The Importance of Brand Consistency for Your Business

What does brand consistency mean for your business? A consistent brand is easy for customers to recognize, and it is the result of having all of your marketing programs working together to develop a consistent image. That sounds impressive, but what does it really mean? It means that if you can develop a consistent brand, then you start to become recognized as an industry leader and your company will benefit from all of the perks that come from being considered the best at what you do.

Image Is Extremely Important

Your corporate brand is the reputation you have built throughout your target audience based on your marketing message and your company’s actions. When you talk about quality and dedication and back that up with good products and service, then that becomes part of your brand.

A consistent brand is much more than a good logo and a corporate color scheme. It is the way that your customers identify your business, and it is the image your business projects. If you want to build a successful company, then broadcasting a consistent and positive image is extremely important.

Agencies Are The Key

If you want to create a consistent brand, then you need to develop consistent marketing messages across a variety of platforms. The materials you bring to trade shows need to deliver the same message in the same way as your magazine advertisements. The best way to keep all of that information organized and deliver consistency is through an agency.

Maintaining and building your company brand is a full-time job that you simply do not have time to perform. If you want to do it right, then you need to work with a professional agency that knows how to build your brand and deliver a consistent message across every marketing medium that you use.

Make Your Marketing More Powerful

A strong brand makes your marketing more effective and powerful. When your target audience is constantly exposed to your brand building efforts across a variety of platforms, then your marketing becomes recognizable. Your company logo becomes a symbol of quality to your customers that increases sales through your normal distribution networks. Your company name is the only reason customers need to buy your products when your brand is consistent and strong.

Enhance Your Marketing Investment

As you can imagine, a strong brand means that you can start to diversify your marketing programs and spend less money on basic brand building activities. An agency knows how to sustain your brand once it is established, and then continue to grow your brand to make it more valuable.

Expand Your Exposure

A consistent brand can withstand exposure to industries and markets that are outside of your normal target audience. For example, consider the insurance company that is seen advertising at professional hockey games. While the idea of an insurance company and professional ice hockey are not consistent, the strength of the brand means that the added exposure brings in more revenue. Your brand can benefit from the same type of cross-industry exposure when your marketing is strong.

Growing a business becomes a little easier when your target audience recognizes your company’s name and associates that name with quality products and services. The only way to have a positive reputation precede your company is to have a consistent brand that creates excitement in your target audience.

4 Ways You Can Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts

You put together what you thought was a great email with an enticing offer and then sent it out to your customers. But after a few days of waiting, you have almost no results to show for your efforts. What happened?

Sometimes people can make email marketing into something much more complicated that it was meant to be. If you want to make your email marketing campaigns effective, then you need to hire a professional Internet marketing organization to give you the right results. But there are four basics about email marketing that every business owner should know that will help them to better understand their email marketing efforts.

Know Your Customers

Your email marketing efforts all start by understanding what appeals to your target audience, and what type of message will entice your customers to respond to your emails. By collecting sales and customer service data through good contact management software, you can develop customer trends that are valuable in developing effective email marketing campaigns.

Learn From Your Previous Email Campaigns

For the last three email marketing campaigns, you used a blue colored background to your messages and the response to each message was disappointing. For your next message, try a green background and see if that inspires your customers to read your messages.

Every success and failure you experience in previous email campaigns can be used to enhance future efforts. You may use something as simple as changing background colors, or your lessons may be a bit more complex. But as long as you are learning how to succeed from each marketing campaign, then you are headed in the right direction.

Segment Your Target Audience

Your customer profiles are invaluable in developing email marketing campaigns because that data can help you to create focused target audiences. Instead of sending the same message to every customer, you should be segmenting your customer base and creating target audiences that will respond to different messages.

For example, you can group all of the customers together that have a history of buying new product accessories as soon as they are released and send out new product announcements to those customers first. An effective email marketing campaign tries to make each message specific and personalized for every customer.

Have A Schedule

Your email marketing campaigns should have a release schedule to make it easier to monitor the progress of each email piece, and to make sure that you are spacing out your emails properly. Over time, you will be able to develop an understanding as to how often and how many emails you should be sending out to get the maximum results.

It does not take long to realize that finding success with email marketing requires the experience of a professional Internet marketing organization. Good email marketing does not happen by accident. It is planned meticulously, and then the data gathered from each campaign is used to improve future messages. When you do email marketing right, it can be an effective marketing tactic that helps your company to grow.

