Happy President’s Day! I hope all of you who are off today are enjoying some extra time with your families. Today is a day to reflect on all that our forefathers had created here in America and to rejoice in the awesome freedom that they fought so valiantly for in our country and that we enjoy today.
Just imagine though, what it would have been like for them had they been able to take advantage of all the technology that we have at our finger tips today. For instance, what if George Washington could have used Twitter to tweet to the Continental Army key battleground locations and war plans. He definitely would have had the Constitution drafted and posted to his circle on Google+ for comment and review. Or, what if Lincoln had Facebook as a means of spreading his message of equality among men? Maybe the Civil War would not have been so bloody, the South would have been less affected and the Emancipation Proclamation would have been a blog! It’s kind of fun to imagine what President’s Washington & Lincoln’s accomplishments would have been and how they would have lived if social media were a part of their eras in history.
Let us know your thoughts on what our two great Presidents would be doing with social media if they had access to our technology back them – we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Pepsi, Coca Cola, McDonalds – they are all corporations that we can easily recognize without necessarily seeing the name. Why is that? What have they done with their corporate brand that was so brilliant? Why is your brand not so easy to recognize?
These are all very thought provoking questions. But seriously – who cares? I’ll tell you who cares – YOUR CUSTOMERS! If your corporate brand is less than consistent you are confusing your customers and your potential customers. People will not be able to connect the dots with all your marketing if the message is not cohesive across all platforms. Here are five ways to establishing and maintaining your corporate brand like the big guys:
1) Logo – Most consumers remember a company’s logo and not necessarily the name of the business. Make sure your logo is a strong element and used consistently and constantly everywhere you are talking about your company. Keep your logo files somewhere safe that you can access for future use on all of your marketing. Click here for more details on logo design.
2) Branding starts with the owner or CEO of the company. As the owner it’s your job to ensure that your staff, vendors and all other stakeholders maintain and protect the company’s brand identity. By inspiring your brand within your employees you are creating brand managers in each and every one!
3) Technology – keep pace with changing technology and how it affects your corporate brand. Today’s technology may not be tomorrow’s and it’s the key to your strategy. Be sure you are on top of trends and changes so that you are not left behind by your competition!
4) Keep your customers satisfied – your brand is highly affected by whether or not your customers are happy with your company’s performance and their interactions with your brand. They wills spread the word when they’ve had a positive experience OR a negative one! Make sure you put customer satisfaction at the top of your priority list.
5) Performance measurements – keeping up on how your brand is performing gives you the ability to move and change based on the feedback and performance of your brand in the market. If you are not keeping track of how well your brand is performing you will have no idea of how to keep your momentum going. Keep your finger on the pulse of your corporate brand and you’ll be a huge success!
So, you don’t have to have a huge marketing budget or tons of employees to increase your brand awareness or to be successful with your corporate brand. Providing some guidelines, gathering your troops and resources and keeping an eye on your customers are all keys to your corporate brand strategy. Just put the keys in the lock and turn! For more help with creating your corporate brand, click here.
Last week, depending on where you were and what groundhog you listen to, we are either in for 6 weeks more of winter (is it winter yet?) or only 6 weeks till Spring. In my book that’s really 6 and one-half dozen of the other! But fun none the less.
Let’s talk about 6 weeks from now – that will put us around March 21st . We will have experienced Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, Ash Wednesday and St. Patrick’s Day in between! That’s a lot of opportunity to pass you by! But if you start now and you plan out six weeks of marketing strategy to get your business going by the time Spring truly arrives you will be so far ahead of your competition all they’ll see is your dust. How do you do that? Let me show you how!
First, pull out your calendar for February and copy one for March too. Take a look at the things you have going on in your business like events, tradeshows, special pricing deals or networking opportunities. Note them on the calendars. Next, decide what days you want to reach out and touch your customers. Whether it is through a direct mail piece, social media marketing via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other, email marketing, blogging relevant information or advertising. I recommend doing some of each so that all your bases are covered. After you have decided what you are going to do, then plug them in on the days of the calendar that you would like to do them. If you are planning on reaching out to your Facebook connections with a special deal, make sure that you are promoting this well in advance and are scheduling reminders along the way until the deal is over.
If you are inviting your customers and connections to an in-house event, make sure you schedule when to send your invitations, when to post it to your social media and when you are going to send out reminder emails. By creating and sticking to your 6 week calendar you will be more likely to follow through with your plans than if you were to just pull dates out of the air and try to fly blind with your promotions.
