The next time you find yourself in the company of preschool-age children, ask them what they want to be when they grow up. Children are known for dreaming big. In a class of 20 students, you might find yourself surrounded by several future astronauts, firefighters, teachers, ballerinas, doctors, and scientists. Their little minds can be inspiring for us adults.

Children dream uninhibitedly. They dream about things the rest of us find unobtainable. Too often, we think about all the obstacles in our way and allow our minds to entertain the “what ifs,” rather than the “why nots.” As we mature, our goals need to be more realistic for our skills and abilities, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop reaching for the stars.

We need to remember our childhood innocence when it comes to our dreams. It’s the only way we’ll ever accomplish all the things we’re truly capable of achieving.

As Gloria Steinem says, “Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

No one ever made it to the top of their industry by limiting themselves on what they were capable of accomplishing. Instead, you need to imagine the heights your business might be able to reach if you allow yourself to really dream big.

Of course, as a professional, your dreaming must take a slightly more predictable path. You must not only have the end goal in mind, but you must also be able to determine what you need to do to reach the desired end result.

<strong>Identify what you’d like to accomplish professionally</strong>

These goals can look vastly different. If you’re a small business owner, you might have a desired income you’d like to see from your business, or perhaps you want to have enough income to open another branch in a neighboring city. If you work for a company, maybe you want to reach the c-suite or gain the experience you need to start your own company. This is where you should be inspired by the dreams of those in the under age five crowd. Allow your mind to imagine where you’d like to be in 5, 10, or 20 years.

<strong>Outline a path you need to take to accomplish this goal</strong>

Once you know where you want to go, it’s time to outline the steps needed to get there. This includes setting small and incremental goals throughout your journey. If you want to reach a new position within your company, consider what type of education and experience you’ll need to obtain along the way. If you’ve started a business, learn about better business practices to bring in new customers and encourage them to stay. For example, set:
<ul>
<li>goals for identifying and appealing to your ideal customer audience</li>
<li>goals for improving the business website</li>
<li>goals for improving customer experience</li>
<li>goals for using inbound marketing and new digital marketing</li>
<li>goals for integrating digital marketing with traditional marketing practices</li>
</ul>

Once you know what you need to do to reach your goals, you’ll be able to confidently set out on the path toward accomplishing them.

The path to success requires thinking outside the box and being willing to dream big. Children are excellent examples for us to think about what we might actually be capable of accomplishing if we don’t get overwhelmed by the potential obstacles. Too often we limit ourselves unnecessarily. Take a lesson from the smallest members of society and learn how to dream unfettered. If you’re interested in starting a new marketing campaign to help your business reach its goals, reach out to us today. We’d be happy to help you get started.

Young Student Daydreaming

It’s certainly no secret that social media is increasingly becoming one of the single most important tools to connect with your target audience in the most meaningful ways possible. After all, sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more have hundreds of millions of unique users who are actively engaged in social activities on a daily basis. It would be a shame to let such a valuable resource go to waste.

At the same time, you certainly don’t want to neglect your print campaign. It’s still one of the most effective marketing weapons in your arsenal and always will be. So how do you ensure you’re paying equal attention to both print and social media?

The answer is simple: integrate social media into your print campaign and leverage the benefits both have to offer.

Grab Attention and Refuse to Let it Go

In today’s crowded marketplace, the goal of any campaign is to grab the attention of prospective customers. You aren’t just trying to sell a product or service — you’re trying to quickly show why your product or service is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest.

Integrating social media elements into your print campaigns is one of the best ways to accomplish that. It allows you to get your message in front of more people in the places they’re most comfortable holding that conversation.

For an example of this concept in action, consider the hashtag. People use hashtags for everything from highlighting key words and phrases in a post to finding trends, joining ongoing conversations, and adding a definitive statement at the end of a sentence. By including a hashtag at the end of your print mailer, you’re giving your customers multiple options regarding how they can join the conversation and communicate with your brand. If they’d like to continue to learn more about your product or service via the hashtag, they can always do so. If not, they can continue their exposure by way of the print materials the same way they always have.

