Unless you have been too busy bathing of the Southern coast of St. Barts with spider monkeys for the past two weeks, you are probably entrenched in the whole Zombie phenomenon. If not, check out this link to read about the gory incident in Miami and the other bizarre zombie-like behavior rocking the nation.

What interests me is the amount of viral traction that these Zombie-like attacks have gained. In less than a week it completely took over all of the major social media outlets. I could barely pick up my phone without seeing some sort of Zombie-this, Zombie-that message and in no time there’s Zombie YouTube videos being posted by amateur film  makers all over the country, some of which are pretty hilarious. A friend of mine and a screen-printing shop owner, capitalized on this immediately by marketing various Zombie t-shirts and taking full advantage of all the hype.

If there’s one thing we can take from all of this – other than stay away from “bath salts” – is the sheer power of social media. Don’t under estimate it — it can be used to promote any product, service, or organization…. even a Zombie Nation.

Your Message Matters!

More than ever before, organizations are focused on their messaging strategy.  This is includes: communicating your mission and vision, building brand awareness and telling your story. Your company’s messaging strategy should include a positioning statement and a series of key supporting points that convey your value proposition and core benefits. When properly executed, your messaging strategy serves as a roadmap to guide your company around the common obstacles found along the path to increased market share and brand recognition.

Start with a Positioning Statement

Every message strategy should be built on a positioning statement that soundly communicates your company’s offering, as it will be the central theme for all future marketing activities. Your positioning statement should be simple, unique and believable and speak to your target audience.

Support Your Position

While the positioning statement articulates a high-level, abstract benefit, the claims made by support points should be readily demonstrable, as they will reinforce the position statement and unfold your company’s central theme with more detail. They should be as specific as needed in order to form a foundation for all subsequent product, service and organizational communications.

Here are ten steps that will guide you on the path and maximize your communications approach:

1. Tell Your Story: Your story should speak directly to your market and embody your offering.  Tell them who you are, why you’re better, what you believe and – above all – why they should care.

2. Know Your Market: The better you understand the dynamics of the market(s) you serve, the more your targeted message will resonate creating stronger business results.

3. Integrate Your Brand: As with all marketing activities, your company’s brand identity needs to be integrated into its message strategy.

4. Less is More: Your greatest challenge will to be condensing your whole message into simple, concise phrases that will represent your offering.  Choose wisely, be direct and you will be remembered.

5. Be Creative: In many cases, a strong creative strategy will get you noticed and more importantly, remembered. Be innovative in your approach incorporating new ideas and tactics to get noticed.

6. Wide Ranging: Marketing strategies should work across all mediums, whether you’re planning on using them or not. These include online/digital, print, electronic among other medium.

7. Structure It: Messages should fit within a particular “architecture” and structure and should have a hierarchy of key messages.

8. Be Clear: Concepts that are complicated have no place in a company’s message strategy. They should be simple, direct and written so your target audience can understand them easily and fast.

9. Be Persuasive & Consistent: A persuasive message delivers the relevant, rational and emotional arguments necessary to motivate your target audience to act. This message should be repeated constantly, keeping in mind that – since you hear it daily – you may tire of it long before your prospective customers do.

10. Believability: The information contained in your message must be credible; otherwise your target audience will either consider it personally inactionable or irrelevant. Be true to your market and your brand and you will succeed!

Our changing economy presents a perfect time to review your messaging strategy to ensure it still speaks both for your company and to its target audience. The Next-Mark team has guided numerous organizations in developing their messaging strategy and implementing formal marketing, business strategy and communications plans.

Facebook and social networking have morphed into businesses having fast, free, and relatively simple ways to market to a large mass of people in a short time. Gaining more Facebook likes may seem challenging and unreachable once your page has reached its plateau but there are cunning ways to achieve more likes.

How To Get More Facebook Likes:

-Join Relevant Groups

-Joining groups with the same interests or interested in marketing can gain more likes to your page

-Contact admins of groups related to your page

-Promote Your Friends

-Constantly share your page with friends and encourage them to share the page with their friends

-Befriend users that have high influence

-Get your friends to tag you in their own posts

-Stay relevant in postings and status update

-Also post frequently to keep viewers eye on your page

-Like for a like. Like others pages to get a “like” back

-Whenever advertising outside of Facebook always reference your FB page in the advertisement

-Offer some type of incentive for people to “Like” your page

-Like different websites to your page via commenting or blogging

These are just some quick basic tips to stepping up your Facebook game. Get innovative and creative. Oh and by the way, if you haven’t already, go “Like” our page!

