Questions to Assess Your Notepad Design by: Brent Durell

Are your custom notepads truly fit for marketing purposes? Notepad printing has of course been used for
many purposes, and marketing is one of the more alternative but surprisingly effective uses for them. However not all types of notepad printing can be used for marketing.

So, to help you determine if your own color notepads are good for marketing, here are the five basic assessment questions that you should try to answer. Just go through the steps below and you should see if your custom notepad printing will work.

1. Is your header logo and design distinct? � For a color notepad to be used for marketing, its header logo and design should of course be distinct. This allows people using the notepad to recognize and identify the maker of the notepad, and hopefully trust it more in the future.

So you should always assess if your own color notepads have header logos and designs that are distinct and different from the rest. It must have something really original so that people won�t ignore it as they use the notepad. If it does not have that distinct header element, then you might as well not use them for marketing.

2. Is your design in full color? � A good color notepad for marketing is always printed in full color. Full color notepad printing allows designers to use full color graphics in their designs for the logos, headers, watermarks and footers in the layout. So you should ask yourself if your printing options for notepad printing are set for full color or for single color prints. Make sure that it is set for full color notepad printing if you really want you use those custom pads for marketing purposes.

3. Does your notepad have a call to action? � The next question to ask is if your notepads have a �call to action�. For those new to marketing, a call to action in a printed or visual marketing medium is the part of the print where you convince people to respond to the marketing message. This is crucial for the print to produce any kind of result in marketing. Typically this is something like a statement that says �buy now!� or �contact us now!� Your color notepads must have this if they are truly aimed for marketing. So check and see if you have this element.

4. Is the size of the notepad easily mobile and easily kept? � Also, you should ask yourself if your color notepads have the proper size and dimensions for it to be mobile and be easily kept. Marketing notepads must always be small enough so that people can easily carry them around. This allows for better distribution for marketing purposes and for better acceptance by the market in general. So make sure that your custom notepad�s size is appropriate for a more mobile marketing campaign. Anything smaller than 8.5 by 11 inches should be good.

5. Is your notepad easily functional and useful? � Finally and perhaps most importantly, you should ask yourself if your marketing notepads are functional and useful. If your designs take too much space and make the notepad hardly writable then your marketing notepads fail. Make sure that your notepads have ample space for note taking so that they can still be relevant and useful for your market.

That is your 5 assessment questions for marketing notepads. If your custom notepad designs pass these questions then you have a good print design there for proper marketing.

Ad Age Survey: Marketers Buy Facebook More for Awareness Than Likes or Leads

By: Cotton Delo
Marketers who buy ads on Facebook are more focused on building brand awareness than accumulating fans, according to a new survey of Ad Age subscribers by Ad Age and Citigroup.
Asked to identify their primary goal in Facebook ads, 45.9% of respondents put building awareness and sentiment for their brands at the top. Driving traffic to brand websites was the second most-cited goal, with 17.6% of respondents saying it is their most important objective, followed by building fans or likes, staying in touch with customers, generating sales leads and social commerce.
The full survey results are available to DataCenter .
The third-place showing for fan acquisition is perhaps surprising because racking up "likes" has been the centerpiece of many Facebook marketing strategies, even if marketers have also persistently griped that they don't know whether likes translate to increased sales.
"Brands spent a lot of time and energy in 2011 building up their fan base, and fan acquisition was a top goal for many brands," said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer. "I think what you're seeing now is an evolution; now we have these fans and we have to figure out what to do with them."

Ms. Williamson noted that branding and awareness are consistently shown to be a top goal for marketers on social media, but that lead generation and sales tend to be higher priorities for b-to-b brands. On Facebook, those might be the marketplace advertisers buying ads at auction with the goal of driving game downloads and getting targeted users that might have an affinity for their product to visit their websites.
Meanwhile, the setbacks of Facebook commerce have been well documented, so it's not surprising that commerce would be the respondents' last priority, she said.
Facebook's pitch to the world's biggest consumer marketers is that it's a branding platform like TV, and it's been urging them to focus less on metrics such as click-through rates and more on reach and "resonance." The fact that a plurality of survey respondents said brand awareness was their top goal might mean that Facebook's message is sinking in, leading marketers away from expecting immediate results up front.
But "branding" could also be a response from people who feel bullish about their presence on Facebook but don't yet know what the return will be.

