|
|||||
DGG’s Favorite Links
|
Marketing & PR Tips
Marketing on a Shoestring: 10 Ideas to Gain Visibility and Market PresenceIt is said that money is the great inhibitor of innovation. When businesses have to trim budgets and increase market share—the scenario most of the business world found itself in these last eighteen months—it presents an opportunity. Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch seems almost prescient with his 2008 statement: “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small, anymore, it will be the fast beating the slow, the nimble beating the bureaucrat, the aware beating the asleep, the world is flat and opportunities are for the taking." Whether you’re the business owner, the ad agency, or the social media marketing army of one, here are 10 marketing ideas to help you gain visibility and market presence in spite of a limited budget. 1. Make sure your product or service is best-in-class. Spending even $50 on an ad is wasteful if the product is lousy. Conversely, with a highly valued product or service, the social media channels await your brand engagement. A good story told with sincerity can travel at light speed on Twitter. Ford Motor Company created www.thefordstory.com to encourage Blue Oval fans to submit their own stories. Let your product do the talking—blog it, tweet it, and post it on YouTube for tremendous Return on Investment and Return on Information. 2. Don’t forget the basics. Write a Letter to the Editor or an 800-word op-ed to position your message in front of your audience. It’s a fraction of the cost of advertising. Newspaper editors, trade association pubs, and business journals love to receive well-written articles. The better the writing, the higher the placement opportunity. Once it’s in print, send the link into the public timeline with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn conversations for immense ROI. 3. Announce new hires, product launches, surveys, blogs, seminars, events, and company awards in media releases. As much as we would like to believe everyone in 2010 is social media savvy, it’s simply not true. Reporters and editors are probably following you on Twitter for regional information and to take the pulse of the community. Many businesses are skeptical and uninformed on social media. Start with the basic PR tools and then add social media tools to increase the influence. 4. Comment on blogs and offer your expert opinion when appropriate. It’s even better if you have a countercultural or uncommon point of view. 5. Your Web site is your communications engine. Get the most out of it by continually updating it with fresh content. Tweet articles and content that’s easily found on your site. 6. Ask publications and Web sites if they offer discount ad fees for non-profits, start-ups, or small-budget businesses. Team up with another small business to co-sponsor events or co-market ads. 7. Conduct a short (5-10 questions) survey of your customers or prospects to find out what they like and what they may want to change about your services or products. There are many Web-based services that offer custom-built surveys to capture valuable information from your current and potential users. 8. Mail your customers a handwritten thank-you note with a discount coupon. My clients often tell me that they love receiving my handwritten notes of appreciation. Good manners never go out of style. 9. In B2B marketing, write an article for a state trade magazine. Magazine and journal editors have space to fill and are always searching for quality articles. Magazines post their content online, so it’s easy to tweet the link and mention it. More mentions equals more influence. 10. Become an expert in your field. Make yourself accessible to the media by offering your contact information, a positive attitude, and a steady flow of information on your service or product. If you’re easy to find and have the right words, you or your client will be the first ones quoted in traditional and social media news—not your competition.
Psychoacoustics: The Marketing of SoundWhat is psychoacoustics? It’s the new marketing soundscape; "a delicate balance between science and art, a mixture of physics and psychology, and it studies our emotional and intellectual reactions to sounds. When two noises compete, we can only tune into one," says Maria Paggetti in "The Growl Sanctuary," Jaguar Spring 2005. Marketers hope that "one" is the sound of their client’s product, not their competitors’. Maria Paggetti notes that of the 729,000 trademarks in force in the United States, only 23 are sounds. Think of the MGM lion’s roar and its distinctiveness. If marketers can capture sounds for a client and clients can own sounds, it opens up a new branch of branding and market share. The automotive industry understands the power of sound. We want our car engines to purr, not rattle. Bug repellent companies understand the power of sound too. The relatively low-level sound a mosquito produces causes significant reactions in people, and marketers capitalize on that reaction with an array of products to eliminate that incessant buzzing. As creative service firms look for increased client and product visibility through brand building and buzz building, through blogs and Blackberrys, the science of sound is an exciting marketing opportunity waiting to be "owned." When a business creates a market presence with well-written words and memorable graphics, completing the brand with sound will be more than music to the clients’ ears, it’ll be music to the CFO’s ears as well.
