SuccessBlog

Social Media Techniques by Gary Vaynerchuk

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:51:04 -0600

The social media revolution has changed the way we live our lives and conduct our business. Learn social media techniques that will improve your sales from a master marketer at an upcoming event in January in Baton Rouge!

Two clubs, the American Advertising Federation of Baton Rouge and Sales and Marketing Executives of Greater Baton Rouge, are joining forces to host this social media event on Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 7 p.m. at Independence Park Theatre, 7800 Independence Blvd. Tickets are $10 for AAF-BR and SME-GBR members and $25 for the general public. Call the Independence Theatre box office at 225-216-0660 or go to theparktheatre.com to purchase your tickets.

Gary Vaynerchuk will decode how social media platforms work in tandem to give your personal brand strength and reach and turn you into a force to be reckoned with. Gary has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local retail wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. In so doing, he learned that the Internet offers up potential via these free tools for businesses and individuals alike to develop their own brand. Gary will touch on his core themes for best utilizing these tools, including why listening is more important than speaking, the importance of authenticity in business, and what it means to “scale your caring.” Learn more about Gary at garyvaynerchuk.com, or catch him on Twitter where he has over 840,000 followers!

Join Gary at a Wine and Cheese Reception before the event from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Cost to attend the reception is $250. Contact Connie McLeod at 225.231.5549, ext. 3529.

If you are interested in sponsoring this event and promoting your company, product or service to an interested audience of advertising leaders, executives and business owners in south Louisiana, go to aafbr.org to learn about the different levels of sponsorship available.

For more information, please contact Connie McLeod at 225.231.5549, ext. 3529, or Richard J. Dixon at 225.928.1700.

Success Designs will have a table at the event, so stop by and say hi!

Marketing and Consumer Trends for 2010

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:17:10 -0600

A new year is on its way! Now is the time to re-evaluate your marketing strategy and determine what you can do better to meet your goals and objectives. The consumer marketplace is evolving, are you? Here I’ve gathered some valuable free resources and market research to help you understand the challenges and trends for 2010.

Top 20 Trends in 2010

2010 Consumer Trends Forecast by TrendHunter

View more 2010 trends in multiple categories from marketing and business to fashion and retail at TrendHunter Pro.

10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010

By Trendwatching.com

Key Findings:

Being a good corporate citizen, appealing to urban pride, and dealing with real-time reviews are among the things to consider in 2010.
Tracking and alerting is the new searching. Consumers want to be alerted with relevant information.
Audiences in mature consumer societies no longer tolerate being treated like yesteryear’s uninformed, easily shocked, inexperienced, middle-of-the-road consumer. How far you can/should go as a brand, when mirroring societal beliefs that are about anything but being meek?

10 Big Marketing Predictions For 2010

By David Siteman Garland

Is the one-way website dead? Instead of a multi-million dollar marketing plan, will brands begin creating, promoting, syndicating, sharing and marketing their content online? View David’s predictions for 2010.

2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report

By Equation Research

Key Findings:

Marketers and agencies are embracing the world of social media, though navigating the waters can be difficult. Challenges include knowledge, measuring effectiveness, funding and finding the time to invest in social media.
Mobile marketing is still in early adapter mode and is expected to continue to rise in use.

Marketing in a Post-Crisis World

By The House of Marketing

Key Findings:

Online integration, marketing analytics and customer value are on the marketer’s agenda
Consumers are getting more personal, disloyal and sophisticated
Companies need to highlight the added value of their products/services more

Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009

By Pew Internet

Key Findings:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others.
As of September 2009, 54% of internet users have a wireless connection to the internet via a laptop, cell phone, game console, or other mobile device. Of those, 25% use Twitter or another service, up from 14% of wireless users in December 2008.
The median age of a Twitter user is 31, and the median age for Facebook is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

The Internet as a Diversion

By Pew Internet

Key Findings:

Three-quarters of online economic users go online to relax and take their minds off of the recession
Fully 76% of those who have gone online to relax or take their minds off of the economy have also gone online to find the lowest price on something they need to buy.
46% of online economic users who go online as a diversion have also gone online to find or use online coupons.

