Make Your Fans Work for You

The power of word of mouth is that it isn’t a marketing channel the way other marketing channels are. It’s your customer recommending you to other people and automatically comes with more credibility than a press release or a post on your company blog. And one of the most wonderful things social media has done is that it has amplified the power of word of mouth.

But that doesn’t mean you sit down and do nothing. That fan who touts your services does it because she loves your services, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help her along. That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t appreciate a thank-you.

Take it a notch further. Make your customers and fans feel really special. Make them proud to associate with you and make them want to boast about you.

Here is a 6-step guide to making your fans work for you.

Selling Design Services to Your Customers

We often work with clients who offer printing services to small businesses or to consumers for business cards, brochures, letterheads, posters, invitation cards and so on. But how can you capture more printing work per customer and increase your profits? Sell higher-value design services!

Identifying customers who are in need of design services is the first step to selling. How do you do this? In four simple ways.

What do you see?

Your biggest clue is the document that the customer wants printed or copied.

• What is the condition of the customer’s original document? Is it well-designed or do you see obvious problems: stretched or blurred images, difficult-to-read text?
• If the customer wants a copy of a printed document, is the original in good shape? Does it have markings on it or things taped onto it?
• Did the customer provide only hand-written copy that they want you to type up and create a document for?
• Does the customer own a business, but doesn’t have a logo?

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Because my first name is Kelly and I was born and raised in New York (where the first St. Patrick’s Day parade was held), I feel eminently qualified to review these holiday designs. So before you go out for a green beer (or many), take a look at these ads our team designed. It’s no surprise that many are for bars or clubs.

This one trots out all the standards for St. Patrick’s Day. You have the leprechaun, the beer, clovers and several shades of green. There are not one but two glasses of beer, in the event you didn’t already associate the beverage with the holiday. What works especially well is the bar’s logo–you can’t miss the red among all that green.

This one has everything you want in an ad for the holiday. The theme is obvious, the information is easy to find and there are no extra elements. The large beer screams, “drink me!” As a result, the message is clear: come party and have fun with us at Hooligans.

Marketing Metrics Every CMO Should Track

CMOs (and CEOs) are focused on the big picture, while the rest of us lower down the totem pole get our hands dirty. (Well, except for Kelly, who loves getting her hands dirty. Figuratively speaking.) The big picture does emerge out of the small details, and that gorgeous Monet is, if you stand close enough, made up of blobs of paint.

But when you’re more focused on managing your people and putting together your marketing strategy, it can be easy to lose sight of the details. Here are some details that it pays to never lose sight of, because they paint a very real picture (that’s my last metaphor, I promise!) of your marketing performance.

1.  Visits to Your Sites/Profiles

I don’t mean you should write down last week’s number of website visits on your cuff, but you should know whether the number is closer to 1,000 or 20,000, and whether it’s growing or otherwise. You should also roughly know the number of relevant visits. For example, we get a lot of visitors from India because we have an office here, but we don’t offer our services in India, so for my purposes, the relevant number is the number of visitors from North America.

8 Tips on How to Stand Out at a Trade Show

Our booth at a recent newspaper conference

There is an art to creating large-scale trade show exhibits, but it can be just as difficult to create displays for small- to medium-sized businesses, when every inch of space counts.

Many conference attendees do not have a lot of time to spend in the exhibit hall and may not be interested in stopping for anyone (unless you’re featuring a great giveaway, candy or beer!). Plus, depending on the venue, there are likely to be dozens or even hundreds of other companies vying for their attention.

Here are some tips to help you maximize your impact when creating a ten-foot exhibit.

1. Choose the Right Hardware

With a smaller booth, chances are that you are not paying to have someone else set up your exhibit (such luxury!). Therefore, the smart option is to select hardware that is fast and easy to put up and is also light for shipping but sturdy. This is not difficult, as there are quite a few options available today. Affinity Express has two exhibits that each take about five minutes to set up, from unpacking and securing the hardware to hanging the visuals. Although I can’t exactly drag an exhibit across McCormick Place myself, the booth is light enough that it saves money on shipping compared to one or more cases weighing hundreds of pounds.

Before you start designing your graphics, be sure you have measurements from the manufacturer and adhere to those specifications.

Attending the Key Executives Mega Conference

Camaraderie. Camaraderie would be my first word of choice to sum up the Key Executives Mega Conference this past week in San Antonio. The feeling in the air was electric and the conversations between sessions revolved around new technologies, growth of audience, sharing with digital and, most importantly, working collaboratively. The discussions were not just about who had the best product, but rather, who had the best product and how they wanted to share their journey.

It’s always a risk when trying something new, but many times the best outcomes are because of these risks. Some of the best insights come from your colleagues in the same industry and what better place to share your experience? Mega Conference 2012 in San Antonio, Texas.

Buzz words and phrases like mobile, retention, disruption, positioning for growth, becoming the local agency, and modernizing the newspaper world all have deep meaning for us at Affinity Express. I attended the conference with David Grant, executive vice president, and Kristin Meidell, vice president of operations for Affinity Express. Our discussions in our booth were not along the lines of traditional sales pitches, but rather conversations that elicited future thought.

Top Seven Cloud-based Tools I Use Every Week

Our business relies pretty heavily on two tools built by our teams: IDEA (Interactive Digital Entry Assistant) and AESB (Affinity Express Service Bureau). AESB is used by many of our news publisher and retailer clients to order print design, while IDEA is currently used by everyone else and for all other services. (We have written about IDEA here.)

Our tech team is working on a big revamp of AESB that will make it smarter and cooler and way more amazing than before. Hearing our people rave about how our cloud-based tool will revolutionize the business and make our clients’ lives easier made me think of all the awesome online tools that are already in use in other industries. I, personally, rely heavily on these seven. They have all the usual advantages of web tools—they are fast and can be accessed from anywhere. (Also, most of them are free or have free versions, except Constant Contact.) But more than that, they are easy to use and fairly intuitive and they serve my needs awesomely.