Optimize Magazine - Fall 2015

IDEAS FOR MARKETING AND CREATIVE PROFESSIONALS

FALL 2015

Marketing Across The Generations: Advice From Our Experts

Your Mobile App: The Ultimate Subscription to Your Brand Content

Shift Into High Gear with Marketing Performance Dashboards

Jay Baer Dishes on Digital, Content and Social Marketing

VE E R)

Responsive Email: Designing for A Mobile World

G OUCH IV T EC EA O K ( S FR E W UR O EI AY NT N S S! CO ID

HOW TO...

The Goods!

Three great giveaways from three great articles!

Enter to Win TODAY! hopkinsprinting.com/fall-giveaway

Wacom Intuos® Pen Small Tablet Replace your mouse and turn your computer into a digital drawing canvas pad. Connects with PC or Mac. Small, compact size, 8.3 by 7.0 inches, is perfect for limited desktop areas. (Read “My Working Day” on page 16.)

Askinosie Chocolate

Youtility

Bean-to-bar craft chocolate made in the Ozark Mountains! We fell in love with how Askinosie utilizes marketing channels to tell their brand story, and they’ve got a great story to tell. Check out their awesome packaging! (Read the “Marketing Case Study” on page 10.)

New York Times Best Seller by Jay Baer.

(Read Jay’s Story on page 9.) “ In today’s always-on, hyper-saturated marketplace, product messages no longer break through like they used to. Providing helpful information to customers does. In this important book, Baer calls the art of being deeply valued by your customers Youtility. I call it smart.”

— DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT, best-selling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR “ What does it actually mean to create ‘engaging’ content?

This book delivers both a broader vision and a specific road map to creating content your customers will thank you for.”

— ANN HANDLEY, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, and coauthor of Content Rules

ENTER TO WIN! Scan the QR code to register for our giveaways, or enter online at: hopkinsprinting.com/fall-giveaway

WELCOME

Fall 2015

01

EXPERT OPINION Read insights from the following contributors in this issue:

Welcome to the Fall issue 4 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT HOPKINS PRINTING

New Retail Manager

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We are excited to announce a new position at Hopkins Printing.

We have recently promoted David Schultz to manage complex projects for our retail accounts. In this new position David will be working with some of our great retail customers to make sure their complex projects are done accurately, with tight color controls, kitted properly and are out the door at the right time so our customers can sell more merchandise. We believe this will be a great service to our growing list of retail customers.

Roy Waterhouse President, Hopkins Printing

Jay Baer The New York Times best-selling author and 20-year veteran of digital marketing takes time from his busy schedule to share his thoughts on digital and social media marketing trends. (Page 6)

2 We Love LARGE Projects At Hopkins we are always up for a challenge. Regardless of the size or complexity of your project, our production departments can staff around the clock scheduling to accommodate even the most demanding and critical turn times. Whether your project requires 15 days on press or 70 hours of bindery time, we are a customer-centric organization in every way, and will aways place your needs as our top priority.

3 New Sales Associate

Mallory Lee

We are pleased to announce the newest member of our sales team, Steve Shepard. Steve comes to us with experience in large account management in the beverage industry and most recently in the direct to consumer space. Steve has been working hard to connect to new customers and share what we are doing to serve our customers. Sales is tough, but Steve is up to the challenge.

A thought leader in marketing operations and automation with a diverse background in a variety of SaaS business models, Mallory shares her insight for engagement opportunities through custom mobile apps. (Page 5)

4 New Folder This summer we added a new folder to our lineup of bindery equipment. The folder is a Heidelberg Stahl KH82 with a high performance PFX feeder. This is the fastest folder made by Stahl and it will allow us to fold signatures faster and with tighter accuracy. We see this as a powerful addition in serving our customers for the next decade.

Follow us online

facebook.com/HopkinsSolutions

Laura Patterson Laura Patterson, VisionEdge Marketing, is a regular contributor to MarketingProfs and The CEO Refresher. She specializes in marketing measurement, performance management, and developing marketing dashboards for CEOs. (Page 4)

@hopksolutions

linkedin.com/company/hopkins-printing

Optimize is printed on100# U Velvet Cover/100# U Velvet Text paper

01 Welcome

10 Marketing Case Study

Discover four new things about Hopkins Printing.

Lawren Askinosie, Askinosie Chocolates, shares her brand story through packaging and social media.

02 Insights

12 Generational Marketing

Ideas, opinions, news, and trends.

Three experts give great advice and insight into marketing across multiple generations.

06 Jay Baer Interview Founder of Convince & Convert, New York Times best-selling author shares his expertise on digital and social media marketing.

Executive Editor

Cindy Woods, cmoteam.com Contributing Writers

Tim Sweeney, Laura Patterson, Mallory Lee Design

Production Design

Designlogix

Diann Durham

16 My Working Day

Š2015 All Rights Reserved

Graphic Designer and Creative Director Jessica Morgan shares her must-have tools.

Printed and distributed by Hopkins Printing www.hopkinsprinting.com

Fall 2015

INSIGHTS

NEWS | REVIEWS | IDEAS | OPINION |

EMAIL MARKETING »

Responsive Design: It’s Not Just for Websites ow many people this week nearly walked into you because their head was buried in their mobile device? It’s true; we’re walking into poles and missing our subway stops because we’re texting friends, combing through Facebook, and, yes, checking email . . . and we are doing it a lot. The average person looks at their phone 150 times each day, and 43 percent of email is opened on a mobile device.

That’s the good news—as a marketer, you know where to reach consumers. The bad news is that much

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of the email we open we only open once. In fact, 71 percent of consumers immediately delete an email if it’s not optimized for mobile viewing. The moral of the story: you better make a good first impression with your branded emails on mobile devices.

To optimize your emails for mobile, there are three primary design options—responsive, scalable, and fluid.

The consensus is that a responsive design is the most convenient approach for mobile and tablet users, as well for those old-school desktop users. A responsive design allows you to change how your

Responsive-Design Emails: Getting Your Message Read and Increasing Engagement TELL THEM WHAT TO DO . . . TWICE Place your first call to action at the top of your email, but consider adding a second call to action at the bottom of your email so users do not have to scroll back up to click on the main link.

USE BUTTONS INSTEAD OF TEXT LINKS Mobile users will have a hard time clicking on text links because they’re using fingers and thumbs, not a mouse. Use large buttons and keep them away from each other. Nothing is more annoying than clicking one link when you wanted another.

