Rebekah Renford » Marketing

How Great Leaders Inspire Action

Rebekah — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 05:36:57 +0000

I’ve often asked the question ‘why?’ when it comes to Apple. I love that company, you might call me an evangelist for their products, and I’m not the only one. No matter what Apple creates or sells, I cannot help but want it.

I saw this video quite a while back, however I just remembered it now. Simon Sinek’s points and his theory of the golden circle make total sense and I wish more businesses followed this rule. It would be nice if products or services were marketed as something for a cause or a ‘why’ rather than just because it’s new and the consumer should want it. What’s the why? – for Apple, I would say it’s innovation and growth in technology.

Here’s the video, I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to watch it. It’s 18 minutes long, but even if you only get 5 minutes into it, you’ll understand.

I wish I could say that today’s blog post was brought to you by an iPad 2…. but I can’t, because it wasn’t. (Dear Santa…)

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Pricing Power – What Are You Worth?

Rebekah — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:00:46 +0000

I love this recent blog post from Seth Godin called Pricing Power. It got me thinking about worth.

We’d all like to think that we’re worth a certain amount of pay and perhaps for different reasons. It’s hard to tell how much you’re really worth sometimes when there’s nothing to challenge your thinking and perception. For the longest time I figured I was worth a good salary because, although I might not have as much experience as the next candidate, I’ll put my blood, sweat, and tears into my work along with loyalty and doing anything that will help the company grow and prosper. Most of all, because I work hard and I do whatever I can to exceed your expectations.

So if I’m not worth as much as I believe, then what am I worth? And how do we go about finding out what our true worth is? And the ultimate question too, who’s willing to pay for it?

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How should you treat your best customers?

Rebekah — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 03:06:55 +0000

Today I’d just like to share with you a good article from Seth Godin’s blog. Sometimes it’s scary how right he is about so many different topics.

Taken from: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/02/how-should-you-treat-your-best-customers.html

Here’s what most businesses do with their best customers: They take the money.

The biggest fan of that Broadway show, the one who comes a lot and sits up front? She’s paying three times what the person just three rows back paid.

That loyal Verizon customer, the one who hasn’t traded in his phone and has a contract for six years running? He’s generating far more profit than the guy who switches every time a contract expires and a better offer comes along.

Or consider the loyal customer of a local business. The business chooses to offer new customers a coupon for half off—but makes him pay full price…

If you define “best customer” as the customer who pays you the most, then I guess it’s not surprising that the reflex instinct is to charge them more. After all, they’re happy to pay.

But what if you define “best customer” as the person who brings you new customers through frequent referrals, and who sticks with you through thick and thin? That customer, I think, is worth far more than what she might pay you in any one transaction. In fact, if you think of that customer as your best marketer instead, it might change everything.

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Wake Up.

Rebekah — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:02:32 +0000

Another awesome marketing technique. Love it.

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Google’s Hidden Gems

Rebekah — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:25:44 +0000

I’m sure the majority of web users only use the web, image, or map search functions of Google. However there are many tools that Google offers which aren’t necessarily advertised on the main site, or even in their ‘more Google products’. They’re usually found in the Google Labs and one of these tools in particular can help one in the beginning phases of an SEO upgrade – and it’s called Google Trends.

Google Trends allows you to view search trends by multiple terms and compare them. This allows you to see where the trends lie for your specific industry in terms of keywords and what your target market is looking for. This tool can be very powerful depending on what you use it for. It can allow you to see seasonal trends and steady traffic patterns that you otherwise may have missed. For example, you can search for yearly events like “xmas gifts” that you think may have seasonal trends:

It’s also possible to browse trends based on calendar dates rather than searching for them by viewing the Hot Trends. For example, by browsing the top 100 hot trends of November 4th, 2008 it’s obvious you’ll see the majority of results circle around the 44th presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain.

It is important to remember that just because a certain search term is a ‘hot trend’ does not mean that you should put into your keywords or website content if it doesn’t fit with your topic. If it isn’t already apparent to why it’s a bad idea to incorporate content that doesn’t fit your topic or audience I strongly suggest you revert back to either my post on copywriting for SEO or Jess’ post on building the right audience.

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American Apparel Marketing Strategy

Rebekah — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:21:39 +0000

I read this news story today and found it slightly humorous. I heard the morning radio DJ I listen to say that apparently all American Apparel stores carry this magazine and sell it. I’m still trying to figure out what the marketing strategy must be behind it or why on earth a popular clothing store would be selling these magazines.

I still get a kick out of the name of the magazine, BUTT. Could you imagine having to tell someone where you worked or interned? “Yes, I had an internship at BUTT.”

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Project Managing Yourself

Rebekah — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:24:37 +0000

With a little bit of graphic design assistance from Justin, and the authentication and upload from a couple of developers, I completed a small project yesterday. Netgenetix updated an online customer management system used by travel agencies for a company called Pro File Client. My project was making software demos to make learning the system easier for its users. There are three demos, one for an agent level login, one for an admin level login, and one for sales and marketing purposes. Over the span of about two weeks I managed to re-write the scripts, learn to use Adobe Captivate, code the new html pages (from an old template though, so not difficult), create pretty buttons for the videos, record all the audio and put it all together for upload. I was so hoping for a lauch on the deadline before noon. Unfortunately due to other projects being launched and other daily distractions I was unable to have it uploaded until nearly 5:30pm at the end of the day. This means all the QA things I noticed which couldn’t have been tested until it was live will have to wait until Monday to be fixed.

