“Visual Marketing”: the Book

February 17, 2012 Leave a Comment

Visual Marketing bookAs a marketer in the business of advertising and marketing design, I was intrigued when I first heard of the book Visual Marketing, and I was glad to get my hands on it. The premise of the book is both exciting and unoriginal: that visuals have as much to do with marketing as copy or sound is of course, well recognized, and has been used to great effect by advertisers and marketers alike. This book, however, is about visual marketing in the new world of online media: so it is infographics, web design, apps and games that take the center stage along with logos, signs, banners, print mailers and business cards—and thankfully, there isn’t a TV ad in sight.

Yet this isn’t a graphic design book: in fact, some of the examples deal with copy or an interesting business name, making the point that all the elements of marketing go hand in hand and are most effective when they all work together to enforce the message.

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Build Your Brand on Social Media

January 19, 2012 1 Comment

Have you started out on social media but aren’t quite sure what to do with it? Do you wonder how you’re ever going to show your business’s competence and expertise in 140 characters? Or how to get people interested in your industry to follow you?

I provide some answers in this post at the Search Engine People blog. A taste:

Answer Questions

Answering questions from people about the way your industry or business functions is a sure-fire way of making yourself look like an expert (provided you actually know the answers). Look through topics related to your business on sites like Quora and LinkedIn and set up a saved search on Twitter and look at hashtags. Join industry forums and participate in discussions. Use web search and Google alerts to find more questions on those topics. Don’t just answer for the sake of getting your name in: you need to actually add something informative to the discussion.

What else can you do? Read the blog post to find out!

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10 Recurring Features for Your Newsletter

January 12, 2012 Leave a Comment

NewsletterDo you think sending out a newsletter isn’t for you? What could you possibly put in it every week (or month)? Think about it: you might find more content ideas than you now realize. Here are some ideas for recurring features you can have in your newsletter.

Answer customer questions

What customer questions do you or your staff (especially customer support or sales) get frequently? A  recurring column in a newsletter is a great place to answer them.

Feature feedback

Dedicate one corner of your newsletter to glowing testimonials you get from your customers. That’s your little boasting spot! Read more of this post

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Ten Most Popular Marketing Posts of 2011

January 4, 2012 Leave a Comment

For newer readers as well as those of you who missed them the first time around, here are our top marketing posts from 2011.

Designing Our Facebook Page Welcome Tab

Who knew a simple post describing how we created the design for our Facebook page welcome tab would be the most popular of 2011 (even though the post was published in July)?

Redesigning Business Cards to Include Social Media Info

Another post where we merely shared how we updated and improved a piece of marketing material, but judging by searches that led people to this post, quite a few of you are looking for help on designing business cards that include your social media URLs without being overwhelming. Read more of this post

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Happy New Year

December 30, 2011 Leave a Comment

Online holidays greeting card from Affinity Express

Please click here to view our online card.

From all of us at Affinity Express, we wish you a very happy 2012.

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Happy Holidays

December 24, 2011 Leave a Comment

It’s a holiday tradition at Affinity Express to recreate a well-known piece of art using embroidery digitizing. This year, the pressure was heightened since last year’s design just won us two awards: the Stitches Golden Needle awards for Design of the Year, Technical, Corporate and Design of the Year, Artistic, Corporate.

The subject we chose this year was a Renoir painting. And regardless of whether we win an award, I think we can be proud of this year’s design as well! What do you think?

Embroidery digitizing design of Renoir painting

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What Are the Most Influential Retailers Doing on Twitter?

December 22, 2011 Leave a Comment

Klout has shared this list of the top ten most influential retailers online, and it got me wondering: what are they doing that makes them influential (or really, gives them a better Klout score)? Here’s my completely unscientific evaluation.

Amazon

It’s no surprise Amazon is on the list: it’s the top online retailer and has in some ways defined the space. Their Twitter profile is well-maintained but with no surprises: they post links to new products and to content (including Amazon’s best books of 2011, retweet from other Amazon accounts such as amazonbooks and AmazonKindle (and while I’m surprised at the inconsistent capitalization there’s nothing else noteworthy here), and have the occasional apt-and-funny product recommendation.

Victoria’s Secret

They do an amazing job at talking and not broadcasting. They respond to followers, call out people wearing their products, they even thanked Klout and their own fans for their ranking in the influential list. 

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Using Cartoons for Marketing

December 13, 2011 Leave a Comment

Cartoon created by Affinity Express

Cartoon created by Affinity Express for a client

I have been reading the book Visual Marketing by David Langton and Anita Campbell, and came across the example of cartoons to market CaseCentral. CaseCentral markets eDiscovery software to law firms and corporations, and these “Case in Point” cartoons are meant to draw attention, entertain as well as demonstrate the company’s knowledge of the field.

That is a smart use of visual marketing, and it reminded me of the Indian consumer goods company, Amul. Amul Butter cartoons appear on billboards and newspapers all over India. Each cartoon references some current event—an election, a new movie, a sleazy scandal—and the tagline is at once a pun on and a comment on the event that it references. They have been doing this for decades and these cartoons are immensely popular: you can browse through some here.