Build Referral-Generating Relationships With Content

By Steve Klinghoffer

Regardless of the nature of your health care practice, you may have heard the terms "relationship-based marketing" or "content marketing" recently. In marketing circles, they have become today's buzzwords. Because I have helped businesses market themselves with editorial content for almost three decades, I know content marketing to be tried and true-not a fad. When I first entered this business as a young attorney-turned-entrepreneur, we called it newsletter marketing; today, we might also refer to it as Internet, e-mail or social media marketing. Regardless of what you call it, today's marketing comes down to the idea that content is king.

Marketing has always been about relationships, but traditional advertising has changed. For today's marketers, the single best way to maintain relationships with patients and referring health care providers is through content marketing. The people you work with-and want to work with-are skeptical of marketing, especially from a health care provider. They're not looking to be sold. They're looking for a professional with a solid reputation.

By providing valuable content, you can meet the needs of patients and referring health care providers and build relationships with them. Whether it's a blog, eNewsletter, printed newsletter or social media, a content marketing strategy can build powerful relationships and generate results.

Here are four tips to make your content marketing work for your health care practice:

1. It's about them, NOT you.
The focus of traditional advertising was always "me, me, me." But the truth is, your patients and referral sources care much less about you than they do about what you can do for them. That's what makes content marketing so powerful. A dentist, for example, can develop content related to the latest breakthroughs in treatment options and provide links to these with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media.

By informing your audience, you'll demonstrate that you are the expert they should trust with their health, not the one simply trying to sell them a service.

2. Provide value.
Remember that it's about them, and your content marketing will best meet the needs of your readers. Ask yourself, will my patients or referring health care providers care about this? Why should this matter to them? These questions will help you keep the focus on information they will value. And they'll remember you for it.

3. Persist.
Sometimes, if they don't see instant results, health care practices can become discouraged with their content marketing strategy. You often won't know the full long-range impact of your blogs, newsletters or social media posts. But remember that quality content is doing something very powerful: It consistently reinforces the idea that you're the expert in your field, whether it be pediatric dentistry, orthodontics or physical therapy. It also keeps you top-of-mind with your audience.

Marketing Returns to the 16th Century

By Anthony M Turner

Take a quick look back through your history books to the 16th century and you'll quickly recognize that most people lived in small villages and seldom made contact with people from outside.

Obviously there was no electricity, telephones, public transport or other modern accoutrements back in that time which probably accounts for why most villagers seldom travelled outside of their village boundaries and when they did, it was slow and often arduous.

Typically any marketing activity revolved around the local village community and mainly happened in the local market square; the centre point of the village, the hub of commercialism and the focal point for many community relationships.

As with all societal groups, individuals got on with and trusted some neighbours more than others but all listened to local gossip and, whether they believed it or not, often used that gossip as a barometer for deciding who to do business with and who to stay clear of.

Step forward in time a little to the time of the 'railway' and then to the time of the 'telegraph' and notice how those previously remote areas become influenced by the goings on of the city and how astute city merchants created catalogues, brochures and travelling salesmen to enlighten the poor country folk as to what they were missing out on and how much better their lives would be if they only purchased whatever was being sold.

Modern marketing was born at this time and gathered momentum as the years progressed. Marketers started to develop and engage in all the psychological tactics to sell more of their wares we commonly see today. City businesses created shops, offices and manufacturing businesses to create market advantage through 'localised service' in order to sell more and more product.

As time marched forward to the information age, we saw the introduction of technologies - radio, television and then internet which sped up the sales/marketing processes and enabled marketers' greater access and faster tools to 'brainwash' consumers into the many benefits of their products through campaigns of mass advertising, societal manipulation and blatant selling.

