Branding Simplified


Into the Fray is dedicated to helping business owners demystify marketing through design, sales, the digital revolution and more. I want to bridge the gap between yourself and any designer or creative firm you may use. Better armed you will get what you want how you want it without feeling like design and selling is all ‘magic’.

You can understand design. You can communicate your message clearly and concisely. All it takes is work and time as you step.. into the fray.

January 28th, 2013

We’re Moving!

MM_Logo_Color_SmallThat’s right, we’re moving to a new blog spot!

Faithful readers, you’ve known for a while I’ve been developing my own full-time business based on my many side efforts as a marketing guru and graphic designer.  Well the time has come to make everything official.

On January 1st, 2013 we officially launched Marketing Mechanics, LLC.  Some of you have seen earlier efforts to build up our infrastructure online, or even been a part of the beta testing. Thank you all for that!

Into the Fray is being rebranded as the Marketing Toolbox. It will contain all the same great tips, trick and techniques for small business marketing. We’re also adding a few new features such as videos and audios with handy how-tos and detailed discussion on various topics.

Another helpful tool will be our weekly newsletter, Torque, which will include a some useful links for marketing trends, resources and a short summary of the week’s blog posts. Our first newsletter will launch on February 1st and will continue to come out every Friday afterwards. Be sure to subscribe to that if you’d like to avoid missing out on the week’s news.

You are amazing people! I am so very grateful to all of you for reading and commenting on this blog. It’s super exciting to be fully committed to your dreams and turning them into reality.

The New Blog Spot

At the end of February this domain name will automatically re-direct to the new blog site. Until then I invite you to visit the new blog and save it in your favorites.

January 25th, 2013

A Presentation By Any Other Name…

emptysignIt’s a known fact that the best writers spend a huge percent of their time on the tagline or title of a piece. That’s where your success will best lay. Great titles will get emails opened, presentations attended, courses bought and more.

Lousy titles will get you ignored. Worse, if your title isn’t specific enough you might get people signing up for something and thinking it’s another thing entirely! What an embarrassment.

It’s not just about naming your presentation, though. Name your points, your 5 tips, your strategies. Give everything a fine polished sheen. It will make you more memorable and more professional looking.

I saw another interesting play with names as a marketing tool when one of the hosts introduced their speaker/sales guy as the “Master of Ceremonies”.  Really. They called him a MC. He was a great speaker of course and he did some amazing things with his gentle sales pitch at the end of his informational free presentation.  I’m still not sure I would call him a MC, but it certainly gave him some instant clout, especially with the older crowd.

Keep names in mind with your marketing. It can mean a whole lot!

January 24th, 2013

Speaking? Entertain Before and After!

seminarI’ve been to a lot of speaker’s presentations and seen a lot of all-day seminars. Recently I saw a technique that was worth talking about:

Build an auto-play powerpoint slideshow with entertaining quotes and cartoons pertaining to the topic of your speech.

When you think about it, movie theatres have been doing this for ages, though they go so commercialized people do all they can to ignore most of that junk.

So don’t go with commercials being run ahead of your presentation.

Instead, as people are drifting in and settling down, have a quiet entertaining something playing on your projector.

This speaker had some soft, subtle music that wasn’t at all disruptive to soft conversation among guests and hosts, but I think that’s optional.

There are two benefits to this technique. The first is that you’re able to test your equipment and know immediately before the presentation if something isn’t working. The second is that you come off as entertaining, you set a positive mood and enhance the overall experience of your potential customers.

Seems like a worthwhile investment to me!

January 23rd, 2013

Doing It Right: Quality Inn

Blog- DoingitRight_DuckieNot all of them do this, but my road-warrior father had to take a picture when this cute set up greeted him at one particular Quality Inn hotel. That’s right: the bathtub came complete with a rubber ducky.

You might decide that’s really not worth talking about, but let me ask you something: How did I find out about it? Because my father took a picture and showed it to everyone he met who wanted to know what was going on in his life. Since his life can get monotonous (travel, work, travel, work) this was a little something that brightened his week. It gave him something special to share with others and it eventually led to me writing about it.

