Maximizing the Internet

February 29, 2012 1- 5 p.m.
Crowne Plaza Hotel
1 West Street, Pittsfield, MA 01201

Are you really getting the most out of your digital marketing strategy?

New technologies, a changed economic reality and social customers are fueling significant changes for small businesses. By 2015 it is expected more people will be browsing the web on smart phones and mobile devices than traditional computers. The Internet is still one of most cost effective ways to reach consumers on multiple platforms, but businesses need a comprehensive and integrated digital marketing strategy in order to compete and grow in this fast evolving consumer marketplace

This conference brings together professionals and practitioners in to help you gain the knowledge, tools and techniques to move your marketing forward.

• Interactive Panels and Q&A in every session:
• Digital marketing trends
• The mobile web and marketing
• Effective e-communications
• Social media case studies & new channels
• Google Analytics to measure and improve your success
• Wondering about Flash deals, Google +, SoLoMo, here’s your opportuntity to ask.

 Register Here

Conference Fee: $69 for Bureau, regional chamber or regional CVB members $99 for non members

Conference Program

Keynote: Digital Marketing at 35,000 Feet

It may feel like you are free falling in the fast paced world of digital marketing, but knowing the current trends can help you gain control.

Concurrent Sessions I:

The Mobile Mania… the Growing Importance of the Mobile Web: Are you mobile friendly? By 2015 it is expected more people will be browsing the web on smartphones than computers. Find out how this will impact your marketing and what you need to know to stay ahead of this curve.

E-communications That Get Results: Learn the 3 keys to successful email marketing and hear how current email marketers are using it effectively to drive their customers to take action.

Coffee Break & Networking

Concurrent Sessions II:

Social Media Marketing, Best Practices in Action: Learn from case studies on what makes for a good campaign, how to integrate multiple channels and take a look beyond Facebook and Twitter to see what up and coming social channels, like Instagram and Pintrest can do for your business.

Track, Measure, Analyze, Repeat: Google Analytics offers the tools to measure the success of your marketing for free. Learn how to use analytics effectively and analyze the market intelligence they provide to make your marketing even better.

Open Discussion, Q & A: Recommendations from the Field

So what’s the scoop on flash deals like Living Social & Groupon, What is SoLoMo? What are the benefits of Google +. Here’s your opportunity to explore these and other questions, and get recommendations from those on the frontline every day.

Presented by

Colors evoke feelings and represent ideas. In marketing your business, knowledgeable and appropriate use of color is critical! Astute use of color can be one of your most effective branding and messaging tools.

The psychological effect is instantaneous as color stimulates the senses and exerts its power of suggestion. Color is hard-wired into our psyches – we’ve been using it to identify objects as attractive and useful or dangerous or useless since our days as wooly mammoth hunters. Today color’s effect is seen at every level of communication: in corporate identification and logos, signage, advertising in all its many forms, at point-of-purchase, in packaging and, of course, on the web.

Often called the “silent salesperson,” color must immediately attract the consumer’s eye, convey the message of what the product is all about, create a brand identity and, most importantly, help make the sale. At the very least it must create enough interest or curiosity to induce the would-be buyer to find out more about your product or service.

But effective use of color is a tricky and subtle business. Much of the human reaction to color is subliminal and consumers are generally unaware of the pervasive and persuasive effects of color.

SO WHAT’S IN YOUR COLOR TOOLBOX?

You’vegot the three primary colors: Red, Yellow and Blue. These 3 colors are the base colors for every other color on the color wheel. That’s why they’re called “primary.” Primary colors are useful for designs or art that needs to have a sense of urgency. Primary colors are the most vivid colors when placed next to each other, which is why you’ll notice that most fast food joints use primary colors in their logos, as they evoke speed. Think McDonald’s – with that hot red type and those famous “golden arches.” In our culture we often make the following color associations:

RED
Aggressive, assertive, intense, strength, vitality, life-sustaining, passionate, courageous, insightful, love, passion, danger, warning, excitement, food, impulse, action, adventure, vitality

If people are able to see energy, they’d probably see red (pun intended). Red is the color associated with activity, passion, romance, and adventure. This color is the eternal call to action. In design, you’d do very well to use this color if you are offering something exciting and new to your consumers. It tends to make us hungry and has proven particularly effective for selling food and food supplements. – but not a great selection for a diet coach!

