So… How DIFFERENT are you? Not how ODD or STRANGE are you, but how DO YOU DIFFER from your competitors?
Note, that I’m also NOT asking how you COMPARE to your competition. When you COMPARE its often going to be a price comparison. Price comparisons don’t build long-term relationships with customers. When you DIFFERENTIATE its usually about the value you provide.
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Of course color matters! But I’m not talking about polarizing protest slogans. I’m talking about color and design.
Back in the day, designing in color was simpler – from 1905 to 1935 Crayola only gave us eight (8) colors. Now just look at all the choices in your crayon box. Lawrence Herbert saw how difficult it was for designers to communicate the language of color, so he bought the printing company, Pantone, and set things in motion to change that. Even Pantone started with just 10 colors in the early 60’s, but today has just short of 1,900 colors defined. X-Rite bought Pantone in 2007 for $180 million, so I’m safe to say that color is important!
Dorothy opened her eyes and followed a Yellow Brick Road to arrive at the Emerald City, then clicked her Ruby Red slippers to go home. Color can be used to create a sense of urgency, move us along in a direction, and provide us with information.
Another of our long-time web clients in a different part of the country, has over the years, been very successful with an old school method of marketing. Florida has different plumbing and backflow requirements than many of the other US States. Many of the properties that they service have owners that reside in other states.
While email marketing might be quicker, they’re more easily missed and are harder to pin to your cork board or refrigerator than a 4-color printed postcard. We designed these four postcards, one for each primary service Flamingo Plumbing and Backflow offers – general plumbing, drain & sewer cleaning, grease trap cleaning & lift station / backflow service.
Approximately each quarter, we have up to 40,000 postcards printed, address-merged, pre-sorted and drop shipped to our client for sending out.
As you may have noticed, many of these blogs are a mix of new client projects and those from long-time clients that trust us with numerous opportunities to assist them with their continuing marketing needs as they grow.
One such client is Athletic Mentors, for whom we’ve designed & developed their brand logo, several concurrent mobile responsive & ecommerce websites as well as many tradeshow collateral pieces, event banners, sales brochures & flyers, and stationery and business cards.
In addition to banners, posters and tent cards, we recently designed this backlit sign for their new coaching facility. The fabrication, municipal permits and zoning issues and installation were all handled by our good friends at Sign-a-rama which allowed us to provide a total solution to the client alleviating many of the headaches associated in getting this accomplished.
One of the downsides of direct mail is the cost per home to deliver it. Great Deals Magazine helps to mitigate that cost by offering co-op direct mail where all the advertisers share in the overall cost of the production and delivery. That said, Great Deals delivers to over 340,000 homes in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and Battle Creek and that translates into a substantial postage bill.
So when the post office started offering incentives to utilize QR tags (those funny square barcodes) that drove the recipient to a mobile friendly website, Great Deals decided it was time revamp their site.
Working with the owner, the Imagination Factory re-designed the older static site into a more search and mobile friendly CMS (content managed) site. Each of the USPS promotion rules are quite specific, so we also needed to create a site structure and several QR tags to perform everything from a simple click to call to more involved mobile ecommerce functions.
