Posts Tagged ‘marketing campaign’
Advertising Do’s and Don’ts
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
If you’re looking to create an advertising campaign for your business, you need to make sure you approach it correctly if you want it to make an impact. This is regardless of what form your advertising will take - online, print, television or radio. After all, you’re probably spending quite a bit on the advertising costs, so you need to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.
Here’s a list of do’s and don’ts when developing your campaign:
Keeping it Clean
Do use simple ideas: Focus your campaign on one image, slogan, or concept.
Don’t have 4-5 images vying for attention: your ad will likely confuse readers into just turning the page.
Do keep it short: Give them 2-3 benefits and enough interest to make them want to find out more.
Don’t clutter the page with too much information: Again, don’t confuse people with information overload. Save all the extraneous information for your brochure, catalog, or advertorial piece.
Do keep it relevant: Think of your target audience and give them only the offers or benefits relevant to them. You’ll get a much better response rate.
Don’t just throw everything you have out there: If you have several different product lines, you don’t want to talk about all of them in one ad. Relevance is key!
It’s All in the Headline
Do make your headline short and impactful: a website has less than 10 seconds to grab your attention when you land on it. An advertisement has even less, so you need to grab your intended audience from the word “Go!” This means that your headline needs to be snappy, sharp and effective.
Don’t have a long-winded headline: The more your audience has to read, the more bored they’ll become. Get to the point!
Do compare where necessary: consumers want to know why they should buy from you and not your competitors - give them benefits.
Don’t go on too much about your company: you’ll just put your audience off altogether. Offer them something instead - anything that shows what’s in it for them.
Stand Out Visually
Do grab attention with your logo or a graphic: Think about the slogan for clothes designer FCUK - at first glance, you have to look twice to make sure you haven’t misread. This is the kind of attention you want - a catchy slogan and one that stays in your mind after you’ve seen it. If you can afford to, have a professional designer come up with some examples for you.
Don’t be too clever: The last thing you want is for your ad to be so clever that your audience has to think too long to get it. Remember, 10 seconds…
Tags: advertising, advice, danny brown, Marketing, marketing campaign, Marketing Your Business, tips
Posted in News & Articles | 1 Comment »
The Importance of Starting a Social Marketing Campaign
Monday, March 31st, 2008
In order to bring in new customers, many businesses use expensive advertising methods. From newspaper adverts to trade magazines, radio or television commercials or more, the cost to get your business name out in the open can often be an expensive undertaking. However, there is another method that you can use, and it’s both inexpensive and hugely effective - social marketing.
What is Social Marketing?
At its simplest, social marketing is a method of online marketing that can bring very substantial results for businesses that use it. By working to a set plan over certain timescales, you can use things like blogs, social networking sites, online forums and much more to drive new traffic to your company website. And new traffic very often means new customers.
There are literally hundreds of ways that you can use a social marketing campaign to get results; however, if you’re new to the idea then there are certain ones that are easier than others to implement from the beginning.
Make a Timetable
Just like any part of your business’ marketing plans, social marketing needs to be approached properly and with a solid plan of attack. Making time in your day-to-day workings will ensure that you can concentrate all your energies onto getting the right ideas across.
Use Social Media Sites
Over the last few years, traditional methods for reporting the news have gradually been replaced by social media sites. These websites have millions of users who share news stories as soon as soon as they break, often beating established news sites to the punch. Places like Digg, StumbleUpon and Technorati are excellent for users to recommend stories and other websites. If you set up a profile, you can then have friends and colleagues start to recommend your news to other users, which in turn will lead to an increased interest in your business.
Start a Blog
Often looked upon as the musings of lonely people with nothing better to do, blogs done properly can be as effective a marketing tool as you could possibly think. Not only can blogs offer a great opportunity to have the very latest news from your business made available, they can also allow you to show your strengths as an expert in the areas that you’re talking about. Once people start reading your blog and agreeing with what you’re writing, they’ll most probably look at the business that the blog is associated with.
