The Role of Color Psychology in Marketing In building a brand, the visual impact of a business logo or website design is as important as the value of the product or service being offered. And one important aspect of that imagery is the color. For some marketers, a color is just something that could be picked off the top of the head and doesn’t really signify something. But for those who really invest a lot of brainwork in their business image, colors are something that helps define a brand’s reputation. Brandon Gaille, CEO of the internet marketing company ByReputation.com, which specializes in SEO, social media, reputation management, video production, and web design, shared his thoughts on how colors can influence people to support (or not support) a brand: From brandongaille.com: How Do Colors Affect Us Mentally? Think about the psychological effects of colors before using them. Schemes, Contrasts, and Choosing Colors When designing a webpage, contrast is very important.
16 Traits Of The World's Most Successful People When the young journalist Napoleon Hill interviewed the industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1908, Carnegie liked Hill so much that he decided he would share all of the strategies that turned him from a penniless immigrant into the richest man in the world. From that point forward, Hill dedicated his career to understanding the work ethics of highly successful people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, collecting them into his own philosophy and then packaging it into articles, books, and lectures for regular people wanting to achieve more in life. His 1937 book "Think and Grow Rich" is one of the bestselling books of all time. Before he began writing books, Hill ran two magazines with articles that provided the foundation for his most famous work. In the inaugural April 1921 issue of Napoleon Hill's Magazine, Hill wrote about "The Magic Ladder to Success," an essay based on a speech he gave on a tour of the U.S. and would later adapt into a full-length book in 1930. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Business Week: 10 Marketing Rules from Super Bowl Ads Super Bowl season is once again sweeping the entire nation and even other regions of the world. Football fans put their game faces on, while marketers see this as a crucial opportunity to advertise their brands and take advantage of the global attention. Steve Mckee of Business Week shared a post on what marketers can learn from this event, especially in terms of branding focus, strategy and line of attack. From BusinessWeek.com: The concepts needed for a winning Super Bowl campaign are the same for any powerful, year-round marketing program, regardless of the size of your company or budget. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
6 Tips for Making Your Customers Feel Awesome (and Why It Matters) This is a guest post by Alice Default, who’s is in charge of marketing at Front, with a sweet spot for content. She loves books, to-do lists and food (like a lot). Get in touch with her at @alice_default. A few weeks ago, when Lumio (one of Front’s very early adopters) learned that we were moving to the same city as them, they did something that we would have never expected: they invited us to dinner! Not to try and get a discount, or talk about business — we don’t even work in the same industry. They just liked our product so much that they wanted to meet the team who was behind it. We know that being in contact with clients is important, and we’ve done it all: product demos, sales calls, Skype feedback sessions, etc. Today, as marketing automation and pre-written conversations become more and more prevalent, caring for your customers and nurturing real relationships is crucial to growing a successful business. 1. 2. Stay as close as you can to your customers for as long as you can. 3.
Don't Let Perfect Cripple You. Get Stuff Done With These 3 Tips. As an entrepreneur, you want to put your best foot forward in every aspect of your life and business. While perfect is great, completed is often a very agreeable alternative. Entrepreneurs often get hyper focused on details that prevent them from moving their idea, project or business forward. This isn’t an argument for poor quality work or half-assed efforts, but too many times entrepreneurs seek to make something perfect and get lost in analysis paralysis. Don’t let perfection get the better of you! Related: 4 Bulletproof Productivity Secrets Gleaned From the World's Great Achievers Here are three ways to help overcome analysis paralysis to actually get stuff done. 1. Maybe your efforts could be better, but perhaps those improvements and ideas could go into the next iteration of your product instead of holding you back from pushing forward. Related: A Bad Decision is Better Than No Decision At All 2. 3. Related: 6 Steps to Salvage an Unproductive Day
On B2B Lead Generation and the Value of Prospect Incentives No matter what strategy each business employs for their B2B lead generation campaign, one ultimate goal stands out: getting prospect information for them to become leads. Whether it’s through subscriptions forms, call to actions or downloads, marketers would use every tactic to achieve this goal. But prospects don’t just give out information – you have to persuade them to. It could be in the form of a very compelling content piece or an awesome freebie. This is the value of incentive. The following 3 questions, shared by Eric Coffman, Research Analyst and contributor at MarketingSherpa.com, examine the significance of offering these incentives to prospects for B2B lead generation purposes: Do your incentives provide tangible value to your visitors? Incentives come in many forms and differing levels of value. There are two important things to consider when thinking about incentives: cost and relevance. Will visitors to this landing page find the incentive relevant?
The Brilliant Marketing of the Spurs' Becky Hammon Hire The defending NBA champions, the San Antonio Spurs, already stood in stark contrast to the rest of the league. They play "team" ball. They have an international squad of players who pass first and are generally heedless of their individual, statistical accomplishments. On Monday, the Spurs named Becky Hammon as an assistant coach, making her the first full-time female assistant coach in league history. As Ben Collins pointed out yesterday on Esquire.com, the Spurs' press release of the announcement does not once say "woman" or "female." Given how image-conscious and media-savvy pro sports teams are--especially if the story has a potentially trending gender-based headline--it's indeed remarkable that the Spurs' press release was so matter-of-fact in its absence of attention-seeking. The San Antonio Spurs today announced that Becky Hammon has been hired as an assistant coach. The whole tone of it is: "We needed a great assistant coach and we found one.
50 Ways to Promote and Market your Blog Posts The angels are singing, the sun is shining and a torrent of traffic is about to turn up. It is the best article you have ever written and it deserves some attention. It’s your baby. You spent time agonizing over the headline, the introduction is a sizzler and the structure is written for web skimming readers. Nothing happens. The visitors don’t show. The reality is very different to the imagination that started with a dream of thousands of fanatical readers, advocates and viewers turning up to your web front door. No, it’s just time to roll up the sleeves and build traffic one marketing tactic at a time. You don’t need to do all of them but just start. Here are 50 ways of promoting your articles on your blog. Let’s kick this off with some social media marketing tactics. On your profile and Facebook page, post as many inspiring statuses that will engage your friends, fans and followers with a link to your published article. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
The “Customer Service Element” in B2B Telemarketing Just because clients in the Business-to-Business (B2B) sector are business professionals doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be treated as ‘customers’. In fact, they sometimes need more attention and nurturing than regular consumers. Lead generation in B2C is quite simple: you present a product or service, make sure it caters to the needs of your target market, add a little advertising magic, and you’re done. Wear your customer service “badge” Some experts recommend using a “business language” when talking to B2B prospects. Of course, there are fundamental customer service rules, which need not be elaborated: Introduce yourself first and brand your callAddress the other party appropriatelyListen attentively and never interruptSay your “please”s and “thank you”s These are pretty basic and may seem like they shouldn’t have anything to do with a call’s success, but these little things can serve as an emotional investment to foster a budding business relationship.
B2B Lead Management Process: Why you need one Everyone who’s in the business of B2B lead generation knows how important it is to capture and nurture leads. The task does not conclude once the prospect agrees to disclose information, sign up for something or agrees to an appointment. Leads still need a working, effective management process. Do you have a standard process to manage your leads? What do you do with leads that aren’t quite ready to buy or commit? If you answered ‘no’ to any of the questions above, you’ve got a problem with a lead management process. Gather valuable dataValidate and rank leads according to probability of successEstablish processes to nurture pre-sale leadsIdentify sales- ready leads One may find it surprising that most marketing teams have no lead management program in place. Also, without a lead management system what would take care of the prospects, they will probably end up buying from your competition. The objective of a lead management process is threefold.