Five Web Design Trends For 2016

While there is a huge migration of users from desktop to mobile websites, there are still hundreds of millions of people every day who look over and utilize standard websites. The existence of a large audience for your standard website means that investing in the latest web design technology and trends will go a long way towards generating more revenue for your company. The new design trends for 2016 are actually fun to consider, and they will have a tremendous impact on the experience every user has with your website.

Semi-Flat Designs

Flat website designs started with apps that used simple boxes as navigational tools. It then spread to operating systems such as Windows 8, where the idea proceeded to fail miserably. People still like the idea of a website made up of basic shapes and designs, but they just want more from those sites. Look for design changes such as raised buttons and other interactive features that will help flat website design to evolve into semi-flat design, which should be more popular.

Hand Drawn Graphics

Just like music listeners started going back to vinyl records and newspaper readers started going back to the printed newspapers, website users are falling in love with interactive website graphics that are drawn by hand. This was a cute trend until hand drawn graphics started showing up on websites for organizations such as Kutztown University, and being the featured graphics on official PDF files for state and federal government resource guides. Now hand draw graphics are becoming a trend that is hard to ignore.

Moving Images

When you go to Paypal’s website, you may get startled a little bit when the big front page image starts moving. The trend of putting looping movies or GIFs on the front page of a website has been around for a while, but the presentation was never very subtle. Now that these files can be relatively small and the presentation is not quite as dramatic, this will be a trend to watch for in 2016.

Impressive Native Ads

Native ads are designed to be non-intrusive and part of the regular content. Originally, these were quick little movies that would pop up or advertisements written as stories that users could easily dismiss, or choose to interact with. But The Atlantic just released native advertising that is getting tens of thousands of social media shares because of how impressive and comprehensive it is. This trend will not only continue in 2016, but it will grow and it should be something website owners consider to generate more income.

Long Scrolling Front Pages

The idea that all of your front page content has to be on one screen has been disappearing for years, but it may see its complete demise in 2016. Website design has become so advanced that the idea of scrolling endlessly to see a front page has become something that users expect, and it has also become a way to create longer engagement times for web traffic.

It is time to get your website up to date with the latest trends if you want to continue to attract revenue-generating web traffic. As 2016 makes its way towards us, you will want to work with a professional Internet marketing company to create a website that modern users will want to interact with and bookmark for valuable repeat visits.

Four Things You Need At Your Next Trade Show

There is plenty of detailed information on this blog and others about how to create the best trade show materials to show-off your booth. But it would probably be helpful to know which tools, of all the tools that get mentioned, you really need when you start to put your trade show presentation together. Along with your modern booth and all of its attractive accessories, there are four other pieces you need to bring if you want to find success at your next trade show.

Banners

You may have the best light show and the loudest sound system a trade show has ever seen, but all of those trappings are only doing half of the job. There will be a lot of people at your next trade show who are looking specifically for your company’s booth. If you took the time to market your appearance at your next trade show, then there will be a flock of potential customers who want to talk to you. Banners let everyone know where your booth is located and act as unwavering reminders as to where people can find you and your sales team.

Custom Pamphlets

Too many companies avoid getting custom pamphlets printed for each trade show, which means they are missing out on an opportunity to capitalize on their trade show investment. When attendees get back to their offices, it may be some time before they review the material they collected. They may even go to other trade shows before they get a chance to look at your pamphlet. When you create a custom pamphlet, your audience will be reminded of exactly where they saw you and exactly why they liked your company in the first place.

Business Cards

Your business card acts as a pocket-size d billboard that advertises your business to anyone who sees it. If you do not take a full box of business cards to every trade show with the intent of giving every one of them away, then you are not going to be able to maximize your trade show investment.

Focused Product Information

Not only do you need to have new and customized product information printed for each trade show, but that information needs to be focused on the details that the attendees are looking for. A convention of engineers will not want to see the same information that purchasing managers will need. Each trade show you attend needs to have information that is focused on that trade show audience if you want people to be able to use your information to buy your products and get interested in your company.

When you decide to present your company at a trade show, you have made a significant financial commitment. Not only does it cost you a lot of money to present at trade shows, but it also requires a considerable investment of your time to plan each detail and make sure that the show goes off as you want.

Prior to putting together your trade show presentation, you will make a long list of the things that you will need. Each company’s list varies for every trade show, but there are four elements that every company needs to bring to every trade show if they want to find success. Without focusing on the basics, it is hard to generate the kind of income you need to justify your trade show investment.

