Be current

Create a contest that that is relevant to the current events. For example you could create a holiday contest with a virtual Easter Egg hunt. Hide Easter eggs on your website each day, for a period of time and invite your Facebook followers to join the contest. The first player to find an egg and click on it wins a prize. Perhaps it could be gift cards to the surrounding businesses within your community or your own products. All of the clues and hints to find the eggs could be posted on Facebook to drive people to your site!

People love photos

Run a contest using photos of your products, or business. Ask Fans to snap a picture of your products / business (or better yet, of them using your products!) and post the photos on your wall. As a reward give those that have posted the photo a gift card as a thank you.

Another option is to have Fans post a photo of themselves, could be seasonal such as Halloween or of them using your product. Then ask FANs to vote on the best photo and give a reward for those voting and a reward for the best photo.

Make them guess

Run a guessing game contest the same day of every week. The guessing game could be a word jumble of local businesses or landmarks, a picture of a local place where people guess where it’s taken, or old standby of how many items are in the container.

Ask for insight

Ask Fans to share tips on how they do things. The tip with the most unique comments or likes could win a prize. An example could be “what are your tips to growing a great vegetable garden”. Keep it light and fun, not to technical.

Favorite quotes

Ask fans to submit their favorite quotes. This is simple and can be applied to just about any business. The person who got the most likes or comments on their quote wins the prize.

Thank them for “likes”

Run a weekly contest where you’re giving away a prize for those Fans that have Liked something on your wall. Each week, put all the names of the “likers” in a list and do a random drawing to pull names.

Facebook offers a lot of ways to connect with customers, Friends and fans. Please share your Facebook contest success stories in the comments.

The “Direct Mail” Brochure

Direct mail advertising is most often use to communicate a message to a lot of people – usually a tactic meant to reach large quantities. Since direct mail materials are likely to reach customers who are not necessarily expecting your information and may have a large stack of mail to sort through, it’s important to make this type of brochure stand out!

When creating a direct mail brochure, remember that the brochure will serve as many readers’ first introduction to your company. You should communicate your value proposition, what sets you apart from your competition and how your unique strengths will benefit them as a customer. The goal with direct mail brochures is the whet their appetite enough to get them to call your or visit your website.

The “Response” Brochure

When people ask about your product, they have expresses some level of interest and therefore should be considered differently. Since they’ve already expressed interest, write this brochure to take your prospect to the next step in the buying process. This piece should be a bit more specific in addressing how your value points can address their points of pain. Be sure to include facts and testimonials as well.

The “Leave-Behinds” Brochure

This type of brochure is named for the brochures you leave behind after meeting a potential customer. Generally these people are fairly interested in your product or services since they’ve given you the time to talk about it. This type of brochure should be written to be your voice when you aren’t there – reiterate your sales pitch but in the written word.

Write this type of brochure with a complete description of your product and its benefits. Think more Features, Attributes and Benefits, or FAB as we say in the biz.

The “You May Also Be Interested in This” Brochure

This is the brochure you give to recent clients to let them know about the other products / services you offer that may be relevant to their needs. Be sure to demonstrate how your products / services work together and complement each other. This brochure is a great way to demonstrate that you are in-touch with their needs and able to serve them in more ways than one.

Now that you know the types of brochures, figure out where they fit into the buying process for you. When all else fails, remember the audience, where they are in the buying process, and what they need to be communicated to progress to the next stage in the buying process.

Since there are many highly intelligent experts that have spent a lot of time figuring out what subject line formats work best, let’s learn from them! Emarketer.com recently posted an article on email marketing subject lines and below are their findings.

Personalization continues to be more and more important in all areas of marketing and email marketing is no different. The words “you” and “your” top the list for most used terms in subject lines. Below is the full list but first a quick word of caution – some of these words can be flags for spam so be cautious how you use them.

Review the information below and consider how it could have a positive impact on your email marketing.

Top E-Mail Subject Lines Focus on ‘You’

Marketers try for personal connection with recipients

Polls show that marketers are aiming for personalization to make their e-mails stand out in recipients’ inboxes, and the rise of social media has made many consumers expect a more personal relationship with brands. And a look at e-mail subject lines suggests marketers are following that lead.

While in November 2008, subjects with “you” and “your” barely beat out “free” offers, usage of “you” to address recipients directly rose by 2009 to appear in more than one-fifth of e-mail subjects. On the flip side, terms such as “free” and “ship” decreased in importance.

