Marketing BEEP

Print or Internet: Why Not Both?

The internet has changed the way we communicate in so many ways. I remember the days when you hand wrote a letter, mailed it, and waited as much as a month to hear a response. Now, I can email my buddies in Hong Kong and if I don’t hear back in 30 minutes I’m reaching for my cell phone to send a text message. The internet has made the communication process much faster, to be sure. 

 
But there is also the cost factor. It doesn’t cost anything to send an email. It does when you factor in that you pay a monthly fee for internet. Still, it’s cheap and easy. Text messaging is pretty much the same. There is a cost, but not like taking the time to write a letter and mail it.
 
These consequences are far reaching for many businesses. Print advertising used to take up most of the marketing budget, but now it’s only a fraction. In fact, one teacher had to resort to selling ads on his tests to pay for the printing costs! Even educators are being pressured to go digital. 

 
The truth of the matter, though, is that printing is alive and well. Many business models like magazines and newspapers are having to rethink and remake the way they produce income, but the need for catalogs, brochures, and flyers will be around for a long time to come.
 
I don’t know about you, but I still get lots of postcards and coupons in the mail. Why is that? Because they work! Many businesses have discovered that by using both print and internet advertising that they can actually leverage their brand and marketing dollars.
 
Printing has gotten both less expensive and higher in quality as the biggest and best printing firms have risen to the top. The internet has allowed even the smallest business to take advantage of big printing price breaks. This means that while printing budgets may be shrinking, you still have the opportunity to focus your efforts and get great deals.
 
The point is this: print and internet advertising are still essential and both still work. Using both methods can help you get the most for your marketing dollar. Working with top printing firms via the internet can save you money while also getting great looking prints. There’s just no need to abandon one format or the other when both can be made to work for you.

Direct Marketing’s Future in Customers’ Hands, says DMA

"We are all direct marketers now, whether we know it or not," states Michelle Tiletnick, research manager of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to conclude the executive summary of the DMA's new 78-page qualitative report, “Future of Direct Marketing.”

The DMA’s first ever “Future” report details trends in direct marketing for the next 5 and 10 years, as well as how it will get there. The report contains insights from 35 direct marketing leaders, such as Herschell Gordon Lewis of Lewis Enterprises; Alan Moss of Google; Jeanniey Mullen of Zinio; and Akira Oka of Direct Marketing Japan Inc.

The experts were asked specific questions with the most interesting being: “Where do you think direct marketing will be in five and ten years?”

• Customers will be in control. If you don’t give them what they want, one of your competitors will.

• Measurable and accountable marketing will increase because with the economy, companies can’t afford to use marketing strategies that may not work.

• Traditional direct marketing (mail, catalogs) will decrease while digital marketing rises.

• Marketers will increase the use of multiple channels--but will communicate a single message.

And how will marketers prepare for all of these changes?

• Invest in the future (use technology to capitalize on data digital channels offer)

• Ask customers for their media preferences

• Test everything

• Be open-minded

The experts also weighed in on 19 industry categories, including:

• Social media: “As social and mobile channels develop, the metrics and analytics available will become more useful to brand and merchandising managers alike. Rather than simple volumetric measurements (how many people saw our YouTube ‘viral’ video, or ‘friended’ us on Facebook?), you can anticipate learning about how influence spreads through a network, and across channels,” states analytics expert “Wandering” Dave Rhee.

• Email: Jordan Cohen, senior director, industry relations for Goodmail Systems, predicts the reinvention of email as a an app that is “able to support all the functionality of a website [streaming video, rich media graphics, one-click shopping, one-click bill pay and more] with the added bonus of being able to push the content to an audience of opt-in recipients.”

• Print Catalog/retail: “Traditional retailers will become more direct, and direct merchants will look to stores as a means of competing with larger rivals and growing their brands,” according to Neil O'Keefe, the DMA's vice president for the catalog and multichannel segment.

• Interactive Marketing: According to Alan Moss, Google’s director of online sales and operations, “the current state of the economy may accelerate movement down the path that direct marketing has already begun traveling over the past few years--the path towards increased measurability.”

• Media/publishing: In 2009, Mobile Marketer Editor Mickey Alam Khan expects “resources will be moved to the Internet and even mobile, although those two channels will not be able to pay the bills for most media companies, especially with the way they are set up today.”

(Report quotes courtesy Les Luchter, MediaPost’s Marketing Daily.)

