Market Share: A Blog to Stimulate Business

Everywhere we look these days there are attractive, seductive, provocative visuals to lure us into clicking, reading or watching. Without these enticements, we move right along until something captures our interest. Okay, it’s fair to say that there are indeed words that can do this as well. Actually, phrases would be more accurate. The right mix of information can succeed in stopping us dead in our tracks and getting us to pay attention. Combine that with the right image, and you’ve got a sure winner. But wait…let’s take that one step further: the right combination of words, the right visual and a crisp, professional presentation - now there is a formula that leads you by the nose down the path of no return. You’ve been apprehended without even knowing it. So powerful is the attraction that you’ve lost all awareness that you’ve been sucked into a trap, your curiosity propelling you deeper and deeper into the beckoning abyss. Suffice it to say that this constitutes the essence of effective marketing, one of the most manipulative forces in the cosmos. Transcending culture, intelligence, profession, and every other human characteristic, this is a phenomenon of unimaginable proportions, capable of moving an entire lifeform to a desired end. Read more »

Click above to see the animated award-winning artwork

On March 17, 2010, Mid-Hudson Marketing, one of New York’s most prolific advertising agencies, was honored with the prestigious “Design of the Week” award from QuarkXPress, the benchmark in sophisticated professional design software. The Mid-Hudson Marketing artwork was chosen by a panel of international judges from thousands of entries by the world’s most famous designers who show their work at ILoveDesign.com, Quark’s new website.

Mid-Hudson Marketing’s winning entry entitled “Attract Some Attention,” features “dazzling animated graphic art representing a selection of ambitious projects done over three decades for a diverse group of excellent clients,” said company president Marilyn Bontempo, who created the work.

Recognized previously for work involving excellence in marketing, design, photography and website creation, Mid-Hudson Marketing lists 19 other individual awards on its website, two others on an international scale.

With a 35-year history of developing the image of success in business, the company describes its clients as members of the legal community, as well as the engineering, real estate, roofing, healthcare, financial, home improvement, manufacturing, luxury auto accessories and international scientific industries. For more information, visit MidHudsonMarketing.com or call 845-493-0070.

A client recently engaged me to set up a Twitter account for his law firm. Not that he personally had any intention of spending his precious time tweeting, he merely wanted to appear to be on the cutting edge of today’s trends. Since some of his work involves DWI, he is in frequent contact with a younger generation, many of whom are users and aficionados of social media.

Setting up a Twitter account is actually quite an involved process. First, you need to choose a username by which you will be known to all who use Twitter. It must be a unique name, never used by anyone else in the world of Twitter. This name is limited in length to a finite number of characters which makes this process quite the challenge.

Once accomplished, you need to add a “bio” or description of yourself, or your business, which captures the essence of your raison d’etre on Twitter. Since this blurb (as we call it in the industry) will be the most frequently read piece of info you present – your definition, in essence – it should be carefully crafted to represent both what you wish to communicate as well as how you wish to be perceived. (A true marketing assignment!) Read more »

“So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?” asks a New York Times Sunday Styles article, by Douglas Quenqua, June 7, 2009.

“According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned…”  as a result of failure to attract traffic.

But not all abandoned blogs die from lack of reader interest. Some bloggers find themselves too busy! And therein lies the rub!
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Everyone wants to know. What’s going to happen to business in 2009? How can we maintain or even increase market share? What is the right thing to do to build business going forward?

I must admit that after having read countless blogs by national experts on the subject, I cannot say for sure I know the answer because I cannot predict the future. And I’m supposed to be one of the experts myself.  

While one blog/book title I came across made me laugh (All Marketers are Liars) by Seth Godin, called “the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age” by Business Week, I’d be lying myself if I said I’ve known exactly what to do for the past 34 years in business. I haven’t. But I do have instincts and I have been fortunate to have been right about general principles of marketing for an entire career. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.

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Courage. That’s what it’s going to take. Courage to invest precious, dwindling dollars into business marketing to keep the boat afloat. Courage to reach out to markets with dwindling resources and fear of the unknown.

Back in the sixties, Crosby Stills and Nash sang, “We have all been here before…” on their album Deja Vu… but this time, this is new to all of us. We’ve never been here before. How can we plan for return on investment when no one has any money left? Rich, poor, middle class…we’ve all been hit, hard.
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I enjoy all kinds of music. From the music I grew up with to what is popular today, I can appreciate all styles and formats. I have a degree in music and have taught music in the public school system. I have performed music in classical concert venues and have been the keyboardist and backup singer in a rock and roll band. I have perfect pitch and can identify most popular music by a mere snippet of its introduction. Give me soulful rhythm and every part of me will be moving to the beat. In fact, I’ve been playing music by ear since I was four years old. When it comes to music, I am pretty open-minded.

Except when it comes to websites. Whether it’s the tinny quality from my computer speakers or the fact that I have been rattled out of my silent concentration by some unexpected sound, I can’t turn it off fast enough.

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Mid-Hudson Marketing has created a Virtual Internship program to offer students with marketing interests an opportunity to develop their talents under the guidance of a mentor with more than 35 years of experience in real world marketing. Allowing interns the option to formulate their own program with the approval of their school advisor and a Mid-Hudson Marketing professional, this virtual internship encourages excellence in writing, graphics, photography, research, sales and other innovative talents which can contribute to successful marketing in the challenging years ahead.

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For those of us who create websites, no longer do we write text to please our clients, or even to please our readers. No, we now write text to attract the search engines. Every word we use now is calculated, analyzed, and determined by the effect it will have on SEO or search ranking. A client recently emailed me to say that we didn’t need a couple of paragraphs I had so cleverly worked into the home page text and to remove them. Not one to argue with a client, I did so but explained that those paragraphs were there for the benefit of the search engines. I’m sure he wondered what I meant but he did not ask and I sadly resigned myself to his inevitable poorer ranking.

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