PLAY IT SAFE WITH IMAGES Not all mobile devices will automatically download your images. To prevent them from being blocked, use ALT tags and HTML text in your images.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF WHITE SPACE Navigating content on a mobile device is always easier with large fonts (minimum of 11 point for body text and 22 point for headlines), big calls to action, and less copy.

More is hardly ever better, so streamline your message.

APPEAL TO THE ONE-HANDERS How many times have you scrolled through emails after work with your favorite beverage in one hand and your phone in the other? Test your design to be sure it’s easy to navigate for those with their hands full.

USE A SINGLECOLUMN TEMPLATE Having to zoom and scroll makes for a negative online experience.

email is displayed depending on the size of the screen it’s being viewed on, even using media queries to adjust the width.

You can add, delete, or move content around so subscribers have the best experience regardless of what device they’re using; the layout can even be altered from multicolumn to single column on the fly.

A responsive design will also require minimal changes if, say, the size of the most popular mobile devices changes over time.

If you aren’t already convinced that designing optimized emails as part of your email marketing strategy is critical, consider this: an email with a responsive email design has a nearly 15 percent increase in unique clicks, and the first click in a responsive email design has a 30 percent higher click rate than a nonresponsive design. If you’re sending your subscribers emails that aren’t mobile friendly, you might as well send them video of a tree falling in the woods; they’ll likely never see it anyway.

INSIGHTS

Fall 2015

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COOL FINDS »

STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY SITES WE LOVE We had a mission—find great stock photography sites that hit all the marks: up-front pricing, clear definition of use, instant downloads, affordability, and quality. Using the same search criteria on more than a dozen sites, our panel of designers and marketers found their favorites.

Dollarphotoclub.com

How the USPS Could Dramatically Impact Your Direct Mail ROI This fall, in New York City’s five boroughs, the United States Postal Service is testing a new service that lets you know via a daily, 8:00 a.m. email what you’ll be receiving in your mailbox that afternoon. A sneak peek at your own mail may not sound as juicy as getting advanced info on crucial life events such as whom The Bachelor selected, but the ramifications could be profound for marketers. The morning emails contain black-and-white photos of your mail taken at high speed as mail passes through sorting machines, and links can even be attached to the images.

Knowing that the average marketing campaign sees a 37 percent lift when email and direct mail are used together, the USPS smartly aims to help boost ROI on direct mail. The program, called Real Mail Notification™ (RMN), was trialed on 6,600 people in Northern Virginia, and the results were striking.

Ninety-three percent of users opened their emails from the USPS within two hours of receiving them,

and 9 of 10 people said they’d continue to use the service. Eighty-six percent said they’d recommend it. The average response rate of RMN subscribers was 5.9 percent, while the average response rate for a control mailing was just .5 percent. A large percentage of the responses came via click-through opportunities (4.8 percent).

Forming a daily connection from mailed content to recipients’ digital worlds allows marketers to attach online offers to what shows up in peoples’ mailboxes or even to drive them to make an immediate transaction online. Imagine being alerted via email to an offer waiting in your mailbox that evening.

For marketers, the best part— besides the fact that the USPS plans for the service to be free—is the expanded opportunity to reach your audience.

After all, an email may get deleted, but, as the saying goes, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Described by our judges as “the biggest bargain,” Dollar Photo Club is just $10/month with unlimited high-resolution images for a buck! Curated by Fotolia, the world’s number one stock photo marketplace, they have two rules. The first rule of Dollar Photo Club: all images are $1. The second rule: ALL IMAGES ARE $1.

And that’s all you need to know!

Bigstock.com and Shutterstock.com Bigstock was acquired by Shutterstock in 2009, and they’ve played well together since then without disrupting each other. We felt like we were looking at two different levels of quality, both of which were great in the arenas they play in. Purchasing through credits or a subscription plan is easy at Bigstock, with more than 25 plans to choose from. Our favorite plan with Shutterstock was 150 images for $169/month.

Masterfile.com We were impressed with the range of pricing and flexibility offered by Masterfile.com. Monthly subscription plans for budget, royalty-free images start at 50 images/month for $50 and go as high as 600 images/month for $199.

You can make single purchases from their Premium RF and RM collections, with price points beginning at $65 and $250 respectively.

Prime.500px.com Serious WOW! We got on this site and couldn’t tear ourselves away. With a focus on quality over quantity (although there is no shortage of images, at more than 50 million), this premium library is fueled by a community of more than five million photographers. We were delighted to find it very affordable, with flat-rate pricing of $50 for a 72 dpi web image and $250 for a large, high-resolution, 300 dpi image file.

Stock.adobe.com In mid-June, Adobe launched Adobe Stock, the result of Adobe’s acquisition of Fotolia. Integrated into the latest releases of Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Premiere Pro CC, and After Effects CC, you can purchase, access, and manage your images directly from within these tools and other CC desktop apps. Creative Cloud members save 40% on subscriptions starting at $29.99 per month, and single images are only $9.99 without a subscription! Thank you, Adobe!

Fall 2015

INSIGHTS

NEWS | REVIEWS | IDEAS | OPINION |

MARKETING »

Evolving from Marketing Performance Management Dashboard 1.0 to 2.0: Five Key Principles Guest Writer: Laura Patterson President, VisionEdge Marketing Author: Marketing Metrics in Action: Creating a Performance-Driven Marketing Organization

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ncreased competition and pressure from stakeholders have made marketing performance management dashboards a must-have versus a nice-to-have. As a result, most marketing executives have implemented dashboards or are in the process of developing them. Many times the initial implementation is very basic, with color-coded reports that convey marketing activities and reveal tactical, channel-specific information. They focus on things such as the number of opens and click-through rates for email campaigns.

This is what we call “Dashboard 1.0.”

It’s a good start, but it doesn’t really help improve marketing performance or effectively communicate marketing’s impact on, and value to, the business. As a result, Dashboard 1.0 makes it harder to obtain the resources really needed to be successful.

Best-in-class marketers are upgrading to what we call “Dashboard 2.0.” When properly designed and used, more advanced dashboard capabilities provide strategic, enterprise-wide information to help you

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MANAGE PERFORMANCE AND RISK

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CONNECT INVESTMENT AND VALUE

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REVEAL RELATIONSHIPS

5

IMPROVE DECISION-MAKING

Your dashboard should keep you focused on which business needles you’re trying to move as well as serve as an accountability vehicle. As such, it should provide a unified view of how you are doing on each KPI, so that you can make adjustments and corrections to maximize marketing effectiveness.

It should also incorporate thresholds and alerts to prompt corrective action when needed.

Marketers have long struggled to effectively communicate their contribution to the business.

