An important part of your marketing is the overall company messaging, which should change slightly based on audience segmentation. I first learned about this through Michel Neray from Essential Message in a section on sales techniques. The idea is to determine whether your audience is sold on what you do, also if they are sold on you so you don’t waste time selling them on something they already believe in through your company messaging. Continue reading
Tradeshow Design – the booth is Just the Beginning
Venturing into the world of tradeshows can be an expensive experiment if you’re not prepared to optimize it. Many are blown away by the cost of just participating and focus on the space they need to fill – tradeshow design. However, adding a few tactics before, during and following the show will make your investment return a lot higher.
Leading up to the Show
When to Use Creative Design Services
There are many different kinds of marketing-category firms out there, making it tough to decide which kind is right for your needs. Choosing wrong could mean you’re paying too much for services you don’t need, or being under-serviced by a solo freelancer type. Continue reading
Discovering Your ‘Brand’
How to build stability and growth for your company’s services.
Brand is the emotional connection between a company and its clients. More than just a logo, brand is reflected in everything you do, across every mode of communication.
Consider one of Canada’s most successful brands, Tim Horton’s, a brand that immediately conjures up emotional connections about what it means to be Canadian. TD is one of the few banks to get on the “best managed brand” list after it “made over” its brand into “Banking can be this comfortable” with the signature green chair. Both are brands that can be evolved and rolled out into many forms of marketing. Continue reading
If Content is King Graphic Design is Queen in Toronto
One of the biggest marketing challenges today is coming up with high quality content. A result is many people underestimate the importance of graphic design, especially in a city like Toronto. I visited a prospect who has been doing all of their ads in-house (I don’t mean they had a designer on staff). She knew there was a problem, thought they had too many words. I disagreed on the word count. They were just poorly designed. I knew I could take the same content and make it look immeasurably better. This was striking compared to the professionally designed ads the competition was running.
Graphic design can be so subjective and abstract, it can be really hard to articulate what it is you like and don’t like about designs. You may not realize consciously that something looks good, or bad, or creates strong impressions. Continue reading
How Many Points of Contact to Make a Sale?
They used to say it takes seven points of contact to make a sale. That number has increased drastically in recent years due to the number of additional messages we are bombarded with everyday on the internet (went from 300 to 3,000).
What does it mean for marketing your business?
The Big Three – Social Media 101
Wikipedia defines Social media as information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Remembering that successfully building business means building relationships. Social media/online networking provides more ways for people to connect with your business who you may not have met otherwise, and people they know, and people they know. Continue reading
Getting What You Need from Graphic Design Agencies
Marketing Directors often say finding great graphic design agencies to work with is really difficult. It starts with the painful learning curve and wanting to reinvent the wheel. Additional complaints include slow responsiveness, lack of communication and attention to detail, and finally no value-add thinking. The solution is all up front – choosing the right team and setting them up for success. Continue reading
How to make your blog popular even if you’re not a writer
You have a great idea for a blog. Do you sit down and slave over a new post only to feel like no one is reading your it? If you’re spending a lot of time writing articles and giving away your best tips, tricks and insights, you want to make sure people are a) finding and then b) actually reading it.
So how do you make your blog popular?
8 Tips for Choosing a Design Firm
How to choose a marketing or design firm, and what to expect.
Working with creative people is different than working with many business consultants or suppliers. They typically dress and act more casually and express themselves more colourfully. They also tend to think in visual concepts and words. This alternative thinking and creativity can be a significant point of leverage for your own marketing success. Finding and choosing the right graphic design firm for the advancement of your business shouldn’t be taken lightly. We’ve put together the following eight tips to help you in choosing the right designer. Continue reading