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creative briefs |
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My Creative Team memory stick winners include Jay Ahuja, who works with our local NPR station, WFAE. His idea: barter with his radio station to trade MCT services for air time.
Nick Bejarano from Review and Herald Publishing says we should ask everyone to forward this newsletter to their friends in the corporate world. OK, do that now.
Our other winners were marketer - and brand new My Creative Team member - Mark Harrison, who suggested a multiple hit direct marketing campaign.
Michael Sabolcik from Ingersoll-Rand wants us to develop a six-foot tall Mikey logo and position him in uptown Charlotte.
And Roy Delargy from Atlantic Coast Trailer Sales provided some community sponsorship ideas.
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On average, more than 80 percent of web traffic comes from search engines. This fact points out the importance of search engine optimization. However, some studies show that fewer than 40 percent of marketers are effectively utilizing SEO techniques.
Here's more information, as well as a downloadable SEO checklist. |
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Are you ready to add social media applications to your own website? Well, look no more. Here is KickApps, a content management system and viral syndication engine combined into a single platform. Cool.
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Backlinks from high page rank sites still help boost your site's traffic. Who is linking to your site? Find out using my favorite link checker.
What's so good about this one? It tells you who is linking to you and what anchor text they are using, if any.
Also, it tells you the page rank of the site linking to you. Last check, My Creative Team had at least 200 backlinks, and our new blog had 71.
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Hello. Writing tight is the topic of our first article, and we put advertising under the microscope, too. There's a plethora of excellent links in Think this month, as well.
Let's get going. |
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Creatively yours,
Harry Hoover
harry@my-creativeteam.com |
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Write Tight  |
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By Harry Hoover
My first news editor hammered one thing into my consciousness: write tight. Leave out the frills, just present the facts and move on.
Many people who think they are writers want to commit an act of literature every time they let the creative muse out of the bottle. Write tight is good advice no matter what you are writing, but especially today when you are developing search engine keyword ads.
Here's why. The typical Google ad headline has a 25 character count maximum. Description lines one and two cannot exceed 35 characters each. Tolstoy and Faulkner would be in trouble. Let's review some best practices for writing text, or pay-per-click ads.
Preparation Is Paramount. As in all marketing, the prep work is crucial in writing text ads. Carefully define your audience. Who are your targets from a demographic, psychographic and geographic perspective? Are they 16-year-olds whose raging hormones are blocking their ability to reason, or time-stressed 50-year-old IT executives? Get inside their heads. Determine what keywords they would search out. Once you have a few keywords identified, use one of the free keyword research tools to beef up your list.
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Advertising - A Numbers Game  |
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By Mark Harrison
No, I'm not going to declare advertising dead. That's not the case, and it never will be the case. Advertising is alive and kicking, perhaps just a little confused.
What's the problem? Oddly, it seems that advertising has an identity crisis and its parents - the purchasers and purveyors of advertising - are to blame. Mom and dad started using words like branding around the kid. And he, like them, started to believe those words over time.
You can't brand with advertising alone. That's like trying to dig a swimming pool with a spoon. You can support your brand with ad messages. Advertising can be a component of a larger branding campaign. Advertising is a tactic. It's paid mass communications for when you don't have the time or resources to shake hands and greet each member of your target audience.
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) defines advertising as: "The means of providing the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects at the lowest possible cost."
Let's break that down: Advertising can carry one message: a "selling message." It must be targeted. Because so many other folks like you are advertising, you must be efficient with your advertising dollars or it will make no business sense.
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