3 Tips for Branding Success

Branding isn’t only about your product package, logo development and advertising. Branding encompasses everything a consumer sees that is associated with your company. Your Web site, your print business cards, your letterhead, TV commercial, store sign, even your employees – everything the customer sees is a reflection of your brand.

I’d like to share some of my top branding tips that will help your business thrive, which is so important in this tough economy.

1. Create and/or maintain a company blog. This is one of the best pieces of advice I can give. Having a Web site is great – it’s a place for consumers to check you out. But a blog lets you have a conversation with your customers. All you need is a Wordpress or Blogger account and a domain name. Actually, you don’t even have to buy a domain name (which runs about $10 per year), you can append your name to the blogger.com or wordpress.com extensions. But, some people believe it looks more professional if you don’t have those extensions, so it’s up to you. Nevertheless, get a blog, and be sure to update it either daily or every other day.  Any less than that and you won’t attract readers. You can include posts on what your business has been up to or just about industry events and happenings. Whatever you do, be sure to include topics that readers can weigh in on.

2. Realize that you can’t wholly control your brand. A brand is what people perceive your business to be. It’s your customers’ thoughts and feelings about your company. Now, that’s not to say you can’t influence what people think, but ultimately, you need to know that it’s in consumer’s hands (or minds, really). If you have a nice logo that you use on all your marketing materials (don’t forget letterhead, business cards, envelopes and so on) that will give off the impression that your company is professional, not amateurish or new. That breeds confidence in consumers’ minds about your brand. Hosting charity events, producing eye-catching ads and having great customer service can all contribute to your brand image as well. Just be sure you’re always working on your brand because one person’s opinion can be enough to influence others’ opinions about your brand.

3. You and your people represent your brand just as much, if not more than, your marketing materials. The best brand interactions come from one-on-ones between your customers and your employees. Employees that are helpful and efficient make your brand helpful and efficient.

Proper branding is important to the well-being of your company’s long term success. Branding is basically managing your customers’ thoughts and feelings about your company. Remember, the customer is always right, so anything you can do to help the customer understand the brand you want them to know.

Snapily Ever After?

There’s a new startup out there called Snapily, which is an online store that creates user-customized ads, photos, cards and other paper goods into a pseudo 3-D effect. It looks pretty cool, I must say. They even add movement to 2-D images, namely photos. 

Snapily fills a void that Shutterfly, CafePress and Ofoto can’t fill – the moving, 3-D market. It seems really cool, and there’s a great video at TechCrunch’s blog that shows how it all works. You can make a photo 3-D, you can make two photos morph into one (the example is a baby face that morphs into a woman’s face), or you do a “flip” photo, where when you tilt the photo up, it shows one image, and when you flip it back down, it shows another image.

All very cool stuff that uses lenticular printing, which shows a different image depending on which angle you are looking at the photo from.  Snapily is a spinoff from HumanEyes, which has been lenticular printing for about seven years. According to the HumanEyes Web site, lenticular lenses are used to create the 3-D and morphing images. “Lenticular lenses are plastic lenses consisting of an array of optical elements (lenticules). When viewed from different angles, different areas under the lens are magnified. Lenticular images are those which are specially prepared images to which the lens is attached. Views are arranged under lenticules so that each eye is projected a different view. The brain then processes these views to a single coherent 3D image.”

Snapily offers business cards, greeting cards, notebooks and scrapbooks that can hold these “moving” images. A newer technology is in the works in which you can create a 2-second movie clip on a card that plays when you rotate it. Snapily has some competition, but it says that you have to order in bulk from its competition, but you can order in small quantities from Snapily. The products start at $3.99.

Snapily is an Israeli start-up and it uses technology called Depth Illusion Digital Imaging (DIDI), which enables the illusion of a 3-D image to be displayed on any kind of computer monitor, cell phone or overhead projector. Basically, the technology makes an image on a flat surface look 3-D.

It sounds really cool, and it looks really cool, but I offer this info with caution. Unfortunately, a TechCrunch reader posted a comment that said he ordered and paid for his product, but he hasn’t received the product. To me this is a very dark cloud over the company. The customer says he has contacted Snapily twice, but no one has gotten back to him. I really hope that this isn’t a flaky company because I really like its products, but I can’t do business with a company with bad customer service.

Apple Ads Acting Like a Kid

The most recent Apple Mac ads are still attacking PCs. Still bullying them around. At first, I liked the Mac ads, with the kinda cool Mac guy and the decidedly uncool PC guy. But now it’s just getting ridiculous.