In essence, you’re giving them choices, which is one of the best ways to grab their attention and refuse to let it go.

Tracking Success

Integrating social media and print is also a great, easy way to track the success of a particular campaign over a long-term basis. Consider putting a unique hashtag on the end of each print piece you mail. If messages with that hashtag are then retweeted 200,000 times on Twitter, you know your message is being received loud and clear and that your target audience is more than willing to continue the conversation online.

Digital and print marketing don’t have to be independent of one another. Anyone who tells you it’s a “one or the other” proposition is wrong. Print and digital are both great at accomplishing their own things, or even the same things in different ways. By integrating social media and print together, you’re combining the benefits of both platforms into one environment and are truly creating a “best of both worlds” scenario.

Young man with arm around twin brother, close-up

The bandwagon effect is nothing new. Scientists have been amazed for decades by the propensity for people to follow the lead of others. It seems to dominate our lives in so many ways! We become more likely to buy products our friends buy, and we even find ourselves ascribing to the opinions and beliefs of those around us. This psychological phenomenon might be one of the most interesting and influential topics of study in the field of neuro-marketing.

An excellent example in the world of public opinion can be found in the Oxford Journals, dating back to 1977. This experiment used two groups of questionnaires to study participants. Each contained the same four questions, but one set of questions was accompanied by recent public poll results regarding answers to the question. The study found that those in blue collar trades seemed to react negatively in opinion and response rate to the addition of the polls, while white collar workers reacted positively in both of these areas.

The findings of this study have been cited numerous times and have been used as a foundation for subsequent studies on the notion of the bandwagon effect. A study as recent as 2013 sought to determine how influential the bandwagon effect is on voting. The study, published in the Journal of Psychology, found that the opinions and votes of participants were similarly impacted by the behavior of others.

Why do we care so much about what others say and think?

We all want to feel as though we’re part of a group. Put yourself back in high school for a second. You walk into school, put your backpack in your locker, and likely begin to search for your friends. Whether a jock, a bookworm, or a rocker, everyone had their own clique. Even the ‘outsiders’ seemed to have their own group of like-minded people. As people, we enjoy feeling as though we’re part of a greater society.

Our desire to be part of a group impacts everything from our shopping behavior to the social media platforms we join and the content we seek. It explains why that latest cat meme went viral and why various fads seem to arise and disappear overnight.

It can also be a powerful tool for marketers. When you harness the power of the bandwagon effect, you can create the recipe for a successful marketing plan or product launch.

Take social media, for example. These digital platforms are excellent for your customers to let their friends know they like your brand. People are more likely to be attracted to and follow brands their friends follow because of the bandwagon effect. When companies advertise who follows them on social media, it works to create a strong social media community where people regularly converse and engage with the brand. It can also help to encourage others to like the brand.

Similarly, people are far more inclined to try new products if they see others buying them. If you’re running a sale, for example, indicating the percentage of your product that has been bought, particularly as the numbers get higher, can actually help drive new people to make a purchase.

As scientists have been telling us for decades, the bandwagon effect can be a powerful motivator for people interested in making a purchasing decision. Keep the power of groups in mind as you design your next marketing campaign and see how you can leverage this power yourself. Contact us today to get your new marketing campaign started.

Businessman jumping into the air and looking excited

Direct mail marketing is still one of the best and most efficient ways to connect to your target audience, even in this social-media-centric world. But that doesn’t mean you need to eschew technology altogether. Case in point: predictive analytics are quickly becoming not just a recommendation, but a requirement for anyone running a direct mail campaign.

<strong>What Are Predictive Analytics?</strong>

At their core, predictive analytics leverage statistics, data mining, and similar techniques to create a prediction about future behaviors. The idea is to take the past behavior of your target audience and use it to make educated guesses about future activities.

The concept is used in Internet advertising on a daily basis. Have you ever wondered why you suddenly see advertisements for home audio and video equipment or Blu-ray movies right after you purchase a high-definition television set online? It’s a combination of programmatic advertising and predictive analytics at play. Marketers know that based on your purchase, there are certain types of accessories you can definitely use.

