Ascendant Digital Solutions Group

11/07/2023

In the world of branding, there exists a force, a passion, that cannot be underestimated—the power of colour. It's a passion that courses through the veins of every brand strategist, designer, and marketer who understands the immense potential that lies within the hues of the rainbow. It's a belief so profound that it shapes the very essence of a brand, touching the hearts and minds of consumers in ways that words alone cannot describe.

Imagine a world where colours aren't just visual elements but emotional triggers, where every shade on the spectrum has the potential to stir feelings deep within our souls. This is the world of colour in branding, where each choice of hue is imbued with a passionate purpose.

10/07/2022

AT ADSG, we Design, Create and Build Tactical Solutions for your Business. We do it in 3 fundamental ways.

1. We create innovative solutions in strategic marketing development both online and offline, from developing and managing the brand journey from conception to entry into the marketplace.

2. We combine insightful strategy with compelling design. We help our clients develop unique brands and bring them to market that make a real truthful impact.

3. We assist organizations in enabling the technology required for business transformation and growth. We design and build solutions through cloud and Serverless technologies.

Complimentary Consultation

Get your free intro consult with our team and discover where your business is and where there is room to grow, develop and ascend.
We can help assess, evaluate, and analyze your brand, performance, and overall business marketing strategy through an hour conversation.

We can offer recommendations and insights into possibilities to grow your brand in the marketplace and digital business.

04/11/2022

Enhance, Utilize, Optimize and Improve.

Optimization of the Customer journey is understanding how to connect and map your customer interactions across multiple touchpoints to direct and impact the "end-to-end" customer experience.

Businesses can refine their connections with consumers by significantly understanding their journey and optimizing it. It is done by creating relevant experiences at the right time through predictive modelling for personalization.

Your future customer wants to be looked at as individuals, and as a business, you want to make your dollar spend count and be effective. Ultimately, brands must deliver personalized experiences relevant at every stage of your prospect's journey; in 2022, it is not enough to personalize digital experiences by demographics and broad segments.

With all the increases in time spent across digital platforms, your future customer's journey is now more complex than before across multiple channels. There is no longer a straight line funnel because the journey has been dissected into too many options of different touchpoints across multiple digital channels, where new decisions are made, and preferences are now created in real-time.

Long-term objectives, like elevating sales, are predominant; however, sometimes, they may be somewhat difficult to measure or take a while to see results. Subsequently, short-term business objectives can measure progress and results relatively quickly.

The most fundamental core case for personalization is to provide personalized product or service recommendations based on either purchase history, past search history and the changing preferences to increase the likelihood of conversion.

There are increasingly different AI-driven solutions that are plug-and-play and powering marketing to become more driven by data because they can identify patterns and discover opportunities for you to personalize your brand and message to the person who wants it.

Predictive personalization for brands allows marketers to see results quickly and deliver personalized experiences at scale without manual-heavy processes like analyzing tons of data and setting up segments and personalization rules.
Aside from quick results, these tools also improve marketing ROI.

Enabling technology will make life easier. Choose the tools and vendors that understand your business, offer easy integration with existing marketing technology, and do not require much manual configuration or engineering resources. Most tools take time to integrate and understand, but success will come once it is in play and used. However, you will need to understand it, empower it and utilize it.

This involves understanding consumers' changing preferences, external factors, and additional circumstances that might match their behaviour to provide precisely what they are looking for at the right time. Success will come because your future customers find what they need at the right time and have a good experience, and more importantly, businesses can meet their objectives and improve marketing ROI.

03/20/2022

Your business won’t be able to get very far without advertising. Branding and advertising go hand in hand.

If you want to have better advertising for your business, you will need to work on creating a brand first.

When advertising your business, you want everything to be cohesive and represent your business’s identity and values. This can be a challenge when you haven’t taken the time to form your brand.

If you’re advertising without solid branding, you’re missing out on many great opportunities to create an effective campaign.

