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!

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.

“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.

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.

As a confident pencil artist but a terrible painter, I wondered at some point what would happen if I scanned my sketches and began to apply the Photoshop skills I’d been learning as a coloring technique. I had an opportunity for one of our larger beer clients who wanted to save money by eschewing the usual photo shoot, instead pursuing illustration. The subject matter needed to feature figures in kinetic motion (most beer promo involves sexy women, sports, and/or music), somewhat similar to the action-packed superheroes I’d been drawing forever in emulation of my favorite comic book artists like Art Adams and Jim Lee. I combined all of these experiences and the result was a signature style that has received strong positive feedback and led to a slew of new illustrative opportunities.

For the purposes of this post I elected to outline the process using a Corona case card I did after I’d left my original agency and was taking on a lot more freelance. This is how it generally works:

(Click on each image to enlarge it and read Tim’s comments.)

I sketch everything out roughly to get an idea of my composition and how it will fit into the dimensions of the piece. The layout may change radically throughout the process, and usually does, so keeping everything well-organized allows for greater flexibility down the line. (Fig. 1)

I overlay sketch paper and create an individual line drawing of each character, thinking ahead to how I will need to mask off each area for coloring later in the process. (Fig. 2) Each sketch is then scanned.

I create an individual path for each section of color. Anything that will be sectioned (e.g. different strands of hair) has to have its own path. This is where the hours of drawing paths for retouching come in handy.  Kind of my own “wax-on, wax-off” experience. (Fig. 3)

I usually start by filling flat colors for each layer of the character (skin, torso, front leg, back leg, etc.). Then I make a selection with each path and brush in my details with the painting tools. It takes some concentration but it’s probably the most fun. Using this technique also enables maximum contrast between hard edges and soft gradients. You might notice that after I’ve finished drawing a path over the “live” part of the figure, I just kind of sloppily wrap it around and close off the endpoints. This can lead to some fun little happy accidents when I’m painting in the details, especially with my particular cubist/futurist-inspired style that involves shapes in motion or blending into other shapes to flatten out the overall look. (Fig. 4)

I finish brushing in my shading and highlights, making tweaks to the original shape as I see fit. The finished color version almost always looks different from what I envisioned, but since I keep everything layered I have plenty of freedom to rework the piece at every stage. Additionally, all the old retouching tools like Curves and Channel Mixer layers (color adjustment) and dodge/burn (metallic clothing accessories) become useful. (Fig. 5)

Repeat with all necessary characters and background elements. It may seem time-intensive, but a piece like this is generally finished in fewer than five working days. (Fig. 6)

Now it’s time to put all these pieces together in one layered file and make them work together. I’m a huge fan of the illustrator Gary Kelley, and I think his method of flattening the illusion of perspective through color and shape is nothing short of ingenious. My humble tribute to his work is to try to achieve a similar kind of flatness by letting the shapes intermingle. The pool shape is behind the figures, but on a separate layer above the figures I used the pool’s paths to brush some of its shape through them. You can see a similar technique used throughout the other shapes, like the rooftop and the intermingling background buildings. (Fig. 7)

After laying in the product, logo and type treatment, I’m dissatisfied with the flatness. Feels like I’ve taken it too far, so the faces are falling into the background and it’s really flat, not just distorted perspective.  (Fig. 8)

Bringing in some shadows and glows allows me to control the flatness between shapes and define the space on my own terms. Now it’s got a lot more pop, which is the name of the game in POS. (Fig. 9)

Using the square/oval selection tool and the airbrushes, I apply the signature flourishes of this style on a new layer. The placement of each shape is very important; they reinforce my flattened perspective goal while adding motion to an action-oriented theme. On this particular piece they’re more subtle than usual; if you’ve seen the St. Louis sports mural on my website you can see that the style can easily become the dominant aspect of the piece and still allow the other elements to work effectively. It all varies depending on the piece and, often, the client. (Fig. 10)

Speaking of clients, this one decided late in the game to nix the afro, much to my chagrin. But, since I illustrated each character individually it’s a pretty easy fix. (Incidentally, separate working files also help keep this file’s size low, which is significant since it’s 16”x 23” at 300 ppi resolution. This could easily become a 2GB file otherwise). Additionally, I decided that the flat buildings in the background were killing the dance vibe, so I applied a Wave filter to allow them to join the fun. (Fig. 11)

It’s a pretty fun process, and in the end I’m grateful to some very generous people from those early days who shared their talent and knowledge, allowing me to blend it with my own particular skill set and create something uniquely my own.

What about the current recession?  The St. Louis creative community has been hit hard by a combination of the economy and the Anheuser-Busch buyout. In the past year alone I’ve learned more than I ever thought I would about Adobe Flash, Actionscript, Dreamweaver and a score of other tools that may come in handy in the coming decade. I couldn’t tell you whether they’ll allow me to keep up with the young talent coming out of college (!) but I can say that they’ve changed the way I think about certain challenges, which in my opinion is gold to a creative mind.