If you just bought an HDTV, it goes without saying that you could probably use some shiny new Blu-rays to play on it. By targeting you with advertisements based on that information, businesses know they have a much better chance of making a sale than if they randomly targeted 10,000 people, many of whom might not have an HDTV at all.

Many businesses don’t realize this same idea can also play a very important role in how their direct mail marketing campaigns are conducted.

<strong>How Do Predictive Analytics Help in Direct Mail Marketing?</strong>

The major benefit predictive analytics brings to the world of direct mail marketing is one of precision. You no longer have to spend time and money each month to send mailers out to all 3,500 people who live in a particular ZIP code. The fact you were sending out materials to many people who ultimately had no interest in your products or services was always just an accepted “cost of doing business,” but that doesn’t have to be the case any longer.

Thanks to predictive analytics, you now have a better chance of targeting the RIGHT people within a particular ZIP code based on their past interests and behaviors. Instead of sending out 3,500 mailers and achieving a 20% conversion rate, you can save time and money by only sending out 1,000 mailers while achieving an 80% success rate at the same time. It’s about giving you a much smarter way to spend your marketing dollars. It’s also about empowering you to stretch your marketing campaign’s strength even further.

In direct mail marketing, success doesn’t mean spending as much money as possible. Instead, true success and market penetration are achieved by spending every dollar the right way. Whether you have $10 to spend or $10,000,000, that theory will always hold true. By making excellent use of advancements like predictive analytics, you can make sure your important materials are actually getting in front of people who find them valuable. This will go a long way toward increasing not only the efficiency of your campaign, but also its general return on investment.

Working with virtual screen

It was almost the end of senior year at the university. Four close friends — Sarah, Maria, Andrea, and Kaitlin — were preparing to celebrate the momentous achievement of earning a degree. To make their upcoming graduation even sweeter, each had found employment that would begin a few weeks after they received their diploma. These girls had plenty to celebrate.

To make some final memories before they headed off into the work world, they decided to take a trip together. They quickly realized, however, that each one of them had a different idea of what constitutes the perfect vacation.

Sarah dreamed of spending days relaxing by the ocean, doing little besides napping by the water, swimming, and enjoying fantastic food by night.

Maria desperately wanted to explore some fantastic cities. She had never been to New York City and thought the excitement of the Big Apple would be perfect.

Andrea agreed that cities sounded perfect, but she thought one of the historic cities of Europe sounded more appealing — a dose of culture along with the excitement of a city.

Kaitlin was interested in an active vacation, and exploring the Grand Canyon sounded like the perfect adventure to her.

As the girls worked to reconcile their different ideas of vacations, Sarah started laughing. The girls turned to her with confusion and asked what could possibly be so funny. Sarah sighed and said, “I’m going to work for a marketing firm in two months, and I know part of my job is going to be developing buyer personas for a startup. I learned in class how important it is to really understand your buyers, but we’ve all demonstrated this lesson far more clearly than any textbook.”

Here’s what Sarah meant.

<strong>Marketing one-on-one</strong>

Customers expect personalized marketing. General information that leaves questions about the value of products and services won’t engage them. Thanks to the Internet, customers are now in control of the beginning of the buying process. They can read online reviews and research companies long before they make a purchase.

To answer this consumer need, companies must learn how to market to their customers on a one-to-one basis. This requires knowing customers on a personal level and knowing what they seek. In-depth buyer personas are essential for this task.

<strong>Using buyer personas for personalized marketing</strong>

A well-developed buyer persona will mean understanding details far beyond gender and level of education or job. For example, all of the girls in the opening story were college-educated women in their early 20s, but they also had vastly different interests. A quality buyer persona will include information about budgets, pain points, goals, and roles within a company.

Using this information can help you determine the questions buyers are likely to have. This can guide the creation of content and marketing materials that speak directly to potential customers.

The more precise you can make your marketing materials, the more effective they’ll be. Identifying buyer personas is an excellent way to refine marketing efforts and better understand exactly who will be responding to campaigns. If you’re interested in improving your marketing efforts, speak to us today. We’d be happy to help you learn more about how to market to your intended audience.