These resources are sure to get you thinking as you make your plans for next year. What are some other predictions for 2010? Are you planning to do something new and different? What trends do you see in your business?

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Dramatic Shift in Marketing Reality
How to Define Your Target Audience
Branding Basics: How to Build a Brand

SEO Tips: How to Rank Well in Search Engines Part 2

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:49:21 -0500

So you’ve chosen and implemented some keywords on your website, gained some inbound links, and are wondering what to do next to get your website to rank well in search engines. This article will cover creating valuable website content; proper coding; the balance of using images, flash and javascript; domain names and more.

1. Creating Content for your Website

You may have heard it many times before, but it’s true. Content is king! If you want search engines to rank your website high for certain keywords, you need to have valuable content about those keywords in your website. Your content needs to be unique! Copying and pasting other people’s articles onto your website will not help your search engine rankings, since search engines don’t value duplicate content. (Also, using other people’s copyrighted content without their permission can get you kicked out of search engines.) So how do you create unique, relevant content?

Write for Your Customers

Think about your customers, and write about things they would be interested in. Are you a hair salon? Create a blog with articles about the latest hair styles, new products and proper hair care. Do you sell furniture? Write articles with home decorating advice. Not only will people searching for your specific products and services find your website, but you’ll also gain website traffic from visitors who are searching for advice on specific topics. And here’s a bonus—people will voluntarily link to your relevant content and may even share it with others using social media. Writing quality content is the best way to build links to your website.

Stay Up-to-Date

Both search engines and your customers love fresh content, so keep your website up to date. The more unique, quality content, the better! In fact, Google now lets users filter their search results by date, so your website can jump ahead of older articles from highly ranked websites just because it is new and fresh.

Use Keywords, But Keep it Relevant

Remember, each article and each page of your website should be targeting different keywords/key phrases based on what the content is all about. If you have an article about the top 10 ways to redecorate a living room, then optimize for keywords like “decorating a living room” and not something like “candles for sale.” Within your content, be sure to use the keywords in your headings and subheads (this only works well when your page is coded correctly, so make sure your web developer uses heading tags in the code such as <h1>,<h2>, etc.). Use bold and italic formatting to emphasize your keywords.

Internal Links

You can use your articles as a way to entice visitors to look at other pages on your website. For instance, your article about redecorating may mention candles, and the word “candles” can link to your page all about the candles you sell. Or link to other decorating articles you’ve written. Keep visitors interacting with your website by including links to other relevant pages in your site. Make sure the text of the internal links (anchor text) includes keywords from the page to which you are linking so that you will be helping to optimize that page for those keywords.

2. Making Sure Your Website is Properly Coded

There are many different ways to code a website, but not all of them are the right way. The average person looking at websites might never know the difference, but behind-the-scenes code can determine whether the site ranks high in search results or not.

Commonly used programs like FrontPage or Dreamweaver tend to generate inefficient, excess code that can make it harder for search engines to decipher between content and code. The best web developers use CSS (cascading stylesheets) to separate the code used to style their page from the content of the page, resulting in nice clean code that search engines can read. More about CSS

Flash and JavaScript

Be wary of using things like Flash and JavaScript. If used wisely, they will not hurt and can add some nice effects to your website. Think about this—what would a visitor to your website see if they did not have Flash or JavaScript turned on? Would they still be able to read your content? If they can’t, neither will search engine robots.

Images

The same goes with images. If you have text displayed in an image, search engines will not be able to read your image. What you can do, however, is add a meaningful description of that image in the alt tag of the image (this is done in the coding). If an image doesn’t load, this text will appear in place of the image.

Also, using images to link to a page is not valued as highly as text links. Therefore, image navigation can be bad for search engine optimization if coded improperly. However, there are proper ways to code image navigation so that it can still been seen as text links to search engines and can be read by screen readers. Choose a web developer who knows how to code using web and accessibility standards.

Videos

Search engine robots also can’t gather content from videos. When displaying a video on your website, it is best to follow it with a description of the content of the video in text form.

