Seth Godin is a public speaker, bestselling author, entrepreneur and marketing ideologist. He has published 18 books and founded both Yoyodyne and Squidoo. Not only does he have an MBA in marketing from Stanford, but was recently inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame in 2013. But what sets Seth apart in my mind is his model of marketing ideas in the digital age.
A brilliant marketer, Seth’s focus lies on the nature of ideas. How they are conceived and how they are spread. He brings back the concept of tribes- a human social unit linked by common ties. Seth describes tribes as being about leadership, and about connecting people and ideas.
As a writer, Seth’s reintroduction of the “idea of the tribes” strikes a chord. Converted to marketing, it’s about connecting people to a product that tells a story. A shoe company that gives a pair to the needy for every pair bought. A company grown off the backs of hardworking founders. Writing is about telling a story to people who want to hear it. To create a tribe of like-minded people and lead a movement - even if it is just drawing attention to a company or issue. To me, his lesson is about reinventing how you relate. Being a storyteller turns you into a leader, which sets you apart. In Seth’s words - “In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.” Finding what makes our clients unique is what helps drive our marketing strategy. You can find out about his books and speaking engagements by visiting www.sethgodin.com. Or, just type Seth into Google.
The best creative web design for clients all have one thing in common; image quality. Images are the number one visual way information is communicated and in the day and age of increasing demands for quick information, images do a great job at telling a story quickly for site visitors. Images are crucial for efficient web design because they break up content on pages which can be overwhelming for visitors. Essentially, people want information fast, and when they don’t get the answer to a search phrase, they leave the site (contributing to high bounce rates, low conversions, and lowered SEO scores). What better way to convey information quickly than through pertinent images paired with good keyword-heavy content aiming to match a visitor’s search phrase?
Efficient use of images can be hugely beneficial to a site and can add to a business’s branding, their tone toward visitors, their business’s image, efficiency in converting visitors, guiding efficient site-navigation, SEO, and much more. Images work hand in hand with creative web design and are increasingly recognized in their importance in conveying information:
“A common finding is an observed processing superiority of pictures as compared to words, suggesting that pictures have a faster and more direct access to meaning, while words are discussed to require additional translational activity...” -Schlochtermeier, et al. (2013).
Given the importance of images to visitors, it is good to know what constitutes as good images for a website to make the most of creative web design.
When people think of the best web design they typically only think of a site’s layout. However, most people forget that a large portion of layout is where to place high-quality images and content. The best web design is unique for each client and their business. However, there are similarities with site layouts and how images are arranged:
Simple and effective designs use layouts with images that do not confuse visitors, help them navigate the site, sell your unique message, and help convert visitors into a customers. Good layouts also use images to guide visitors toward pertinent pages or locations on their site.
There is a misconception that images need to be small for a website. Images need to be as big as possible to get high resolution, only their file sizes need to be small. Thankfully OCG takes care of all file compression so even if you give us massive photos, we ensure they are optimized on your website. Images that are too small are 'pixelated' or 'low-res' and look bad on websites and can hurt your online appearance and brand identity.
High Res Image
Low Res Image
The images need to be well lit. Avoid using a flash because it tends to wash out all images. The main source of lighting should not be behind the subject either and you should avoid highly contrasted images that add a lot of distracting patterns. This is very important because many images on a website have text over them and high-contrast images make it difficult to read the content and can be strenuous to look at on their own.
Good Lighting
Bad Lighting
Having everything in focus can make the image too cluttered and distract from what you really want to viewer to see in the image. A ‘soft-focus’ pulls the viewer’s eye toward the object you want site visitors to pay attention to while softly blurring the rest. This can also help de-clutter busy images.
Good Focus
Bad Focus
Many people think that if you want to draw attention to something it needs to be centered in the image. That can get repetitive with many images on your site. Take images from close up and far away with the subject in different places. It can be a mistake to take all of your images from one perspective using one composition, unless you are taking product shots.
