Search Google for infographics and they never, ever end; even Infographics to End all Infographics.

Pretty pictures

I’ve seen posts on how to pitch infographics and lists of reasons to use an infographic as a media release and lots of fun NSFW diversions, etc. etc.

For the record, I like me some chart porn. Graphs and pictures make great educational tools to help readers understand complex sets of data; used properly, images and pictures can be powerful communications tools.

As a designer, I know good infographics take time and talent, and therefore money to produce. Benefits to a brand or start-up business include exposure, branding, reach. Make a clever infographic and there’s chance for national pick up or blog coverage, luck that maybe Mashable shares it; awareness.

Inside baseball much?

Visually appealing, with easily digestible, statistical data, a good infographic is designed to be 1) easily, readily shared with others and 2) get your brand name and message out there to your target audience.

Who’s really reading and sharing? And what’s the business benefit besides the aforementioned awareness?

I know people from all walks of life – healthcare, education, law, engineering, counseling, construction, etc. – some social, others not; all of whom are online daily and few really know what an ‘infographic’ is.

I remember discussing iPhone predictions with a few people last year – all iPhone, iPad wielders – and told them to “just look for the infographic, it’s on Mashable.” Lots of blank faces and blinking.

Maybe it’s me.

I started this post one place – collecting good infographics, maybe starting a “week in infographics” quasi-regular feature. I ended someplace far different – not seeing the value, the ROI – especially to small businesses.

Of all the cool infographics I’ve clicked, read, tweeted, I don’t think I’ve even paid attention to who designed it or what brand was behind its creation.

Look at this cute Ode to Beer Infographic I just happened across. Two problems I have with it:

1. I had to look, REALLY look for the sponsor; and I was actually looking for it. It was nothing more than a URL that blended in – too well – with the overall design, violating a rule of getting more value out infographics, being well-branded.

2. The brand – something about online bachelor degrees – seems a mismatch. YES the youngsters will be drinking of the beer, but will they really be Googling, sharing little charts about it? Thinking “Beer, I need money for beer, time to go back to school” and clicking away? IDK.

Tell me I’m wrong

The chance that the infographic will go ‘viral’ isn’t enough. The hope that it gets shared enough and eventually makes its way to the right audience doesn’t do it for me; hope is not a plan.

So tell me I’m wrong. Give me some examples. Show me how your company got great success with creating your cool bacon infographic. Thoughts?

Tags: branding | Communications | infographic | Marketing

It’s always the Season for Shopping. That was a good one from the Wall Street Journal, and it’s true: retailers have carved up the year into approximately 13 to 349 buying seasons.

Basically you and your MasterCard get Tax Day and Groundhog Day off from the retailing mania.

Christmas decorations before Halloween?! 

Seriously, that’s bullshit and really annoys me when I hit the stores; see also, playing the music of holiday cheer NON STOP before Thanksgiving. Not to mention as a small business or retailer, you could be leaving money on the table by thinking too far ahead.

Look at your marketing schedule and the promotional calendars to come up with your e-commerce strategies and do what fits you best.

If you sell outdoor living, have fun with Arbor day. For one client, I’ve done tie ins to other events like Super Bowl or Oscar watch. For another, it’s showing how their product is not just a summer item but has year-around uses.

More importantly, think hard about your products, your customers, your business.

Think beyond the holidays.

What can you do ‘THIS’ time that’s different from ‘THAT’ time?

That’s the question to answer as you decide what promotions to run for back-to-school or Christmas or Spring Break. Or forget the usual suspects, create your own seasons.

Your PR is built around relationships with stakeholders and target audiences; what’s beneficial to them is helpful to you. Don’t wait until your customers have a question or problem, reach out and solve it now. Fire up the old CRM goodwill generators and get some value out there.

• If it’s the slow season, offer quicker turnaround at no extra charge.
• If it’s a busy time of year, give a “patience esta une virtue” discount for those willing to wait.
• If you’re going after the B2B crowd, think of their spending schedules, look at the fiscal year and when budgets may be most flexible. When are your customers’ customers most demanding? That’s when you can step up, offer more support when they need it most.

And if you’ve waited this long, don’t jump on the first Johnny-come-Groupon that knocks on your email. Look at what you want now, what you can do later, and remember, the next ‘holiday’ season starts tom… -er, now.

Thoughts on holiday marketing, besides the crass commercialization of it all?

Photo credit: Funny comic by Pittsburgh Tribune Review cartoonist Randy Bish.

