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Showing posts from April, 2016

Keep your Document Under Control WITH INDESIGN GRIDS

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Adobe InDesign offers you a series of layout tools to ensure that your document contains a consistent visual structure. When used together, InDesign's page guides, baseline grids and document grids ensure that your document looks professional and clean no matter what kind of design you are creating. Page Guides To create page guides, select File > New > Document. Then use the Columns and the Margins settings in the New Document dialog to define your page guides. These settings control the page guides for every page in the document. If you click on the Master Text Frame checkbox, your first master page will contain text boxes defined by the settings you chose in the Columns and Margins sections. To change the page guides after the document is created, click on the master page you want to edit in the Pages palette and then select Layout > Margins and Columns. To change the margins on a single document page, choose Layout > Margins and Columns while on that page. ...

Top Ten Reasons to Use Print

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Given the rate at which advertisers and marketers have been jumping on electronic media bandwagons these days, it seems that print (still the most effective communication medium thus invented) has to justify itself. The Print Council’s recent “Why Print?” campaign of “Top Ten Ways Print Helps You Prosper” is a case in point. While there are certainly more than 10 reasons for advertisers and marketers to prefer print, we’ve taken a tip from the Print Council and present our own top 10 reasons to use print. 1.  Print Gets Delivered Studies have shown that even requested e-mail marketing is not delivered as much as one-fourth of the time by ISPs’ spam-blocking filters. Yet the Post Office—so-called “snail mail”—boasts 99% deliverability. Imagine: the marketing campaigns you have worked so hard on can actually be delivered! 2.  Print Generates Higher ROI Studies conducted by the Direct Marketing Association and the Wharton Economic Forecasting Associates have found that ...

Lowered Postal Rates Mean Now is the Best Time to Give Direct Mail a Try

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To say that most small businesses have something of a love/hate relationship with the United States Postal Service is an understatement. USPS is one of those necessary things to get a wide range of direct and print mail marketing materials out into the world. With a decade of increasing prices chipping away at return on investment little by little, it's no wonder many organizations started to skimp on direct mail spending in favor of other "cheaper" solutions in the interim. Now, however, the tides may be truly changing as postal rates are on the decline with no clear end in sight. If you've been waiting to jump back into the direct mail world, now might be the PERFECT time to give it a try for a number of reasons. Postal Rates: What is Going On? On April 10, 2016, the cost to ship a first-class letter in the United States fell to just $0.47 - a rare phenomenon in recent memory. Additionally, the price of sending a postcard dropped a penny, international lette...

The Future of Search Rankings: What Companies Like Google Are Going to Focus on Next

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Starting in 2011, Google has made a series of regular updates to its search algorithm to determine exactly how sites appear in a results page for a particular string. Gone are the days where the site with the highest volume of relevant keywords "won." Panda penalized spam-filled sites that offered little in the way of actual content in favor of valuable information that actually satisfied a particular search. Google's changes have also focused on things like maintaining a proper balance between genuine content and advertising and pushing sites to offer social media integration and more. They've even given an edge to local businesses, leveling the playing field and essentially making sure that even small businesses can evenly compete with large, national corporations that can outspend them day in and day out. What Does the Future Hold? If you take a look at all of the high profile changes that Google has made to its ranking algorithm in recent years, what is th...

Calculating Customer Value

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It’s well documented that it’s easier to sell something to an existing customer than it is to find new customers. An existing customer has already given his trust (and money) to you, so it’s easier to persuade him to buy again than it is to convince someone to buy who has never heard of you or your business before. When you are allocating funds for marketing, you should consider more than just the initial purchase when you look at your cost of acquiring customers. You should also look at the future revenue you might derive from that customer. This concept is called calculating the “lifetime value” of a customer. Although the calculations vary, the lifetime value of the average customer (LVC) is essentially an estimate of your average sale (AS) amount multiplied by the estimated number (EN) of times a customer reorders: LVC = AS x EN As an example, suppose you sell light bulbs for $2 each. Your customer Fred buys at least three light bulbs for his house every year from ...

