How to Work with Designers

December 2, 2011 by 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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9 Tips on Getting the Most out of a Conference

November 18, 2011 by 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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Designing Our Website Icon/Favicon

November 3, 2011 by Leave a comment

How do you make your brand stronger down to the smallest detail? How can you enhance your website and stand out from competitors and other companies? Try using a favicon, which is also known as a favorites icon, to display in the address bar when your site is open in the web browser. You can see them today on most popular websites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Facebook Icon Twitter Icon LinkedIn Icon
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

Without an icon, your site can look flat or worse, like you don’t care enough to create one.

Affinity Express didn’t have a favicon, so I suggested creating one and took on the task of designing a 16×16-pixel icon that could also be used in various media such as Facebook. I wanted our favicon to convey creativity because we offer advertising and marketing production solutions and have a team of more than 900 designers. With this in mind, I developed several design studies that were true to our corporate branding.

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Happy Halloween

October 31, 2011 by 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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Designs of the Quarter: Online Ad, Coupon, Vector Art

October 28, 2011 by 2 Comments

The results of this year’s third Designs of the Quarter contest are in, and as always, I’m proud to present some of the best work within Affinity Express.

Online Ad

Designs of the Quarter: online ad

This eye-catching ad was an easy choice for Design of the Quarter because it grabs attention. Regardless of the online newspaper’s headline, you can’t ignore the ad because it surrounds the content. Even better, it earned high praise from our client: “We need to keep maintaining the high quality we’ve become accustomed to through Affinity Express. This is an AWESOME piece of creative built by your team. Keep up this great work.” Read more of this post

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The Potential of Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

October 25, 2011 by 2 Comments

Small businesses seem to agree that social media marketing is effective.

  • “Creating a profile on a social network” was named the most effective marketing or advertising tactic. (MerchantCircle survey, 2011)
  • 34% of respondents who had used social media said it helped them reach new potential customers and 15% said it increased sales. (Deluxe Corp survey, 2011)

via eMarketer

However, they are yet to explore the full potential of social media.

This should soon change: 83% small businesses plan to use social media for business. Yet social media is far from being indispensable: only 4% small businesses can’t do without it. Read more of this post

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Repurposing Content

October 21, 2011 by 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.

Read more of this post

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Marketing for the Holidays

October 11, 2011 by Leave a comment

Start preparing for the holidays now!When the weather is warm, the sun is shining and kids are out of school, I think about . . . the winter holidays. It sounds counterintuitive but this is the best time to put together plans, place orders and get ahead of the requirements of the season. I realize the summer has already passed, but hope this post will help you catch up!

The best advice of all is to start as soon as possible. These days, holiday decorations go on sale the day after Halloween with good reason—many people start planning and purchasing early. That’s why, whether you are a B2C or B2B company, it pays to have a roadmap for the holidays before you start hearing carols and seeing inflatable snow men on your neighbors’ lawns. Read more of this post

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Retail Client Achieves 65% Lower Costs and Half the Turn Time

September 27, 2011 by Leave a comment

Design for Retail Client

A design our team created for this client

We support several retail clients and their print design needs: in-store signage, flyers and image editing for product images on their websites are some typical products we work on. One of our clients is a leading grocery and pharmacy retailer with 2,500 stores, 140,000 employees and several well-known brands. In addition, the client also provides supply chain and business services to another 2,200 independent retailers. 

Cost Pressure and Inefficiency

In an innovative move designed to reduce costs, our client centralized production for the retail chains so all requests would come through corporate headquarters for better control and standardization. Yet they still needed a better way to provide support, reduce turn times and improve communication with external customers and internal design functions.

The company was outsourcing to a U.S.-based company, but the service was expensive and not meeting all their needs in the creative services segment. The company needed more productivity, lower costs and greater value for their investment.

As a result, the retailer made another breakthrough and decided to become one of the early adopters in the retail industry of business process outsourcing for advertising and media. The company selected Affinity Express, based on our reputation for transforming production for our clients, to build and operate an optimized onsite, onshore and offshore delivery platform, customized to meet the requirements of the client. Read more of this post

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Recreating A Printed Document

September 23, 2011 by Leave a comment

From time to time we are sent scans of printed documents and asked to make changes. This may seem like a simple thing to do, but it can actually be quite challenging. Even changing a phone number can lead to a great deal of work and take many hours depending on what is provided.

Here’s an example of an order we received recently that will help me illustrate this point.

Front of postcard

This is the front side of the postcard (I blacked out the company details)

Read more of this post

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Eight Tips on Organizing a Great Event

September 21, 2011 by 2 Comments

Event planning often falls under marketing, whether that means trade shows, client visits or corporate meetings. And if you are a small- to medium-sized business, the chances are you don’t have a budget to hire an outside firm or a consultant. We’re just back from the Affinity Express annual strategy workshop and I’m glad to say that it went quite well, from the hotel to the meals to the events. Based on this recent experience, here are some suggestions to increase the likelihood of success for your event, regardless of the type of meeting or the industry you are in.

1. Visualize the Details

This is probably the tactic that has helped me the most, especially when it comes to large events. You have to know the venues, details and agenda better than anyone. Plus, you should see them from the perspective of your participants. When you envision through how guests will enter, what they will see, what they will need and what they will expect, you can effectively cover all of the details. Your goal is to have the attendees relax and feel completely taken care of, even when you’re having a straightforward business meeting.