YELLOW
Tropical, sunlit, healing, illuminated, discovery, positivity, sunshine, curiosity, playfulness, cheerfulness, amusement and also cowardice. A popular design color, yellow is associated with feelings of happiness and good cheer. This color suits the inquisitive and the playful. If you want to conjure up feelings of entertainment and amusement and intellectual stimulation, yellow can be a wonderful design color choice.

BLUE
Authority, dignity, security, faithfulness, trust, reliability, belonging, coolness, trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, and professionalism. The color of calm skies is the color that people associate with serenity and tranquility. It gives off the feeling of distance and perspective. The color blue can give the person looking at it great reassurance. Deep blues in particular seem analytical, serious, scholarly, academic, naval and regal. Blue offers the bonus of being the world’s least disliked color.

Your Secondary Colors are: Orange, Green, Purple. These 3 colors are what you get when you mix the primary colors together. Orange is a mix of red and yellow, Green is a mix of yellow and blue, and purple is a mix of red and purple. Secondary colors are usually more interesting than primary colors, but they do not evoke speed and urgency the same way the primaries do.

GREEN
Natural, freshness, harmony, mobility, wealth, life, tranquility, health, money, animals, healing, This color is being embraced by those who embody or represent environmental-related endeavors or practices, while darker greens, because of the color of our currency, also remind us of money.

ORANGE
Warm, cautious, hazardous, cozy, energetic, fun, cheeriness, warm exuberance, comfort, creativity, celebration, fun, youth, affordability. This color brings youthful vitality to mind. Some people associate it with cheap and mundane things but many designers choose orange if the brand is targeted towards young people. Think Nickelodeon.

PURPLE
Royalty, spirituality, dignity, sophistication, costliness and mystery, royalty, justice, ambiguity, uncertainty, luxury, fantasy, dreams, magic and wonder, this is purple. Children are inexorably drawn to the color purple. It brings to mind the days of kings and queens, of lords and ladies, of princes and princesses. This is the color to use if your target consumers are children.

Tertiary Colors: are those “in-between” colors like Yellow-Green and Red-Violet. They’re made by mixing one primary color and one secondary color together. There can be endless combinations of tertiary colors, depending on how they’re mixed.

And then you’ve got the Neutrals: Black, White, Grey and Brown

BLACK
Formal, mournful, rich, elegant, serious, seriousness, distinctiveness, boldness, somberness, authority, practicality and a corporate mentality, seriousness, darkness, mystery, secrecy, seriousness, distinctiveness, exclusivity, boldness and being classic/traditional.

While black is also generally associated with death and misery, we are so used to seeing printed text in black and white printing, that this mitigates these associations when it comes to text. However, it may be wise to use it more for accents, rather than as the main color scheme. And remember, a little black here and there may give people the impression of stability and elegance.

GRAYS
Neutrality, indifference, reserve, somberness, authority and practicality. This color may conjure up images of the corporate mentality (think pin-stripe suit) but there can also be something very restful with gray.

BROWNS & BEIGES
Somber, natural, authentic, utilitarian, earthiness, woodiness and subtle richness and simplicity. Brown usually evokes nature and mother earth. However, even if you are branding an environmentally-focused company you should think about using one or more additional colors. Browns on their own may make your design look dull and washed out.

WHITE
Psychologically white is the color or innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity, purity, truthfulness, and being contemporary and refined. White has become a very popular background color in web sites, because it offers the best readability onscreen, and as a non-color.

So that is how colors generally signify in our culture. However BEWARE – for a given context, not all versions of a particular colors are created equal. Above we said that blue is associated with strength and assurance. However, imagine a powerhouse industry like IBM with a pale, baby blue logo. Not a winning idea! That’s why there are are two more color words you should know:

VALUE AND SATURATION

Value in this context does not have any thing to do with the works of a color!. Rather it refers to the amount of black or white in a color. The more black a color has in it, the lower its value. Higher value colors, those with less black appear brighter. For those of you old enough to remember think of those old grey-scale bars in the text patterns of black and white television.