Tags: Advertising | Marketing

There are always exceptions but I don’t get some ‘mass’ marketing. Unless you’re selling something any and every consumer wants and needs to buy — i.e. toilet paper because yes, we’re all full of crap – it doesn’t make much sense.

Targeting your audience with a shotgun? Or a laser?

As technology gives consumers more ways to block, skip, fast forward and otherwise ignore our marketing efforts, I think it’s time to take the mass out of marketing, or refocus how our ‘precise’ aim should be and just do it smarter.

Refining a target is square one; talking about seeing past the big numbers and really look at all those filters that your private data gives marketers before gearing up your content marketing push.

Goldilocks is not your only customer

IMO Coke made a mistake putting big money into pushing Coke Zero solely at men. The marketing strategy – ‘men don’t drink diet’ – I find limited because:

1. I don’t get it. An informal focus group of the gentlemen soda drinkers in my world: many drink diet and none feel emasculated by it, even if the ads are aimed at women.
2. They didn’t go for it. I wanted ads of lumberjacks in pink plaid eating quiche drinking Coke Zero while walking tiny dogs, ‘not drinking this will attract hot chicks’ ads like it’s a horrible body spray. If you are gonna skewer a stereotype, put it on a spit a over fire that can be seen two counties away.
3. It was dumb. Most Coke Zero drinkers I know are women, so you spend gagizillions of dollars developing a product and targeting NOT them? Even if you don’t go after them, you almost target against them and their money? Ok, good luck with that.

Yes Coke Zero is successful in the cola wars, but it’s because women – a lot of them – are also buying. (Sidenote: Coke Zero is a big NASCAR sponsor; 40% of fans are women. Hmm.)

My point is, in thinking of your mass product as ‘this one is too hard, this one too soft’ you can sometimes overthink what is just right and for whom.

Show me the Moneyball

Movie previews, saw that there is some serious female talent in the cast, yet they were barely mentioned in the trailer for new comedy “The Big Year.” Because comedies about men are not relevant to women? Tell that to the team behind The Hangover; or Bridesmaids, as the men in that audience were laughing their asses off along with us women.

Entertainment – many products – cross demographic lines. Women in the audience seemed to like Moneyball, so there isn’t a good reason to limit the preview to only the male audience you think you’ll target. (See also, Serenity - targeting only the Sci-Fi fan and marketing ‘different’ wrong.)

I’m a woman, I like sports and I enjoyed Moneyball. FWIW As a business owner or manager, it’ll have you rethinking those metrics, how you look at the numbers you think you need to hit the sweet spot between niche and mass to succeed.

Apple as go to example

The iPad is marketed as enterprise devise, as education tool, as communications wonder, as gaming machine, as electronic babysitter, digital crack. One ad that targets all those demos so that every Goldilocks with $500 can buy the iPad that’s just right for her.

What’s some of the worst ‘mass’ marketing you’ve seen, too broad or too narrow? Can you think of how to to redefine your niche, where your cross-over – and hidden sales – audiences might be?

Tags: Advertising | mass marketing | target audience

Warning: this rant was inspired by my friend Jenn Whinnem and some bullshit I’ve read and seen in the last couple weeks. If my ‘feminist politics’ get your boxers, briefs, thongs or granny panties in a twist, feel free to bounce rate out of here.

Vagina Marketing

How does one go about marketing the vagina? That was my question to Jenn, along with the ‘joke’ that it’s illegal to do so save Nevada. See this is about the marketing of the word vagina.

Words change meaning. In Kate and Leopold Liev Schriber couldn’t stop laughing at how commonplace the word Erection was used back in old timey, sephia-toned days for something other selling boners to middle aged men.

Words have connotations. There’s the riddle designed to show gender bias, about the doctor who’s Dun Dun DUN! also a Mother, the kind that’s a woman. With ovaries.

The brain trust at Summer’s Eve is at again, because their last round of douchey stupidity wasn’t dumb enough. The meme of their latest blight on marketing:

Vaginas are awesome!

Look people, stop squirming. You wouldn’t be here without a vagina, unless you’re a clone, were hatched in a lab or are possibly an alien. It’s a word, a part of the anatomy. I’m more squeaked out by the word bowels, so let’s pretend to not be 12 years old or Butthead’s 2nd cousin, thrice removed. Ahem.

They have cast a Cat on a Mission, a CAT PUPPET as spokesperson for this ‘viral’ atrocity. Bad tongue in cheek meta puns, OMG.

