How to Share Your Brand Story with Social Media + Worksheets

Brand storytelling has always played a significant role in the success of marketing campaigns.

Done right, it has the power to bring a brand alive and evoke an emotional response from its audience.

With the magic of storytelling, brands can build a personal connection with their customers and create a loyal following – one of the cornerstones of success in any industry. 

Social media has provided a new platform for brand storytelling that today’s business owners must learn to navigate. But just how easy is it to tell a story through this ‘less is more’ medium? It turns out there any many ways to tell stories using social – all you need is a healthy dose of creativity, authenticity, and passion.

Download the Brand Story with Social Media Worksheet

Sharing Your Brand Story Handouts

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Working From Home–Our Top 5 Tips

After a year of working remotely, we’ve learned a lot about how to make work-from-home life a little smoother, easier, and more productive. Above all else, our biggest takeaway this year has been FLEXIBILITY. Whether you’re working from home temporarily due to Covid (hello, survival mode!) or are in it for the long haul, these 5 tips can set you up for success.

Working From Home–Our Top 5 Tips

1. Schedule based around your peak productivity.

If you typically do your best work in the morning, make sure you are starting your day off bright and early and “getting to work” on time. If the afternoon is where you hit that sweet spot of productivity, let your schedule reflect that. With a wide open schedule and a lack of firm time parameters, you may be tempted to just get work done “here and there” throughout your day. But this approach can make your work day feel long, unstructured, and overwhelming, not to mention unproductive. Set a schedule for yourself that respects your daily rhythms.

2. Set up a functional work space.

“Make sure you have a good chair. It’s very important to your back and posture. Make sure it is the right height and distance from your computer screen and keyboard and mouse. I have tried sitting on an exercise ball in the past, but they have to be inflated frequently. I also found it too distracting to use the balance ball for a chair when on calls.”
~Ruth Paarmann

Having a defined work area is a simple trick to provide space, focus, and comfort. Your space should have all the materials you need within easy reach, a comfortable chair to avoid back pain and a sore neck, and good lighting to keep eye strain at bay. Also consider what makes your workspace a more pleasant experience that makes you want to stick around: bring some healthy snacks, drinks to keep you hydrated, and music or headphones for ambiance and focus.

3. Dress for success.

This may mean dressing in “work clothes” to get you in the right frame of mind, or dressing in soft, stretchy clothes to help your body feel more comfortable. You do you. Wear what makes you feel good and enjoy being kind to your body.

4. Mix it up.

“Use a Pomodoro timer. There are several free ones in the app store. It reminds you to get up and move around.”
Pomodoro Technique ~Christine Vaughan

Don’t treat your work time as one long chunk of monotony. Add some non-work tasks to your to-do list each day, so that you have a variety of things to look forward to. Dedicate a 5 minute break to get up and move periodically. Stretch or get up and walk around. Set alarms to remind you to switch gears and get your blood pumping every once in a while. Your body and brain will appreciate it.

5. “Commute”.

“Set a non work task for yourself before and after your work day. I find working out, cleaning or yard work are good choices. This helps me get away from work and lets me transition to home mode.”
~Todd Young

When the work day is over, turn off your computer, leave your work space behind, and go to a different part of the house. Take a little time to decompress, as though you are commuting home. With a defined space and defined times for work and home activities, your brain will better be able to focus and maintain attention on the task at hand.

 

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5 Tools to Help You Reach Your Digital Marketing Goals

Do you ever feel like you could meet your digital marketing goals so much quicker if you just had the right tool for the job? When it comes to digital marketing, few things are as essential as the tools that help you run your business more efficiently so you can focus, prioritize, and save time. These five tools are some of the most essential. All of them are user-friendly, work well across multiple platforms, and are either free or well worth the cost!

Young photographer and graphic designer at work in office.

Trello – Project Organization & Team Collaboration

Trello is a virtual bulletin board tool that allows you to manage projects and collaborate with your team–a solid digital marketing practice for saving time and frustration. Easily create lists and tasks, adding color labels, team members, and due dates as needed. Links, images, documents, and files can all be seamlessly added to tasks, so everything you need for a project can be stored in one place.

Creator Studio – IG + FB Planning & Scheduling

Instagram is a visual wonderland for digital marketers, and Facebook is fab for social presence, but it can be a real headache to try to post consistently about ALL THE THINGS. If being present and consistent on Instagram and Facebook is part of your digital marketing strategy, Creator Studio is an excellent tool for scheduling, planning, and automatic posting to both platforms. It’s FREE, so you’ll save money by not paying for more elaborate tools, and the analytics that are included make tracking your success a cinch.

Animoto – Video Creation

Animoto is a digital marketer’s dream come true! With three relatively easy steps, it allows you to create slideshow or marketing videos from a collection of images. The process is simple:

  1. Set the theme, style, and music
  2. Customize your photos, video clips, and text
  3. Produce and share your video

Animoto is a fantastic tool for creating simple, but stylish videos without all the fuss and gadgets required for longer form professional videos. For most short marketing videos, Animoto is the perfect tool for the job!