Utilize free online resources to pre-schedule your email blasts and social media interactions to save you time and effort. Instead of watching TV at night, set your DVR and use that time to create your content for each week.
The weather this year has been perfect for doing business – your customers are out and about – no one is hibernating this year, so do not let your marketing hibernate. Commit to take the next 6 weeks and work at it. With just a little bit of planning and effort you will see the results of your marketing AND you might just have some great campaigns that are award worthy!
Join 20 Twenty Graphics at the FAME Awards on Thursday, February 23rd – click here for registration information.
For more information or help with an Award Winning Marketing Strategy, click here
So how's everyone feeling the day after the big game! I know we are certainly a little tired here from all the excited and probably still have a little bit of a food coma going on! Since we still have all that food on our minds we thougth that perhaps this blog about nachos and your website might be appropriate.
There is a misconception about launching a website and automatically having tons of visitors, or hits as the term goes. Believe it or not, your website needs (and deserves) some promotion in order to be an effective selling tool for your company. I like to think of my website as a bag of Tortilla chips. They’re good by themselves, but what makes them even better are the things that go with chips, like salsa, guacamole, jalapeno peppers and nacho cheese sauce – is your mouth watering yet?
I’m going to show you how you can have all that…& a bag of chips!
Everyone is buzzing about SEO, SEM, social media and various other online marketing these days. But where do you start & what is the most effective way of bringing traffic to your website? If you go back to my example of your website being a bag of chips, they always taste better with a few sides to go with them. Let’s start with SEO, or in this example we’ll say salsa. You need to have a clear goal with regard to where you want to be within the organic results of a search engine. Maybe page one or two is your initial goal. But how do you get there?
Try adding some guacamole to your chips, or should I say a blog. No website should be without a blog. Blogging is one of the most effective ways of increasing your website’s SEO and can increase traffic to your website by as much as 55%. It also helps establish you as an expert in your field and provides your readers with valuable insights and information. Many of my clients do not want to attempt blogging. They claim they don’t know what to write about, but there are many sources for content that you can tap into and if you are offering your readers something of value, blogging will be a snap once you get started. In addition to blogging some other online methods of increasing traffic & SEO are social medial marketing through sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to name a few.
So far we have chips (website), salsa (SEO) and guacamole (Blogging/Social Media Marketing). Once you have accomplished bringing more traffic to your website through blogging and various other social media marketing then you can add the jalapeno peppers, or should I say nurturing and tracking those leads and converting them into customers. How do you do that? One of the most effective ways of capturing your website visitor’s information is to provide landing pages where they can fill out a form to gain access to whatever you are offering them. For example, you might run an online campaign with e-mail, through your blogging and on Facebook for a free white paper on a topic that is compelling and important to your customer. When the visitor clicks on the offer, they are directed to a landing page where they fill in the form (usually email address and name and possibly a question about their interest). Once they submit the form, the white paper is made accessible to them. Presto! You now have a new lead and their contact information so you can follow up and convert this lead into a new customer.
But no order of Nachos Grande would be complete without the cheese sauce! One of the most important parts to optimizing your website is analyzing your results and making necessary adjustments. There are several online analytics that you can take advantage of, the most widely used being Google Analytics. Once you know how your visitors are finding you on the internet, what search engines they are using, the phrases they are searching for you with then you can determine if you need to adjust your campaign and your offerings to continue to increase traffic and generate even more leads.
Truthfully, if your goal is to become #1 on an organic search engine, then you need to rethink your goal. What you should be looking for is to increase traffic, generate leads and covert them to sales. By improving your sales process through building offers and landing pages, blogging and social media, your website will go from a stale bag of chips to a lead-generating, sale making plate of nachos with all the ingredients and flavor you’ve been craving.
If you need help with optimizing your website and generating more leads, contact 20 Twenty Graphics today.
Happy Groundhog Day!
It certainly feels like Spring outside!
Do you think the Groundhog will see his shadow tomorrow or not?
Are we in for more warm weather or 6 more weeks of winter?!!
