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The Cinematic Presentation (Part 1 of 3)

We’d rather be at the movies

Most of us here at ARENDS love going to see movies in the theater.  On opening night the crowd is buzzing with excitement, the lights dim, the sound thunders in, and the screen lights up with stunning visuals.  It’s a fantastic experience, even if the movie, well, doesn’t live up to its trailer.

On the other hand, most of us – including you, we suspect – really hate listening to PowerPoint presentations.  Most presentations have jumbled visuals, complicated slides, and could have been emailed just as well as presented.

Why we love movies

OK, what do movies have going for them?  First, films have great visuals.  Directors and cinematographers select exactly the right camera angles and compositions to create the scenes that tell the story.  And great movies are driven by great stories.  Listening to and telling stories is a vital part of the human experience.  Good stories, well crafted and told in exceptional ways, connect us and move us in ways that go far beyond entertainment.

Tell Stories

Whatever your next PowerPoint presentation is about -- quarterly earnings, a sales pitch, whatever -- make sure you think through the story.  Make sure it has a beginning, middle and end.  Use compelling yet elegantly simple visuals that support your story.  Do these two things, and you are well on your way to creating effective, memorable presentations.

In part 2 we’ll discuss how to craft stunning visuals for presentations.

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3 Essentials for an Effective Social Media Strategy

Opportunity Knocks

Social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter offer exciting opportunities for both B2C and B2B marketers.  And they seem simple enough to implement. However, there are definitely right and wrong ways to go about building your company’s social media presence.

Here are three things to consider as you begin engaging customers and prospects online.

Who?

The “Who” of social media strategy is two-fold.  First, who in your organization or your agency will be monitoring and updating your social media? It’s essential that they be familiar with both the mechanics of each particular social media site, as well as the basic public relations, marketing, and customer service implications, when it comes to talking with customers.

The second part of the “Who” is who you’ll be talking to and engaging.  It helps to build customer profiles outlining who your target audience is, what their online habits are, what their buying patterns look like.  Ignore this step and you risk talking to the wrong audience.

What?

What you say and how you say it is another crucial part of the picture.  With marketing and PR people involved, it’s easier to craft a consistent content strategy. New product launches, contests and promotions are all great topics to talk about.  And be sure to ask your audience questions and fish for new ideas.

Listen.

The immediate assumption about social media is that it’s a great channel for talking to, and often times at, customers and prospects.  But social media is even more valuable as a listening tool, enabling you to tap into what customers and prospects are saying about your brand, your company and your industry in general.

Many companies utilize Twitter and Facebook to solve customer service or technical issues.  There are also a number of tools that can help you monitor the buzz about your company on social media sites.  These provide an early warning about negative brand perception issues, as well as serving as a pipeline for new product ideas and customer insights.

So to recap, it’s essentials for effective social media that you: 1) create profiles that tell your team who they’re talking to; 2) outline topics in advance and vet what you’re going to say and how, and 3) listen, adapt and engage.

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Inbound Marketing

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote a great book entitled Inbound Marketing: Get found using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. Their main point: right now millions of people are searching the Internet for your product or service.  They are inbound.  Your job is to make sure they find you.

To do this, optimize the copy and meta tags on your website to reflect words that you think your potential clients would use in a Google search to find you.  Do your best to build up the number of links that point to your website from across the Internet.  A good way to star: as your channel partners and strategic allies to post a link to your site.

These are just two tactics within the broader practice of search engine optimization, or SEO.  And it’s wise to make it an essential component of your customer engagement strategy.  Executed properly, you’ll open up vital new inbound streams of qualified leads and potential revenue.

Some great primers on SEO can be found here and here.

And be sure to weigh in, if you like, with comments if you’ve had success – or struggled with – implementing an inbound marketing program.

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Marketing with Google 101

The Google Revolution

By now everyone knows that Google is the dominant portal to the Internet and the Internet is the portal to just about everything, including your company.  As a marketer, manager or business owner, you also probably know that your company needs to be involved in this Google information revolution somehow.

The key question is: how?  Quickly followed by: who has the time?

You’re busy running your company, doing your job, keeping customers happy.  You don’t have time to look into all of this.  So here’s a little Google 101, just to help you stay current.

The Index

OK, you have a website.  Step one is to make sure that Google knows your site exists.  The Google crawler -- an automated software program that “crawls” the web, indexing new content -- may find your site without you having to do anything. But it’s very easy to submit your site directly to the Google index here:  http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl.

Ah, if only it were that easy.  Indexing is just the start.

On Page SEO

When the Google crawler indexes your site, it scans the actual words used in your web pages, as well as the meta data/tags.  These tags are words embedded in the site’s computer code that describe each page’s content.  Google uses both words and tags when it compares the content on your site with queries typed into the search window at Google.com.

The better the match between your content and the search query, the higher your site will rank in the Google results.

Making everything related to the content of your site – its meta data and the searchability of key words – as Google friendly as possible is called On Page Search Engine Optimization (or On Page SEO).

Stay tuned and learn more about Off Page SEO in our next post.

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