Group Of Women Sitting Around Table Eating Dessert

Constructive criticism is one of the most powerful tools available to businesses of all types today. After all, who better to tell you how you’re really doing than the people you’re supposed to be pleasing in the first place? Thanks to the Internet and the scores of online review sites that have cropped up over the years, you don’t have to look very far anymore for someone’s honest opinion of a product or service, especially now that everyone has an equal voice in the proceedings.

However, the key word in the phase “constructive criticism” is “constructive.” Online review sites tend to be a collection of overwhelmingly negative reactions, regardless of whether or not they have any basis in fact. As a result, many people tend to immediately discredit them or wash their hands of online reviews altogether. In reality, there’s a huge amount you can learn from both the good and the bad online reviews — provided you know how to wade through the noise and find it.

<strong>Overwhelmingly Positive Reviews: Not as Overwhelmingly Helpful As You Might Think</strong>

Overwhelmingly positive reviews can be a great boost to your confidence as a business professional. They can be a great indicator that you’re on the right track and that you’re meeting the expectations you set for yourself when you started a business in the first place.

Unfortunately, these overwhelmingly positive reviews that give your business 11 out of 10 stars aren’t telling you anything you can actually use to make your organization better. Make no mistake: you are never as perfect as you think you are. Every business, regardless of industry, always has room for improvement. While a dramatically positive review may be a nice pat on the back, it isn’t something you should necessarily spend too much time thinking about.

<strong>Negative Reviews: Finding the Needle in the Haystack</strong>

When people are angry, their emotions tend to take over. This is evidenced in just about every one-star review you’ve ever read for a product or service online. They’re usually lengthy diatribes about how “everything was awful” and tend to even mention things that a business can’t necessarily control, like the way the post office handled a delivery.

It can be easy to quickly dismiss these types of reviews, but you really shouldn’t for a simple reason. At the core of the one-star review is still a dissatisfied customer you can learn from to make your business better in the future. Try to go through a negative review and delete all sentences that are pure emotion. A sentence that says “this is the worst company ever” has nothing valuable to tell you. Once emotion is gone, you’ll be left with a much clearer indication of what really happened.

<strong>The Math Equation of Constructive Online Criticism</strong>

If you want to quickly get to the heart of all reviews and paint the clearest possible image of how you’re doing, you need to approach online criticism like something of a math equation.

Consider three reviews: one overwhelmingly positive, one neutral, and one negative. Compare all three, and look for the common elements. Does the overwhelmingly positive review have something in common with the neutral review, like a positive employee encounter? If it does, you can rest assured the referenced employee is truly doing a great job.

Likewise, does the negative review share something in common with the neutral review? Would the neutral review have been more positive were it not for X, which is also present in that one-star comment by a disgruntled customer? If so, then you’re looking at a genuine point of contention that should be fixed as soon as possible.

Online reviews are inherently valuable thanks to the equal voice they give everyone, from the people who love your business to the people who don’t and everyone in between. People have an instinct to wash their hands of online reviews due to their anonymous nature and the grand emotions that are on display, but this is a mistake. So long as you know exactly what you’re looking for and how to find the grain of truth hidden in that emotion, you come away with valuable, actionable information you can use to make your company better moving forward.

Speech Bubble Icons

Do you think offline marketing is obsolete? It isn’t…not by a long shot. In fact, you need to pay just as close attention to your offline marketing as you do to your online marketing in order to achieve success.

Used in conjunction with online marketing, offline marketing can help ensure your message gets across to your audience in a variety of ways, making it more likely they will become customers. However, you have to go about offline marketing the right way for it to be effective.

Here are four mistakes you could be making with your offline marketing and how to correct them.

<strong>1. Not Using the Phone Book</strong>

Believe it or not, people still have landline phones, and many of them still use the phone book. You may have heard others say that people just toss the phone book into the recycling bin now and never use it. However, many people prefer to look things up alphabetically in a phone book, where it’s nice and simple.