Sitemaps

To help search engines find all the pages on your website, create a sitemap that includes links to all of your pages. There are different ways to do this, and you can submit the sitemap directly to Google using Google’s webmaster tools and also include a link to the sitemap in your robots.txt file. What’s a robots.txt file? This is a plain text file that you can use to tell search engines which content they should avoid indexing on your site, and well as where your sitemap is located. For example, you may want to keep certain personal folders on your web server from being indexed. Robots.txt is also a great way to stop search engines from indexing duplicate content. For example, if someone can access your blog article in two ways with different links (how-to-decorate.htm and archives/2009/how-to-decorate.htm), then you can tell search engines not to index the archives folder. This is a common issue with blogs.

3. Using Relevant Domain Names and URLs

Using your keywords in your domain name and in filenames are very important. As I mentioned in Part 1, if you have a page about widgets, name the page “widgets.htm.” Using hyphens between words in URLs is also helpful (i.e. blue-widget-parts.htm). Don’t use too many words though—you don’t want to look like spam.

Once you have a domain, stick with it. The age of the domain is taken into account. The longer you’ve owned the domain, the better.

One thing to note is that having multiple domain names pointing to the same site is not usually helpful. Ideally, you want to optimize your site for one domain. When using multiple domains, be sure you are using a 301 redirect to forward other domains to your primary one. Splitting your link building efforts across multiple domains is a waste of time and effort, not to mention the possible duplicate content issues.

This also applies when you have multiple links to your homepage in the same domain. For instance, “domain.com,” “www.domain.com” and “domain.com/index.php” are 3 links to the same page. Avoid using “index.php” or “index.htm” to link to your homepage, and instead use “domain.com” or just “/”.

Conclusion

There are so many things to take into account when optimizing a site for search engines, it can make you dizzy. Just know that creating a website and putting it on the web is not enough. If you really want to get traffic to your website, it needs to be coded properly from the start, contain lots of good content with relevant keywords, and gain valuable inbound links from good sources. Following the SEO tips and techniques in this article and SEO Tips Part 1, you will surely move up in search engine results. Good luck!

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Related Resources

SEO Tips: How to Rank Well in Search Engines Part 1
Comparison: CSS vs. Table-Based Layouts

SEO Tips: How to Rank Well in Search Engines Part 1

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:33:42 -0500

Have you worked tirelessly on your website and can’t understand why it’s only getting 5 hits a day? Creating a website is only half the battle. The other half is getting people to go to it! By far the best way to get traffic to your website is to have search engines do the work for you. Follow these basic search engine optimization tips and techniques, and you’ll be on your way to getting your website to rank on the first page of search engines for certain keywords.

1. Choosing Great Keywords

Keywords are not really single words but instead often consist of a combination of words or phrases. Researching and choosing keywords is really a topic all by itself, but here are some quick tips.

Pick the key phrases that you think potential customers will type in search engines to find what you have to offer, and then do your research to find synonyms and to determine the best wording. Use Google’s Keyword Tool or another tool to learn what phrases are searched more than others. For example, you may find that “hair salons in baton rouge” is searched for more often than “baton rouge hair salons.” (Tip: When using Google’s Keyword Tool, turn the “match type” to Exact to accurately compare phrases)

If you are targeting a local market, add the location in your key phrase. There is much more competition for general keywords, so you will find it easier to rank in local results. Keywords should reflect the content of your website. Each page is likely to have different keywords that reflect the content of that page.

2. Implementing Keywords on your Website

Once you’ve chosen your keywords, you’re ready to integrate them into your website. It is best to use the whole phrase exactly as it is searched for on your page, at least one or two times, since this will be valued more than having the words apart.

Of utmost importance is to use these keywords in your title tags (this is what appears in your browser’s title bar). Keep your title tag around 60 to 70 characters.

Use keywords in your URLs. If your page is about widgets, name that page “widgets.htm,” for instance. Use your keywords in headings, paragraphs, alt tags, anchor text (links) and meta tags (hidden tags in your source code). Just don’t overdo it—you don’t want Google to suspect you for keyword stuffing.

Note: When integrating keywords into your text, keep your visitors in mind. You want your content to read well, and a bunch of repeated phrases can be obvious and annoying to your readers. It is okay to use synonyms every now and then to avoid repetition. Search engines are smarter than you think and will take the related words into account.