Good Composition
Bad Composition
You may hear web-designers or account-coordinators talking about ‘mastheads’. Mastheads, banners, or site headers are the images that display at the top of each web page. These images need to be large (to work with a responsive website) and need to be ‘landscape’ not ‘portrait’. Additionally, because visitors only see a tiny part of the whole image, it is a good idea for the image to capture 'depth’. For example, instead of taking images from a top-down angle on a subject, try taking shots from different angles that emphasize perspective. A good way to do this is taking a series of images starting from the ground-level and moving up.
Good Perspective
Bad Perspective
Many clients find sites and ask what we can do to make their site more like the example they choose. The most common site people tend to ask for is Apple or other sites for technology companies. So what do they do that makes their layout work so well?
Ah, that thorny space between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we all try to stick to a diet of salad for the next four weeks while we wait for our bank accounts to refill in time to get the last few gifts we forgot about on Black Friday. On tap this week: Best selling books of 2015, SnapChat for business, wrangling your 2016 email marketing plans into a calendar, a look into OpenTable’s dual-design process, and hot business trends. Hottest selling business books of 2015 NEW YORK TIMES
Evergreen business heavy-hitters Malcom Gladwell (Outliers, Tipping Point) and Tony Robbins (Money: Master the Game) are joined by mid-career authors Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Freakonomics, Think Like a Freak), relative newcomer Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit), and others on this list of the best-selling business books of 2015. What the heck is SnapChat, and how do I use it for business? SMALL BUSINESS TRENDS Just a few short years ago, SnapChat was making headlines as a controversial tool for frisky teenagers and adults who wanted a way to send private content to friends without the risks of exploitation—the content disappears as soon as it’s viewed—that come with other social media outlets. Today, businesses from BuzzFeed to Mashable to Comedy Central are using SnapChat to reach a younger audience, with content that lends itself to SnapChat’s ephemeral quality. Build a killer email marketing calendar for 2016 EMAIL EXPERIENCE COUNCIL Newsletters, promotions, launches, events. New customers, current customers, former customers, possible customers. If you’re a businesses with multi-layered email campaigns, things can get overwhelming when you’re planning for the coming year. The Email Experience Council lays it out for you in this handy guide. Too complicated? Let us build a comprehensive email marketing campaign calendar for you. See how restaurant reservations maestro OpenTable designs its mobile experience for both sides of their marketing coin INVISION We love a good behind-the-scenes look at how today’s most innovative companies are handling their web and app design, digital marketing, brand strategy, content creation, and other components of a successful product. Here, OpenTable opens the doors to its design department to give us a look at how they solve the problem of who to design for when two different market segments use the same app. Srirachi2Go Makes Hot Debut AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION Possibly the only instance of a tiny, empty bottle going viral you’ll ever see. Sriracha2Go pleases hardcore chili sauce fans by providing a portable vehicle for their addiction, and the Internet goes wild.
If you’re doing business in 2015, the term marketing automation has likely made its way into your vernacular—or at least your inbox. But unless you have a comprehensive marketing department, or a service provider who specializes in it, you’re probably not making full use of it as a time-and money-saving tool. If you’re like a lot of small businesses, you may even be fuzzy on exactly what it is. This brief primer is for you. Marketing automation is an umbrella term that refers to the process (and its technologies) of turning prospects into customers in a way that's data-driven and standardized. Marketing campaigns are automated, and usually channeled through email, social media, blogs, and websites. That automation allows your marketing staff to spend fewer resources on moving prospects through the sales channel, while speeding up that process. Data gathered during this process is useful both in the journey to a particular conversion, and for future marketing and even product planning. Automation typically has three components that work together: Intelligence/Analytics At this phase, prospect activities—for instance, who clicked what link in an email, or used a particular search term—are tracked and analyzed, allowing campaigns to be more highly-targeted to a prospect’s interests based on their behavior. Prospect-Campaign Automation Here, prospects are categorized based on the analysis of their interests gathered in the first phase, and then presented with marketing messages and campaigns that target that particular interest. This is where you’ll see marketing components like shopping cart reminders, and those uncanny Facebook ads that seemed to know what you were thinking earlier in the day. Workflow Automation Marketing campaigns activities can be creative and exciting, but they can also be tedious and labor-intensive. Workflow automation allows marketing staff to automate repetitive processes, like campaign budgeting, file approvals, brand asset management, campaign scheduling, and other internal activities. The field of marketing automation isn’t new, but for many years it was used primarily by larger organizations with the budgets, staff, and expertise to purchase and use those tools. In recent years, it has been gaining traction among even small businesses and entrepreneurs, thanks to more accessible and affordable technologies, and an increasing number of digital marketing agencies offering it as a one-stop service.
