The request is seemingly harmless, at its surface: “I need a presentation about [topic] for a sales meeting… tomorrow.”

That’s not so difficult, I say to myself. I live and breathe that topic every day, so the copy will be no trouble to write.

Oh, but wait. What about the design? What visual elements should I use, and in what dosage?

Right there, your confidence in being able to whip up a no-hassle, professional Powerpoint presentation just took a nose dive. It’s not that you aren’t capable of doing the work, but if you don’t have a corporate template you use for all of your presentations, then how do you decide on the design theme, colors, graphics, and animations that are meant to support and emphasize the copy? Because, very often, the graphics  and animations can overpower the copy to the point that your audience’s attention is distracted from the critical message of the presentation. It’s the pitfall of many Powerpoint presentations created by well-intended individuals that happen to be too Powerpoint-savvy for their own good. And let me say here that graphics and animation does NOT directly equate to a professional presentation.

There are several factors to consider how to build your Powerpoint presentation:

1. Your presenter. Are they comfortable in expounding upon brief copy, or do they need more copy in the presentation to help deliver their messages?

2. The audience. If your audience is comprised of high-level executives who don’t have a lot of time, you may want to lean toward less graphics and animation. If your audience is marketers, salespeople, or creative staff, you may be inclined to use more creativity when you build the presentation.

3. Your brand identity. No matter how you build your Powerpoint, it’s a smart idea to keep brand integrity in mind at all times. After all, your Powerpoint presentation is just like your website, your sales literature, and anything else that represents your company’s brand identity. So, don’t use any colors, graphics, or write anything that doesn’t reflect well on your brand. And, ideally, companies should have a Powerpoint template design that can be used for every presentation across your organization.

I think Powerpoint is a necessary evil for nearly every company. That first blank slide can be intimidating, but once you have made some decisions about your presenter, your audience, and your brand identity, you will feel more comfortable about building a Powerpoint presentation that meets the expectations of you and your colleagues.

For many, it’s a no-brainer: “No, that’s not for me. I don’t write (or) I don’t know what I would write about.”

For some, it’s an easy decision: “Yes! I blog all the time and love having the space to share and exchange ideas.”

For a very few, it’s a difficult decision: “I want to blog, but I want to do it right, not just because I can.”

So, then comes the paramount consideration. . . What should you blog about?

Well, let’s stop right there. It doesn’t matter what you blog about. There’s an audience for any topic imaginable (and some you can’t ever imagine). Bloggers devote way too much thought to what they blog about, forgetting that the primary goal should be to share original thoughts and keep in mind their intentions for writing. It’s not about what you write about, it’s about how you make it yours.

Wait a minute. Back up! What’s this about “intentions?” We’re talking about a blog here. Why does a blog have to be so well-thought-out?

Your intentions for writing your blog DO matter, because:

#1. If you don’t know the intention of your blog, why you are writing it, and believe in it, you won’t stick to it. You’ll lose interest in it, or, you’ll just trudge along barely-willingly because your boss makes you do it.  Thus, your blog will fade away into that cold cemetery full of other blogs that started off with a BANG but quickly were abandoned by their owners.

#2. If you don’t know the intention of your blog, and believe in its purpose, then your readers won’t know it either. Your readers need to be able to identify or relate to your blog in some way that is meaningful to them. If you write about donuts one day, then plate tectonics the next day, that may actually be okay as long as there is a central theme, identity, or relevancy that people can point to.

[I admit that my blog is far from what I envision it to be. It's an evolving creature that may take many forms across its lifetime. I strive to find its true identity every week.]

What caught my attention was the QR code incorporated into the main image of the page. The text in the image implies that the visitor can scan the QR code to get more information about club seats. However. its not very clear what is offered if/when the visitor scans it. There’s a website listed in the image, apparently to get the scanner app on one’s phone. But again, not very clear, especially to someone who is experiencing a QR code for the first time.