Make sure you’re not just listed in the phone book, but also have a nice, attractive print ad accompanying your listing. People are more likely to call the businesses with nice-looking print ads than those that don’t have them.

<strong>2. Giving Up on Direct Mail</strong>

What’s the point of using direct mail when you have the Internet, right? Well, the point is that people still appreciate the personal touch an attractively printed card in the mail gives them. It shows you care enough to take the time to get a contact’s information and send them a card the old-fashioned way. People can take their time looking over a direct mail ad, considering it for days or longer before making a decision. Direct mail gets results.

<strong>3. Not Carrying Business Cards</strong>

Business cards are still the accepted professional way to introduce yourself and your business to other businesspeople. They’re an industry must at trade shows and a courteous thing to provide to new contacts. Don’t just assume everyone is going to type your contact information into their smart phone when they meet you. Most people don’t have the time. Get good-looking business cards printed up. Include your phone number, email, and website, and hand them out to everyone you meet. An attractive business card still commands respect in the business world.

<strong>4. Avoiding Community Bulletin Boards</strong>

All of those flyers and business cards posted on community bulletin boards get more attention than you’d think. Flyers get the most attention because they’re large and easy to see. Print some bright, eye-catching ones with engaging graphics and a bold phone number in plain sight. Before you know it, your phone will start ringing with new customers. You’ll probably get some new ones coming through your door, too.

Offline marketing is still important. It works best when used in conjunction with an online marketing campaign, so you can reach more people and present a unified message. Make sure your ads are attractive, engaging, and intriguing, and you’ll get new customers from them.

Hispanic businessman leaning head on wall

When you think about all the different marketing channels you have at your disposal, they’re really all working toward the same goals, though in different ways. Each one helps to spread the word about your brand — or at least about a specific product or service you provide. Each channel also helps create new ways to interact with your customers in an intimate and meaningful way. Most importantly, they all give you the opportunity to establish yourself as a trusted source of information in your industry and build a reputation as a place people can turn to in their time of need.

Though that description certainly applies to marketing channels like social media, direct mail print, TV and radio commercials, and more, it also describes one very important element of your business that people tend not to think of as marketing: customer service.

<strong>The Role of Customer Service in Marketing</strong>

When you set out to create a new marketing campaign, one of the first steps always involves sitting down and taking a long, hard look at what your customers need. This is most obvious in television campaigns, where you have just 30 seconds to outline a problem and show how your product or service solves that problem once and for all.

When you really think about the function of customer service in your business, it’s doing the exact same thing. You’re helping people have meaningful, satisfying experiences with your brand, while showing them that the products you’re selling are backed by trustworthy individuals with a strong sense of integrity.

In many ways, your behavior is the marketing tool in this scenario. If you can turn a bad experience with your product into a good one through sheer customer service force of will, you’re building the same type of relationship with your customer that a successful ad or direct mail campaign might. The benefit you get is the ability to control the conversation as it’s being played out.

In that respect, your customer service department is almost like a fully interactive television ad. If customers have a positive experience, they’ll tell people about it. If they have a negative experience, rest assured, they’ll tell people about that, too.

<strong>Customer Service Considerations</strong>

The point of this relationship isn’t that you should start treating your customer service department as just another in a long line of marketing opportunities that can be exploited. In fact, the opposite is true. Doing so will almost certainly come off to the customer as artificial and can do far more harm to your reputation than good. Overloading your potential and existing customers with overt marketing messages can also make your brand come off as “pushy” when people are just looking for answers to important questions.

Honesty and integrity are the name of the game, especially in terms of customer service. By using your customer service capabilities to truly put your best foot forward and create meaningful interactions with customers, you’re accomplishing many of the same goals you aim for with your other marketing channels. When people have a positive experience with representatives of your customer service team, they’re far more likely to tell their friends and family members. You’re also creating loyal followers that will generate repeat sales, which is another task that the best marketing campaigns are capable of accomplishing.

Anyone who has ever worked in marketing understands the value of market research. Solid research can teach you about your intended audience and what your customers are looking for, which will allow you to grow your company and position it for success.

