Ad Campaigns That Work

Posted in: Advertising, Blog, Creative, Marketing by Paul McEwan on August 9, 2010 | 1 Comment

Just because the Pet Rock or The Million Dollar Home Page are simple doesn’t mean they are easy to think up. It takes a creative mind to think up simple. The kind of simple that have most people scratching their heads wondering why they didn’t think of it first. To create an ad campaign that works always appears to be simple. So simple it looks like the creative department didn’t  do anything and left it to the art department, but it’s the other way around. It’s the idea. If the creative is good, the art department is hardly needed, it all just falls into place. The best ad campaigns don’t ever change our minds about a person, place or product but  they will change our actions. Our actions to buy, go, or vote for.

I Don’t know if this guy thought of this by himself or if it’s been done elsewhere. It illustrates my point. More people who would otherwise never give any money to a street person, will be more likely to change their minds and throw money at this guy than any other in his market sector.

Principles Lead Your Brand

Posted in: Blog, Marketing by Paul McEwan on May 5, 2010 | No Comments

Successful advertising and marketing is about knowing your businesses basic principles and allowing them to lead your conversations and interactions. Whether it’s an ad campaign or social network marketing, it should not be about convincing someone to like you. It should be about giving reasons to try you.

People don’t believe they need help in this area because even the largest corporations do it by convincing rather than using principles and incentive driven methods. Look at BP.  British Petroleum changed their name to Beyond Petroleum to “Greenwash” their brand. How is that working out for them?

People want to be liked, even business owners. When it’s personal it requires more than a  self help book. It’s deeper than that and that kind of help is hard to convince a ROI outcome.

What are your businesses principles?

An example of No Market Research

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Real Estate by Paul McEwan on March 29, 2010 | No Comments

Just had a letter handed to me by an assistant. It was..

• hand delivered to her home by a Realtor this morning.
• The envelope was hand written.
• The content was a very well put together article/guide to selling your home
• accompanied with a nice personal letter from the Realtor who did the delivery. (could have used a second set of eyes)

The person who got the letter doesn’t own the house. She rents it. FAIL

If you’re going to go to this much trouble to market, why not spend some time doing the research? There is a way to know if the home is owner occupied. You can even find out where the absentee owner lives. If you can’t then hire someone like us to do it for you.

This poor Realtor double failed. The person who received the letter not only rents but she works for a top 1% Realtor. Not a hope in hell on this one.

MyRealPage Postcard Marketing Campaign

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Printing, Real Estate by Paul McEwan on March 22, 2010 | 1 Comment

You are not JUST ANOTHER REALTOR.

Not if you are a myRealPage Realtor.
You are a SmartPhone Enabled Realtor and that’s exciting!
You also have VOW and many other advanced website features many don’t have or don’t know about.

Why not direct people to your website with a proper marketing campaign.

TribalYell will help you inform prospects of your website features with FREE content on the back of your postcard campaign.

Don’t have a postcard campaign?
TribalYell has that ball already rolling for you too. Here’s our solution to help get your prospects online.

Here’s what you get:

• 1 Custom postcard design (with your branding)
• 18,000 postcards printed with your custom design on side 1
• 3 x6,000 campaigns pre-printed side 2 (marketing aimed at increasing website traffic)
• Delivered to 1,500 owners in your farm area once a month for a full year rotating the message every month.

Each ad rotation comes with a “badge” for your website that ties the message together like this one below.

Claim your area now (We will not deliver more than one campaign per area)

One cost covers

• design
• print
• postage
• delivery to the post office
• 3 website badges

Start now

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Google Goggles and Real Estate

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on | 1 Comment

What is Google Goggles?
Imagine taking a picture of a house with your phone, submitting that picture to a Google search and getting all the listing details on it. That’s what Google Goggles will do.

Thanks to the ever advancing Google, you can now search the web by taking a picture of the item you want to know more about. While this technology is in its infancy, in 2 years it will be full blown so the question is: What does this mean for Real Estate?

Image searching. It’s not new and it works by analyzing the image name and alt tags given to the image within the HTML code. What is new is the ability to take a picture and submitting it to a search – That will affect real estate.

What are image names and alt tags?

Image Names
If you upload an image with a name DC0023854.jpg blind luck will produce any search results. Changing the image names to something like 103-548-main-st-vancouver.jpg has a much better chance of being indexed by search engines and found by someone, which hopefully leads back to your website

Alt Tags
Alt tags are descriptions written into the HTML. You don’t need to know HTML to add Alt tags. When you upload images to Facebook, flickr or Picasa (and almost any image hosting site), there is an area to add tags and many times a description.

Surprising how many images from the MLXchange describes itself as “exterior front” (the default). Please change this to the appropriate room at least. Add to the description in the MLX to help yourself further. Put the address or who it’s listed by or even your website in that additional description area. The question remains whether or not the MLXchange is adding these descriptions into the HTML as Alt tags. We know for sure that it renames the pictures. For now, who cares, let’s get used to doing this and hope the MLX will change.

Here’s the result
When someone (anyone using Google) types in a particular address of a house to get info on it, the idea is to have your listing images show up first. In the future, (a few years away), when someone takes a picture of that house for information on it, your information will show up.

It’s important to note: Adding text on the image via Photoshop (or image editing software) does not help at all.

If you feel like geeking out on this subject, read more about it here:
http://www.realestateseopros.com/blog/seo-news/google-goggles-for-real-estate-coming/

Don’t forget to contact us if you need any help with this or anything else.