Top 10 Subject Line Terms Used by US E-Mail Marketers, November 2008 & November 2009 (% of total)

Experian’s “2010 Digital Marketer” report said this reflected the growing savvy of marketing e-mail recipients. Consumers now expect free shipping offers, which makes them less of a selling point in e-mail subject lines.

Offers of savings in general, however, remained important, and with good reason. More than one-half of adults said they were likely to open an e-mail containing promotions or coupons, and 30% said they would forward such an e-mail to others, up from 28% in 2008.

Among multichannel retailers, for example, “save,” “off” and “% off” each appeared in about 12% of subject lines. Shopping and classifieds sites saw the highest share of traffic coming from e-mail clicks, compared with other industries, at 9%.

Top 10 E-Mail Marketing Subject Line Terms Used by US Multichannel Retailers, November 2009 (% of total)

Experian also found that e-mails encouraging visits to stores increased by 50% compared with 2008. And the use of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” more than doubled, as Web marketers included more Black Friday offers and consumers became more familiar with the latter term.

Keep up on the latest digital trends. Learn more about an eMarketer Total Access subscription today.

Check out today’s other article, “Social Sites Lure Users Around the Clock.”

Often times we take our existing relationships for granted and as a result we unintentionally neglect them – clients and/or influencers. Many of you have probably experienced this issue in some form as it commonly happens to marketing and sales people. I guess it’s because we are always asked to “get more”. Get more traffic, get more leads, get more conversions, get more sales….get more! And if we are honest with ourselves, we’re all motivated by the chase of the new. This issue can probably be chalked up to “the pursuit of something new” syndrome (yes, I just made that up but I stake claim to it – please send all royalty payments in cash).

The irony is that many times, “the pursuit of something new” actually prevents us from getting more business, and takes longer or costs us significantly more to do so. Identifying those you suspect would be good customers, targeting prospective customers and building a relationship with a new customer is many times a long and expensive journey. On average, the cost of acquiring new customers can cost 5x more than retaining current customers.

Don’t get me wrong, your sales efforts need to be balanced based on your situation – and for many that is a balance between reoccurring sales, add-on sales and new sales. However, if you only have a dollar to spend on marketing – that dollar is best spent on communicating to your existing clients. Here are a few tips on marketing to existing customers to drive sales:

1. Stay in touch
We prefer email marketing or personalized notes. Keep in touch periodically and especially on special occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, etc).

2. Show your appreciation
Demonstrate your appreciation for their relationship by sending things like a gift certificate to their favorite coffee shop or restaurant.

3. Make connections
Make a referral and send your clients business whenever possible. Connecting clients with other business that may be a referral sources is often appreciated.

4. Spend time with them
While this may be more of a sales tactic, it doesn’t have to be a sales pitch. Make sure you spend time with you clients periodically – and don’t “sell” them unless they express interest. Think relationship building, not sales.

5. Manage your reputation
Good customer service keeps customers coming back but an unhappy customer can be costly. Make sure you listening for frustrations when you do interact with customers, but also listen on social media tools. Frustrated customers will share their frustration on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, SmallerIndiana and the like. By monitoring these tools you can response quickly an put out any fires. This is called reputation monitoring & management – if you are not doing this, contact Three Hats right away as it could be a costly mistake!

6. Share good news
When there is good news about your business or your clients business and industry, send them a quick note referencing the article.

7. Ask for feedback
Ask your customers how you are doing and if there are ways you can improve your service. This can be an informal call/email or a more formal survey.

As we become more and more of a “digital society”, how we communicate is changing and so are our communication habits. The Internet and the thousands of communication tools that have evolved with it (Email, Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter & many more) give us the ability to communicate 24/7 and with people all over the world, but are then enabling “bad communication practices”?

Are we using these tools improperly to communicate?

To answer this question, ask yourself these two basic questions:

1. Who am I communicating to with this tool – the target audience?
2. What information do these people want to receive?

We are seeing a lot of people communicating the same message, via multiple tools, to various audiences. Frankly, that’s just bad communication! Some of the more prevalent tools we see this happening on are Facebook, LinkedIN & Twitter. We commonly see people linking their Twitter accounts to the Facebook and LinkedIN accounts – and vice versa. Each of these tools has a different purposes, different audiences and function differently. As a result, you shouldn’t communicate the same across all of them.

To illustrate the point – would you share the same information to your mother on Facebook as you would with a potential employer on LinkedIN? Or better yet, would you share the same drunken college story with your buddy on Facebook as you would with a business partner in Twitter? Probably not. I don’t mean to pick on Facebook – that’s just the easiest example as it is one of the most common tools.