Imagine if nearly everything you needed to know about your customer base existed in a single space, and all you needed to do was find a way to listen to the conversation. Well, it is — and you can. That space is social media.

Social media (and the Internet in general) has come to dominate nearly half the globe. Customers use the Internet to communicate and connect with each other and the brands they want to do business with. These customers are telling you what you need to know about the needs of your intended audience. Here are a few ways you can put social media to work for you.

<strong>Pay attention to how your customers speak</strong>

You likely already know you should be monitoring social sites for mentions of your brand in case customers register complaints or talk about experiences they had with you. There’s more you can get out of these basic brand mentions, though.

Pay attention to how people speak about your company and the services you provide. Listen to what your customers are mentioning as the most important aspects in their buying experience. What matters the most when developing customer loyalty? What draws people to your products and services? What causes them to go to your competitors? This insight will help you improve the customer experience and better meet their needs.

<strong>Get quick results for surveys</strong>

Rather than spending weeks or months gathering data from surveys and study groups, you can use social media to learn about your customers significantly quicker. Pose questions to your followers, and encourage customers to share experiences with your brand to get a feel for what matters most to them.

In many ways, the information you glean from social media might be even more valuable than what you learn from focus groups. Nearly 3/4 of all people with Internet access use social media in some form. Using social media for your research, therefore, has the potential to help you gain a much more complete picture of industry trends and customer preferences.

Using social media for your surveys can also be a fantastic way to control costs related to social research. There are a variety of free tools available across a number of social platforms, but even the ones that have a cost tend to be more cost-efficient than spending the time and money to conduct surveys and poll focus groups.

<strong>Get real-time results</strong>

Traditional surveys often take several weeks or months to process and analyze. When you use social media to gather this important information, you get your answers in real time. This can help you implement positive changes for your customers and take advantage of the information you learned, while remaining confident that trends have not yet shifted.

Social media is a valuable tool for market research. It can help you learn more about your customers so you can better meet their needs and grow your business.

Building brand awareness is one of the cornerstones of successful marketing. People need to see you as the trusted leader you know you are. Every message you put out into the world — from flyers to advertisements to the content on your website — must reinforce that core ideal. The goal is to create a consistent brand experience across every marketing channel.

To illustrate just how important a consistent brand experience is, take a look at a company that has mastered it: Apple. Apple is notorious for the strength of its brand. Say what you will about its products and services, but you can’t argue with the fact that when that shiny white “Apple” logo appears on a computer, portable music player, or advertisement on television, a very clear image of what that logo represents pops into your mind almost immediately.

The major theme of Apple’s company over the years has been simplicity. The lengths to which the company has gone in its effort to reinforce that concept are actually quite astounding. Apple has long been lauded for its television commercials. Instead of relying on flashy graphics, loud music, and other tropes typical of traditional television advertising, Apple displays key products on stark white backgrounds with a basic music track not unlike what you would hear in an elevator. In a word, the ads are incredibly simple, just like the products themselves.

If you take a look at Apple’s website, it’s almost like one of the company’s television commercials brought to life. The website features a stark white background and large, simplistic lettering. The products themselves are clearly the emphasis. Simplicity rears its head yet again.

This extends even to the print marketing materials that come packaged in the box along with Apple’s products. Instead of the extensive user manual that accompanies most products, you get a short and painfully straightforward pamphlet with basic tips on how to get started using the device you just bought. The only other item in the box (accessories notwithstanding) is a sticker with the Apple logo. Simple, simple, simple.

Apple succeeds because every last bit of marketing it puts out into the world harkens back to that core message of simplicity. The avenues it uses to communicate that message may change, but the look, feel, and emotion behind the message remains the same.

This isn’t a phenomenon unique to Apple. If you think of the biggest companies in the world (or even the most successful businesses in your area), the one thing they all have in common regardless of industry is the consistent brand experience they deliver. By focusing on your own marketing message and clearly communicating it in a straightforward and consistent manner across all marketing avenues, you, too, can build awareness and create the same type of consistent brand experience for your company.