic to your website is through quality content and blogging. Depending on the quality of your blog more people are likely to follow and interact with you, making your site and product more visible. 2. We take a disciplined approach to marketing: by planning, strategising key movements. 3. We make videos : We keep our viewers entertained and in the loop of things we are doing in the form of videos. These are in house videos shot by our in house film maker, with a strong idea. It doesn’t have to overspill budget. Videos are an easy cheap way to raise awareness by sharing them on social media sites. 4. We use social media to the hilt, strategically: We don’t just post stuff for the heck of it. We plan their releases and we make sure we are aggressive while doing it. 5. We use email marketing : We use mailing lists to send out emailers on various offers that we have at a given time. 6. We make use of analytics: We just don’t blindly do paid advertisements on social media sites. We carefully gage the analytics on how well they fare or not. 7. We do press releases: Paid press releases making sure they happen over a periods of time and not just in an all at once approach.

Face it! A product has to exist in order
to create a brand.
There is no brand without a product.
Not meaning that the two are the same.
Although sometimes people associate
a brand with a product.
Both are important.
It is important to have an okay product at least,
but more important to have a fabulous brand.

According to Seth Godin,
“A brand is the set of expectations,
memories, stories and relationships
that taken together account for a
consumer’s decision to choose one
product or service over another.”

Brands help product development.
How? By evoking emotions.
By caring about the needs of a customer.
By identifying the cultural values of a
consumer base and using the information
to define a company’s direction.

“Product first is very retro, very 1980’s.
We have to put the idea first.”
Says Kevin Roberts global CEO of
Saatchi and Saatchi since 1997.
According to him finding out what
a consumer wants is better than
looking into a product and figuring out how
to make that product better.

According to Al Ries,
“It’s better to be different than it is to be better.”
Perception is what makes a brand.
Perceptions are difficult to change once they’ve been
formed and only continue to harden
in a consumers mind.
In the vast market with the emergence
of similar products ,brand identity plays
an important role.
A well crafted brand identity helps
to safeguard being drowned amongst a sea
of competitors.

J.K Rowling, who wrote
Harry Potter, and sold over 500 million copies
of it wrote a novel and had it
published under the name of Robert Galbraith.
It sold not more than 1000 copies.
After people came to know that it was
actually written by JK Rowling ,
sales jumped and it sold over 1.1 million copies.
Just goes to show what is more important.
The brand or the product.
Another case in point would be Apple’s Iphone.
In comparison to Android which has a better Operating
System, Iphone still performs better and sells
more phones than Samsung. Brands evoke emotions
and products with low emotional appeal are very easily
replaced.

Branding initially started with the branding of animals such as cows. A symbol was marked on to the cow to convey a message. Typically, who the cow belonged to, what breed they were and quality. It helped to segregate the cow and to differentiate it from others. That’s what branding does. It differentiates a product from the other in a specific manner. It gives a product or service an identity. Branding creates a feeling or emotion, and is an idea of an image of a product. It creates a loyalty to a certain product or service. It expresses its value and communicates what a particular brand is. A brand unlike marketing doesn’t push a person to buy something. A person who understands a brand would just be pulled to buy it, due his faith in it. According to Jeff Bezoz “ Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room “. A brand is what people think about you, it gives you a feeling of your product.

Good communication lies at the heart of graphic design.
What is graphic design?
And what do graphic designers do?
Graphic design is a means of communication,
problem solving through the use of visuals and art,
typography, illustrations, symbols, colours,
amongst various others.
Almost everything that we see,
requires the work of a graphic designer.
Graphic designers are visual problem solvers.
They work in branding, advertising, packaging,
publishing and web development.
It’s always easy to overlook their importance,
but a graphic designers job is gravely important,
not just aesthetically but functionally as well.

Self publishing, becoming todays norm, has guided most
writers to design their books in a certain way. It’s easy,
and to self publish an e-book is even easier.
1. To design a great book focus on the cover of the book:
As the saying goes, don’t judge a book by its cover,
in the self publishing world we realize that people do
judge the book by the cover. A well finished cover tells
us that the author will honor our time spent with the
book as well. The cover basically establishes the books brand.
It leaves a lasting impression on a readers mind.
2. Another factor for a well designed self published
book are the pages of the book. They are like the architectural
foundations of the book.
3. Next is the marketing aspect of the book.
Marketing should be undertaken even before the book is
written or it falls at the risk of lying under a heaps
of thousands of other books that have not been marketed well enough.
4.Book reviews are another way a self published
book could find its way to success.

The views of whether an ad agency should remain independent or sell out are variant and come with their own set of pros and cons. Independent agencies are mostly culturally driven. They do justice to a creative product. Although money is important it is not the centre of how a business is to be conducted. Staying independent has a host of advantages. They get to choose who their clients are according to similar ideologies, passions and interests. They can choose to give their 100 percent to those clients according to what they have chosen. They can make the right choices on what they think is the right way for their own agencies like where to reinvest profits etc. It allows for free change in strategic direction. These ad agencies can focus on their own clients and creative people. Independent agencies can take their own risks with their clients. According to Amber Williams, “It’s not so much that an agency is independent, its that all people working there have chosen an independent agency. These types are often more novel thinkers, thrive on risk and generally produce more transformative ideas.” An independent agency can make quick decisions. They are not slaves that have to meet quarterly numbers. On the other hand choosing to sell out has its advantages too. Belonging to networks bring in support. Belonging to a network ensures more expertise, better marketing, research, as well as technology. Mahesh Chauhan co-founder of Salt Brand Solutions, says, “ Most businesses cant be ‘IPO-ed’. But agencies cant. So how does an agency go public, raise money for growth and expand? If you are not IPO-able on your own the only way to move forward is to sell out to a global buyer.” Agencies can choose to sell out, even if they don’t really have a succession plan of their own and owners would want to ensure, their baby projects being well taken care of at the hands of bigger agencies and an agency could reach its full potential only after joining a larger network.