Eye-catching designs are one way to make your food packaging stand out on the shelf, but quality printing goes beyond what graphics alone can achieve. Traditionally, many of the specialty substrates, inks, and coatings were only available for offset printing, limiting the solutions available for small-to-medium sized brands. The following technologies provide alternatives that are more feasible for shorter production runs and are better suited to smaller brands.

In this article, we'll explore one example of a social post for our brand Virginia Foodie, and how we optimized the post for each of our social streams. Take a look at how we started with the blog post and diversified parts of the actual blog copy to adapt to what each individual social platform audience would engage with the most. Follow along for tips and tricks that have helped us maintain relevance on every platform when speaking to our 50K+ following.

Auditing marketing communications is a necessary evil. We all know it needs to be done, but it feels like such a herculean task that a lot of people put it off or don’t do a thorough job. Our Marketing Communications Audit Workbook has everything you need to perform a detailed audit and makes it easy to think critically about the value of your marketing efforts.

Food and Instagram go together like peanut butter and jelly.  Why? Because Instagram is essentially visual storytelling and a way to connect with others through experience sharing. Although technically food is nourishment, it is also much more than that. It is community, story, and connection. Whether you are an enthusiast, a blogger, small business or running a major brand’s social account, we have some easy workarounds, fail-proof food photography tips, and must-have apps that will surely inspire you to get your food-gram skills up to par.

In order to make a compelling case for social media, senior leadership needs to understand the connection between regular social posting and increased revenue for the company. To help you make the case for a social media budget, here are seven legitimate business reasons that support having a strategic plan in place for social media marketing:

This spooky list is all about the scariest thing a marketer can do. From social media to misidentifying your audience. Prepare to be frightened, and Happy Halloween!

Typography sets the stage for how your brand is perceived. How should your audience feel when they first encounter your brand? Excited? Comforted? Intrigued? Choosing typefaces can be a daunting task; there's a vast selection of fonts out there and the fonts you choose need to coordinate with each other and blend cohesively with the rest of your branding. Think of typography selection as an exercise in subtlety. There’s a balance—mixing too many type styles can leave consumers overwhelmed yet overusing a single typeface can be boring or kitschy depending on the chosen style.

As marketers, we often have to prove that our efforts are worthwhile and contributing to the company's bottom line. Calculating the ROI is part and parcel to the process of proving our worth. Determining the ROI of landing pages is essential for improving lead quality, understanding visitor behaviors, and increasing conversion. Now, a high ROI can look different for many companies; there is no "one size fits all" approach to calculating it.

In the world of product marketing, it is not unusual for there to be a little tension between marketing and sales. Marketing revolves around words and images. Sales involve building relationships and closing on contracts. Sales often have immediate needs and sense of urgency. Marketing is in it for the long haul. Tension.

Every day, over 3 billion people use social media. It’s one of the first places people turn to when something new, exciting, life-changing, discouraging, outraging, big or small happens. It’s used to announce engagements and the birth of firstborns, deliver breaking news and recap major events. It’s the first thing we look at when we wake up and the last thing looked at before going to bed. Everything gets put on social media in today’s age of oversharing–whether we agree or disagree, as marketers it’s something that can’t be ignored. Be proactive and meet your audience where they live on social platforms.

What if I told you that in order for your brand to stay relevant in the expanding global market you must be doing one crucial thing - embracing diversity. What if I also told you that not embracing diversity will affect your bottom line? Would you invest right now to change the way you market? If you are not marketing to diverse audiences, you are already lagging far behind the curve.

By changing the way that consumers shop, digital retail giant Amazon is redefining how manufacturers bring their products to market. Amazon reports that more than 50% of the products sold on their website come from small businesses. These items are marketed as a specially curated selection and sourced from manufacturers ranging from family-focused entrepreneurs, artisans, and innovator-makers to women-owned shops. Amazon’s distribution and fulfillment services reduce significant barriers-to-entry that these smaller producers face. With an increased opportunity to break into a new and potentially highly profitable market, shoppers (and businesses) are seeing a shift in the size and type of manufacturer whose product is accessible to the masses.

In today's consumer culture, brands need to make sure they remain top of mind for their customers, after all—they are competing with many other brands for their limited attention. Many successful companies utilize visual brand stories to keep their customers coming back and choosing them over the competition.

Without a doubt, color is one of the most powerful and effective tools for communication. It has the ability to express thoughts without words and elicit emotions that leave lasting impressions. Because of the strong reactions that color can evoke, the right color palette is one of the most important considerations for a business to identify their brand, along with typography, graphic elements, and imagery.

Even though the average person is bombarded by an avalanche of marketing content every day, most modern consumers are willing to see or hear a review from somebody they respect or admire. So lo and behold, with the rise of digital marketing and social media communication comes "Influencer Marketing." Influencer marketing can be a very powerful marketing tactic. Brands can find epic success by leveraging influencers to drive brand awareness, exposure, conversions and customer retention with a deliberate influencer marketing strategy.

Do you ever wonder if all the marketing activity you are doing is actually productive? Are you ever in a situation where the sales team is questioning how your campaign work is tied to their goals? Establishing a strong brand promise that both the sales and marketing teams can use will help avoid that uncomfortable feeling that stems from uncertainty.

Brands that don't have a strong brand personality aren't relatable and can seem faceless and inaccessible. Modeling a brand after a human characteristic is a surefire way to build a fandom, and speaking of fandoms... as the resident office nerd, I am here today to compare popular brand personalities to famous superheroes!

They say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so just imagine the stories brands can tell on social media. That was the basis of our thinking when we built one of our own social influencer platforms in 2017. As marketers we wanted a social platform to tell the stories of some of the best food and drink producers in our state of Virginia to an audience that really wanted to know about them. We started researching heavily but came up short in finding a social presence where all of this converged–and so Virginia Foodie was born.

Isn’t it exciting to be on the hunt for the next BIG IDEA? We like it, too! But we also know that a hint of skepticism should always accompany exciting big-picture marketing ideas. It's remarkably easy to get distracted by the method of delivery and wind up delivering a version of your brand story that is a near miss–something that is close but not effective. Fun projects can be great to work on, but to be effective marketing campaigns they must tie directly to sales goals.

Testing is the unsung hero of marketing. Sure, it's not glamorous but making the effort to consistently test your marketing efforts really pays off. Different methods of testing can tell you certain things about how a webpage or campaign is performing. User experience, or UX for short, is a broad term that encompasses all aspects of the user's experience when interacting with your content, including aesthetics. This article will go over some different kinds of UX testing methods, what they can tell you, and what you can do with that data.