Creativity.   Some people have it, some people don’t.  Does it matter?  Is it necessary?

Like with many questions the answer is a solid… It Depends.

If you’re a businessman, creativity doesn’t matter.

If you’re an athlete, it doesn’t matter.

If you’re a marketer, it doesn’t matter.

Or does it?

If you’re a businessman – you will argue that your bread and butter is how well you run your business.  How successful a business is.  The numbers are proof of everything.

And that is entirely true.

But do you do it alone?   No.  You have a team of people including a few creatives as well.

And odds are, how you became successful had a fair amount of creativity in it as well.  Did you do something that was ahead of its time?  Did you involve a certain department or technique that others thought was crazy?  You were clever and you used creativity to make your business just that much better.

Same goes for marketers and athletes as well.  IF you do everything by the book, if you pay attention to every rule, and every guideline for how you’re supposed to do something you are only as good as the person telling you.

You have to believe that you can be and do more.  Boundaries must be pushed. Limits have to be surpassed. Ideas need to be created and followed up on. Creativity is in every breath you take if you have a dream and a goal in mind. Devising a plan to get where you want to be is nothing less than integral and you won’t get there by going with the status quo.  Be different, do things differently, don’t follow the herd.

Your business will be that much more successful.

You’re races/contests/games/matches/etc will be that much more fulfilling.

Your marketing campaigns will be fresh and pop and receive the recognition they deserve.  All because you took a few minutes to explore your creative side.

Go ahead – develop that fun website, interesting blog, unique project.  What do you have to lose?  And what is there to gain all because you took a step in a direction that most don’t.  Isnt that what sets apart the winners from the losers?  Hard work, determination, and creativity?  I’d think so.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an internet marketing strategy that helps your website rankings on search engines. With search engine optimization, you can manipulate your web design content by using keywords or phrases that search engine spiders can find. This will allow your website to rank higher on search engines and thus drive more traffic to your page, positioning your website and business among the top rank of searches.

Keywords
Placing keywords and phrases into your website is one of the main strategies of SEO. A good tool to figure out proper keywords is theGoogle Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool gives you data on monthly search volumes per keyword variations to give you an idea of the best keyword to use. Make sure to place your keyword frequently throughout your website or web article. At least ten times per 500 word article is a good basic amount for search engine optimization.

Meta Tags
Meta tags exist within the html of a website and provides a meta description and meta keywords hidden within the html tag of your website. Search engine crawlers can see this information and optimize your website based on your description and keywords. This can help your SEO by giving information about the content of your website that search engine spiders and crawlers can find.

Text Links
If your website has image links, flash or javascript navigation, be sure to add text links within your website for search engines. Text links, and text in general, are how search engine spiders find your site. Deep links are hypertext links that link to a specific page of a website, rather than the main page itself. Deep links from a high ranking site are sure to help your SEO.

Fresh Content
It’s important to keep your website fresh with content, keeping your website relevant to search engines. A great way to offer fresh content is by starting a blog on your website. This provides a simple way to update your website, as well as provide keywords for SEO. Quality and unique content is important for search engine optimization so it might be a good idea to hire a copywriter or SEO specialist. Contact Tempo Creative for your internet marketing and SEO needs and we can help get the job done.

The feds finally made official what most of us felt early last year. Marketing experts wrote about “How to run a business in a recession” in January 2008. Now, a year later, we are all looking at the world through recession-colored glasses. Marketing budgets are slashed or eliminated. We know; we work in marketing.

Take off the glasses and come out of the fog. Web marketing remains the most cost-efficient tactic you have in your toolbox. It’s time to squeeze the most you can out of the web – in fact, there is no better time than now. Your clients and customers need to hear from you now, more than ever.

One way to reach out is by adding a blog to your existing web site. Just like this one. A blog can be about any aspect of your business, updated frequently (once a week is ideal), and as fresh as this morning’s coffee. A blog gives you the chance to speak personally and directly to your audience about what is going on in any aspect of the world in which you do business. Blog updates also give you an excuse to contact your email-marketing list with a message, which drives traffic to your site.

Plus, a well-crafted blog will help elevate your search-engine rankings. An experienced business blogger will include key words about current topics that your customer base may be searching for. That’s the blog bonus.

Here’s one consequence of not keeping in close touch with your clients and customers during a recession. An email recently made the rounds discouraging people from buying gift cards for their holiday giving, listing a number of stores that it claimed were going out of business by the end of 2008. Much of the information in the email was bogus or incomplete – in fact, it neglected to clarify that some of those businesses were closing locations while opening others. (Read the email and the Snopes.com report).

Bogus or not, imagine the impact if that email was the only communication your customers had about you during the holidays?

Anytime in the month of January is the appropriate time to post a 2009 message on your own business blog. Remind your customers that you are there for them, recession or not.

