For example, does your company aspire to join the Fortune 500? Or would you prefer to remain a small to medium sized business that maintains close contact with your customers and clients? Some Chicago Businesses do not consider their goals before jumping into a social campaign. Online marketing is best not left to the assistant who spends her whole day on Facebook. Once you head down the wrong path it‘s difficult to right the ship.

Beyond Big Marketing reached out to Jonathan E Cowperthwait, head of product marketing at awe.sm to share his thoughts about DIY online marketing.

Old saw: At a cocktail party, an accomplished writer met a surgeon. “Oh, a writer!” the surgeon said. “You know, when I retire, I want do some writing.” Without missing a beat, the writer replied, “Yes, and when I retire, I’m looking forward to carving up some patients.”

DIY Online Marketing is Dangerous!

Look. Everyone expects consultants & specialists to justify their existence with a defense of expertise — you wouldn’t pull your own teeth, or perform your own open-heart surgery, or design your own space shuttle, would you?… — and everyone knows it’s not always true. Sometimes it’s true (lawyers, structural engineers…); often it’s not; and sometimes it used to be true, but it’s not anymore. (Fifteen years ago, if you’d told travel agents that mere mortals would someday search for their own fares and book reservations on the airlines’ computer systems, they’d have laughed at you….)

But when it comes to online marketing, expertise absolutely matters. To use that surgery example: it’s not even whether you can operate; it’s that you’re probably looking at the wrong vital signs.

If you’re a savvy personal user of Twitter and Facebook, you might be familiar with the joy of having your posts liked and retweeted, and feel gratification at amassing friends and followers. But unfortunately, too many self-marketers — and the products that offer to help do-it-yourself marketers… — then think that these same metrics are all that it takes to be successful in online marketing, too. There’s the assumption that simply being popular and liked is all it takes to succeed.

What Are People Saying About Your Brand?
One of the shortcomings of DIY marketing is the failure to monitor what is being said about your company. Whether you like it or not, what your customers say about your brand has a tremendous influence on your reputation and sales. In some businesses that depend on referrals, such as professional services, reputation management is even more important. Before you can enter the conversation, you need to understand what is said about your brand.

Ask yourself: Do my ads, tweets, and Facebook posts drive conversions on my website? By how much? And which specific ads & posts are most effective? While we’re at it, take a step back: what are my conversion goals anyway? Wait a minute, what’s a “conversion goal”? …

If you don’t know how to answer those questions, that’s fine. You’re not supposed to; you’ve got a company to run. (Your surgeon probably doesn’t do his own taxes, either, and your SCUBA instructor doesn’t re-roof her own house…). But a marketing expert does know how to answer them, and they matter. If you’re not measuring what matters, your online marketing efforts are wasting your time and money, and in a fiercely competitive industry your small business can end up — sorry for the metaphor, everybody… — dead on the table.

Look for a marketing firm that can recommend the best practices to influence public perception of your brand. For example, if there is currently no comment about your brand on social media, then you have the opportunity to start the conversation yourself.
If you make the most of this opportunity, your brand will attract new customers. It’s easy to get carried away with social media, so remember your overall brand strategy and goals when you engage on these platforms. If you are looking for “Beyond Big” Marketing results and awe.sm tools to measure your results, look no further.

Wow this camera is Good!

Before you invest a lot of your time and energy into an Apple 1to1 class in iPhone photography, consider some of the benefits your competitors receive from working with professional photographers and consider what issues you might be facing.

DIY Photography ~ Doug Brooks – Photography Representative

People who take their own photos to use in advertising or promoting their products or businesses fail to recognize that the inherent lessor quality of their images, as compared to those done by a trained and seasoned professional, often make a negative impression on their potential clients that loses the sale. If the images are sub-par will the product being sold be sub par? If you don’t put the effort into presenting your product in a quality fashion could it be as a result of them not knowing what quality is? How does that impact the sale? Honestly, people may not consciously know why …. but they do respond negatively when something is perceived as being less then stellar.

“Do people know that big marketers often spend a day or more having a single image created for their advertising campaign?

Recently VanKirk photography competed for a job for a boutique company.
No store, all web, and they didn’t understand that their food item had to look fabulous to make the sale.
They asked us how long and how much to shoot just over 30 of their confection items.
We suggested we’d max out at 4-8 per day dependent upon the product itself and how many people were there to art direct.
They wanted all 30+ shot in one day and they needed that day to be the following week.
When I pointed out that would mean taking a picture every 20 minutes in a 10 hour day… no potty breaks allowed, they didn’t get it.
We stated that when it comes to high-end food photography time = quality, that lighting, composition and propping rarely happen that quickly, they simply didn’t get it and didn’t appreciate our attempt to educate them on the subject.