Short of Apple and American politics, I can’t think of an industry more consistently skilled at building and riling up a fierce, loyal fan base than sports. Games are exciting by nature, but great sports marketers are experts at capitalizing on that foundation. They know how to make full use of tools like brand strategy, social media, and email and internet marketing, even internal marketing, to make everything about their game, their players, their ticket sales. But those sales boosting strategies aren’t unique to sports, and any business willing to invest in the value of enthusiasm can steal them to power their own home field advantage.
This is something that sports marketers do really well, and it’s an easy play for any business to add to their repertoire. There are many great ways in which the sports industry markets that any business can put towards their list of sales boosting strategies. We all know that social media is about engagement, and that engagement usually means broadcasting and interacting. But how carefully are you listening on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and other social media outlets for positive mentions by existing and potential customers? What do you do when you find them? You amplify them. Like them, but don’t just like them. Respond, but don’t only respond. Retweet, reblog, link to those mentions in your marketing emails, share them through all relevant channels. Enthusiasm is most infectious when it’s observed in an un-coerced third party (just like endorsements—and enthusiasm is a form of endorsement). Sports teams amp up fan excitement by compounding the energy of excited, individual fans, and you can do the same thing for your product or service by letting your potential customers be voyeurs to the happiness of your existing customers. Be sure to listen for other customer and market segment conversations about things relevant to your business, too, and be a conduit for those. Sharing excitement about upcoming events, new technology, and other things your customers are interested in can align you with the shared philosophies and positive feelings that are precursor to buying.
We know what happens in the football huddle: The quarterback pulls the team together mid-game to strategize the next play, congratulate or motivate players, commiserate on a sagging score, or in general to get player buy-in back at peak levels. In other words, it’s a kind of internal marketing. Whatever it is that happens here during any given game, you can be sure the quarterback feels it’s critical to winning that particular game. Not the game they planned for, hoped for, or even expected statistically—the game that’s currently in progress, with all of its unexpected turns. Keep your sales boosting strategies and marketing plans bold and robust but flexible. This way they can be quickly adapted to unexpected changes like economic downturns, new technologies or outlets, poor product reception, social media backlash, or any of the number of fumbles, blocks, and interceptions that can plague a campaign. Internet and email marketing are especially good channels for marketing flexibility. Social media, too. Campaign messages can be quickly adapted to reflect changing information, corrected for mistakes or oversights, take advantage of new developments, or work around a mea culpa situation gracefully.
Have you ever been invited to a luxury box seat for a high-profile sporting event? If so, you know how much that changes the experience of watching a game. That game is, technically speaking, the same game for everyone in the stadium. The lineup is the same, the announcers are the same, the plays are the same, no matter where you’re watching from. But I assure you the game doesn’t feel the same from up there behind those big windows, wine and cheese in hand, as it does in the crowded, sometimes too-hot or too-cold and almost always stiff-seated stands below. The VIP treatment changes—and almost always enhances—the customer experience. Sales boosting strategies that add to a customer's value and experience will increase sales simply due their satisfaction. Levels of purchase have become more commonplace since the advent of web apps and services, and this can work for just about anything—but keep it simple, and make it meaningful. You can shift up or down with this. If your service is basic, what expansions, add-ons, or concierge-like perks can you offer at a higher price point to add value, and boost the customer’s experience (and opinion of your brand)? Even something as simple as extended support hours can boost your customers’ sense of their value to you. If your product is already complex and/or high-dollar, can you provide a pared-down version to offset the image and value of the original? This can also make your brand more accessible to a larger market, but be careful and talk to a brand strategist on this—some brands can be damaged by offering more basic and affordable options (think of a $22,000 MSRP on a Rolls Royce).