Why And How To Change Your Company Logo

Changing your company logo is never something you do on a whim. The decision to change your company logo should only be done when it is absolutely necessary, and it should be a well-planned event. Your logo is something you invest a lot of time and money into as part of your branding efforts. When you are going to change that logo, you are going to change everything your customers already know about your company. That is why it has to be done right, or else your company will suffer.

Why Change Your Logo?

The best reason for changing your logo is if your company changes its name. Whether you merged with another company or changed your name for legal reasons, changing your logo to coincide with a name change can actually be a very effective marketing tactic.

Another reason people use to update their logo is to modernize it to fit contemporary styles. If you feel that you need to change your logo to keep up with a certain style or look, then you did not do a very good job of establishing your brand. There are companies with logos that are hundreds of years old that have never changed because there was no need to change. Instead of changing your logo to meet contemporary styles, you may want to have a professional marketing company look over your branding process and fix it for you.

How To Change Your Logo – Step 1: Design A New Logo

Unless you are a graphic design or marketing company, you should not be designing your logo yourself. A professional design company will create a memorable logo that will make your new name announcement more effective. Work closely with a professional marketing company to design a logo that best exemplifies your new company.

How To Change Your Logo – Step 2: Gradual Shift

The biggest mistake companies make when they change their logos is they choose a random date and then just change everything over. Suddenly, customers are getting invoices with new logos on them and the website has been completely changed. This is not going to give your customers time to adjust, which is why you need to use a gradual shift.

A gradual shift consists of transitional stationary that has both logos at the top and says that the old one is becoming the new one. You should develop the front page of your new website and then let customers preview the new page before you actually launch it. Let your customers ease into the new logo and it will be easier to say goodbye to the old one.

How To Change Your Logo – Step 3: Make The Change

In all of your marketing materials that talk about your transition to a new logo, give customers a date when the change will take place. It is easier to make it a significant date like the first day or last day of a month. When that date arrives, make the change by launching the new website and switching over to the new correspondence and invoicing materials.

By creating a gradual transition to a new logo, your customers will be at ease with the change and it will not disrupt your business. If you must change your logo, then hiring a professional marketing company to help you make the change properly is critically important.

5 Reasons You Need A Killer Company Brochure

There is plenty of information on how to introduce your company with a brochure, and how brochures add value to your product presentations. But it is hard to find convincing information on why you really need a company brochure as a means of general introduction.

Most business owners understand the value of brochures designed specifically for certain products, and the need for having brochures that are customized for each trade show. But there are plenty of good reasons for your company to print up and use general company brochures every day of the year.

An Elevator Speech With Pictures

Every corporate executive, business owner and sales professional prides themselves on having a great elevator speech. A corporate brochure is an elevator speech with effective pictures in a glossy and professional package. When a business professional understands the potential of a good corporate brochure, it is easier to see why they are so valuable.

No Bounce Rates

When you hand a prospect a brochure, there is no other brochure for that prospect to bounce to and put yours to the side. With a website, thousands of people a day will bounce from your website to other sites in seconds and take away your chance at telling your company’s story. But with a brochure, the audience is captive and will read your story without jumping to read the story of the competition with the click of a button.

Show Your Professionalism

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with handing a prospect who is interested in your company a nice business card, the impact of a professional brochure is worth the investment. As with any marketing piece, think of how you would react if a business owner was able to give you a colorful brochure of their company along with a business card. You would not only be impressed, you would immediately have a positive impression of that company.

Highlight Your Company’s Strengths

In the marketing world, a picture is worth 1,000 words and the picture you put on the front of your company brochure can make a strong first impression on any prospect. If you have a product your company is known for that has a sleek look that appeals to clients, then make that the cover of your brochure. Your company brochure should use your company’s biggest strength to make a first impression your audience will never forget.

Give Them Something To Look At Later

Your prospect may listen to your pitch and take your brochure, but they may also fold up that brochure and put it away without reading it. But hours later, when they are flying back to their office, they will reach into their pocket and pull out your professional brochure and spend some time actually reading it. One of the most valuable aspects of a brochure is that it cannot be turned off or ignored like an online ad. Once your prospect has your brochure, the marketing impact can be felt at any time.

A good brochure can be an invaluable corporate marketing tool that you should carry with you at all times. A brochure can enhance other marketing pieces, and it can be that professional first impression your company makes that sets your organization apart from the competition.

