Twitter provides a tremendous opportunity for businesses looking to talk with and learn more about their customers and potential customers. What happens all too often, however, is companies sign up, toss a Follow Me icon on the website and wait for followers to show up. Twitter is a community of give and take. You should get to know your neighbors. Here are some pointers are running a more engaging Twitter account for your business. read more
We often come across companies that know they want to market themselves but they don’t know what to say or how to say it. More than that, they don’t know whom to say it to and they often resort to grabbing a bullhorn and yelling to everyone. Target marketing helps you to be engaging to your audience and helps you to more easily see where you resources are best placed. To begin to develop a targeted marketing strategy you must first be laser focused as to who you are and what you want to get across in a message.
Sure, having a market large enough to support your business is important and should be a major part of your analysis when considering even starting one in the first place. But even though you may consider yourself that well rounded, perfect for everyone solution – not everyone will see you that way. You shouldn’t want them to.
The truth is there can be side effects with that approach.
I’m here to help your business, so I wanted to make a simple plea.
Please use the internet to reach your audience. For your own sake… please…..
Millions and millions of folks across the country are logging in every day. Folks sitting in their cubicle are surfing the web while they’re supposed to be working. Retired grandparents are sitting at home reading Facebook on their iPad. Anyone under 30 is trying to look you up on their iPhone (hopefully not while they’re driving) or asking their Twitter friends for recommendations on businesses that do exactly what you do. read more
Not every book you read to help your small business has to do with accounting or hiring and firing or how to be the perfect manager. Those may be important topics but so are less tangible subjects such as inspiration, creativity, and differentiation.
Below are five must-reads for small business owners and business dreamers of all sorts.
What is brand equity and what does it mean for your business?
“Products are created in the factory, brands are created in the mind.” – Walter Landor
A former CEO of McDonald’s once said, “If every asset we own, every building, every piece of equipment were destroyed in a terrible natural disaster, we would be able to borrow all the money to replace it very quickly because of the value of our brand… The brand is more valuable than the totality of all these assets.”
In addition to being Intern Extraordinaire by day for Shout Out Studio, I’m a full-time college student at night. Think Batman, only for the good of marketing instead of justice. As I sit in my Marketing class I often come across a few terms, models and theories that make sense to share. That brings us to Brand Equity.
Marketers can live in a precarious position. Often existing somewhere between the legal department, HR, accountants & the C-suite; marketers can be pulled in every different direction. The result is often mediocre, watered-down messaging.
“Don’t say that, we might offend somebody.”
or
“We don’t want our competition to know our secrets.”
or
“Show me something more … um … corporate looking.”
These are the kiss of death to marketing success. Roy H. Williams in his classic book, “The Wizard of Ads” gives 9 key words that will determine the success of your marketing efforts:
“The risk of insult is the price of clarity.”
If you’re going to seduce the perfect customers and clients, then you’re going to have to risk insulting those who are outside of that group.
Photo Credit: Stuart Caie
Choosing between boring, yelling at or seducing your audience seems obvious; seduction wins, duh! But all too often we don’t take the time to seduce the audience. We fall into messaging, writing and design that will offend nobody and – consequently – will engage nobody.
Seduction requires being subtle in some ways & overt in others. Being forward yet being coy. A bit of tug & pull will have your target audience drooling over read more
One of the truths about SEO is that inbound links are absolutely critical to increase your search ranking.
When I explain how Google sees inbound links as votes of confidence, I always see folks nod their head. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Then I ask them how they think we should go about link-building.
Blank stare.
I thought I’d try to help the folks out there who need some help. Here’s a list of 25 ways to get inbound links to your website: read more
Analytics Marketing Strategies
Understanding analytics marketing these days seems to require the Wizard of Oz. A group of uniquely important characters, related in more ways than they realize – all with individual goals that turn out to be on the same ultimate path. They all rely on each other to get where they’re going. They all have a role to play. read more
When I first read this story all I could think of was what a sickening feeling the individual responsible must have had when they realized what had happened. We’ve all had an email, tweet, or message we couldn’t recall and had to live with the consequences; to some degree that has become the nature of the beast.
There have been some really good reports on what happened and how it ultimately impacted KitchenAid and its brand. One of the best is from Simply Measured which shows the statistical response to the entire event including the crisis management by KitchenAid’s team. read more
I can sit studying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs and core elements of consumer-driven marketing strategy for years, which it seems I have been doing nothing but for 4 years. Yet no matter how much I immerse myself in my textbooks, nothing will prepare me for real life experience more than working in, well, real life.
This is where Shout Out Studio comes into play.
The last few months have been a sprint. Seeing how times like that can impact the quality of work and life got me thinking about margins. Not the profit kind, though they are important for your business. I’m referring to time margins. Thought margins. Creative margins. Take a break margins. Read some fiction margins. Listen to your favorite record margins. Go for a walk, play with the dog, grab a drink with friends, margins. read more
Color can play a major role in how folks think about your business
Color choice in branding and identity design can come from many different places. Maybe it’s simply your favorite color or the color of your house when you were a kid or it’s a representation of a word or phrase in your company name. All of those reasons are legitimate but another thing you might want to consider is the way your company will be perceived by others because of the colors you use. Some companies also think about the potential saturation of a certain color or palette in their market. We did when developing the palette for Shout Out Studio, but we also wanted our colors to reflect our personality and intention. read more
LinkedIn has just released a new report on how people use various social networks to stay in touch: “The Mindset Divide Revealing how emotions differ between personal and professional networks.”
Most of us have multiple networks we use on a regular basis. This report highlights the differences between how we use them as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each. read more
Optimizing a website for search engines is absolutely critical for brands hoping to be the answer to a searcher’s query.
While the importance is obvious, the strategy and tactics to get there are not. Being such a misunderstood practice, Search Engine Optimization has attracted both champs and chumps. Unsuspecting clients might have no clue they’ve hired an SEO chump until read more
We did what everyone else does. We sat around a table and asked the question, “What do we want to have on our website?”
It’s a normal question that small business folks ask themselves. Our answers to that first question prompted lots more questions:
- “What do we want to accomplish with our website?”
- “How will our audience really use our website?”
- “What does our audience need?”
- “How can our website help?” read more
Creating a website can be a rewarding investment if you approach the project with some key things in mind.
- What do you want to accomplish by having a site?
Whether you’re a photographer looking to present a polished portfolio or a retailer aiming to generate sales online, its good to document goals to measure yourself against. For many of our clients, this answer is some form of increased sales, improved revenue, more clients, greater exposure, etc. Your goals can help guide a number of decisions around navigation and the number and type of pages you need. read more
Marketing Pros just published a new study covering the current usage of social media. Here are some of the highlights. read more
Salesforce.com invited General Colin Powell to speak at its Dreamforce 12 conference and share his thoughts on the ups and downs of social media. He spoke on a number of points including its role in the Arab Spring and its threat to totalitarian regimes.
This is a good background article and is a fairly quick read.
Photo Credit: Facebook(LET)
A brand is a terrible thing to waste. It can also be a rewarding yet tiring thing to create. This total package of concrete and abstract things and emotions can seem daunting. Like trying to catch fog. Brand development contains a number of things to consider. The good news is that you can start to create a more clear picture of what your brand should be by asking yourself a few key questions. read more