Reaching more customers and generating sales are two of the most important parts of an effective marketing plan a business owner needs to accomplish. And fast.

Increasing taxes, cost of living and a generally competitive climate make a challenging environment for any business to grow. Fortunately, we have the World Wide Web. Never before have so many had such massive potential reach to every corner of the globe. I’ve heard there are places in 3rd world countries that have no running water – but they DO have access to the Internet. Even so, for many who are in business for themselves, the cost of designing or programming a branded presence online leaves them stuck with the usual templates and “basic” options.

But not anymore.

Customize your Facebook Page Presence – Without Coding

Before I explain, let me make clear that the single most important web presence you can establish, for the long haul, is a blog. But that doesn’t mean social networks should be ignored. Facebook and other online social networks can be quite powerful. And if you are just getting started in business with limited capital, social networks can be VERY helpful in getting the word out at extremely low cost. But a Facebook presence alone is just a third of the battle. With smart phone madly increasing, having a mobile presence is also important. And what about having a website? Often fledgling businesses are missing all three online tools.

Getting a professional looking Facebook Page, mobile site and website can be expensive to program. Well, it used to be expensive. Then Heyo came to be.

Heyo is an amazing online service. It allows you to “drag and drop” a professional looking Facebook Tab Pages together without any coding. Everything you need to create custom Tabs on Facebook is neatly presented in Heyo, and easy to use. I’ve been using it for some months, and I can verify it is truly a Do It Yourself (DIY) service – because I am not a programmer or coder myself. If I can use it, so can you.

No coding means you save time and money implementing your enterprise social media campaign yourself. Or at least implementing it in house.

For example, The Association produces the Canon Boot Camp, effective training for digital filmmakers. In 2012, we held a Premiere event showcasing 8 short films produced by Canon Boot Camp students. All the films are amazing, so of course I wanted to showcase them on our Facebook Page by creating a new Tab. If I didn’t have Heyo, I wouldn’t have been able to create the Tab without it either looking ugly our waiting for our Webmaster.. But I did have Heyo. So in a couple of hours, I had dragged 9 videos into place on a new Tab, added some text and social buttons and I was done. Click the photo below to check out the Tab:

Reaching More Customers with Facebook

If you already have a website you’ve spent time designing and coding, Heyo allows you to drop already existing webpages right into Facebook Page Tabs in about 3 seconds. No coding required.

If you’d like to run a contest, Heyo already has a contest page template designed. Just drop it in to the Tab. Provide a place for people to sign up for your newsletter while you’re at it!

Are you a Realtor? Heyo has several templates for showcasing properties. Want to add a Facebook Share button? Go ahead. It’ll take you about 30 seconds. Put the button wherever you like! Heyo truly is a Do It Yourself solution that pretty much anyone could learn to use quickly and easily. There are several templates already in place for restaurants, Realtors and retail outfits.

Once you’re done building out your Facebook Page, Heyo allows you to turn your Facebook Page into a mobile application and a website in minutes. But don’t take my word for it. Take Heyo for spin yourself with their free trial. Give your Facebook Page a DIY facelift today!

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

Lawrence is a graduate of the Canon Boot Camp and has helped us pull off several boot camps as well. But that’s the tame description. In the real world, Lawrence falls (literally, sometimes) into the category of “high risk” shooters, creating and filming stunts and other adventerous moments in time for his clients.

On top of showcasing his new reel (see video below), we asked Lawrence for his experience and advice for others considering his line of work and how his training at the Canon Boot Camp helped him:

More often than not it’s about the basics. Yes, these shots can be quite difficult and risky but it was the fundamentals of training my eyes. There is no room for error as things are happening so fast that the very thing you are shooting actually “seems” to become secondary, if you can believe it.

Mind you everything has been planned. In fact, my shoots seem more like a Bank heist than a shoot itself as timing and somewhat rhythm are key.

Reel – Lawrence Ribeiro from Destination Unknown on Vimeo.

One thing that my mentor preached to me, repeatedly, was training my eye to be discriminate. The tool? A toilet paper roll. Yes, I did say that. You see, at any given time there are thousands upon thousands of objects of interest in view, but you only need a couple or so. And when things are going so fast, you need be precise in your actions. How you frame and compose a shot has to be discovered by following the greats and sometimes looking at Art/Photographs, as opposed to advertising, can be a great vehicle for such.