Best Ways To Use Printed Banners In Your Business

Sometimes success in business centers around who can call the most attention to themselves for the least amount of money. At a trade show, the company with the huge light show gets all of the traffic because it attracts a lot of attention. But there are ways to call attention to your company that are more subtle and cost-effective than a huge light show, but equally as effective.

Large, printed banners offer a great marketing value because they can be used over and over again in a variety of situations. The key is to know when to use your banners to call attention to your company and get a strong return on the relatively small investment you made in having those banners printed.

Storefront Window

Your company name is on the sign out in front of your business and all your banner does is repeat that company name. But the advantage your storefront has over your sign is that your storefront is at eye level with the people walking down the street. There are zoning laws regarding your sign, but you can hang your printed banner in your front window and attract traffic all day long.

If you feel like investing in focused banners for your window based on events or promotions in your store, then you will attract even more traffic. The next time you are planning a sale or promotion in your business, have a banner printed for your storefront window and watch how much more traffic you get this year than you got last year.

Outdoor Events

When you are part of outdoor festivals and events, it is critically important that people know where you company’s booth is located. If you pay attention at outdoor events, you will see some companies with printed banners at their booths, and other companies without banners. The companies with the banners are always the ones attracting the traffic and taking full advantage of their event exposure.

Press Conferences

If your public relations people are doing a good job, then your company will host one or two press conferences each year that bring in good attendance. The key to getting maximum exposure from a press conference is to own the press conference and give the media plenty of visuals to take pictures of and talk about. A large banner at your press conference helps to enhance your brand name recognition with the media and it will also result in some free advertising when it shows up in the pictures and video from the conference.

Local Parades

Local parades are excellent marketing opportunities that companies often allow to pass by without using them. Contact parade organizers of the most popular parades in your area and offer to sponsor some part of the event. The result will be your company banner slowly moving down the street as it is seen by thousands of enthusiastic people.

A durable printed banner offers a lot of marketing opportunities to companies that know how to gain exposure. The return on the investment in a banner can be significant, provided you spend the time getting it seen by plenty of people. Even a simple banner with your company name, logo, and website address on it can gather attention and help to significantly enhance your company’s brand marketing efforts.

WTF is Brand Recognition?

As we read through these blog posts we do our best to address as many important issues as possible because it is our job to keep you guys informed. One thing we noticed is that we spend a lot of time talking about improving your company’s brand name recognition, but we have spent almost no time explaining what brand name recognition is. Let’s change that right now.

What Is Brand Name Recognition?

Have you ever noticed that almost none of GEICO’s advertising mentions insurance? While other companies put together elaborate commercials that explain various risk situations and how they cover your losses for you, GEICO has a little talking lizard telling jokes on a boat outside of Seattle. Who’s insurance are you more likely to buy? You are more likely to buy GEICO’s because of the strong brand name recognition.

Brand name recognition is the instant notoriety of your logo or company name by people who see it. The more you spend to market your company name and logo, the stronger your brand name recognition. We are experts in creating brand name recognition through our online and offline marketing programs and we know how to get your company the attention it deserves.

Does Brand Name Recognition Replace Quality?

We have to assume that GEICO offers quality insurance services because the company has been around for decade. People buy their athletic footwear based solely on which sneakers have the Nike swoosh on them, but those Nike sneakers also happen to be very high quality products as well.

We can build up your brand name recognition in your marketplace to the point where people are buying your products because they are familiar with your company name, but you need to provide quality products and services if you want to keep those sales coming in. Brand name recognition and quality product and service offerings work hand in hand to make your company an industry leader.

Why Should I Care About Brand Name Recognition?

What is your favorite soda pop? When you go to the store to buy soda pop, you are given choices but you always choose your favorite brand. Over the course of many years, you become fiercely loyal to that brand and would never even think of changing brands.

Brand name recognition helps to start the process of brand loyalty by giving consumers a good reason to buy products without actually knowing the quality of those products. A consumer may see your product and see your competition side by side, but your strong brand name recognition means that the customer buys your product. When the customer is satisfied with the quality of your product, then that establishes the loyalty which creates another repeat customer.

When you have such strong brand name recognition that you sell products to new customers based solely on your name, then you enhance the value of your marketing and give professional marketing experts like us a lot to work with. It significantly increases the return on your marketing investment and makes breaking into new markets much easier.

