Feature – Page 4

Making Pictures Perfect

Now that everybody has a camera in their hand at all times, we have seen the rise of the selfie. But just because our phones can take photos doesn’t mean that every photograph is appropriate for every venue. If you have a professional website, you need high quality photographs that represent the epitome of professionalism, not just your mastery of the selfie stick.

Here are some elements of website-worthy photos:

Photographs need to be high resolution. A lower resolution image looks grainy, blurry or pixellated when it is enlarged for a website.
Images must be legal. Just because you can copy and paste an image doesn’t mean you have the right or privilege to include the image on your website. A google search of an image will often aid you in determining the source of the image and whether or not the image is reproducible in a commercial setting. Sometimes, the image is reproducible if properly captioned or with permission from the photographer or publisher.
Portrait photography should be well thought out. You may want an image of you or your employees on a website. That is perfectly OK; however you should consider what settings of your photos would be the most natural fit for your website. Images of you in your office, meeting with clients or patients are often much more friendly, and less stilted looking than a classic headshot.
Consider the backdrop. A deluxe country club in the background might be jarring if you are trying to market yourself as cost effective and “man of the people”. Green screen backgrounds are often inappropriate and don’t always translate to websites.
Think about all aspects of your appearance if you are sitting for photos. Don’t wear summery outfits for an all-year website. Don’t wear loud patterns. Avoid sloppy or frayed clothing. Consider a professional make-up artist prior to photographs.
Consider purchasing images. There are many sources of what are called stock images. You can search for images and even crop the images. Once you purchase the image, you can use it to your liking on your website. Sometimes, we will purchase “demos” of these images and place them in a website that we are creating. These temporary images have a “watermark” over them that disappears once the image is officially purchased. By placing one of these images in an unpublished website, the client can eyeball the images before we have spent money on them. Once the images are approved, then we purchase them. Stock images are often available of your hometown, your industry, products, processes and a diverse group of people.
Hire a photographer, but only if he or she has shown you images that are similar to what you are seeking. Maybe there is a specific landmark that is important to you geographically. In addition, interiors of your office are often a way to show off what you do. For a client of ours who was a carpet cleaner, images of before and after added legitimacy to the website.

Websites are really words and images. The images attract our attention, but they shouldn’t distract from the text or offend our senses or sensibilities.

TV and Radio Ads: Not Just for Mad Men

We have created several commercials for our clients in the past and are in the process of creating one now.

We continue to believe that TV and radio commercials can still be quite effective, despite tectonic shifts in the viewing and listening audience. Before you embark on this seemingly epic project, here are some questions you should answer or at least consider:

What are you “selling”? Do you have a new product, an innovative approach, a new brand identity or do you just want to have a greater impact in the marketplace?
Who is your target audience? This is a really significant question as it helps to narrow down what channels are the best fit for an eventual commercial. Consider the age demographic you are targeting, the geographic locations, urban vs. suburban, male, female, gay, straight, liberal, conservative…
What is your budget for a commercial and is it enough to produce a high quality product?
Do you have a vision for how a commercial should look or sound? Alternatively, do you have an idea of what should not be incorporated into the commercial? (It is perfectly OK if you do not have this vision; that’s why you hire marketing professionals.)
What aspect of your industry is underserved or not talked about? Can you address this in a short commercial spot?
Who are your competitors locally? Do you have any sense as to their marketing strategy?
Have you seen or heard effective commercials in your industry (locally, nationally or even in other markets)? What aspects of effective commercials in other realms move you or repel you?

Creating a commercial is a time-consuming and somewhat costly endeavor. But a commercial ultimately is a message that you control Not only that, you also choose when and to whom you send this message.

Summer Marketing To-Do List

Summertime and the livin’ is easy!

Well, don’t take it too easy if you are running your own business. Summertime is marketing retooling time. For some people, summertime is low season, although not for our realtor clients who are in high season now.