Once you have keen sense and [training] you will start developing your own style.
The Canon DSLR is a great tool for images, but your eyes need to be trained. Bang for your buck…this is still the ticket. For the really fast stuff, the DSLR can be limiting. However, if you move at the same or similar speed as the object than that can be accomplished with the Canon DSLR.

Lastly, practice is needed. I know veterans that have been shooting for over 40 years…they still practice and so do I.

Be the best that you can be…

Lawrence Ribeiro
Freelancer
https://vimeo.com/58590233
Manhattan Beach, CA
Great words of advice for any filmmaker. Thanks, Lawrence, and we look forward to viewing your future work.

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

I hate long, verbose articles. Why can’t they just say what they promised to reveal?

So, I’ll cut to the chase. (By the way, I’ll explain the Vampire picture at the bottom of the article.)

THE SIMPLEST SECRET

The simplest secret of marketing is that you (your company or service or product) has to be what the target audience wants.

Skillful marketeers know what the target audience wants. Once that’s known (with really good survey research, not the blah blah you get in the canned marketing surveys) the marketers move to the real challenge, i.e.  how can we make your company or service or product look like what the target audience wants.

A TRUE STORY

We agreed to do a marketing campaign for an attorney who wanted to help people being abused by debt collectors.  A noble cause.  So we were aboard. But when we did our market research (actually calling people being abused by debt collectors) we found out they didn’t trust attorneys.  (Apparently some congressmen must have had some one of their friends or family abused by debt collectors because they passed the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act which gave  $3,500 automatically if they had evidence they were being abused by debt collectors.

So, we asked the people being abused by debt colletors a question (I’ll get to how we found them later on), “If you had a case that proved you were being abused by debt collectors, would you want an attorney to take the case and get you your automatic payment?”

Their answer?

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t trust attorneys.”

Another said, “They make you sign something you don’t understand and you end up owing them money.”

So this was a problem.  How could we get them to sign up??

We did a second round of calls.  Our question was, “Would you trust a Consumer Advocate Group to take your case?”

The answer?

A resounding “YES!”

So, we talked our client into changing the banner on the website pages we were building for him to say “Consumer Advocate” instead of “Attorney at Law.”  Now he was a trustworthy fellow. Now they would call him.

What happened?

We changed the target audience’s perception of who this man was.  He’s the same attorney.  They embrace his help because he’s what they want.

HOW WE GOT PEOPLE WHO NEVER PICK UP THE PHONE TO TALK TO US

You may be wondering how we figured out how to reach people who were being abused by debt collectors.  These are people who sit in their homes ignoring all phone calls coming to them because it might be a debt collector.  So how did we get them to talk to us?

Well, we designed the perfect bait to attract them.  Any ideas what we did?  Send your bright idea in.  Next Thursday, we’ll tell how we did it.

WHY THE VAMPIRE PICTURE?

You tell me.  Email in your best guess why I put the vampire picture in this article.  We’ll reveal that in next week’s blog.

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

Sometimes half the battle when it comes to marketing anything online is just an idea of what could be done to get to the top of search results. The Internet is so massive, and there is so much happening on the Web, that a kind of writer’s block can set in, and perhaps nothing new will come to mind regarding different ways to promote a film.

Obviously, there’s a lot of competition out there in the marketing world, especially online. Since anyone can create content and distribute it, it’s important to do more than the competition if your work is to be found by your target market. Fortunately about 80% of your online competition is only doing a mediocre job of creating content and posting it. The other 20% is fairly active, but only about 10% will be really “killing it” when it comes to content creation. And since the other half of the battle is often creating content to use online, films are pretty much tailor-made for an online campaign. They say that “stories sell” and what is a film but a story told with light? Use the content in the film to your advantage by using bits of it for online content in your campaign.

The two most important pieces to consider in your climb to the top of the mountain are the number of pages of content you post online (best done via a blog) and the number of other websites that link to your content. So be sure to cover those bases really well. Lots of content posted on a blog (good quality content, of course) takes care of the number of pages you will have. If you need links to your content in a hurry, get some good press releases out there about your film. Just one Press Release, properly done, can result in thousands of backlinks to your site from many, many news sites.

