blogs: key to the dynamic website

We often recommend the use of blogs for businesses when approaching a website for them. That might seem a little odd if you think of blogs as i used to, that they are personal free-association online journals. Yes, there are those that have personal blogs that do divulge just about anything on their mind, but that isn't really what i am referring to here.

A blog can simply be the free avenue in which a dynamic website can exist while still being professional. Moreover, a company can be more free to show more personality, flavor and experience through a blog than a website. When it comes down to it, a website needs to have a level of professionalism that can win over potential clients. Coupled with this website should (not always, but often) be a blog that also supports your brand to win over potential clients. Both of them working together can give a broader-reaching response to question of "who is your company".

Recently, we helped Closeknit Clothing setup a blog. With their focus on fashion within an urban market, this sort of avenue is perfect medium for their intended audience. We branded their blog to match the look of their already-existing website so that both of them complement each other and further the brand of Closeknit Clothing.

We also added in the capability for visitors to subcribe to future blog posts. Then, when Closeknit updates their blog, subscribers will automatically get e-mailed and therefore this can be treated as an ongoing e-mail newsletter.

Click here to view their blog.

photos...art within the ordinary

I have this tendency to think in images, to create momentary photos like an internal camera obscura. Sometimes, i am lucky enough to have an actual camera with me to capture some of these angles, colors, lines, textures and shapes that seem to catch my eye. Such was the case yesterday where the light of the beautiful sunset allowed me take some photos of seemingly innocuous things. Trying to capture the ordinary things in life in a new, interesting way is a challenge.

This challenge holds true within marketing as well as within photography. Without an interesting angle, a wall is just a wall...a marketing piece is just a marketing piece. There is the need to have a creative presentation of your product/service in order for it to stand apart from the ordinary.

We would love to help you create something unique.

-jeremy

marketing in nature

In undergrad, the most influential class that i took was rhetoric. While that might seem like it is a class that teaches one to wax poetic, it is rather a education on how to learn, process and read messages as well as giving you the basis of how to communicated effectively with others. Anyways, one of our classes was about learning from nature.

It might sound a little odd to think that we can pick up cues from nature and use them within marketing. On the other hand, most consumers are creatures of habit and often fall prey to subconscious cues used within marketing in order for them to choose what products or services that they spend money on.

Today i have been looking at flowers. There are a few outside my window that are striking in their color and density. Strong purples, oranges and yellows are easy to notice from a distance while they seem to just get more striking as you get closer. These flowers are tiny advertisements to passing bees. With the pollen that the bees carry, these flowers must get bees to land there in order for them to continue to exist.

TIP. With all of the marketing "flowers" out there within your market, why would any "bees" come to your company? Looking at the plants outside my window, i would say that catching attention utilizes the idea of being different/unique while have prolific messaging so that is one ad doesn't cause a customer/client to look your directly, another ad will.

consistency with the brand

There had been a few questions from clients about logos and how that logo can be used throughout various mediums. There are certainly no rules for this, just principles that should be followed in ensure the best possible brand recognition.

Principle one: give your brand some time. It is easy to want to swap out the brand periodically if you do not think that it is performing. This is fine to do every few years (5-10 years) to keep the logo fresh and current (look at how IBM, Pepsi,...etc. update their logo periodically while keeping the same structure to the logo), but let your logo fully saturate your market before changing your branding. If it doesn’t perform over the long-hull or you are updating the company itself, then it is time to update the logo and then push that logo on the market.

Principle two: let the ads tell the story of who your company is, do not switch up the look of your logo to attempt to tell your story. The logo (brand) needs to ground the various marketing/advertising that you are doing, it should not be used as the advertising (unless you do this intentionally to go against the norm, see sample below).

Principle three: the brand needs to have recognition. This means that it needs to be noticed but noticed for the right reasons. For instance, if you squint your eyes at a logo for a short distance, the text and/or graphic should still stand out and not blend together or disappear in the background. Thus, it will be easier to reach a larger audience simply because your brand is more recognizable.

