The Skinny on… Why use a creative consultant?

Creative ConsultantsMany companies use an outside consultant, instead of hiring an additional employee or assigning in-house staff, to carry out their communications, marketing or graphic design needs.

In the business world, image really is everything. If you don’t promote a unique and professional image, then it is highly unlikely that you’ll fully meet your sales and marketing goals. It doesn’t matter how good your products or services are.

Agencies are able to devote full attention to your company’s opportunities and needs with an impartial and unbiased view. When you work with an outside creative firm, you aren’t just employing one person; you’re hiring a whole department—one that produces tangible, dollars-and-cents results. Staffed by experts in many areas of the communications and creative, rounds out your team. Each professional is highly trained and experienced in marketing. Because of this, they are experts at knowing what works and what doesn’t when creating a professional image that properly reflects your company.

If you don’t have public relations, advertising, graphic design or social networking experience yourself, then it can be difficult to determine what will actually work for your company. Creative agencies are experienced in planning and developing positioning statements and brand visuals day in and day out.

If you are thinking about promoting your company through public relations, the media depend on contacts that they trust to bring them a real news story. They trust agency personnel that they have been working with for the long term. PR professionals are skilled at communicating each client’s unique strengths in an interesting, innovative way.

Public relations is more than press releases. Effective publicity is choosing the correct placement of your news whether it is in print, broadcast or on the Internet. It’s getting your name out into the marketplace, getting that exact placement in the specific newspaper or trade publication.

A brand-marketing agency will help you differentiate your brand, generate new sales opportunities and increase your visibility through traditional and online marketing efforts. Using sound communications and marketing strategies will increase the support and awareness of your company.

Using a consultant leaves you to what you do best on a daily basis for your company. An agency’s full-time business is communicating ideas and messages to the public, and garnering marketing support for your product and / or service.

Your commitment to working with an agency to develop a sound communications or marketing program does make a difference. The payoff for your company can be tremendous.

It’s a Wrap

Concentre Communications, Inc. –

Named one of the top 20 Women-Owned Businesses in the 2012 Book of Lists from InBusiness.

Received recertification of eligibility for a five-year period as a Women-Owned WDBE for federally-funded projects performing a commercially-useful function in advertising, graphic design, strategic planning and marketing, and public relations.

Accepted and remains in force ®

by the USPTO for another 10-year period.

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For more expert help, visit our website: www.concentre.us frequently.

Social Media – It’s Your Business

Marketing | StrategyEffective marketing campaigns these days must include social media. Your competitors are gaining a competitive advantage over you if you aren’t embracing social media methods of connecting with your customers. It’s where your customers are.

Social media is an octopus. It invades everything on the Internet and will create a huge mess if you don’t take it seriously. Those tools are fast becoming the single most important way to attract new business customers and sustain old ones.

Actually, social media marketing tools bring us within reach of the ultimate marketer’s dream: reaching the right audience with the right offer at exactly the right time. They reveal who is using your social media content, what they are doing with it and what they want. Social media tools allow you to focus on smaller, more meaningful targets instead of a broad, undefined audience. You gain open collaboration, constructive conversations with your customers. Customers now have the ability to talk to brands: directly interacting with them online socially.

Lots of people – your prospects and customers – are using Facebook™, Twitter™, YouTube™ and others. You can’t afford NOT to participate. People talk to each other using these channels. They talk about what they do, what they like, what they buy. Customers trust their online friends’ recommendations almost as much as they trust their real-life friends’ advice. You can’t buy better advertising for any amount of money.

When customers want to gather information about a product or service, they Google™. Utilizing social media will help your company’s product or service appear near the top of their search results.

Using social media also gives you an advantage of being able to monitor the buzz about your business. A dissatisfied customer can easily tell their online network almost immediately. If you use social media and monitor your reputation, you’ll be alerted to such a complaint and be able to respond quickly to address the issue before it gets out of hand. This is an important and powerful tool.

Before you start, don’t forget to develop a solid social media strategy, stick to it and engage your followers. If you do, you are well on your way to becoming an online collaborator and influencer.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started. Start with one of these. Then, as you get more comfortable in the social media space, expand out to another.

  1. Facebook: Engage your followers with a Fan Page. Keep them aware of new products or features, weekly specials, events, promotions, contests and place content that will drive traffic to your Website or blog.
  2.  Twitter: Follow your followers and those tweeting about what interests you and your business.
  3. Blog: Start blogging and add content frequently based on what your customers are looking for. Post informative content and your customers will more likely to give you repeat business.
  4.  YouTube Channel: Do you ever wish you had a YouTube video that went viral? I can’t assure you that yours will, but I can guarantee it won’t if you never post a video.
  5. Linking Tools: I use Hootsuite.com, but there are many others. You can use them on your computer or cellphone, schedule tweets, reply to tweets, track trends, keywords and see who is talking about your business. You can easily integrate your text message or “ping” to broadcast to all of your social media networks when you choose.

By using these five tools, you will be well on your way to gaining valuable mind share with your customers.

Social media is not an end in itself. It is not the silver bullet for business success. Yet, it is a hugely important tool to include in your marketing strategy. The days of simply ‘broadcasting’ your product, your service, your image, are gone.

Your image is what the customers say it is. To be successful, a business needs to be engaged in open collaboration online with customers via social media.