Tim Murphy

Like what you see? Visit Tim Murphy’s website to view more of his work.

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.

Eventually, the 50% commission Mary Kay consultants make (along with a variety of motivational perks that included jeweled pins, MK–emblazoned apparel and business items, and the unfettered, absolutely consistent encouragement at any evidence of the smallest step taken out of my comfort zone) convinced me to don pantyhose, heels, and a skirt and blazer and begin selling Mary Kay’s skin care and color cosmetics line to my friends and family. I was good enough at it to earn my Red Jacket, the blazer awarded sales consultants who recruit three new selling team members within a certain time period. Alas, I was not good enough at it to earn either the coveted pink Cadillac or the first Mary Kay car award, at the time a red Pontiac Grand Am.

In addition to the Red Jacket that still hangs in my closet and several hundred dollars of unsold cosmetics,  I took away a lot from my 5-year-stint as a Mary Kay consultant. The most important lesson I learned is this: it pays to learn to sell. I’m convinced that anyone can benefit from good sales training, which not only makes you an expert in your product but gives you insight into human nature, helping you to read body language and understand how different personality types respond to sales advances in different ways.

Beyond the general appreciation of sales as a profession, here are some tips and wisdom I learned from Mary Kay that I use all the time. OK, so maybe a few of them sound a little cheesy; they still work and inspire me to this day—because, after all, isn’t working for an advertising agency kind of like being in the cosmetics business? Sometimes it takes just a little touch-up and sometimes it takes a complete makeover, but it’s always about making a client look their best.

1. Smile when you’re talking on the phone. It makes your voice sound friendlier. (If you have to, place a mirror near your phone and smile at yourself to keep yourself honest.)
2. Dress up a little before you go shopping for an item that requires contact with a salesperson or out to eat. You’ll get better service (as long as you are your normal friendly self).
3. FAYC. That means forget about yourself completely. Which, of course, is impossible, but nonetheless worth aspiring to. Think about how you can meet a client’s needs in the meeting, not just about what you hope to gain from it.
4. Only buy what you need, even if someone gives you something “free” to buy more. It took me a while to learn that it was more prudent to buy an $18 item outright than to buy $75 more to get the $18 “special of the month” item free.
5. Follow up. Call people back regularly to see if they need anything and while you’re at it, ask about their family or about that new job. If you’re not pushy, they will look forward to your calls and not always let the answering machine get them. (Maybe they’ll even call you back!)
6. If you don’t ask, the answer is always “no.”
7. Don’t give up. Every “no” gets you closer to “yes.”
8. Get your priorities straight. In Mary Kay, it was always family first and your Mary Kay business second.
9. It takes a lot more work than I was willing to do to earn a car. Nonetheless, it’s not a scam. There are thousands of Mary Kay cars being driven by Mary Kay consultants who earned them.
10. The last four letters in the word enthusiasm stand for “I Am Sold Myself.” If you pride yourself on being rational in your business interactions, you may benefit from introducing a little more warmth in your voice. You can be enthusiastic without being out of control.

What I didn’t learn: Why Ann Arbor women don’t wear lipstick. And why, as soon as I started working in Ann Arbor, I joined the crowd, applying a light layer of subtle lipstick only for client meetings. But that’s a  post for another day.

These email promotions (and tweets) center mostly on changing technologies, often with little mention of the need for creative marketing strategies. While all of this technology is extremely important, we seem to be living through a time in advertising where we are more intrigued by the medium than the message.

Recently a friend gave me Juicing the Orange, a book about how creativity is THE key to successful advertising. It chronicles eight major ad campaigns by Fallon Worldwide, an ad agency based in Minneapolis, MN. While Fallon is not among the largest agencies in the world, it has served an impressive list of major brands including Purina, Citibank, United Airlines, Holiday Inn Express, EDS, BMW and others. What the agency is best known for is their “single-minded devotion to, and the belief in, the power of Creativity.”

Of course the changing technologies necessary for reaching customers are highlighted in their case studies. Like all other major agencies, Fallon has lived through the decline of mass-market advertising. In fact, they were the first agency to forego television advertising in lieu of web advertising for an auto account. Way back in 2001 they created 3-minute, action-packed mini-movies (starring hunk Clive Owens) for their client BMW. This was truly radical as no car company had ever considered that an online campaign could be as effective (and in the case study in the book, perhaps more effective, and much less expensive) than the then-prescribed TV spot of the beautifully polished, high performance car driving through pristine mountain roads.

