Today, Memorial Day is synonymous with bbqs, picnics, and pool floats — but the historical significance of the holiday stretches far beyond a three-day weekend.

Trying to stand out on a platform with 1 billion active monthly users is a difficult task — and that’s where the value of hashtags come to play. Hashtags are ingenious. They function as a way to label your content and make it discoverable for people everywhere. The right hashtag can connect you with your audience on social media, help leverage your digital identity, and create a ton of user-generated content.

But hashtag marketing is not as simple as slapping a “#” on just any word or phrase. Instead, it requires taking careful consideration of how you want to categorize and brand your content.

In 2010, Instagram came about as a simple photo-sharing platform. Now, it’s the most influential app of our generation — crawling with brands, marketers, and influencers.

In its 10 years of existence, Instagram has grown into a new sales channel for businesses and a source of income for creators, and it’s now the second most logged into social networking site for daily use after Facebook.

Cultivating more sales this spring — with peak occasions like Mother’s Day, graduation season, and Father’s Day — is more important than ever. Return from ad spending might be lower than usual, but your brand’s continual effort will yield more sales in the back half of the year.

With cities still on stay-at-home mandates and many businesses closed, the coronavirus will impact Mother’s Day quite a bit this year.

In the world of marketing, we often see clever videos that amass hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of hours. The question at hand is, how do you turn a standard video into a viral sensation?

But making content go viral is out of the control of any marketer, no matter how savvy they may be. Rather, it’s all in the hands of consumers. Content has to be likeable, be shareable, and catch on at the right time — which is more challenging than it seems.

But making content go viral is out of the control of any marketer, no matter how savvy they may be.

In recent years, there has been a questionable statistic floating around about the human attention span: it’s down to a mere eight seconds from 12 seconds in 2000. Articles even claim that a human has a shorter attention span than that of a goldfish. If this were really accurate, how are people able to binge watch a Netflix series or a dozen YouTube videos?

Everyone has loyalties to different brands. Chances are, some of your favorite products have come as a result of companies working together. Brand partnerships involve two brands — corporations, nonprofits, retailers, media properties, or even celebrities — collaborating in a joint venture. The premise of partnership marketing is very promising: brands can leverage each other’s audiences and combine resources to achieve a mutually beneficial goal.

The most successful brands practice sustainability throughout the year — but if there’s any one day to take action and show appreciation for our planet, it’s Earth Day. This year, April 22nd will mark the 15th anniversary of Earth Day. Since its inception in 1970 - when people demanded an end to toxic air, water, and soil pollution - Earth Day has inspired brands to commit to sustainable practices

Goods are tangible, services are intangible, but experiences are memorable. The last decade has seen a massive shift in consumer spending from possessions to experiences, from materialism to meaningfulness. As something once purely attributed to millennials, the growing importance of experiences is true across the board — irrespective of age. In this article, we’ll dive into the basics of brand experiences, why this shift is happening, and some common brand experience trends that are contributing to customer loyalty.

You scroll through your Instagram feed and see a video watermarked with a vibrating TikTok logo, accompanied by an upbeat remix of a popular song. Navigate to the TikTok app, and you’ll find a whole world of video that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the web — including YouTube. Known for its short-form video dance crazes, TikTok has captivated the world with its humorous and unrefined content. Despite what it seems, TikTok is not just limited to frivility and fun — from dance challenges to internet jokes to full-blown lip-syncing. It’s a hub for unapologetically wholesome content, which might be exactly what the world needs right now.

In the modern age of social media, what makes people laugh makes them share. As the one day a year where brands can play pranks on their consumers without furious backlash, April Fool’s Day presents a unique marketing opportunity. While scrolling through social media feeds and emails on April 1st, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish what is real and what is fake.

Digital media campaigns require marketers to be able to think quickly and execute even quicker all while being hyper aware of how to constantly develop successful content that puts them ahead of the competition and in the spotlight.

When we analyzed some of the most iconic digital campaigns, we noted many similarities: a focus on safety, rewarding loyal consumers, selfies, and taking radical steps to create word-of-mouth.

Sustainable marketing is more than just a buzzword — it's a fundamental shift in how consumers perceive the products and services they are purchasing. Each year, consumers demand more “responsible” brands. As a result, a new kind of marketing has emerged for brands — green marketing — that involves them being more transparent about their production habits and sustainability credentials.

Justifying marketing spend has been a challenge since the beginning of time. Do you know whether you're leaving money on the table with your content marketing plan, hemorrhaging your budget, or missing potential revenue?

The visual trends of 2020 see the influence of technology and implications of AI spilling into traditional forms of art and design. We will see a predominance of motion, line art, gradients, and liquid abstraction, and the minimalist design trend of previous years will continue to manifest itself through muted colors and simplistic illustrations.

Love is in the air — and on the Internet.

As a holiday centered around spending money for your significant others, Valentine’s Day presents a distinct opportunity for brands to reap profits. Pinterest boards reign supreme as people scour the internet for the perfect gift, Instagram wins over fans with fun contests and branded hashtags, and Twitter sees brands publicizing witty retorts.

Each year since 1999, Pantone has carefully analyzed trends, technology, and real world events to arrive at a single color they dub the Color of the Year. Pantone views this annual color selection, “an educational program that is intended to highlight the relationship between what is taking place in our global culture and how it manifests itself in color.”

Claiming an ad spot during the Super Bowl used to be the pinnacle of marketing prestige. But in an era of ever-decreasing Super Bowl television viewership and omnipresent digital disruptions, the most successful campaigns are breaking ground off the TV screen as well. Most viewers don’t give one medium their undivided attention and instead have one eye on the TV, the other on their smartphones. 

Sharing images on social media isn't just proof of engagement – although that is always a plus. When followers share your visual content with others, that immediately exposes your brand to a wider audience – and shows customer engagement and appreciation. That leads to more traffic, more brand awareness, and ultimately more sales.

Visual attraction in customer behavior is very much tied to the color or combination of hues that you utilize in your product marketing campaigns. Your choice of colors and their usage in your campaigns allow for your audience to instantly know who you are, what you do, and what you’re about. Keep in mind, however, that this can work both ways, as poor decisions around color can drive people away or send the wrong message! Color invokes emotion. Consumer behavior is tied to emotion, so it is logical to study the emotional reactions that particular hues invoke in the minds of your target audience.