There are a few flaws in the use of this QR code application. To not overly pick on the Redskins, I’ll try to be gentle(!):

1. On or near the QR code, there is no indication of what is gained by scanning the QR code. To be user-friendly, you need to clearly specify that there will be a unique or exclusive value gained by scanning the code. The sheer novelty of scanning a QR code just to see how it works will only take you so far. And if you disappoint the person scanning it, by offering little more than the novelty of scanning it, you’ve risked losing some respect and loyalty.

2. The QR code itself has to be one that is scannable by the most common and popular scanner apps. I scanned this particular code with my Droid, neither the app that came with the Droid, nor the Neoreader app I downloaded to my phone a few months ago, could read this QR code. If your code can’t be read on the first try, very few people will be persistent enough to keep trying. The Redskins page has a QR code reader site listed on the image, yet when I go there I discover that it’s ONLY for iPhones and iPod Touches. Ouch! Kind of useless for my Droid!

3. At this point, while I appreciate the effort of the Redskins using a QR code on their Facebook page, it’s really too much work to get the user experience that they are trying to offer. So, for the average visitor to their Facebook page, it’s a point of frustration that we (I) can’t see what is offered. There’s no alternate way to get the experience, or find the destination, of the QR code. That’s their third flaw: Not giving people a way to experience the QR code, even if, going in, they need to download a reader, is not being fan friendly.

The bottom line with QR codes, for those advertisers and marketers using them in the U.S. (we are lagging behind other countries in the effective use of QR codes), is that most have a long way to go in learning how to most effectively use them. There’s many great examples of QR code marketing, but this particular case is exemplary of an unfriendly QR code. Marketers need to test and re-test the QR code experience themselves before they make it live to their audience. That testing, and looking at the experience from the user’s point of view, would help them catch some of the flaws like the ones seen in this example.

Unfortunately, too many marketers fall into the same habits that marketers 10 years ago did. Taking the easy route of marrying up a mailing list to a static, one-dimensional direct mail piece. Just take a look at your mail when you get home from work tonight. We call it “junk mail” because it’s not personalized or relevant to us or our interests. We toss it out without giving it 2 seconds of our attention because it’s as plain as day that it was sent by a company who is not as interested in identifying our interests or pain points as they are in dumping their mass marketing list onto a postcard and hoping for a few random responses.

If I come across over-passionate, it’s because so much of the mass marketing we receive should be eliminated, and the sender could experience far greater response, if they try one-to-one marketing. Simply put, one-to-one marketing is all about personalizing your marketing communications, whether it be in digital or print. At the basic level, you can use the recipient’s first name in the copy on your direct mail piece, for example. At a more creative and impactful level, you can design their name or company name into an image used on the piece… like in the image in this blog post.

Here are 5 Can’t-Do-Without Tips for One-to-One Marketing:

1. Stop sending mass email by starting to use your recipients’ first name (or first and last, depending on the nature of your relationship) in all of your outbound marketing.
2. Speak with a marketing company like Prime, who has the technology and experience of using variable data printing and imaging, which enables you to personalize any material (digital and web), like the image to the right. With a mail list and a creative strategy, amazing things can take place!
3. Seek out more information, beyond names and addresses, that distinguish each of your contacts and prospective customers. That data will allow you to make your messages more relevant and create higher response rates. If you are a car dealership, for example, and you know who test drove that shiny new red truck, you should use the image of a red truck in your marketing to them.
4. Use personalized URLs (pURLs) when you want greater response rates to surveys, event registrations, and sales campaigns. Research has proven that if one’s name is in the URL, there is a better chance that they will open the link and respond. But be sure that you are offering something of value for their time; don’t just collect information and abandon them!
5. Turn your campaigns into programs. Your one-to-one marketing should not consist of just one piece on one occasion. Make it a program that offers a different message, but always of value and relevancy, across a long period of time. You want to build relationships that turn into customers and partnerships. One-and-done will only cause your recipients to forget you.

I hope these tips help! I’d love your comments and questions.

P.S. Test Drive personalizing domains and landing pages here! http://trypersonalizedmarketing.com

Specifically, when it comes to B2C marketing, there really is no better way to sanity-check your marketing theories than to ask yourself  how you would respond to receiving the marketing campaign. If you are not “in the space” or among the people who would typically be a consumer of the product or service that you market, then ask someone who is closer to that space. After all, although we are marketers 8 hours (or more!) by day, we are consumers 24 hours a day. And, as marketers, we often forget that we live in both worlds – being a marketer and being a consumer – so to separate the two completely means that you are overlooking a valuable market research tool — YOU!