Dashboard 2.0 helps you connect the investments you are making on behalf of the organization to the value marketing is contributing to the enterprise.

gauge performance, monitor progress, and facilitate decisions. Serving as an interactive, predictive tool, it provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs). It also enables you to better manage risk, improve marketing performance, and prove the impact of marketing investment on the bottom line to the rest of your C-suite colleagues.

With more than 60 different channels today, marketing has become extremely complex. This complexity makes measuring the synergy and benefit between different channels difficult. Dashboard 2.0 must provide insight into how well the overall system is operating, where the synergies are, and what gaps are present.

Here are the five design principles behind Dashboard 2.0. Follow these principles to ensure your new, more advanced dashboard clearly shows the connection between marketing investments, activities, and outputs and helps you quantify and justify resource requirements at budget time. Dashboard 2.0 should:

Dashboard 2.0’s information must be actionable, enabling you to make better decisions on future activities. It needs to foster C-suite decision-making, specifically decisions around strategy and investments. This also helps you to be more aligned with enterprise initiatives and helps you show your business acumen.

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You have to start with the end in mind. Dashboard 2.0 capabilities enable you to clarify your objectives and goals, monitor whether you’re on track, and make course corrections where necessary. By adhering to these five principles, you will be ready to use your dashboard to manage performance and drive action.

It will be clearer to you and your leadership team how you are contributing to the business and where there are opportunities to improve. n

RELATE DIRECTLY TO THE MARKETING PLAN

When the marketing plan is aligned to business results and is measurable, it serves as the blueprint for your dashboard control panel. Indeed, the metrics chain defined in the marketing plan is the foundation for the KPIs you select for your dashboard.

CONCLUSION

INSIGHTS

Fall 2015

05

5-MINUTE EXPERT »

Your Mobile App: The Ultimate Subscription to Your Brand Mallory Lee VP of Marketing at mobile app and messaging platform provider Bluebridge. @MalloryRLee

MARKETING DASHBOARDS 2.0 BEST PRACTICES Your New, Advanced Dashboard Should: • P resent relevant and actionable metrics and KPIs as well as their performance targets in a consistent, easy-to-consume way • Reflect the relationship between the metrics and their impact on the outcomes

• Account for performance thresholds and integrate alerts when appropriate

• Provide directional guidance on what adjustments, if any, are needed

SIX CATEGORIES FOR EVERY MARKETING DASHBOARD

If you were to count up the number of ways that your customers, prospects, or fans engage with your brand each day, would you be happy with the result?

Now, compare that number to 150.

app arrive directly in the hands (or on the

That’s the average number of times we

wrists) of users on that most personal screen.

pick up our smartphone and interact with

This great access to users requires a sound

it each day. The smartphone is our most

mobile strategy, keeping permission at the

personal device. It’s our alarm, the first thing

forefront. Mobile messaging is the best way to

we wake up to. It’s our personal assistant,

break through the clutter of email and social

window to the social world, and memory

messages, which are becoming inundated

recorder. As a result, the smartphone screen

with ads. But if you don’t honor the personal

has become extremely valuable real estate

nature of the smartphone, users will turn

for brands. The mobile apps we choose to

those notifications off.

place on our smartphone are among our

All companies should consider adopting

most trusted and adored brands, and we are

a mobile app strategy in the coming year.

exposed to them up to 150 times per day.

According to the Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2015 report, the average consumer

Feature these six categories on your dashboard, including both target and actual results. These categories represent the essential roles and responsibilities of marketing: finding, keeping, and growing the value of customers. ustomer acquisition and retention: 1 CNumber of customers, retention rate, acquisition rate, etc.

ustomer value: Lifetime value, loyalty, 2 Cshare of wallet, etc.

3 Customer equity: Referral rate, propensity to repurchase, etc.

innovation and adoption: Rate 4 Pofroduct product adoption, revenue from new versus existing products

ompetitive market value: Category 5 Cownership, rate of growth compared to competitors, market share growth

he bottom line: Show me the money.

6 TWhat are we investing, and what are we getting in return for that money?

For this reason, an app download is the ultimate subscription to your brand’s content.

spends 2.8 hours a day interacting with digital media on their smartphone.

By participating in the

Once downloaded, various content

mobile landscape, you

channels are unlocked for users.

can make it easy for

From blogs to podcasts,

your audience

YouTube, and your website,

to follow you with

disparate channels can be

a unified hub that

integrated into a unified

includes all your

content hub. Marketers

digital content.

can easily cross promote subscriptions to

As with any effective communication,

email newsletters,

relevancy is key.

event registrations,

Your app users

online purchases, and content downloads. Push messages via your mobile

have gone “all in” by downloading your mobile app.

Don’t abuse that privilege. n

06

Fall 2015

COVER STORY

JAY BAER New York Times best-selling author, world’s #1 content marketing blogger, and international speaker dishes on digital, content, and social marketing.

Interview by Tim Sweeney

Meet Jay. A 20-year veteran of digital marketing, Jay Baer has consulted for more than 700 companies, 31 of whom are Fortune 500s.

His current firm, Convince & Convert, is the fifth multimillion-dollar company he has started from scratch. His second book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype, was #3 on the New York Times Business Best Sellers List and a runaway #1 Amazon Best Seller.

Jay’s Convince & Convert blog was named the world’s number one content marketing blog by the Content Marketing Institute, and it receives 250,000 monthly visitors. Jay also hosts and produces the Social Pros Podcast and the Jay Today video podcast. Befitting his Arizona roots, Jay is a tequila collector and maintains his allegiance to the teams of his alma mater, the University of Arizona.

Q: CMWorld named you #3 in their Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2014.

You also have the number one social media marketing blog in the world, according to Content Marketing Institute. How did you get to this point?

Jay Baer: Consistency. I’ve discovered that

becoming a “media brand” that people rely upon for marketing education requires perspiration, more so than inspiration. I’ve published strong content on a daily or near-daily basis for almost eight years. It’s a cumulative effect, more so than lightning in a bottle.

Q: With regard to publishing consistently, are you trying to break news or further the story?

JB: We decided a few years ago we weren’t

Connect with Jay: Blog: www.convinceandconvert.com

Facebook: Jay Baer (Jason Baer)

Twitter: @jaybaer

LinkedIn: in/jasonbaer

going to be able to out-news anybody like Tech Crunch or Mashable. So we’ve always tried to specialize in what we call the “. . . and therefore” approach. We will tell you what has happened—

Fall 2015

the trend or the state of the union—but we also believe it’s our role to tell business owners the next sentence, and that is, “. . . therefore, you should be doing THIS.” The objective is to publish what people will not have seen anywhere else.