Multiply that by just a dozen smiling customers. Think that might be worth the few extra cents it cost to install rubber duckies in the bathrooms?

That’s marketing being done right. It doesn’t have to be expensive to be worth talking about. This hotel understood what was important about getting a room: feeling content and at home. Sometimes that means a five-star breakfast buffet. Sometimes it just means a rubber ducky.

January 22nd, 2013

Free Social Media Marketing Tool

logo_gCheck out this iPhone app geared towards small businesses. It’s called Glyder and its founder is trying to create a compact way for small businesses to update social media, email marketing and so on. The app is free for iPhone users, though I don’t see an option for Android users as of writing this post, sorry.

Though some of its features are a little unconventional, the goal of Glyder was something simple for non-tech-savvy entrepreneurs who want some fast way to get digitally social.

You can pay for some of the extra features, but the main source is free, so why not try it out for yourself and see if it’s worth your time?

http://welcome.glyder.co/

 

January 21st, 2013

Our Marketing Fell Into the Swamp

Does anyone remember that scene on Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail where the king of the swamps is talking the history of how his ancestors conquered the lands?

“When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.”

The reason that bit is funny is the sheer ridiculousness of someone spending all that time, money, blood and sweat into the exact same effort four times, especially after the third devastating tragedy. However it’s amazing how the castle they’re in now wouldn’t have existed if the king had taken the logical route and given up after the first or second attempt.

Marketing attempts will fail. Some might even end in flames of hate and hurt reputation. If this happens to you, remember the funny stories you’ll be able to tell later, after you’ve built your forth castle.

January 18th, 2013

Marketing Records

filesWhen thinking ahead to the future, you’ll want to provision for your past. Later designers or marketing groups you bring in will want to know what promotions you’ve done so far. Alternatively, you might have written some amazing copy back for a mailer in 2010, but can’t find the original document anywhere.

This is where having a binder full of one or two copies of every marketing material you make will be very helpful. Let’s face it, we’re tactile people. Sometimes just flipping through old marketing material will inspire a new idea. Plus there’s no need to file name anything, everything will be visual and easy to find.

If you’re super organized put each one in a sheet protector sleeve for easy removal, and write in sharpie the name and location of the files you made them from. Alternatively you could burn a CD of the year’s marketing stuff and store it in the back of the binder as an archive.

You can take this archiving to the next level by also recording how many leads and customers you got from each promotion. Over time you’ll be able to document if certain types of promotions work better or worse, what’s a great ROI and what is a waste of money. This will be priceless after a few years.

Digital marketing materials such as websites, e-newsletters and videos have lots of free analytics you can tap into. Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) is a fantastic tool for website tracking. It’s free and easy to install into any website. It is very quickly becoming the number one analytics tool out there. With this system installed into your website you can track users, where they’re from, how they found you, how long they stay, which pages they visit the most, what files they download most and so on. Sure, there are other options out there, but I’ve yet to see one with so much ease of use and popularity.

Most e-newsletter companies include analytics as part of their service. Both MailChimp.com and ConstantContact.com are excellent no or low-cost e-newsletter services. They can track how many people you send to, how many open, how many click links in your e-newsletter and so on.

Most video hosting services such as the powerhouse YouTube have built in analytics. You can see how many people viewed your video and even how many people liked or disliked it.

While all these digital recording tools are fantastic and worthy of note, please keep in mind they cannot document the most important two fields of interest: How many leads did you get and how many customers were made from those leads? So keep those recorded as well somewhere, ideally in your binder so everything is in one place.

Marketing is a difficult thing to measure, since it may take several exposures to your marketing before someone buys, however even knowing the tipping point marketing piece will be of help. Thinking along the lines of “What were our results” will sharpen your marketing faster. Plus, you’ll be thanking yourself later when you do your year-end review and plan for next year’s marketing efforts.

You… are going to do an end-year review to set up next year’s marketing plan… right?

January 17th, 2013

New Resources from Your Local Library

librarynewsI have in my hot little hand a newsletter from my local library. They’ve been making huge headway into assisting us in our digital book needs.