Microsoft finally retaliated after what seemed like years of getting attacked by Mac commercials on its “uncoolness” and now Microsoft has all kinds of people saying “I’m a PC.” Well, of course, Apple couldn’t have that. Now Apple’s making fun of Microsoft for running ads that defends its product? I think Apple is like a school yard bully – Apple just keeps poking fun of Microsoft and Microsoft hasn’t really said anything bad about a Mac in their commercials – it’s just keeping its hands in front of its face to protect itself from another blow by the Mac. There is a subtle idea in the Microsoft ads that Mac users are soulless bunch, and snobby. I’d have to agree with that, just by the sheer snobbery I encountered in college by Mac users. I’ve had plenty of Mac users (including professors!) who rolled their eyes at me because I didn’t know what something Mac-oriented was. Well, excuse me! Not all of us can afford to spend $1,500 on a computer or laptop! Sheesh.

One of the newest Mac ads feature the PC guy doing some accounting, allocating more money to advertising than to fixing Vista. Microsoft has a $300 million ad budget, by the way. The PC guy talks about fixing Vista by pushing more money toward the advertising.

Another new Mac ad makes fun of Microsoft not saying the “V-word”: Vista. The PC guy has a sensor-like buzzer that he uses to buzz out the Mac guy’s using the word “Vista.” Then, at the end, like a little kid, the Mac guy says “Vista, Vista, Vista, Vista” really fast (remind you of a 6-year-old?) so that the PC guy can’t buzz out all the “Vista” words.

You can see the two commercials at Technologizer.com. I know all the Mac users will disagree with me and will say I’m just a PC-user crying at the injustice. Well, that’s fine with me if you want to call me a PC! Although, I’m not cryin’ – I’m just telling the truth as I see it. And isn’t that what blogs and computers are for? To express ourselves? To express our creativity? I’d like to think so.

Why can’t we just make our choice of Mac versus PC by operating system and personal preference? Probably because many people can’t afford to buy a Mac, which supposedly makes it superior. A price tag doesn’t justify a computer choice in my book.

Elements of Good Web Site Design

Web sites that are frequented have good design. And there are certain elements that are common to all of these Web sites. Google and Yahoo! are two of the biggies. I’m going to outline for you the elements of good Web site design so that when you hire a Web designer or when you take a stab at designing your own Web site, you’ll know what to look for.

No scrolling or minimal scrolling. People don’t want to scroll – they want to click! Keep your Web page content short enough that you don’t need a long scroll bar. If you must, you can allow for a little bit of scrolling, but it’s best to just link to more info on another page. A scrolling page is an intimidating page, and no one likes to be intimidated.

Relevant content. You need to include content in your Web site that customers would want to know, not what you want to tell them. Most customers don’t want to see your impressive sales numbers; they want to know what your product or service can do for them. They want to know prices and shipping info. Make this info easily accessible and easily identifiable. People won’t search on your Web site for too long before they give up and go on to the next Web site.

Useful content. This ties in a bit with relevant content. This goes beyond relevant content, though. If you give readers some useful info in the form of white papers, how-to articles and other “helpful hints” they’ll keep coming back for more. Give people a reason to visit your site, other than when they are ready to make a purchase. If you give them the research tools they need, they’ll come back to you to make a purchase because you’ll be seen as an expert.

Easy to read. No one should have to squint to read the teeny text, and no one should have to shield their eyes from the bright background. Make your site easy to read, which generally means a white background with a black or gray text color. You can have color in photos, graphics and as accents, but stay away from light colored text on a light background, or a dark colored text on a dark background. Make it easy on the eyes.

Balance graphics with text. An all-text site is boring. And hurts the ol’ eyeballs. An all-graphics site has a hard time getting your message across. Keep your design balanced by using text and graphics in somewhat equal measure.

Interactivity. Include a Flash video or a blog where visitors feel like they are part of the Web site. By encouraging visitors to interact, you are creating a more memorable experience for them, which will keep them coming back.

Online Tools that Blend Online and Offline Marketing Efforts

Marketers spend a lot of time on MySpace, Facebook and on their own blogs, wikis and podcasts to connect to other marketers and to potential customers. That’s all fine and good – it’s great, actually, but many marketers are exclusively staying online. That might not be so good. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you want customers to come in and experience your store, right?

The best way to get online and offline traffic to your store is to use social networking sites and review sites that encourage people to comment on their offline experiences online. This can pull in both online and offline traffic by getting people intrigued enough to visit both your online and offline presence.

Chris Brogan, a social media guru, suggests three Web sites for promoting your business, especially for businesses with location- or niche-based products or services.

