Among our clients and colleagues, we’ve seen more activity and interest in, and asked a lot of questions about, what they might do better or differently in marketing this year. Many are downright giddy that 2010 has come to a close and are looking forward to marketing their companies with renewed vigor. Insight180 has compiled a list of tips to get you started on the right foot. The first is especially appropriate for the new year. . .
Before we wrap up 2010 and prepare to send it away, we would like to offer one last bit advice about a trend worth following this holiday season regarding holiday emailers. Consider it a gift from us,—um, well, actually from one of our favorite email marketing and distribution companies, Emma— to you. Click here!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the holidays are here! When it comes to holiday newsletters, now is the time to spread the cheer. Don’t have much time on your hands? Let us make it simple with a few quick tips:
As our team here at Insight180 prepares to welcome the fall weather, we also would like to extend a warm welcome to our newest marketing associate, Jess Reikowsky. Jess first joined Insight180 as a graduate intern in May after graduating from West Virginia University with a degree in marketing and a focus on brand management. Jess will be coordinating social media efforts, managing client accounts, and assisting in PR and marketing efforts. We believe that she will add great dynamic to our team and are delighted to have her. Welcome, Jess!
What drives one person to succeed and achieve is likely to be completely different than what drives the next. Therefore, not surprisingly there is something to be said about lack of performance in the workplace. In an effort to combat this problem, employees are often offered incentives, increased pay or bonuses for example, in order to spark the flame of creativity and get the ball rolling on productivity. However, what most leaders do not realize is that incentives are scientifically proven to dull thinking and hinder creativity. Scientists report that while incentives seem like the most logical way to boost productivity, not only are they unreliable but they also harm the process.
5 easy steps to boost creativity
Many of our B-to-B clients still debate the benefits of Twitter for their businesses. Sure it makes sense for retailers, but are other businesses going to follow us? Well, many B-to-B companies are behind their B-to-C counterparts in their efforts to ramp up, but we’re seeing more and more take advantage of social media outlets to gain clients. We understand that for a small company with limited time, it can be a tough call — it takes time to tweet, blog, or create content on Facebook. This is something that has to be developed and maintained with great thought and care. However, there are plenty of potential clients who are already online searching for services and ready to follow.
We are inundated with more than 2000 marketing interruptions per day – whether it be print, radio or TV advertisements, emails we need to sift through despite our filters, banner ads on the websites we visit, billboards we pass on the way in to work. It is a very crowded marketplace and it gets more and more challenging to get your message to your potential customer. So why not allow them to find you more easily? This is the premise of “inbound marketing” – using Google, social media outlets, blogs and other methods to get people to find you. We recommend two excellent books on the topic: Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (founders of Hubspot), and Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day, by one of our colleagues (and clients) Hollis Thomases, owner of Web Ad.vantage. While the adage “It’s not what you say, it’s what others say about you” is true to a large degree, we would also argue that you had better, indeed, have something substantive to say. You can tweet and blog and reference key search terms ’til the cows come home, but if potential clients land on your website and find little relevant content, a cluttered or crowded site, or an amateur design, you can be sure that they won’t come back. While Halligan and Shah devote a chapter to creating remarkable content, they don’t emphasize enough about the importance of branding and design.
Being that we are in the middle of the World Cup and that the United States just beat Algeria to advance to the next round I thought this was the perfect time to look at the new logo for the Vancouver Whitecaps. For those of you who don’t follow soccer, the Vancouver Whitecaps are a new addition to the MLS (Major League Soccer). They have been around since 1973 but 2011 will be their first season with the MLS, so I think it is only appropriate that they’ve engaged in rethinking their image, and after careful introspection, have re-branded themselves. The goal was to have a clean and efficient look that could stand up to all sorts of mediums and I personally think it is a success. I like the simplicity of the new logo and it’s defined look. It doesn’t give into the current trend of sports logos using a mascot to sell the brand, it takes a risk. It lost the original “cartoon” feel and became more simplistic and shield-like. Also, it has a lot of symbolism which gives it strength. This blog quote explains it best:
We’ve been working on some projects lately that have had clients sending us some pretty big image files. We’re all getting so used to high res images from high res digital camera’s, we often don’t realize or forget that these images are sometimes too large to email.
Brand Identity: Winemasters Logo
Our logo design for Winemasters
I recently had a client meeting where the basic idea of branding came up as a discussion point. The meeting was with a company owner who was having trouble with business growth and looking for a way to help his sales staff deliver better on every-day meetings and client visits. His concern was a common one: his sales had always come in as a result of a relationship built by a sales people one-on-one with the customer. And the salesperson only had so many hours in the day to feed those relationships.