Apparently, someone said they would do it. Someone always does.
So 3 weeks later we found out that the shots weren’t looking that great, the person who accepted the job took nearly 2 weeks to get it done, everyone was unhappy.
It was a lose / lose situation!

When it comes to photography for your business, think twice about DIY photography or the cheapest source and stock photography that makes your site look alike.

When you hire Beyond Big Marketing, you benefit from our experience and perspective from working with a marketing company that understands the value of Professionals like Debra VanKirk and how she can make a difference in your business. Choose this Chicago marketing company and leave DIY marketing to your competition.

Our next blog … What happens when you think your DIY Social Media is “good enough?”

Reach for the stars!

Oliver, one of our development leads helped with a plan that included establishing the blog first with the same content as the old site for the new site, only changing the name of the company and the URL. Then we set up 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one. Once these pages were indexed, we used the same strategy on the website itself. It’s always tricky when you take a website that has 5 years of age and replace it with a brand new URL.

So far the results have been very encouraging. If you have important questions regarding your website marketing, Contact Mark at Beyond Big Marketing.com.

Hello Beyond Big Marketing

Our clients have grown beyond Chicago to include: Wisconsin, California, South Carolina, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Mexico and the UK.

As our client list grew, their need for more innovative marketing strategies has also evolved and grown.

To meet these challenges, we’ve grown beyond creating web sites, printed materials, marketing, traditional design, and search engine optimization to include: naming, branding, mobile websites, mobile applications, social media campaigns, customer personas and one-to-one marketing plans.

As our thinking has expanded, our targets have become more focused.

We embrace the new challenges that the growing global village inspires, we hold fast to the commitment of quality, service, measurable results, and inspiration that helped Big Black Pencil grow to what it is today.

Beyond Big Marketing will lift customer expectations beyond existing marketing concepts to a world where we can quickly grow their brand and business ahead of their competition, one customer at a time.

The products are not complicated to understand. You see, you go, you move on. What’s interesting about these are that they are usually at some of the most fun places you can imagine; Weddings, Concerts, Marathons,  anywhere you want to go. So Beyond Big Marketing decided to brand “Portable Toilets in Massachusetts” As Bouse Houses. Kind of like the Klennex of Facial tissue.

Will there be Bus signage and billboards for Bouse Houses? Who Knows? But if you are in the cape and the urge strikes you. You might want to say. “Keep your eyes open for a Bouse House.”

If you are looking for a creative marketing agency in Chicago, You might want to say. “Keep your eyes open for Beyond Big Marketing.”

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.

1. Does the faculty have field experience?
2. Will the program accommodate your schedule?
3. Will you have one-to-one interaction with the faculty?
4. 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.

Michael,

Your question revolves on how to track page views and whether this book is right for a novice. It depends on your interest and desire to manage your own business.

The book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics  allows you to have a better understanding on how to use GATC Google analytics tracking code and understand the basics of visitor data and can also help you understand and customize the GATC to meet your tracking needs. While this information falls into he advanced implementation section, the book is clearly written and offers helpful notes that stand out and briefly describe common requests and specific information on how to customize the tracking code.

I hope this is helpful information, If your business and website traffic is important to you, this book will help you better understand your website traffic. Here’s another thought. If you want to get Free website analysis, go to www.bigblackpencil.com and fill out the contact form and write your URL and FREE website analysis in the comments box. We will send you a high level report on your rankings and website eye tracking.

Visit www.cranecomposites.com

Well that’s not exactly true. Beyond Big Marketing recently teamed up with Crane Composites to make their website dream, a reality. Their website was well thought out and well designed. The problem was, like many large companies, the site needed to function in IE6 along with most current browsers. The site was ready for development but needed expert coding and trouble shooting to make the website concept come to life. Taking existing files and making them compatible and functional is often more difficult than constructing the files from scratch. (which is exactly what we ended up doing) But solid communication and attention to detail helped us deliver this project on time, on target and on budget. The client remarked. “Beyond Big Marketing is great- all went well and we are up with new website now! Thank you again, the site is fabulous!” All we can say is … Thank you Mindy. Look for an innovative on site SEO strategy for Crane Composites in the coming month.

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?

Save energy and save money

Teda Jenkins provided the copy for the site and Marilee Popovich was the design lead on this.

Does your Chicago marketing agency improve your performance and save you energy?

If not, contact Mark Cramer 312-437-4332 and lets get started.

Visit www.eco-screens.com today and start saving money on your energy bills today!