New Online Articles

A successfully managed advertising agency knows they must combine their professional expertise with the goals of their client. At times, they may even have to guide the client in a better direction. Agencies with experience know this must be done tactfully.

A lot of times clients have great ideas. A strong agency can incorporate those ideas into tried and true marketing strategies. When searching for an online advertising agency, make an effort to find a company that understands the delicate balance of blending ideas.

Some companies believe they are the experts and should not be questioned. A lot of small business owners want to call all of the shots. It becomes apparent early on whether personality styles will mesh.

Speak with ad agencies about their advertising agency management techniques. Wag the Dog Marketing will work with you establish a blend of client ideas and agency expertise.

Building Relationships

In addition to the work you do with your advertising agency, it is important to build relationships within your industry. In many cases, these can be profitable to both parties. If you have never considered partnering with other companies in order to optimize your advertising, now is the time to explore this option.

Consider companies that offer services that can be combined with yours. For instance, if you are a moving company, you may want to build a marketing relationship with a box distributor. You can share ad space on your websites and offer recommendations to one another.

In order for this to work, be sure you trust the companies you are trading advertising with. If you will be giving them word of mouth referrals, they should be reputable. You should also know that a trustworthy company is representing you. Do not associate yourself with companies with negative images.

Part of advertising agency media management includes linking industry partners together. Wag the Dog Marketing can ensure you make beneficial choices.

Create a Masterpiece

A great way to spread the word about your company is in a detailed manner that the average customer does not expect. Author a book about the history or your company or field. With the popularity of ebooks, this will not need to be several hundred pages. Just putting together a book that is 20 or 30 pages will let your customers know you are an expert in your field.

If you think people may not be interested in what you have to say, think again! A lot of potential customers want to understand the ins and outs of the products and services you offer. Even if someone chooses not to read your ebook they can still be impressed with your effort and knowledge.

The best advertising agency management will include sharing innovative ideas with their client.

Invite Friends…

Or at least invite guest posters. These can be regular visitors to your site or anyone that has won a contest for posting on your message boards. Be sure you evaluate the writing style and ability of any guest posters.

Let writers know you reserve the right to edit their work, but assure them that the general message of their post will remain. This gives them a chance to promote themselves or their business, or just share their feelings concerning your products.

Great advertising agency management will help you utilize all of the tools available for your use. Wag the Dog Marketing is a company that has internet marketing under control.

Rich Armstrong is a marketing consultant for Wag the Dog Marketing. Learn more about advertising agency management and other tricks of the trade - visit www.top-dog.org today.

There are many uses of call tracking for marketing companies. For companies that handle multiple campaigns it is important that each marketing effort records precise data about the responses generated. Marketing companies know there are plenty of numbers to crunch and call, tracking reduces that stress while increasing productivity. Clients are always looking for the marketing company that will produce results and more importantly help them figure out how to focus their marketing dollars. Some of the statistics provided by call tracking are showing all campaign and call activity, average call length, track your return on investment (ROI), which areas (i.e. area codes or states) are providing the most calls, and closing ratios.

Another good feature of call tracking is the real-time reports generated, which can be immediately downloaded for review. You can view your call logs and listen in on recorded conversations between your agent and the customer. Most, if not all, call tracking systems will allow you to download the recording as a WAV or MP3 file.

The way that marketing companies benefit from call tracking is how this software streamlines your reports. While it takes several man hours of hard work deciphering the statistics, you get all activity logged into easy to understand graphs and reporting methods that instantly display how your business is doing. It allows you to better position yourself in this competitive marketing environment and make wise decisions with your budget. Investing in a good call tracking system can prove to be priceless for the amount of data you’re able to collect, not to mention the ease of the system. With a good system you will be able to take on more clients and handle multiple campaigns with less stress.

Quality control in any business is important. With call tracking you can listen in to your agents and make suggestions on how they take the call. Say for instance that your marketing company includes a call center, how will you make sure all of your agents are being professional and effective? Listening in on conversations and instructing them is key. You don’t build a successful business by allowing poor phone etiquette and leading customers to believe your business is not the best in the industry. Not to mention this also affects closing new and/or repeat business. By utilizing call tracking you’ll see the many great benefits for yourself. You’ll begin to see how it optimizes your work flow, save time and money, and bring in new business.