Below are some real world examples that we’ve seen on Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter.

Facebook Example
Would your Friends on Facebook understand a post like:

“Thanks @SomePersonsName for the @SomeOrganizationsName mention at #QRS! Thanks @ SomePersonsName & @ SomePersonsName for tweeting about it!”

Unless you are an active Twitter user, the above looks like Pig Latin to you and your Facebook Friends.

LinkedIN Example
Would your professional contacts on LinkedIN appreciate a status update like:

“It’s impossible to flirt with the bank tellers because they see how broke I am #tfln (awesome!) 3 days ago from Twitter”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say your business contacts don’t really care about you flirting with anyone and probably have a different perception of you after reading this!

Twitter Example
If you work for a nationally recognized PR firm, would your company, colleagues, peers or fellow citizens appreciate a Tweet like:

“Fine New Orleans. Go back to your stupid flooded sh#t hole of a city with the trophy”

I know for a fact that the person who tweeted this is perceived much differently now!

Should you communicate this way?

These types of bad communication practices are becoming more and more common and are “cluttering” up our lives even more than they already are. If I am connected to you on LinkedIN (a professional networking website) I don’t want to hear about you “flirting” with anyone. And as a result of you telling me that – I probably don’t want to be networked with you anymore.

It is imperative to understand what the purpose of the tool is, whom we are communicating to and what information they want to receive from us.

Why is this important

Why is this important to your business? Because if you don’t understand this point, your customers might not want to be networked with you anymore either! Remember, you do have some control over how you or your business is perceived.

If you want help understanding how to use these tools to better communicate for your business, give us a call. 888.694.0646

Should I be using these tools to market my business?

We suggest the answer to this frequently asked question be a resounding, definite, straightforward, MAYBE!

Let me explain. First let’s start off with explaining that Facebook and Twitter are “social media tools”. Social media appears to be an ambiguous term and there are many different definitions floating around. Our interpretation of social media is web-based technologies used to stimulate social interaction and communication. At the end of the day, Facebook and Twitter are simply “communication tools”, and there are dozens of other “tools” just like them under the social media umbrella.

Now, back to the question at hand: Should I be using these tools to market my business? To answer this question, we refer to our three principles of marketing.

1. How are you different and why would someone what to buy from you?
2. Who is your target audience (in most cases, your buying audience)?
3. How does your target audience prefer to be communicated to?

Answering these three questions is the first step to every marketing initiative, and evaluating an investment into Facebook and Twitter is no different. It is easy to succumb to the peer pressure of Brian Williams and jump right into using Facebook and Twitter, but we are here to tell you….MAYBE!

The marketing principal of “How are You Different” is vitally important, but for this article, we are going to focus more on the “Target Audience” and “Communication Preference” principles.

The biggest attractions to these communication tools seems to be:

1. Everyone else claims they’re doing it, and
2. It’s free…we’ll, kinda

There are a tremendous amount of people, possibly even your target audience, using Facebook and Twitter but you must determine if they are the “right people”. So, you must ask yourself, “Is your target audience on Facebook and/or Twitter?” Both of these tools are Internet based, which means we have a tremendous amount of data to help us answer these questions. Spend some time defining your target audience, and performing research to determine if they are in fact using these either or both of these tools.

This is where the free part comes into question. The tools are free, but there is time required to determine if they are appropriate communication tactics for your business and what your plan is for reaching your target audience. Furthermore, there is time associated with setting up these tools, and actively using them to communicate and participate in conversations with your target audience.

That’s right, having conversations! An important aspect to both Facebook and Twitter is interaction. These are not your traditional one-way broadcast tools like TV or Radio. Those that are your Friends/Fans on Facebook and Followers on Twitter expect to have a virtual conversation with you. If you approach these relationships by just broadcasting information and not interacting, you’ll soon find that no-one is listening!

There is time associated with defining and building the measurement system to evaluate the effectiveness of your social media marketing plan and if you are receiving an appropriate return on investment. There may not be a cost to purchase these tools, but they certainly require planning and strategy along with time to use them properly – and time is money!

So MAYBE! Make sure you address the three principles of marketing and if you conclude that social media marketing is right for your business, spend the time to plan your work and work your plan.
If you are not already, follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

I think of myself as pretty “handy”. I enjoy doing small projects around the house but certainly know I have limitations when it comes to building things (especially when electricity is involved!) I’m lucky to have most the tools and actually know how to use the majority of them. I have multiple hammers and have driven a few nails over my 32 years.