This is one reason why you see signs with group names and directions in hotels when there are events. Having people wander around aimlessly, wondering where they are supposed to go, is not the best start to a gathering. The annual event for the Chicago chapter of Go Red For Women was a great example of effective signage. It was a large hotel and there was no doubt where to report, check your coat, find the ballroom, etc. They answered all the questions before they could be asked (and we were proud to have helped design the signage).

Dinner at the strategy meeting

Dinner was a time to relax and have more informal conversations

For our dinners around the strategy meeting, I had perused the menus and arranged for special requirements in advance. Each day, I arrived early to meet the servers, select wine and appetizers, discuss the approach with the staff and ensure everything was set up the way I wanted. Over the course of four days, my boss never started a question with, “Did you . . .?” When our guests arrived, they didn’t have to think, just enjoy themselves, which they certainly did. I’m not naming names but there was spontaneous karaoke at one point! Read more of this post

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Coupons, Print and Online

September 16, 2011 by 2 Comments

September is National Coupon Month. Coupons have traditionally been a common and effective sales promotion technique. At Affinity Express, we often create coupons for our clients, for print or for online use.

Coupon
Some coupons are handed out to the customer at the checkout counter, to encourage future visits

Companies often put in a coupon within another piece of communication, like an ad, a flyer, or a mass-mailed letter, to encourage you to take that final step and buy the product(s) that is the subject of the communication. Read more of this post

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Generating New Ideas for Blog Posts

September 9, 2011 by Leave a comment

Blogger's blockIt is blog publishing day and you are staring at a blank screen but your to-do list has reached epic proportions. All of your contributors are mysteriously offline. What can you do to get the creative juices flowing so you can post something other than a blog about writer’s block?

Here is the list I run through when all else fails.

1.     Interview Someone

I know from experience that it is almost impossible to push someone (especially someone who isn’t a professional writer or marketer) into sitting down and quickly turning out an insightful post. Instead, schedule a 15-minute call and submit questions in advance. Then take notes on the conversation. You’ll be able to ask follow-up and clarifying questions much easier this way. Then you can get some supporting research and other opinions while your subject scurries off to other tasks. You can also interview outside contacts, customers, analysts, etc. Just decide in advance what you want to know so your conversation has focus.

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Learn Marketing from the Competition

September 6, 2011 by 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.

Read more of this post

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The 6 Most Essential Marketing Activities

September 2, 2011 by 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. Read more of this post

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Premedia Designs Evoking Childhood and Nostalgia

August 30, 2011 by Leave a comment

As this is my first post, I’ll start off with a short introduction: I work with retailer clients at Affinity Express, trying to see how best we can serve them with our premedia solutions.

As I looked through some of our best recent premedia designs, I found a few that caught my eye and wanted to share on the blog. What’s common among these samples is that the ads and marketing materials are all aimed at kids, are baby products marketed to parents, or evoke the nostalgia of childhood.

Premedia sample: comic flyer

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A Five-Step Recipe for Marketing Success

August 9, 2011 by 2 Comments

Cinnamon pecan buns

My cinnamon pecan buns

You’ve already heard that I work long hours juggling multiple priorities in my role with Affinity Express. When I show up at the office armed with trays of decadent desserts my coworkers, I invariably hear the question: “How do you find the time?” 

The answer is that I make the time because baking not only gives me a welcome break from work but also reinforces the way I approach marketing and gives me an opportunity to think through more complex challenges. Let me explain.

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How to Outsource Marketing Design and Keep Your Brand Consistent

August 3, 2011 by 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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Designs of the Quarter: Video, Print Ads, Flyers and Image Editing

August 1, 2011 by 1 Comment

For our second Designs of the Quarter contest this year, we called for entries in the categories of: flyers, print ads, video ads and image editing. Now that we’ve shared the good news with our team in our newsletter, we’re pleased to let you know about the winning designs.

Flyer

This flyer stood out because the image ties in perfectly with the headline, “Healthy Kids” and grabs attention. The boy looks ready to take on the world! Plus, the layout of the text lets readers easily grasp the point: donations are requested for this worthy cause. When you have so little time to engage, it is important that messages come through quickly.

Designs of the Quarter: flyer
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Branding is NOT a Luxury

June 23, 2011 by 5 Comments

White beverage boxes with blue caps: no branding or textThey’ll tell you, you can’t afford to think about branding if you’re a small business. They’ll tell you it’s a luxury because it’s only for the Cokes and the BMWs. They’ll tell you you have better things to focus on, like sales, for example.

They’re dead wrong.

Anyone who says any of the above doesn’t have any idea what branding is. Branding doesn’t mean you spend millions on an advertising campaign that features sports stars and TV celebrities. What it does mean is that all your communications—from the sign outside your office to your website to the uniforms your staff wear—all show the kind of business you are (or want to be). They communicate that you’re great at what you do and that you want to serve your customers. Branding says whether you’re a fun, casual workplace or a staid, old-fashioned one. It reinforces whether you’re in business for the long haul or a fly-by-night operator. It helps your customer connect and remember every experience they had with you and to like buying from you so much they’d be willing to drive across town or pay 30% more.

Now tell me that isn’t important to you.

So how do you brand if you’re a small business and can’t afford an ad agency? Here are some simple rules to follow. Read more of this post

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