The fastest way to get printed material produced

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Printing by Paul McEwan on February 2, 2010 | No Comments

It’s not easy to explain printing processes and short run digital vs long run offset to those who “just want it printed”. There is a belief that the smaller the amount, the less money. But doing things this way will cost way more in the long run. The fastest way to get printed material produced is to pre-print colour “Shells” professionally and then imprint the information in black  in a blank area in the design, (perhaps your own laser printer). The most simple form of this is letterhead. Yes, it’s still cheaper to have your letterhead professionally printed and stored for your use at a later time.

Bulk, pre-printed colour shells stored for imprinting later are called called “Shells”. Shells need to be printed offset and in large quantities. When you do this, you will pay fractions of the cost compared to printing short run. Here’s why:

Digital:
Is basically a giant Xerox (digital laser) machine. The “ink” is actually a type of plastic fused onto the paper with heat. It’s far more expensive and slower to come off the digital press. It seems faster to the customer because there is no waiting time for plates to be made, press to be set or ink to dry. But in reality, a press can produce more per minute.

Offset:
Is ink to paper, (laying into the paper). Never will anyone purchase 500 or 1000 pieces of offset printing because there is a set up to get the press to run the job and a drying time for the ink. This is why 1000 pieces cost the same as (or close to) 2500 pieces. Some printers minimums are around 5000 pieces for offset. Once set up the cost per piece is a fraction of the cost of digital printing.

Important: You can not run a digital printed piece back through a digital printer (laser) again for risk of delaminating the first print job. (remember, the “ink” on digital printing is a type of plastic). The heat that fuses on your imprinting will de-laminate your past printing. Sometimes it works. Many times people wonder why their printer stopped working and jammed so badly.

Cost:
Full colour, full bleed postcards printed one side and stored at the printer for imprinting short run black and white on the back when needed cost about $700 to $800 for the first 10,000 (offset of course) and about half as much more for double the amount and so on.

The black and white side is about $85 for the first 1000 imprints and $55 for every 1000 (or partial) there after.

The “Simplify Your Marketing” seminar explained a lot of the different cost effective touch points we offer that are not only priced well but easy and fast to implement in a moment’s notice. The seminar explained how design and marketing departments work and how to save on design billing.

Click here to add SEO

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on January 6, 2010 | No Comments

Adding Search Engine Optimization [SEO] to a website isn’t as simple as pushing an “Add SEO button“. If there happens to be anything like “click here to add SEO” on your website you can rest assure it’s a marketing thing. Even if it works, developing a website so that the SEO can be turned on or off is all about up-selling. It gives third party sellers something to give away as incentive.

From a marketing point of view it’s smart but it feeds on what people don’t know about SEO.

It would be like an electrician wiring your house but wanting more money for the light switches to work.

We teach Social Media too

Posted in: Blog, Marketing by Paul McEwan on December 10, 2009 | No Comments

Wow, how many people are jumping on this bandwagon and how long can the wagon ride last?

We’re talking about the teaching of social media.

Remember when Milli Vanilli were found out to be lip-syncing fakes? Too young for that? Well the radio station the cool kids listened to marketed themselves as “we never played Milli Vanilli”. Will there be companies marketing themselves as “We never taught social media 101″?

Nothing against social media here. It’s a good thing and those of us in it are always being asked to teach it. Five years from now, when everyone is doing social media well,  a 101 course on the subject will be synonymous to Using Your Telephone 101.

Social media is supposed to be natural. It’s conversations. The hard part (The part to teach) is knowing the different platforms and what they are good for. That part will never stay the same – it’s always going to get easier to do and the platforms will fall in and out of favour .

Would love to hear some University and College courses taught in our past.

Free Marketing!

Posted in: Blog, Design, Marketing by Paul McEwan on December 4, 2009 | No Comments

Everything you need to market your business online is available to you for FREE!

• Websites
• Templates
• Email
• Eflyers
• Social Media
• Blogging
• and Courses for doing all the above

…and what have we missed?

This was great for a moment while competitors were still catching up online and you got a head start using these tools. Everyone is catching on now and they’re all using them. Eventually the playing field is leveled and differentiation is not as simple as being the only one there.

Now how do you stand out?

Content? They actually have to start to read what you’re saying.

Visual

A visual brand is the only thing that is going to give you any differentiation without anyone clicking, reading or listing to anything. It lasts a lifetime and builds on itself the more you use it. There is only one way to create a visual brand: The right way.

Doing something temporary will be hard to shrug off later when you grow out of it or you know you need to change. A template visual brand is not your own – someone else is using it and watering it down.

For a visual brand to work it must be:

• Authentic to who you are
• Unique to you (helps relay your message)
• Performs in a variety of platforms without change (Yes, even print)

Again, a visual brand can last a lifetime and is not something to go pick off a rack for $1.49 but if you want to get a free logo try this.

The Art of Design and Client Relations

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on November 23, 2009 | No Comments

A lot of the worlds best designers (or at least the ones who win all the awards) get fired a lot. Whether it be a creative marketing campaign, advertising campaign or some other idea that got canned and unused often will still get submitted and win a lot of awards. So what does that say? Are most marketing designers producing mediocre work because that’s what their client wanted?  “Build me a website like that guys” scenario.

It’s important to note that industry standards and mediocre are not the same thing.

The new direction of TribalYell puts creative energy first. We’re going to put our foot down on that. We know more than the client who is hiring us what leads a person to read a website and what causes search engines to find it and we know it well. If we don’t then we deserve to be fired and the question needs to be asked, why were we hired in the first place if they know more? Always doing exactly what the client asks turns around and bites both  of you in the rear eventually. The fix can be costly.

We’ve never been fired but if we are it will be for doing our work really well.