03/06/2022

Your unique selling proposition can be seen through your content. Content is everything.

The digital world has accelerated in so many ways in the past two years.
But even after Covid, these marketing tactics remain essential, especially if businesses are new, reinvigorated or going through a self-audit to be better. These digital marketing trends are not, but your business should keep or consider using them to engage and educate your new customers, keep the current ones coming back and generate more traffic and increased revenue.

There is no blue pill to trust on your impending success. Businesses must earn their business through trust and exemplifying their core competencies. No one wants to be a commodity. However, if you don't invest in your truth, that's precisely what you will become.

The accelerated digital world's global downturn and behavioural change have created and institutionalized many changes within our lives, and we have all enabled technology to benefit our lives.
Content marketing is still the overall winner when looking at tactics to support your digital marketing. Content marketing allows your creativity to keep your brand healthy and resourceful while also providing a logical way to track your success using platforms that can measure all your analytics.

It's important to remember that your content is only as good as how you distribute it. It doesn't matter if you publish an article on your blog, create videos on YouTube or record awesome podcasts. But what does matter is how you achieve in getting your authentic and professional brand-driven content to the attention of your future audiences. Content establishes your expertise, promotes your brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it's time to buy what you sell.

Many people use social media platforms like Facebook / Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn to share any information with their friends, followers, audiences, and segments they would like to get in front of. You can also boost these posts by paying for advertising them, which may help get more eyes on your brand, what you stand for and your work.

All these social media-type platforms have been instrumental in how businesses have shifted theirs into marketing strategies and plans allowing businesses to promote their latest and greatest content and answer any questions their target audience may have. Customers are more informed in the current state of access to information than ever before. While social media has been around for quite a long time now, how people use it is changing.
In a world where we have the power to find out everything about a subject matter with just a few clicks, it's now become one giant consumer research tool - just like a search engine.

Today, businesses are in a unique position to take advantage of the opportunity to reach new audiences and re-engage existing ones if they know how to do it. All these channels allow you to connect with your target audience or geographical region while also creating posts that will help generate traffic to your website, which will establish your expertise your brand awareness and, in the long run, keep your business at the top of mind.
If your goal is to gain customer awareness, you need content that has actual value. This means understanding the wants and needs of your target audience so that you can produce content for them based on what they will find valuable. After all, if this person doesn't see any value in your brand or message, why should they become customers?
The more emphasis you put toward this will better impact how they see value in your brand and the message behind it.

SEO is essential, and it needs to be an integral part of your business plan. Today, however, we go about new and improved tactics that need to be adjusted and need more attention if you want your website or blog content found on search engines. It's not a secret that Google wants to provide all their users with the best results possible. They want their search engine results page (SERP) to be chock filled with very high-quality, super engaging and informative content, so Google can rank it higher in search rankings based on users searching.

02/23/2022

Engaging in marketing using Influencers is paying off for brands.

Working with influencers and digital creators is still a new form of marketing. But, as the market becomes convoluted, as a business, one would have to ask, is it worthwhile to use influencers in future campaigns to propel your business forward?

Influencer marketing has often been met with skepticism by professionals in marketing and by businesses who question the strategy. But, it seems today that it is proliferating from some of the biggest brands. So, now the new question is how to use it, rather than whether you should or not. How will it benefit the business, and how much will it cost?

It might feel like we've all made fun of influencer marketing in our lives, yet influencer marketing is getting bigger and bigger. Today we are all over-exposed with the number of sponsored content every time you go on social media.

Businesses engaging with influencer marketing are witnessing the benefits of creator posts. Influencer marketing is working for many of the big brands today. Remember, it wasn't very long ago when influencer marketing was estimated to be worth approximately 2 billion dollars in market value today; it is now estimated to hit $15 billion.

These numbers might seem outright crazy, but it remains a massive industry with 500 million daily active Instagram users. Sixty-eight percent of consumers say they come to the platform specifically to engage with influencers.

