The Daily Carnage

The savvy marketer's hub for industry news, insights, resources, and culture.

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4 Survey Tips for Customer Insights

NOVEMBER 28, 2021

Customer satisfaction surveys are an essential tool for a brand. Marketers want to read minds, but asking a question directly is their best bet to knowing what’s working for users. With the feedback surveys generate, you can improve a product, service, and overall customer experience. What’s better than that? Here is how to make sure your surveys are helpful to you without being annoying to your users.

Keep It Short and Sweet: It’s not just about cutting the character count from your users’ answers – you also need to remove wordiness from your questions. Survey length is also crucial for keeping abandonment rates low. If you can give users a heads up (i.e. a 5-minute survey), that can help set expectations.
Try to Ask One Question at a Time: It’s easy for marketers to want to ask one question after another (or a bunch of follow-ups). Give people time to think through a single question before moving on to any further possible ones.
Yes/No Questions Are Your Friends: Yes/no questions require little time commitment and are straightforward. Not only are yes/no questions easy to answer, but they also make your segmenting and data tracking easier to manage.
Offer Some Incentives: People don’t like to give things up, especially data, for free. There are a lot of ways you can entice your users with things like gifts, discounts, giveaways, or credits. In most cases, it makes sense to entice customers to answer your survey.

Check out the full Influencive post for examples of customer satisfaction surveys that have worked for other brands.

The 2021 WeTransfer Ideas Report

NOVEMBER 23, 2021

What’s the big idea? WeTransfer, a sick FTP tool and awesome creative resource, released their annual Ideas Report. They asked over 10,000 people from 135 countries how their creative worlds have changed in the past year (since ya know, 2020 and 2021 have been game-changers).

The creative industry is always shifting and WeTransfer wanted to get a pulse on it. Here are the big takeaways:

Based on the surveys, Latin American creatives are more willing to push their boundaries than their peers in Europe and North America.
Gen Z respondents are citing mental health as the main creative distraction during the pandemic, and it’s a big driver for them wanting to switch jobs.
While many Gen Z creatives are exhausted with being responsible for a brand’s voice on social issues, 75% say it’s important brands take a committed stance.
Women are one of the largest drivers for social and world issues among the creative demographics surveyed.
This might not come as a surprise, but budget remains one of the biggest blocks to creative work.
The Great Resignation is no joke! 45% of global creatives are thinking of changing their jobs in the next six months. 😳

Check out the full, free report for more stats and for the friggin’ beautiful charts.

Thinking Of A Logo Redesign? This Is How To Do It

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

Your logo is a big part of your brand’s identity and well, branding. While it’s not the full picture, your logo is one of the first impressions and chance at storytelling visually. But when is it time to revisit your logo’s design? And that’s a pretty big leap to take…how do you go about it?

It might be time for a redesign when…

Your business services have grown or evolved.
You want to target new audiences
You have a dated design.

Now, if you have a well-established brand, you don’t want to lose that identity and brand equity of your existing logo. Logo design is delicate business for something so bold.

Things to consider for your logo redesign:

Gauge your audience’s attachment first. Like we said, your existing identity might already be doing the most. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but make sure you do have the audience attachment needed to keep a logo as is.
Redesign or refresh? Make sure you know what elements of your existing logo are essential to your brand. You don’t have to change everything, maybe you just need to refine them (think of all the “ironed out” logos of the 2000s that simply updated their text treatments).
Market TF out of it. If you are making a major change to part of your brand, make it known! Explain the design, get it transitioned into your marketing, and celebrate it. Obviously, if the changes are subtle you shouldn’t promote your logo the same way. BUT we can’t stress enough that you need to communicate it internally and update your branded assets.

Logo.com, a logo generator and design inspiration resource, has the full scoop of examples (and mistakes) in their blog post.

Using Mixed Reality, AR, & VR for Businesses

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

So, the Metaverse is coming in hot and heavy, more experiences are becoming virtual, and brands are going to have to get with the programming. Here’s how you can leverage these new technologies for your business.

What’s the difference between AR, VR, & Mixed Reality?

Augmented Reality (AR): This is about having virtual objects in real-world experiences but there is no interaction between real-world and virtual objects.
Virtual Reality (VR): This is made up of virtual objects in virtual environments like offices, classrooms, conferences, even whole worlds (usually in the hopes of a majorly overtaking the senses).
Mixed Reality: The name speaks for itself where real-world objects and virtual objects together.

Well how do you use it?

Once companies get over the novelty and “toy” perspective of AR/VR, they can begin to consider it a serious investment to their business model. Here are some examples to take advantage of these technologies:

Thinking outside of the box for presentations, pitches, and demos.
Enhanced customer experiences, especially in retail, for pre-customers or existing clientele.
Not to be confused with a toy, AR/VR are great tools for gamification in employee engagement or loyalty programs.

For more industry-specific examples and technology resources for reality technologies, check out the full Forbes article.

3 Retargeting Solutions to Utilize Right Now

NOVEMBER 14, 2021

If at first your ad doesn’t succeed, retarget ’em. Retargeting uses a user’s online behavior to serve them relevant ads. This is typically from paid ads, website visits, and search activity.

Now, retargeting takes as much strategy as your general ad strategy because you don’t want to retarget just anyone who happened upon your brand. And because of the changing policies of cookies, pixels, and data privacy, retargeting is not amateur hour.

Here are three expert tools that can get you on the right track for retargeting potential customers.