Saturation refers to the amount of a color used. When a color is at full saturation, it is extremely vibrant. Pastels and tints are de-saturated colors and they have their own associations. For example PINK evokes femininity, innocence, softness, health, sweetness, innocence, youthfulness, tenderness while pale blues evoke feelings of calm, pacific, ethereal, fresh, clean, and cool. Colors that are extremely de-saturated tend to be close to being neutral because there is so much gray or white in them.

COLOR IN CONTEXT

Now it is important to remember colors are rarely seen on their own! They are usually seen next to other colors (including black and white). The way they relate to each other will have a huge effect on how your image is perceived. To think about color in context it may be useful to embrace two more terms:

Complementary Colors: Red and Green, Blue and Orange, Purple and Yellow. These are the colors directly across from each other on the color wheel. Don’t let the name fool you. They rarely don’t necessarily look together. In fact, they become the contrast makes them extremely vibrant. Complementary colors are useful when you want to make something stand out. For example, if you use a blue background and have an orange triangle on it, the orange will practically jump off the page and be almost blinding.

Analogous Colors: Red and Orange, Blue and Green, etc. These are colors right next to each other on the color wheel. They usually match extremely well, but they also create almost no contrast. They’re good for very harmonious-feeling designs and artwork where you want viewers to feel comfortable. Shades

Shades occur when black is mixed with a color and tints occur when white is mixed with a color, but we can also get wonderful colors by mixing colors with just a bit of a color adjacent on the color wheel – think Chinese red (which tends to be more orange-y red) than primary red or Cherry red, which would have just a bit more blue. We can also get wonderfully complex and sophisticated hues by mixing just a bit of a color with its complement. Take shades of rust, which can be achieved by mixing our reds with just a touch of green.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON YOUR CHOICE OF PALETTE

Think carefully about what you are marketing – what associations are you trying to create? Should your colors be vibrant or soothing, straight-forward or sophisticated or complex. A poor color selection can actually damage your company’s image in the eyes of the public, which the right color selection can go a long way towards creating the image you want to have with your public.

You also need to think about your market – the color associations detailed above hold sway in mainstream North American culture. But not all cultures share these impressions. Fro example, we associate death with the color black, but white is the color of death in Chinese culture, and purple represents death in Brazil. Yellow is sacred to the Chinese, but signifies sadness in Greece and jealousy in France.

There are also technical aspects to color selection. Will your color selections work as well in print as they do on the web? If you are making use of both of these formats, you may want to consider limiting your choice of colors. And remember, not all computers process color the same way! You may need help in choosing colors that are considered “web-safe.” Remember too, that there here are palettes that work well for the disabled.

Overall, effective color choice can be a complex process. But it is also one of the most exciting and tangible choices you can make to communicate your image in a manner that is both effective and compelling. Why not that “silent-salesman” to work for you?

What factors do people use to evaluate a website’s credibility? Nope, it’s not what you might expect. Those more objective criteria such as the identity of the site or its operator, privacy policy, customer service policies, sponsorships or testimonials aren’t it. A recent Stanford study showed that 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of a company based on the overall design of its website, with design look specifically being cited more often than any other website feature, with 46.1% of the study participant comments addressing the particular design look in some way.

A major factor in this has to do with typical web behavior. Today’s web is world that is rapidly interactive. The norm is for web users to spend small amounts of time on any given page. Site visitors spend much of their time clicking away, moving from page to page quickly. So it becomes important to analyze just what it is that that grabs their attention, how to hold it and what criteria are they using to evaluate the site?

It turns out that when a website is perceived as being credible and offering of high quality information, products or services the site visitors are basing their judgments on a series of key visual cues that can be grasped rapidly. These include layout, typography, font size, white space, images, color schemes and so on. Looking good is often interpreted at being good.

