Great article from Ask The Wizard.

Your voice, however, has to be everywhere your company interacts with the market and customers. It’s more than the brand, it’s all your communications, including customer service responses and presentations that employees give at conferences.

SEO Design Solutions - good practical design and development advice

Tips On Marketing With Social Media

Virtual Marketing Blog

Now That’s What I Call A Response Rate - Blyk shares some very impressive response rates to targetted mobile advertising

Now That’s What I Call Segmentation - earlier piece on Blyk

19 clever ads using and abusing available physical space.

Research seems to show that the fabled tipping point marketing and PR people have been tripping over each other to stumble upon mightn’t really exist. Oh well.

The Question of Community

Key quote

That’s the point: Social media is about more than just one community, the social media community: it’s about all the verticals and other communities that likely matter more to your client or business.

This topic is a particular favourite of mine, because I spent a number of years on the agency side of the table, responding to RFPs and various tender documents. Then I switched sides and spent another number of years evaluating design company’s work and assessing their pitches.

The advice in this article is absolutely on the money. Highlights include

In our experience, organizations that use the RFP process to purchase creative services often find that their expectations are not met.

As it happens, those compelled to respond to RFPs are often at the bottom of the barrel. Design firms that are in demand typically don’t waste their time with the process.

This is completely accurate, and exacerbates the client’s perception that design is overpriced, and often ineffectual. Consequently less effort is put into finding a design agency the next time there is a requirement for a piece of design work.

A design team can serve as an excellent partner, and any good one will look for ways to help you accomplish your goals in a cost-effective manner. When you reduce design to a line-item, however, you miss out on ever having such a relationship with your provider.

When looking for a firm to fulfil design requirements, clients should be looking for a partner and not a provider. Being external, they may often have the ability to suggest new approaches to problems, and help the marketing people get internal approval. The design team will often be able to give details of how a similar campaign worked for another client of theirs, and show the process involved.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Telegraph article

Via beyond pr

List here.

A few thoughts that spring to mind on some of these …

Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer – “Attracting is the new selling. It is the least-visible, and least-examined principle behind most companies today that are growing quickly through word of mouth.”

“X is the new Y”. Sorry Jackie, nothing replaces selling. You can attract ‘em all you like, but if they don’t buy, well then your attracta-marketing has failed.

Tim Berry, Planning Startups Stories – “One of the most expensive myths in marketing is that lower price produces higher volume. That might be true for coal or gasoline, but not for most businesses. Lower price means, well, ask yourself: do you always eat at the lowest price restaurant? Buy the lowest price clothes? Do you drive the lowest priced car? Pricing is your best statement of value.”

Truer words never spoken etc.

Drew McClellan, Drew’s Marketing Minute – “Do Less. One of the most tempting aspects of marketing is the veritable smorgasbord of different marketing tactics that you can toss into a marketing plan. It’s almost overwhelming.

Many marketing professionals make the very understandable mistake of believing that more is better. But they’re wrong.

You will be vastly more successful if you do less, but do them better. Pick 3-4 marketing tactics that you think are really going to be valued by your audience and drive the behavior/action you’re looking for. Then, figure out how you can do them in an extraordinary way.

100% consistency. 100% relevancy. Do less. But do them better.”

Spot on. Identifying a strategy is easy. Picking appropriate tactics is the hard part.

Brian Moran, Publisher, Small Business Edge – “LESS IS MORE: In today’s cluttered world, your customers are being bombarded with thousands of messages every day. In order to rise above the noise level, you need to capture their attention immediately and then hold it while giving them your pitch. You must be able to deliver your message, if necessary, in 25 words or less. Include your main feature and the main benefit in the message. If you hook the potential customer, they will gladly ask you for more information.”

It’s all about clarity and a really well-honed pitch. Learn to write microcontent.

John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing – “Become a journalist - no, I’m not really suggesting that you join the staff of some publication, but the acceptance of new media tools like blogs and podcasts has turned the marketing tables - so take advantage of the allure of a reporter and start a blog and podcast and request interviews with industry leaders, community leaders, authors and maybe even your biggest prospects. Instead of asking for a meeting to demonstrate your product, ask to feature your prospect in your next blog or podcast episode. You will automatically change your status in their eyes, increase your role as an expert and create great content for your marketing materials.”

Spot on.

Yeah, another top ten list.

The amazing Helvetica documentary. Comments to follow after I’ve watched it (a few times!)

Times New Roman users, pay close attention. It’s never too late to change your ways.