Beyond Big Marketing» Integrated Marketing

DIY Marketing in Chicago, Is Your Competition Beating You With Marketing Agency Expertise?

Mark Cramer — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:48:16 +0000

Cutting corners with DIY marketing may seem like a good idea but it can be the most expensive decision you could ever make. Especially in a major market like Chicago. Developing your own marketing strategy and approach can be exciting and fun. Companies have access to a wealth of inexpensive technologies and techniques to experiment with. In some ways, the appeal of DIY marketing seems simple. All you need to do is create a few messages about your company, publish those messages in the media or Internet and wait for the customers to show up. But do you have the time and resources to run a marketing campaign effectively? Before you invest a lot of your time and energy into a DIY marketing effort, consider some of the benefits your competitors receive from working with marketing agency experts.

Strategic Advice

When you hire a marketing company, you benefit from their experience and perspective from working on a variety of campaigns. For example, the agency will be able to recommend the right mix of marketing methods to make the most of your marketing budget. Rather than simply experimenting with various DIY marketing techniques, your competitors may benefit from having a cohesive marketing strategy. They will be able to set goals to bring in qualified prospects that sales can easily convert into customers. While you can hit on a winning strategy with DIY marketing, your competitors will already be miles ahead of you by that time by taking advantage of strategic advice from a marketing firm.

Does Your Marketing Work?

There’s an old saying in advertising – “half the money spent on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know what half.” That’s especially do with DIY marketing efforts which combine trying a wide variety of techniques without any systematic effort to determine what works. With the right guidance and analysis, companies can run a few marketing tests to determine the best way to reach their customers. Following an analysis of this data, a Chicago marketing firm can advise you on the best way to further expand your campaign.

Look Ma ... I'm a web designer!

Keeping Up With New Marketing Methods

Staying informed on all the important developments in your industry is challenging. What about the latest marketing efforts? Do you understand how Google operates and makes it presence felt on the Internet? Do you have a strategy to make use of Groupon to win new customers (or are you going to lose money with Groupon like this British bakery)? When your business has a trusted marketing advisor on hand, staying informed on the latest marketing trends becomes much easier. It’s too easy to be carried away with DIY marketing excitement and lose valuable money and time. That’s why so many businesses hire marketing advisors to find marketing strategies that make sense for them.
If you’re tired of seeing your competitors gain more and more customers, contact Beyond Big Marketing to see how we can help you address your marketing needs. To grow your business, hire us to develop a marketing campaign that meets your needs. The longer you wait, the longer your competitors will continue to grow and obtain market share.

Expert Opinions

Next week’s blog posts will be posts from smart people who know a lot about professional photography, professional SEO strategies, professional web development, professional marketing strategies, and professional content development. They share stories on the drawbacks of DIY Marketing.

Does your chicago marketing agency know your customer persona and your value proposition?

Mark Cramer — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:33:38 +0000

As a small or medium business owner, you know your customer better than anyone. But sometimes you are at the mercy of a marketing agency that doesn’t even bother to ask you. I’m talking to a potential client that was smart enough to ask me how I would approach their business.

This particular prospect is a University but that doesn’t mean that you can’t ask the smart questions from your agency too. Here’s our process:

Listen to your customer

Every customer has a persona. It is important to understand this before executing any creative marketing assignment. In today’s market place, understanding your customer’s persona can make a difference between creating a meaningful actionable communication or getting lost in the abyss.

This is especially true when communicating with students seeking a four-year degree or advanced degrees. Instead of simply marketing a University, one needs to consider a programmatic strategy. There is a unique value proposition for each degree a student seeks. Your message needs to zero in on the correct value proposition.

The value prop is tailored to the student persona and identifies key program strengths.

Does the faculty have field experience?
Will the program accommodate your schedule?
Will you have one-to-one interaction with the faculty?
How does it stack up against the competition?

After measuring key factors like, accreditation, specializations, residency requirements, class formats, completion schedules, admission requirements and tuition, you are ready to begin to develop a successful creative marketing communication.

Assuming the goal of the marketing program is to increase quantity and quality of leads to drive increased applications, you need to identify marketing channels that will most effectively achieve these goals.