We just followed Punxsutawney Phil on twitter so we can be the first one's to know! @GroundhogPhil
You all know that we are a huge fan of Inbound Marketing and cannot say enough good things about it, but we also hold traditional marketing near and dear to our hearts. Just because your company is practicing different Inbound Marketing techniques does not mean you should give up on the old tried and true marketing methods. Here’s few quick things we suggest:
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1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket - stretch your marketing dollars by budgeting low cost, high exposure, targeted methods to include a variety of marketing media. Things like e-Mail marketing, e-Newsletters and Facebook Fan Pages and Blogging can be used in conjunction with Direct mail, print ads or radio to gain critical exposure across several media for planned events, specials and sales. Always keep your campaigns consistent across all methods of advertising so that your customers do not get confused.
2. For every online campaign you launch, you should be supplementing it with a direct mail, print ad or other type of non-internet campaign to ensure your success.
For example, Email Marketing (to existing customer lists) can be economical and effective with reaching those that have already shown an interest in your products and services. Utilize analytic reports to find out which customers opened the email, clicked on something and contact them to follow up on their interest. Send a direct mail piece to the postal addresses of that same list to continue your message. You are then covering all of your bases and keeping your message consistent. Always remember to have a call to action on both e-Mail and Direct mail to give your audience a compelling reason to act now.
3. All of your print and offline marketing should direct your customer to your online campaign where the details can be displayed. Make sure your website is designed and/or updated to reflect your Facebook Fan Page, Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. for brand recognition. Your current events, sales and promotions should be tied in to your website. What your clients see online should be what they see in print.
4. For every print PR story you publish, so should you publish an online PR story. Then you should link the online PR story to your blog, Facebook, Website and other Social Media for SEO purposes. You get double the bang for your effort.
5. Dedicate yourself and your company. While many internet and social media marketing sites are free to use, remember that the cost comes as a time investment and you must make the commitment first to start and then dedicate yourself to the upkeep and maintenance of your marketing.
For all your marketing needs contact 20 Twenty Graphics today!
There are so many people and organizations that make a difference in the world. From hunger, health and well-being, to treatment of animals and everything in between, there are so many ways and so many opportunities to make a difference in the life of another being. Sometimes it feels so overwhelming to think about all those in need and to come up with a way that you, as an individual can participate and really feel like you are helping. For some, it’s volunteering at a local food bank and for others it’s helping raise funds to help fight disease. Whether it’s a marathon run, 5K walk or a local community event, there are opportunities everywhere to make a difference in the world.
But did you ever think about making a difference to the people you work with? Have you ever considered that the contribution you make in your place of work every day is making a difference in the lives of others? I have to admit that recently I was questioning my very existence and why I do what I do every day and whether or not it mattered. I know – boo-hoo for me, right? Then, someone much smarter than myself pointed out that what my company does every day, helping other companies market themselves, can make a huge difference in the world because those companies in turn make a difference. I guess that’s what it means when they say we are all connected in the Circle of Life!
For instance, we are working with many different types of companies, including homebuilders. When we help homebuilders sell homes we are helping them create the neighborhoods, where eventually, many people will live, raise their families and grow. When I think of it from that perspective it makes me very proud and honored to be a part of such a long-reaching process that makes lives better for people.
So, the next time you are dreading heading into the office, or you feel uninspired and unmotivated, keep in mind that you are participating in something that is so much bigger than just how you feel about it. You are making a difference to someone, somewhere. Going forward, I will always be thinking about making a difference to my clients’ businesses and how I am helping them to make a difference in the world. :) Have a great Monday!
Interested in what those tools might be...download our free whitepaper today to find out!
Your company’s success is measured in many ways, but one of the most common measures is your annual sales revenue. If you have not determined your annual sales revenue goals and how you plan to capture those sales it’s time for a check under the hood! Just like a car with an engine knock, you know it’s there, but you don’t know how or why it’s there. It’s the same with your sales. It might be easy to take a look at the volume or number of sales you made in 2011, but how do you go about measuring where those sales came from? Knowing the history of your sales’ sources gives you the knowledge you need to plan and set goals for future sales. And how do you know where to budget your precious marketing dollars for 2012 and what marketing strategies have been working for you that you plan to incorporate into your new plan?
What if I were able to offer you a marketing strategy that not only increases the traffic to your website, but offers a way to capture that traffic in the form of leads and a way to analyze and revise it all as needed? Inbound Marketing is a methodical approach to attracting more traffic to your website through compelling content in the form of blogging, social media interactions, videos, and various other online methods of sharing relevant information with your audience. As opposed to Outbound Marketing, which are things (like TV & print ads) that you put out into the crowd and hope that someone’s paying attention and is not going to fast-forward their DVR right past your commercial or using your ad in the bottom of the bird cage. Marketers are realizing, now more than ever before, that these traditional methods of marketing do not work on their own. Your prospects are not paying attention to outbound methods and it will only get worse in the future! So, how do you accomplish changing your entire marketing program? How do you get started when it’s all so confusing and seems like a jumbled mess?