Daniel Bernal is vice president of a direct marketing firm and has over 10 years of business management experience. He understands how call tracking can benefit marketing companies and has developed a call tracking system around this knowledge.

A good promotional campaign is the core of successful business. However promotion doesn’t have to be expensive. Your display signage is a great way to reach and influence customers.

Display Signage Is Economical Marketing

With all the advertising options available, display signage is still one of the most effective methods of capturing customer attention. One of the great strengths of visual displays is their immediacy. Once you capture customers’ attention, all they have to do is walk into your business. With commercials, flyers and other advertisements the customer has to make a more deliberate effort to reach your company and it’s too easy for them to become distracted.

Signs are inexpensive and durable. Once you buy the sign, it keeps sending out your message for no additional cost, bringing in new customers every day. Other types of promotion keep costing you month after month if you want to keep your message visible to the public.

Signage Design Tips

Since so many people are going to see your display signage, you need to consider the design very carefully. A sign is simply a communication medium and you want to be sure it is sending the message you think it is.

How far away will people be viewing it and how fast will they be moving? Visual displays for an indoor mall shop will be different than those for a store looking out on a busy freeway. If your visual displays are an indistinct blur, it can’t do its job. Use simple designs and fonts. Fancy lettering may seem like a good idea, but often it just makes it hard for viewers to read the name of your business. Your logo should be clearly displayed so even if customers can’t read the name, they will still know it’s your business.

Putting Up the Sign

Once you have your display signage, you need to place it properly for maximum impact. It should face the direction you expect most traffic to come from. If you have multiple avenues of heavy traffic, use more than one sign. Most signs are either parallel with or perpendicular to the front of the building, but a diagonally mounted sign can be seen from both directions. Many businesses use two signs in the classic wedge shape so customers can see it from the front, left or right of the store.

Place lighting so the sign is clearly visible at night, even if your business isn’t open during these hours. The sign sill acts as a promotional tool at times the business is closed. If it is well-lit, potential customers will remember your business and may come by the next day.

Change your display signage from time to time. A sign left in the same place for too long becomes part of the landscape and people stop seeing it. By changing the design, you keep your business image fresh in the minds of passing customers.

Author is a freelance copywriter. For more information on visual
displays, visit http://www.wlconcepts.com/.

The design of signs and other visual displays allows organizations to deliver messages more complex than words themselves. You can take the same text, put it on signs with different design schemes, and produce completely different feelings in customers. It’s important to be sure your interior graphics are giving the message you want.

What Do Colors Say?

Colors attach powerful emotions to your interior graphics. Reds project feelings of energy while blues are more calming. Dark colors can be unwelcoming while bright colors attract attention. The saturation of a color has a direct correlation to the strength of its effect on people. While the psychology of colors is not an exact science, it is a technique used extensively by marketing professionals.

One of the most common examples comes from the fast food industry. Most fast food interior graphics use shades of red and orange. Why? Because studies have shown these colors both increase appetite and make people fidgety and want to leave. This embodies the fast food industry - eat and run. These color schemes have contributed to greater food sales and to faster customer turnover.

Setting the Mood

What message are you trying to send to your customers with your interior graphics? You can’t choose an effective decor until you pin down what mood you are trying to create.

In the fast food example, restaurants of this kind don’t want to be too welcoming. They want a steady stream of customers moving in and out of the establishment. However a health spa would prefer creating a more relaxed atmosphere. They would use a cooler palette to have a calming effect on people. A dentist’s office might use the same tactic to reduce anxiety in nervous patients.

Color isn’t the only tool to create mood. What images appear in interior graphics are powerful influencing forces as well. Stylistic choices can strongly influence the type of customer who frequents the establishment.

Design to Your Demographic

Business owners should consider the type of clientele they want to attract as well as the population mix of the area when planning interior graphics. Consider the decor options for a small coffee shop. A business located in a downtown area would use a traditional decor aimed at young professionals on the job. A coffee shop located in an area of the city with an older, retired population might choose displays more reminiscent of a 1950s restaurant.

The wrong design choices can reduce customer flow. Hip modern design in an area with older customers is likely to fail as locals head to businesses with more familiar decors. Similarly, a design which works with older people could be seen as stodgy and old fashioned to younger clients.

Age, income, profession and more can influence what kind of graphics makes a given customer feel comfortable. All of these should be considered when designing interior graphics.