If it seems like you have a bit more time on your hands, utilize the time to knock of some of these important tasks:

Summer Reading: You may already do a lot of reading about your industry. Expand your horizons and do some really deep thinking while at work about various issues surrounding marketing and communication. Traackr (an online blog) suggests these books (among others): Optimize by Lee Odden about all kinds of marketing today and Human to Human: H2H by Bryan Kramer who discusses the interpersonal aspect of customers and marketing.

Website Home Page Makeover: Go visit your own website and hang around on the home page. Is there anything on there that is looking tired or do the words sound trite at this point? Think about what new images you would like on that page, if any, and tweak the words. If you have time to go deeper into your website, check out all of the pages and make changes.

Get Out There: You know there are ways to meet potential clients and potential referral sources. But life gets in the way. Use the summertime to take out colleagues that you trust in “adjacent” industries (not your direct competition) or even contact colleagues in your industry but from other cities. Use these people as resources to tall you about good organizations and charities that give you exposure to a larger group of people than your regular “peeps”. Whether it’s a specific bar association subcommittee, or a golf tournament or home tour that really has movers and shakers or a charitable cause that moves you, find out ways to be “out there” that are good for you, good for the community and may eventually be good for the bottom line.

Client File Management: How do you organize your clients and patients’ files? If you don’t spend time on file management, this task can become epic and monumental. Instead, spend time culling through your files, pull out clients and patients that you haven’t seen for a set time (what’s a good time for your business? 3 years? 2 years?). In addition, as you are going through these files, you might want to keep a running list of future interactions you would like to organize with certain clients. Keep this list for future business plans (I remember that I sold a house to Mrs. Jones, but she had older parents who were considering moving. I should call her to see if she’s still interested in looking.)

Create a Marketing Calendar: You know how your business cycle runs, for the most part. Think strategically about effective marketing campaigns and their time frame. If you want to encourage referrals, when would be a good time to do a referral marketing blitz? If you run a retail establishment, what specials and sales and even events would bring traffic to your store or to your website? You can even plan ahead as to what social media posts you will make in the future and write them ahead of time.

Clean Up Your Email: Every sent email is saved, but you may not need both your incoming and outgoing emails saved. This is a good time to really delete excess email from your systems, both temporarily and even permanently.

Password Protection: Summer is a great time to change all of your passwords. You can use password encryption software or just redo your passwords yourself. Be sure to keep a copy of your new passwords in a safe, but accessible place.

It’s important to remain productive throughout the summer. These longer days give you time to hang out in “planning” mode.

We’re Planning Your 4th of July Party

Sometimes, we get involved in event planning. And sometimes in our personal lives, we even socialize. So, to benefit you, our blog readers, we are cyber-catering your 4th of July party with our best ideas. We will not be there, you have to purchase everything and clean up afterwards, but here are some sizzling ideas to make your party a celebration:

Step #1: The invitation

Evites and texts and phone calls work well. But if you want to be creative, grab a small watermelon and Sharpie the invitation details (when, where) right on there and hand deliver the watermelons to your guests. If you want, you can make your party BYOW, bring your own watermelon. You can also attach an invitation to a sparkler and make the event BYOS.

Step #2: The menu

You know your guests and party style, so maybe you have a typical cookout menu (burgers, potato salad, pasta salad, cole slaw, etc.) or maybe you have a more refined palate (grilled salmon, sweet potato fries, grilled corn, roasted asparagus). If you have guests from lots of backgrounds, you can have them bring something from their home country, and make a melting pot party. You can have an apple pie theme. You can have all kids of burgers: fancy blue cheese ones, veggie burgers, salmon burgers, bacon cheese burgers, etc.

We also have a cheap and easy flag cake that we “make” when time is short: Make a yellow sheet cake or buy a rectangular one from a grocery store. Ice the cake yourself with Cool Whip (any amount of fat is fine.) Then using sliced strawberries, make stripes and put blueberries in the corner for stars and you have a flag cake.