Team marketing is a big component of sports marketing, but I’d argue that player marketing is the key to the emotional resonance that gives sports its true power. Players are storied, and as humans we’re helplessly attracted to stories—particularly ancient story archetypes like the hero’s journey, rags-to-riches stories, David and Goliath. Embedded deep down in our DNA is the universal need for something to root for, and it’s why sports and games elicit the responses they do. It’s why a single sports team can affect everything from a fan’s wardrobe (black and orange, anyone?) to their emotional behavior (shouting red-faced at the screen, or the field), to their willingness in some cases to paint themselves and go out into public with large foam appendages attached to their bodies. Burt Shavitz, the now legendary figurehead of Burt’s Bees personal care products, is a favorite go-to example of the power of storytelling in a brand. The quality of his products is top-notch, but it’s his unlikely story—north country recluse living off the land and raising bees stumbles on myriad uses for beeswax—that populates the brand with its infectious personality and wins it fans (and hundreds of millions in revenue) worldwide. If you can capture the fertile seeds of story that served as the seeds for your company’s products and services, or that underlie the company itself or the people in it, marketing magic can happen. Just be sure the story is congruous with the company’s brand image, and is told consistently across all messaging.
Read our other articles pertaining to e-commerce.
It’s the first week of December, which means we’re all decking our halls with the hundreds of marketing emails we’ve received in the last week from retailers trying to pull in Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and now even Giving Tuesday dollars. After that annual deluge, it’s tempting to swear off email marketing for the rest of the year. But this is also a time when consumers are particularly open to and appreciative of non-selling messages, which means you have a chance to do some feel-good branding work to set the stage for 2016. Here are four merry ways to make sure your holiday greeting is the one your subscribers remember: Personalize the subject line Using your subscriber’s name in the subject line can increase open rates by as much as 41%. This may seem too easy, but personalization is still the leader when it comes to getting subscriber attention long enough to get that coveted click. When it comes to email marketing, regardless of it being the holiday season, it is important to make your opening line shine. Pay special attention to your opening line, not just because we have ever-shortening attention spans, but because most email programs display the first line of your email in the inbox view. Do it right—with clear, evocative language that hints at what’s inside—and your subscriber will be more likely to open it. Use a custom, branded graphic or illustration This is your chance to show your subscribers that you’re more than just a shopping cart, or bullet list of services. Put your graphics team to work on a custom e-card design for your subscribers that captures the essence of your brand. Take it further and spin your brand into a traditional holiday scene: Use your logo as the star on the Christmas tree, use your brand colors in place of the typical red and green, or place your hottest products under the tree. Keep it original, genuine, and focused on the customer Done well, even a simple, text-only message that comes from the heart of your business can plant the seeds that grow into future sales. Let your audience know they’re important to you, and that you’re reflecting on the prior year with gratitude. Above all, thank your subscribers for being subscribers, your customers for their business, and if you can, give them a sneak peek at some things you’ve got planned for the new year. Happy Branding!
In marketing, there are few guarantees. We set goals, do our research, plan, weigh the opportunities and threats, then execute. Finally, at intervals or once the campaign has finalized, we evaluate the result make decisions about what to do next.
It is little known, but prior to 1900 and a little after, there was a Lake Tahoe resort on the North shore of Emerald Bay called, appropriately, the Emerald Bay Resort. Then, as now, Lake Tahoe was something of a vacation hotspot, despite having virtually every tree in the basin cut down and sent to the Virginia City silver mines. This is where the marketing/scuba diving similarities are uncanny. When the Emerald Bay Resort was in its heyday, they'd offer rowing skiffs and similar watercraft to guests, which they would use to ply the waters of the lake under human power. Although the resort is long gone, these little vessels, known to some as Emerald Bay's "miniature fleet" had been scuttled and remain on the bottom. For small craft enthusiasts, the miniature fleet is like a liquid time capsule--a submerged museum of the evolution of boat building. On Sunday, our mission was to find it.