For many years customers followed the trends, bought the products and dived deeper and deeper into debt as they blissfully contributed to an ever wasteful cycle of consumerism.

But then they (the consumers) started to wake up, they started to realise how they had become slaves to all this 'stuff' that was meant to make their lives easier, they started to resent the constant bombardment of messages telling them they were not OK if they didn't have Brand X and started to get frightened as they realised their whole world was crumbling under ever increasing mountains of debt.

They also found their voice and, through tools like social media, blatantly tell the world about those who have betrayed their trust, who have given poor service or who sell shoddy products or deliver shoddy service.

So, welcome to the world of consumer scepticism, a world where advertising messages are no longer believed and trusted, a world where personal referral from those we trust determines our buying patterns more frequently, a world where consumers help each other to determine who is worth dealing with and who is not. Then look at the way we are creating buying communities (villages) based on common interest and common need rather than geographical location and realize marketing has returned to the 16th century style - just with a global, modern twist.

Article written by Anthony M Turner - an Australian based Coach, Mentor and skills trainer for small business who has assisted around 2000 individual business owners from a wide variety of business disciplines to achieve their best.

How One to One Marketing Works

By Leland P Nelson 

One to one marketing or most known as personalized marketing is an extreme form of product differentiation. One to one marketing differentiates products from competing ones by giving unique product offerings for each customer. It is an approach that focuses on providing services or products to one customer at a time by identifying and then meeting their individual needs. One to one marketing had been most useful in interactive media such as the Internet.
This kind of strategy is applicable in all parts of organization like marketing, sales, production, service, finance, etc. Furthermore, One to One Marketing recognizes the lifetime values of loyal customers who make repeat purchases far exceed that of changeable customers who constantly switch suppliers in search of a bargain.
One to one marketing has four main steps to accomplish its desired outcome. Firstly is Identify. In this stage the main concern is to known the customers of a company, to collect reliable data about their preferences. Second is Differentiate. Distinguish the customers in terms of their lifetime value to the company, to know them by their priorities in terms of their needs and divide them into more restricted groups. Third is Interact. The aim in this stage is to know by which communication channel and by what means to contact with the client is best made. It is needed to get the customer's attention by engaging with him in ways that are known as being the ones that he prefers the most. Lastly is Customize. Personalize the product or service to the customer individually. The data that the company has gathered about a customer, needs to be put into practice and the information held has to be taken into account in order to be able to give the client exactly what he wants.
Two forms of one to one marketing are personalization and customization. Personalization is when the company's decision is based on the previous collected data from the customer, what marketing mix is suitable for individual. Example of this is Amazon.com which uses collaborative filtering to find out what book and music to recommend to customers. Customization is when the customer proactively specifies one or more elements of his or her marketing mix. Example of this is MyYahoo feature at Yahoo.com which allows users to specify elements of their home page such as the weather forecast, reports on their favorite stocks, or priorities given to local sports news.

Why Postcard Marketing?

By Dennis Boyd Jr

Postcards are a cost-effective alternative for generating leads, getting the word out about your business and your special offers, i.e. marketing. Unlike other advertising methods your message is delivered directly to the decision maker and the best part is... they don't have to open anything to get your message.
They are also cheaper than mailing letters. In fact, since the new postage increase has taken place (Effective January 22, 2012), the postage cost to mail out a standard 1st class postcard ($0.32) is over 28% cheaper than mailing out a standard 1st class letter ($0.45).
You should use them to pre-qualify prospects before they enter your sales cycle. Let them self-nominate to receive future contact from you. (When this happens, you will no longer have to make cold calls. You will make warm calls because THEY WANT what YOU HAVE to offer).
You are not trying to sell your prospect with this piece. You want them to take action and request more information. This establishes you as the expert and puts you in control because the prospect wants YOUR EXPERTISE to satisfy THEIR WANTS and NEEDS.
With any lead generation tactic, you should ALWAYS use a two-step approach. By this I mean you need to have a "Do this, Get that" mentality. In the industry, this is known as Direct-Response Marketing. Keep it simple, the harder you make things for the prospect, will in turn make it harder for you to convert them into a new customer or client.
Direct mail gives the prospect an opportunity to self-nominate and say "Hey, I'm giving you permission to market to me, now show me what you got!"
Once your prospect takes action (visits your website, sends your reply card, reply envelope or calls you for more information), you have momentarily secured their desire and now you must handle any objections they may have and close the sale. If you do not close on that call, you must follow-up with Excellent Customer Service.
Sounds like a lot of work doesn't it? Seems like it might be too much to handle? If you were doing all of this work yourself, yes it could be a lot, but as a business owner, you need a simple automated system that works for you instead of you working for it.
When you decide to use postcards as ONE OF YOUR marketing tools, you leverage your time, money and effort, so your business will do all the things it's supposed to do: increase profits, generate qualified leads, attract new business and build brand awareness... whether you decide to work or not... and do it consistently.