SpokesKITTY Carlton is supposed to make the WORD Vaginal synonymous with Awesome. The point is “to get women talking about their bodies in an open way,” according to their press release. And this shit will somehow help them sell crap.

Western civilization is doomed

Time capsule: Jersey Shore, Viagra, E-Harmony, KY ‘for women’, overpriced cars, junk food, no-effort diets, teeth whitening. We’re apparently the most vapid, narcissistic, selfish little trolls and sadly much of this crap is being ‘marketed’ to and/or ‘for’ women. Piffle.

Thinking about Cialis, Viagra ads, all ripe for the mocking – thank YouTube. They’ll use terms like ‘ED’ or ‘erectile disfunction’ but don’t dare use the words penis, flacid, limp, impotent, soft or anything else that might dare suggest the lack of a man reaction is anything other than a serious medical problem. Guess you don’t make money making dudes feel crappy about themselves, worrying about penile freshness? IDK.

Women on the other hand, it’s some inferiority on their parts – which marketers exploit to sell them crap – if they can’t pass the freshness test or experience that pleasure moment. See also, KY and its Intense ‘for women’ ads that are in fact, also very much about and for men.

Summer’s Eve has decided that the way to remove the ‘stigma’ of the word vagina – quoting from their press release – is to invent “a fun way to give it a new, positive place in today’s vernacular.”

Because the word vagina itself is so offensively negative?! I get what they wanted to do, but think this is pretty much a dumb, offensive way to go about doing it. That or I just don’t get their brand of funny.

The part I skipped

Same week I saw this: the courts decided that violence towards women was cool to sell to kids, provided the scantily-clad women covered their naughiest of digitally-enhanced, jiggling NIPPLE and VAGINA bits. Yes, I am over simplifying. I’m also skipping another 1,200 word diatribe on cultural values and who is responsible when a child of 12 buys a ‘game’ in which the object is to shoot, kill, curse, steal, fight and/or abuse women.

Instead, I’ll ask the marketers “to women for women” WTH my version of a game would be like, if it will be totally Vaginal and when can I expect it to hit shelves? Oh if I score points by buying shoes, you’re all fired. Blah blah tell me what you think blah.

Tags: Advertising | PR | press release

You have the business plan, the cool product or killer service. You’ve figured out your business model, your three core strengths. And you’ve got a phone (goes-without-typing essential) you’d love to be ringing off the hook with folks wanting to give you large piles of cashy money.

Next step: tackle that Marketing P known as Promotion. Or not.

I did an ad layout for an Atlanta small biz, and what hit me were the missing pieces I had to find for a basic print ad. Customers may not notice or comment when you have it, but they will notice if you don’t.

Things you can’t NOT have to market your business

Identity. It all starts here. A basic logo, some stylized treatment of the name that wasn’t created in PowerPoint with 10-year-old clip art.

It’s how you “brand” so do it.. just not comic sans. (Designers joke.) That investment shows you mean business, on your “still gotta have them” business cards, print materials, free coffee mugs and this newfangled thingy called the Internet.

Website. First, a counter argument. Rare is the business that with the right product (booze) and right location (intersection shopping center) can do fine and dandy, sans website. I was told, license to print money. True ‘nugh.. and EXCEPTION.

“Well what about Facebook?” whines the small business owner. Sigh. Are your customers active on FB or your own site or forums elsewhere? People are social creatures, the trick is finding where.

That said, your website is where YOU have control, a way to tell your story, where people can contact you with your ‘branded’ email. Domains are cheap, WordPress is free, websites still matter.

Images. Can you imagine visiting a website, flipping through a brochure or scanning a magazine without them? Bor-ing! Photos and videos breath life into marketing because they humanize your business.

If your product or service is your custom work, hire a professional for eye catching images. It’s an investment that will pay for itself every time you run an ad, share them on your website and Facebook page, submit them to a magazine for big, fat “free” publicity.

If you’re a reseller or installer, look to your vendors and co-op some marketing, use their product photos. When it’s a “generic” business without need anything custom, there are plenty of royalty-free houses for professional photos; for SMBs on a budget I’ve got two words: iStock account.

Story. Talk to your customers, talk with your employees, your vendors; hone your elevator pitch. You want that great website, that “free” double-page spread in the local living magazine think story, not sales.

Beyond talking points, ass-numbing bullets, your small business has a tale to tell. If you don’t know who and what you are, you’re in big trouble. What you do, how you help others, where, when, why do you offer extra services? W’s are right there, waiting for your answers to tell that story.

What’s another “can’t afford to skimp on” marketing essential?

Tags: Brand | Design | photography | website