Brands already actively engage with influencers to promote their product or business see its value. Almost Ninety percent of them believe that influencer marketing is super effective.

Today, a couple of quick stats are that Instagram users are reportedly using the platform to discover, research, and decide about their future purchases. A very high percentage of users are using Instagram to help in the final purchasing decision.

Although influencer marketing is part of the future marketing mix potential, now it's more about whom to engage.
Marketing using Influencers was once about getting whoever had the most prominent platform with followers. More numbers mean a more extensive reach. But this is not necessarily always true. We are now seeing that 'micro influencers' can be better for a brand to connect with.

Generally speaking, Micro-influencers are influencers with 25,000 or fewer followers. These influencers, through time, have become more of a more niche market. If they are hardcore and specific type of Influencers, then it can be assumed that their followers also want more specific content. So, these niche influencers can connect directly to an audience interested in particular products/lifestyles.
Ultimately this means that brands can narrow down whom they want to talk to and have a better connection to the right customer.

There are concerns for those engaging with influencers is that clients cannot accurately measure the return on investment (ROI) on Influencer spending. Instagram is upgrading its platform to give better metrics for the brands and the digital creators. Now branded content ads have started on the platform, and instead of it being a 'paid partnership' with a particular influencer, it has become a 'sponsored post' but on the Influencer's feed. Sponsored posts are brand-operated by the brand itself. The new feature allows better control for brands to achieve better reach, better optimization and, most importantly, better measurables.

02/17/2022

Personalization through Video Content is a powerful tool.

Video Content Marketing is a powerful form of content advertising your brand and enabling you to reach your prospective audience and rise above your competitors.
Video is efficient and creates a solid communication tactic of building an online presence in our technology-driven world. Several case studies and statistics have proven how vital video marketing can be to businesses, products, and services.
What makes video marketing unique is that it can help you impact a larger audience with emotive and multi-layered reasons about your products or services you offer.
While the benefits of video marketing are incredible and multi-faceted, businesses must think about the options available to incorporate unique video marketing strategies into their business plan, brand, or roadmap for growth.

Video content marketing is unique and can be a meaningful way to promote your brand through strategic video. These videos can be published on many social networking platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. You don't need the master editing skills to edit a video because a simple online video editor would help you create such amazing videos. But the better quality it is, the better effect it will give. Of course, depending on your business.
An effective video marketing strategy can be impactful and efficient when creating and delivering an impactful message to your prospective audiences.

Videos are the best creative tool for explaining your product and service in the form of a story. It is instrumental because it can intimately offer your prospective customers a sincere opportunity to learn about your product.
Customers will usually purchase a product if they understand the prime features of the product or service and how it can benefit and be a solution to them. Video content offers the excellent benefit of a visual representation of your product, enlightening and inspiring your audiences to learn more about your products. Storytelling should never be underestimated.

Businesses might be interested to know that video content offers too many options to mention. You can create content in many ways, depending on the advertising and marketing solutions you want to achieve.

Your video content amplifies your business objectives and the use of
many social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook offer features to tell stories. This feature will allow you to put stories online for a duration of time. This is a relatively flexible and quick way of directly connecting with your audience. A few other features that might interest you within and outside of these social channels are the ability to include Live Video Features and Webinar Features.

Videos can offer an exceptional return on investment because the ROI you may get will entirely depend on production value, storytelling, and ultimately the channels and viewership you want to showcase.

Videos Work Wondrously For SEO. As we all know, SEO plays a crucial role in helping companies generate leads. Publishing videos on platforms like YouTube that can be analyzed down the specific popular terms is an excellent approach to ranking your brand positively through Google.
The better your ranking is on SEO, the better your online presence will have. Videos are a great way to improve your brand's credibility and boost your online presence. This will only ultimately enhance your company's sales and performance.