Principle four: the brand is not the company. A common misconception is that the logo and other branding must convey all that there is about a company or organization. While this seems far-fetched, people actually want to try to do this. In reality, the branding is a small representation of the company that should have the goal of drawing potential clients/customers into your business.

I could go on, but this is already getting lengthy. Just remember that a brand is not a brand at all unless you get it in front of people. So market well.

-jeremy

Diversify

It is easy for companies to get hung up on a marketing initiative that has worked. While this might not seem like a problem, it certainly can be since it is not thinking in terms of what is best for the company, rather, what is easier. Just because there was some success once on a marketing initiative, doesn’t mean that it is the best possible outcome for all of your marketing initiatives.

TIP: Diversify your marketing initiatives. This will keep your proverbial eggs in multiple baskets. This will also allow you to gauge the effectiveness of your media mix (various marketing through different mediums), and then continually re-vamp your marketing strategies as you progress. Diversify, evaluate and then diversify again.

-jeremy

Small business vs. large business

Whether you are a small business or a large business there are ways to approach marketing that should be standard. Here are a few of the basics.

1. Actually do marketing. A surprising amount of business folk out there still see marketing as a waste of money. These same doubters often rely on their own larger-than-life personality to sell and have not given marketing a chance to increase their business potential beyond what they can accomplish by themselves.

2. Look at the long-term (strategic approach). Marketing is not just about immediate sales but it can create the framework for a client/customer base for years to come.

3. Look at the short-term (immediate sales). Whether this is promoting a sale or it is the day-to-day sales, this cannot be overlooked so that both existing customers are not forgotten and potential customers can be added to the customer base.

4. The brand is sacred. Treat your brand with as much consistency and reverence as possible. It is not something to change on a whim or something that should be degraded visually or verbally for the sake of any immediate sales.

The ultimate goal of marketing should be growth for the business. No matter what size business you are, if you are not growing then one reason could be ineffectual marketing.

Market well,
-jeremy

Emphasize quality

If your product or service is not quite solid is it possible to make some sales? Absolutely. The problem will be with sustaining those sales throughout time. Marketing effectively is not about trying to cover up the lack of a solid product or service, rather, marketing effectively is about letting the audience know about your quality product or service and then get them excited about learning more about you or to purchase the product.

TIP: As tempting as it is to want to sell to a vast audience immediately after concepting a product or service, try to work out some initial kinks to hone down what you are selling prior to bringing it to the greater audience. Marketing can help increase sales and exposure, but a quality product/service will exponentially sell itself throughout time.

-jeremy

simplicity is complex

As an undergrad art student, I remember being introduced to the minimalist art movement for the first time. These artists were made famous for such things as putting just a few squares on the canvas or leaving the canvas entirely blank. My first thought, like most artists who see them for the first time, was that I could have done that. Now, I’m not so sure.

For simplicity to work in art, there has to be a conscious decision to leave out elements. When faced with a blank canvas, it feels good to put all of your thoughts, energy and passion into making that canvas not blank anymore.

TIP: The goal of art is to express while the goal of marketing is to sell. Therefore, with marketing and design, simplicity is crucial for the viewer to focus on the message at hand. To do this, there needs to be a conscious decision to focus on a couple, or one, key element(s) and to leave out the extraneous information.

EXAMPLE: Let’s say you have a tee-shirt company in Oregon and you want to establish yourself in the market. You sell slim-fit shirts with age-old sayings on them. You only use organic cotton. You are a woman-owned business. You manufacture over 10,000 shirts a year. You sell to the western US. So, with that situation, what do you say in your marketing materials?

There are a few ways to slice this one, but you could say “Oregon Shirts, Organic Wisdom”. In other words, focus on one or a couple of items to put in the forefront of the marketing and put the other information as the secondary line of marketing (further within a brochure/website). The idea is to draw in the audience by the first marketing piece, thus, getting the audience onto further information to fully gain their trust in your product/company.

-jeremy

Live TV Spot

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 metrics

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

Target your audience

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

visuals, visuals, visuals

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

service marketing is not a monologue

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

marketing your brand

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

print vs. web

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

google yourself

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

stand apart

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