The challenge today is often not about content quality, but about content amplification. There is so much good content out there, and most companies aren’t spending enough time at the strategy or tactical levels.

Q: You produce podcasts, blogs, YouTube’s “Jay Today,” and presentations, and you tour with international digital roadshows.

How do you stay on top of what’s changing in digital marketing?

JB: Practice! You force yourself to get good at working in small bursts in any conceivable location.

And my team at Convince & Convert and I are adept at taking one piece of content and turning it into many others. The “Jay Today” videos that I shoot three times a week go on YouTube, Facebook, and iTunes. We transcribe them and turn them into blog posts on our site medium.com/@jaybaer and on LinkedIn. We’re always trying to atomize content and tell stories more efficiently and effectively.

Q: Do you have any predictions for what marketing topics might be trending in late 2015?

JB: I expect to see the continued development

of what Mark Schaefer and I have been calling “spineless” content, meaning that it doesn’t “live” primarily on your key hub—the spine of your operation (like your blog). Instead, this content lives primarily on third-party sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. The reality is that people are voting with their thumbs, and they are typically not voting to visit your owned web properties.

07

Q: How should companies be dealing with that trend?

JB: In almost every case, you’re not in the

eyeballs business. You’re in the actions business.

Unless you are selling ads, you don’t care about eyeballs; you care that people engage in a way that helps you meet your business objective. There is this notion that the best place for this engagement is on properties that we own. In the spineless approach, maybe you say, “I don’t really care if this action occurs on real estate I control. I just want it to occur.” If Facebook is going to say, “Why don’t you post this here?”, then go ahead.

Now Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to pull leads from their site. All these sites are encouraging you to create content on their platform.

Q: How do you tie social media marketing to business outcomes?

JB: It depends on what you’re looking to achieve.

The big problem with social is that most companies look at it as a customer-acquisition tool, when it’s more suitable for customer retention and loyalty.

Q: In light of that, what do you think are the most underutilized social media channels for marketing?

JB: For product companies, it’s Pinterest.

For all others, it’s Instagram. If you’re selling product, especially via online purchase, Pinterest is a potential gold mine. People are creating wish lists there, and the amount of traffic that comes back to your website is far greater than any other social network. As for Instagram, it offers far and away the highest engagement rates of any social network today because, fundamentally, people like to look at pretty pictures and are going there for that reason. It’s also completely mobile and requires one tap to “like” your photo. You can’t get that for free on Facebook or anywhere else; but we’ll see what happens with that, because Facebook owns Instagram.

For B-to-B companies, an untapped opportunity is SlideShare. It features a higher concentration of business owners and senior managers than even LinkedIn.

JAY BAER’S BOOK CLUB Given his hectic schedule, Jay Baer doesn’t have a ton of time to read books.

Still, here are three he absolutely recommends you put on your list.

1. Different: Escaping the 2. Content Inc. – by Joe Pulizzi Competitive Herd Coming in September, this book, – by Youngme Moon authored by the founder of the The Harvard Business School Content Marketing Institute, professor and Senior Associate explains how to develop valuable Dean for Strategy and Innovation content, build an audience around writes on differentiating your that content, and then create a business in the marketplace. product for that audience.

3. Flip the Funnel – by Joseph Jaffe The sought-after speaker and marketing consultant discusses why your current customers are more important than getting new customers and why that has big implications for social media and content marketing.

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Fall 2015

COVER STORY

People go there to look for knowledge and great presentations. We’ve had great success with SlideShare, and lots of B-to-B organizations could also do so, but many of them have not been able to make the leap from a PDF-style white paper to a SlideShare that is more presentation formatted.

Jay’s Favorite Blogs and Emails Jay Baer glances at 30 to 50 blogs and countless emails each day, curating them based on their headlines. “I get the most value from the emails I subscribe to, and many of them send me headlines from blogs,” he says. “Having been involved in the Internet since 1994, I’ve trained myself to sift through them quickly.” Baer has seven email accounts, some of which are used only to receive his favorite blogs. “And one inbox is just for anything related to my son’s hockey team,” he adds. Here are his favorite blogs and emails.

Q: What about a brand that has good content, but doesn’t know how to maximize it or get sufficient return?

JB: The challenge today is often not about

content quality, but about content amplification.

There is so much good content out there, and most companies aren’t spending enough time at the strategy or tactical levels to think through how that content will be found, shared, and disseminated. It’s one of the reasons influencer marketing and paid social are so hot right now.

SmartBrief

Q: So how can companies get the

Sign up to receive daily, weekly, or monthly email newsletters that cover social media marketing, visual communications, video advertising, and more, depending on your area of interest.

most from what they have?

JB: One of my favorite resources now is a

site called Relevance.com. It’s all about content amplification—taking a piece of content and getting people to know about it. Your process should involve asking yourself who the natural audiences are for a piece of content and how do you seed this content—via email, by reaching out one at a time, via a guest blog on somebody else’s blog that drives people back, through media relations, or through paid social media advertising.

We recently launched a new podcast called “The Business of Story,” which went to #5 on iTunes’s all-business platform. For that, we did a bunch of Facebook advertising and put ads in front of people.

Q: Of all the brands you work with,

how many are doing an ample job of tracking the effectiveness of the content they produce?

JB: It varies. And it’s not an expertise issue;

it’s just that some companies are so big that tying metrics together across such a huge variety of content and channels is very tricky (and expensive). Sometimes, you need to ask yourself, “What’s the ROI of knowing your ROI?” It takes time and resources to get the metrics right.

Swayy Baer sets his browser homepage to this site, which shows you what’s being shared on Twitter and Facebook from people you are connected with.

MediaPost Choose to receive newsletters covering online media, the agency business, brand marketing news and practices, and media buying, selling, and research.

The Buffer Blog Baer calls Buffer’s newsletter “consistently good.” You’ll get daily blog content with social media tools, tips, experience, and advice from Buffer’s worldwide team.

Contently For creatives, businesses, and consumers interested in content marketing. Their TCS newsletter delivers content-industry news to your inbox.

Q: So what metrics should they be measuring?

JB: Here are the four: 1. Consumption Did people read, watch, or listen to your content?

2. Amplification Did people share this, comment on it, or forward it?

3. Lead Generation Did people, after consuming this content, engage in a behavior that indicates they are doing something that will yield results for you? Did they download your e-book and then go to the pricing page?