Want a Marketing Edge? Write to Be ReadThe chief purpose in communication is to be read. Whether it’s emails, texts, tweets, blog posts, letters, memos, or proposals—we want people to read what we’ve written. Good writing is clear, readable, and audience appropriate. It attracts the reader to the message. On several occasions, I have read a book review in the Wall Street Journal and within the hour left my house and bought the book—Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss was one of them. That’s effective book review writing. Every word you use or misuse sends a powerful message about you and your business. And it’s a perception that cannot be easily deleted if you don’t take time to proofread your copy, fact check your statistics, or use concise language. This includes our tweets and blog posts. If we become so consumed with the volume of our information on Twitter and forget that the language in our tweets sends the first impression of us, we need to slow down. Here’s an example from IABC’s Communication World’s Cringe Collection, and it’s an actual global company’s advertorial: "Given the limitations on current storage management technology imposed by heterogeneous storage infrastructure, achieving nominal capacity allocation and utilization efficiency is nothing short of a black art." What do you think that nugget of incomprehensible writing cost the company? Perhaps more damaging than a loss to its bottom line is the damage to a company’s reputation when poor writing is published. A company’s significant investment in professional graphic design, marketing, printing, and a Web presence is doomed when the words can’t be read and understood. Whether you’re composing a media release, a blog post, an email to a prospective client, or a tweet, the following five easy steps will help you write clear, effective communication: 1. Use language tools to help you write strong copy. Need a good word? Check out www.thesaurus.com and www.dictionary.com. Buy Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and reacquaint yourself with the elementary rules of usage. For a refresher on possessives and apostrophes, read Eats, Shoots & Leaves. 2. Write sentences in simple subject-verb-object format. If you want consumers and clients to read your marketing communications, “write to express, not to impress” (Bob Bly). 3. Increase your writing fluency by increasing your reading. An excellent place to start is the daily reading of The Wall Street Journal. 4. Keep your average sentence length under 20 words when possible. 5. Proofread your writing, and then ask a colleague to proofread it too—especially with Web-related copy and information that is posted on the public timeline. For instance, commenting on the Nobel Peace prize and accidentally writing Nobel Piece prize may attract attention you don’t want. In today’s business world, mastering the power of language is a must for success, and it’s one of the most cost-effective changes you can make to gain a marketing edge.
You Are the Message: How to Create Your Personal and Business BrandRegardless of your industry or position, you have a brand. Each of us sells services, products, ideas, and opinions to colleagues, bosses, consumers, and clients. There is no "get out of brand free" card, according to my friend Kae Groshong Wagner. Every business has one. If a colleague introduces you at a networking event, your brand is the last part of this sentence: "I’d like you to meet Anne Deeter Gallaher, she’s a ______." Recently, Sherry Christian, evening news anchor for WHP TV 21 in Harrisburg, introduced me as Anne Deeter Gallaher, marketing guru. That’s my brand. The purpose of managing your brand is to fill in that blank before your colleagues–or your competition–define who you are. The following seven strategies are tools to help you define your brand and send the best message into the marketplace: 1. Take a close look at your presentation package. 2. Define your message and create your personal tag line. 3. Surround yourself with good company. 4. Know your target audience. To whom are you selling? 5. Distinguish yourself. 6. You are what you say. 7. Be friendly to everyone. A company or personal brand is only as powerful as the purveyor. Start today to refine your brand and drive your message into the marketplace. For the entire article on personal and business branding that appeared in paBanker Magazine and the Central Penn Business Journal (Oct. 19, 2007), send an email to adg@deetergallahergroup.com requesting a pdf.
Three Principles for Business Success1. Craft a clear message. What are you selling? If you can’t answer that question clearly and succinctly in one sentence, then you need to tighten your message. A good test to determine if your message is clear is to explain your business to a third grader. If he or she understands exactly what you do, then your message is straightforward. 2. Define your target audience. Who are you selling to? Before you send your message into the marketplace, discover who needs your product or service. Imagine you have a spectacular deal on a hunting cabin in Fulton County. To sell your adventure, you’ll need to discover where Pennsylvania’s one million deer hunters reside; but you can be sure that a direct-mail campaign to the city of Philadelphia would be a waste of marketing dollars. 3. Demand attention. A clear message aimed at a defined target is an opportunity for a business blitzkrieg. Devise a short-term plan to burst onto your target’s radar screen, and once they take notice, begin to devise an eighteen-month plan that continuously puts you in the news, in print, on the Web, in blogs, and in people’s conversations. If you’d like some fresh ideas on how to accomplish any of these three principles for business success, contact us at adg@deetergallahergroup.com.
Ten Rebranding Tips for Companies Ready for an Evolution1. Know what your brand is before you rebrand. 2. Know what your clients value most about you—ask them. 3. Restrain yourself from changing brand elements that don’t need to be changed—tag lines, logos, office décor, stationery package. 4. Concentrate on being well-positioned—determine where, when, and how often to be seen. 5. When you make the initial splash in public—make it big! 6. Be willing to invest in sending the best message possible into the marketplace—you will have to spend money. 7. Demonstrate to your clients that you are willing to do the very same things that you ask them to do—invest in a new logo, redesign a stationery package, pitch story ideas, or venture into the social space. 8. Seek advice from non-branding professionals—those on the front line of your brand who would potentially buy your service. 9. Don’t let your guard down and expect slack on your own rebranding—right down to the logo M&Ms. It all matters. 10. Pour every ounce of passion and belief into your rebranding—it’s contagious and very effective in garnering attention, new clients, and engaging employees. |
Search
|
|||
|
|||||