Despite the annoyance and frustration this project brought me, I actually probably had the most fun working on it than I have in the past few months on other projects. I learned so many things working on this one project alone as well. From simple coding tricks and some design tips to dealing with difficult audio. I can’t even begin to list all the techniques I tried to make the audio for these demos usable. Everything from making home-made sponges for overtop of the mic to making full on tents around myself to keep the sound confined and adding blankets and material to absorb the sound in an extremely boomy and echo-ey conference room. I spent hours trying to make the audio usable for these demos.

Considering the majority of this project was done myself it was also an experience in project managing myself. I’ve never really done any freelance projects and building your own website doesn’t really have much of a deadline unless you want it to. In order to make this deadline I pulled my first all nighter since college – and it actually wasn’t too bad – I managed to stay awake and still be productive at work the next day. People say to me, “why? why are you doing extra work you don’t get paid for?”. And the answer is, because I want to. I guess I’m exceptionally dedicated and caring when it comes to work than most people – but I’m not about to let a project go out past deadline or looking like crap if I can help it – especially if its a project I did all myself. It’s about the pride in the work and the reputation you get from it. I want people to look back on it thinking “Rebekah did an amazing job on that project” not look back on it thinking “We can do this project well as long as Rebekah isn’t involved”. It’s about pride and dignity, dedication, and the feeling it brings you when it’s done.

As for those demos, well, two of them are password protected but you can see the sales demo if you want. However I’ll warn you its probably pretty boring – its a software demo. Those of you who want to provide tips or criticism feel free to do so.

Thanks!
Rebekah

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The Giant ‘F’

Rebekah — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:03:10 +0000

I was driving around downtown Vancouver the other day and came upon a life-size letter F. Some good marketing if you ask me – I know I looked it up when I got home. It’s a new campaign for Fujifilm called ‘Get on the F list‘. I just thought it was worth posting for others to see. I apologize for the quality of the photo. Taken with my cell phone, on a rainy day, while driving (sort of, it was a red light).

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Blogging for Business

Rebekah — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 07:36:55 +0000

The following is a post I wrote for Citrus SEO on blogging for businesses.

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To some smaller organizations, the decision to add a blog to their website isn’t a hard one. What about those larger, more conservative companies? They stand to lose a lot more and aren’t generally a fan of the risk factor. Their fear is well justified though – employees have been dooced for posting confidential information or information that would be embarrassing to the organizations they worked for. Many companies are mainly worried about losing control of their company message and reputation.

However, there are many advantages to blogging for your business. They’re great for bringing traffic and links to the company website as well as promoting new products or services. Search engines love web pages that are constantly updated and include a lot of content – a blog caters to these search engine obsessions. A blog is also an easy way to measure success and receive feedback on a business’ products and services as visitors can easily comment (unless this is opted out of) on posts and link back to information they find valuable or interesting.

Before starting a company blog there are several things to consider. For example who will write for the blog? Should there be rules for writers? Which blog software should be used? A full-time blog takes a lot of work to maintain and writing interesting or valuable posts at a consistent rate can be difficult for any one regular employee to maintain. However if several employees are to contribute to the blog then it would be wise to establish some guidelines and policies for them to follow while writing. Staff availability and dedication is something that is essential to a successful corporate blog. Depending on the size of the company and how active the blog will be there are several different choices for blog software platforms. Some popular choices tend to be Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad.

Even though there are several risks to starting a blog for large companies there are also a few ways to mitigate that risk by adding things such as comment and post moderation – so that nothing goes live until it has been approved. Another way is to determine a low-risk focus to the blog while keeping it interesting and valuable to the readers. This keeps employee bloggers focused on safe topics that are unlikely to cause any large ruckus in the blogosphere.

Blogging for a business tends be very beneficial to companies if it’s done properly and with care – rushing into a decision such as this is likely not a good idea. If you plan on starting a blog for your business I highly recommend reading Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business by DL Byron and Steve Broback, as it will give you a great base for business blogging the smart way.

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How to get your customers back (the easy way)

Rebekah — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:26:48 +0000

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s had a completely flawless experience with Telus. And I’m pretty sure Telus has lost a lot of customers for their unchanging ways of arrogance, inconvenience, and not-so-great customer service.

So… in the eyes of Telus, how would you attempt to regain your customer base? Well you COULD go about the hard but more rewarding way of regaining their trust and respect through many different facets. OR you could, say, just create a new service provider?

Some of you may have noticed in the recent year or so that a new mobile service provider has come out of THIN AIR with more ads in all mediums than is countable (seriously I can’t turn around or turn on the radio with seeing or hearing about it). It’s called Koodo.

And guess what. Koodo? Owned by none other than Telus.

Get your customers back the easy way by fooling them into something bigger and better that is really just you with a new hairstyle. Woohoo!

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