By no means am I saying that YOU are the only marketing research tool you need. There are plenty of “experts” and sources you could check as well. You only have to spend 5 minutes on Twitter to discover that truth!

Yet, with every piece of marketing you think up, whether it be digital or printed, asking yourself if you would respond positively to the medium and the message is kind of a no-brainer. It’s obvious that we need to ask ourselves how the consumers would respond, since they are the true targets in your campaign. But don’t overlook the power sitting right there in your mirror, and let him/her talk you out of a campaign that just doesn’t feel right. Chances are, something isn’t right about it if YOU don’t think you’d open the piece and take the call to action.

10. “I don’t know the results of my campaign.” >> Why? If you build tracking into all of your campaigns, you would have some measure of the total responses, sales leads, and ultimately how those leads pan out with your salespeople. If you don’t have the tools to measure your campaigns, seek out a marketing partner with focus and expertise in marketing measurement. After all, how do you know where to spend your budget if you don’t know how successful your various programs have been?

9. “I never personalize our marketing campaigns.” >> Few of us pay attention to form letters or mass marketing we receive in the mail, the types that are obviously created that way because the senders know nothing about us other than our names and addresses. So, then, why do we as marketers create such campaigns? For your next direct mail or email campaign, consider using personalized URLs to lead them to a custom landing page. If you do happen to know your recipients’ interests in the products or services you sell, you can even use graphics or messaging that leverage that data, so that John Doe gets a mailer with an image of the new red truck he has been thinking about purchasing. Wouldn’t John be more likely to notice and respond to that mailer than one with a general message with no personalization?

8. ”Social media doesn’t fit our business.” >> There’s no aspect of social media that can help your business? Take a step back and look at all the areas in your marketing communications plan that seem to be falling short. Do you have an effective PR plan? At the very least, you can approach social media at a public relations tool in which you become a trusted resource of industry information, as well as fitting in the occasional message about your business. For example, LinkedIn and Twitter are invaluable tools to expand your business’s reach into new markets. Don’t let social media pass you by just because it “appears” that it’s not a match for you.

7. ”Our salespeople don’t follow up on leads.” >> Ask yourself if all the blame for that rests on them. Could you create a quick system for them, or better yet a CRM, that scores and ranks their leads, allowing them to focus on the warm-to-hot leads more than the cold ones? Could the leads that come from your marketing campaigns and event activity be delivered to them with more qualifying information than merely their contact information? If your marketing asked more information about what those people were interested in, your salespeople could use that information to customize their sales approach and make their communications more relevant. Help your salespeople with their time management; don’t hinder their time by sending them a boatload of leads without qualifying data.

6. ”Direct mail doesn’t generate enough responses.” >> Have you tried integrating your direct mail with a web component? For example, your next direct mail campaign could direct recipients to go to a website to download a whitepaper, sign up for a special offer, or simply learn about a new product or service. Once your recipients reach that landing page, you should collect their information, including 2-3 brief questions that would help you segment and qualify them for future sales and marketing communications. They key, however, is personalization and relevancy. You won’t get the responses you want if you don’t find some means of either personalizing the URL (pURLs) on the mail piece and/or using the data you’ve gathered previously… like, if they’ve expressed interest in purchasing a new red truck, you need to use an image of a new red truck in your marketing to them to help make it relevant to them.

5. “I have never shadowed our salespeople on their customer visits or calls.” >> A lot can be learned from getting out from behind your desk and shadowing your salespeople. Whether its on a conference call or meetings, you can benefit from listening to the questions potential customers ask about your business, as it can give you new perspectives on how you can shape your marketing messages. Also, listening to how your salespeople present themselves and your business can allow you to share ideas about alternative sales communication methods.