If you haven’t guessed already, I am in awe of the Amul campaign. They combine contemporary relevance, story-telling and art to create a powerful message that evokes the brand and ties in the product, and they have done this consistently for over three decades. If that isn’t brilliant, I don’t know what is.

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6 Reasons Why I Hate Your Website

December 9, 2011 6 Comments

Mobile siteThere are many, many reasons why someone might hate your website. If it works for you—gets you a great number of leads every month or your e-commerce sales have gone up since the redesign—you can shut this page now and go back to work. But if you wonder what it is about your website that’s just not bringing in the leads, read on: your website might be committing one of these mistakes.

It Annoys Users

Forcing me to wait through a two-minute Flash “intro” before I can even get to your site will really annoy me. Almost as bad is making me click on an “enter site” button. I AM on your site, so why do I have to ENTER it?

Other things that annoy your users:

  1. Music that plays as soon as I enter your site so I have to frantically mute my computer while coworkers raise their heads and look around
  2. Cluttered design with little white space and too many different elements
  3. Bright clashing colors or light text on dark background to give me a headache
  4. Lots of Flash, so that getting to your “management team” page feels like a complicated and difficult game
  5. Your website takes so long to load I can make myself a fresh cup of tea while I’m waiting

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How to Work with Designers

December 2, 2011 Leave a Comment

Over at the Search Engine People blog, I offer more advice on working with designers.

Working with someone in a remote office is always difficult, but when I started out, I found it harder to get design done efficiently because I didn’t know much about design and I hadn’t realized how I could be a better client.

So here’s some of  what I’ve learned the hard way!

Once in a while you work with a designer who can take your “I want something pretty, but corporate, and use our brand colors but do something different and fluid” and turn it into a fabulous design. (Thanks, Mel!) But lets face it, that’s really rare. So here are some tips for marketers and business-owners on working with web or graphic designers (whether they are employees, freelancers or a business services provider).

Give detailed instructions.

This is the most obvious but also most important tip. Especially when you start out working with a new designer or provider, make sure you write down every little thing you can think of. Here are some common aspects I often forget to specify:

  • The size of the design (in pixels or inches or whatever works for you)
  • The purpose: Is it for print or web? Will it be used in your blog and have to fit into the blog column? Is it a direct mail piece that has to fit into a certain size of envelope?
  • Do you have preferences on how the design should be laid out? How many columns? How much space should the image take up?
  • When do you need it?

And make clear what you can’t do: e.g., change the colors in your logo, use serif fonts, or whatever your guidelines are. Which brings us to…

Click here to read 8 more tips.

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Thanksgiving Print Ads

November 24, 2011 Leave a Comment

Happy Thanksgiving! It’s the most anticipated meal of the year, but what is important for us is that many businesses have special promotions around Thanksgiving and rely on our advertising and marketing production to meet deadlines and increase revenue. For retailers, they are already deep into promoting holiday sales and hoping to make the most of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Restaurants and other businesses food-related try to get people to their doors or to buy their products (as wells as to advertise in their dining guides).

Here are just a few of the many print ads our team has created this time around.

Newspaper print ad for Thanksgiving Dining Guide created by the Affinity Express team

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9 Tips on Getting the Most out of a Conference

November 18, 2011 Leave a Comment

Attending a business conferenceIf you’re like me and work in a small department, conferences are an incredible opportunity to learn about what’s new in your field and meet people who do similar work. I went to my first two professional conferences this year, the Click Asia Summit in Mumbai and Ad-tech in New York. I was extremely excited to meet speakers I’ve read and heard of, people doing incredible things in marketing, and just meet a group of fellow marketers and chat with them about challenges we all face.

But if you have a tight budget (and who doesn’t?) conferences, including traveling to them and staying at hotels, can be extremely expensive. So how do you make the most of every single industry event you attend?

1.  Find the best events

This is obvious, but also probably the most important. With so many events in the year, which one(s) give you the most bang for your buck? Research online, read blog posts on the last year’s events, and ask people (both on Twitter and your real-life colleagues). What are your objectives? What do you want to learn about? What kind of people do you want to meet? Figure all this out and then check out which event makes the most sense for you. Read more of this post

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Social Media Marketing at Ad-Tech

November 10, 2011 4 Comments

Some quick notes from yesterday at ad-tech. We stayed in the social media track, because there were interesting topics up, and I was excited to see Chris Brogan, whose blog I read religiously, in person!

David Fischer, the Vice President of Advertising and Global Operations at Facebook, revealed that if you reach out to your fans and their friends, you get 81 times the distribution. Nielsen statistics also indicate that 68% are more likely to remember an ad with social context, twice as likely to remember the message and four times as likely to buy.

So how do you build your brand on Facebook?

  1. Connect
  2. Engage
  3. Inspire

Well, that sounds easy! Also remember, your social media strategy is really your people strategy. Create personalized experiences and let people share them. Read more of this post

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Happy Halloween

October 31, 2011 Leave a Comment

Witch's Cat

With Diwali celebrations in India last week and Halloween today, it seems like a special time everywhere! Diwali is the festival of lights and if you’re in India at this time, you can expect to see every window in every home or shop lit up with traditional oil lamps or the equally ubiquitous strings of electric lights. If you’re in India, happy Diwali!

