Capture Clients with Words That 'Hook' and Graphics That 'Kick!'

Take these 5 design/marketing tips to heart. Using them consistently will save you time in the long run and attract more customers.

Keywords:

graphic design, marketing, desktop publishing, graphics, diy, design

Article Body:

Do the marketing pieces you send out lack pizzazz and personality? Are they capturing the clients you want to work with?

As your company's in-house graphics person--perhaps more by default than by intention--you're pressed to be a jack/jill-of-all-trades. You want to do a great job of producing promotional pieces, but you have little time to learn advanced design and marketing skills.

Your ongoing challenge is learning to do a little more to get a lot better results--quickly and painlessly.

How can you improve them? What Techniques Can You Apply NOW?

Take these 5 design/marketing tips to heart. Using them consistently will save you time in the long run and attract more customers.

#1 Develop a brand identity and stick with it

Branding is an all-encompassing concept that brings together your business's product mix, pricing, ambience, promotions, identity, and much more. From a graphics point of view, it's your logo, stationery, business card, website, and flyers that create a graphic personality. Your descriptive tag line bonds these pieces with added pizzazz.

Think about familiar brands like Nike's. You know what it offers instantly when you see the logo (the Nike swoosh) and tag line (Just Do It!). You want that kind of instant recognition for your company.

The results? Your messages get noticed because you've built credibility and recognition into your brand through consistent use of graphic identity techniques.

#2 "Hook" customers with persuasive writing and a "call to action"

Make a habit of doing these two things: Use persuasive words that "hook" their interest, and include a well-defined call to action in every piece. When writing marketing pieces, what can you do to make them more effective? Apply these basics:

- Know who you are writing for and keep their preferences in mind as you write each word.

- Put your message in terms of "you" rather than "I" or "we." People don't care about what "we" offer; they care about how your product or service can make their lives better.

- Make it clear what your readers should do, think, or believe as a result of reading the information you present.

- State your intention as a command--known as a "call to action." It can be as simple as "Call Today" or "Order It Now."

The results? The whole point is to encourage your prospects to take action! Whether it's to send an email or pick up the phone and call you, using precision wordsmithing persuades your prospects to take action...now!

#3 Use digital photography and illustrations to add "kick" to your marketing pieces

A ho-hum marketing piece generates few calls. What a waste! Learn the ins and outs of working with digital photography and illustrations -- so much easier with Internet resources galore to choose from.

A few quick tips:

- Place your strongest image in the top half of the page where it will get the best visibility.

- Using one large picture makes a stronger impression than several smaller ones.

- Group several small pictures so they collectively form a single element.

- Juxtapose a small picture with a larger one for contrast.

The results? Photos and illustrations help you add the "eye" appeal that translates into "buy" appeal.

#4 Jazz up your layouts so your most important points stand out

Break up monotonous lines of text with attractive "pull quotes" or "call-outs," which make critical information stand out on the page. To create a pull quote, just copy a provocative or challenging statement from your text and paste it into a different position on the page using large, contrasting type. Add decorative quotation marks, border it with lines, or place it inside a box to jazz it up.

The results? The points of interest you've added draw the reader's eye to the exact point you want them to remember.

#5 Ensure professional results by using the right file formats

You've just created a flyer that will be printed and mailed to your clients. To finish it off, you import a needed graphic from a website and send your file to the printers. Ouch! The resulting graphics looks blotchy and amateur in print. What went wrong? Graphic file formats for the Internet (72 dpi, low-resolution JPG and GIF) and file formats for offset printing (300 dpi, high-resolution TIF and EPS) are totally different animals. In this case, you've used the wrong file format and resolution for your purpose.

The results? Choosing the right file formats gives you a professional-looking document with clear images and the quality you want.

Start using these five easy techniques to add pizzazz and personality to your marketing pieces now, and you will "hook" new clients immediately.

© Karen Saunders 2005

For Homebuyers, Pictures Tell a Thousand Words

This article describes digital photography techniques for taking pictures of home interiors and distributing the photos to real estate clients using email and web sites.

Keywords:

real estate, photos, photography, interior, marketing

Article Body:

Homebuyers are using the Internet as their primary means to search for homes. How have real estate agents responded? By providing low quality photography of the houses they are selling. Wrong! Realtors still don't seem to understand that marketing a home properly always includes first rate photography. High quality digital photography should be a major component of every real estate agent’s marketing efforts. An agent’s goal in photo marketing is to provide a quality collection of photos showing home exteriors and interiors for both buyers and sellers. These photos are used for listing presentations, flyers, emails, multiple listing services and agent web sites.

There are many excellent cameras on the market. It's important to choose one that takes quality photos in almost any kind of interior lighting. Visit a quality photography store and talk with a knowledgeable salesperson. At a minimum, the camera must take wide-angle photos and work with an external flash or "slave flash." Another useful accessory is an easily adjusted tripod.

Once you have purchased your camera, here are a few simple tips to get you started:

• Wide-angle, wide-angle, wide-angle. Use a wide-angle lens. For most interiors, you'll want to take in the largest possible area of the room.

• Decide what part of the room is most interesting from a visual standpoint and make that your focus. You want to photograph the most appealing areas of the room and compose your photo so that these key areas are emphasized in your photograph.

• Eliminate excessive clutter. A famous photographer observed that photography is "ten percent creativity and ninety percent moving furniture."

• Keep vertical lines vertical. It confuses your viewer when vertical lines are tilted. Also try to keep horizontal lines parallel to the top and bottom of the frame. Finally, keep your camera level and don't tilt it up or down.
The main problem in indoor photography is lighting. The built-in flash of the digital cameras simply isn't bright enough light up an entire room. However, there is an easy solution called a "slave flash." A slave flash has an electric eye that senses when your built-in flash fires, and then the slave flash fires at the same time. These flash units are usually battery powered, and run from about $75 up depending on the brightness and features. You can find them at your local camera store, or do a search on the Web for "slave flash" and "digital camera."

Another potential problem is the red-eye reduction feature. You'll either need to turn this feature off or purchase a flash unit that can work with it. Some of the slave flash units are designed specifically to work with cameras having red-eye reduction and will fire at the right time, but it's usually easier to turn the feature off on the camera.

There are a number of other things that you can do to improve the lighting of your indoor photography. Turn on all of the lights in the room. A low cost solution that you may want to consider is buying one or two clamp-on flood light units from a home improvement store and bouncing their light off the ceiling in darker rooms. Be sure to open all curtains to allow as much natural lighting as possible, but try to avoid shooting directly into a window where glare may overexpose your photograph.

After you have taken your photos, a mistake often made by agents is sending photos to clients via email that, in terms of file size, are much larger than need be. Your client is not going to be happy if they use a modem to connect to the internet and you send them twenty megabytes of photos!

There is an easy solution to this problem. Microsoft has a free program named Image Resizer that is included in PowerToys for Windows XP. Image Resizer enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click and reduce the file size to one tenth its original size and still provide an excellent image. You may download this program by going to the Microsoft download web site at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

Rather than send photos directly to clients, you may also choose a photo sharing service like Shutterfy.com to create an online album. To share photos, go to Shutterfly and open an account. The various screens will guide you through uploading your pictures to its web site. Then you can send an email to your client with a link to the online Shutterfly album.

If you follow these simple suggestions, you'll be amazed at how much improvement you'll see in your interior photos. A well-taken picture is worth a thousand words.