A Quick Look Behind the Curtain: Production

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By Mekelle Bess

Once a client gives us the go on a project, it can be several weeks before they see anything.  So let me explain a little bit about what happens during that time.

The account executive (Jessica, Brittany or Sean) come back to the production manager (me) and together we go through the details and expectations of the project. We’ll talk about mandatory items, goals, deadlines etc.

From there, the traffic/production manager opens a new job in our system.  It’s better for one person to control the job opening process that way we achieve some semblance of order. Next, we’ll create a schedule and send it to our client for approval.  Once that is done, an official kick-off is set with the creative team.

During the kick off meeting we go through the schedule and project details so everyone is on the same page.  It’s the traffic/production manager’s job to track the jobs and prepare daily “work to do’s” for each team member involved, as well as keeping a weekly “status report” of all the projects going on.

After the kick off, the creative team gets diligently working to produce the first round of creative for our clients.

All in all, the schedule, kick off, and initial thinking can take a couple of weeks.  But just because you’re not “seeing” something, doesn’t mean we’re not working on it!

The Secret to Being Liked

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By Mac Logue

As a parent of interested kids, I get a lot of questions that defy quick, superficial answers. It’s not unlike answering questions from clients whose money depends on the answer. Recently, one of my kids asked me, “what’s the secret to being liked?”

With Abigail, the typical pabulum about “being yourself” simply won’t do. So I told her about the inverse relationship between being interested in other people and your own popularity. When you meet someone for the first time, ask five questions about the other person before you say anything about yourself. It’s a strange dynamic, but the more you get someone talking about themselves (not hard to do) the more they begin to like you.

On the flip side, how many times have been to a party and couldn’t escape that person who would not shut up about themselves? It’s enough to make you stuff baby corn in your ears to drown out the boring.

Sounds like most corporate marketing doesn’t it? The principle is the same. Since the discovery of marketing, companies have spent literally billions of dollars talking to themselves. And no one is listening. If you find in your own marketing that you talk almost exclusively about yourself and how awesome your products or services are — you’re being that guy at the party.

Try this instead: talk about your customers. Talk about what matters to them. Talk about how they can make more money or simplify their lives or look younger. Talk about what they stand to gain from buying from you — and only then talk about how your product or service does what you promise.

It’s a simple formula that works in personal relationships as well as business. To be liked (or bought from) care more about the other person. Ask questions about them; talk about what interests them. And they’ll remember you and like you and, assuming your product is a viable alternative to other choices, most likely buy from you.

We have two sayings around here that, if you are a client, you have no doubt heard me say. First, everyone’s favorite subject is me. Find the me in your sales cycle that matters most and talk about what matters to that person.

Next, we love to say (because it’s true) that people never remember what you say, but they never forget how you make them feel. As you approach your marketing, it’s a good philosophy to keep in mind.

The role of blogging in your in-bound marketing strategy

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By Mac Logue

Blogs. While they are seemingly everywhere these days, it’s impossible to know exactly how many active blogs there are in the world, but it’s safe to say that the number is in the hundreds of millions. With all of that noise on the Internet, why should your business be adding more to the conversation? The answer to that question is easy to understand. Creating an effective blog, on the other hand is not so simple. Continue reading →

The Right Font

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By Geoff Johnson

Being a designer, I am all about fonts. I could spend hours on myfonts.com typing in my name, trying to find the coolest rendering of “Geoff Johnson”. Using cool fonts is one of the big things that drew me to being a graphic designer in the first place. But what about fonts for the web? What really used to bug me about designing for web is that I was so limited by the choices available.

It used to be that as a designer you were limited to a select few standard fonts, Helvetica, Arial, Times New Roman, Courier (you can see the rest of the list here: Web Safe Fonts) If you wanted to vary from that list you would have to export your characters as an image, like a jpeg or png file. Aesthetically this wasn’t a problem; it became an issue however, when it came to Search Engine Optimization. Images aren’t visible to the bots the way text is, and the lack of text tends to reduce your rankings.

Image-based text is also a problem if you use a Content Management System and want to be able update text on the fly. You can’t simply type in your text. Instead you have to convert your text to an image in a program like Photoshop and upload it to your site. Clearly a waste a time and a pain in the anatomy.

But the good news is, we’re no longer limited to a handful of web-friendly typefaces. New products like Typekit, and Fontdeck have emerged in the recent years, making a designer’s life easier but more importantly allowing for better looking, more branded sites.

These services offer designers the ability to use any display typefaces, without having to save them as images. And now content on the sites we design both looks good and is searchable by Google’s bots. This helps our clients tremendously, both from a brand perspective and with SEO, because our sites are both aesthetically beautiful and completely functional — attributes every business needs.

 

One of our favorite ads ever

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There is so much to love about this spot. The casting. The music. The concept. Black and white. The surprise. With no voiceover, no text (until the very end) — it communicates with undeniable strength the benefits of “buying” this brand.

This is a low-res video, but that doesn’t diminish the spots power. It’s quite possible I’ve posted this before, but it’s worth seeing again.

The Power of Giving

How to leverage your social media following into more leads

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By Brittany Moore

Every company has heard the buzzwords: SEO and social media. In fact, last year the Harvard Business Review surveyed 2,100 companies and found that 79 percent use or plan to use social media. You know that you should be doing something but you’re not sure exactly what. You’ve been told that you need a social media “presence” because your customers are “out there.” Well, that’s all very true but most companies stop short of what will add to their bottom line.

First of all, you can’t just create a Facebook page or start tweeting 23 times a day and expect to make an impact on your brand or company. You have to have followers and you have to know what they like if you ever want them to “like” you. A saying at our office is: “When a person talks to themselves, people call it crazy… but when a company talks to itself, people call it marketing.”

