Pic Tip Friday: Extraordinary Placement

Pic Tip # 2: Put your product somewhere out of the ordinary where it will stand out.

Perks and their attraction

Last month, my mom decided she wanted me to "refer" her to Wells Fargo just so she could open an account and get a free stuffed animal - a Wells Fargo Express Pony, to be more specific. Supposedly, these things are collectors items, especially since you can only open so many accounts.

Anyway, my mom made me wait for an hour while she opened a new account. At the end of the hour she found out there were no ponies available, and the Wells Fargo representative gave her an "I owe you." We went back later for the pony, but it still felt like a lot of work for nothing.

It does go to show, however: customers like perks and will jump at any opportunity to receive free stuff.

What deals have you offered to get customers interested?

Make decisions easy for customers

In my last two posts I talked about using newsletters to make it easy for customers to find and buy your products. It's important to note that in a society where the economy is bad and people are looking for deals, customers will be comparing products, and it's up to you to make the final decision, hopefully one in your favor, easy for the customer.

Amazon has a simple way of doing this. To keep the customer on their own site, Amazon compares products for customers. More specifically, it compares reviews of products. The customer does not have to go searching through the many reviews on a product. Rather, he can view the best and the worst review at the same time.

How do you make the final decision easier for your customers?

Newsletters Part 3: Amazon's product suggestions

While Amazon's regular emails with product suggestions do not fully qualify as newsletters, they give us yet another example of a simple way to remind customers of your product.

Amazon sends out regular emails to me, featuring products I might be interested in based on my previous purchases. The emails start with a summary of products and their photos and then gives more product details. They get me interested in a product before they give me the details. The summary also serves as a useful way of telling me what I'm in for. All newsletters should make their point clear from the very first sentence to the subject headline.

A quick word of caution based on Amazon's emails, however. While the emails are sometimes helpful, they come far too often and are often repetitious, which easily gets on my nerves. Always be careful to avoid annoying your customers with too many emails. It's usually more useful to pick a regular date on which to send your newsletter and at a rate that will not annoy customers.



What do you add to your newsletters to remind customer’s of your products?

Read Newsletters Part 1

Read Newsletters Part 2

Marketing vs. Public Relations

Two interesting opposing viewpoint posts over at HubSpot echo some thoughts and questions I've had for a while: Are public relations and marketing two completely different things? Or, do they contribute to one another? Or, are they becoming the same thing?

While many of my teachers and several of those I follow on the web seem to believe marketing and public relations are two separate things, I've come to think of them as integrated with the possibility of becoming one thing under the right circumstances, especially when it comes to social media.

Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter can be used to inform, to interact with publics, and to remind publics of a company's product. For example, at Sierra Repertory Theatre, one marketing person heads the social media efforts, posting links to interesting articles and interacting with customers about theatre, but also linking to ticketing systems, commenting on the success of shows, and reminding customers that they only have a few days left to see shows.

I worked for Sierra Repertory Theatre a little over the summer and found that the theatre company has a one-person marketing department that handles both marketing and public relations. The position basically involved maintaining positive relationships with theatre goers and with theatre reviewers at various area newspapers, but it also involves dealing with subscribers and maintaining subscriptions and donations.

In this case, it would seem that marketing and public relations overlap.

What do you think? Can public relations and marketing work together or become one? Are sales driven by public relations?

Want more money? Write a book!

Have you ever noticed that when a movie becomes successful, a line of books come shortly after. Disney did this with Pirates of the Caribbean. They created a series of young adult books about Jack Sparrow. I remember reading book versions of The Mummy Returns and Hallmark's Arabian Nights. And today I came across a new series of books based on the hit TV show Glee. You can visit the site for the book, which FOX advertised on Facebook, here.

How successful are these knock-off books? What have you done similar to this?