The evolution of technology has also made it easy for people to view video content simply. Many statistics have proven just how engaging video content is for viewers. Such statistics should encourage businesses to consider incorporating video content in their overall marketing strategy.

Video Build Trust Among Your Prospective Customers, so it's essential that as a business, you need to ensure that you create trust among your customers, and this is so critical today to showcase your USP and truth to the solution your business provides. It is the crucial element to building and sustaining a solid base of customers.

Your videos' visual representation and expressive language can help you Humanize your brand and connect with your viewers. Video marketing can create authentic, relatable, and fun-loving content to help your audience connect with you.

You can effortlessly leverage video marketing to improve your company's performance. It has become has taken over the industry of marketing in the last decade. Videos are a prime aspect of building a solid marketing strategy.
Apart from many reasons why video marketing can help you boost your company's credibility, those mentioned above are some of the most potent perks of video marketing. You can use video marketing to connect deeply with your potential clients, thereby generating leads.

02/16/2022

Marketing Traditional or Digital: Use Both because they both do matter.

Marketing is the exercise of creating brand awareness and driving sales. However, there is no one way of marketing. Depending on your business, your budget, and the strategy of what you intend to do, while digital is where most play today, the spectrum of marketing arsenal today can still include traditional means.

You can market your products on Television, Outdoor Digital and Traditionally printed billboards, Purchases online ads, direct mail and much more. While people tend to create a difference between Traditional and Digital, in the end, it's still marketing, and the tactics used to solicit and measure can be attributed to both utilizing technology.

You can go for both types of marketing if you have a reasonable budget. But if not, you should focus on a marketing strategy that will be within your budget and provide good ROI.

Digital marketing focuses on marketing for brands and products through online methods like websites, various social media platforms, mobile applications, emails, et al.

Today, however, when it comes to digital, there is still a constant difficulty in understanding the actual difference with digital; the separation between organic and paid conduits, meaning you can manage your Facebook, but can you work Facebook as a media server.

Types of marketing like:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Organic promotion method through search engines.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Promotion through search engine ads.
Social Media Marketing (SMM): Marketing through Social Media (both paid and organic)
Affiliate Marketing: Marketing through affiliate marketers
Email Marketing: Marketing through emails

Traditional marketing is simply marketing that we use traditionally. It deals with more physical items like print ads in magazines and newspapers, radio or TV commercials, posters, brochures, billboards, direct mail etc. It is a conventional form of marketing that helps grow your business and promote your brand using offline marketing.

There are pros and cons regarding marketing from either side of the fence. But in the end, they all can work if you strategically do the research and tactical work, positioning them in the right way for the tactical reason. Yes, traditional advertising can also be measurable.

Digital Marketing +

One of the best digital marketing things from a strategy point of view is that you can show ads only to your target audience. Either search engine ads or social media ads have many options to target. You can target as per demographic, interest, and many more things. It increases the chances of the user getting converted from your ads.

On online ads, you can choose the goal of your ad campaign. It could be brand awareness, consideration, sales, etc. You can also decide how you will pay, whether the cost per click or impression. Not just that, you can use influencer marketing for brand awareness and affiliate marketing and email marketing for driving incremental sales. The ads and social media platforms provide analytics that helps you measure, track, and make changes over time.

The idea of engaging potential future customers in digital marketing is relatively easier to measure because audiences can measurably react to your digital content by likes, comments, shares, etc. They can also engage with CRM through your segmented or personalized emails and via other digital platforms.

Since digital marketing depends on the internet, there are a plethora of spammers and hackers in this space that can cause damage and create security and misuse on your social media accounts. So when digital marketing is concerned, it must be a priority to stay on top of trends and security issues.
Just as it is straightforward for your audiences to engage with your social media posts and ads, it is also easy to give negative feedback by commenting on your social media post or rating your app, store, business, etc.
The truth or opinion is valid, and what you do in the reaction is what matters.

