Association Memberships

I just found this amazingly insightful article on how to make association memberships work for you by Wendy Nelson Kenney, and wanted to share:  

http://23kazoos.com/2009/04/12/how-to-profit-from-association-memberships/#respond

Partnering with Constant Contact

As of April 13th, 2009, Away Marketing has become a partner with Constant Contact.  The main advantage of this partnership is that it allows me to more easily manage your email campaigns.  It also makes higher levels of training and information available to me so that I can more fully accomodate my clients.  If you are interested in getting started with email marketing, Constant Contact is by far the best email marketing firm out there.  Remember, though, that Constant Contact is not a spam company.  They won't sell you email addresses and they won't let you use email addresses unless you have a prior business relationship with the addressees.  The purpose of email marketing is to keep in touch with your customers and potential customers to produce new business and referrals.  It's meant to keep them from forgetting about you.

E-mail Marketing

Today I attended a lecture by Ron Cates of Constant Contact, and it was very informative.  If you don't know, he's basically the chief email marketing guru at the biggest, most established email marketing firm in the world.  If you get a chance to go to one of his seminars it could really change the way you do business, especially when it comes to dealing with your customers.  Fortunately for us, he happens to live here in Phoenix so he often makes himself available to smaller groups, whereas he normally lectures to audiences of several thousand.  This guy is the expert at keeping a dialogue with your customers that will lead to return business and referrals in abundance.

A lot of people don't know that buying and building lists and sending emails to people you don't know is actually considered spamming, not email marketing.  Interestingly, spamming is illegal, and you will be blacklisted for doing it.  Email marketing, on the other hand, is the process of sending your customers and business contacts informative newsletters and special offers in an effort to generate return business and referrals.  When done effectively, it can be 20 times more cost-effective than direct mail, and it can lead to a lot of business.  The most important thing is that you maintain a relationship with your customers, and don't lose them to other vendors who are constantly competing for their attention.  The bottom line is that if you are hesitant to ask your customers for their email addresses and you don't want to send them emails, we need to talk.    

Climbing Trees on News Channel 3

It's always good to see a client in the news, and one of my clients, Dan Stevens, of Living Tree Service, Inc. has been getting more than his share of press lately.  The thing I've noticed about reporters is that they want a story; they're not there just to give you free advertising, so you have to be creative.  Dan's press appeal comes from the fact that he not only trims trees, but he is a world-class tree climbing competitor, having won the Arizona state competition twice, and having come close to winning the Western Chapter competition a few times.  Here is a link to his News Channel 3 interview, and here is a link to all of his press and competition stuff.

These competitions have been really good for their business.  They started their tree service in November of 2007, and it's been one of the few businesses I know of that has thrived in this downturn.  People take notice when you care about your work and your customers, and they know when they're dealing with the best.  It's a pleasure to do advertising for a company with such a great story to tell.  

Right now my main concern for them is making sure they have a plan for growth and are able to meet the demand during summertime, the busy season for tree companies, because they are already slammed, and it's not nearly in full swing.

Altitude Content Work & Ad Campaign

When Altitude hired me, they already had a website, and had sold some product, but hadn't been really successful online.  Their site was actually pretty difficult to find, and it was hard to tell from the site exactly what they were selling.  

On this project I ended up rewriting 100% of the copy, re-shot all of the photos, and set up search ad campaigns.  They already had the flash banner at the top of the site, but I did end up building the navigation menu from scratch to match the site a little better than the old menu.  I think the menu does a lot to tie everything together.  


With the content work, I felt it was really important for us to show exactly what they do on the first page.  I didn't want people to have to click through the whole site to figure out what they're selling.  Also, the site focused more on the benefits of simulating altitude conditions than it did on the benefits and attributes of this particular product, so I changed the site to focus more on the product.  Naming the product was a big thing, too.  It didn't have a name before so I ran some tests to see what name did the best and the result was "High Altitude Simulator."  My clients didn't like that so they went with "Altitude Generator," but that didn't keep me from running the name that worked the best in the ad campaigns.  

Anyway, they started getting leads right away and are selling machines even though we've only spent about $300 on ads to date.  I'm hoping to expand the ad campaigns now that we know they work.  I will keep you posted