Like finding a bunch of tiny boats, effective marketing begins with research. Imagine (and, who wouldn't) the boats are your potential customers. As a marketer, your goal is to deliver your message to the boats, er... customers. BUT, before you can deliver your message, you must know where to find them. Your marketing dollars are like air (or, in our case, Nitrox, but that's not important). It's a big lake, so if we were to have any hope of finding the miniature fleet, we couldn't just jump in and start swimming. And, unless you have unlimited time and money (who doesn't?), the last thing you want to do is blow your budget not knowing whether your target market is anywhere in the vicinity. We read books, asked people in the area and dug through everything we could find on the Internet (BTW, I think this "Internet" thing might really catch on). Eventually, we narrowed our search by comparing old photos of the resort to the surface geology (rocks... big ones) of today. I'm no expert on geologic time, but how much could a 50,000 pound boulder erode in a hundred years? Thus armed, we chose our drop in point, geared up and rolled over the side of our trusty research vessel (aka. Joe's boat). After about 25 minutes in the water, we hit our mark by identifying a lapstrake rowing skiff dating back to the late 1800's. Our research payed off and we had the opportunity to visit a unique piece of history because we narrowed our search without wasting our precious breathing gas.
Your budget is your budget. Too often, the approach to marketing (especially media advertising), is to decide and commit, skipping the research part altogether. In fact, the system is kind of set up that way. Our job is to make sure that you deliver the right message to your boats while you still have air left.
And there you go. Diving and marketing. Peas in a pod. PB & J. Different, but so eerily complimentary, that I believe it's high time we thought about having meetings underwater.
Speaking of scuba diving and marketing, OCG Creative is a Reno web design and internet marketing agency that provides marketing services for a variety of industries such as the scuba diving industry. Take a look at some of the work we have done for clients such as Adventure Scuba.
I'm starting to feel like we're beating the same drum with back to back articles about WordPress, but the simple fact is that marketing with WordPress makes a lot of sense for most businesses of pretty much any size. It takes planning and effort, but of all the low cost ways to grow and market your business, writing blog articles can eat away at your competitor's market share in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, for them to compete with. It's hard to decide whether WordPress's incredible ability to reliably achieve top search rankings, or the ease by which site owners can manage their websites is the more valuable feature, but in my view search engines always win out over everything else. Not true in all situations, however. For a lot of business owners, providing a simple means of managing content is key. This is especially true for companies that use their websites to supply current information to an established user base. SEO may be be a factor in this case, but by no means most important. For most organizations, search engines rule. If you are selling a product or service, achieving top search engine rankings can mean the difference between success and failure. With WordPress, I've spent years experimenting with the right combination attributes and discovered that it is possible to achieve more or less real-time indexing of your website content. What this means is that, within minutes of your publishing an article (post or page), Google will have already added it to its search engine results page (SERP). I can't emphasize enough what realtime search indexing means to most businesses. By eliminating the normal crawl cycle, search engine marketers (as well as non-technical website owners or content managers) can get onto the SERP in a few minutes, a process that often takes 30 days or more--sometimes much more. Generally speaking, my list of top reasons business owners should consider WordPress is as follows...
All this sounds great, and it is. But, there are a few things for which WordPress may not be the best choice. Topping that list is large scale e-commerce. While there are many plugins (WooCommerce is one popular example) that make selling products possible, and even simple, none that I've worked with are ready for prime time. WordPress also may not be the best choice for websites that must present many varying types of data or content. For example, a site with several regions or feature areas on each type of page. To do this using WordPress, programmers often issue database calls to specific post categories or tags and display the result in the appropriate location on the webpage. It seems clever enough, but if you have a lot of them, things get out of hand pretty quickly. We've resolved the issue by doing unique things with custom post types, but there are times that a more traditional content management system (CMS) makes a better choice. This isn't so much of an issue here, but most web designers simply don't have the programming skills to do any serious custom work within the WordPress engine. As a result, many web designers install off the shelf themes and modify them. Many times, that's fine, but these modifications can be a nightmare if done improperly. For example, your website can be completely wiped out just by performing a routine update. Even with a few drawbacks, I'd say that 70% of the web development projects we do are custom WordPress websites. And, we are an engineering firm capable of building anything our clients dream up from scratch. If you've got questions about whether WordPress might be a good fit for your website project, drop me a note with a few details (joe@ocgcreative.com) and I'll be glad help you explore your options.