Traditional Marketing

When placed as a potential physical interruption to your day, it is more visible to be impacted by traditional ads, TV ads, newspapers, magazines, or billboards. If a conventional Advertisement is impactful and means something, the impact of the ads remains very strong even over time. Unlike Digital Ads, Traditional ads sometimes can't define how many people have seen them and how many might have engaged with them. However, there are measurable tools today within a spectrum of eco-system. You can blend and enable digital technology to measure Traditional means if your business objectives are set up to do so strategically.
Its 2022, the world has not just entered a digital era; digital is now enabled and embraced. Our daily activities are now online, like reading the newspaper and banking. While traditional marketing still has an audience, it is on the decline with the growth of digital marketing methods. Today, businesses need to start investing in digital forms of marketing and use them to their advantage.

Setting a marketing budget is a priority, but ensuring you are getting your maximum returns on your investment depends on the strategic planning meeting the desired outcome. Businesses should focus only on those marketing channels and methods that are more likely to quantify better the dollar spent.

Given the future state of technology, businesses must accept that digital marketing can help generate qualified leads/sales without causing much stress on their budget. This risk is less served when comparing it to traditional forms of marketing. You will find businesses of all scales taking advantage of digital marketing if you look around. Primarily because of the lower cost/barrier to entry compared to offline marketing strategies such as print advertising. Even though print ads can aid in brand building, digital marketing can help a company build a solid foundation for effective promotion. And you can do it with a much smaller budget.

02/11/2022

Any brand can compete on price. But price should not compete against your brand.

Today's world has most definitely evolved and gives us more considerations as to the way brands are built.
Many companies have had to adapt, and some have had to re-evaluate their brand to bring forward a newer, healthier, and more innovative business value and proposition. Those who have adapted quickly have moved forward with a clean online user experience and a relevant overall brand identity. However, on the other hand, brands that stuck to the " way it has always been " has become outdated and irrelevant in terms of what has become crucial today.

Authenticity and Honesty, and more importantly, what do you stand for in aligning and ensuring your values match your customers and the world around us.

There is no question that a rebrand is an investment in time and money. Still, it could also be an eye-opening experience to those consumed with self-orientation and not focusing on the customer. To be forward, your brand and its values are an integral part of a company's future in advertising. With each change in society, whether economic or cultural, brands have a critical need to reinvent themselves to have meaning, reliability and intimacy- these qualities equal trust.

A rebrand can attach to many things like updating or rebuilding a website or changing your core messaging for something fresh and relevant, but it's not just about new graphics and a logo. The most important part of the rebranding is ensuring that you inform your customers about your company's core purpose and headed direction.

All with a positive experience for the customer.

A rebrand should be a strategic initiative, but if your current brand isn't future-focused, you will not get the customers you want. Suppose you've changed your business objectives so much that your current branding no longer speaks to who you are. In that case, this is the time to think about a rebranding strategy based on a tactical way of thinking using research and data to support your business on the go forward.

Understand Your Target Audience

Business-to-business companies need to acknowledge a few additional factors when looking for a brand refresh. B2B brands usually are specifically targeted to a specialty compared to business-to-consumer (B2C) consumers. This reality is that B2B companies focus more on their expertise and then negotiate costs to get the job.

Business to Consumer however, must appeal to a much broader spectrum of audience. Purchases also usually include multiple decision-maker points and sometimes longer buying cycles all driven by a need for a solution to the problem. Emotional or aspirational factors often go B2C.

In certain circumstances, a newly developed brand is necessary to keep up with where your segment is headed in the future. If you are starting to consider, understand where you want to go and strategically think about how you will get there......from your customer's point of view.

Many times than not, there can be a miscommunication and confusion between you and your potential audience's comprehension or feeling about your brand.

At Ascendant, we will go through a complimentary Consult with your team and utilize any existing data to understand your place in the market and where you may be able to thrive and grow.
If you are a new startup company looking to enter and impact the marketplace or a longtime leader in your segment, we can ensure that your firm stands out for the right reasons in a crowded field to compete.