A colleague recently posted on Facebook that she was, sadly and after many years of devotion, no longer a loyal customer of a certain big box retailer. She was refused the right to return an item for even a store credit, for what was apparently a policy not even the store manager understood.

When you, a small business working to promote your online services, products or real-world storefront, hear a story like this, your wheels should be turning. You can compete with mega-stores because you have something they will never have: the ability to take care of each and every customer as a unique and important individual. You’ve got the opportunity every day to to market directly to your competition’s customers – but even more importantly, you have the chance to catch the golden moment a dissatisfied mega-store customer declares, “I’m NEVER shopping at there again!”

Here’s how you can swoop in and save the day:

- Extend a price matching offer. It doesn’t have to be on every item in your store. It can be on a certain product line, or for a limited period of time. It’s a lure you are dangling in front of a customer who is ready to bite out of sheer frustration.

- Publicize your niche. Go after the customer who wants that one special thing that you do SO much better than a big box retail chain. They’ll love your personalized attention. They just need to know you are there.

- Shout your success. Post your favorite customer stories that illustrate how choosing you over a mega-store made it a win-win.

- Blog, blog, blog. Write every week about your competitive advantage, share a story, talk up a new product, make a special offer to anyone who mentions the blog.

All those dissatisfied customers have been desensitized to what it means to be actually “served” in a retail establishment. Give them a wake up call. Let it be you that gets their attention.

August is a transitional time of year – schools are back in session, Congress is out of session, and you might be one of those businesses experiencing the late summer lag. No better time than now to start mapping your web marketing strategy for the holiday season. While consumers typically grumble every year about how early the holiday merchandise starts pushing its way to the front of the store, they still readily take advantage of the best deals when they see them. So push your message to the front of the in-box and update those web banners. Here are a few ideas for sprucing up your holiday offerings:

• Offer your holiday discount special in August for services that will be rendered in holiday months. For example, if you are a housekeeping service, “Book your Holiday Sprucing Up service in August and get a 10% discount!”

• Preview holiday merchandise with “Order now for the best selection” or “Limited edition for 2009” messages. For example, if you are a florist, offer a limited number of special edition centerpieces at an attractive price so that clients will be inclined to reserve theirs early.

• Praise your customers for being smart shoppers. Build a little pat on the back into your e-blasts that says, “We know you are a savvy consumer and we’re tailoring our business to serve you better.” Follow it with a sampling of buy-early-and-save items that are compulsory buys, like stocking stuffers and teacher gifts.

• Follow up with a thank you and an additional offer. Once you’ve got them buying early, keep them in the queue with an offering made only to them. If you’re the florist, after the purchase of a Thanksgiving centerpiece, offer them a discounted pine bough wreath for Christmas – if they order now, of course.

And finally, just as a matter of housekeeping, take advantage of the slower season to get your web marketing ads, e-blasts and messages ready to go. Hang the lights and light the candles!

I recently spoke with a prospective client who wanted their website to rank on the first page for a fairly competitive keyword. They had it in their heads that they could help boost their rankings by adding a blog to their site. Not a bad idea, or is it?

OK, of course a blog can be a huge benefit to the search engine optimization efforts of any website. There is, after all,  a reason I am taking the time to write the content you are currently reading. But, can a blog hurt your rankings? You bet it can. There is an old saying: “Anything worth doing is worth doing right”. This applies perfectly to websites that are considering adding a blog to their offerings. Here is a quick list of 5 things to think about, in no particular order, if you are considering adding a blog to increase your search engine rankings:

• Frequency of Blog Posts: How often will you take the time to post content to you blog. I have come across a number of blogs that seem to get a post up on the website about twice a year. That is not exactly a way to build up any sort of readership and isn’t likely to add much benefit to your SEO efforts either.

• Commitment: Bloggers often come out swinging, but then can’t go the distance. They tend to post a good bit of content in the beginning and then stop. Maybe it’s because they run out of ideas to blog about or maybe they get bored. Either way these blogs quickly lose their interest from readers and search engines alike.

• Poor Code: A blog is still a web page. If you don’t know how to use meta descriptions, keywords, title tags etc.. then you aren’t going to get your pages crawled effectively by the search engines. Another coding issue with blogs can be the way your URLs are written. Let’s use WordPress for an example. WordPress is a very common blogging platform, and a good one at that. However, the default permalink structure doesn’t allow for any keywords to be used in the URL. There are simple fixes to remedy this, but you have to be aware of these problems before you can address them. Poorly coded websites do not often achieve impressive search engine rankings.