3. Building Links

Search engines factor in the inbound links to your website when determining rankings. Think of links to your website as a popularity contest. It’s not just about the number of links you can get to your website, but the value of the websites with the link. Are the cool kids linking to your website? A few links from sites with a high page rank and also .edu and .gov sites are more valuable than tons of links from sites with low page rank. It’s also helpful to get your website linked from similar sites to your own.

The text of the link is also important. Ideally, you would want websites to link to your site using your chosen keywords as the anchor text. Search engines also look at the anchor text you use to link to other pages within your website, although it is not more valuable than an inbound link.

Submit your website to a few key directories, but don’t fall into the trap of submitting your site to thousands of low quality directories and link farms (This can be regarded as link spamming). Try to get your site listed in highly ranked directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory.

Make sure that any sites you link to aren’t to link farms or other suspicious sites. These can actually hurt your rankings.

4. Writing Meta Tags

Though meta tags are becoming less and less important to search engines, they are still used in some instances. Meta tags are tags hidden in the source code of each page of a website that can give search engines information about your website.

The most important meta tag is the description meta tag because this is often the description displayed in search result listings. Be sure to include your keywords in your description, but make sure it reads well since it should encourage users to click on your listing. Try not to exceed about 150 characters.

The keywords meta tag is less important since the major search engines no longer take it into account. If you still want to use it just in case, include your chosen keywords for each page in the keywords meta tag, but only include about 3 or 4. Each page should have keywords about the content in that page; don’t use the same keywords on every page.

Remember, all of these tips must be taken in moderation. Excessive keywords, links, duplicate metatags, duplicate content, etc. can actually hurt your rankings. You don’t want to be seen as a spammer!

This is the end of part 1 of the SEO tips. My next post covers website content; the balance of using images, flash and javascript; domain names and more! Move on to Part 2 of how to rank well in search engines.

SEO Tips: How to Rank Well in Search Engines Part 2

Get Your App Together Workshop

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:32:00 -0500

The American Advertising Federation of Baton Rouge is holding a workshop on how to make phone apps on Saturday, Oct. 3, 2009!

Here are the details:

Get Your App Together workshop

Date: Oct. 3, 9:30am-11am
Location: Lamar Advertising Office, 5551 Corporate Blvd, Baton Rouge, LA 70808
Cost: $10 for AAF-BR members and AAF students and $25 for non-members

As technology continues to evolve and unite us, more and more consumers live their life on their phone. The media to know lies in the palm of your hand. Join digital expert Alessandra Lariu as she discusses the basics and guidelines to get an App completed. Her philosophy of design is to create work that is surprising, interesting or useful. “But especially useful. Useful is the new cool,” Lariu says.

She’ll share her expertise on topics such as:

App market & market share
Other platforms (Android)
Who are the best players/developers?
Documents you’ll need
What kinds of apps do well
Dealing with Apple and getting approved (including AppStore guidelines)
Pricing models (Do apps make money?)

Alessandra Lariu is the SVP Digital Group Creative Director of McCann Erickson in New York, where she works with clients such as MasterCard, General Mills, Kohls, Weight Watchers and Verizon.

If you would like to participate in this event, please RSVP by Sept. 28 at http://www.aafbr.org/. Please invite anyone you think would be interested in the event!

We are also looking for sponsors! Success Designs owner Mandy Porta is coordinating the event as the Workshops Chair for AAF-BR. Feel free to contact her for more details at (225) 368-5492.

Magnolia Assisted Living Opening in Gonzales

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:45:35 -0500

Construction of Magnolia Assisted Living is underway, with plans to open the facility in the spring of 2010.

Magnolia will be the first green assisted living facility in Louisiana, with the sustainable design and construction following the guidelines of U.S. Green Building Council for LEED Certification.

The senior living community will include 12 one-bedroom apartments and 24 studio suites, all featuring 10’ ceilings, durable laminate wood floors and ADA accessible private baths. In addition, a variety of comfortable community areas will be available including an elegant community dining room, a private dining room for guests, a screened and furnished back porch, media and living room areas, beautiful landscaped grounds with gazebos, a library and more.