As marketing organizations struggle to better understand and justify their role and purpose, there are a limited amount of tools available to succinctly measure marketing’s and public relations’ effectiveness.  Many businesses are conducting Marketing and Public Relations Audits to gain new insight into their productivity and effectiveness.  Audits can be a very formal process (conducted by an outside firm) or a more informal process (facilitated by an organizational leader). Either way, audits need to be objective and comprehensive. Marketing and Public Relations Audits thoroughly examine and evaluate marketing and communications practices and results.  They offer a baseline for performance measurement and a framework for effective future planning.

Marketing and Public Relations Audits help organizations identify their most urgent marketing and communications needs.  It can be a time-consuming operation, but the information gained can provide invaluable insight and provide strategic direction.  The audit includes a comprehensive review of the company’s marketing and public relations environment, communications objectives, business strategies and tactical activities.  The audit identifies operational strengths and weaknesses and recommends changes to the company’s marketing and public relations programs.  Each Marketing and Public Relations Audit is unique to the individual organization.  The audit should serve as a basis of discussion and review and not necessarily be a definitive action plan.

The primary benefits of conducting an audit include: new learnings and measurement for past and future successes; a quantitative benchmark for future evaluative studies; and a fair and consistent appraisal of past and future performance.  Most importantly, audits can serve as an important basis for annual marketing and public relations plans.

When an organization cuts marketing and public relations spending, it cuts the one function whose sole purpose is to increase business!  By engaging in an audit process, organizations can better assess the functionality and effectiveness of their marketing and public relations departments.  The marketing and public relations audit becomes an essential tool for business success.

In a word, Marketing is Dynamic!  Marketing is full of life and there is little room for marketing activities that do not embody the life of your business.  Beyond all of the new technologies and tools to support the growth of your business, the basics still apply.  The following list provides insight into everyday marketing strategies for your business.

1. Remember to “Sharp Shoot.”

Know the segment you are targeting and build your marketing programs to specifically meet the needs of that segment.

2. Relationships, Relationships, Relationships.

The three keys to marketing success – no matter what your product, business today is based on strong productive relationships. Whether it is a strategic partner, client, competitor or vendor relationship – strong relationships can drive business growth.

3. Get “Up-close and Personal.”

Direct Marketing, including direct mail, tele-sales and Internet strategies, places you closest to your prospect. Incorporate these tools into your marketing strategy.

4. Experience the “Joy of Referrals.”

Referrals are the fuel of business today.  A client who is referred to your business is more likely to make purchases and maintain a long-standing productive relationship with your business.  Remember always ASK for referrals from your customers, prospects, colleagues and even competitors!

5. “Love” Your Competitors

Your competitors may be your greatest resource for learning about success and failure.  Track their products and services and routinely leverage that information for decision-making. There is lot to be learned from your competitor’s successes and failures. (Continued on Side Two)

6. Publicity is Free.

Public Relations is an invaluable tool at a community, national and even international level. Work hard to get a third party to tell your story in any form of media.  Remember, most publicity is free and available to those who ask.

7. Perception Is Truth.

Perception is the way we receive and translate our experiences – how and what we think about them.  When we discover how we are perceived, we gain invaluable insight into others’ truths. Work hard to transcend the limitations of perception and begin to address others’ truths.

8. Overcome the “Fluff Factor”.

Don’t underestimate your prospects or customers, they know when it’s “Fluff” and when it’s Real. Remember you can’t hide behind an inferior product of flawed service; instead focus on making your product or service superior and eliminate the need for fluff!

9.  Recognize the Power of Words.

Can you deliver what you say you can? The words you use to express your value proposition will endure.

10. Celebrate Your Failures!

Don’t be afraid to Celebrate Your Failures. Our failures will always have more information than our successes.  Never be afraid to re-address why you failed and what lessons you learned in the process. What will you do different the next time around?

So I’m three episodes into AMC’s reality TV show “The Pitch.” I am still thoroughly entertained, which is pretty impressive as there are only a few reality TV shows that can keep me entertained past two episodes (Duck Dynasty being one – which is quite possibly the funniest thing on television).

