For most medium and small businesses, marketing was pretty simple just 10 or 20 years ago. They’d buy an ad in the yellow pages, maybe run a few newspaper ads, send out a direct mail piece to their regular customers, and that would be it. Advertising with mass media like TV, radio, magazines and billboards was often too expensive, although a billboard might be considered if the business sold a product and the board was nearby.Read More
My company, Caudill’s Electric, has been around since 1973. Over the years we’ve grown to be one of the Piedmont Triad’s largest electrical contracting companies, and in addition to traditional electrical work (wiring structures, installing lighting, etc.), we also sell and install high end security systems, audio/video systems, and home automation systems. Today those four areas are the focus of our business, and one of our biggest challenges is finding ways to reach the audiences we want to reach, because those audiences have changed a lot in the last few years.
When you sell a product, the first thing you have to do is figure out what makes your product different, what makes it unique. My father started our company in 1962, and as I got older and joined the business I saw the need to take us in a direction that would make us stand out from other poultry producers. I saw that the industry was moving toward a race for faster, cheaper, increased production. The result was a uniform type of chicken bred to grow fast (so it consumed less resources) and with a big breast (so it provided more of the meat consumers wanted). But I didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing – I wanted to bring something new and different to the market. That was flavor.
Bulk email development and distribution can be overwhelming and frustrating. One common challenge is keeping an email’s design intact and consistent across all email clients (e.g., Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.). This issue arises because email clients, unlike web browsers, operate completely at the discretion of the application developer, which causes disparities from one email client to another. Outlook, for example, uses a word processor rendering engine instead of a browser. As a result, an email may look great in Gmail but fall apart in Outlook. Go-to email service providers like MailChimp and Constant Contact have not even been able to account for this across the board.
It’s on to part two of my follow up to the post Trick question: Are you a marketing planner or a marketing doer?, which touched on the basic requirements of a strategic marketing plan:
Whether we are developing a new brand identity, updating a website, or laying out an advertisement, color is an integral part of our days. Applying color in a wide array of applications can be challenging and art directors excel at interpretation of color. The art directors at Reuben Rink execute designs for a diverse set of clients every day, and in this blog post we explore the influence color has on their design philosophies.