Potent potables: Make sure there are non alcoholic drinks for kids and designated drivers. Put some fun into both. If you make sangrias for the drinkers, make some punch with fruit, too. Jello shorts old hack? Try some pudding shots!

Step #3: The activities

If you can do a firepit, then s’mores is an activity unto itself. Good music is important, making sure that some patriotic tunes show up in the playlist. Be sure you have sparkler time (which must happen concurrently with John Philip Sousa’s march). Bring out the guitars if somebody is talented. Put on the fireworks from the National Mall in Washington DC on TV (but beware of the bewitching quality of the screen). Old fashioned games are a blast and people will do them: whether it’s croquet on the lawn, horseshoe tournaments, charades or Bingo, any easy game let allows all ages to participate in any physical condition keeps people occupied and out of the kitchen.

Step #4: Clean up!

Start cleaning up as you go. This encourages your guests not to be piggy. Spread around sufficient garbage cans so people can clean up after themselves. If anybody asks what they can do, have them change out the garbage bags or make a round doing pick-up.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame, but only if….

Spring and summer sports are in full swing (some are winding down, too). But look around you and you’ll see parents traveling all over to soccer, baseball and softball games, not to mention lacrosse camp, tennis matches, swim meets, track and field events and pretty soon you can add some pre-season practices.

But for now, let’s discuss the games. They happen everywhere: school fields, community recreation centers, parks and rented space all over. Let’s face it: some of these venues are awesome. And some of them…much less awesome.

So, in the spirit of community improvement, we offer our marketing suggestions for making your venue a happy parent place. If you are in charge of these places (or related to or a friend of somebody who is), feel free to pass along our suggestions. Remember, happy parents means more rental income! Thanks ever so much!

How to make your sports venue parent-friendly:

Lovely lavatories: We have left a sports field where there were only porta potties to find the nearest McDonald’s. But we have also seen real bathrooms with lights, clean floors, adequate toilet paper and paper towels. We would love to see a facility that had separate bathrooms for the athletes, because let’s face it, they smell and they get their dirty shoes everywhere.
Delicious delectables: If you sell food and drinks, our wallets seem to open up on their own. But consider always stocking these: hot chocolate when it’s 50 degrees or below, diet soda for the parents, fun candy, and soft pretzels (who can resist these?) Extra credit for kosher hot dogs or plain cheese pizza slices. Also, some concession stands take our debit cards now. Awesome!
Sunny/shade sections: Some of us are baskers, some of us avoid the sun. There should be seating that accommodates the sun worshipers and the sun-averse.
Bleachers Bums: We can bring our own chairs, but if the bleachers are there, we can avoid it. We like bleachers with a top row with a back on them (best views and a little back support). Also bleachers with stairs as opposed to having to walk up and down the seats are ideal. And, if the concession stand wants to rent out those portable seats if we leave our driver’s license, awesome!
Wi-fi: A girl can dream. I know we are supposed to pay attention to the game. But our daughter is only up to bat every 9th kid…

Kickstart these ideas!

Crowdfunding is a great way to get others to literally buy into your fabulous idea. You come up with an innovation, post it on a crowdfunding site like kickstarter, create enticements for people to want to become shareholders and then make your product, whether it’s a Zach Braff movie, a new child care gadget or some new fancy way to prepare coffee.

Well, we have a few ideas and will offer them up free for you to develop, fund and manage. These ideas have been percolating as we contemplate the end of the school year and having kids at home again. Tell us if you really do take any of these on. We may be willing to be an early supporter.

Boomerang Buicks: That college kid has come back into town, and there’s no longer a car for her or him. And they’re too young to rent their own car. Help find them short term car rentals that don’t break the insurance budget and that will be reliable transportation. Finally, make the final day that the car is due home the day before they leave to return to their campuses.

Lunch Lady Limos: We’re back to making lunches again. There are no pizza days, no hot lunch days, it’s just us. And we hate the idea of it. So, take it on. Create healthy lunches that our kids will eat. Make sure they follow our dietary guidelines including individual preferences and allergies, and drop it off in a cute container every day by 8:00 a.m. in front of our house so they can go to camp or stay home, and we’ll know they are well-fed without resorting to ramen. Extra points if the lunch set-up includes utensils and a personalized note on the napkin.