Author is a freelance copywriter. For more information on interior
graphics, visit http://www.wlconcepts.com/.

Out of Home advertising, is a form of advertising that many businesses already know very well. Basically, it is a form of advertising that appeals to the average consumer when they are out of their house. This means that it is not television or radio commercials or internet advertisements. It is billboards and ad space purchased on walls and at public locations.

Digital OOH advertising is something that does the exact same thing, but basically just takes it to the modern era. Rather than having a static advertisement, you can have a digital advertisement. There are many places in public nowadays that can play commercials, so you can use your television commercial out of the house to actually appeal to people. This is just one example of the wide world of digital OOH advertising that is available out there for the smart business marketer.

Utilizing Digital OOH

A lot of people think that when a new way of doing something comes along, people automatically have to pay homage to that particular way of doing something. The truth of the matter is that people do not have to pay homage to that particular way of doing something. It is a business choice. There is no point in getting enamoured of something like digital OOH unless you are willing to go through it all and do it in a way that actually benefits your business. If you are just going to do it for the sake of doing it, there is no point in really doing it to begin with.

This is confusing, so an example is best. Suppose that you are already doing OOH billboard advertising and it is going great for you. All of a sudden, your city creates a beautiful square that is surrounded with plasma screens. Plasma screens will give you an opportunity for digital OOH advertising. Should you take that opportunity or should you let it slide in favour of keeping at it with your current campaigns?

The easy answer is that you should stick with the billboard if it is working well for you. The medium answer is that you should try out the OOH plasma advertisements through the digital commercials that you have and see how they do. The hard answer is that you should switch entirely if you think that the plasma screens can really up the ante as far as your advertising returns are concerned.

You will notice that none of those three answers refer to switching to digital OOH for the sake of advertising in digital OOH media. And in the end, that is what is meant by not doing it for the sake of doing it.

Final Thoughts

Utilizing digital OOH can really benefit you if you use it in the way mentioned above. It can give you better campaign returns through higher exposure and more interesting advertising media. However, that is not necessarily going to be better than a highly effective standard OOH campaign.

We offer intelligent and strategic digital Out-of-home (OOH) media planning and OOH advertising services across North America. Our advertising campaigns deliver across over 80 networks in over 16 main venue categories and over 70 sub-categories.

Call tracking has become quite an attractive piece of software that more businesses, from small companies to large corporations, are using it in their day to day activities. This technology is not only used for tracking calls but it also streamlines marketing response reporting, return on investment (ROI), closing ratios, it is used for sales and customer service training, it records conversations for quality control, and tracks multiple campaigns. The great thing this is that this technology is not expensive compared to the amount of information and tracking of stats call tracking gives. This is definitely not something you can get from a regular phone company and if it is possible to get this information from them then it is definitely not streamlined. You’ll probably have to call and wait in a long hold queue just to get sent a long list of call logs that you have to manually sort out. What a waste of time!

A few examples of who uses call tracking are call centers, marketers managing multiple campaigns, and even small local shops. It’s not hard to see why so many types of businesses use call tracking. It doesn’t take a computer savvy individual to learn the functions of call tracking and yet it still makes them seem like marketing gurus. It’s like having a marketing team with available answers a few clicks away. Any company taking their business serious should consider the potential of call tracking. Not to mention you can log into your call tracking account from your computer or mobile device, which makes having control while on the go easy.

Call tracking boasts many features that will help any size business. One feature a tracking system utilizes that will help anyone’s business is real-time reports. It allows you to see what campaigns are doing well, which do poorly, and where you can best concentrate your marketing dollars. Most call tracking platforms have graphing abilities to visually show how your money is being spent. If you decide to add another tracking number, you can simply log on to your account and add an extra line, usually without having to talk to any customer support or sale representative, and within seconds you have another line available. If you need to go back to a previous phone conversation, depending on the platforms terms, you can go back by date, length, or campaign name and download a copy of that conversation. This is great for quality control or sales training purposes. It’s such a useful tool, for many reasons. I believe once you get into a good call tracking system, you won’t do business with out it.

Daniel Bernal is vice president of a direct marketing firm and has over 10 years of business management experience. He understands how call tracking can be beneficial to any business and has developed call tracking software around this knowledge.