Upcoming.org: This is an event guide for the Web, but is locally based. You just search by your city and type of event if you’d like (social, education, comedy, politics and other categories). You can find networking events or you can add your own event to the calendar. You can also search by date and city if you know you’ll be in a city on a certain date, or just to see what’s available for the upcoming weekend or month. Upcoming is a branch of Yahoo!, so if you have a Yahoo! ID already, you just sign in with your Yahoo! email address and you can add events to your calendar. The nice thing about this is that you can add the event to your Outlook calendar or Google calendar – whatever calendar you look at regularly.

Yelp.com: This is review site that is also somewhat social, since you can link to friends and become someone’s fan. Brogan doesn’t recommend “stuffing the box” with your own great reviews, but suggests with some creativity you can get people to at least give their opinion about your product or restaurant. Some local businesses that don’t have a Web site are only found on review sites like these, so this site could be a great place to find local business prospects. I would think that it would be a great place to get some testimonials, too, if you can get the poster’s permission.  

Meetup.com: “Maybe it’s time for a little less face-to-screen and a little more face-to-face” is this social networking site’s tagline. People create groups that meet once a month, or at whatever interval the group chooses. I like Meetup since I’ve met some nice people through one of the groups, but I’ve heard that there are some Meetup groups that exist just to sell unsuspecting people stuff. I definitely don’t like that. But the potential for networking and word-of-mouth marketing is great with this Web site so I wouldn’t count it out. These meetings are for the most part informal, which is a nice change from stuffy networking opps. 

What other sites are out there that do well to blend online and offline marketing opps? Let me know of any other good ones that I missed.

5 Reasons to Choose an Advertising Agency Focused on Online Advertising

As the Internet has grown, so has online advertising. There are advertising agencies that now do only online advertising. Many of these are spin-offs of traditional advertising agencies that realized that their online advertising departments were growing bigger and bigger.  

Online advertising has a different set of rules than traditional advertising, so advertising professionals have specialized. That’s how we got to the point of having traditional advertising companies and “online advertising companies” (I’m using this term to define brick-and-mortar agencies that focus on online advertising, not agencies that only exist online). Maybe you’re thinking that an online advertising agency isn’t really needed, that a traditional advertising agency can do everything from online to brochures to billboards. That might be true, but unless the traditional advertising agency has a dedicated department that focuses just on online advertising, you’ll be missing out on many benefits: 

1. Online experience. Advertising agencies that focus online have more experience and more exposure to the online advertising world. These people work in this venue every day. Many of these advertising professionals bring other backgrounds into their positions, which enhances their ability to take what was traditionally offline (like TV) and put it online in a format that works.  

2. More effective online ads. Oftentimes, these online agencies can create a more effective online ad simply because they’ve done more research online and are used to the online atmosphere. Online advertising agencies know what works online and how to get the Internet user’s attention. Online agencies know what colors work best on computer screens, and how to get an ad to look good on a computer as well as a BlackBerry.  

3. They know the right approach to take. An online agency knows where to advertise on the Internet that perhaps traditional agencies don’t know about yet. Online agencies have the inside scoop on up-and-coming Web sites to advertise on because they have connections.  

4. An extensive network or online connections. These agencies often work with both Web sites that need advertisers and businesses that want to advertise online. Marrying these needs is easier for an online agency because it already has the resources, the contacts.  

5. An online agency can do all your online advertising needs for you, including email. If you need a generated response email, an online agency can do that. If you need an interactive flyer or newsletter on your Web site, an online agency can do that. Online agencies employ many more Web designers and online specialists than traditional agencies. You can tap into a lot more technology-minded brains at an exclusively online-focused agency.

4 Steps to Creating Brand Equity

Small businesses and large businesses both know how important brand equity is in today’s overcrowded market, even if they don’t know exactly what it entails. Brand equity is the outcome related to how your customer recognizes your differences from your competitors and why you are the better alternative. It’s the value of your brand to the customer.

Brand equity stems from the customer’s experiences with your product or service. When a customer has used your product over and over again, that builds equity, or value, in your brand. Your value to the customer is what separates you from your competition. It’s what makes customers loyal to your brand and motivates them to refer to their friends.

Many try to create the level of brand equity that great companies like Coca-Cola and Sony have. It takes hard work to get to that level, but it’s not impossible, especially when you implement the following steps in your marketing plan.

1. Define your positioning. This is the one thing your company stands for in the minds of your customers. You need to clarify your positioning in the market among your competitors. “One” is the important word here. You must define your brand position with just one element. Ask yourself and your employees, what is the one thing that makes you different and better than the competition?