To the rest of you, happy Halloween. Have a terror-filled, dark and gory holiday and (if you aren’t busy setting out candy or making last-minute adjustments to your costume) check out these designs created by our team. Pretty creepy, huh?

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Repurposing Content

October 21, 2011 3 Comments

100% RecyclableAs a marketer, I’m constantly inundated with advice on what I should be doing. Apparently, marketers are now publishers, but not the old-fashioned magazine publishers who only needed to worry about one issue for the month. We have blog posts to write (and they’d better be long and well-written and useful and frequent), newsletters to send out regularly to our subscribers, website copy to frequently update (to catch the attention of the elusive search engines), the Facebook page to continually update and monitor, the Twitter account to be briefly witty on, the press releases to send out and reach the media, sales collateral to keep engaging and current, events to plan for, and maybe ads to create and manage. Don’t forget the internal communication: at Affinity Express, for example, we have a quarterly newsletter, as well as memos and posters we often put up to inform our internal audience.

How does a small marketing team with limited resources do all this?

1. Read widely.

Not only is reading about industry news and best practices essential for you to learn, it also helps you think and may provide material for a blog post. I’ve blogged about a book I read (and that was a fiction book and not about marketing or business, so don’t be narrow in your selection), articles that I disagreed with, a blog post and speech that inspired me.  I also routinely cull industry articles and put in a few of the best links into our monthly newsletters.

2. Dig into what’s already available.

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Learn Marketing from the Competition

September 6, 2011 5 Comments

Spy on your competitors' marketing activities How much time and effort you need to spend on marketing depends partly on what your competitors are doing. Are they doing something that you aren’t, and that might work for you? Are they getting a lot of visibility online, and you need to catch up fast? Or are they relatively clueless, and you just need to keep on doing what you’re doing?

Here are some areas you can easily look at and see how your competitors fare. All you spend is some time at your computer.

1. Website

How effective is your website versus your competitors? It’s time to find out.

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The 6 Most Essential Marketing Activities

September 2, 2011 2 Comments

You’re a small or medium business, and your marketing team’s really small (or you don’t have one). You see so much advice around, so many things you need to do: SEO, email marketing, PR . . . where do you even start?

Believe me, I feel your pain. Always having worked in small marketing teams with a very limited budget, I know you’re expected to do a lot with next to nothing. How do you prioritize?

Below are the six most essential marketing activities that I believe every business should work on, in order of priority. So if you’re just starting out, you can start with #1 and work your way down.

1. Website Design

The first thing I’m gonna do if I hear about a new business that seems interesting (maybe I heard a customer rave about you or I met one of your employees at a conference) is to look up your website. And if it’s not designed well, your website isn’t going to impress anyone. Don’t pretend people don’t try to look you up online: you need a website, and you need it professionally designed. If you only spend on one marketing activity this year, make it this one.   Read more of this post

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Cool Things Newspapers Are Doing on Facebook

August 11, 2011 2 Comments

You’ve heard it before: newspapers should be using Facebook. But what should they be doing?

Here’s what some of the best newspaper pages on Facebook are doing right. (Instead of looking through all newspaper pages I could find on Facebook, I started out with this list. I also included a few from here.)

Read on to see what Facebook features you should be taking advantage of (even if you’re not in the news business). Read more of this post

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How to Outsource Marketing Design and Keep Your Brand Consistent

August 3, 2011 Leave a Comment

Print ad for laundry service

Print ad created by Affinity Express

As I ask (and answer) in my post at Search Engine People, how do you outsource marketing without losing your voice? Let’s take design. How do you outsource design of your ads and marketing materials without losing consistency?

Managing an outsourced team can be no different (or difficult!) than managing a team in-house, provided you follow the rules.

For example, rule #4:

Give detailed, specific instructions.
I can’t tell you how many times our clients fail to do that and are surprised when our designs don’t match their expectations. If you have something specific in mind, you have to really tell them what you mean. You can’t just say “make it like our current logo, only better.” You have to say, “I don’t like this black box in our logo because it makes us seem unapproachable. Replace it with something pink and poufy and transparent.” Yes, the designer will use their judgment: that’s what you’re paying them for. But you can’t give them vague statements and expect them to read your mind.

Now go over and read the rest. Don’t forget to tell me what you think I got right and what I missed.

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5 Steps to Ensuring Quality Through Training

July 22, 2011 1 Comment

Classroom trainingFor an organization with a unique business model like ours, it’s not enough to hire designers who are knowledgeable about design; we also need our employees who can deliver on client requirements, whether that means simply following instructions or getting creative. With clients being half the world away, as distant culturally as they are physically, this is a challenge we deal with every day:

How do we ensure that our people deliver quality designs, every single time?

When I asked one of our associate managers for training how she thinks quality becomes ingrained into organizational culture, she said:

“Training has to be taken very seriously. We have to bridge the resources we get and the expectations of the client with training. Not merely classroom training, but on-the-job training has to be handled sensitively, so that best practices are shared.”

Here’s how we do it. Read more of this post

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