Package Design

By Deb Favilla 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the right packaging design is worth a thousand commercials. Packaging is much more than a plain paper box for distributing and showcasing your merchandise. A product's packaging should allow your product to stand out among the competition. The packaging design is a statement about your company, and the design should provide a pleasant customer experience after the product is purchased.
When consumers visit a store, a barrage of products and choices visually assault them, many of which are competing directly with your product. As consumers scan the shelf, they can decide which product to purchase in a matter of seconds. In that time, if the packaging design of your product does not immediately "stand-out" and "grab" the consumers' attention, they will purchase something else. Manufacturers of packaging and paper products employ creative professionals who can assist you with colors and graphics that grab a consumer's eye and make your product stand-out among the competition.
Another way to make your product stand-out is with point-of-purchase displays. Generally a large stand-alone display is located at the end of a shelf or near the checkout line at a store. A countertop display is located on a counter or shelf next to the point-of-purchase. Both stand-alone and countertop displays present a product that is easy for the customer to see and convenient to pick up. They encourage the consumers to make a last-minute or impulse purchase as they wait in line to pay for their merchandise.
Brand identification is essential in marketing your products. Proper branding immediately associates a consumer with products and enterprises, and the packaging design of your product should reflect your brand. A consumer might not recall all the details of an advertisement, but they can remember a dynamic graphic or catchy logo. The right branding can draw the attention of new customers and continue to hold and increase the loyalty of existing customers.
The goal of effective packaging design does not end with attracting the customer before the purchase but should also create a pleasant customer experience after the purchase. Packaging materials such as foam inserts, partitions, or packing peanuts ensure that the product is shipped without breakage. No consumer wants to open a package to find the merchandise inside appearing as if it just went through a trash compactor. Packaging design can also make the product easy to access and enjoyable to remove from the package. If there is more than one product in the package, or if the product has multiple parts, good packaging design ensures that all the items are well organized and easy to locate.
When considering the needs of shipping your product and how best to create a striking visual attraction to the packaging, a professional and experienced company that employs creative professionals and most modern design applications will best fit your needs. From production to point-of-sale, experts in packaging design can provide you with a range of options that can meet your package requirements and fit your budget.