4. Sales Did the people who consumed this content ultimately become customers? Sales metrics become more difficult to track. B-to-B operations have it much easier because there is visibility on

every transaction. In the case of, say, a SkittlesTM YouTube video series, it’s hard to say this many views equaled this many sales.

Q: You are of the belief, and have included in your book Youtility, that content should inform, delight, and inspire. Most companies get caught up in selling. How can brands balance between selling and informing/ delighting/inspiring with content?

JB: It’s the golden rule. You know the content you

like. It’s content that’s truly, inherently useful. Why would your customers want something different than what you want personally? There is, of course, a time and place for content that nudges the consumer toward the sale. The problem is that in many companies

Fall 2015

that particular content is present at all stages of the funnel, and in all channels. It should be toward the bottom of the funnel, and only in certain channels.

Q: Can you address the importance of an established road map/timeline for how a brand rolls out its content and social marketing strategy?

JB: You have to have an editorial calendar and

you have to have processes, but doing content and social media well requires an equal mix of planning and spontaneity. When content is overplanned, you miss opportunities to break out and ride the zeitgeist. The best practice is a quarterly or monthly calendar with some big tentpoles and anticipated cadences, augmented by daily or weekly calendars that are more reflective of real-time circumstances.

Q: Have you found that in-house

creative teams are attracting better talent, and have you seen a shift away from companies using agencies to create their content and instead using them to advise more on strategy?

JB: We have a great team at Convince & Convert that includes a regular cast of pros, augmented by many excellent third-party resources. On the client side, we work with major brands that pretty much all employ a mix of in-house and out-of-house assets. In terms of shifts, we see agencies being asked to look at the horizon line and help with strategy, and that’s certainly most of what we do at Convince & Convert. Day to day, we are seeing more companies take the lead role in execution, simply because the pace that content/ social needs to run at can be hard for agencies to achieve, unless their relationship with the company is so close that they are practically embedded.

Q: What is your most requested workshop and why do you think it is so popular?

JB: “Youtility” at present, because it answers a

very timely question: “We’re creating all this content, but why?”

Q: Tell us about your Social Pros Podcast

and your new Definitive email. With all of the curated content sites and services out there, why choose to do your own?

JB: Social Pros is one of the most popular and longest-

running marketing podcasts. We’ve produced a weekly show for three-and-a-half years and have focused on telling the stories of big-company social media professionals. As the tagline says, it’s the show for “real people doing real work in social media.”

The audience for Social Pros is the same as the guest lineup—people who run social media at big companies.

Definitive is content for a broader audience of digital marketing practitioners, not just social. For a long time, we’d been sending the “here’s what happened today that you should know about” type email. It was

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successful, but lots of people were doing that. We changed the name to Definitive, and now we send it based on a topic, not a timeline. Mondays we send an email about a key topic in social media and provide links to what we think are the three best resources available anywhere by any author on that topic. Tuesdays are content marketing.

Wednesdays are digital marketing, etc. It gives readers access to a living library of the very best resources. So it’s not about “news,” it’s about supplying the “definitive” resource guide.

Hence the name. n

WIN JAY’S NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER YOUTILITY! We asked Jay to share four of the best takeaways from his book.

Here’s what he told us: Your customers are hyper-researching everything.

1 You need to answer as many of their questions as possible in multiple formats.

creates trust, and trust creates and keeps 2 Transparency customers. Find a way to stand out with your honesty and humanity. is the new big. Take big content ideas and break them up into many smaller 3 Small executions (like we do for “Jay Today”). marketing is about help, not hype. One of the best examples is a McDonald’s 4 Smart program called “Our Food, Your Questions.” It allows customers to ask any question they want about their food, and people ask questions that a skeptic would ask—the type of questions that companies used to just delete. But McDonald’s answers all of them with a remarkable level of detail. One person asked, “How come food I get at the drive-thru doesn’t look like what’s on TV?” McDonald’s had their Director of Marketing work with their ad agency and their TV director to create an eight-minute documentary on how a commercial is shot. The fundamental lesson is that the food they use is actually obtained from the closest McDonald’s restaurant to the shoot, but they do things such as trim the pickles and drop sesame seeds on the buns with tweezers!

REGISTER TODAY TO WIN! Scan this QR Code or Register Online at: www.hopkinsprinting.com/fall-giveaway

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Fall 2015

CASE STUDY

MARKETING CASE STUDY: SWEET SUCCESS

by Tim Sweeney

Craft chocolate maker Askinosie has weaved a modern success story using resourceful marketing practices and a transparent business model that aims to do good for the world and make great chocolate.

hen Shawn Askinosie sold the first Askinosie chocolate bar eight years ago, his daughter Lawren was still a teenager. Today, she is the Director of Sales and Marketing for the Springfield, Missouri-based bean-to-bar craft chocolate company whose annual output of chocolate has gone from roughly six metric tons in 2008 to a projected 30 metric tons this year. Sounds like a lot of chocolate, but, as Lawren Askinosie says, “What we do in one year is what the Mars® plant probably makes in one shift.”

Their overall output may pale in comparison to the big boys, but when it comes to running a socially responsible business, Askinosie is at the top of the heap. Shawn Askinosie was a highly successful criminal defense lawyer when he

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realized that his career was too stressful. The idea of starting a chocolate company came to him out of the blue; all he knew about chocolate was that it tasted good. He set out to learn all he could about the chocolate business, even traveling to the Amazon to study the postharvest techniques of cocoa farmers. His plan was to become one of the only people in the United States to make chocolate straight from the bean and to source the beans directly, treating the cocoa farmers in Tanzania, Honduras, the Philippines, and Ecuador like business partners and even sharing profits with them. And that’s exactly what he’s done.

That brand story resonates with consumers, thanks to what Lawren says has been a slow build, doing the little things every day and every week. “In

the company’s infancy it was important that our brand reflected the same transparency we use when we work with our farmer partners,” she says. “But we want people to buy our chocolate because it tastes great, and then we want them to feel better about their purchase because of what they know about our company.”

Askinosie doesn’t work with distributors, but works directly with hundreds of buyers across the country. Although Lawren says the company never had the resources to do traditional advertising, don’t be fooled; they know how to tell their story with . . . um, flavor.

For starters, each chocolate bar package features the story of the farmer who helped make that bar. “The packaging has always featured farmers and used sustainable wrapping, but we wanted to honor them and the work they are doing even more,” Lawren says. “One way to do that was to provide details on who they are.”

Each bar also comes with a “Choc-OLot Number” that consumers can enter at Askinosie.com to learn more about how the bar was created, including where it was farmed and how and when it was created and packaged.