Of course your site must function well – with well-organized information flow, accurate and compelling content, and with all elements and links fully operational. But that is alone is nowhere near enough to reflect well on your business. According to a recent study by emarketer.com, if a design looks unprofessional – sloppy, thrown together, with cheesy graphics and inappropriate color schemes – web visitors will get turned off quickly, no matter how accurate or valuable the information they are being offered. And when they get turned off, they quickly click away to seek elsewhere for information or services.

That connection between visual design and credibility isn’t a simple thing. Sites built quickly using generic photos and color schemes that are overly busy, or inappropriate to your operation can do significant damage to your branding efforts. Site visitors have probably visited thousands of web pages, and they are quick to those built from generic templates, even if they don’t articulate this directly, but the upshot is that these websites can feel stale and out of date. Credibility suffers and so does your bottom line.

Slick-looking websites also frequently receive negative comments, with viewers quick to make judgments about the people behind the site on the basis of the design look. Perceptions of slickness occur when the site feels like it has been designed by a marketing team, rather than people who care about the consumer or site visitor.

The goal then is to achieve “a polished, professional look,” without veering over into slickness.

And where concentrate your efforts? Design is significantly cheaper than advertising and many other branding efforts. This makes the return on the design investment even that much more impressive. Though it may be less expensive, it certainly has the largest reach and the most direct impact on sales. Wall street analyzes brand identity design as making the highest contribution to brand valuation. Data based on a couple dozen high profile case studies shows that the specific return on investment in design is 50 times that of advertising or any other branding effort.

If your website is an integral part of your company’s marketing, find another place to cut costs! 

Next time we’ll discuss color as an integral part of the well-designed

We all know that there are some pretty shady websites out there! College librarians and professors are constantly telling students not trust everything they read on the web and incidences of cyber crime and identity theft have become issues of concern to all of us.

So what can you do to make sure that your website complements the integrity of your business by creating feelings of credibility and trust, for both the information found on your site and the services your business offers?

Earlier studies suggested that having a privacy policy, or site ownership might be crucial factors in establishing credibility, but more recent research suggests that people rarely use technical criteria like this. So what is it that really gets evaluated? Identity of the site or its operator? Customer service or related policies? A site’s sponsorships? Nope.

In recent studies it is the “design look” and overall visual appeal of the site that get top honors. The key “visual cues” that comprise the overall visual design of a site include layout, typography, font size and color schemes are the most important factors.

Professionals in the field had hoped to see people use more rigorous evaluation strategies while assessing sites. This suggests that Consumer WebWatch, (a project of Consumers Union, the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and ConsumerReports.org, supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Open Society Institute) along with librarians and information professionals, must increase their efforts to educate online consumers so they evaluate the websites they visit more carefully and make better-educated decisions.

So when building the website for your business we suggest a two-pronged approach: working with professional web designers to develop a site that has the compelling visuals that inspire today’s web-visitors, while building in the other elements like privacy policies, customer service policies, sponsorships, and operator identity that will become increasingly important for tomorrow’s more savvy and more discriminating web users.

So what do you think characterize those visual elements are that are most important for today’s web consumers? Stay tuned for our next blog post and we’ll have some of the most current research for you.

Your website is a reflection of you.

Now that you’ve invested all the time and money into making it pretty, make sure it says something.

Most business websites:

• Don’t say it clearly.
• Don’t say it creatively.
• Don’t say it well.

Which means your company and its message gets drowned in the Internet’s infinite chatter.

Gone are the days when you just slap up a quick sentence about what your company does.

Consumers want simple, clear, and easily accessible messages.

Everybody’s got a smartphone these days. And most use it to spend their money—about $300 each time. So make sure you don’t miss out on this highly tech-savvy market demographic to sell your good or service.

We’re talking the mobile smartphone advertising sector and that’s the advice from industry execs regarding its—get this—local efficiency.

Consumers in record numbers are using these handhelds to search for and act on (purchase) products and services and in their own neighborhoods. A Google study of more than 5,000 smartphone users found that three-quarters of them, or 74%, make an actual purchase either in-store, online, or on their phones.