Form-u-lator: Take all of our personal information and fill in all forms, including school registration forms, last minute camp forms, medical forms, immunization forms, emergency pick-up forms, after school clubs forms, and athletic participation forms. Extra funding if you will also take our children to their yearly physicals.

Pool-ooza: We need a service that drives or walks kids and supervises them at neighborhood pools. This could utilize the talents of carpooling and resource collaboration.

Sept-erminator: We know that school will begin once again in September. And while we are happy to see our kids back in the learning environment again and out of our houses, the school supply and book lists are overwhelming, especially if the kids are at a variety of schools. Sept-erminator will collect all relevant supply and book lists and do all of the shopping, making sure to first check our own personal inventory so we are not again buying another set of pristine colored pencils. Sept-erminator will also manage the purchasing of all warranties associated with calculators and computers, as well as tablets.

Knock, knock!

Who’s there?

Sometimes, nobody!

This week, K2M had another mission. A client asked for our help finding a cool, hip space for a music performance in Detroit. So, armed with a list of cool, hip places (from a cool, hip much younger friend), off we went into the D.

And we found several great venues, some of them with lovely, earnest people. And we had a pretty good lunch in Corktown. And plans to go back in the city on a weekday, maybe for fun.

That was the good part of the trip.

The bad part was that these start-up and emerging venues are somewhat unfindable. The question is whether or not this is purposeful. One young man told us that he needed so much energy to keep his venue operating that he just didn’t have time to be more findable, right now. We were lucky. We knocked on the door and he answered. His business model is fascinating, which is “If you build it, they will come.” For the most part, it is working. And once he saw us, he gave us his cell phone number and an email, so now he’s findable to us. But what if he hadn’t answered the door? Would we still know about his place? How would we have gotten his contact information?

Other venues have no published phone numbers anywhere (and we mean anywhere) and are open only on evenings and weekends. It’s great for the general public, but what about those who wish to do business with you.

It’s a reminder of the one knock on cell phone numbers. They are unfindable. So, either you have to bite the bullet and publish them on your website (if you even have one), or be pretty vigilant about checking your email, which has to in turn be findable.

This “findability” is not limited to club owners, gallery spaces, and warehouses. We frequently run into doctors and lawyers who are virtually unfindalbe online even though they have an office phone.

Our takeaway is that it’s fun to run around Detroit, scouting out locations, but we would have loved for somebody to answer us…by phone, by email….Hello….is there anybody there?????

Hitting all the Channels: Marketing an Event

K2M recently was involved in a community event, a brand new event, one that a small cultural organization was putting on in a venue new to them. How do you get people to come to a one-time only event, especially if you are a small organization with few board members? What are the best marketing and public relations moves when you have no data on previous programs? What will work?

The answer we discovered, fortunately and unfortunately, is DO EVERYTHING!

We say unfortunately, because every idea takes time to execute. We say fortunately because we received immediate feedback that every little bit counts. So what did we try?

Paid advertisement in local community magazine. This lets your core group know that your organization is alive and well and doing programming. This is an expensive element, but it’s sort of counterintuitive. Even if the ad isn’t necessarily “money well spent”, not spending the money makes you look defunct and inactive.
Non-paid pre-publicity in community newspapers. We discovered that some people came from as far as Lansing from a tweet they received from Metro Times. So that worked, too!
Facebook posts. For the aged 40-65 crowd, this is the same as word of mouth and it’s free. The organizational Facebook post was important, but even more so, were the reposts and shares and likes.
Facebook ads: These are relatively inexpensive and our survey indicated several people attended and were at the event because of the ad.
Information on the website: Your website has to be accurate and up to date if the website address appears on ads. People will go to the website if they forget the address of the venue or the time. It is not “outbound” but it is dependable inbound marketing. And when they go, the website needs to look presentable and inhabited.
The sandwich board on the street with the poster and the arrow to your event. If a tired law school student walks by and realizes there is a concert around the corner with free cookies and water, it looks pretty tempting.

