Tips + Ideas
Between our years of experience and hopping on the ever-moving technology bandwagon, we’ve come across tips and ideas that will hopefully help you to be more effective as you promote your organization. If you’d like these delivered to your mailbox, sign up for the ECI Tips + Ideas ezine. Or subscribe to our RSS feed.
So What’s for Dinner?
For all of you who need a little creativity in your meals, we thought we’d post Chef Jeff’s dinner ideas. Read More
The Huffington Post recently reported that “57% of small businesses’ top New Year’s resolution is to expand marketing to attract more customers.” *
Tip 105
5 Top Resolutions for
Small
Businesses in 2012
That means for each business doing nothing, there is a competitor who plans on improving their marketing efforts in 2012. The article continued, “…as an entrepreneur, you can't just ‘hold steady’―you've got to keep growing and making big plans, even in tough times.”
So where do you start? Might we suggest a few? Here are 5 top resolutions for a better brand in 2012:
- Display a sharper, more professionalbusiness image to the world. Seriously, who would you call first? A company whose logo and marketing materials look like they came from the Middle Ages, or one that’s as frrrresh as eating sushi off the boat?
-
Give your sales staff the tools they need to produce. Take it from our head sales guy, Jeff… you might as well cut ‘em off at the knees, otherwise.
- Get a rockin’ new website, if you’re due. Aesthetics are one thing, but technology is another. The latter necessitates that businesses update their websites every 3 to 5 years. (For example, in the last 3 years, Flash is out and Content Management has radically changed.)
-
Strategize on how to set your business apart from the competition. Be purposeful on how you get your name out there…don’t just let it happen randomly.
-
Be consistent in sending out newsletters or blogging. Lack of consistency is the key “drown factor” here. Even if you only send an email out once or twice a month, get someone to write articles for you 3 months in advance, then you have them ready to go. Of course, while you’re at it, you might as well do it right and get a professional to customize the look and brand for you.
* Huffington Post 12.27.12
Don’t throw up any of these 7 red flags to a design firm…or you’ll get the “aggravation tax” added to your bill!
Tip 104
7 Top ways to blow your budget while using a design firm:
Have you ever done a renovation or addition to your home or built a home from scratch—only to say “hasta la vista” to your budget while you’re in the thick of it? Things easily get out of control if you don’t have a tight reign on the process, don’t they? At ECI, we’ve found the BEST ways for you to get out of control and blow your design budget:*
- Don’t tell us everything up front. If you want a website now but are thinking a few months or a year down the road you might want to add e-commerce, don’t bring it up until it’s too late.
- Make sure you have a loose approval process, and bring in the Big Guns only after most or all of the work is done….OR…
- Give yourself a large committee to oversee the work on your project, and purpose to please each and every one of its members 100% at every step of the way.
- If you’re writing your own copy for your brochure or website, give us multiple drafts that are NOT approved and final, so we can keep re-entering and re-formatting the information over and over again.
- Don’t worry about being organized. Throw us the scraps of paper that you’ve scribbled your thoughts on or shoot us myriads of random emails, and let us decipher for ourselves what we think should be done or where things should go.
- Feel free to engage in lengthy phone calls or unnecessary meetings to let us know that you’re not organized and don’t value our time.
- Try not to get back to us in a timely fashion. If you allow time to pass, we will need to reassess and remember where we are with your project. (This also allows your project to drop its priority status, and go to the bottom of the to-do pile.)
*Sure, this is sort of snarky, but we’re really
bringing this up to help you to NOT get out of
control. At ECI, we pride ourselves in adhering
to client budgets, and warning you before you
start to blow it.
People looking at your website don’t really care about your company.
What they do care about is finding a solution to their own problems, pain, needs, or desires.
Tip 103
So you think your website is for
your company?
Your website is NOT for your company; it’s for your audience. What are the first questions they have when they’re looking for your products or services? Do you answer that right on your home page, or on a page that is easy to get to with an obvious button name? If they have to take 3 or 4 steps to hunt for the answers, you’ve probably already lost them as a prospect.
Just like people who only use the pronoun “I” in their conversations, a website can be pretty annoying or
boring if it doesn’t seek to have empathy for the issues of others…in this case, the user.
“User-friendly” doesn’t just mean easy to use—it can also connote that a website “puts the shoe on the other foot,” i.e., shares the problem that the user has, and then provides a solution to that problem.
To put it bluntly, the people looking at your website don’t really care about your company. What they DO care about is finding a solution to their own problems, pain, needs, or desires.
Marketing will stabilize and give strength to your company when your other efforts can’t.
Tip 102
Take a tip from “This Little Piggy.”
This little piggy went to market. Was it an open air market? A supermarket? Perhaps the author of this nursery rhyme from the 1700’s meant: “This little piggy went to market his business.” (Who knows??) In reciting this to your children, though, did you ever notice that the burly piggy isn’t the one who ate roast beef? The biggest and most robust piggy of the five is the one who went to market! In the same way that your big toe stabilizes your whole body and gives strength to your stride in a way the other toes can’t, marketing will stabilize and give strength to your company when your other efforts can’t.
It’s amazing how many organizations think they can get by in this Great Recession by not going to market, when it’s the FIRST thing they need to get them noticed. Sure, budgets are tight, and marketing dollars are submerged beneath the priority of bills and salaries. Yet, if they don’t market, and attract more clients, things will go from bad to worse.
Don’t let pain transform your thought processes. Marketing is a critical investment for your company. Hard times call for smart strategies. Can you afford to NOT go to market? Git yer piggy on!
It’s paramount that someone is in control of your brand practically 24/7 — whether it’s you, the head of marketing, or an outside firm.
Tip 101
Do you confuse your prospective customers?
Creating confusion is easy. If the way you promote your business is inconsistent across different media, you can be heading for trouble. For instance, say you have a professional-looking logo and business card, and even though your website might have outdated technology, it still works for the moment. Yet when you place an ad in the local magazine or newspaper, you give control of your brand over to their desktop publishers, who get paid to knock out ads as quickly as possible. They ask you for an electronic file of your logo, which you scrounge up and hastily email to them.
The result? The logo came out pixilated and stretched. The typefaces and colors are inconsistent with your business card and website.
An ad that you paid good money for, totally undoes the quality you’ve been striving for in promoting your business.
Here are some ways organizations confuse their prospective audiences (which is easy to do across various media):
• Inconsistent branding
• Unclear message
• Too many things shouting for attention
• Speaking about quality when reality is
half-baked execution
• Identity crisis
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. If you don’t have anyone inside your organization to be the “Brand Master” or “Brand Police,” now might be the time to allocate that all-important job to an outside firm.