Whatever your message, don’t make it about you and your company; don’t go on endlessly about how awesomely awesome you are. Make your communications about your customer. Focus on what they want and tie your marketing strategy steadily to it.

Make a list of the top 10 questions your prospects and clients ask you. As you write, address those questions. Answer them honestly, not with a self-serving answer, but with advice/expertise that is useful to your reader.

Post once a week to your blog and then post links to to your social media networks too. So many companies don’t do this and it’s a significant mistake because social media sites are excellent to help drive traffic to your site. And each person that comes to your site is a potential lead. Converting that traffic into leads, though, takes work. This is the next step where many digital marketing plans fail.

When you’re sending your Facebook fans to your blog, make sure you have Calls To Action (CTAs) around your blog posts. These CTAs should make an offer to your web visitors (aka prospects and clients), and it should be an offer of value.

Once a prospect clicks on the CTA, they’ll be taken to a landing page where they must give their name and email to receive the offer. Voila! A lead is born. The key is in the offer itself. I doesn’t matter  if it’s a whitepaper, ebook, video, demo or a webinar. Make it educational and beneficial to your prospects so that they will feel that the exchange of their name and email is fair. Also, make sure you add tracking codes to your site so that you can see where you get the most traffic referrals, then integrate your CRM with your inbound website leads so you can track lead-to-customer conversions. Before you know it, you can say this web visitor came to our blog from LinkedIn, clicked on a CTA, downloaded a whitepaper and became a lead in our CRM, now they’re one of our top clients. It may seem like a mouthful but you know what they say…money talks!

An ad costs how much?

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By Mekelle Bess

They say television advertising is dead, but the reports of its demise are still premature. To create broad awareness of your brand or product, it’s still an effective medium. That said, we get a lot of questions from clients as to the cost of an ad. It’s a bit like asking what does a house cost, but I thought we’d explore some of the factors that go into TV production.

Continue reading →

Florence Nightingale, B2B sales and data visualization.

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“There is much enthusiasm in organizations today about analytics and “big data.” However, unless decision makers understand analytics and its implications, they may not change their behavior and adopt analytical approaches while making decisions. Quantitative analysts who care whether their work is implemented—whether it changes decisions and influences actions—care a lot about this issue and devote a lot of time and effort to it. Analysts who don’t care about such things believe that the results “speak for themselves,” and don’t worry much about communications. As a rule they are not effective—today or throughout history.”

This comment from a recent Deloitte University Press article struck me as profound. In full you can read the article here: http://dupress.com/articles/telling-a-story-with-data/?id=us:sm:tw:dr12:read:dup:031513

Or join us at the FitzMartin blog over the coming days and I’ll make a few observations while sharing some highlights for you! You call also join me on twitter for up to the minute notification and commentary and B2B sales: @B2Badvisor

Sales and data visualization? Oh yeah, they connect. Connect both for the sales presentations you make and in the interpretation of market data and segmentation of target profiles you call! Once I get over 100 rows of data in a spreadsheet, maybe less, I need help to see what the data is whispering. Excel offers very good and stock tools that cover most of what you face. After that, call an MBA student in…after all you probably know one working at your favorite coffee shop. Regardless, enjoy the article or keep posted for some thoughts and highlights. It promises to be similar to ESPN highlight reels about March Madness but for sales and marketing geeks! …admittedly less thrilling and more important.

Secret Shopping: how to learn from the competition

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By Jessica Phillips

In a recent blog post I wrote about creating and maintaining a differentiated and profitable customer experience. Today, I thought I’d expound on the area of secret shopping and how to effectively use it as a research tool.

Here at FitzMartin, we are constantly studying other companies and industries that offer valuable insights for helping our clients…research methods like this have become second nature to us, but I am reminded lately that many marketing leaders outside of the agency world don’t know what they should be looking for and how to apply the findings to their business. Here are a few tips that hopefully will help:

1. Make a plan. Create a secret shopping guide outlining what you want to learn. Go in with a purpose, not just with the mentality of “I’ll just go in and see what sticks out.” You’ll notice more if you are consciously looking for something. Look for how the company caters to the needs and wants of their customers, embraces or tried to diffuse stereotypes people may have of the company/industry, and how they build on the emotion they want you to experience.

2. Go into it looking for details. Before you walk into a store, know that you are looking for how people present themselves and how they make you feel. What are they wearing? How long does it take someone to speak to you? What exact words did they use? Did they make eye contact? Were they distant or did they get very close and personal? What were they trying to do with the environment? Could you tell anything by the placement of signage? Was it obvious they were trying to get you to move in a certain direction? Was it cluttered, or neat and organized? How did the environment make you feel? Comfortable? Anxious?

It’s in the details that we find ideas.

3. Write it all down immediately. Keep your journal in the car, don’ take it with you (you want everyone to react to you naturally). Sometimes, I use my smartphone to jot down observations, ideas or to take photos of interesting things (inconspicuously, of course!). When you get back to the car, write out (in as much detail as possible) your experience using the secret shopping guide you created.

4. Apply it. One tip for applying this research is to think about each area of interest listed in your secret shopping guide and then each of the core areas of operation for your company and identify how you can create an improved customer experience  where those overlap. Let me give you an example: if one of the areas of interest in my secret shopping guide was “emotions” (as noted in number 1 above) and one of the key areas of operations for my company is employee development, then I would ask myself “what emotions do I want to create here and how can I use the training of my employees to achieve that.” If each area of operations if doing this same thing and you meet together regularly to discuss observations,  ideas and a implementation plan,  you’ll be able to make a huge impact!