Without price being the motivator.

02/10/2022

Game changer.

Apple today announced plans to introduce Tap to Pay on iPhone, empowering merchants in the US to accept contactless payments.

02/08/2022

Your Company's bottom line and overall performance can prosper in the Cloud.

Since the beginning of cloud computing, the limitations of traditional IT infrastructure are becoming more apparent each year. Today, many businesses are struggling to adapt or understand how to make significant adjustments as the marketplace evolves and to new trends as their technological environments are now becoming inefficient and outdated from a performance standpoint.

Today, Cloud-based services offer a much more scalable and reliable IT infrastructure specifically designed to simplify the performance of your business and development and support growth potential.

Below, we have listed some of the positive advantages of cloud computing to help you understand the experience businesses are having by migrating to the Cloud.

Pliability and Versatility

A high level of liability provides companies that invest in cloud-based services.

The Cloud offers almost unlimited bandwidth and storage space, allowing businesses to instantly scale up and down their capacities to support growth and cope with website traffic.

This removes the need to purchase and install equipment and upgrades on-site. Cloud computing also allows for improved workplace flexibility, as employees can access applications and data on a remote server off-site, anywhere and at any time.

Business Progression

By switching to cloud computing, more businesses can have better and more backup solutions and reliable disaster recovery without the hassle of setting them up on a physical device.

For many companies, investing in complex disaster recovery plans can be costly, and backing up data is time-consuming. The Cloud is designed so that data stored in it is also reflected across servers so that if one server fails, your information is instantly backed up.

This allows you to reaccess your data quickly, minimizing your website downtime, which could lead to a productivity loss.

Cost-Effectiveness

The most significant advantage to your business when discovering cloud computing is the overall operational savings in IT.

Remote servers remove all the in-house storage equipment and application requirements. Even more compelling is the reduction in your overhead costs, such as all the software updates, your management, and your overall data storage.

Cloud-based services are also inexpensive to use, as they are typically installed on a pay-per-use basis, which means businesses can rent precisely what they need and can see a return on their investment. Many companies with constrained budgets can easily recognize the benefits of cloud computing.

Improved Teamwork

The cloud environment has significantly increased collaboration between groups and communities with access to duplicate records.

There is a removal of communication limitations in traditional IT, and it makes things much faster and easier for employees working in many different locations to get access to information and collaborate with other team members. For your business, this helps simplify processes, and in the end, more work gets done efficiently in a shorter time.

Scalability and Ex*****on

Cloud technology is designed to scale to progressively meet a business's changing IT requirements.

As your business develops and grows, it will require more storage space and bandwidth to deal with the increasing traffic to your website. The Cloud servers can be installed intuitively to help businesses scale up and down and ensure that they can perform under heavy loads.

Cloud technology will also improve website speeds and minimize your downtime.

Software Updates Automatically

At Ascendant Digital Solutions group and with cooperation from our partners at Skymantle, our cloud services offer regular system updates to ensure that your IT requirements are always met. We provide round-the-clock maintenance of cloud servers – including security updates – freeing up time and money that businesses spend doing this in-house.

It is environmentally friendly.

Cloud-based services are very environmentally friendly for businesses with a Corporate Social Responsibility, that is passionate about maintaining a small carbon footprint. Using a virtual environment for data storage plus running web applications will mean less energy consumption is needed and reduced carbon emissions in your workplace. All that being said, the real win for your business is that cloud computing also minimizes your physical hardware needs, which means less IT equipment is required in the office.

Automatic Software Integration

An essential benefit of computing in the Cloud is the software integrations, which happen automatically. This reduces any need for businesses to have to integrate their applications manually. If you are about to transition to cloud technology, your software applications and services can be easily customized concisely, allowing your business to customize the services that best suit your business requirements.