Success Designs had the pleasure of producing the marketing materials for the facility, including a logo, business cards, letterhead, envelopes, pocket folders, the leasing office sign, and a website. All of their identity materials work together to portray a relaxing atmosphere where you can live freely and breathe easy. Residents can enjoy premium indoor air quality, natural daylight and beautiful views from the comfort of their homes.

The Magnolia Assisted Living website at http://www.magnoliaseniorliving.com has been featured in CSS galleries for its quality, clean design and web standards compliant code.

We’re very excited to play a role in the marketing efforts of Magnolia Assisted Living, and we wish them much success!

20 Great Resources for Design Inspiration

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:56:31 -0500

Are you looking for ideas for a new company logo, business card, email newsletter or a website? Finding good examples of visually pleasing and effective marketing materials can be tough if you don’t know where to look. Get inspired by the best by visiting these 20 great design inspiration websites.

Logo Design

LogoFury.com - This gallery contains over 3,000 logos for inspiration.

LogoPond.com – View more than 2,000 logos selected to be top notch, or if you’re really feeling stuck for ideas, browse through the more than 50,000 logos that have ever been submitted to Logo Pond.

LogoGala.com - This gallery allows you to browse logos by color.

LogoFaves.com

Business Cards

Flickr Business Card Gallery by Daily Poetics - This flicker photo set contains numerous business card designs.

Creattica.com - Creattica showcases logos, websites and business card designs.

E-mail Marketing Designs

Campaign Monitor Email Gallery - You’ll forget you’re looking at emails after viewing this gallery of beautiful email marketing campaigns.

Website Design

A search for CSS galleries will bring up pages of websites that feature designs that not only look great but also follow the latest web standards. Here are just a few.

CSSMania.com – This gallery is continually updated with beautiful, standards compliant designs which you can sort through by business type.

CSSDrive.com - CSS Drive lets you sort through featured websites by number of columns, color and design style. The gallery also showcases beautiful navigation menu designs.

BestWebGallery.com

101BestWebsites.com

SiteInspire.net - Site Inspire contains various websites that can be sorted by design style, theme and type.

Colorgorize.com - Colorgorize lets you sort websites by color.

CSSUberClean.com - This site features simple, clean designs.

OnePageLove.com - This gallery features websites that say it all in one page.

Ecommerce Website Design

CartFrenzy.com – Cart Frenzy features some nicely designed ecommerce shops that you can sort through by product type.

CartCraze.com - This gallery allows you to sort through its featured online shops by industry.

And More

TheDesignInspiration.com - The Design Inspiration features the latest logos, websites, illustrations, fonts, photos and patterns all in one place.

DesignFlavr.com - This gallery featuring websites, illustrations, photo manipulation and more.

ColourLovers.com - Coulour Lovers is a great place to find inspiring color schemes and patterns.

These websites are full of great design inspiration that will keep you entertained for hours!

Feel free to comment. What are some other sites with inspiring designs? Did I miss your favorite design inspiration site?

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Comparison: CSS vs. Table-Based Layouts
10 Tips for Writing a Design Brief

Third Party Resources

100 Great Resources for Design Inspiration
101 Places to Get Design Inspiration

Create a Buzz about your Business

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:25:27 -0500

So you want to market your business, but you don’t have the dough to buy an ad during the Superbowl or even in the Super Saver. Rest assured, there are lots of ways to garner attention for your business that don’t include giant billboards, television promos or an eight-page spread in Cosmo, but you might have to get creative.

Help Someone Out, and It Will Come Back Ten Fold

Lending a helping hand not only gives you good Karma points, it can be a great way to advertise your business. If there is a charitable event taking place in your area, contact the events coordinator and offer to lend your business’ services or goods for a good cause.

For example, say you own a small design firm, offer to design fliers, banners, and other types of signage for the event. If you don’t own a business that lends itself to servicing an event, offer to lend a hand in any way you can. Then, not only will the patrons of the event get to see the kind of work you are capable of, all of the advertising that goes into promoting the event will list your company as one of the sponsors. That means, anytime and anywhere the event is being promoted, be it in the local paper, on a website, on television or the radio, your name will get out into the public eye right along with the event.

