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What to do next?
How to market in the 21st century. Does anyone even look at the Yellow Pages anymore?
It is a challenge keeping up with all the new marketing options facing local business and nonprofit organizations.
And even though it's "free" to be on Facebook and various other social media sites, it takes time and effort to properly promote your business on these communication channels. Otherwise, it won't help, and may even hurt.
How do you come up with an affordable plan? The same way you did it before. Determine your total marketing budget, look at all your options and make some tough decisions.
Of course, if you've been really diligent in tracking where your customers come from, it can make this much easier.
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Kaye Marketing has won 2010 All Star Award for
Constant Contact!
Check it out!
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Who is our fabulous copywriter?
I am happy to introduce my behind-the-scenes copywriter, Peter Kaye.
Local media has gotten to know the quality of his writing and we have enjoyed unparalleled success in having articles published that highlight the activities, events and expertise of our clients.
Peter has a strong intellectual curiosity and enjoys ramping up his learning curve to meet the needs of our diverse clientele. (From pest control to hosted contact center solutions)
Peter is a CPA, MBA who began to hone his writing skills at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He was selected to join the School's Law Review and was its Executive Editor during his final year. He then served as a law clerk for a Connecticut Appellate Court judge drafting legal opinions.
Law career highlights include prosecuting drug smugglers for the Justice Department.
Peter enjoys reading the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and is most proud of his library of etymological dictionaries, which he shows only by appointment.
Although Peter seems permanently attached to the computer writing lively, timely, interesting PR, website copy, brochure copy and even my newsletter copy, I do share him with Brookdale CC where he is an adjunct mathematics instructor.
He also offers private SAT tutoring and even takes the SAT himself as though it were a crossword puzzle, consistently receiving perfect or near-perfect scores.
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Welcome!
Facebook, Email Marketing, Groupons and More.
Where do you start and how much do you spend?
This is a challenging time to market your business. As we all know, the economy is in no rush to recover and consumers spending is sputtering along. So the pressure is still on for small- and medium-sized businesses to work really hard and really smart if they are serious about positioning themselves for profitability and growth.
Building a customer base does not happen by chance. It takes a concerted effort to distinguish yourself from your competitors through not only fair pricing and outstanding service, but also an intelligent marketing campaign that puts your business in the spotlight. It's all about getting the word out, creating product or service awareness of your company to prospective customers by exploiting those channels of communication that work best for your particular business -- and all while staying within the constraints of a reasonable, manageable budget.
These days, getting on the radar screen of your prospects and separating yourself from the competition requires planning, creativity, and knowing how to take advantage of the new communication channels developing through technology. And it's not just about "jumping on the internet." To do it right, to cost-effectively leverage this technology, a business needs to know how this technology works and where to devote its resources.
Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by small business owners is time management. They are swamped between the actual doing of business, providing the best service for their customers, and the myriad of tasks of running a business. The sobering truth is that if you want to do it right, you can't do it all. It makes more sense to focus on what you do best - servicing customers - and let a specialist deal with the marketing, especially when there is such a steep learning curve just to understand all of the customer communication channels now available through new technologies.
After more than two decades of providing marketing services, I've seen enough to say that the fastest, most efficient route to grow a business is through successful marketing. Your top-notch customer service doesn't matter if potential customers can't find you. With all the noise out there, hidden gems stay hidden.
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What's the deal with all of these deals?
Most of these promotional deals follow the same modus operandi. The objective is to promote word of mouth advertising in order to drive more customers to your business.
This is how it works. Customers sign up to receive daily deals in their local area. The offer is usually at least a 50% discount. If the deal is appealing to the subscriber, they can purchase it.
The subscriber is encouraged to recommend that deal to their friends. If their friends then purchase that deal, the subscriber can earn points, get an additional discount, or even get their deal for free.
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When it Come to Printing Resolution, Numbers Matter
Often, those who try to create their own brochure grab a picture that they happen like on the Internet. (Photos that may well be copyrighted! ) The picture looks great on the computer and when the print job comes back, the picture is "grainy" and "fuzzy."
The reason for that is a pretty complicated explanation but it boils down to resolution, which can be thought of as a measure of density, and the difference between PPI (pixels per inch) resolution and (dots per inch) resolution. They are not the same and that confusion causes a lot of pain and heartache, not to mention wasted money. Resolution images on a computer screen are expressed as PPI; printer resolution, how many dots per inch the print head can put down is DPI. To get the same quality, the DPI has to be a much higher number.
Optimal resolution for print is 300 DPI whereas screen resolution on a monitor is usually only 72 PPI. Resolution, scanning, and graphics size, especially for someone unfamiliar with Photoshop, can be confusing. Add to that the distinction between black and white halftones and CMKY color halftones and your head will start spinning.
Start with the highest resolution image you can find. Most good cameras can shoot produce a print at 300 DPI for an approximate size of 6 x 8. You can easily make this image work for a printed brochure, or adjust the image to use on the web. What you can't do is take an 6 x 8 image on the web and use it on a printed brochure. You can adjust down but not up.
Here is what you need to know.
Website: 72PPI
Digital Printer: 150DPI
Professional Offset Printing: 300DPI
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RGB VS. CMYK
Monitors emit light and emit colors as red, green or blue (RBG) light. All colors of the visual spectrum can be produced through merging these three colors of light, but computer monitors can display only a small fraction of them. Inked paper, on the other hand, absorbs or reflects specific wavelengths.
Color printing uses a four-color mode, (CMYK) cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Printing inks produce a subset of the visible spectrum just like monitors, but they have a different range. As a result, the same art being displayed on a computer screen will not match to that which is on paper. And that means the same warning for colors as for resolution: what you see on your computer screen will be different than what is reflected on print and the conversion from RGB to CMKY is not automatic.
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Search Engine Optimization: SEO
It's no accident that certain websites make it to the top of search engines such as Google & Yahoo. The process of the back-end work to generate "clicks" is called SEO. It is not enough to have a nice-looking website. For the website to be effective, it must be search engine friendly so that prospects will connect to your website using the keywords that link to your site. But positioning on search engines is actually a complicated undertaking requiring a detailed, specialized knowledge of search engine applications. It involves much more than simply fiddling with keywords. Long-term consistent top billing comes from being a popular site (which includes being linked to many other sites especially social marketing). The more roads and bridges that are built toward your site, the more easily it will be found. SEO involves building this hidden back link infrastructure that drives web browsing toward your site. In addition, content is critical. It is not enough to look visually attractive, the site must have interesting content that people want to read or it will be so low on the search engine hierarchy that it may as well be invisible. And if there is no real content of interest, a visitor will click once and leave. Search engines refer to this as a site's bounce rate. And a high bounce rate will knock you way down the ladder. The object is to hook visitors and have them stay on your site. For more information on our SEO packages click this! |
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Our business is to help your business grow.
Sincerely,
Julie Kaye
Kaye Marketing Communications
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