Tag Archives: marketing

Useful Advice on Looking for a Professional Online Printing Company

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Looking for an online printing to hire and create your printed marketing materials? With hundreds and thousands of online printing services out there, searching for the right one for your printing needs can be quite overwhelming. To weed out those that are reliable enough, consider creating a list of the best possible candidates then pick the one that best fits your requirements.

One of the first things that you must remember in looking for an online printer is to not decide according to a provider’s rate. Although price is a key aspect in choosing a printer, you must keep in mind that you can get what you pay for – meaning, paying for cheap printing can possible get you cheap, substandard results. When you come across a company that is offering rates that are way too low than what others are offering, keep yourself from grabbing the opportunity as it could only do more harm than good. It is practically unrealistic for any printing company to provide the lowest price for top quality printing. High quality materials such as paper and ink don’t come cheap. While many printers can offer to match your budget, adjusting their quotes far too lower than the standard rates can only mean that they are cutting corners somewhere in the process. This could result in poor choice of paper or in the use of cheap ink. If you are printing materials for your marketing campaign, this set up is not good as it could affect your professional image.

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Interactive Must Be Part of the Ideation Process

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In my years of working in and with advertising agencies I have heard clients on more than one occasion assert that “print is dead.” One copywriter I once worked with realized that the possibilities of interactive were more restrictive than print and suggested that web be the first part of any marketing campaign and not the last. While I don’t think it is necessary to place web projects first (an agency should get the GENERAL creative thinking out of the way before process-heavy projects such as web or mobile are tackled), there is a strong possibility that agencies which continue to leave their web designers and web developers out of the ideation process will produce a predicable anti-climactic ending to every campaign of which digital is a part.

Forget about the old frustration of art staff choosing a non-standard font… When does social media exist outside of a web page? Or an online video? Or SEM? Traditional agencies need to stop treating these projects like the standalone artifacts of old media and accept the fact that they are not only part of the whole, but in fact, the largest part.

A little background is in order here. Just twenty years ago the internet was about liberating people from the confining hours of their local libraries. The internet was one-way… presentational. Business websites amounted to “here’s what we do, and here’s our phone number.” This has been retroactively termed Web 1.0. In 1994 when the first web form was introduced, making it possible for people to submit information to a website, everything changed. Darcy DiNucci, an information architect, coined the term Web 2.0 in an article in which she wrote that the internet would soon become “the ether through which interactivity happens.”

It has been said before that the internet has changed the way people thin

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Market Segmentation Definition and The 6 Steps Of Segmentation

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Market segmentation is the practice of dividing a company’s total set of potential buyers (i.e., its market) into meaningful groups, or segments, for the purpose of properly tailoring future marketing and advertising efforts to each group. The goal of segmentation is to maximize the company’s marketing return on investment by design programs that target only those prospects who are most likely to respond to their outreach efforts.

Doing market segmentation correctly takes roughly three parts science and one part art. It is mostly science because carrying out proper segmentation is a highly-analytical, even mathematical, process. On the other hand, since there are many ways to approach segmentation, doing an effective job also relies upon the refined judgment and deep marketing experience of the marketing analyst. This is where the art comes in.

Steps to Market Segmentation

The basic steps that should be followed in any B2C (business-to-consumer) segmentation effort must include the following:

1. Determine the geographical trade area: Are you targeting only households in a small part your part of town? An entire city? The entire country?

2. Estimate the market size: Conduct an initial analysis to determine approximately how many households exist in your trade area.

3. Eliminate any obviously unqualified households: Next, adjust your market size estimate by eliminating any households that clearly fall outside of your target market. For example, if you sell swimming pools, you should eliminate all apartment-dwellers from your market size calculation.

4. Find out who your existing customers are: If your business already has a customer base, the next step is to conduct an analysis of those who have bought from you in the past – namely, your existing customers. This type of analysis may take into account a range of household characteristics, including simple demographics (like age and income), psychographics (including opinions and lifestyles), and typical buying behaviors.

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