This might sound like a lot of work, but if your marketing agency truly cares about your business success they should insist on learning more about your customers. We’d like to learn more about you. Click on our website checklist and tell us what you think your customers need.

Old School social media works wonders today.

Mark Cramer — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:18:06 +0000

Social media isn’t new, we’ve just forgotten just how effective it can be. Here’s an example my Wife shared with me.

Grandma’s Direct Mail Program

Throughout the 1960′s and into the 70′s, my dear grandparents owned and operated a resort on a small, quiet lake in northern Minnesota. Grandma and Grampa were thirty-six miles from the nearest town, and only came into town once a week to stock up on groceries and resort supplies such as fishing bait and licenses, pop and candy bars.

The name of their rustic establishment in the middle of nowhere was the Frontier Resort, and they kept seven cabins full of guests from mid-May until Labor Day weekend every summer for nearly twenty years. Surprisingly enough, nearly one third of their returning guests were from the Chicago area, 616 miles from the Frontier.

How did people eleven hours away find this quaint wilderness sanctuary where walleyes would practically jump into your boat, and sunfish were plentiful for the kids?

Here’s Grandma’s secret to success: handwritten responses to the leads she got from the local Chamber of Commerce.

Every week she would receive in the mail a list of possible guests – people who had contacted the Chamber of Commerce and had specified what they were looking for in a vacation stay near Bemidji. She would sit down immediately and qualify her leads with either a big X over the lead or numbering down the side of the page all of the potentially good prospects.

Then together we would stuff envelopes with her brochure and a short note – a personal invitation to visit the Frontier Resort on beautiful Balm Lake. She could have typed the addresses on the envelopes – they had a really fine Underwood and that would have looked pretty slick and professional. But with her perfect old school handwriting, she would carefully address the envelopes. And I’d lick and stick the stamps.

It was a different time. A time for good penmanship, personal notes and invitations. Her weekly direct mailings would be approximately twenty letters to people who had never been to her resort, but who had simply expressed an interest in her geographic region.

I would say that her response rate was incredibly high – she’d answer her phone with “Good afternoon. Frontier Resort.” always assuming that if her phone rang (on a party line, by the way!), somebody must want to make a reservation. She was usually correct in that assumption!

Marketing success is still measured by reservations booked, sales closed, leads converted, or profits maximized with expenses minimized. But Grandma’s success was based on her passion to make a resort vacation a personal, one-of-a-kind experience for her guests. She always made it a memorable one, starting with the initial contact, the invitation to the Frontier.

What’s your marketing passion? Contact Beyond Big Marketing and find out how to build your brand, one customer at a time.

(All photos ripped from Google images. Thanks!)

What’s your weiner whistle? Social media thoughts from a Chicago Marketing Agency

Mark Cramer — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:46:37 +0000

Oscar Meyer is an example of a social media pioneer. I saw the Oscar Meyer weinermobile on the street today and had to stop, get a picture, a whistle and of course a hot dog. This is the second time in my life we crossed paths. I couldn’t help but morph into that seven year old kid again and grin ear to ear. It made me wonder just how many brands, large or small, effectively leverage their brand. There were little kids and moms all smiling as they walked around the wagon, peeking inside and got their weiner whistle.

Social Media for 60 years running

At Beyond Big Marketing, we think about ways to tighten the relationships between customers and their brands. The wiener mobile and FREE wiener whistle is one of the first viral social media campaigns launched in the 30′s and is still successful today.

Why was it successful?

It was about the brand
It was spontaneous
It was rewarding
It was fun

The weiner mobile helped Oscar Mayer build their brand one bite at a time.

Some Chicago businesses dive into social media and expecting immediate results, likes and follows. They are disappointed. We’ll help you reach out to your customers and make them smile one byte at a time. That’s how to build brand buzz and customer loyalty.

If you are looking to make a real impact on your customer, contact us.

We’ll help you find your weiner whistle.

Beyond Big Marketing launches a new website for Griffith Airport

Mark Cramer — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:19:15 +0000

This Indiana airport is keeping our Chicago-based marketing agency on our toes. This is the third website we’ve created for them in the last six months and it makes navigating around Griffith airport easier than ever. Based on strategies from Google’s wdyl beta site, everything you need to find is at your fingertips. Get directions to the airport, search airport weather, destination weather, flight status, airport news and additional airport services. It’s easy and fun to use. If you are into customer satisfaction 2.0 contact Beyond Big Marketing and let us make your customers happy too. What’s next … look for the first dual website launch from Beyond Big Marketing next week. We will be launching a traditional website plus a unique mobile website for one of our newest clients. If you only have one of these, who are you missing?