Demystifying Marketing on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

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With the existing and ever-remerging social media outlets available to us, the confusion as to how to use them can sometimes make us wish for the days when only local newspaper ads and the yellow pages were used for getting our name out there. Before you throw your hands up and invest in a sandwich sign board, let's break down the mysteries that surround the three most popular social media platforms you can use successfully to grow your business. Facebook Facebook is probably the first platform you think of when you hear social media. It's not surprising, considering that, as of January of this year, it has over 1.5 billion monthly active users. For those of you marketing to millennials (15-34-year-olds), about 91% of them use Facebook, most likely without ever looking up from their phones. With numbers like this, if your business doesn't have an active Facebook page with content that is updated daily, you're seriously missing out. Facebook is a fantastic pla...

Successful Secrets to Achieving Your Business Goals

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Do you ever wonder how some people just seem to rock at getting things accomplished, while others seem to dream big but never really get anywhere? It's not luck and it's no accident. Successful entrepreneurs know the secret to setting goals and making their dreams come true - they know about SMART goal setting. You may be thinking, "Well, I'm smart...why aren't my dreams coming true with my existing goals?" The trouble is not your I.Q. The trouble is likely with your goals. Successful entrepreneurs set goals with 5 key factors. Their goals are: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Timely Let's break down what all that means... Specific Goals Goals that are specific address the what, why, and how of the goal. An example might look something like this: "Increase our Facebook followers to reach more clients by implementing a Facebook advertising campaign." Breaking that down further, the "what" of this goal ...

Marketing Automation: What You Need to Know

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"Marketing automation" is more than just a buzzword - it is a very real practice that is empowering marketers around the world to accomplish more than ever in a shorter amount of time. At its core, marketing automation is a term used to describe a set of software, technologies, and other platforms that automate marketing on certain channels. These can include e-mail, social media, websites, and more. The idea is that by automating certain repetitive tasks that, while hugely important are also time-consuming, you unlock a host of additional benefits that can't be ignored. Reaching Customers on a Deeper Level Targeted marketing has always been the bread and butter of many businesses in terms of increasing customer engagement. People don't want to feel like they're just one of a million different people being marketed to simultaneously - they want to feel like your business is taking time out of its busy day to speak to them directly. This helps increase the ...

Marketing Automation: What You Need to Know

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"Marketing automation" is more than just a buzzword - it is a very real practice that is empowering marketers around the world to accomplish more than ever in a shorter amount of time. At its core, marketing automation is a term used to describe a set of software, technologies, and other platforms that automate marketing on certain channels. These can include e-mail, social media, websites, and more. The idea is that by automating certain repetitive tasks that, while hugely important are also time-consuming, you unlock a host of additional benefits that can't be ignored. Reaching Customers on a Deeper Level Targeted marketing has always been the bread and butter of many businesses in terms of increasing customer engagement. People don't want to feel like they're just one of a million different people being marketed to simultaneously - they want to feel like your business is taking time out of its busy day to speak to them directly. This helps increase the ...

Color Management and Proofing, from Monitor to Press

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The Secret to Accurate, Eye-Pleasing Color Do you know the old joke about the guy who asked a taxi driver how to get to Carnegie Hall? The driver replied, “Practice.” Creating beautiful printed pieces also takes a fair amount of practice. We continually work on color management and color proofing to create the best results for you. This article will help explain what we do to help you achieve the color quality you expect. Our main goal sounds simple: Make the printed piece look like what you saw on your computer monitor. But right away, we have a problem. The light you see on the monitor is made by combining red, green and blue light and shining the result into your eyes. However, the color you see when you look at a printed piece is created by reflecting white light through translucent cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks that subtract color (from the white light). Our next problem is gamut: Your computer monitor can produce up to 16.7 million different colors. Our eyes...

Frequency in Marketing: Striking a Balance Between Quantity and Quality

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As marketing professionals, we hear it time and again - one of the fastest ways to turn a prospective client into someone that wants nothing to do with your business is to contact them too many times in too short of a period. People don't like to be bombarded with marketing materials - it makes them feel overwhelmed and can be quite off-putting. Despite this, quantity is still important, as you always want to keep your brand at the forefront of their minds. Contacting too frequently can give the perception that your materials lack quality, however, which is why striking the right balance between the two is so important. The Google of it All Search engine giant Google has made a number of significant changes to its algorithm in recent years, starting with Panda in 2011. These updates have regularly been designed to penalize low-quality sites that spam the Internet with content, weeding them out of the top portions of search results to be replaced with sites that are actually...