Google Analytics – Trends & Reporting

Google Analytics offers free digital analytics software that allows you to track trends in traffic to your website. With in-depth details on who is visiting your site, what they are doing when they get there, and how long they stay, you can decipher whether or not your website is accomplishing your goals and adapt your strategy accordingly. Custom reports and metrics are available at your fingertips, as well as detailed insight into your audience. When you know who you are reaching and what they are looking for, you can make more informed decisions on content, performance, and how best to increase conversions in the future.

Canva – Content Creation

Canva is a graphic design tool for creating eye-catching graphics and custom templates that look professional but only take minutes to create. You can upload your brand images, colors, fonts, and logo to easily customize your content while maintaining consistency. Perfect for your brand’s Instagram grid or Facebook feed, Canva is super easy to use–even people with no design experience will be making solid content in no time!

While there are hundreds of tools out there for digital marketers, these are five of the most useful and easiest to implement as you grow your strategy. Give them a try–your clients will thank you!

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WordPress 5.0: What Iowa City and Cedar Rapids Needs to Know About the New Editor

The growth of sitebuilders like Squarespace and Wix has been notable and WordPress wants to keep its place in first (WordPress is the most prominent CMS available, powering over 30% of the web). So, developers have been working on the 5.0 release with a common goal in mind: to make generating satisfying content for your WordPress site simple and enjoyable. We are living in the age of user experience, after all. But even small adjustments to a platform like WordPress make site builders fussy, so this update, with its cutting-edge Gutenberg, has us all “Ach du lieber Gott!” But, have no fear: like its namesake, 5.0 and the new editor are designed to make content development easier and more accessible and with a little time and patience, that’s what we can expect. Here’s the breakdown:

What’s different about 5.0?

The most notable difference, and the one people have been buzzing about, is Gutenberg. Gutenberg is the new cutting-edge editor for WordPress and with it arrives some fresh content development concepts that we have already begun to see in other platforms like Medium and Ghost. Gutenberg is unique in its use of blocks as a more visual way of selecting, producing, and organizing content. Drop in a block, fill it in with the content you like, put it in place and move on to the next one. The process is easy to understand and relieves the writer of the need for shortcodes and custom fields in order to achieve the desired appearance.

Thanks to Gutenberg, creating custom themes just got a whole lot easier, but chances are it’s going to cost you the use of those lovely page-builder tools and plug-ins. It’s important to remember, however, that Gutenberg is not a page-builder, it is a content editor. Chances are good that future versions will make the move from post to page, but as of right now, Gutenberg is designed to allow you to customize content, not design.

When is it going to be released?

Last we heard, the WordPress core team scheduled a proposed release date of today, but now they say it’s TBD. The folks there say there’s a good chance 5.0 will need some more time in the oven so they’re allowing up to 8 days of cushion. If those 8 days aren’t sufficient, they have scheduled the next release date to be January 22, 2019, in order to avoid falling through the cracks during the hustle and bustle of the holidays.

Anything I should be worried about?

As is the case with any update, there is always the chance of a site breaking. 5.0 is a huge release and most sites are made up of several moving parts and chances are, they’re not all going to play nice together. Before upgrading to 5.0 and activating Gutenberg, make sure to test for any faults. Here’s a testing to-do list graciously provided by Yoast.

  1. Install a local server like DesktopServer (there’s even a blueprint for Gutenberg you can install) or Local by Flywheel
  2. Install a backup plugin on your site, like Duplicator
  3. Run a full backup of your site, including themes, etc.
  4. Migrate the Duplicator package to your new test site
  5. Install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin
  6. Select which type of beta you want to install in Tools > Beta Testing
  7. Install the latest WordPress update

What do you plan to do to prepare?

Thanks for asking! We, along with countless others who use the WordPress platform, have been already testing out some of the features 5.0 and the Gutenberg editor have to offer. Today, the latest beta version is available for testing.

For those saying, “let’s take this slow,” you can install the classic editor plug-in which will allow you to continue using the classic editor post-5.0 update.

Feel like taking 5.0 it for a spin? You can use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin or you can download the release candidate here (zip). Remember, BACK UP YOUR SITE BEFORE MAKING ANY CHANGES. Follow the action and get all the latest updates on 5.0’s progress here.

For our clients:

No need to worry—we’ll take care of everything on our end. Again, Gutenberg is a content editor, not a page-builder, so your site’s appearance won’t change. Gutenberg will allow site builders to customize future content, so it won’t affect current content or design. Some sites may upgrade to 5.0, and some might remain in the older version. We will personally contact clients if any changes are necessary with the update.

If you have any questions about 5.0, Gutenberg, or anything really, don’t hesitate to ask!

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