Spoiler Alert!!!!!!! Griffith Airport Now has a Mobile version of their web site. check out this …

What do you love?

Chicago Marketing Agency feels the heat

Mark Cramer — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:56:39 +0000

Chicago Marketing Agency looks to improve good Google Rankings while retaining great Yahoo & Bing rankings

Chicago Marketing Company feels the heat.

Topics trending on the Internet include: making websites more engaging for the user. Relevant and interactive homepages improve conversion and we’re all for it. As part of Big Black pencil’s recent experiment is to make our home page more engaging for you, we are proposing to make the following changes to our website:

Proposed Changes to Beyond Big Marketing

Proposed Changes to Beyond Big Marketing We are going to start adding relevant.

Case Studies on the home page

First we used an eye tracking emulator to see if the new content would generate more interest.

Tracking eye movement

Copy to promote interaction

We also are looking to write new copy for the home page to be more customer interactive and geared to encourage engagement. Websites are a living and breathing thing. It pays to update information relevant to helping your customers. We are interested in providing our visitors a more interesting and useful user experience. Let us know what you think.

Chicago Marketing Agency Panda Experiment

Mark Cramer — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:17:30 +0000

Beyond Big Marketing is going to take 30 days to make our site more interesting to the viewer and hopefully to Google. The wave of Search Engine Marketing is changing. Grab your Big Black Surf Board. We are going for a ride!

Google SEO Experiment

Here is a benchmark of where we stand traffic with Google Analytics.

Google analytics benchmarks as of July 6 2011

Current Keyword rankings for marketing related keywords for Beyond Big Marketing. Lets see where we go from here!

These are benchmarks for Beyond Big Marketing, A Chicago Marketing Agency

Chicago Marketing Company Helps G&N Aircraft launch an new website to celebrate 50th anniversary

Mark Cramer — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:19:08 +0000

In celebration of their 50th year of being master engine builders, G&N Aircraft is launching their new brand and website. www.gnaircraft.com. Located in Griffith Indiana, Paul Goldsmith, Owner and G&N have been providing quality aircraft engine overhaul repairs and custom engine replacements for customers throughout the country.

50 years of keeping you flying

The website features an automatic engine status update feature for customers and offers easy editing and updates.

Beyond Big Marketing and G&N Aircraft worked closely together to develop a brand identity that celebrates G&N Aircrafts’ 50 years of leadership, experience and commitment to performance.

Black Pencil (BBP), is a Chicago Marketing Agency specializing in Branding, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media and Content Development solutions, has recently launched a branding campaign and website for G&N Aircraft.

Contact Beyond Big Marketing and see what we can do for your business.

Chicago marketing agency is teaming up with Chicago Photographer to offer marketing packages to small and medium sized local businesses

Mark Cramer — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 15:01:27 +0000

Image is everything

Why is this Chicago marketing agency and Chicago photographer offering marketing packages to small and medium sized local businesses?

There is a greater need to promote a professional and quality image online now more than ever before.

Beyond Big Marketing and Bart Harris Photography have bundled a unique marketing package that is an ideal “Phase I” package. Our small business solution package handles your startup marketing, branding and photography needs.

Bart Harris Photography (773) 975- 0070

Beyond Big Marketing (312) 437-4332

BBP launches a social media blog for Onsite Sanitation

Mark Cramer — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:46:52 +0000

We launched an events blog for one of our customers, On Site Sanitation.

Looking for Fun Stuff in Minnesota?

The blog is designed to reach out customers looking for special events in Minnesota. The strategy is to drive traffic to our customer’s customers site. we are excited to help our customers help their customers. The events portal for On Site Sanitation gives them a decided edge when it comes to helping differentiate their services from their competitors. Plus this optimized site will help Minnesota residents stay on top of events in their area. It’s a win, win!”

Are you looking for creative social media strategies that don’t cost an arm and a leg?

Why don’t you try Big Black Pencil?