Marketing Archives - Page 4 of 5

PARTNERSHIP MARKETING

February 25, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

This fabulous corporate headshot was produced by Lisa DeNeffe Photography – a business we are lucky to work with from time to time. The model is one of our long-time and favorite clients, Rosemary Camposano of Halo Blow Dry Bars and G3 Strategy.

Lisa and Halo have put together their services in such a great way. Halo is offering a discount to Lisa’s clients on hair and/or makeup styling before their photo session. And Lisa is offering Halo clients a discount on a corporate head shot package.

Both Halo and Lisa will send an e-mail campaign to their clients, so Halo will be introduced to potential new clients and vice versa. There will also be printed collateral for display and hand-outs and the web page version of the Halo e-mail campaign can be linked to from blogs and social media. At the least, each business is generating new in-coming links from credible sites to their own website for a nice search engine optimization boost.

Partnership marketing is a win-win situation. Your business’ clients win as they get an introduction to a new service or business and they get a nice deal. Your business wins with exposure, added brand recognition, and SEO.

MPS wins too! We have the opportunity to work with these great businesses and we developed the e-mail campaign Halo will send.

And my Facebook post for Halo reached eighty Facebookers in the hour after being posted.

TIPS! Think about the types of services that would complement your business and would be of benefit to your clients. This is such an excellent sample – what could be better than hair and makeup right before a photoshoot? Find a partner:

with an over-lapping target market to your business,
with a nice-sized e-mail list and/or blog following,
with the ability or contractor able to bring about a quality e-mail campaign and print collateral,
and with your level of energy and commitment to work to maximize all possible marketing pathways to make the partnership a success.

Thanks for reading – Rachel

GRAPHIC DESIGN DONATION

February 14, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

We are pleased to support the Montalvo Arts Center by donating graphic design and printing costs to the Montalvo Service Group. It’s the most local to us of the non-profits we support. Each time we visit, we feel good knowing we’ve contributed to the preservation of this beautiful villa and grounds.

This year, we’ve produced two designs for the mothers’ day brunch fundraising event. Wonder which they will choose?

If you would like to treat your mum to brunch next May, keep an eye on their website.

LOGO RE-DESIGN AND PRINT COLLATERAL

January 27, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

MPS is lucky to be working with Vintage Affaire – one of the Bay Area’s premiere wine auctions which benefits Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

First project, redesign the logo and craft the save the date postcard.

A BIG DAY

January 3, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

It’s a big day! A busy day! We launched our new website and we signed and sealed Happy New Year cards to our clients, friends and associates.

TEAR-OFF REFERRAL CARD

January 2, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

We worked with a new printer, PrintingForLess.com, to make this referral card. (2025 updates – we still love this printer!)

Referral cards are difficult. They need to be small enough that someone would carry it around. Nice enough that people will pass them onto their friends. They need to track the giver and the receiver so that the rewards can be passed on and so you can track your ROI.

Our client has been handing these out all holiday season. We’re looking forward to finding out if they do bring in new clients – it’s a great offer for the giver and receiver, so they should.

E-MAILS WORKING FOR OUR CLIENTS

December 28, 2015 by Rachel Hunter

(2025 review – funny how so much has changed since this 2015 post and how much remains the same.)

There are many ways to approach e-mail campaign development and production. We’ve narrowed it down to three options to cover all our clients’ budgets and all the devices out there.

We also include enhancements to our e-mail campaign services that our competitors skip. We usually do all the graphics and copywriting. For each campaign, we also produce a web page version which our clients use as landing pages for online ads or social media posts. A week after launch, we provide a free report on the campaign’s success.

And finally, because we don’t like to just do a one-off campaign with a short lifespan of value, we add the web page version to our client’s site on a news archive page so all that work put into making the e-mail campaign continues to pay off as a boost to site search engine optimization and additional information for site visitors to enjoy.

Reporting shows that around 55% of all our clients’ e-mail campaigns are being viewed on smartphones. This is a higher percentage for retail businesses and a lower percentage for B2B and service businesses. Because of this, the non-responsive e-mail campaign designs we were doing just a few years ago were dropped – a business’ e-mail must be readable and actionable on a smartphone.

Here’s what is working for our clients right now:

Mobile-friendly campaigns render cleanly, but not responsively, on all devices from smartphone (landscape and portrait) to desktop computer. These are the lowest priced options since they do not need complex responsive code or an e-mail campaign platform’s design interface.

They work well on all devices and on a smartphone do not require pinching or side-scrolling.

Here’s a mobile friendly e-mail campaign.

Responsive e-mail campaigns render the same code/design on any device. For these, we use a template provided by an e-mail campaign service provider, but prevent them from looking “from a box” with custom graphics.

Different e-mail campaign providers vary in quality and services. We like Vertical Response the best for its same-time-zone customer support and list management features, which we find to be the most adaptable to split-list campaigns and the way our clients wish to manage lists. However we have been recently surprised and pleased with how Constant Contact has improved – no more phone-tree nightmares when calling for support and great reporting. Of the main providers, MailChimp is our least favorite as the list management is non-flexible and there’s no phone support.

Here’s a sample of one of our responsive e-mail campaigns, produced through Constant Contact.

Custom, responsive e-mail campaigns require a lot of work. Two versions of each campaign are produced: a desktop version and a smartphone version. These are the best looking and performing types of e-mails as the design is specific to the device.

Our company campaigns are coded in this way.

We work closely with our clients to make sure we are providing the best fit for their needs, and their budgets.

Our e-mail campaign portfolio.

PHOTOSHOP FUN

December 10, 2015 by Rachel Hunter

(2025 review – Rachel’s grateful for her two decades of Photoshopping before AI. There’s no need for HI [human intelligence] for a project like this anymore.)

Love it when I get to play in Photoshop and make something that works for a client. These custom bracelets by Gleim the Jeweler are perfect for the event invitation “engraving.” So pretty as header for an e-mail campaign and for a home page slide.

E-MAIL CAMPAIGN HEADER:

WEB SITE HOME PAGE SLIDE:

RESPONSIVE E-MAIL CAMPAIGN

November 10, 2015 by Rachel Hunter

We’ve just finished our first e-mail campaign for Gleim the Jeweler.

Our client has traced sales back to their store and their online store from this campaign, so hopefully we’ll be doing many more of these campaigns in the future.

A bonus with working with Gleim is the beautiful jewelry.

OWN YOUR NEWS – PDF VS. OUT-GOING LINK

October 31, 2015 by Rachel Hunter

(2025 update! This info originally from 2015 is still relevant.)

Media mentions are great marketing! But if you simply link to the online version of the article, you are not getting the full benefit of the piece.

When you link to the article or post on the publishing website:

• You are directing your visitor off of your site where you can lose them to the distractions of ads, other articles, post comments, or mentions of your competition. (Look at all the distractions in the webpage capture of the article on the left side of our graphic above.)

• The publisher may remove or change the link at any time. Your article is lost and you have a dead link on your site. (BTW, if you do go this route of simply linking to an article, put a reminder in your calendar for a few times a year to test all the links on your site so you can fix any that are broken.)

• Out-going links do not help search engine optimization (SEO) at all.

We recommend putting the content of the article to a PDF which is uploaded to your website’s server. That way, you can control the content and remove ads, mentions of your competitors, and all distractions (see the clean article on the right side of the graphic above.) You always have possession of the story. And while PDFs may not be optimized for SEO the way a regular web page may be, they do help SEO.

Here’s an example We integrated press articles with items related to this event: postcard and poster (MPS designed and produced), photos, social media, blog posts, and the press release put out by our client, Hope Patricia Daly.

Send John a line for more information.