I don’t make time to watch television because I get too impatient with the commercials. I find myself analyzing them to figure out how they were made, and why. I pick apart the copywriting, and silently critique the camera angles. It feels like work!
But this time of year, once a week, I reserve time for Mad Men. The AMC channel’s Emmy award-winning drama series is well written and beautifully filmed. The characters are engaging and believable, and many of them can teach us something. Read on for small business marketing advice you can glean from Mad Men’s colorful cast. [click to continue]
2010 is turning out to be the year of web typography. There are two companies offering you the ability to customize the typefaces on your website, and they’re easy – and often free – to use.
Google’s Font API is free and offers a handful of open source typefaces. Typekit is a commercial solution that’s reasonably priced, and offers a wide range of fonts that’s growing every day. They have a free, entry-level offering, and paid options that vary by how many page views your site gets per month.
Typekit now has fonts from Adobe, Moveable Type, Veer and other major type foundries. On this blog, I recently switched from the web standard Georgia to Chaparral, which is an Adobe font I use in all my PDF materials. (Do you like it? Let me know in the comments!)
Fresh Fonts Served Daily
Both services work in a similar fashion: typefaces are “served” up onto users’ machines, much the way websites are served on the Internet. Users don’t need to have the typeface installed in order to see it used on a web page. [click to continue]
I’ve been invited to a birthday party, and I want to get a fabulous gift for the person who we’ll be celebrating. What’s the best way to choose something they’ll like? I can’t start picking out wrapping paper colors or writing the message on the gift tag quite yet.
Think About the Recipient
I like to think about what their hobbies are. How do they spend their free time? What’s their daily life like? When I focus on them, it’s easier to find a gift they’ll enjoy.
Once I’ve purchased a gift, it’s time to wrap it. I can’t wrap the gift until I’ve thought about who it’s for, and I’ve purchased it, right?
I have to know who I’m giving it to, and what I’m going to give before I look for a box and pick out the wrapping paper.
That’s the way it is with design, too. [click to continue]
The past few weeks I’ve been rolling out the lessons in the Big Brand System online course. One of the concepts we’re talking about early on is target markets. It’s important to define and clearly understand your target market before you work on your marketing materials. If you don’t know who you’re aiming for, you’re almost guaranteed to miss.
Don’t be Afraid to Lose
When you market your business, you have to imagine you’re dumping the whole of humanity into a big sieve. Everything you do – what you write, how you present it, and where you share your messages – gives the sieve a little shake. [click to continue]
If you’ve ever worked in an office environment, you know there’s one shortcut to becoming popular among your colleagues. Position a candy dish on the corner of your desk, and keep it filled with goodies. It’s a great way to guarantee you’ll get chatted up by all sorts of people who otherwise might not have stopped by to say hello.
Content Marketing is Like a Candy
No matter what your business sells, there’s a way to create marketing materials that are useful for the target market you want to reach. This is what content marketing is all about: packaging information your market will find valuable, then offering it to them as a way to market your business. [click to continue]
