It’s really fun to think about your marketing plan on a global scale. It’s big time with a potential to reach billions of people. But like any great marketing plan, its quality, not quanitity to brings paying customers to your door.

I am very interested in the idea of hyper-local marketing that Michael Lefebvre, The Uncommon Agent is doing in Norfolk, MA. Mike is a real estate agent in metrowest Boston that has begun doing feature videos of local town businesses. Take this one for example of Joe’s Barber Shop.

This video is successful in many ways: you get to know a town business and some history of the town, you get to know Mike and his “giving back” to support local businesses, and you are entertained by the story. This is a perfect vehicle for someone like Mike who is in the business of making connections and convincing people about hisknowledge of the area.

But this could work for corporations as well. Imagine a company like Comcast (who tries to be involved in a local level) highlighting local businesses like this. It would do wonders for their brand.

What do you think about hyper-local marketing?

The dotted line is a powerful thing. It is one of those secret weapons that marketers use to draw attention to a specific part of the communication. It is most commonly used to highlight an offer or a call-to-action.

What was once used as a directional vehicle, dotted lines were put in to signal to the customer that it was a coupon to cut out. In fact, in some cases where marketers  had zero confidence in customer intelligence, they would even throw in a little icon of a scissor.

Where production budgets allow, we also add a perforation around the coupon to make it even easier to tear out. In these cases, we still print the dotted line to call attention to the coupon. Read more…

Acquiring new customers is great. But keeping them and growing your relationship with them is even better. One of the best ways to do that is to establish a loyalty program for your most loyal customers.

Loyalty programs can be as simple as a repeat buying program and as complicated as one that establishes a new form of currency. It could be executed with paper tickets and hole punchers, or with robust data capture, barcoding and other CRM techniques.

But if you aren’t careful, your loyalty program could be a giant waste of money. Here are 5 steps to creating a good loyalty program: Read more…

Evaluating creative talent is incredibly challenging. The candidate needs to have the executional skills required for the job but execution is only part of the story. You need to feel comfortable with brining in a new personality into your well-oiled machine. One mistake can disrupt your department’s efficiency and jeopardize the happiness of your existing star performers.

Typically, the use of references can reinforce the good gut feeling you could have after meeting a candidate. But when evaluating creative talent right out of school, you will need to rely on other indicators.

After over 10 years of hiring entry level designers, art directors, and copywriters, I have developed my own set of evaluation criteria. Some are very tactical, checklist type items. Some are more emotional. All are critical. Read more…

If you haven’t seen this before, it is worth a look. J.J. Abrams the creator of LOST among other things speaks at TED about “The Mystery Box”. This theme is quite applicable to the digital world and most specifically our roles in social media. With the so called “democritization of technology” everyone has access to tools to do fantastic things. But what will you do with those tools is what differentiates us.

I hope this inspires you as much as it did me.