What Your Customers Want To Read

One of the most frustrating parts of working as a marketing creative today is that, no matter your particular skill or specialty, there is no end to the parade of people ready to tell you that customers only care about something else.

Are you a graphic designer? People want to see photography. Web engineer? What matters today is multimedia. Multimedia producer? You’re going to need a good website for that, as well as a good story to tell around your video. Copywriter? Sorry – no one reads anymore.

There is no question that the explosion in global and mobile digital communication has forever upended how businesses and customers find, regard and interact with each other. But people do still appreciate great graphic design. They can still get a bit choked up with just the right brilliant image. And, yes, people do still read. What they don’t read is the stuff that bores them to tears – which, unfortunately, accounts for a staggering portion of modern, prose-based marketing today.
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Adapting in the Agile Marketing World

If you’ve been working at all in the world of marketing over the last few years, no doubt you’ve encountered the word “agile”. Lifted from the lexicons of manufacturing and technology, agile marketing is a philosophy of embracing the sheer volume of data, events and sometimes outright chaos that exists in the commons of business communication.

An agile marketer recognizes early, adapts quickly and prepares continually. In an increasingly interconnected global society, where a single comment or short video can “go viral” and become a major news story in a matter of hours, it is no longer enough to plan an annual campaign and spend months executing a battle plan. Your business and market are moving much, much faster than that. You need to be able to turn on a dime.
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On Finding Your Value Core

If I had to point to any single problem that nearly all companies had in common, it would be this: they only talk from one side of the argument.

Everyone is important. Every product is revolutionary. Every new business initiative is destined to rock the world and change Life As We Know It Forever. And when you approach your marketing from the perspective of only one side of the issue – the side that means you win – then you miss out on some of the best opportunities you’ll ever have for creating a truly effective sales message.

So how do you hit both sides of the story without turning your message into an ambiguous mess?
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Making Design Work

designEverybody has a different idea of what design is – and that’s most of the problem. When you’re trying to wrangle the conflicting opinions and priorities of your creative team, your sales people, your product managers and your customer support staff, it’s only natural that consensus is going to be hard to find. We all agree that good design works. What we disagree on is how to make it work.

Most of us tend to notice design only when it fails, or when it suddenly meets all of our needs at once. Unfortunately, most projects have to aim for somewhere in the vast territory that exists between catastrophe and catharsis, and as a project manager your job will be to arrive at that destination safely and securely.

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Filed under Design, Inspiration, Strategy

givingbackAt Load Bearing Creative, we are committed to giving back. Whether it’s through services, expertise and advice or products, we are dedicated to contributing to our community.

As business owners, we know there’s more to philanthropy than just helping others – although that is our primary motive. Providing services to non-profits is a great way to build your business and promote employee morale and loyalty.  Continue reading

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Being A Different Kind of Different

Direct competition is bad business. You can see it every day, and probably could name at least three businesses operating in your own industry that are guilty of its excesses. Positioned the same, targeting the same customers, providing the same product, priced at the same level: in a world of increasingly diverse tastes, needs and resources, there are few more reliable ways to ruin your business than to busy yourself in offertortiseing up more of the same.

Direct competition destroys value. Eliminating significant distinctions between you and the next guy only guarantees that you’ll compete on price, which always turns into a race to the bottom – and a dash to see who can go broke first. On a grander scale, that destruction of value takes a serious toll on quality, markets and people.

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Practical Marketing and Deliberate Sales: Tips For Reality-Based Business

We’ve all heard it before. The many voices of professional marketing, each touting a different buzzword as this year’s great revolution in business. Frankly, we’re as tired of them as you are.

blueprintsAt Load Bearing Creative, we do our best to avoid terminology and strategy that doesn’t really mean anything. You won’t hear much from us about the dynamism of permission-based channel relocations, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Your business doesn’t need that. What it needs is a practical plan for building sales and developing markets, and buzzwords aren’t going to get you there. Continue reading

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Things That A Case Study Isn’t

storytellingOn the face of it, a corporate case study is about the simplest type of technical collateral there is. Structurally, a case study is the basic three-act dramatic formula that we are all familiar with: set out a problem, struggle with the challenge, race towards a solution. Case studies present this basic storytelling format in context of a successful customer engagement, telling the tale of an everyday company that solved an important business problem with this wonder product or service.  Continue reading

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RSS Is Dead, Long Live RSS

Looking back, it’s easy to remember forms of webtalk in days gone by and think, that’s quaint.  Geocities comes to mind.  MySpace.  Even – as much as I hate to admit this – UseNet newsgroups.  And one day, Facebook and Twitter will likewise go the way of Gopher, supplanted by some new and more efficient way of getting info out there.

stock-photo-23131934-internet-news-and-rss-conceptWhen we talk with clients about their social media presence, occasionally we’re still asked about RSS feeds.  RSS isn’t nearly the hot marketing medium today.  Should we care about ensuring that our website has an RSS feed available?

And to that I say, absolutely yes.

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The Real Magic of Following Through

istock_000019867979xsmallWhen I was a little kid, I had a fascination with stage magic. I’m sure a lot of kids do. My father indulged me, with visits to local magic supply stores to buy colored scarves and interlocking metal rings and fake cup and ball tricks. One trick that I still remember very clearly, nearly forty years later, is the Magic Money Machine.

The Magic Money Machine was an astoundingly simple, nearly foolproof magic trick. Anyone could do it. It was a small plastic box with a slot, a roller and a crank. You opened the box to show the audience that it was empty inside. You closed it. You waved your wand. You inserted a blank piece of white paper into one end. Said the magic words. Finally, you turned the crank and WOW! A crisp, beautiful, absolutely legal dollar bill made its way out of the slot. Money from thin air!

Of course, the trick isn’t hard to figure out. You roll the dollar bill in beforehand, and the crank and roller are designed to carefully hide the bill until it is needed. But to a five year old, it was great – particularly if you dress it up in some dramatic showmanship, make the effort to sell it as real magic.

I tell this story to clients sometimes to try to make a point.
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