But there are so many more ideas you can implement for promoting your film online. While you might need a pro to help you implement some of them properly, there are a number you can implement with minimal training or computer skill. Where I have a resource to use that I like, I’ve hyperlinked directly to their site on the list below:

1. Search Engine Submission
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Forum Discussions promoting the film topic
4. Online Newsletters
5. Social Networking Sites
6. Fan Clubs
7. Photo Sharing and Free Downloads
8. Article Submission
9. Blogging
10. Video Sharing and Trailers
11. Tagging (video sites, etc.)
12. Podcasts
13. Podcast Directory Submission
14. Spark forum discussions directly related to facts and figures (research) relating to the film.
15. Doc Sharing
16. Share Presentations
17. EBooks
18. Track and respond to online comments
19. Leverage your email signature
20. RSS Feeds
21. Social Bookmarking
22. IMDB Movie Database
23. Online Contests
24. Twitter
25. Online Polls

For a deeper insight, visit the source of the list, a Slideshare presentation by Ramesh Kumar.  I’d suggest picking one item on the list that you feel you can implement right now, and implement it well. Then move on to the next time you feel you can implement, and so on.

Have you already successfully promoted your film? Do tell! We’d love to hear your successes and failures, for the benefit of the community. Share your story in the comments box below, or email trevor@theassociation.tv to share your story.

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

If you’re like us at The Association, you try to be as time efficient as you can, but also want to produce beautiful imagery.

If you are a Canon HDSLR filmmaker, you have the luxury of scrolling through defined Picture Styles such as Auto, Faithful, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait, and Standard.  My go-to Picture Styles are Faithful and Neutral. Faithful has a great pop of color that is very saturated and the blacks are very crushed, instantly giving a very rich and pleasing look. But what if you don’t want your image to be “stuck” like that forever? If you want more control over your image, try Neutral. Neutral’s look is more washed-out than all the other Picture Styles, so it may appear bland and not pleasing to the eye on an LCD screen.

However, this Picture Style gives you a lot more control over your image in post-production. Your black won’t go black as quickly as in Faithful, meaning that you’ll be able to keep more of the gradation from grey to dark grey to black. Your colors won’t be as saturated to start with, which will give you the option to be less saturated than Faithful’s look if that’s what you desire. Faithful is a great go-to look if you know you’ll have to upload the video quickly online, however, Neutral will leave your image with more options if you have time to color grade.

Here’s a video we made showing you all the different Picture Styles so you can determine which look you prefer. Let us know in the comment section which one you like to use!

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

Marketing blindfolded (like playing roulette in Vegas) is exciting.  It’s a big gamble for high stakes. But you’re throwing your money away.   I want to talk to you about a highly-pinpointed marketing campaign; one in which you spend money only on reaching your most likely prospects.

People ask me why we are so successful at highly-pinpointed marketing campaigns.  It’s simple. We know what the target audience is interested in.  Thus the marketing message cuts through the noise, sticks in their head and moves them toward a sale.

People have heard our war stories.  The time we rolled out direct response TV ads that pulled 438 phone calls the first four times it aired.  I’ll never forget that day.  The first TV spot was supposed to air at 2:14 in the afternoon.  At 2:14 and 15 seconds, I got a call from our client.  “The phones aren’t ringing.  We’ve cleared all the lines and the phones aren’t riging.”

I said, “Well, it’s not 2:14 yet.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“It was a sixty second spot.” I said, “so you’ll start getting calls in about 25 more seconds.”

There was a silence.

Then, she said, “Oh my god, I gotta go the phones are lit up.  Call you later.”

That’s how our marketing campaigns work.  We’re pretty good at this.  We’ve adapted to the new style of marketing.

In old style marketing (interruptive marketing) you jumped in front of someone’s face and blurted out the company message in thirty seconds if you were on TV (more “hang time” if it were a printed piece. But things have changed.

The buying public today has deflector shields up for this type of marketing.  Very little gets through those shields unless the target audience is interested in it.  That’s part one.  Part two is, once you’re past their deflector shields you have to say something that moves them to DO something or at least change an opinion, which will lead to them to do something – hopefully buying the product or service.

So marketing campaigns should have stages (milestones) which will ultimately lead to the success of a campaign. It helps to determine these milestones before the campaign.   The campaign may be designed to 1) change one’s opinion of the product, 2) expand one’s awareness of the product’s capabilities, or 3) prompt one to consider buying the product (or service).

It’s all about moving the target audience toward a sale.

