Hile Design has been selected to redesign the website for Great Lakes Seminars. The updated website will increase navigability and add a class-search feature while providing an updated look for the company.

Great Lakes Seminars specializes in offering educational seminars throughout the United States for physical therapists, occupational therapists, athletic trainers and physicians. The company was founded in 1998 by Patrick Hoban, also co-founder of Washtenaw County’s Probility Physical Therapy, with one instructor teaching a single course. Today Great Lakes Seminars offers 11 different classes, including their Integrated Manual Therapy Certification course. The seminars are taught by 12 instructors and 13 assistants. The company also employs four full-time office staff members.

Hile has been contracted by Associates in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation PC of Ann Arbor to redesign the company’s logo, identity and website. The website will provide information about APM&R and the details of their services, which include: electromyography, prolotherapy, motor point blocks, regenerative injection therapy and many more for conditions ranging from neck pain to cerebral palsy. Physical medicine and rehabilitation, also referred to as physiatry, is a field that specializes in restoring optimal function to people with injuries to the muscles, bones, tissues, and nervous system by treating the whole person without surgery.

Dave was interviewed by Lucy Ann Lance, local Ann Arbor radio personality, where he discusses the history of Hile Design.

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In my last post, I listed some key points to think about when updating or launching a website. Today’s post talks about a topic that every business owner needs to think about: marketing yourself in today’s challenging economy. Too often, whether a business is large or small, the first response is to cut back on advertising costs and wait out the recession. Here are some practical tips for how to keep customers coming and with them, income flowing.

1. Focus on quality first. Try your best to ensure that customers will love what you deliver, whether that’s a product or a service. Otherwise, your marketing efforts will be in vain.
2. Keep wooing your current customers. They may have needs you haven’t yet discovered, so stay in touch and find out if there is more you can offer them. Landing a new customer costs 10 times as much as servicing an existing one.
3. Conversely, some customers may not be worth pursuing. Why give your time and emotion to customers who make unreasonable demands, are never satisfied with your pricing and make up only a small part of your business? Center your efforts on those who are already fans … and help them grow to another level.
4. Know your competitors better than they know you, and then distinguish yourself with advantages they don’t offer.
5. Give to get. Offering as much as you can for free—whether it’s industry tips, time and cost-saving tricks, consulting or pertinent white papers—will help build a sense of expertise and trust with prospective customers. They will see you as the go-to expert when it comes time to purchase your goods or services.
6. Your website is your most important marketing asset, but your customers have to find you online. In addition to using search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising, drive customers to your site with a well-orchestrated, integrated campaign. The campaign could include email; online or direct mail; radio and TV; outdoor advertising; and blogging and other social media outlets such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
7. As much as possible, don’t let your short-term response to the economic downturn deter you from your long-term marketing and growth goals. Hunkering down and slashing marketing costs are not effective strategies for riding out an uncertain economy. Winning new customers is the only hope for success, so keep on promoting your business. This doesn’t necessarily mean spending more money. Instead, the ultimate performance of a marketing campaign or program flows from correct targeting. If you target with the right message, you’ll realize increased success.
8. Don’t think in terms of selling your services. Instead, think of solving your customers’ problems—today’s customers don’t want to be sold to. If you can’t fix or alleviate a customer’s nagging problem or situation, why would they want your products or services?
9. Be open to change. Advertising that may have worked last year, or even last quarter, may not work in today’s rapidly changing economic climate.
10. You can create your own PR. Writing frequent local press releases is free advertising. There are also sites such as www.pr.com and www.prweb.com, which for a nominal fee will assure your press release gets dispersed to all major search engines.
11. Remember, consistency is key. It’s more effective to reach customers with frequent, targeted marketing initiatives than to blow your budget on one massive “Wow” effort.
12. There is no magic trick that will alter the current economic climate. One thing is certain: Doing nothing will produce nothing, and doing little will produce little!

It’s time to update your website, or perhaps you are launching your first-ever site. You’ve got so many options for web providers—from companies selling template solutions for under $300 to high-end experts. As your most important marketing asset, your website needs careful thought and reasoned strategy. Choose carefully whom you will entrust your all-important online marketing to.