Criteo: One of the best practices for retargeting is to personalize it. Criteo is a great tool for giving warm leads personalized offers. With machine-learning, Criteo uses pixel information as a jumping-off point for previously viewed products and related products to make special offers.
AdRoll: What do you do if someone leaves your form or abandons a cart? AdRoll will fix that up for you. AdRoll uses segments based on behaviors and traits to retarget. They pinpoint users that show genuine interest in your product, ensuring they are as warm as possible instead of every Joe Shmoe that hit your landing page.
RollWorks: Do you have a lead database? Rather than lead nurturing, RollWorks offers lead scoring and account organization. RollWorks take a different perspective on retargeting by laying out your warm audiences for more in-depth retargeting strategies. They offer easy automation, email retargeting, and pipeline management. They’re also a killer education resource for retargeting and account-based marketing in general.

Learn more about retargeting solutions and examples on What Runs Where’s full post.

12 Paid Advertising Mistakes

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Paid media can be a beast. There are so many variables for what makes or breaks a campaign. Semrush gave a list of 12 common mistakes made when it comes to paid advertising. We can’t fit them all, so we wanted to list the top 6 big fudges that we see in paid ad campaigns that aren’t doing it for clients.

One and done ad sets: Two big variables in ads are creative and copy. If you aren’t testing out different ad sets with different words or visuals, you could be throwing money at something that isn’t working over and over again.
Leaning too much on search engine settings: Smart campaigns and default settings are great to try, but they might not be in your campaign’s best interest. While they are easy, automatic settings aren’t always going to help your goals.
Ignoring competitors: If you aren’t seeing what competitors are doing, how are you standing apart? See what keywords they are bidding on and if they are worth exploring your brand as well.
Not knowing what to bid on: Now, bidding strategies are a whole world of their own. Determine your goals and then find your best bidding strategy to support them.
Driving traffic to irrelevant (or icky) content: Listen, your ads are going to be wasted if you’re landing page is bad. And if you aren’t directing traffic to content that aligns with the intentions of a user, they’re gonna bounce.
Not enough testing!: Unfortunately, paid ads are rarely a 100% hit. There’s going to be some misses, or some slow burns, along the way. You have to continuously test to see how you can influence ad performance.

Read Semrush’s full blog post for the rest of the goofs you could be making with your paid advertising.

Building Your Marketing Team

NOVEMBER 9, 2021

You know the saying, “Teamwork makes the dream work.” There are several moving parts and essential roles for your marketing team to operate like a well-oiled machine.

Does your marketing team have these roles covered?

SHARE IT: bit.ly/carnageteams

10 Signs It’s Time for a Website Redesign

NOVEMBER 8, 2021

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover…but you can judge a brand by its website. It’s not enough just to have a website, you have to have a good one. Okay, checkmark. But how long do you keep it as is? Here are the signs that it’s time for a website redesign:

Leads are Dropping: Now all sorts of variables go into leads, but one of the main purposes for your website is for information potential customers. How are your landing pages and contact forms doin’?
Low Engagement: Your website quality is a huge driver to people eating up your content, too. If you’re noticing really low levels of engagement for your blogs, videos, etc., it’s time to investigate options.
Slow Page Loads: People want results NOW. If you’re noticing high bounce rates and slow page speeds…it’s time to optimize.
Outdated Web Design: You gotta stay with the times! Aesthetics are essential and you don’t want a website that’s too busy.
Inconsistent Branding: A website redesign is a chance to iron out all branding no-nos.
Low SERP Rankings: Getting a redesign is a good opportunity for SEO best practices to be baked into your new site.
Broken Site Elements: We’re not just talking about a redesign for the sake of looks. Your site also might need a boost in functionality.
Different Experiences on Different Devices: You better be mobile-ready and responsive to make it nowadays.
You’re Outgrowing Your Current Site: It’s a good problem to have, right? But don’t let the urgency of growth overshadow the need for a new site.
Outdated or Nonexistent CMS: Content management systems are essential for easy edits and updates, but they are not a one-size-fits all situation. And are you up to date on your CMS updates?

Check out Virtual Image’s full post for more examples of what your site might be experiencing or missing!

Microcopy to Boost Your UX

NOVEMBER 7, 2021

Every little bit counts when it comes to UX and what you are saying to your users. That’s where your microcopy comes to play.

We’ve covered this little slice of copywriting before, but let’s give you a refresh on microscopy. Microcopy is every tiny bit of copy on an interface. Some great examples are clever CTA’s (most commonly), product labels, descriptions, placeholders (especially for search bars), basically anywhere with text that isn’t your main attraction of copy.

Reasons to care about microcopy:

It gives more opportunities to inform your users.
In turn, that means fewer chances for weak user experiences.
It helps express your brand voice.

It’s good stuff, right? It’s one of those details for your UX that can set you apart from a competitor with a similar site, product, or packaging. But how do you use microcopy as effectively as possible?

Here are best practices for using microcopy:

You’re gonna need a crystal ball – Microcopy used well anticipates the needs of users before they know it. Look at your interface and walk yourself through it while asking where you could possibly add guidance or more information.
Keep your microcopy micro – Short, sweet, and to the point is the mantra for most instances of copy. Microcopy should be as brief as it gets to nudge a user.
A/B test your microcopy, too – Obviously, A/B testing is your go-to for all things being touched by a user to make sure it’s performing at its best. Test out your different CTAs, banners, and search fills.

Algolia is a developer of a few search-related products, so they know their stuff on UX. See their full post to see prime examples of companies using microcopy.