CPA marketing stands for Cost Per Action marketing or Cost Per Acquisition marketing, and it’s an advertising strategy that’s starting to gain some notice in the online world. If you haven’t heard about CPA marketing or don’t really know what it’s all about, you’re in good company. I venture to guess that a lot of “gurus” don’t know too much about the subject.

So let’s see if we can shed a little light on the subject!

CPA Marketing in A Nutshell

Cost per acquisition marketing is an online advertising model where the advertiser only pays for a specified action linked to the advertisement. For example, if you run a banner on a website and only pay the website owner whenever someone clicks on the banner and subscribes to your newsletter, that would be a CPA marketing campaign.

I’m sure you can immediately see the benefit of running such a campaign - you only pay for actual subscribers, rather than paying for clicks or impressions. This is by far the most lucrative form of advertising currently available to online businesses.

CPA Marketing is really an advertisers dream.

You can run a cost per action marketing campaign for nearly any outcome you choose, but most online businesses use it for purchases, free trials, subscribers, zero friction, etc. If you’ve seen the advertisements where you’re required to put your name and email to get a coupon or be submitted for a chance to win something, then you’re already familiar with the concept behind this form of advertising.

How Can You Benefit From CPA Marketing?

Although cost per action has been around for a long time, there have been some interesting developments in the industry recently. The most beneficial development for most of us is that there are now a large variety of advertising networks available to advertise your offer. Many of the full-service firms will even help you form your campaign, design your creatives, and even help you with your landing pages.

Not only are there a large number of advertising networks that offer CPA marketing, but there is also a variety of methods of showing your advertisements now available through these networks. You ad now has the opportunity to be shown in a full page pop under, pop over, email, contextual ad, banner, survey, form, etc.

There are tons of choices and lots of opportunity to profit, especially in zero friction campaigns.

CPA Marketing And Affiliates

And that brings me to the other evolution of cost per action. As an affiliate, you have a lot of opportunities to offer CPA advertisements on your website - beyond the normal pay per commission affiliate program.

As an affiliate, you have the opportunity to earn a lot more affiliate commission through cost per acquisition marketing because it’s generally easier to pre-sell your website visitors on those kinds of offers. After all, it’s generally easier to get visitors to fill out a form or request more information about something than it is to get them to pull out their wallets.

Of course, there is also a downside. It’s often more difficult to get approved to join CPA affiliate programs than it is to be approved for your normal, run of the mill affiliate program. In fact, I recently came across a statistic that only about 10% of applicants are approved for programs within CPA networks.

If you can get approved, you can earn some serious affiliate revenue.

Want to know more about CPA Marketing? Get your Free Copy of 10 Days to Smokin’ Traffic Now!

In your business, you sell or promote something of value. And when people get on the internet, they are also sharing things of value.

How can you make those two separate facts of life work together to fulfill your mission to promote products or services using online videos? How can you get all the exposure you want by capturing the attention of the online audience?

The millions of people who view and share YouTube video clips are doing so because they find something of value within those clips. Most of the time, an entertaining or compelling property to a video, regardless of its subject, causes it to spread like wildfire via email to friends, or embedded on personal web pages or blogs.

It is called new media. What is this property? How do you entertain or hold attention? It may be a confusing new media landscape, but the good news is very old rules of grabbing attention still apply.

Here are some of the oldest and most reliable:
1) Tickle the funny bone.
No matter the product or service, chances are there is a way to use humor to talk about it. Look around your subject for ways to draw unusual comparisons to everyday things. For this, you may wish to hire a writer, or look within your own business history for amusing stories you can adapt to your clip.

2) Pique curiosity.
Ask questions in your video, questions you answer yourself, doing so with your product or service on center stage. Create tension and suggest controversy by blacking out eyes or faces of people appearing in your clip. Set up your clip as a question with your own product or service as the answer.

3) Stir up anger.
Today, a huge and growing business surrounds political discussion. Strangely, the most popular of the channels and personalities trafficking in political editorial take a pro-business perspective that manages to get a rise out of people by making government a scapegoat for everything under the sun. Look for ways to use this very profitable anger to frame discussion of your product or service.

These three methods will impart shareability. Another way to say it is your video can go viral. This adds value, and brings maximum exposure to your clips. Especially when using skilled Chicago videographers, your YouTube videos can get you and your value noticed online.