The Importance of Capturing Consumer Email Data

By Inge Van Eetveldt 

Consumer email data is one of the most valuable resources available to brands in the marketing field. Collecting and being in control of a consumer database not only provides your company with a direct link to your most loyal consumers, it allows your brand to communicate in a way that is personal and highly effective. Email communication with your consumers can take many forms - whether you simply want to keep your consumers up to date on what's happening in your company or whether you use their information to create perfectly personalised promotional campaigns - the fact remains that your company database is the fuel that drives the most powerful engine in digital marketing: email.
Why email is still the best
As channels such as social media and mobile connectivity become more ubiquitous every day, may brands are inevitably asking whether it is necessary to still place as much emphasis on the collection of consumer email data in particular. Surely a Facebook 'like' or some steady traffic to your site fulfils the same objective? The short answer in this case is no. Email is still considered to be the best and most effective marketing medium available to brands and while social media and content marketing strategies also have their roles to play, they simply cannot compete with the measurable efficacy of an email marketing campaign created with the help of a profiled database. Email provides marketers with exact statistics that can track and analyse the behaviour of your consumers - unlike with other media - there is no guesswork here. You can have specific insights into who saw and interacted with your brand's campaign.
Personalised campaigns
Brands that have access to a profiled and managed email database are able to create personalised campaigns. This means using the information provided to your brand by the consumers themselves upon sign-up in order to create tailored campaigns that appeal to individual subscribers on some or even multiple levels. When it comes to personalisation in email marketing the sky is the limit - it all depends on how extensively you have asked subscribers to profile themselves. Ultimately, people respond to content and messages that are relevant to them and with email marketing and a personalised database, you don't have to fire a shot in the dark and hope that it may be relevant to the person who receives your message.
Email data rental
Email marketing in itself is a fairly simple marketing vessel, but its power lies in the quality of the consumer email data to which it is sent. However, not all companies have been in business long enough or simply collecting data long enough to have a database able to provide them with a real return on investment. This is where reputable email marketing companies that specialise in email data rental steps in. Renting another company's data means that you will gain short and limited access to their database where their subscribers have opted in to receive material from companies like you. Email data rental provides companies with a larger audience than they normally would have while also allowing your brand the option of growing your own email database through them.
Collecting email consumer data is still as important as ever, and now that email can be incorporated into all aspects of a holistic digital campaign it is one that should never be neglected.

Five Tips When Negotiating With B2B Leads

By Belinda R Summers 

As part and parcel of b2b lead generation campaign, it is only normal to be involved in business negotiations. You have to admit that this is a task that is rather difficult to perform if you are not skilled in talking with b2b leads or prospects. But you will agree that this is a necessity. Closing business deals will depend on your skills in creating brand value, and you need to prepare a few things first before you go ahead with your plans and try calling up prospects. Failure to consider the basics may put you in a bad position later on. So, how will you be able to do it? What should you be thinking about?
1. Know their ceiling - as a rule, there is a certain price or value of your service that prospects are simply not willing to pay. You need to identify what level prospects are willing to sign up before you give out the actual price. You do not want to set a price that might be easily countered by your competition in appointment setting, right?
2. Offer higher tier products first - even if prospects are looking for only a basic business solution, introducing them a higher tier product may actually be a good way to make them sign up. Only sales leads that are entirely certain of their affairs will be able to reject your offers, but most would be willing to pay the higher price, if it meant getting a higher end product or service.
3. Give some discounts - depending on the product or service you are offering, it would be advisable to offer a discount to your prospects. It would be a good idea for volume purchases or advanced payment. It will encourage prospects to do business with you. This is a normal tactic at the start, especially if you are working with them for the first time.
4. Talk to the decision maker - in the course of your work, you will have meetings with lower level executives who will demand this and that from you. As much as much as possible, before you proceed to offer different contract terms, get the feedback from the person who will actually sign the paper. You might end up offering something far less than what the prospect actually had in his mind.
5. Put a floor on your price - this is one of the most important points to consider. Remember, there is no point getting that deal if you are not making any profit at all. Try adding up the costs you will incur in providing the product or service. From there, you can sketch a clear idea on how much you should be charging. Taking deals below that amount will put you in a tight spot, no matter the size of your production volume.
It also pays to know what marketing tool you should be using to communicate with business prospects. There are a lot available, like social media or telemarketing, but what is important here is that it fits your business structure well. It should also maximize your capacity in finding, generating, and qualifying business leads.

Know How Popup Advertising Plays an Important Role in Internet Marketing by: Dylan K. Williams

Popup advertising can be very useful depending on how they are used. Most of the internet marketing experts and companies use this advertising strategy for obtaining the best results. The primary purpose of this method is to pull up the web traffic to a particular promotional website. Apart from this, popup ads will also help the business to draw more email addresses, which will be important for generating good contact lists and customer data base. This will in return help the company for email advertisement campaign. Usually, this is considered as a form of online advertisement. These are some of the major reason why it used in the internet marketing. When popup advertising is used in online marketing, it will help the website to maximize the distribution of the product information to many people. The usage of this online marketing strategy can become useful, useless or even harmful to your website. Therefore, if you are planning to use this technique for your website, it is very important to understand the process thoroughly and then use it for obtaining effective results.