• Security Issues: There seems to be an endless number of blogs on the internet that either don’t have any security or really lazy adminstrators. Take a look at some of the comments that get approved on these blogs. Is it any surprise that you won’t get strong search engine rankings for your page when the comments are full of spam links? It is important to take the time to read the comments and make sure that they are appropriate for the content of the page. If you do choose to publish links from user comments, they had better be to legitimate pages of relevant content.

• Quality Content: Write blog posts that are relevant to the purpose of your website and will be of some value to your sites visitors. If this means waiting until you have something worthwhile or entertaining to say then wait. Poor content will lower the online reputation of your blog to both visitors and search engines.

Just because someone said you should have a blog on your site doesn’t mean you should run blindly forward with this effort. Having a poorly coded, infrequently updated, blog that is full of useless content and spam will make for a perfect anchor, pulling your site right to the bottom of the search engine rankings.

A colleague came to me today asking for a logo for her department. She wanted something to print on chotchkes and t-shirts. “We need to attract some attention!” She declared. “We want to brand ourselves!”  She showed me concepts she’d created with input from her co-workers. Each was full of emblematic – and problematic – ideas. Clutter, in other words, created by trying to represent multiple ideas in one picture.

Branding isn’t something you do by creating a piece of art to represent ideas. A logo is not a brand. What my colleague didn’t understand is that her department is already part of a branded product. Her department is  a piece of an organization that has a strong reputation, uses marketing messages that recall key themes, and follows a strategic marketing plan. By jumping off the ship and waving their own flag, the department in question would be diverting from the well-laid strategy that was guiding the fleet.

“But we are the stepchild, and we’ve got so much to offer,” she argued. “Look at Nike. Everyone recognizes that brand.” Yes, indeed. We all recognize the swoosh. But if Nike let each division of their corporation create its own logo, what value would the swoosh have?

As a compromise to my colleague’s request, I pointed out that our brand identity standards allowed for a tagline – a key phrase that could be used to represent their unique identity in marketing materials and giveaways.  In the end, she went away satisfied, having a fistful of control over the message.

While a logo can be an essential component of marketing, it’s not the jumping off point. It’s important as part of your overall strategy to create and enforce brand identity guidelines, and hold firm when renegades want to go their own direction.

Been There, Haven’t Done That

Marketing your small business, service, product, whatever it is that you offer, is never the same from day to day. It may appear the same. But the fact is, every marketing plan and ploy is in constant revision. It happens on the scale from “tweaked ever so slightly” to “completely thrown out the window.”  Particularly in web marketing and web site design, the ability to react and reset is critical, and the opportunities are frequent because the environment changes so quickly.

For example, are you on the lookout for the emergence of new customer types? Just because you developed your product or service for X, doesn’t mean that you don’t have appeal to Y and Z who suddenly discover you due to a great web marketing campaign. They may be subsets of your target market, but they look at you differently than even YOU do. Glean their insight to develop your outreach.

Also important is to measure outcomes. If your business is seasonal, you should know at the end of this fall season what you want to do differently next fall. Did you meet your goals? Great! Now, how are you going to push it even further next time? Did you come up short? Find out why. If it has happened before, figure out what you did that was the same. And try something different next time around.

There is something to be said for “sticking with what works,” but only if you know WHY it works and only if the definition of working is “increasing sales and profits.”

5 Mistakes Made By Marketing Do-it-yourself-ers

Want to save a few bucks and a lot of time? Hire a professional. Mistakes in marketing can impact your brand, your message and your results. Don’t skimp on the important basics. Here are five areas where home-grown marketing efforts can fall flat.

• Poor writing: The fewer words the better. Think of it as pepper. Just a little is perfect. Too much and you’ve ruined the soup. You want to leave people wanting more, and wondering about you.

• Ignoring established brand recognition: If you have a logo that you’ve used forever, don’t change it! Not without the input of a professional designer, preferably one with branding knowledge. You may despise your logo, or tagline, or your commercial jingle, but during a budget crisis is not the time to make such a big decision. Work it – your customers recognize it, and you can save the ta-da! redo for a big new product roll-out.

• Not updating your web site: This is the easiest virtually free marketing you can get. An out-of-date site just says you don’t pay attention. Don’t let news, product reviews, special offers or holiday ads sit past their usefulness – and on the web, that’s a very short shelf-life.

• Don’t track results: These days it is so easy to track the results of marketing campaigns. Establishing a landing page and url, an auto-responder e-mail, clicks on a banner ad—there are so many ways to glean insight into your customers’ reactions to your marketing efforts.

• Miss a big opportunity: What’s a big opportunity? What ISN’T a big opportunity is the question. It is what you make it. Holidays, overstocks, back-to-school, your business launch date anniversary, your dog’s birthday all can be transformed into marketing opportunities. Make a calendar so that you can plan ahead and get creative! Soon you’ll have customers waiting to see what you will do next!