Guest Author – Tim Snider, Deja View Media

At Deja View Media, we’ve been helping clients produce promotional videos and commercials for nearly two decades now. Along the way, we’ve worked with a lot of different brands– each, with their own unique product or service to showcase. The one thing that differentiates successful TV spots from others is that they’ve incorporated the following best practices.

Written by Amanda Marshall

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.

By David Jones, VP Operations, Caudill’s Electric

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.

Written by Jay Mclain

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.

In the world of marketing, the 4 P’s are a well-known way to define the elements used to create a strategic marketing plan. They are:

1. Product – The thing or service being sold and what makes it unique, which determines the marketing message.
2. Price – How much the thing or service will cost, which determines the target audience (e.g. a $20,000 car and a $70,000 car are marketed to very different audiences).
3. Promotion – How people can made aware of the thing or service, which determines the choice of marketing tactics (e.g. shampoo can be promoted through a free sample; a computer monitor can’t).
4. Place – Where the thing of service is available (e.g. in person, online, locally, nationally, etc.), which determines the marketing reach and media choices.

The importance of social media for building brand awareness, increasing web traffic and generating leads is undeniable. While the specific benefits of each social platform vary, all provide one crucial benefit to businesses – the ability to create a dialogue with your target audiences.