Most of us have at least some building tools – like a hammer, and even though most would say they can use a hammer to hang a picture, or build a flower box, few would say they could use it to build something significant like a home. That requires a set of skills and experience many of us don’t have. I learned the lesson early in life when I misused a hammer and almost knocked myself unconscious… and I still have the scar to prove it!

Email Marketing is no different – maybe no physical scaring, but if you try to do it yourself you could be putting your business in harm’s way. Email marketing uses a tool, email – which is probably even more prevalent than a hammer these days. To do email marketing right, it requires a set of skills and experience many business owners don’t have – much like building a home. Just because I know how to use a hammer, I certainly wouldn’t try to use one to build my own home. In the nearly 10 years that I’ve been a marketer, I’ve found that Email Marketing is one of the most difficult aspects of marketing. It is extremely challenging – even for professionals that do it on a regular basis.

So why do so many people believe they can do email marketing without the necessary skills and experience? Based on the numerous conversations with clients that have tried it themselves, we believe it is due to a lack of understanding. There are simply hundreds of potential points of failure with email marketing. To be blunt, even though you know how to use email, or even one of the many “self service” systems available now for email marketing, you should not do your own Email Marketing unless you are an experienced professional. Your business may not be able to recover from the proverbial scar that could be made if you make even one mistake.

If not done properly, one simple email could cost you thousands of dollars in fines, damage your brand, harm your client relations or even lose customers.

Below are just a few of the finer details that many are not aware of with Email Marketing:

Email Permission:
Did you realize that if you send a mass email to someone without their permission, you are actually breaking the law? By far the most important aspect of email marketing is the concept of permission. Businesses sending emails without the recipients “permission” is SPAM and could be in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, which means the sender could be subject to penalties of up to $16,000 for each separate incident. Just because you’ve exchanged business cards at a networking event, doesn’t give you the legal permission you need to add that person to your email list.

And even if you have a legitimate email list, there are a number of technical qualifications you must adhere to – like including your snail mail address in the email.

Email Design:
The design of your email plays a huge role if your email is received, opened and read. Did you know that there are over 18 mainstream email systems used and that the emails you send look differently in each of these various programs? Have you ever seen your email marketing in AOL? Yahoo? Gmail? Outlook 2003? Outlook 2007? Mozilla? If I am speaking a foreign language to you right now, then you may be sending poor-looking emails to your clients and prospects without knowing it – even if you are using a reputable “self-service” system.

Email Spam filters:
Are you aware that there are 11 mainstream Spam filters and that each have different definitions as to what looks like Spam? Do you know that the wrong characters and words in your email can affect whether your recipients even receive your email? If not, you are probably wasting money on emails that aren’t even being delivered to your recipient’s inbox – let alone being read. These are things that “self-service” systems typically don’t help with either.

Email Content
Once the email is delivered in the recipient’s inbox, the next most important piece is the subject line. Do you know what makes compelling subject lines – causing people to want to open and read your email? Are you aware that if your subject line is too short or too long, fewer people will open the email? Do you understand how images work in emails between email programs? Do you know when to use images and when not to use them? Were you aware that approx 30% of email recipients don’t even know that images are disabled in their email system – meaning they are not seeing your images?

Email Measurement
Do you understand keywords, hyperlinks, landing pages and other aspects in your content that make email marketing effective and measureable? Do you know the best days and times to send your emails to your target audience to assure the greatest open rate? Do you know what audience segmentation is and how it can add to your email effectiveness?

Much like building a home, email marketing requires the necessary skills and experience. If you think email marketing can be and effective marketing tool for your business, you need to leverage a professional who has spent the time learning the “ins and outs” of this marketing tactic.

Three Hats Marketing has helped many businesses effectively use email marketing – and we can help yours as well.

We’ve got the scars to prove it!

Many businesses combine the function of Marketing & Sales. In some cases one team facilitates both needs and in other cases one person oversees both functions. In any case, it usually doesn’t work! Sales and marketing are two completely different business functions – admittedly there should be a close collaboration between the two, but still separate. If you are looking for a short definition, marketing activities feed sales efforts and support the long term vision of the company.

• Marketing is the understanding of how your service/product is unique – who the buying audience is that needs your service/product and how that target audience prefers be to be communicated to.
• Sales is understanding the potential client’s true needs, specific points of pain and how to remove any hurdles that may prevent them from buying your service/product.