I did a little a digging to see what other marketers had to say about the show and found a few controversial threads in advertising blogs. One in particular caught my attention as it directly relates to a conversation I had with my Art Director while discussing the show. These elaborate pitch’s that the agencies put together on the show cost some serious coin and would result in devastating losses for most advertising agencies. This may be a fundamental flaw in the business not just the show itself.

The show might be giving a slightly skewed view of the industry, but it does make for some entertaining television (it’s still no Duck Dynasty). Check out the attached article for a more detailed analysis of What “The Pitch” Left Out: Why Agencies Get Hurt By An Upside Down Approach To New Business

Blatantly piggy-backing on the growing popularity of Mad Men, AMC recently aired a reality of show based on the behind-the-scenes world of advertising agencies called “The Pitch.” Being in the industry, I figured that this could be pretty entertaining.

Sidenote: Does anyone else find it ironic that we are drawn to the marketing of advertising in-between which we watch advertisements?

The Pitch offers viewers a never-before-seen view inside America’s top ad agencies. Each week watch two agencies as they compete to win a new client the only way they can: by going head-to-head in a cut-throat, winner-takes-all showdown, a presentation known as The Pitch. With only seven days to prepare, the pressure to perform is intense. The whining, the brainstorming, the blue-sky thinking: it’s all here as the teams work around the clock and pray for the moment of inspiration that will win them the job and keep their companies alive.

I caught the first episode in which two agencies compete to win an account with the creators of the sandwich artist, Subway. I have to admit I found the show pretty entertaining – and well, relatively accurate in some senses. I don’t want to be a spoiler so I highly recommend that you check out this show. I have a feeling “The Pitch” will be a topic of some future blog posts from myself and the Next-Mark team..

The Pitch Trailer

I recently read about a man named Ed Samane, who started a martial arts franchise business with a twist – a focus on bullying prevention. It made me wonder how many other types of businesses could tweak their concept for new audiences and take advantage of opportunities just waiting to be “ripped from the headlines.”

Samane drew on his own experiences as a morbidly obese child who had turned to karate to lose weight and end the taunting. He succeeded at both. Significantly, it wasn’t his fighting skills that won the day, but the confidence and self-esteem he’d gained that allowed him to stand up to bullies until they backed down.

Now offering seminars for kids and parents at franchisee stores, Samane is rebranding the concept in order to launch a nationwide schools program. From a business angle, I guess we’ll see. But, on a marketing level, it’s a natural – a darn good story tied to a national issue focused on the very thing most people hold most dear – kids.

So, got ideas? If so, we can help you assess their potential.

I recently returned from the Coachella Music Festival in Indo, Ca. If you happen to be generationally disconnected or just generally dis-like awesome music then you may not have heard of this epic event – where basically all of the best bands and DJ’s from all over the world congregate in the desert for three full days of amazing-ness (or madness).

Coachella is more than just a music festival, granted, it is quite possibly the best music festival in the world, but it is a gathering of like-minded invidiuals, it’s the modern-day Woodstock – well, maybe a little cleaner and a ton more organized (so I’ve been told). The tickets went on sale for this years’ event at January 13, 2012 at 10am and were sold out by 1pm PST – that may help you understand the recognition that Coachella as a brand holds.

I ventured out West to the desert with my good friends, Maxwell Winchester, Blake Bockhold and Chris Stewart. We only get together a few times a year and the excitement for this; our inaugural Coachella trip has been building for almost a year.

Arriving at the venue on Friday was somewhat overwhelming with the sheer size and extravagant production of the multiple stages, vendors, art displays and the music already blasting into the desert (If you want to hear more about all the rad performances that we had the privilege of seeing throughout the weekend stay tuned). I want to take a minute to thank all the people involved in the production of this spectacular event. Having been involved in putting events and trade shows together for clients at Next-Mark, I really appreciate the manpower and effort that it must have took to put on an event of such magnitude. Every nuance from lighting, stage set-up, to beer gardens and shuttle transportation was put together seamlessly.

There are many aspects of this event beyond the music that impressed me including the impact of digital marketing, social media, and the vast product placement (Heineken, Red Bull, Apple, to name a few). The digital integration at Coachella gave the ability to be automatically “checked-in” on Facebook with your wristband at various locations throughout venue, virally promote surprise acts (i.e Tupac Hologram), and build awareness of trending #coachella topics. Check out my pictures for a visual experience!