The study, titled “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users,” found:

• 88% of smartphone users take action within a day
• 79% use their smartphones to HELP them with LOCAL shopping
• 60% actually visited the local business

What are you waiting for? The study just confirms that incorporating location-based products and services into your business marketing model will make it that much easier for your audience to reach you.

Three major consumer usage patterns emerged from the data:

1. Action-oriented Searchers
2. Local Information Seekers
3. Purchase-driven Shoppers

How many times have you heard, “this is the future”?

We can tell you now that it’s already here. The Google survey found that 93% of smartphone owners use their phones within the home.

• Thirty-nine percent said they used their smartphones “while going to the bathroom” and approximately 20% would give up cable TV before their smartphones.
• 81% of users “browse the internet.”
• 77% use mobile search.
• Google said that 72% of smartphone owners use their devices “while consuming other media,” and one-third while they’re watching TV (See the blog “Second Screeners.”)

Mobile searchers are looking for a range of information types (below). As an aside, the survey confirms how critical mobile is as a news delivery platform.

• News (57%)
• Dining (51%)
• Entertainment (49%)
• Shopping (47%)
• Technology (32%)
• Travel (31%)
• Finance (26%)
• Automotive (17%)

And the best news is that smartphone shoppers “spent a median of $300 on purchases made on their smartphones.”

Businesses, small and large, who don’t develop comprehensive cross-channel strategies will lose out.

But not those who formulate a business strategy that caters to mobile shoppers who use their phones in-store, online and through mobile websites and apps to help them shop.

SCVNGR, A Google Venture funded gaming company in Cambridge is hosting educational workshops for small and local business owners. Dan Green, President of The Green Internet Group, will be facilitating two “hands on” workshops for businesspeople and marketing professionals.

Social Media 201 is geared towards those who have been actively engaging in social media and are looking to improve  efficiency and performance.

Social Media 302 is geared toward experienced social media marketers, including businesspeople, marketing managers and marketing professionals looking to gain a better understanding of return on investment from social media.

Social Media 201 – Intermediate

When: July 26, 2011 8:00 AM

Where: SCVNGR HQ, 175 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

Optimizing your Social Media Marketing to Increase Efficiency and Performance

• Focus and goals: Strategic use of social media to produce measurable business value;
• Define success: How to choose attainable objectives and know if you are winning;
• Tools and applications: Get better results in less time;
• Engagement: Increasing the value of your existing social network;
• Negative comments: When to engage, when to step back;
• Integration: How to integrate social media with online and offline;

REGISTRATION: VIA EVENTBRITE

Social Media 301 – Advanced

When: August 23, 2011 8:00 AM

Where: SCVNGR HQ, 175 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

Show Me the Money: Advance Look at Social Media Datasets and Campaigns
We will examine recent client case studies to reveal the real costs and real returns from actual client campaigns.
Learn:

• How to measure return on investment from social media;
• How to assign monetary value to different types of engagement and behaviors;
• How to choose the right tools and applications for your objectives;
• How to use data to increase your return on investment;

REGISTRATION: VIA EVENTBRITE

But how much do these web design savings cost your business?

Great design pays for itself—over and over again. Some food for thought:

• 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of a company based on the design of its website – Guidelines for web credibility persuasive technology lab, Stanford University
• 68% of shoppers will distrust a site that doesn’t have a professional appearance – emarketer.com study
• Design is significantly cheaper than advertising and many other branding efforts. This makes the return on the design investment even that much more impressive. While design may be less expensive, it certainly has the largest reach and the most direct impact on sales. Less then 10% of a brands entire audience will have seen an ad before setting out to buy the product. Brand identity / package design is seen by literally 100% of possible consumers, providing the last and most important opportunity to influence the sale.
• Wall street analyzes brand identity design as making the highest contribution to brand valuation. Data based on a couple dozen high profile case studies shows that the specific return on investment in design is 50 times that of advertising or any other branding effort.

If your website is an integral part of your company’s marketing, find another place to cut costs.