Posts

Showing posts from January, 2016

Brand Awareness: Becoming Another Kleenex

Image
In today's world of marketing, if you are not marketing online, you are missing a very big boat. Marketing is now a science with logistics and parameters that were largely unheard of just a few years ago. However, that is not the case with the notion of brand awareness. The auto industry was probably the biggest contributor to the idea that brand loyalty could be utilized to sell more products. That industry is over 120 years old, and brand awareness became a fashionable tool in marketing automobiles by the early 1900s. Brand awareness, of course, is the extent to which a name, label, logo, catch phrase, jingle, or another identifier that is associated with a brand, a specific product, or a company is easily recognized by customers. Brand awareness may be old news, but the Internet has taken the concept to new heights, becoming far more measurable and quantifiable as part of an overall marketing strategy. There are many examples of successful brand awareness implementation.
Image
Peter MacCullum Cancer Centre: Break 20 examples of creative outdoor ads Originally Published on July 9, 2015 by Designer Daily When creating print ads or web banners, you are limited by the space and the display techniques. For outdoor ads, you can play with the surroundings and the only limits are the limits of physics. The agencies that designed the following 20 outdoor ads just did an amazing job at being creative. See more examples Here...

Remaining Competitive in Business by Attracting Top Talent to Your Organization

Image
Make no mistake about it: one of the biggest keys that you have regarding remaining competitive in a crowded marketplace isn't the work that you're doing, per say. It's the people who are doing the work in the first place. By attracting top tier talent to your business, you affect the entire enterprise from the top down in a number of positive ways. Thankfully, actually getting the attention of these mythical "perfect" employees is a lot easier than you might think - provided that you keep a few things in mind. Attracting Talent is One Thing - Keeping Them is Another Many people believe that attracting top talent to a business is something akin to a sports draft. So long as you throw as much money at a person as possible, they'll definitely come to work for you, right? Maybe. Getting a hugely talented person to work for you is really quite easy. Getting them to stick around is easier said than done. Studies have shown that people are willing to
Image
40 free resources every designer should know Jennifer Cirpici is a Dutch graphic designer and blogger. This post originally appeared on  OtherFocus  & thenextweb.com . Ever wondered where designers get their resources to help them succeed with a project? Here is a list of great resources including sites, PSD. files, actions, UI elements, mock ups, et cetera. Best of all, they are totally free and available for you to download. Bookmark this post so that you can always look back at this great list that can help you succeed. Read More...

The Importance of Making Sure That Your Employees Actually Like Each Other

Image
Make no mistake about it: a business is more important than any one person. A successful business is truly the sum of its parts. It's a collection of people all working together to form a cohesive whole, helping the business as an entity move forward into the future and accomplish the goals that it has outlined for itself at the same time. Finding the right people to fill the right positions is one important step towards achieving this environment, but it is exactly that â€" one part. An element that is just as important (but one that far too many business owners fail to pay attention to until it's far too late) comes from the idea that your employees also have to actually enjoy working with one another if your business is going to succeed the way you want it to. The Business Consequences of Employees That Don't Like Each Other When your employees don't like one another, it creates a situation where they become disengaged from their environment. This is tru

Get Your Business Headed in the Right Direction in 2016

Image
The new year is a time of many things. Oftentimes, people look at it as a way to get a "fresh start" in their personal lives and work towards the goals they may have lost sight of in the previous year. The same concept can hold true for the world of business, but only if you approach things from the right angle. There are a number of important steps that you should take at the beginning of a new year to make sure that your business is headed in the right direction - both literally and figuratively. Identify Where the Goal Posts are in the First Place One of the most important steps to take at the start of any new year involves developing a plan for the days, weeks, and months ahead. Simply put, January is the perfect time to start developing both a short-term and a long-term strategy to identify where you see your company going and, more importantly, how it's going to get there. During this period, it is always important to develop a list of priorities for you to

Sensitivity to People's Needs

Image
Doing business involves a product or service and a buyer and seller. In large part, it also involves the formation of relationships. The fact that some of them are quite temporary does not diminish the importance of these buyer-seller relationships. The objective, of course, is to limit the number of temporary relationships and increase those that are ongoing. Repeat customers are intrinsically valuable for the success of a business. Naturally, these relationships should be as positive as possible. To do this effectively, you need to be sensitive to the needs and desires of the individual. Never forget that your customers are, first and foremost, individuals with personal needs. In years past, some companies dealt only sporadically, if at all, with this issue, trusting fully in their products to supply what the customer needed. But, the relative success and failure of many such businesses have proven this outmoded attitude to be counter-productive. Indeed, an entire indust

Data Security in 2016 and Beyond: What Your Business NEEDS To Be Prepared For

Image
We now live in an era where the vast majority of our personal and professional lives are playing out on the Internet. This is particularly true in terms of business, where cloud-based collaboration tools and hosting providers make it easier than ever to access our mission-critical documents from any location on the planet provided you have an active Web connection at the time. Because of the increased amount of faith that we're putting into the digital realm, data security is of the utmost importance. There are a few key issues regarding data security that your business NEEDS to be prepared for moving forward. Passwords are Going Away Simple passwords have long been considered by experts to be woefully inadequate as far as actual data security. This is especially true now that everything from bank account statements to medical records are being stored electronically. All it would take is someone with a little knowledge and the right hardware to guess even the most stringent

The Evolution of Sales: How the Landscape Has Changed

Image
Depending on whom you are selling to, and how, the nature of the sales process has changed since the birth and incredible growth of the Internet. However, with all of the changes in how we communicate with digital connectivity, some things have not changed much at all. Sales are still sales. It is the targeting of sales that has changed more than anything else. A century's worth of knowledge about how to go about selling something has not been made obsolete, but it has experienced some competition. The old guard, presenting the "correct" path for sales taught new recruits the art of manipulation. Jeffrey Gitomer, Zig Zigler, Brian Tracy, Tom Hopkins, and many other authors on the subject have outlined a strategy for increasing sales on the basis of this manipulation. They have shown us a successful, proven model for sales. So, what has changed? Old School The mantra for the old school approach was to establish and maintain a sort of control over potential cust

Adaptation: The Happy Accident

Image
One of the strange paradoxes of scientific discovery is that no matter how plodding and careful science is about most developments, some of the most astounding discoveries have occurred purely by accident. The most famous of these was the discovery of penicillin. This discovery only occurred because biologist Alexander Fleming took a vacation. Returning to find that his staph bacteria petri dishes were contaminated with an invasive fungus, he observed that the fungus had repelled and killed the bacteria. The age of antibiotics was born. Dozens more examples demonstrate that the happy accident is one of the most valuable resources in human development. One of the earliest known examples occurred when, for better or worse, some Chinese experimenters looking for the elixir of eternal life accidentally discovered gun powder, instead. In 1938, a du Pont chemist discovered that his experimental gas had escaped its container and that a strange slippery substance was left behind. T