4. ”I don’t do much to market our business before or after events.” >> Put yourself in the shoes of the companies and individuals who you target at conferences and trade shows every year. You receive a marketing piece or email from an exhibitor a few weeks before the event, asking you to stop by their booth. But you never hear from them during the other months of the year. Would you be more inclined to pay attention to that company if they communicated in relevant ways throughout the year than if it was just for a one-time event?

3. To salesperson: “No.” (without listening to what they have to say.) >> When approached by their company salespeople with new ideas they may have, marketers often fall into the trap of saying (or thinking) “No” right away. Marketers do this because they can be so inundated with the projects they are currently managing, that they have a hard time envisioning how they can fit even one more activity into the mix. Or, marketers don’t want to consider that their salespeople may have a unique perspective from being “on the front line” and knowing what their customers need the most. Tunnel-vision is a dangerous thing, marketers!

2. ”I don’t tweet.” >> To discount Twitter as a viable communication channel is to turn your back on thousands upon thousands of eyes that could ultimately become partners, associates, and even customers. It is true that no one should think that there will be immediate return on your Twitter time investment, but if you value the practice of continual education on the topics that interest your business the most, and are willing to share information you discover as well, you WILL find value in Twitter. It’s only a time-sucker if you let it be. You don’t have to read every tweet; you can create a column in Tweetdeck for just those you follow whose opinions and information you tend to appreciate the most.

1. ”I’m too busy doing what HAS to be done to focus on what new things I COULD do.” >> When you are too busy managing the marketing programs you’ve already committed to, you will overlook  new opportunities that could become integral to your success. Doing the same old thing year after year, because it’s worked before, is fine if there has been a measure of success. But you must be able to keep the door ajar for some amount of new among the old. Evolving your marketing is critical.

What do you think of these? Could you add more “excuse” sentences and their solutions to this list?

We have lots of awards and pictures on the wall, because we are proud of the marketing work we do. Yet, upon entry, it feels busy for such a small space. There isn’t any rhyme or reason to where certain wall hangings are placed. And the dark blue walls don’t exactly help create an open-air feeling. Additionally, we have two doors inside our lobby, and often our visitors do not know where to enter, even though there is a ring bell sign that signifies that someone will greet them when they ring the bell.

Yes, we are calling ourselves out (which I am only doing to highlight some points in this post), but we come across many company lobbies that have a lot to be desired. Naming no names, of course, there are lobbies that leave no impression that a visitor presence is valued. There are other lobbies that are locked down like Fort Knox, leaving the visitor with the slight expectation that they may be patted down upon entry. And, there are lobbies in which the visitor is met by a receptionist or other employee, yet must wait a long time to be seen by the person they’ve come to meet.

Many companies treat their visitors with a worse impression than the people that call into the company, when really its the visitor who has gone out of their way to physically visit the company. Those visitors, it can be argued, deserve an equal or higher level of customer service than those on the phone. Not to mention, if a person has taken the time and effort to visit your company, they usually are people who tend to “mean business,” have graduated past the prospect-stage, and now are more willing to take the leap into becoming a customer.

Giving some more thought what a lobby that leaves a good impression “looks” like, here are some ideas (feel free to add to or edit):

• A clean, de-cluttered environment
• An employee to greet the visitor (when staffing budgets allow)
• Just a few pieces of literature, preferably about the company or its industry
• Comfortable seating
• Some type of branding to reinforce where they are (in case they forget)
• Windows that let natural light in, especially helpful in small lobby areas
• Short wait-time to see the intended party.

After we improve our lobby, I’ll post a photo. I’d love to hear your comments on this topic and discover if you believe this is as big of an issue as I’m making it. Isn’t a company lobby a marketing channel, just like the literature you give to a customer, or a website?

QR Codes are not just becoming popular because of the novelty and mystery of the first-time views of those funny-looking graphics that look more like a Rorshark test than any barcode you’d see on a package of Corn Flakes. At least people are asking questions about what QR Codes can do, and more importantly, how can they help us market better than we are with our existing tools.

This question popped up my office this week as I was developing a direct mail piece to promote our QR Code expertise. “Expertise?” How can one be an expert in something like a QR Code? Isn’t it just like a graphical representation of a hyperlink? Scan the code with your smartphone, and be taken to the QR Code owner’s pre-determined website or message? What more is there to it?