Well, 20 Twenty Graphics has the answer!
Through our comprehensive marketing review which is based on YOUR SALES GOALS we can help you strategize and determine where to budget your 2012 marketing dollars. We can give you the 4-1-1 on exactly how much website traffic you need to generate to achieve your sales goals. Taking that a step further – we can also calculate how much of that traffic needs to be converted to a true lead and how many of the leads you convert need to become paying customers. Our Inbound Marketing plan will help you understand how your goals translate to sales!
Don’t put off the inevitable any longer, it’s time to learn about Inbound Marketing before you are left behind in a cloud of dust by your competition.
If you are looking for a REAL way to attract traffic to your website, convert traffic to leads, succeed with social media and blogging all while creating crazy SEO for your website, look no further – just click here!
At the beginning of every year, I have the opportunity to see a couple of different economic forecasters speak at different associations that I belong too, which is always something I attend because we all know that knowledge is power. Even though these forecasts are based on results from previous years, current market conditions and they can’t take into account any unforeseen situations, like natural disasters and outside influences (like the debt crisis in Europe), I like to get a feel for the general atmosphere of the economy so that I can plan for the year appropriately.
The first forecast that I attended, was provided by Professor James W. Hughes, renowned economist and head of the Economics Department at Rutgers University. Here are some of the highlights that I took away from Professor Hughes’ presentation:
- NJ saw the most job growth in 2011 since 2000 – this is very promising, right?!
- Our state is also seeing a rebalancing of private and public sector jobs, however, local government jobs grew, while state and county level jobs were shed
- Every public job is balanced out with 22 private sector jobs
- Added 47k private and shed 20k public jobs at state level while local grew slightly
- The recovery will continue in NJ and will track closely to the national recovery
- External factors make us vulnerable and our recovery is dependent on those factors
- Our housing recovery for production starts will be 2-3 year longer
The second forecast, was the very next day, and presented by Patrick O’Keefe of J.H. Cohen, LLP, who specializes in the housing market. His information was geared toward the real estate marketing in NJ. Some of the highlights from Mr. O’Keefe’s forecast are actually a review of the past:
- We have seen some improvement in the National housing market but it’s taking a long time because of external factors, debt burdens, fiscal imbalances and financial re-regulation.
- Economy will grow slower for the next two decades than it has in the past.
- Household net worth is 14.1% less than it was in 2007.
- Damage was done in the real estate and mortgage areas due to home values declining 25.1% with the value of the mortgages being down only 3.1%.
- Construction accounts for 3% of NJ’s GDP.
- 1/4 of the missing jobs in NJ is in the construction industry.
- Homeownership is declining in NJ and the country.
Where we came from sounds pretty dismal (and I’ve only selected some of his points from my notes to share with you). But don’t despair; he had some promising information on the future:
- General demand for housing exists.
- Prices are back to where they were in the middle of 2004 and new home prices increased more than resale prices.
- Mortgage rates are at the lowest level ever and the fed plans on staying the course for the time being.
- The affordability index is extremely high which means the fundamentals are all positive for the housing market.
- As we go forward in 2012 the first half will be different than the last half and he’s predicting that we will resolve some of the issues with foreclosure and jobs.
- The second half of the year will see the market rationalize and become more conventional and rates will remain accommodating.
- Building activity will increase particularly in the multifamily arena.
- Construction permits will be up around 15 - 17% which will be above the lowest amount ever in 1997 by about 50.
- Construction financing in multifamily will be more readily available.
Please keep in mind that I’m sharing some of the notes that I took during these presentations and that I can in no way replace the entire presentation from both of these renowned economists, but I wanted to share some of the hope for our economic future that they both agree will be slow. In my book (and the famed story of the tortoise and the hare), slow and steady wins the race!
For more information on the economic forecast for 2012 check out this webinar by NAHB CEO Jerry Howard, Chief Economist David Crowe and Senior Vice-President for Government Affairs Jim Tobin. They take a look at the association's plans for the year, the economic forecast and how the upcoming elections will shape the policies that affect homeownership and the housing industry.
Watch Here