So, the takeaway: do everything you have time and money for. And ask every attendee you can how they heard about the event, so you can use data-driven decisions in the future.

Do We Still Need Websites?

In a word, YES!!!!

We are always amazed when small business owners and service professionals believe that they can be found and that they don’t need a website. We have heard from small restaurants, “My customers find me on instagram”. Doctors have informed us that their practices rely on referrals through insurance and physician groups and not on a web presence.

Well, we usually like to be sweet with our words and choose them carefully, but…they are wrong. Not just somewhat wrong, but all the way wrong.

While it is true that Instagram is a great platform for quick communication and lots of images, and this works well for small retail establishments, including restaurants, Instagram cannot be your only internet address. The same is true of Facebook and Twitter. Twitter works great for quick fun posts and for gathering a community around hashtags and for spreading instantaneous buzz. Facebook offers up a wonderful amalgamation of ideas, posts, sharings and images and is important for nearly every business venture. And there are great qualities of all sorts of other social media outlets, including Pinterest, Snapchat, and on and on.

Yet, none of these social media “channels” is like a website. A website shows the stability of your business. It has your contact information. It shows either through inclusion or omission what you are all about. It tells people about your services, your products, your hours.

One size does not fit all. Don’t be sucked into believing that every website needs 45 pages of content, a new blog post every week and hundreds of images.

So, what does every website need?

Functionality: it should “work” well, be easy to navigate and not feel clunky.
Working contact information including an email address that gets checked regularly.
Useful content: not only what you provide and sell, but information about your area of expertise. So every dentist provides dental surgery, but not every dentist has information about what to expect after surgery on their website.
Thoughtful images: Choosing images is time-consuming but bad images make a (lousy) lasting impression. Finding images that are clear but not overused enhances the look of your website and indicates that you are not a copycat or a fly by night operation.
Indications that the website is “fresh” and updated. If you have a blog section, it’s not great if the last blog post was more than a year ago. Calendars should be current and any banners should also refer only to what’s happening today or in the near future.

Retronyms: When something’s so retro, it has to be renamed

We love the term retronym. A retronym refers to something that was formerly called one thing, but then is replaced or updated in a way that it has to have a new name in order to be differentiated from its replacement. Here are some examples of retronyms:

Acoustic guitar: An acoustic guitar used to just be called a guitar. Then Les Paul came along and changed rock and roll forever. Now, you have to call those guitars that aren’t plugged in and amplified an acoustic guitar.

Analog clocks: These used to just be called clocks, until those geniuses who clearly hated all of the time problems from elementary school math decided that digital was so much easier. Presto! Analog clocks were reborn.

Desktop computers: Ah, remember when computers were only in geeky labs in college campuses. Then they migrated to offices and homes. Then, the evolution of smaller and smaller devices began, so the invention of the laptop meant that our old computers had to be called desktop.

Brick-and-mortar. We used to call these things “stores” in the old days. Now that e-tailing is prominent if not predominant, we had to back up and create a term that differentiated “real” shopping from “cyber” shopping.

English Muffin. Yes, in Southern England, it used to just be called a muffin. But the good old American muffin was so tasty and sugary-good, that it had to be renamed to differentiate the delectables across the pond from one another.

Manual typewriter. Duh. The term was invented after the electric typewriter was born.

Conventional oven. What’s so conventional about that oven? Well, it predates the microwave, so every prepared food has to have two sets of directions as to how to reheat things (and sometimes the conventional is still better…)

Forward slash. Before those long internet addresses, we just used to call that symbol on the bottom right of your keyboard a slash. But the intrusion of the backwards slash meant the invention of a retronym.

Corn on the cob used to be called….wait for it….corn until the popularity of canned corn required a retronym.