The emphasis of the book is definitely not on the medium of delivery, but on the research and development of the creative ideas and strategies behind the campaigns. And their creative solutions were often a hard sell to their clients. As quoted in the book, “Publicly announcing our devotion to creativity put us in risky territory. In the world of marketing communications, ‘Creative’ typically means ‘self indulgent,’ the kind of art for art’s sake ads that win awards but don’t affect the client’s bottom line. In the larger business world, creativity can be an even more pejorative word. Innovation is prized, but creativity conjures images of an improv group brought in for a team-building exercise, or empty exhortations to ‘Think outside the box.’”

But time after time Fallon proved this stereotype false. By focusing on creativity to reach their clients’ customers and taking risks, they rung up an impressive resume of often wildly successful campaigns (that at times saved their clients from financial doom).

Why is this book so timely right now? Because of the sheer amount of media we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Whether serving major clients like Lee Jeans or the Bahamas Tourism board (both case studies in the book) or, for smaller firms serving mid-sized local clients, the need to stand out creatively has never been more important. Think about it. Has there ever been a successful advertising campaign that you can recall that is boring, uninspired and derivative? So, it’s not enough to be ranked number one in your industry on Google, if you don’t retain your site visitors with a compelling and creative brand message. Without the creative, you will have lots of site visitors but you may not be gaining many customers. And it’s not enough to have an extensive marketing campaign if it’s forgettable, because it won’t define you against the thousands of other boring and forgettable campaigns we all immediately dismiss and forget.

Creative content and strategy, not technology, is king. (Actually, you need both.)

By the way, I highly recommend you set down your book about search engine supremacy (if only temporarily) and pick up Juicing the Orange by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn. They also have a wonderfully entertaining website where you can see (via videos) many of their now famous, and hugely successful campaigns that are discussed in the book. You can also purchase the book on the site if you are so inclined. Visit juicingtheorange.com. You won’t regret it, and you will see the power of intelligently applied creativity firsthand.

References. If you read enough agency websites in succession they all begin to sound the same: we’re experienced … we’ll deliver … we’re creative … we put a premium on serving our clients. Well, take them up on the client thing. Ask to speak with some of their clients directly. Talk is cheap, and companies can say anything about themselves. If they can’t produce references from satisfied clients, that’s a red flag.

Listening. Before handing out sage advertising advice an agency should listen to you and then listen some more. The fact is that no client has built a viable business (especially in today’s economy) without knowing a thing or two about meeting the needs of their customers. It’s true that effective ad agencies know how to help grow a business by motivating existing customers and reaching new ones. And good agencies will help to define a clear marketing message in order to increase sales. But not before they fully understand the goals and unique challenges of each client. They should listen more and speak less.

That said, you aren’t hiring an agency to be your lap dog or “yes men” (or women). After listening and understanding your challenges, they should bring in fresh new marketing ideas—and your job is to be open to them.

Accessibility. Some creative firms only provide an email form with which to contact them. That’s suspect. They should at the very least have a phone number, and a brick and mortar street address wouldn’t hurt either. They’re not engaged in covert ops, they are in advertising. So why the secrecy?

Samples. I have actually visited agency sites that don’t show any of the work they’ve done. What’s up with that? Advertising depends on ideas expressed through the combination of creative text and visuals. If they don’t show you their work (or enough of it for you to make a judgment about their expertise), it’s probably not worth seeing.

Creativity. Judge the firm’s portfolio by their creativity, not just by their experience in your particular industry. Creativity is what will get you noticed and what will set your company or product apart. It doesn’t necessarily matter if the agency has worked in your industry before because good advertising needn’t be industry specific. Effective advertising is made up of great ideas targeted successfully to distinct markets. Look to see how a prospective agency thinks, and again, look for satisfied clients across a spectrum of industries.

Bias. People have biases, and advertising agencies do too. Some are biased against newer marketing methods such as social media and phone apps. Or conversely, others view any offline media as old fashioned and ineffective. Truth is, people access information in many different ways depending on the industry and the customer base. I recently had a conversation with an online marketer who couldn’t believe that my firm had helped a company experience radical growth through a billboard campaign. The fact is that over 80 percent of the client’s customers’ decisions were affected by the billboards. How did we know this? Because our savvy client asked their customers (who generally had a short waiting period before being seen) to fill out cards asking how they came to the company (online search, referral from a friend, etc). Pay-per-click stats are not the only way to confirm return on investment.

I have my own personal bias. It’s a bias against advertisers and marketing firms that insist their clients conform to their particular niche marketing approach, and don’t consider all the options of what might work best for their client’s customers.

Friendliness. Friendliness? Isn’t that kind of touchy-feely? What’s that got to do with business, as long as the agency gets results? Well, from my experience, accounts go south less because of agency deliverables and more often because of miscommunication, misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Yes, hurt feelings! You and your agency are going to be spending time together in meetings and on the phone and corresponding by emails. It will go much better for both sides if you like each other.

So that’s my bare-bones list of what to look for if you’re in the market for an ad agency. Do you agree with my points? Are there other factors that need mentioning? Let me know your thoughts.