Wrap ‘n Wear, a baby carrier company and long-time Wold Creative client, was featured this morning on the Studio 5, a Utah-wide live TV show. The experience was fun for all involved and this was a great way to get the name out there to a larger Utah audience.

TIP: What the greater viewing audience might not know is that opportunities like this exist for just about any kind of business. If there is a TV/Radio show that deals with topics similar to your product/service, you, most likely, can pay a nominal fee to be on that show and thus have wide exposure within a market. Certainly, this is not for all companies, but it is another potential avenue of advertising on television without the huge fees that are normally associated with TV media buying.

-jeremy

Marketing has traditionally had the black eye of never really knowing the efficacy of a marketing initiative. For instance, if someone were to run a newspaper AD, send out direct mail and run a radio AD campaign, all that could be determined from this is the overall number of people that walked through your businesses doors and purchased something.

Of course, there are ways of capturing the data of where people heard of you, but those surveys are often cumbersome and sometimes are not an accurate tally of how effective each marketing initiative that you did.

TIP: One easy way to run ads and still know exactly how effective they are is by increasing the amount of ads on the web. This should be done anyways in today’s market, but it this case, you can fully be aware of exactly where your website traffic is coming from, how many pages they view, and if they purchase something online or not. This is done using Google’s free tool called Analytics. This is something that Wold Creative Group puts on every webpage that we design, but you don’t have to have us do it for you. Check it out at Google.com/analytics.

-jeremy

So you have a product or service that you are trying to sell. The avenues that you could take in order to market your product or service are innumerable. So what do you do? Do you use TV, radio, print, direct mail, interactive (online) marketing, telemarketing, yelling really loudly from your street corner?

First of all, as stated in previous posts, you need to take a step back from the medium (print, web, radio, etc.) and strategically look at your brand. What kind of company are you? Do you have any distinct features that stand out from competitors? Who is currently buying your product or service? What demographic do you think would resonate with your product or service?

TIP: This all comes down to targeting your audience. By answering some of the questions above (not a complete list there), you can start to figure out who your company should be marketing to. It is not a good idea to think that you should market to everybody because that is impossible and a waste of valuable resources. Instead, figuring out the audience that you should go after will create a situation where you are maximizing your marketing dollars and give you a greater return on your marketing investment.

-jeremy

It must be important if it is repeated 3 times. You could have the best product or service in the world but if people cannot picture it or somehow identify with it then you will have one heck of a time trying to sell it. We are a culture that wants to the “kick the tires” before we drive it off the lot.

TIP: In other words, show off your product and/or service to the world in the best possible light. Like it has been stated before, this does not mean to show absolutely everything, it just means that in order to hook people in to actually see your product or service for what it is, you need to let give people a taste of it through good photography or other visuals.

Generally speaking, the first thing people notice in a marketing piece is a photo/design/colors/layout and the second thing they notice is what it actually says. Both components of the marketing piece are equally important but the visuals will either cause the viewer to pause long enough to read the text or, if ineffective, will cause the marketing to not be noticed at all.

-jeremy

There is often a tendency within business to want to tell the public everything about itself or tell the public what to think. While this might actually be the way to go for some product-oriented marketing, let me give an analogy of what this might do for service-oriented marketing.

Imagine that your public viewing audience is another person that you are meeting for the first time at a party. The easiest way to cause a person at a party to NOT ask any questions about you would be just tell them everything there possibly is to know about you immediately. Not only is this slightly uncomfortable, it does not invite the person to engage you in a conversation.

TIP: Especially within the service-oriented business world, the goal of marketing is to be a catalyst to engage your potential clients in a dialogue in order to gain the trust of that potential client. It is usually only after trust has been established that a potential client moves to become an actual client. Trust comes from interaction or conversation and marketing is the opening line of that conversation.

-jeremy

For most marketing initiatives there are a couple possible positive results. The most obvious positive result is that the marketing campaign directly translates to sales. The less obvious result is that the campaign establishes your brand within your market.

TIP: When going after sales with your marketing campaigns, do not lose sight of your brand. An AD might translate to some immediate sales, but a consistently established brand will translate to on-going sales and something that an AD alone cannot give…the public’s trust of your brand. If you look at the long-term reward for your marketing initiatives then your return on initiatives will grow exponentially with each campaign.

-jeremy

OK, so I could write a book about this and still not fully resolve this debate but the short answer is “preb”, my lame attempt to combine both print and web into one word. If you think that just online marketing or just print marketing is what your business needs, then you are absolutely looking at this the wrong way and potentially missing some potential customers.

TIP: do not look at marketing and advertising through a particular medium (print, web, environmental, tv, radio, etc.), look at marketing through all appropriate mediums. This is what the industry calls a “media mix” where the campaign and your company’s messaging is the most important piece of the puzzle rather than the particular medium.

A simple example of this would be if you were promoting a “special” at your store and you decided to send direct mail, ran online ads on appropriate sites and each of these ads (print and online) directed people to your website that highlights the “special” on the homepage. This is just one small example how thinking across media boundaries can exponentially increase the efficacy of a marketing campaign.

-jeremy

We have all typed our own names in at some point to see what comes up in a search engine. OK, maybe I’m the only one, but anyways, it is interesting to try this with your business as well. First type in your business name to see what comes up and then try searching by the services you provide.

If you have a hard time finding your business online through typing in what it is you do, most likely potential clients are having the same issue. This issue of being “found” within web searches is often referred to as SEO (search engine optimization). Both the design of your site (that’s where we come in) and the placement of your website’s URL on other sites (we can help there too) determine how easy it is for people to find you online. We will be discussing this in more detail soon, but here is the first tip that every business, particularly businesses that are just starting, should do to help their online exposure.

TIP: Put your URL (www.yourname.com) on as many reputable free sites as you can. This would include local/national listings of businesses, associations, business networks, partner companies…etc. If these websites are credible, not only will putting a link on their site help you through direct links from that site, it will also increase your listing within the search engines.

-jeremy

We live in a culture where we are bombarded by messages. Every product or service has their logo stamped on what they do, commercials remind us to buy things that we never knew we needed and the consumer is in the middle of it all. In such a competitive market for the consumer’s attention, how do you stand apart?

Simplicity and uniqueness are a good place to start. Focus on a simple, easy to understand message that highlights your unique characteristics as a business. It is OK to not tell the public everything there is to know about your business from the beginning. Giving too much info will cause the heart of what you do to be lost within the sea of messages. I made a quick grahpic, below, to highlight how this sort of marketing can be utilized.

-jeremy