“We maintain a database that allows people to see the production story of the bar they are enjoying, from receiving the bean through the entire process,” Lawren explains. “We’re creating sustainability and involving our fans in the process. The package is another vehicle for us to tell our story.”

The packaging story has taken on a life of its own and encouraged the company to develop additional customer-engagement projects. The company hires women from a local shelter

Fall 2015

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SOCIALLY SAVVY CHOCOLATE Askinosie’s early marketing tactics included hiding chocolate bars around town and putting clues on social media for people to find them. Nowadays, they post several times each week on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

to make strings from the biodegradable bags that carry the cocoa beans to the factory. Those strings then go on the Askinosie packaging.

In addition to its ultra-informative website, Askinosie also has a “Travelogue” that runs on Tumblr and is updated four times each year. It’s a blog of sorts, written in Lawren’s or Shawn’s words, where visitors can see pictures and stories from trips they’ve taken to “origin” (chocolatemaker-speak for the places where the beans come from) and meet the farmers. The stories and photos are initially shared on social media channels, then “live” on the Travelogue.

“It’s another way for our customers to know more about our origin and it’s integral to our business as another vehicle to that transparency,” Lawren says. The company creates a synergistic content plan for the year broken down by quarter, month, and week spelling out what products, projects, origins, or recipes will be focused on at certain times. “This plan is a living document, so it changes all the time to ensure we’re being timely,” Lawren says.

A lengthy waiting list of wholesalers and bulk customers is proof that doing good deeds and making great chocolate has put the product in demand. Still, Askinosie carefully evaluates its growth. When you make chocolate that requires 75 steps, each done by hand, ramping up production while maintaining high standards has to be done strategically. “Growing significantly and becoming a major chocolate maker has never been one of our goals,” Lawren says. “It’s making great chocolate and feeling good about it, and people feeling good about buying it because they are supporting farmers.” n

Askinosie uses Twitter for real-time current events or promotions and to connect individually with customers or retailers who ask questions. Last summer they teamed up with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, blending their Limited Edition S’more Bark chocolate into the ice cream and giving it away out the back door of their factory. Using a special hashtag, they tweeted to followers to come to the back door and knock three times for a free ice cream. “We were much busier than we thought we would be,” Lawren says. “It’s a small, midwestern city, but our fans are social media savvy. We had a lot of millennial-aged people, but a surprising amount of middle-aged consumers.”

On Facebook, the company creates more long-form posts, often related to current events and always with photos. They post everything from farmer updates to breaking news on a new product.

On Instagram, the brand shares pictures of delicious-looking desserts, photos from the factory, or even news of a flash sale. “We use Instagram all the time,” Lawren says. “We are fortunate that food is a nice medium to have for photos and we can kind of make people drool a little bit.” For each trip that Lawren and/or Shawn take to cocoa farms abroad, they also create a hashtag so that people can follow along and get updates in real time.

[The goal is] making great chocolate and feeling good about it, and people feeling good about buying it because they are supporting farmers. – Lawren Askinosie

Love Chocolate?

ENTER TO WIN ASKINOSIE CHOCOLATE!

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Fall 2015

GENERATIONAL

Generational Marketing: Why Aren’t You Doing It? an you name at least five characteristics of each generation? “If you can’t, you probably don’t know them well enough to design a marketing campaign toward them,” says Ann Fishman, President of Generational Targeted Marketing and author of Marketing to the Millennial Woman. Fishman works with brands of all sizes to help them understand what many don’t: history forms generational characteristics and characteristics produce values, attitudes, and lifestyles. And all of those things shape the marketing messages and channels we respond to.

Lisa Walden, Head of Marketing for BridgeWorks, a Minneapolis-based generational consulting firm, says that each generation is now bringing its distinct generational perspective to “traditional” life stages and reinventing them based on their generational personalities.

Smart marketers, she says, are tapping into the intersection of the different generations and their life stages. “Millennials are in their 20s and 30s but are delaying major milestones. They are just now beginning to embrace home buying and becoming parents,” Walden explains. “Baby Boomers, far from pursuing classic retirement, are embracing encore careers or pursuing voluntourism. Gen Xers might be just now digging their heels into their careers as they start to experience empty nests, and the Boomer management tier holding leadership positions is just now starting to consider retirement.”

Based on the birth-year ranges that BridgeWorks uses, the generational breakdown of the US population, from largest to smallest, looks like this: Millennials, Baby Boomers, Silent Generation, Generation Z, and then Gen Xers.

“Boomers currently control most of US disposable income—70 percent, in fact—and marketers are

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eager to capture that market,” Walden says.

“Gen Xers, though they are in their peak earning years, continue to be overlooked by marketers because they are a smaller population; that’s a huge missed opportunity.” According to a Pew Research Center study, Gen Xers (34%) and Millennials (also 34%) make up the two largest portions of the US workforce, with Boomers (29%), the Silent Generation (2%), and Generation Z (1%) rounding things out.

So why, as a marketer, do you need to know these things? Consider the influence of the Internet on the purchase behavior of Millennials and Gen Xers. According to Business Insider, Gen Xers spend $1,930 annually online, just $70 less than Millennials. A whopping 74 percent of Millennials believe they influence the purchasing decisions of their peers, according to Edelman 8095, a study on how Millennials connect with brands and make purchases. Another study by advertising technology

company Nanigans says that 98 percent of Millennials are more likely to engage with a friend’s post over a brand’s post, and they are twice as likely to purchase products peers have shared.

MARKETING TO MULTIPLE GENERATIONS If you have parents over age 65, you’ve likely watched TV with them and laughed at a commercial they didn’t understand. That, Fishman says, is because very few companies today are tailoring their marketing to suit a variety of generations. It’s certainly possible to market to one generation without offending others—or even to appeal to several generations simultaneously— but it’s not easy.

“Brands need to include the generational characteristics that appeal to a variety of generations,” Fishman explains. “For instance, Baby Boomers distrust authority, so they don’t want to hear the opinions of experts like critics.”

THE GENERATIONS A summary of five generations: (Insight from Ann Fishman, Generational Targeted Marketing) SILENT GENERATION (born 1925–1942) Between the GI Generation and Baby Boomers, they never produced a US president, but started the Civil Rights and women’s movements. Many now feel as if life has passed them by, and they want a taste of it before they pass on. Overlooked by marketers, they’re willing to spend on trips and jewelry because they want to feel as though they are living their lives.