2. Let everyone know your story and bring it to life. Position statements are often internal statements that need to be made external. The way to do that is by telling a story. Document your best corporate stories, which are likely to come from the founder, that best reflect your positioning statement.

Cracker Barrel, a well-known restaurant that serves “old country” food and has “old country” stores that shelve nostalgic brands of candy in nostalgic wrappers, is positioned to bring that old country feeling back to people. Everything about their restaurants and stores reminds people of a time long gone. Their Web site and their menus tell the story of how the first store and restaurant opened in Tennessee in the 1960s to give travelers a place to get a good meal and pick up candy for their kids on their way home. These old time stores often had a barrel of saltine crackers that the community members would gather around to visit with friends. And so Cracker Barrel was born and its story is told through the menus, Web site and everything that is in the store, down to the old look of the labels on the candy and other products. Cracker Barrel tells its story in text on its Web site and in everything it does in its stores, including the label printing.

3. Build the brand before the transaction. Before the customer gets to the cash register, or even to the store, start branding. The easiest way to do this is to give something away that has your branding on it. It doesn’t have to be something big; it could be a free notepad at the door or even an email coupon for a free item in customers’ email inboxes. As long as the coupon has your logo and elements of your brand on it, it counts toward building your brand equity.

4. Measure efforts. You can simply ask customers when they come into your store what they think of your brand, or you can do some research on your own. You can send out surveys to customers and prospects in the area or you can check the social media conversations going on about your brand. Consumers are quite active on forums, blogs and chats, especially when they are unhappy about a product or service, so check out what people are saying about you online.

Vendor-rating Web sites Technorati.com and Yelp.com are great places to start.

By implementing these steps, the road to building brand equity will be a lot smoother and a lot shorter. And the great thing about these steps is that you can get started on that road today.

Freelancers’ Productive Strategies

I’ve been freelancing full time for about six weeks now, and I’ve been successful thus far, I would say. Other than working more hours than I ever did for a company, I’m pretty happy. Of course, if I weren’t so greedy I’m sure I wouldn’t have to work 60 hours a week. To try to get my hours back down to the “normal” 40, or even better, to 35 as one company I worked for implemented, I’ve had to employ some strategies. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

 

I’m more productive in the morning. I’m a night owl, but I find that my brain doesn’t work as fast at night so I try to get up by 7:00 to start writing by 7:30. Of course, as the weeks have gone on, that 7:00 has slipped to 7:30 and sometimes 8:00. That’s not good. I do my best and most productive work before noon, or before I take my lunch, which is generally noonish. In the afternoons, I’m just sluggish from lunch and my brain feels like it’s exploded into a bunch of tiny pieces, which means that to get anything done takes twice as long because I have to find the pieces before I can use them.

 

For other freelancers, this means find the time that works for you, even if it isn’t 8-4 or 9-5. Work when you feel most energetic and when your brain is “turned on” – not when your spouse or friends tell you you should be working.

 

Take breaks. My back hurts. My neck hurts. I have to consciously tell myself to get up every hour or two from the desk to stretch and just move my legs. Taking mini-brain breaks works wonders. It also helps out my sleeping legs! I read in a magazine that you should take a 5-minute break every hour. I tried that and it just disrupts me. Instead I take a 5-minute break to walk around every two hours or so. It’s never two hours on the dot – just whenever I finish a task I can take a break.

 

I found a good blog article on the Freelance Switch Web site: http://freelanceswitch.com/working/practical-freelancing-tips-to-get-%20your-creative-juices-flowing/ that has some good tips on how freelancers can manage their time to be most creative. One of the tips given by Raj Dash is to not read other people’s work until you’ve spent some time writing. That doesn’t work for me. I like to read some news tidbits from MSN’s Web page (my browser’s homepage) before I start my day. I also read emails, and freelance job boards before I start working for the day.

 

That leads me to, keep looking for work. Some freelancers, I’ve read, are obsessive about looking for new work, new opportunities every day. I’m one of those. I feel like I’m missing out if I haven’t searched the job boards each day. One of my faves is FreelanceWritingGigs.com. The two hostesses of this blog search Craigslist and other freelance job boards for the best jobs (read: the ones that pay more than $1 for 250 words). It really cuts down on my time looking at Craigslist so I can get some writing done.

 

What other good tips do you have for being productive? Share them. I could use them, especially since I’m just about to check my email again after finishing this sentence!