To be truly effective, you must assemble your team with the right people & process in each of these business functions. Both groups need to consist of people that understand the value of what your company sells, how that value impacts the consumers you are selling it to, and how the competition stands up to your service/product.

Your marketing team needs to understand how to best communicate your Unique Selling Proposition to the target audience. This may at times require using multiple channels to communicate to multiple audience segments. The people in your marketing department need to understand the effectiveness of each communication tactic and what the expected Return On Investment is. This team needs to be able to create the communication tools which may require copy writing, graphic design, email marketing, direct mail, website development, Internet marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click, video production and much more. Your marketing team needs to know how to measure the effectiveness of implemented tactics and communicate this information to the decision makers.

An effective marketing department requires much more than just creating pretty pictures! We commonly dissect the functions of a marketing department into three categories: strategy, management & execution. Every marketing activity, not matter how big or small needs to these three elements to be effective. To do so requires a lot of experience, resources and knowledge. If you can’t afford to have all these resources, perhaps you should consider an Outsourced Marketing Department – provides all the resources, experience and skill set of an entire Marketing Department, for less than the cost of one marketing employee.

Sales – we’ll, sales sells! Sales removes obstacles and provides trust. Short and simple – I am a marketing guy after all!

You can’t afford to ignore the needs of needs marketing or sales. You can’t afford to have one resource serving both functions. Sales and marketing. Marketing and sales. Each needs the other. Each must reinforce the other.

If you think you can’t afford all the needed resources of a marketing department – use an Outsourced Marketing Department.

Outsourced marketing enables you to add leadership, experience, and expertise to the marketing and advertising needs of your company without the typical associated costs of adding full-time staff.

You can add these integral pieces of the puzzle to your business while maintaining the flexibility to only pay for what you need when you need it. There are typically several financial models to best suite your budgetary situation – from a monthly retainer to project-based fixed fees.

In addition to the financial benefits of outsourcing your marketing, below is a list of a few additional:

1. Additional expertise in marketing strategy, management and implementation – as well as the creativity of an ad agency
2. Draw from general business expertise of what works and doesn’t
3. Provide a fresh, outside perspective on your business and industry
4. Offset the impact of marketing staff reductions
5. Hire only when you need resources
6. Maintain a sense of priority and focus with critical projects by knowing your need will never fall by the wayside

Tom Smith is the founder of Trendstream, a research consultancy that specialises in providing research and consultancy on social media, web and mobile. He formerly worked as Head of Consumer Futures at Universal McCann.

Social media continues to grow globally in terms of adoption, usage, interest and impact in a massive way. It’s undeniably changing the way that content and information work particularly in terms of the publishing of consumer opinion. This has transformed the way that consumers relate to brands and the way that brands should operate, driving direct interaction, transparency and a more consultative approach.

However, we still operate in a system defined by the old media world and consequently big brand involvement is still in the main tentative and sporadic. From my experience of trying to get big brands to embrace the social revolution, there are a number of reasons why they have yet to embrace the real opportunities that involvement can deliver:

1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel: It is of course so much more; it is a completely different approach to interacting with consumers and customers. Of course, you can advertise in a social media environment, but the true return on investment comes from developing communities, creating content to be shared, and talking and listening directly with consumers.

2. It does not fit into current structures: True social media falls somewhere between marketing, PR, communications, content production and web development. No one is quite sure whose responsibility it is and who should ultimately deliver their organisation’s social media strategy.

3. Communities and content are global: Users of social media connect, consume, and share content globally with little care for international borders. Marketing and PR departments and objectives are set up nationally or regionally. Very few organisations have a truly international structure and perspective.

4. Social media needs a long term approach: To build community, distribute content, or get people actively involved in an application takes time. Marketing and PR work on short time frames and are wedded to sets of individual campaigns or short term objectives. Social media is not a campaign, it’s a permanent approach.

5. No guaranteed results: You book advertising and it’s guaranteed to work. For, example you book a web campaign on page views and you keep going until you reach your goal. This is what advertisers call a push medium, i.e. you choose when people see it. Social media is a pull medium; usage and interaction is totally dependent on the user choosing to do so. If it’s not relevant or lacks creative brilliance it will not work. This makes it hard.

6. The metrics are new: Companies are used to the big numbers of advertising, but these numbers are different. Advertising is measured in booked exposures, i.e. page views, while social media is measured in direct interactions, i.e. number of friends, number of views or number of users. These numbers will always be smaller, but not necessarily any less measure of success.

Read the full post at Mashable.com