Build Your Brand on Social Media

January 19, 2012 by 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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What Are the Most Influential Retailers Doing on Twitter?

December 22, 2011 by 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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Digital Media and the Newspaper Industry: an Interview with Michael Fogel of Hearst

November 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Michael Fogel, VP at Hearst Media

We recently met Michael Fogel, vice president of technology development at Hearst Newspapers. Hearst is a client of Affinity Express. Using our services to become more efficient and proactive is just one of the ways Hearst is adapting itself to the growing predominance of digital media and the decline in circulation and print ad revenues.

This blog post lays out Mr. Fogel’s views on the newspaper industry and explains how Hearst is riding the wave and leading the industry.

Digital Media Has Disrupted the Newspaper Industry

According to Mr. Fogel, the split in revenues for the newspaper industry used to be 80% advertising and 20% circulation. That was prior to double-digit declines in print revenues.

Not only have print revenues dropped dramatically, but newspapers are struggling to offer online services. Even as news publishers find ways to create and deliver digital products, margins on online services are lower and publishers need higher volumes to compensate.

How Hearst Uses Digital to Its Advantage

Unlike many of its counterparts, Hearst is surviving and even thriving in the digital world. The company was very close to realizing a year-over-year revenue gain in October. To Mr Fogel’s knowledge, no other news publisher can say this. Read more of this post

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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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Social Media Marketing at Ad-Tech

November 10, 2011 by 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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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.

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.

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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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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.

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 by 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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SMBs and Social Media Marketing

July 14, 2011 by 3 Comments

Facebook design created by Affinity Express“Small and medium-sized businesses look for new customers on social media,” eMarketer says. The article quotes studies that say SMBs find social media effective and important for marketing.

The best part of that article, though, (in my completely biased opinion) is that they reference our survey on the use of online marketing and advertising by SMBs, and the fact that 50% of our respondents reported having used social media marketing.

Interestingly, another survey quoted by the article found that 83% SMBs planned to use social media marketing this year. Even more interesting, nearly two-thirds of SMBs in another survey said they used Facebook alone to promote their business.

All of this attests to the growing prevalence and effectiveness of social media marketing. This is in line with my own assessment as well. As a company, we’ve seen more orders for social media work in the past few months (designs for Facebook tabs or Twitter backgrounds, for example). We have trained and are training our people on the peculiarities of designing for social media. Our E-Marketing Manager Unmana Datta recently had an article on Facebook marketing published in Supplier Global Resource, a publication targeted at promotional products suppliers. Read more of this post

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Designing Our Facebook Page Welcome Tab

July 7, 2011 by 4 Comments

I had been coveting the interesting welcome tabs other brand pages had on Facebook, so I asked Kelly if we could have one of our own. Never one to refuse a reasonable request, she asked Mel if he’d be interested in designing one.

Now Mel knows that if you give clients options to choose from, they’re more likely to approve your work. So he sent us three designs to choose from.

Facebook welcome tab design with orange background

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Lack of Affordable Resources is the Biggest Challenge SMBs Face with Online Marketing

June 28, 2011 by 1 Comment

So how can more SMBs embrace the advantages of online marketing? If online marketing is actually more effective than they think and small businesses lack the resources and the knowledge to use it more effectively, how can this change?

But first, some more data. We asked our respondents about the challenges they face in online marketing.

Challenges of Online Marketing for SMBs: Affinity Express survey

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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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Online Marketing Effectiveness: Affinity Express Survey Results

June 21, 2011 by 1 Comment

In my last post, I shared some of the results of our recent survey of our SMB customers. While I found the number of respondents using online marketing surprisingly low (63%), it informed us that SMBs (or our respondents in particular) aren’t very well-informed about online advertising and marketing, which is reflected in their low use of relatively easy and affordable channels such as online ads and blogging.  

Therefore, I was less surprised at their assessment of the effectiveness of online tactics. While 56% found online advertising and marketing somewhat or very effective for their businesses, fully 44% found it ineffective. I believe this is less an indictment of online marketing and more an indication of the need to educate SMBs about these tactics.

Effectiveness of online advertising or marketing: Affinity Express survey

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Only 63% of SMB Respondents Have Used Online Advertising or Marketing: Affinity Express Survey

June 10, 2011 by 5 Comments

In our recently concluded survey of our small business customers, we asked them about their use of online advertising and marketing tactics.

63% respondents have used online advertising and marketing: Affinity Express survey

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Why Commenting On A Blog Is Like Going To A Dinner Party

June 7, 2011 by 1 Comment

Don't forget to use coasters!As several commenters pointed out on this post, there’s not much difference between virtual and “real” face-to-face communication except for the medium you use. The same rules apply: remember your manners, put the other person at ease, be cheerful, be gracious.

That is the premise of my post over at Search Engine People. In my several years of exploring the blogging medium, I’ve realized how powerful commenting can be as a way of making new contacts. If you leave witty insightful comments on someone’s blog, they or their readers may want to follow you back to your blog and see what you write. You can find people whose views you agree with, and a blog comment saying so might even lead to a friendship. (I have several friends whom I’ve got to know through blogging, and I know that’s pretty common.)

You can also get business opportunities. The reason why I was invited to post on the Search Engine People blog in the first place is because the editor liked a comment I left on a post there.

And if that’s not enough to get you to go over and read my post, here is one of the tips I share:

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Advertising and Marketing in the Digital Age

June 2, 2011 by 1 Comment

Twitter designed by Affinity Express

Twitter background designed by Affinity Express for a client

Interactive services is such a dynamic, interesting space. I recently interviewed Marisol Oberzauchner, director of interactive services at Affinity Express, to pick her brains about what she thinks of the space and what Affinity Express is doing in it. Here you go. 

KG: You help lead interactive services for Affinity Express. This is a dynamic category and it seems to change almost daily. How do you stay current with the latest trends?

MO: Our clients are looking for informed guidance. In my role, I have to continually stay abreast of what is happening in the industry, so I connect to social media portals that cover these topics, track new technologies through communities on LinkedIn and access creative groups. Outside of work, I read technology books, computer magazines and daily digests. At times, I attend demonstrations of new products. The information is available; you just have to stay current and make it a daily priority. 

Of course I follow the leaders in the space but also keep an eye out for the smaller firms who are trying to depart from the norm and solve problems in new ways. Breakthroughs seem to come frequently from these smaller guys and then the Apples and Googles buy them out. YouTube is a great example. I also found the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com interesting. A bigger recent event was of course Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. Read more of this post

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SMBs and Online Marketing

May 26, 2011 by 3 Comments

Facebook Page designed by Affinity Express for BNOW DentaleMarketer recently reported results of a survey of online marketing tactics by SMBs with the headline: “For Small-Business Marketers, Are Fewer Channels Better?”

The gist of the article is that use of online tactics by SMBs has increased tremendously since 2010, but the effectiveness of these tactics has decreased. For example, 86% have a website in 2011 compared to 52% in 2010, but the reported effectiveness of the company website has gone down from 68% to 64%.

eMarketer explains this phenomenon thus:

A rush of small businesses to new marketing channels can mean that less experienced respondents are now reporting on the effectiveness of their efforts, which would naturally be lower than those who have been using a channel for many years. In addition, some small businesses could be overreaching by trying to tackle too many channels at once, without the necessary time and resources.

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