But the key to successful and effective marketing plans and campaigns is to design with laser precision so your message  “talks” to what your target audience is interested in.   How do we do that?  We survey your primary, target audience.  We find out why people buy and continue to buy your product or service or maybe why they stopped buying it.  We find out more about your customer so they will lower their deflector shields.  Then, we create a “smorgasbord” of messages that will be tempting to your target audience. We test these message first, inexpensively. Then, we pick the winners and we roll out the campaign, in stages, with milestones for each.

So, it’s all about knowing your customer and your potential customer.   If you skip that step, you’re just marketing blind.

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

A primary goal of any effective marketing plan these days is continually creating content and marketing it where your potential customers and clients can access it easily. Two of the most used channels in today’s modern world are Google Search and Email Marketing. In short, leveraging these two tools allows you to get found by prospects already interested in your product or service, and, by enticing them onto your email list, staying in touch until they purchase. Hopefully they purchase more than once!

What’s not to love? I’ll tell you what. Spending all that time creating content and using it only once! Creating content takes time and effort, and although it’s well worth it, make sure to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness by re-purposing content several ways. Just to be clear, I am NOT referring to posting the same content online in several places, as if it were original content. That’s cheating.

I’m talking about creating content for your blog, then featuring some (or all) of those blogs as email newsletter content, driving visitors to your blog. The increased visits further improves website visibility even more. Then use the same content a third way by hooking up social media accounts to your blog, so that each approved blog post pushes out across multiple social channels. Some companies leverage hundreds of employees’ social media accounts by linking them to their blog platform, instantly increasing the visibility of each blog post.

What of long tail keyword research and SEO? Well, best to still incorporate that, but SEO is not as important as it once was. If you can consistently create valuable, engaging content your target market really digs, you’ll eventually win. From what I’ve seen, only about 20% of any company’s online competition (on the 1st page of a Google Search page) regularly creates online content. Probably only 10% does a super job of blogging. So you can beat about 80% of your online competition just by producing more content more consistently than they do. Flavoring your content with a sprinkle of SEO work will sweeten your results, so optimized your content with keywords if you can. Just don’t overdo it.

So Get Smart. Create content regularly, blog it, email it and viral it out to your social networks. And get found online.

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

Pretty much every business is going to attempt marketing and advertising to some degree.  There are those businesses that survive just through referrals, and maybe that’s all they need. But lately I’ve been hearing more and more that what used to work for business development isn’t working as well anymore, regardless of the method.

Postcards, mailings, TV ads, newspaper – Traditional Media doesn’t always cut the mustard anymore.  So what does that mean for the future of business development?
First off, Traditional Media may not be as effective as it once was, but that doesn’t mean it should be canned.  From a “holistic” perspective, it does have its place in the overall scheme of things.  Traditional Media is great for creating awareness and driving interest about any topic.  But realize that, because of the Internet, consumers have a voice in the marketplace they didn’t have before.  This voice is expressed through blogs, comments, Facebook, etc., and is picked up by new potential customers with the help of a quick Google search, and serves to validate (or not) your marketing message.

If a company is doing a bad job delivering what it promises, it is unlikely the world of social media will be very kind without first addressing that issue.  But that is an Operations matter and not the subject of today’s article.  Perhaps the next article. So, potentially a business needs to continue their Traditional Media approach while also engaging in social media and online networking to ensure the consumer has enough information with which to make a decision: to purchase, or not to purchase?

Whether your business has been around for years or just got started, there is a way to increase the effectiveness of both Traditional (mass) and New Media (digital) efforts.  It’s very simple, but escapes the attention of many business owners. Take the blindfold off.

Yep.  It’s that simple.  Let’s look at this from the perspective of two gunmen at target practice.  They both have the same model gun, bullets and targets.  One of them, however, is blindfolded.  Assuming they have the same level of skill, which one of them is going to hit the targets more?  Obviously the one without the blindfold.

The way to remove the blindfold is to conduct market research prior to executing and effective marketing plan.  But not just any kind of market research.  I mean emotional market research.