You can start a blog fairly easily - either as a sub-domain on your existing website, or as a separate entity that links back to your site. This second option is an excellent way of growing links to your website as well, which is another important aspect of social marketing. By combining all these aspects, you’ll soon have a far improved presence online, and one that the likes of Google will soon pick up on.
Tags: advice, danny brown, E-Commerce and E-Business, Growing Your Business, marketing campaign, Marketing Your Business, online marketing, social marketing, tips
Posted in News & Articles | No Comments »
Get Up to Speed by Utilizing a Marketing Dashboard
Monday, November 26th, 2007
When you get in your car and drive somewhere, you utilize a dashboard. It tells you important information such as how fast you are going, if there are any problems with your car, and even which direction you are headed, depending on the model of your car.
In Sales and Marketing, we utilize dashboards almost every day; but for the most part they are unsophisticated. Writing your weekly sales numbers versus quota on the dry erase board, sending around a monthly newsletter with results in big bold letters, these are simple dashboards.
In today’s information age, things are moving quicker than our outdated marketing dashboards of the past. We need newer, faster tools that offer real time intelligence to let us know if we need to shift our focus mid stream to be more competitive.
Managing marketing programs in real time
Which figures do you use to measure your marketing and sales progress and success? Leads? Pipeline? Deals? Orders? Revenue? The indicators you use to drive your actions should be available to you at a glance. You can’t make today’s tough decision with yesterday’s data. A Marketing dashboard displays results as they arrive and alerts you to milestone events. With marketing performance metrics on your desktop, you can monitor one marketing program while working on the next one.
Marketing dashboard benefits at a glance
* Unifying different data sources into a single display
* Knowing when and where prospects visit your site
* Monitoring your own progress against campaign goals
* Staying abreast of competitive threats and opportunities
* Identifying and shifting resources to top performing programs
* Tracking and comparing conversion rates for different programs
* Making better decisions based on real time data
* Seeing pipeline performance data in real time.
Marketing departments are often perceived as just a cost center. Most people don’t realize marketing makes some of the most important investments in any organization. Utilizing a Marketing Dashboard for your key metrics allows you to monitor, share, and prove the value of your business decisions - on demand, day after day. Empower yourself to increase your marketing ROI based on real-time marketing performance indicators.
Different types of Marketing Dashboards
From a simple Excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of business intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in marketing reporting and analysis. An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming “must-haves” for all businesses. Easy-to-use by non-technical business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.
You’ve decided to get a Marketing Dashboard, now what?
You have bought in to the concept of a dashboard - now what do you do? The most difficult piece of creating your company’s marketing dashboard may be the first step, which is deciding on the metrics for your board. They should provide you with data that is actionable.
Consider that many companies are trying to figure out the subcomponents of their brand value chain. They’re asking questions such as “If we invest money in doing some branding here, how will it impact consumers at various points of the process, and how will it ultimately translate into growing our sales and in turn our value as a company?”
Once you have determined the right metrics, data visualization can narrow down the information and track the key metrics and how they are progressing in a clear and compelling way. Identifying whether a given marketing campaign or tactic has an immediate or lagging effect-or no effect at all-on brand awareness means that the traditional semi-annual tracking wave is no longer enough. Instead, it means capturing a real time rolling sample on a continuous basis to ensure you have the necessary data.
There are a number of companies who specialize in dashboards and business metric managing. A few who provide information via the web are:
* http://www.marketingnpv.com/
* http://www.advizorsolutions.com/
* http://www.visualmining.com/
* http://www.tableausoftware.com/
Utilizing your Marketing Dashboard and making sure you are up to speed
You have the strategy, the goals and objectives. You are gathering the data, now take advantage of the information age and get it piped into a dashboard to let you know how your marketing efforts and dollars are working. Utilize a Marketing Dashboard and make sure you’re up to speed, headed in the right direction, and that there are no warning lights on, indicating a potential problem.
Tags: advice, larry Slusser, Marketing, marketing campaign, marketing dashboard, Marketing Your Business, tips
Posted in News & Articles | No Comments »