Whatever you do, make sure your video is produced with the highest of standards. Bad video equates to a bad product or service. So make sure every aspect of your marketing materials is produced professionally, whether it is a brochure, website or video.

Irwin Myers is the president of Video One Productions, a Chicago video production company that has helped businesses and individuals with their multimedia production, editing & duplication needs since 1987. Visit our website at http://video1pro.com and our blog at http://video1pro.com/blog

In the competitive Chicago videography market there are so many reasons your brand, product or company should consider using video technology as a marketing tool.

Here is a list of the top seven:

1. Image Management
The way your business looks on-screen is entirely under your control when you use promotional video production. That control is a rare opportunity. Your brand, product or companies across the entire marketplace is never entirely under your control, but when you use promotional video production, the outcome is yours to decide.

2. Convenience
Video does not interrupt a prospect as might a phone call. Video is viewed on the demand of the prospect or customer, when they want and how they want. Prospects who use video to evaluate purchase options appreciate being in control of how they do it, and will appreciate you as a result.

3. Faster Buying Decision
Sales video production makes for a faster sales cycle. Major business schools agree that video speeds up buying decisions. Video production delivers what prospects need to know, en if the video results in questions, those questions will be explicit and to the point, speeding up the sales process.

4. Reduced Sales Overhead
Travel to an out-of-town prospects place of business can drive up costs beyond the benefit of doing the business, even if you land it! Video production allows you to keep sales costs in line without missing opportunities.

5. Novelty
Market studies on sales video production show that nearly everyone given a DVD will view it at one point or another, even if only out of curiosity. Make that curiosity work for you!

6. Standardization
Doing web video production the right way ensures that consistent, correct information is presented to prospects at all times. Managing a library of web video production titles allows you to address many different groups of prospects, but always with consistency.

7. Retention
Modern society is used to receiving visual information. Text can be skimmed. A phone call can be a distraction. But video shows. Video captures attention and holds it better than any other medium, especially as most people receive information via television or the internet.

Because we are in a tough economic environment, we need to be cognizant of every technique to create interest in our product or service. Video is the best way to get people to listen to and view your message. So use these seven tips to expand your client base within the highly competitive yet profitable business marketplace with your video, whether it is a Chicago video or produced locally.

Irwin Myers is the president of Video One Productions, a Chicago video production company that has helped businesses and individuals with their multimedia production, editing & duplication needs since 1987. Visit our website at http://video1pro.com and our blog at http://video1pro.com/blog

A real estate agent from Denver that I am doing internet marketing for came to me today and asked how he can set up a blog. He had just gotten back from a convention and everyone was all abuzz with the wonderful marketing possibilities that come with having your own blog.

He was telling me about this wonderful “new” program called wordpress that would allow you to host your blog with them for free and how you can yada yada yada…

It was obvious that he was sold on the idea of using a blog to help with his marketing but had no idea how to put any of it into practice. There are a few things that anyone getting ready to start a blog as part of their internet marketing plan should know.

Places like TypePad or Blogger and Wordpress will allow you to host your site as a sub domain for free. Do NOT DO THIS! You will be severely limited as far a extra features are concerned. It could take a long time to build an audience and it will take even longer if you are not able to capture any traffic from your website.

If you do not have a website yet that’s ok, for as little as $20 a month you can have your own website with a full featured blogging platform.

If you already have a website adding a blog to it will allow you to have fresh content (which Google loves) on your website without having to change your well crafted sales material.

Once you have a blog on your own domain name you can then use it for two forms of internet marketing, SEO and Social Networking. The seo applications of your blog will be your first concern and the social networking will eventually come into play once you have a reader base.

Just like your content writing for your homepage the blog needs to be keyword focused. The best way to do this is to include your keywords in the title of your posts, and to write articles that relate to your keywords. Don’t get sidetracked stay on topic!

Create categories and place every post in the category that relates with that keyword. Google will like the site structure better and your pages will rank easier. Keep your list of categories down and try and have as many posts in each category.

Link to past blog posts to help users find other useful information that relates to the post they are already reading. This also helps the search engines crawl your blog. Make sure your page titles are relevant to the articles you are writing as well.

As long as you host your blog, develop great articles, and start with an SEO perspective, you will be able to get a great reader base. That’s how you can use your blog to effectively market online.

The Denver Internet Marketing Specialists are your source for Denver Internet Marketing. Gary Hall is a freelance writer.