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BABY BOOMERS (born 1943–1960) A huge generation formed when soldiers came home from World War II, they had schools built for them and huge competition in the job market. As a result, they are the first American generation that puts its focus on the good of the individual over the group.

Appeal to their historically driven sense of self by using the word “you.”

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Fall 2015

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Naturally, generational characteristics also have an effect on the things we hold most dear, that is, our values.

Smart marketers recognize that a great marketing experience can mean something very different between generations, even if they are purchasing the same product.

Instead, they gravitate to sources like Zagat because it’s based on surveys of their peers. Alternatively, the Silent Generation that came before them loves a product with the Good Housekeeping seal of approval because they were raised on it.

Jason Dorsey, Chief Strategy Officer and Millennials Researcher at The Center for Generational Kinetics, a Millennials research and strategy firm, says that successfully engaging with specific generations starts with decision-makers taking the time to learn what works with each generation, what doesn’t, and why. “This can be a challenge for many companies, especially when their

GENERATION X (born 1961–1981) A generation that responds to an individualistic marketing approach because many had to look after themselves when growing up.

They are children of the women’s movement and experienced divorce in great numbers. They’re a somewhat cynical lot who want to know what is practical about your product.

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marketing worked like a charm in the past but is no longer creating the results they need,” Dorsey says.

“The marketing didn’t change, but the generation did.”

In recent months, you may have noticed that Viagra has begun using a woman in their television commercials who appears much younger than what you’d imagine is the corresponding male target audience for their product. Fishman believes this is done because the brand understands that Baby Boomers don’t want to be told that they are old. “They market the product as though a 45-year-old may need it because that makes it okay to take it at age 70,” she explains.

GEN Y/MILLENNIALS (born 1981–9/11/2001) A generation that works and thinks in groups because they were team taught, were team graded, and received trophies for showing up for a team sport. They will do your marketing for you, telling their friends about their experience. They love giving companies feedback, gravitate to group discounts, and respond to a quick delivery.

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Dorsey and his team at The Center for Generational Kinetics worked with an automotive client on communicating with potential Millennial customers. Rather than following up on web leads with a phone call and lengthy voicemail, the automotive company responded by filming a short video or taking candid photos in the car using a smartphone, specifically for the potential customer.

They then sent the video or photos to the potential customer via mobile. “The potential customer not only sees the car through a lens they can’t get online, but they also see the salesperson who will be there to greet them,” Dorsey says.

GENERATION Z/BOOMLETS (born post 9/11/2001) This is the overprotected generation—at home because of kidnappings, at school because of tragedies like Columbine, and in the real world because of the advance of terrorism. Their parents and grandparents are often part of the decision-making process, so aim to win them over, too.

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Fall 2015

GENERATIONAL

THE RIGHT SALES TOOLS FOR THE RIGHT GENERATION Because we come from various generations and have been exposed to different forms of media and technology, it makes sense that we have learned to interact with brands in different ways.

In fact, Dorsey believes that our communication preferences are as crucial as our generational attributes because they determine the mode(s) in which we act on those values, preferences, and behaviors within a brand experience. While one generation may love casual communication via mobile technology—because for them that is a sign of authenticity, which they value—another generation may expect more formality.

“A Millennial may want to post his or her entire car-buying experience on social media and expect the brand’s ambassador to engage with them throughout,” Dorsey explains. “A Baby Boomer may be neutral or even turned off by that same brand ambassador asking to take a picture of them with their new car and post it on Instagram.”

Studying the role that generational characteristics play in consumers’ purchase behaviors can also help companies learn where potential sales are lost. In the insurance industry, for example, nearly every traditional company follows a linear sales process. Dorsey and his team identified that

if Millennials are presented with more than a few steps they often fall out of the sales cycle. They also discovered that those same Millennials are hugely compliant as customers if companies start with the end first and work backward.

“We created a way to make this scalable for insurance companies, and now they are starting their conversations with the end of the process and Millennials are going all the way through,” Dorsey says. “Both our insurance and automotive clients still offer the phone calls, voicemails, and printed brochures, but we’ve expanded their toolkit to accommodate each generation in their marketplace.”

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Fall 2015

Five Characteristics for Five Generations

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recently featured videos of mothers APPEALING TO VALUES and daughters discussing their insecurities Naturally, generational characteristics also and snapping selfies. Frito-Lay’s “Do Us have an effect on the things we hold most a Flavor” promotion offered consumers dear, that is, our values. Smart marketers the chance to create the world’s greatest recognize that a great marketing experience potato chip, something anyone could get can mean something very different between involved in. “Dove’s campaign naturally generations, even if they are purchasing targets two generations of women,” the same product. “This generational Silent Generation Baby Boomers Fishman says, “and who difference is driven by values and (born 1925–1942) (born 1943–1960) doesn’t want to create the preferences, which are learned • Question authority • Traditionalists world’s greatest potato behaviors and have a high • Historically driven focus on self • Demand quality chip? And neither level of predictability within • Rely on their social circles for information • Prefer hard copy information • Respond to the word “you” in marketing campaign offends a generation spanning the • Fond of family imagery in marketing • Willing to try new things any generations.” same geography,” • E njoy face-to-face interaction over phone or email

In the end, says Dorsey. it’s about knowing

Today more than your customer and ever, our values affect understanding that what we purchase Generation Z/ Generation X it does matter, for and from whom.

Boomlets (born 1961–1981) instance, that a “Generation X and (born post 9/11/2001) • Individualistic and self-reliant group of people Millennials have a real • Ambitious and collaborative • Interested in all things healthy didn’t go online until interest in all things • Technologically savvy • Love authenticity and sincerity age 50.

“I’m not healthy, and are asking, in companies • Expect bite-size, real-time messaging • Seek product information saying everybody in ‘How can I take better • Gravitate to visual, shareable messaging • Don’t respond to a • E xpect social, mobile, and a generation is alike,” care of myself?’” says “one-size-fits-all” approach local marketing Fishman says, “but if Fishman. Chipotle is one Gen Y/Millennials you grew up in the company that recognized (born 1981–9/11/2001) Depression, you’re this and produced a healthy • Empowered and spontaneous probably a little thrifty.” n alternative to fast food. They don’t use genetically modified ingredients (GMOs) and even created an app that lets customers order food that will be waiting for them when they show up.

The fact that Gen Xers grew up listening to Baby Boomers brag about working 100 hours per week has led them to value a work-life balance. High divorce rates in the families they grew up in, and later being locked out of the job market by Baby Boomers, has made them skeptical consumers. As a result, Gen Xers want their purchase problems solved quickly and tend to love companies that treat them fairly. Much of their skepticism stems from being marketed to since birth. “They have seen as much marketing as people on Madison Avenue,” Fishman points out. “They know the tricks and love authenticity.”

Her advice on marketing toward Gen Xers: don’t waste time with loads of copy or repetitive links, and be sure you have a good website.

• Want to know you’re marketing to their needs • Like brands that add value/rewards for interaction • Optimistic about the future • Love sharing brand experiences with others

A SAFE BET If there’s a safe bet to place your multigenerational marketing chips behind, it’s in appealing to consumers’ desire to make a difference through what they purchase. “Baby Boomers started it all in their efforts to save the environment, and Millennials and Gen Xers demand a cause as well,” Fishman says. “So three generations love to see a company trying to save the world. That needs to be in your marketing.”

Dove and Frito-Lay have had recent success resonating across the generational lines. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign

Each generation is now bringing its distinct generational perspective to “traditional” life stages and reinventing them based on their generational personalities. Smart marketers are tapping into the intersection of the different generations and their life stages.

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Fall 2015

MY WORKING DAY

My Working Day Jessica Morgan reckons she wouldn’t last a day as a designer without these 10 things.

Jessica Morgan Creative Director www.jessicadraws.com Twitter : @jessicadraws | Facebook : Facebook.com/jessicadraws s a designer, there are a great many things that are essential for me to be able to do my job, the most obvious being my Mac, Internet, a space to work in, a very large coffee, and a brain that’s not too sluggish from being in the pub the night before!

But what couldn’t I live without? I’ve put together this list of 10 things I see as essential to my working day as a designer.

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1. Wacom This nifty tool has been with me since I started. I think of my Wacom as an extension of my hand. It’s so wonderful!

lonesome. In the way that my sketchbook is my idea jotter, Post-its help me organize my day and keep on top of tasks.

4. Spotify O, Spotify, what would I do without you? Answer: go out of my mind! I don’t know about you, but the kind of music I listen to completely depends on my mood. Spotify is there for me, whatever mood I’m in. It finds some awesome tunes for me to fall in love with while I’m busy

6. A Social Media Tool I work with social media a lot, and use all of the platforms to promote my work and my business.

It’s important for me to be able to make the process of posting content super efficient and reliable.

I also need to see how posts are engaging and compare them with other posts so I can make sure all my content is as impactful as possible. Sprout Social is a great tool for this. I can connect my social networks together in one neat list and compose content to post all at

8. An iPhone I’ve no idea where I would be without it! If I’m not plonked in front of my Mac, I spend a lot of time each month meeting clients, attending networking events, and generally being on the move.

While I’m doing this, clients are emailing and I’m scheduling more meetings and events and work. Phew! How is this possible? My wonderful iPhone. My calendar is always open, my FreshBooks app is running, my Skype app is always in use for my overseas clients, and Sprout Social is there to add content to my networks on the move.

9. Visual.ly Within the last year and a half, infographics have become a major component in marketing. I’ve had the pleasure of working with numerous organizations on a range of infographics. Although shared through web pages and social media, where do designers go to promote their work and find inspiration? Visual.ly.

I’ve used Visual.ly to collect all my infographic work in one place, which is great for potential clients.

“ The most obvious things being my Mac, Internet, a space to work in, a very large coffee, and a brain that’s not too sluggish from being in the pub the night before!”

It’s made the transition between sketching everything on paper and then wrestling with the pen tool in Illustrator a lot more fun and definitely a lot faster.

I use it instead of a mouse or a trackpad for everything. I really am severely attached to it, so please don’t take it from me!

2. A Sketchbook Being planted in front of a 27” screen all day, it’s good to break away and do a little, quick, five-minute doodle. Not only does it calm me down once I’ve checked that I can still draw, it’s also a nice break for my achy brain.

3. Post-it® Notes I’m talking about the actual, real, physical kind, not those electronic ones. In fact, I’m probably keeping the Post-it manufacturing industry afloat all on my

working hard. The radio function is genius. Now the developers need to find a way to make Spotify know what mood I’m in and what I want to listen to. Hurry up, will you?

the same time or go out at different times. Engaging with social media is a must for businesses, but it can be quite distracting. This saves a great deal of time and distraction.

5. Snacks If you’re anything like me, work tends to overtake a great deal of things, including preparing healthy brain food. In some cases, you completely forget about lunch and look up to find it’s already 5:30 p.m.

Sound familiar? Enter graze.com.

Genius idea! You browse through the options for healthy snacks (and a few naughty ones). Bin the options you’re sure not to like, and set when you’d like your nifty little snack box to be delivered. One of my favorites is the popcorn with a twist of black pepper. Yum!

7. A Time-Tracking App There is one thing a designer should never be without, and that is a decent time-tracking app. I searched high and low for something that not only had a well-designed, easy-to-use interface, but also was available across mobile and Mac platforms.

I found it. FreshBooks.com is a very valuable cloud accounting tool for tracking your time across projects, tasks, and clients. You can add team members and invoice your clients directly, giving them the option to pay online.

10. Competition When I was just starting out and working from my living room desk, I knew I needed to get into shared office space to keep the creative juices flowing and the competition in my line of sight.

It was the best thing I ever did. It gave me a push to improve my skills and always be up-to-date with the latest tech. n

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CALENDAR SHOWCASE Each quarter, Hopkins Printing produces and distributes a quarterly calendar and notepad that have been designed for Hopkins Printing by one of our talented design clients.

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2015

Hopkins Printing 2246 CityGate Drive Columbus, Ohio 43219

Favored delivery methods used for customer acquisition and retention as reported by Target Marketing 2015 Media Usage Survey.

Acquisition Retention E-mail 86% 87% Social Media Engagement 72% 66% Direct Mail 54% 54% SEO 64% 44% (2015 compared to 2014)

56% of marketers surveyed planned to increase their budgets in 2015 for content marketing as a marketing tactic.

Commercial Sheet-fed Printing Wide Format Printing Digital and Variable Data Printing Pre-Press and Production Services Bindery Mailing and Shipping Email Marketing Web 2 Print

30% of marketers

reported they were increasing their spend on direct mail in 2015.

Hopkins Printing 2246 CityGate Drive Columbus, Ohio 43219 Ph: 1.800.319.3352 hopkinsprinting.com

30% of marketers reported increasing their budgets for mobile applications in 2015.

Mobile Marketing: In a comparison of 2014 to 2015, 42% of marketers said they planned to increase their spend on mobile marketing.

Data Source: Target Marketing 2015 Media Usage Survey

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