The main aim of the popup advertising is to attract more web traffic to a promotional website. This could be done when certain website will be viewed by the visitors. When a visitor will visit a website, a pop up window will be allowed to appear. These ads will convince the visitor for visiting certain website for getting some freebies. Moreover, they will also provide useful information for the visitors. When the visitor is bound to visit the website, he has to click on the ad. However, when you are using such popup ads, for your website, it is very important to make sure that you are using the right graphics and words. In some cases, the visitor will neglect the pop up ads if it is very bright or in striking color. Therefore, it is very important to make sure that the ad is created in the right way, which suits your business. In order to enhance the ad, you can also give it a blinking effect. The pop up ads should be simple in appearance yet attractive for the visitors. The first glace only should convenience the eye of the visitor.

Another great advantage of using popup advertising for web advertising is that, it will help the company to generate email addresses, which are very useful for list building. When you are using pop up ads, you will be able to use it either non-permissive or in opt-in way. In opt in process, the pop up window will appear when the user is about to go away the promotional website. In some times, it will also appear when the visitor is halfway by visiting it. These pop up ads will ask the user whether he or she needs to receive newsletters about the products or services they are promoting. Here the visitor has the power to either enter his email address or even to neglect it. However, this depends on the choice of the user. When you are surfing on the web, you will be able to find pop up windows that will even provide you information on wellness, health as well as the latest trends. These ads are more informational than promotional.

Non permissive is another option of generating the email addresses with the help of pop up ads. In this list building process, the pop up window will come out by offering downloadable useful applications and unbelievable freebies, as an online advertising process. This process is also some times known as banner ads.

Can Internet Marketing Be a Long Term Business? by: Tanaka Ara

Here is the basic honest truth: most of the people get into Internet Marketing because they are convinced it is an easy way to earn quick money. Their approach is to make a fast website, put up some advertising and a few affiliate links and then sit back and watch while they earn real cash. There are a large amount of individuals who do this and also earn lots of money on the internet. But what if you want more than some extra or even quick cash (quick cash, naturally being a misnomer)? Can Internet Marketing really be leveraged to produce a worthwhile and long term career?

The quick and dirty answer is that yes, you are able to make Internet Marketing your long term and sustainable career. You only need to take on the project properly. The procedures and programs you use to build something to earn fast money are not all that different than the methods and systems you will use to build long term profits. So what would you do if you need to develop a sustainable career on the internet?

It is very important that the first thing you do, in order to earn long term money online, is accept the fact that you are going to have to do real work. You will have to do actual and real work on a daily basis and you will have days when you feel fantastic about what you do and days when you wish you could find something else to take on. This causes it to be just about like every other occupation that is out there. If you want to produce lasting cash flow by working lots right now and not at all later on then you are going to be in for a rude awakening in a little while. So be ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

There are a few ventures that lend themselves much better to a long term career than others will. Affiliate marketing, to use one example, is a great task for someone who wants to earn money on a part time basis or to supplement your already existent income. Is it truly possible to earn a full time income in this manner? You could if you pick out only the right products and then work like crazy to promote them. A far better approach, nevertheless, is to create your own products or websites and then promote those. This gives you full control over the projects you take on and how you accomplish them. And you will end up more likely to stick with it in the long run. If you want to give a service on the web this works much the same way. Writers, for example, need to create websites for themselves and create portfolios that they can point to as examples of their work.

Finally, perhaps the most significant thing that you need to recognize is that, when you want to build a long term and reliable income on the internet, you need to truly dedicate yourself to your task. You might have fun and feel rewarded by your efforts but first you should tell yourself "yes, I really want to do this." Making a half hearted effort is not about to get you anywhere.