You need to ask any provider of QR Code marketing strategies 3 questions, in order to understand if they can provide more than just a mobile link.

3 Questions to Know if Your Marketing Provider has QR Code Expertise:

1. How have you used QR Codes to help businesses reach their consumers? Can you demonstrate real examples?

2. Can you measure the activity that comes from a QR Code scan? What data points can you collect?

3. How have you linked and integrated QR Code marketing to other marketing mediums, i.e. QR Codes to direct mail, marketing collateral, event material, etc.”

As we move closer to 2011, you’ll see QR Codes really take off, so it’s far better for you to discover how your business can benefit from this tool now. Good luck!

I guard my cell phone very closely, and less so with my email in-box. I am more receptive of email marketing because it’s a known method of marketing that we all get in various forms and quantities. While I am not always fond of some of the strange sales pitches that land in my in-box, I’ve come to expect them.

The good news around text message marketing is that the recipient must opt-in to give permission to the marketer to send texts (thanks to the CAN-SPAM act that also regulates email marketing). Yet, even if I were to opt-in to such a service, there’s something about a text message from a marketer or business that’s trying to sell me something that feels intrusive. Am I the only one who feels this way? Surely, I am not.

Unless I have granted permission to a marketer or service to receive a one-time or short-term bit of content via text message, I am not interested. Political campaigns or charitable causes are examples of good uses of text message marketing, but even those need to state clearly, upfront, what kind of messages will be relayed and for how long. I opted in for a particular political candidate’s text message updates a year ago, yet long after the election, I still receive random texts from that organization that have nothing to do with the campaign.

Just as an aside, email marketers rarely do a good job of setting expectations upfront to their recipients about what kind of content they’ll receive and how often they’ll receive it. When they do state that upfront, and stick to what they promise, most of the time the open and click rates on those emails are higher than if the email marketing is sent at random frequencies and with no clear standard for the type of content or topics shared.

What are your thoughts about SMS text marketing? Are you as protective as I am about the content that comes through on your cell phone? Or are you open to anything, within reason, that marketers text to you?

Pick a few topics or issues that are key in your industry, that meet these criteria:
1. Current hot-button issues or challenges that your customers face
2. General appeal or applicable to a wide audience
3. Easy to explain and present (ideally, non-technical)
4. Can use real-world examples that your product or service can solve

Read up on webinar platforms, such as from Webex or GoToWebinar. For a small investment in one of these services, you can schedule free or paid audio/video sessions with people interested in the topics you present. Has your email list become stagnate? There’s a good chance you can revitalize that list by offering an educational session about a topic in your industry, or common questions or concerns that people face when evaluating the products and services you sell. Only at the end of the webinar should you mention how to get in touch with you to learn more about your company.

For instance, a financial service company may want to offer a series of webinars on mortgage issues. Or, a web agency could present some how-to’s on selecting the right web design or SEO company. By inviting people to attend your webinars, you show that you care about more than getting their business, and in doing so they will think of you when they are ready to buy because you have shown that you are a leader in your field. Being an educator puts you ahead of the pack of those who just sell, sell, and sell.

To start, create a Powerpoint presentation on the topic you want to present in your webinar. Don’t try to fit in too much. A succinct presentation, though it may cover a small portion of what you really want to present, will go over much better than one that is overloaded with information that will bury your audience. Next, decide who in your company will present the webinar. This should be someone who is well-spoken and can answer questions with authority. Or, find an expert on the topic outside of your company.

Once you have signed up with your webinar provider, schedule the webinar and send an invitation to your lists. Plaster the webinar details in every social network, direct mail, or any other channel you have at your disposal. Ultimately, you not only want to re-invigorate your existing list but gain NEW people who may be future customers. Finally, once you host your webinar, be sure to record it in a file that people can download at a later time. You may even choose to offer it as a free download. Depending on your industry, it may make more sense for you to offer both the live webinar and the recording for a reasonable price. Gauge the interest of the topic and price it accordingly.