Sometimes market research is conducted, but all that is obtained is facts and figures.  What you need are the “buttons” that when pushed, get an emotional reaction, and communicate directly to the heart of the consumer. Here at The Association, we call this “Optimized Market Research.”
A fatal, fatal mistake is to assume that you know exactly what your customer needs and wants, and that you know how to communicate to them on an emotional level that will speak to their mind on the subject.  Did you ask them?  If not, you just might be off an inch or too. However, we are looking to hit a bull’s-eye, not just get kind of close.
Case in point:  One of our clients, a skilled and trustworthy attorney, had a 2-3% conversion rate for his Pay Per Click campaign before market research was conducted.  All of his marketing, both paper and online, spoke a very conservative message: “I am an attorney.”
Market research dug deep and  revealed his potential clients didn’t trust attorneys.  They also weren’t conservative about the issues they had, they were angry!  So the existing marketing efforts missed on two levels.  Potential customers couldn’t “see’ the advertisements because they couldn’t relate to them on an emotional level, and an attorney was the last person they would seek out to resolve their valid cases.
The solution was to re-brand the attorney as a “Consumer Advocate” and change the imagery in the advertisements to show angry and upset consumers.  Instant success!  Conversion rates rose as much as 8%!

Market Research can save a business thousands and thousands of dollars if it’s done correctly, and the data is usually valid for at least 10 years.  How much more income would your business have if your existing marketing was 8% more effective? Take 10-20% of that figure and invest it in Market Research, and see your results soar accordingly. Make every move an effective one.  Get market research done for immediate use, and use social media to create a permanent “feedback loop” so you always have up to date information (the good and the bad), and the door to success will open.  If you feel like you don’t know what to do, you just might not have enough information to make a decision.  Done properly, Market Research will give it to you.

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

If you’re wondering why the Internet isn’t bringing tons of business to your door you’re not alone. Most people we talk to feel the web isn’t living up to their expectations for new business.

A lot of people embraced the Internet and it’s promise of a new life with abundant cash flow. Most of us suffered through a huge learning curve to master new terms and technology to be able to “surf the web”.   Then, NOTHING but the sound of crickets!

Why?

Well it makes us feel naive, but putting our website up was like taking out a single line ad in the New York City Yellow Pages and expecting business to flock to our door. You can find the shocking news on the Google blog site which says that a year and a half ago Google crossed a huge milestone of 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

So I hope you see the task ahead if you want to be found on the web.  You have to be more relevant. You have to increase your presence on the web. And now we come to dogs and what I learned from them.

We all know dogs mark their territory.  The more marks the bigger the dog, or at least that’s what dogs think, judging by the way they pee on everything stationary (and some thing’s not so stationary).

So when Pepe the Chihuahua marks every tree for six blocks he is building his “presence” in the neighborhood. He’s now a big dog even though he’s twenty times smaller than Max, the Great Dane.

It’s the same game Google plays.  Google doesn’t know how big you really are. All Google knows is how many “trees you marked”. What does that mean?  Make 60 websites? Add 600 pages to you website? No. It’s much simpler than that.

On the web you increase your presence by having lots of inbound links. (Inbound links – d. Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site.)

There’s two general types of links that can help your site increase online visibility. Other sites listing your URL on their site (Inbound Links) and links from your own blog/site that link to your own pages (Internal Links).  Inbound Links show Google that your content is useful to others. Internal links point out important content (potentially) on your site, expecially if you link to certain pages a lot.

So if you’re feeling like you’re very insignificant on the web, write tons of blogs, and like Pepe, the Chihuahua, you’ll be a big dog in Google’s eyes.  Writing blogs doesn’t have to be hard. We’ve found some easy tips to make blogging a breeze.  Go, Pepe!!

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf

In the rush to adopt the DSLR many videographers and filmmakers bring assumptions that might not be true in the DSLR universe.  For example: focusing.  Since I began shooting film and then when video came in, I would always zoom in to get focus and then zoom back out to frame up the shot. (This assumes you’d set your back focus correctly.)

This procedure doesn’t work on the DSLR zoom lenses.  It used to, but not since the last eight years.

Still lenses are built for still cameras.  Still lenses only need to be in focus the instant before exposure.  The zooming is already done. They don’t track focus when you zoom in and zoom back out again.  They set focus just as you press the button.

And everyone knows this except me! They tell me that the lenses used to track focus “back in the day” but not any more.

Just thought you should know.  So use that magnify button to check your focus.  Or better yet, press the AF button when shooting video to check focus.  It’s faster that pressing “magnify” and rolling focus around.  I set my camera to “AF Quick.”  I set the selection point to one point Auto Focus. Now I know wherever I put that dot is where it’ll get my focus.   We’ll have a shoot-out on these two methods next time.

Until then, remember to send in any Homer Simpson moments you’ve had with your DSLR so we can pass it along to the teeming masses out there.

(I’ll stop filming when they pry my cold, dead fingers off my 70-200mm f 2.8.)

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf