Chandeliers filled the hotel

From the moment I entered the lobby I was engulfed by youthful luxury and style with magnificent chandeliers, velvet curtains, marble floors and vivid colors. Our room had a balcony filled with oversized furniture and overlooked the pool. I felt comfortable and spoiled!

When exiting the lobby for dinner and drinks that evening, we were met by the hotel’s very own car service. It’s a sleek black SUV with their “Stay ZaZa” tagline on the side doors and the skull of some horned animal on the grill. Complimentary car service again offers a luxurious and carefree feeling.

Having a room booked at the hotel that night was like having the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. We were automatically VIP status…or as Hotel ZaZa puts it “ZZIP”. The pool and restaurant area turned into one of the hottest night clubs in Dallas and we had front row seats! Once again, the hotel was a true destination.

Saturday brunch was incredible in their elegant restaurant. When it was time to pay the check, we were handed a promotional card that featured quotes from media write-ups about the hotel and a “Stay ZaZa” pen.

Pen, Matchbook & Promotional Card

While walking out, we found a matchbook and mini notepad once again with the famous tagline reminding you to “Stay ZaZa”.

Daytime at Urban Oasis was definitely the place where you went to be seen. Poolside cocktails and a free popsicle made me a happy camper! As the day went on, the pool grew smaller and smaller as more and more people joined the party. And Hotel ZaZa likes to host a party.

Balls of Fun at Hotel ZaZa

Around 2:30pm beach balls started flying from a 2nd floor balcony. I can’t believe how crazy I went over a beach ball. I even tried to take my new prize back to the room and was stopped and ask to leave the ball behind. When I inquired as to why, I was told that they were protecting their brand and didn’t want their logo to “end up somewhere they didn’t approve.” I respectfully gave up the beach ball!

As someone that discusses the importance of branding daily and as a business owner that is working on our very own brand, I was thoroughly impressed with Hotel ZaZa and all they had done to enforce their brand and image.

I’ll be back…and I might take my little dog too!

All Dogs Go To ZaZa

]]> http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/blog/branding/hotel-zaza-a-branded-success/feed 0 http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/blog/uncategorized/marketing-all-wheels-need-to-be-in-orbit http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/blog/uncategorized/marketing-all-wheels-need-to-be-in-orbit#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:26:53 +0000 Katie Osborne http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/blog/?p=539 Introducing the Luna Cycle: All marketing wheels need to be in orbit!
*Note: Our model is to serve as a summary of good marketing practices.

To be successful in business, you have always needed a marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy has always needed to promote your brand while protecting it at the same time. And the result of a truly successful marketing plan is a well recognized brand of a profitable business! Smaller businesses struggle daily to keep up with their marketing and branding. It’s easy to get focused on one particular method and forget about the rest. I am writing this blog today to stress that marketing strategies have not changed and as a business, you can’t survive on just one approach!

Full Moon Design Group's Luna Cycle

Print doesn’t substitute your networking activities and web doesn’t substitute your print materials and social media does NOT substitute for all of it! Instead, you will want to make sure that they are all working together, in unison, promoting your brand and communicating the same message.

There are five different marketing wheels and each one orbits around your brand. Each of the five, have their own moving parts. We will be expanding this blog into several posts in an effort to start the conversation of each of the wheels and the components it is made of.

It all starts with your Company Culture. Developing a strong company culture will ensure that your company’s mission is brought to the forefront and that you are getting the Word of Mouth marketing that you want.

Next, you have your Activities. These activities consist of Special Events that you hold as a company, Charities or Non-Profit organizations that you and your company support, local Chambers that you are a member of, Professional Associations that make sense for your company and employees, Sponsorships that promote your brand to the right audience and Tradeshows that will help you get in front of your audience.

Your printed materials will consist of creative Ads, Direct Mail, Stationary, Brochures/Flyers/Pushcards, Promotional products and Presentation Materials. When engaging in your Activities, it’s always helpful to have printed material to support your brand. What printed material you have at each activity should be relevant and impactful.

Moving to the digital world, you now need to have a website. Your website should be clean, inviting and engaging to your current clients and prospective ones. Features of your website that should not be overlooked include a Blog, Newsroom and Email sign up form for your newsletter. In your Blog, you’ll be the expert and offer advice, your Newsroom will keep people abreast of the “goings on” in your company, and your Email newsletter will be a place for special offerings and information.

Expanding into the digital world, we find Social Media and boy does it get complicated and overwhelming! Social Media is an all access pass to the world. It’s a free medium for you to engage strangers, communicate your thoughts & ideas, and invite people in to really “get to know you” as a business. Social Media is now the gateway to higher rankings from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Ask. To keep it simple, we’ve grouped Social Media into several descriptive categories…and this just scratches the surface!

The most familiar outlet is the Lifestreams/Microblogs which include Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. Within these Lifestreams, you will find Location Based applications like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Whrrl…great ways to promote your business and interact with the public. When blogging or offering useful white papers, Social Bookmarking is a great way to make sure people find you. Popular methods are Delicious or Stumbleupon. Moving on to more fun stuff, you’ll find the Media Sharing sites like YouTube, Ustream and Flickr. For businesses, it’s important to participate in Business and Niche Networking sites like LinkedIn, Ning & Spoke. And last, but not least, you have the Review based sites including Yelp, Google & Yahoo.

The sixth component of the Luna Cycle is Public Relations. Your public relations strategy should be coordinated with your marketing strategy and pushing the information out to the public. Full Moon Design Group has strategic PR partners in place that we work with frequently to ensure our clients get exposure in all aspects of their business, in as many places where their audience resides.

1. Regulations! Businesses must comply with the federal CAN-SPAM Act. Read this and remember it. Here are a few of the highlights.  Click on the link to read the full text.

a. Don’t use false or misleading header information.
b. Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
c. Identify the message as an ad.
d. Tell recipients where you’re located.
e. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.
f. Honor opt-out requests promptly
g. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

2. Develop a quality mailing list. Businesses need a comprehensive and easily available list of all the e-mail recipients.  Whether that is from a subscriber page on their website, or through a list purchasing service, there are a ton of mailing lists available out there, but not all of them are worth obtaining (even some of the free ones).  Spend some time in generating the list, accumulating the relevant addresses and verifying those addresses. Don’t forget your past customers.  If they have been with you in the past, liked your product or service, chances of them being interested in what you have to say are pretty good. Don’t mail randomly.  Pre-screen your recipients, categorize them by specific demographic or target information and you will increase the effectiveness of your campaign.  The more time spent on refining your lists, the better your responses are likely to be.

3. Double Opt In & Sign Up confirmation

a. As an added safeguard against anti-spamming laws, always make your mailing lists double opt-in. This means that when a new user subscribes to your site or mailing list, they will be sent an email with a link that they must click on to confirm their subscription. This is very important because many people try to use a fake email account, someone else’s email address, or can accidentally enter an incorrect email address.  If the person uses someone else’s email address, this extra precaution removes the chance that the person who receives the message will report your email as spam.
b. In addition to the Double Opt In, every email you send should have a link that allows the receiver to unsubscribe.  This is also a requirement of the CAN-Spam Act, but we thought it warranted another note here.  Not providing this in your email is illegal and also an instant sign of spamming.
c. Contact Information is another requirement.  You should also clearly include your organization name, physical address or P.O. Box, phone number, and fax.  This should be done with or without those laws, as it also increases your credibility as a legitimate business.  It also allows for potential customers to make direct contact with you if they have any questions or want to know more about your products or services.

4. Personalization – Emails specifically addressed to the individual have a greater response rate than those that are generic and impersonal.  It is very easy to include a mail merge that personalizes the email or newsletter.

5. Formatting Content

a. Create a Powerful Subject Line – When your email reaches the recipient, you have about a half of a second to grab their attention.  Make sure the information in the headline accurately describes the information contained within the email, but also makes the reader want to read the content within.
b. Pyramid Your Content – Always include the most interesting content in the first paragraph of your email.  A lot of people have an email preview pane.  They won’t read the rest of the email if the first paragraph doesn’t catch their attention.
c. Keep it Simple – It will keep your readers reading, it will limit your spam filtering rate, and it just looks more professional.  Too many fonts, sizes, and colors trigger spam filters and look cluttered.  Too many images do the same thing.
d. Make sure you include a text-only version for those non-html emailers.  Though few and far between, we know that they are still out there.  And they are some of the hardest to reach.

6. Effective Distribution

a. Choose the right day of the week and the right time of day.  Emails sent on Tuesdays and Wednesdays tend to have higher open rates and click through rates as well as emails sent at 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.  People are generally getting ready to go to lunch or leave for the day and may have a few minutes to spare because they don’t want to start new tasks before they leave.
b. With newsletters, consistency in timing helps establish trust, and it helps people to expect your newsletter.  It also increases your open rates and click through rates.  Plan newsletter to arrive on the same day of every week or two weeks, or month.  As long as it is consistent, people will respond.

7. Welcome New Subscribers – Set up an auto response email to new subscribers.  This has several benefits.  First, it makes the new subscriber feel like you are welcoming them to the “club”.  It also helps solidify their presence by recognizing them and establishing them.  This is also a great opportunity to engage them.  You can offer special incentives or discounts to products or services only available to new subscribers, only available for a specified period of time.  It can be a call to action.  And the more involved the subscriber is in the beginning, the more likely they will hang around.

8. Spam Filters: There is a reason why there are laws and there is a reason why there are spam filters.  Not everyone follows the rules and the smarter the spammers get, the smarter the filters have to be.  In turn, legitimate businesses have to use extra precautions when creating their emails so that they don’t get picked off by the filters even if the content is secure and the receiver has subscribed to the information.

a. Use contrasting colors for back ground and text.  If you use 2 colors within the same family of colors (think light blue text on a dark blue background or vice versa) – spam filters might think you are hiding text.
b. Using the right and wrong words: words like “free”, “sex”, “Viagra”, and anything with an “Exclamation!” are very heavy spam triggers.  You should avoid these types of words whenever and wherever possible.  Experienced writers will have a full list of these words and will know how to create an email that grabs your audience’s attention.
c. Images:  Don’t include too many images (1-2 per email is a good rule) and keep images small.

9. Test Your Email!

a. Test Your Links – make sure they go somewhere.  This is what you are trying to get people to do.  If they click on a link that doesn’t work it demeans your purpose and your credibility.
b. Test the whole email for spam filter pickup.  Signing up for multiple email accounts is easy and free.  You can set up a Gmail account, a Hotmail account, and a Yahoo! account.  You may also have a friend who works for a large corporation that have their own firewalls.  Test the email on a small scale before you send it to your entire email list.  If the email gets pushed to the junk mail folder or the spam folder or gets completely filtered and not delivered, then you will know that you have some clean up to do.
c. There are also tools out there that will help you determine if you have too many flags in your email.  One tool is spam assassin.  It is software that will send you a report and a list of why your email was considered spam.

10. Proof, Edit, Make Sure There Are NO Errors – once it is sent, there is no pulling it back.  Give it to a colleague, a friend, anyone that hasn’t already seen it through every revision and have them take a long, slow, look at it.  Even the slightest mistake will stand out.  This is a representation of your company.  Make the impression last.

So you can see there is a lot to know about email marketing before you hit the send button.  Full Moon Design Group can help you achieve your goals while avoiding costly errors.  We can ensure that your message goes out at the right time, to the right people, and with the best possible outcomes.  Building an effective email campaign isn’t easy, but we make the process easy for you.  We integrate it with your overall marketing campaign to gain maximum exposure for your business and your brand.  There is a right mix of elements and we can help you determine what the right mix is for you.  Give us a call. 512-428-9072

]]> http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/blog/uncategorized/pt-2-top-10-guidelines-for-making-your-email-marketing-campaign-a-success/feed 0 http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/blog/branding/5-quick-marketing-tips-for-gaining-market-share-on-a-tight-budget http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/blog/branding/5-quick-marketing-tips-for-gaining-market-share-on-a-tight-budget#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:30:02 +0000 Katie Osborne http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/blog/?p=223 We know that money is tight. But does that mean you should stop talking to your clients or looking for new ones? NO! Times like these are your opportunity to stand out from the competition. While your competitors are crawling into the corner, you should be stealing the spotlight!  Here are a few tips that will help you gain market share and shine even brighter now.

Tip #1:

Attend networking meetings.

royblumenthal

The best business relationships start face-to-face. Plus, most networking meetings occur during meal time…and since you have to eat, you might as well be meeting prospects as well. Networking opportunities surround you! The first place to look is your local chamber. Then you will want to ask fellow members where else they network and interact with other businesses owners. Another outlet is to find something that you have a passion for, like a non-profit group or arts group. Get involved and build those relationships. You could network morning, noon and night if you really wanted to! But don’t forget, it’s all about who YOU are (See Tip #4) and what YOU have to offer.  What you get in return will soon follow.  NetworkInAustin is a great Austin resource to find networking opportunities around town.

Tip#2:

Matt Hamm

Utilize social media outlets. Currently, most social media sites are free. This is a great time and place to establish yourself as an industry expert. First, most companies are still not using these outlets to reach their customers.  Those that are, may not be direct competitors. If they are direct competitors, then that’s even more reason to make your presence known.  Second, you have friends and colleagues and they have friends and colleagues, and so on. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. are all great places to share your knowledge and they are where most people (2010 stats and facts) these days reside online. People are hungry to learn – hungrier now than they’ve ever been before and they usually turn to their immediate networks first to find the information they seek.  Make sure it’s you that they are getting their knowledge from! (and having a presence on these sites actually helps your SEO!)  Not sure where to start?  Call us:  512.428.9072.  We can help.

Tip#3:

Ask for referrals. This is something that we all forget to do and it should be the easiest task of all! Pick out your top clients – especially if they are always raving about your products or services – and ask them if they can introduce you to some more prospects. You will find that your happiest clients are more than willing to help you in growing your business…You just have to ask! Quality referrals most often come from those with whom you have already done business.  Full Moon Design Group knows this and we are rewarding those who think of us and send business our way.  We recently launched our 2^nd Annual Referral Reward Campaign.  Our rewards prove to our clients that we appreciate their confidence in us.

Tip #4:

Ensure that you have a memorable identity.

matthew solle

It’s simple – marketing is consistently getting in front of prospects with a consistent look and feel on a repetitive basis. Your business brand or identity is the foundation that you will need to build credibility in the marketplace. If you are going to seek business from your competitors, you better make sure that you look like you have a business. No self-designed business cards that you have printed on perforated stock from your local office supply store…nope…not allowed! You need exceptional quality assets to let your audience know that you can provide that same quality in the products or services you offer.  Not sure what I mean by brand/identity? Take a look at Full Moon Design Group portfolio section to give you more of an idea:

http://www.fullmoondesigngroup.com/portfolio.html

Tip #5:

Make sure you have a website. If you don’t, now is the time. The web is no longer a luxury for businesses…it’s a must. Times are changin’ folks and your website is no longer your online brochure. It’s a place where people are looking to learn more about you, your clients, your culture. They want to interact and learn from you. Blogging, videos and pictures is what’s hot for websites now. The time and money that you invest in your website will pay off in the end. Think about it…your site is working prospects when you are busy at that networking lunch (see Tip #1) or sound asleep in bed! But websites aren’t cheap, you say… Or are they?  Full Moon Design Group has websites starting at just $500 – sites that you can change content on your own (and we’ll show you how!) and blog and feed into those social media outlets of which you are now a part (re: Tip #2).  Take a look at a few samples below:

www.jbaustin.com/
www.austinecofence.com/
www.hillcountryhomeimprovements.com/