Here are a few important considerations to keep in mind:

1. Since most of your traffic will arrive via your homepage, it should clearly and concisely communicate exactly who you are and what you do, all within a few seconds.
2. But some of your visitors will come to your site via sub pages, so be sure you have full contact information on every page.
3. Your visitors are impatient. You can’t say everything about your company and services. But you need to define your key points with the goal of prompting a personal contact with your company. Include multiple calls-to-action within your site copy.
4. Have defined site goals and determine in advance how you are going to measure success (drive sales, raise awareness, create buzz, engage and educate).
5. Cut out the jargon and advertising “happy talk.” Communicate as straightforwardly as possible. Imagine your potential customer is sitting across the table from you.
6. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not an end in itself. It’s no good to be ranked #1 on Google if your site isn’t compelling. You’ll have lots of short visits with no conversions. Content is king!
7. Have your site built with a Content Management System (CMS). This allows non-technical people to keep your site updated with current content without having to rely on an outside web company. And keeping your site updated will help with your Google ranking, since Google loves new content!
8. People love to look. Consider communicating a complex concept through an interesting graphic, video or animation.
9. Lay aside your personal preferences for the good of your site (you may love the color pink, but it’s not right for your construction company’s site).
10. Appoint a few people from within your company to manage the project, and give them the authority to make decisions. Committees kill creativity.
11. Your website has to be true to who you are (your brand). Customers expect that your company will be truthfully reflected through all your marketing touch points, and especially with personal face-to-face contact.
12. Nowadays it’s important to assure your site reads well on mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.

Hile has created an animated 30-second TV spot for their client Grasshopper. Gary the grasshopper, the corporate mascot Hile designed last year when the company changed its name from GotVMail to Grasshopper, has the starring role in the commercial. In the spot Gary morphs from one scene to another while his head remains in a consistent position throughout. Why? To help assure the brand message still gets expressed as TV viewers fast-forward through their commercials. The goal was to create an ad with visuals interesting enough that viewers have to stop fast-forwarding and watch them. An article posted on Wired by Eliot Van Buskirk explains the results of the study, performed at Boston College, and described in the November 2008 issue of the Journal of Marketing:

“The act of fast-forwarding through ads causes viewers to pay even more attention to the center part of the screen—the better to know when to return to ‘play’—even as advertisements whipped past at 20x the normal speed without sound. Apparently, our brains are still able to process images and retain brand messaging even when we’re only seeing one out of every 24 video frames.”

The concept of the “TiVo proof commercial” was the brainchild of Grasshopper’s CEO, Siamak Taghaddos. Grasshopper is a Boston-based company offering virtual phone systems, which empower entrepreneurs to start and grow their small businesses from anywhere, using any phone. The company has won many accolades including: “66^th fastest growing company” by Inc. 500,  “Best entrepreneurs under 25” from Business Week, and “Top 40 under 40” from American Venture.

See the Hile Design–created Grasshopper commercial.

We’re pleased to welcome Tim Murphy, an illustrator from St. Louis, Missouri, as HileItes’ guest blogger today. We love the opportunity to showcase talented artists like Tim. Thanks, Tim, for being part of HileItes.

Hello all! Greetings from chilly St. Louis, Missouri. When Dave asked me to contribute a guest blog post to this space and discuss my work, I thought about the ongoing recession and how it mirrors the one during which I got my start. I decided to take a brief look at the early experiences that shaped my style, and detail how the skills I was forced to learn in a recession contributed directly to whatever success I may have eventually found. Hope you enjoy.

In 1995, fresh out of college and eager to become fabulously wealthy doing little more than doodling Wolverine in the margins of my notepad, I instead found that my hometown of St. Louis featured a creative industry centered around beer and little else. Never much of a drinker, and more naïve and snobbish than I realized at the time, I held my nose and accepted a role in a digital imaging group at a mid-sized sales promotion agency. Due to the recession, senior workers were being snubbed in favor of eager young (read: cheap) talent, so in retrospect it was a fabulous and rare opportunity to break into an industry that usually required years of experience. But, green as I was, I didn’t realize it at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Until recently, if you called my home phone number, you’d hear a cheerful message recorded by me announcing that you’d reached “Monica Getz, your Mary Kay Beauty Consultant.” Yup, that’s me. Used to working from home as a proofreader and editor for the years I was raising my two daughters, I was particularly attracted to the “independent” part of the “Independent Beauty Consultant” label when I signed up to sell cosmetics in January of 2002.

I admit, I was one of those “not in a million years” types of women when it came to the idea of selling Mary Kay. It wasn’t that I was averse to the idea of selling. And I wasn’t opposed to either makeup in general or Mary Kay cosmetics in particular. It was just the idea of me selling makeup that gave me pause. Read the rest of this entry »