For even more media coverage, you can try hosting your own charitable event. Be sure to send out a press release notifying all of your local media outlets about who you are, why your are sponsoring the event, who the proceeds will benefit, and why it will be an interesting event to attend as well as all other pertinent information such as, times, dates and admission fees. Don’t forget, philanthropy can be a great tax write-off for your business as well. Speak to your CPA or dig up some information on charitable contributions and business, and see just how much you can save by giving.

Give It Away

Nothing puts a bigger smile on someone’s face than the sweet smell of free stuff, and your potential clients will be more than happy to jot down their valuable contact information if it means they might get something for nothing. Raffling off a prize is a great marketing strategy, and you have probably seen it done many times. You may have even signed up for the chance to win a free week at the local gym yourself or some other prize.

Decide on something you would like to offer, such as a discount on a service or product from your business, and set up raffle boxes in businesses that don’t compete with you around your area. Try setting up your raffle in the businesses of people you know, places you frequent or places you do business with yourself. Have contestants fill out a piece of paper with their contact information (name, phone number, email address, mailing address) and hold a drawing as often as you like. You may want to offer everyone who submits their contact information a discount of some sort. The valuable thing for you is getting a great contact list of people who are interested in your business. You can then use it to mail out fliers, coupons, newsletter and emails. These are effective, inexpensive methods of getting your message out and building your business.

Get the Message Out

An important component to effectively marketing your business is to get your message out often. While the identity of your business should remain consistent, informing your customers about new promotions, events, products and services is a great way to keep people interested and to keep your business on the forefront of your customers’ minds.

One simple way to do this is to compose a monthly newsletter and send it out via mail or email to all of your contacts. The goal is for you to create a rapport with your contacts, so be sure to include information that will be fun and interesting for your target to read. Avoid using the letter as a platform to boast about your company’s achievements, and instead focus on the benefits your company can offer clients. For instance, if your newsletter is promoting dentistry, you may want to include an article about the health benefits of good dental hygiene, trivia questions about healthy mouth care, an article about a new technology that your office is now using and a discount on teeth cleaning.

The longer your contacts spend with your marketing materials, the better chance they will become your customers, so it is in your best interest to give them plenty of engaging material. Similarly, regularly updating your website with current information, news articles or blog entries also helps to keep your customers’ interest in your business piqued.

Generating buzz about your company is a pivotal part of your success, and oftentimes, a business is only as good as its marketing campaign, even if the product or service is phenomenal. Regardless of whether you have a large advertising budget, with some creative marketing techniques and a little ingenuity, you can promote your business to thousands of potential clients without breaking the bank. The right mix of great products and creative marketing can turn today’s newsletter or fundraiser into tomorrow’s Super Bowl spot.

Feel free to comment. What are some creative marketing ideas that you have tried, and did they work? How have you generated buzz about your business?

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Free Marketing Ideas

Branding Basics: How to Build a Brand

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:48:36 -0500

Branding is a process that is overlooked by many small businesses, but every business has a brand, whether the company is actively involved in the branding process or not. Wouldn’t you like to have a hand in shaping your company image in the eyes of your current and potential customers? This article provides six essential steps to building your brand.

What is a Brand?

A brand represents a company’s personality. It is the embodiment of all information, ideas, images, and associations that people have of your company, product or service. A brand is built through word of mouth, experiences with the company/product, marketing materials and more. Branding helps people to distinguish one company from the next.

What comes to your mind when you think of Apple? Words that come to my mind are trendy, hip, creative and sleek. This is no accident. Everything from the name and product designs to the TV commercials and other marketing materials helps to establish this image.

You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to influence brand perceptions. Here are six steps to get you started on taking control of your brand:

1. Determine Your Target Audience

Your brand must appeal to your target audience, so it is essential that you know everything there is to know about who you are marketing to. The methods you would use to market to stay-at-home moms will be vastly different than those used to market to business owners. Discover the people who are mostly likely to buy your products and services. Be specific—how old are they, what are their interests, what are their values? Learn more about defining your target market.

2. Find Your Primary Message

When someone thinks of your company or product, there should be one thing that stands out in their minds. For instance, when you hear Volvo, you probably think safety. Again, make sure that the message is one that appeals to your target audience. Find out what is important to your audience and how your product/service can benefit them. The message should be simple and easy to understand. It also must be authentic. If you want to be known for superior customer service, be sure you can deliver on that promise.