Our marketing professionals are ready to talk to you about a brand name recognition program that we can put together using our services. We will get your name into your target audience and make you a household name in your industry. Then we will show you how we build on that brand name recognition to turn your company into an industry leader.

Marketing Essentials for 2015

It is our job to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing information, which is why we are fully prepared to handle your marketing needs in 2015. The marketing world changes constantly and what worked in 2014 may not work as well in 2015. As the year starts to come to an end, we just wanted to point out for marketing realities for 2015 that we already know.

Keywords Will Be Less Important

Remember those good ol’ days of creating lists of primary and secondary keywords for your website content that would help to drive traffic? Well, those days will be all but over in 2015. As Google continues to change its algorithms, the emphasis will be on quality content and not the use of keywords.

Google’s Panda and Hummingbird updates are working together to try and make searching more intelligent and the Penguin update is being updated to make sure that the links on a website offer value to the user. If it all sounds confusing, don’t worry. We have it under control and we can put content on your site that will drive traffic in 2015.

Social Media Marketing Will Become Huge

Social media marketing is already something that we focus on with strong intensity, but it will become even more intense in 2015. One of the reasons that social media marketing is changing in 2015 is the changes being made by the major social media platforms.

For example, Facebook is no longer the free business marketing platform it once was. If you want to use Facebook to market your business, then you are going to have to pay a lot of very complicated fees. We will help you to understand the new Facebook and use the other social media platforms to your advantage as well.

Organic Links Will Be Critical

Organic link building is when you take the time to work with other website owners to develop relationships that are beneficial to your website users. Anyone who buys links with a lot of traffic going to them is going to be punished severely and that trend will continue to intensify throughout 2015.

Google started cracking down on purchased links with the first Penguin update and there are more Penguin updates being released in 2015. Google now considers it to be spamming when you put purchased links on your website and we have all of the resources necessary to avoid Penguin penalties.

Quality Content Will Become More And More Prevalent

Web content used to be crafted by professionals who knew how to build pages and articles around certain keywords and keyword phrases. As we touched on earlier, keywords are starting to diminish in importance, which means that quality content is going to be king.

We have a team of professional writers who will create your quality content and get your website the attention it deserves. We are prepared for the changes coming in 2015 and we put quality content on your site that will drive plenty of traffic.

In 2015, Google will be looking to change the way that websites create and utilize content. We are prepared for those changes and we are ready to get your website the traffic you need throughout all of 2015 and beyond.

Professional Presentation Folders Get People’s Attention

There is the right way to make a good first impression with an important presentation, and there is the wrong way to do it. The wrong way involves using standard presentation folders with sticker and writing on them to try and give the impression that the folders were customized. The right way is to contact Tom and Company and let us create professional presentation folders for your next presentation.

Prove Your Professionalism

True professionals attend to all of the important details and understand the critical nature of looking, as well as acting, like a refined organization. From the moment you walk into the conference room to give your presentation, your customer will be watching every move you make and monitoring everything you say. When you start handing out your hard copy information in our professionally printed folders, then you will establish a first impression that will get your customer’s attention.

Give Your Information Credibility

Our professional presentation folders have a silk finish to them that shows how seriously you take the information you are about to present. If you take your information seriously, then your customer is going to take that information seriously as well. Utilizing our professional presentation folders will help you get the attention of your audience before you even start your presentation.

Create A Lasting Impression

When your presentation is over, your customer will be left with the information you have presented and the care you took to create that presentation. One of the prime examples of the respect with which you treat your information and your customer will be the presentation folder you use to hold your hard copy information.

Your presentation could be a standard PowerPoint presentation with some photocopied pages to accompany it. While your information could work to set you apart from the competition, your familiar presentation will allow your information to get thrown in with everyone else’s and forgotten. But when you use our professional presentation folders, you will make a lasting impression that will give your information and your organization respectability in the eyes of your customer.

We Have An Array Of Options

Along with a variety of colors and a silk finish, we have an array of effects and options that you can choose from to make your presentation folders unique. Contact one of our marketing experts today and we will help you to create a corporate presentation folder that will make your next presentation impossible to forget.

We can highlight your logo with a different texture, or we can add an effect to your presentation title that really makes it stand out. Gives us a call and we can discuss our full line of options for our presentation folders that will give you the professional appearance you are looking for.

When you want your customers to take your message and your company seriously, then you have to show that you are serious about what you do. Our presentation folders allow you to set the proper tone for your next presentation and help you to elevate your level of professionalism in the eyes of your customers.