Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category

There is a new book out by Seth Godin that gets to the why of New Marketing and explains the 14 trends that go with it. He encourages you to wisely dive in and embrace it. What are you waiting for?

Seth Godin who has written 11 books to date including Purple Cow as well as being an entrepreneur and highly respected speaker has another great book for us to read, Meatball Sundae. I truly enjoyed yet again his getting to the point writing merged with real-life business examples. Godin doesn’t focus on the negative instead he illustrates through words what a company did and what they could have done better and on the flip side what they did and what he thought was amazing about it. He also includes many websites that should be looked over as examples or used in your new marketing strategy. Godin gets into old marketing and new marketing how they differ and why old marketing is not the future or the present. He touches on, The Long Tail theory coined by Chris Anderson which is also one of SEOmoz’s must read books. Godin explains why direct communication with your customers is more important then ever and how one person can effect your business by using direct communication. It’s up to you to make it a positive comment or a negative one.

Quote from Meatball Sundae:

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I don’t have a problem with political ads. In fact, I think the whole campaign finance reform issue is ill conceived and does the opposite of what we really want. People, including political candidates, have a right to run ads ad nauseum. The more information we have, the better.

I’m not afraid of occasional political references. In fact I’ve been known to make my political and even religious views known here on this blog, but I never go so far as to preach those views to my audience. I think it’s silly and bad for business. If you’re looking for controversy, I don’t think that’s the smartest way to drum it up.

When businesses mix politics with their advertising campaigns, you have to start wondering about how much benefit they get from it. Especially when dealing with hotly debated and deeply personal issues.

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What do you do when you have to incorporate too many keywords in too little copy or you have a group of keywords that don’t easily fit into the existing web page? Besides the obvious solution of creating more copy to accommodate these situations, use your right brain to help you out here.

What do you do when you have key phrases that are personal in nature i.e. “make my writing better” as a core term? You could use it as a headline to spark your readers curiosity, but at times that may be an awkward act to follow. The most simple way to do this is to use customer quotes or testimonials.

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I’m pretty immune to advertising. I fast forward through TV commercials, and rarely watch anything on YouTube, unless it’s referred to me as a great marketing piece. When I found cleanishappy.com (hat tip to my buddy John), I could not pull my eyes away from the screen. And it wasn’t just the butt shots (all tasteful, mind you) that interested me, but that certainly was an attention getter. These guys put together a fantastic presentation that not only was able to grab attention, but maintain the interest. I clicked on on every link and watched them all the way through. Now, where do I get one of these?

What do you think? Did you find this as compelling as I did?

Last year I put my business information on the sides of my truck. From the picture below you can see that I kept it very minimalist. I used just enough information to make the point. It shows our business name, web address and a tag line just to point out we do website marketing. It’s readable going 79 65 MPH on the freeway and nothing there distracts the reader. In my opinion, it was perfect.

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Use bullet points or a numbered system to:

• Break up your copy into consumable pieces
• Aid in the clean design of your page
• Make it easy for the reader to reference previous points
• Save time when reading through dense copy

When you are marketing to an audience, logic would dictate that you need to speak to them in a language that they understand. This seems like an obvious statement. But I am talking about something far more subtle than sending a Spanish commercial to an English speaking audience. I am talking about a common mistake amongst marketing professionals, especially when dealing with the youth market.

Just like clothing styles that rotate in and out of fashion with the occasional new concept joining the cycle, the words used to describe the trends move in cycles as well. What was “cool” yesterday is “hot” today. Or maybe it’s “wicked” or “awesome”, “boss” or “sweet”. You most likely won’t find accurate definitions for these terms in Webster’s Dictionary. But, if you’re going to be in the marketing game you better know today’s definition of the word.
Having an understanding of your target’s demographics current linguistic nuisances not only establishes your credibility with your audience, but its helps them better understand your message. It also makes them feel like your message is for them, not aimed at them.
So how do you acquire such rapidly changing language skills?

You PARTICIPATE in conversation with your audience and when they are speaking you LISTEN.

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Here’s a tip about writing press releases. Simply put, never ever ever do this!!!

This post is a slight departure from my norm and is the product of my increasing disgust with what I like to call the “Macintosh March”. Ok, I’ll keep this short and to the point.

The aura of non-conformity which is aggressively cultivated by Macintosh through a slew of anti-PC advertising campaigns designed to establish the Mac brand as a sort of hip anti-hero, cleverly positioned against the clunky and counter-intuitive PC which symbolizes a robotic established norm that is out-of-touch with today’s ultra-cool, carefree, “down-with-the-man” computer user.

The problem is that the Mac campaign has been too successful and now every gutless-yuppie-thrill-seeker type is filing into the Macintosh March where they too can join the ranks of the tech-rebellious and “Stick it to the man” in a very controlled and safe way. So much so that the Mac is in fact the very antithesis of true non-conformity: It has degenerated into a “non-conformity fad” (uber-oxymoron). A predictable outlet for the masses to be “hip” and different, while marching alongside a million other mindless idiots who purchased their Macintosh not because it was the logical solution for their unique computing requirements, but because “it’s a freakin Mac”.

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If you’re tired of my yabbering recounts and “lessons” learned from each apprentice episode, have no worries. On Thursdays, March 22, 29, and April 19 you can learn from a real apprentice!

Trump university is sponsoring a series of call-in seminars featuring Sean Yazbeck (The Apprentice Season 5 winner), Kendra Todd (Season 3 winner) and Randal Pinkett (Season 4 winner).

You need to sign up for each session, which is limited to 200 callers each.