3. Choose a Tone and Personality

Strive to create an emotional connection with your target audience. Do you want to make them laugh, cry, relax, get excited? When you walk around with a Starbucks cup, do you feel upscale and classy? How would you feel if you were driving a Lexus? A Hyundai? Do you want your company to be a cool kid or someone stable and trustworthy? Determine what your company’s tone and personality should be to effectively target your audience and portray your message.

4. Create Your Image

Once you know how you want your product/service to be remembered, all other marketing decisions are easier. Every font, color, paragraph, photograph, design layout, and marketing medium used should work to establish the company’s personality and image.

Do you want to be fun and hip? Use trendy fonts and bright colors, write funny ads and run them in popular magazines and TV shows, sponsor a hit music event… you get the idea. With every business decision, ask yourself if you are helping to establish your brand. If someone sees your fun and hip ad and then comes to your store, they shouldn’t be welcomed with elevator music and guys in sweater vests.

5. Be Consistent

Evaluate your business name, logo, business cards, brochure, outdoor signs, website, storefront, etc. Do they go together? Are you using the same fonts and color scheme in all media? Do all your materials work together to portray the company’s main message and personality? Think beyond marketing materials. What about your sales pitch, pricing, customer interactions, employee dress codes? Consistency is key to a building a strong brand.

6. Track the Results

The main purpose of branding is to drive sales. Not all businesses get it right the first time. Test your strategy to see if your target audience sees your brand as you see it. If they don’t, perhaps you are not reaching them with your marketing, or maybe they have personal experiences with the product/service contrary to the brand message. If they do understand your brand, is the message strong enough to get them to buy from you? If not, find out what will.

Ask your current customers what they like most about your product/service. How does it fit into their lifestyle? Look online to see if anyone is talking about your brand on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. You may come up with a new message that will resonate with your audience. Try not to do anything drastic that will alienate your current customers, but don’t be afraid to change things up a bit. Attitudes change over time, and messages may need changing to keep your company fresh and up to date.

Feel free to comment! What are some good examples of strong branding? What brands do you use that you identify with? What companies seem to have drastically changed their branding for better or worse?

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Success Designs Owner to Serve on AAF-BR Board

Thu, 14 May 2009 17:21:31 -0500

Mandy Porta, owner of Success Designs, is one of 12 professionals newly chosen to serve on the Board of Directors for the American Advertising Federation of Baton Rouge (AAF-BR) for a 2-year term.

AAF-BR is an organization that consists of local professionals based in the fields of advertising, public relations, marketing, sales promotion, production and the buying or selling of advertising. The club is an affiliate of the American Advertising Federation, the only national organization representing the interests of the entire advertising community.

“This is an exciting opportunity for me, and I’m looking forward to serving the local advertising community,” Porta said.

Other club members chosen to serve on the AAF-BR Board of Directors include Jessica Bensen and Miranda Lemon of Amedisys Home Health Services, Emily Clemmons of Ink & Air/Gaupp-Wozniak Communications, Steve Davison of Digital FX, Inc., Margo Jolet of the LSU Office of Communications & University Relations, Theresa Overby of the Baton Rouge Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, Shannon Perry and Tammie Tran of Lamar Advertising, Brian Rodriguez of Gatorworks, Aimée Schultz of Covalent Logic and Hunter Territo of XDesign.

Each board member will be responsible for managing a committee. Porta will serve as Workshops co-Chair for the first year of her term in an effort to promote professional development for members. She will be responsible for organizing up to four workshops on topics of interest to the organization’s members.

“I’m already brimming with ideas,” Porta said. “I can’t wait to get started.”

Porta has been a member of AAF-BR since 2005 after graduating from Louisiana State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication (and a concentration in Advertising). While in school, she was a member of the student Advertising Federation club and was a highly-involved participant in the campaign that won third place in District 7 in the 2005 National AAF Student Advertising Competition.

“Being involved in the advertising field has been a blessing,” Porta said. “So many designers come out of school ready to make pretty artwork for businesses without knowing how to create art that sells. I think having a background and experience in advertising and marketing gives Success Designs a competitive edge.”

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