For the most part this has been a silent revolution – but no more!

In addition to Kindle-ready book downloads and MP3s you can download and ‘check out’ for 30 days, the library has come out with over 160 digitized magazines including popular business titles. All 100% FREE!

If you don’t have a library card, get one and check out this fantastic business and marketing resource.

While you’re at it, check in with your local library’s events. I found out mine is sponsoring free video-making classes, a great consideration for those of us wanting to post commercials and other viral videos online.

Results will vary depending on location, but check this out. In a month’s time all of the following workshops are available free of charge at my local libraries:

  • How to Self-Publish Your Book
  • Game Making Tips & Tricks
  • Chocolate Tasting (Ok not business related buy, yum!)
  • eBook & eMagazine Walk In Help
  • Ask-A-Lawyer Clinic
  • Moble Device Ins & Outs
  • Online Creative Writing Resources
  • Video Editing & Sharing
  • Make Lab: Movies
  • 3D Computer Modeling/CAD
  • Websites & Blogging
  • And Tons Of Basic Computer/Office Software Courses

Do you think you might find something worth your while, if nothing more than to socialize with potential prospects? I think so!

Don’t forget the library is also a great source of marketing books and research!

January 16th, 2013

Review: Free Marketing: 101 Ways Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business by Jim Cockrum

freemarketingDown and Dirty: 4.5 out of 5

Read it in chunks and implement implement implement. Great, practical advice.

This book makes me think of Guerilla Marketing but on digital steroids. Jim takes a new look at the marketing environment and has found ways to get around a great deal of the traditional marketing expenses we expect to pay. He doesn’t fully discount them, which I have to give credit for. It would be easy to dismiss traditional methods, but Jim simply suggests alternatives that wouldn’t cost as much.

The core of Jim’s methods involve content, interaction, relationship building and reputation management through digital methods. I love that he walks us first through the importance and impact of various methods and then on how we can baby-step our way into creative useful content.

One of the things that most stuck out to me was his way of viewing titles like ‘Author’ and how more of us should be using that as part of our job description. I’m actually writing a book, so that might not be as relevant to me as others, but it was interesting. I also liked his solid advice on building relationships through forum participation, blog comments and ‘friendly stalking’ via Google Alerts.

The most useful part about this book is Jim’s references to various free or cheap services and tools we can use. Better, you can find many of  those resources and the most current updates on those resources or new options at his book’s website 101freemarketing.com.

This is a book worth keeping and re-reading as you run out of ideas for content creation and building of customers and leads. It’s not easy, but it will be worth your time.

If there was one thing I would lament about this book missing is the physical aspect. There’s not much about networking or building one-on-one relationships with people in person. There is a lot that digital media can replace, but personal contact should always be considered, especially with more local-oriented businesses.

Check out this book, all proceeds go to charity so it’s a double win if you ask me.

January 15th, 2013

Great Marketers Have a Special Mix of Expertise

sheepWhat sort of staff should a small business be looking for, marketing-wise?

I meet so many companies who hire a graphic designer without considering that artistic skill doesn’t always mean they’re prepared or knowledgeable in all the other nuts and bolts of marketing.

At the same time I see others hiring essentially salespeople with lots of people-skills but not a lot of understanding of how to build the foundation for people to feel comfortable and interested in listening to a ‘pitch’ or some other type of sales.

I recently read an excellent article by Alica Kan in which she gives perhaps the perfect analogy to what marketing is all about. She likens a marketer’s job to preparing a restaurant and setting the stage for the very best chance that a customer will want to make a sale. That’s the ambiance, the service, the food quality, the positioning of tables, the menu, the customer service – the entire experience.

That’s not a position easily filled. Certainly not by someone who just has experience in sales or just has experience in graphic design. I say this as someone who was thrust into a marketing position with only graphic design experience myself. That was a bit hair-raising! Not to toot my horn, but it’s clear I rose to the challenge and evolved, adapted and learned how to make marketing really work for small businesses.

I loved Alicia’s ‘Sheep Question’ she talked about when interviewing for a really good professional marketer for your business. Check it out on her blog post here!

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