Follow these simple tips for an effective call to action on a site:

1. Define a clear objective – What are you trying to achieve and who is your target audience? Once labeled, it will be easier to create an appropriate call to action.
2. Find the perfect place – The call to action should stand out so visitors see it instantly.
3. Write to the point – Explain clearly what you want visitors to do and why.
4. Get persuasive – Convey a sense of urgency so visitors will react right away. Use action words like “now” and “register” to provoke a response.
5. Distribute the calls to action – Having a call to action on your home page is the primary location, but more than one is acceptable. Remember you can distribute them throughout your site depending on the content on the other pages.
6. Design brilliantly – The design is just as important in attracting a visitor as the content. Develop a design that will highlight your message and make the call to action pop.

Remember, it’s important to experiment with different calls to action to see which works best with your target audience.

http://www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/6-tips-for-effective-call-to-action/

1. Get Personal – Address potential clients/email recipients personally to prevent an automatic delete of your email.
2. Target Your List – Stay up to date with your email list by consistently reviewing prospects.
3. Get Real – Make an effort not to appear like spam. Avoid overused phrases and anything that sounds too good to be true.
4. Limit Emails During the Holidays – People are busier than normal during the holidays and are less likely to take the time to open your email. Avoid email marketing during those times.
5. Make Emails Easy to Comprehend – Grab your target’s attention and get to the point. Make sure the recipient knows instantly what you want them to do with the email, whether it’s clicking a link or printing a coupon.
6. Show Your Brand – The goal of email marketing is to make your brand, service, or product known right away.

Follow these steps for success at email marketing. Know your target, identify with them, consistently deliver, and make an impression.

http://www.speakprofit.com/6-practical-email-marketing-tactics-for-successful-business-campaigns/

http://mashable.com/2012/03/05/future-digital-marketing-trends/

1. The earlier the better – Don’t start a brainstorming meeting any later than 11 a.m.  If it’s too close to lunch, people won’t be able to concentrate on anything other than their next meal. If it’s after lunch, people will be lethargic and hit that mid-afternoon tired spell.
2. Give a clear objective – Make sure everyone understands the objective of the brainstorming session.  When you aren’t clear, the ideas you receive may be off course and waste time.
3. Do not lead your team with too many examples –It’s okay to incorporate your ideas into the mix after the session is underway, but if you share too many ideas too early, you could inhibit coworker’s thinking.
4. No idea is bad – Never tell someone an idea is bad or wrong. People won’t want to share their ideas if they are put down. Instead, encourage others to build off ideas to form a web.
5. Encourage creativity – Some ideas may sound strange, but they can lead to great thoughts or solutions. It also helps to incorporate magazines or any other materials to spark the imagination.
6. Take breaks – Every 40 minutes have everyone stand up and stretch and get a glass of water for a couple minutes. This break will rejuvenate their minds.
7. Think elsewhere – It helps to get out of the office to think. Even standing in a circle in the parking lot on a nice day helps kick start the brain.
8. Include Booth Bay Creative – And of course we always recommend using Booth Bay Creative as a creative asset to any project or brainstorming session!

Incorporate these simple tips into your next brainstorming meeting and you will be surprised with how productive you may be.

Gerflor is a worldwide leader in flooring for the residential, industrial and commercial markets. The company employs over 2000 people throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Every day, over one hundred million people walk on Gerflor floors. However, with no presence in the United States, Gerflor had been virtually unknown.

As Gerflor prepared to enter the American market, it was literally starting on the ground floor. They needed a business-savvy partner to build brand equity and help them compete with flooring giants like Armstrong and Mannington.

After an extensive search process, Gerflor chose Booth Bay Creative as their marketing agency.

Positioning and Strategy

Our first goal was to identify a brand position that would resonate with American flooring distributors, installers, retailers, and homeowners.

Gerflor has been a technology leader in the flooring industry for over 75 years and has pioneered advances in durability, fade resistance, noise absorption, and warmth underfoot. The company was about to introduce a breakthrough product, Textline®, the only loose lay flooring backed with textile fibers for quick installation without sub-floor preparation, special tools or adhesives.

Accordingly, Booth Bay positioned Gerflor as the unrivaled innovator in the flooring industry; a position that would bring credibility to an otherwise unknown brand.

We created many themes before settling upon “Innovation to excite your imagination”. This theme was unveiled with great success at Surfaces 2012, the nation’s largest event serving the floor covering industry, with a booth, display materials and new product catalog.

Gerflor’s new positioning and theme will be used in all marketing communications for the foreseeable future.

I recently came across an interesting article on hubspot.com and felt compelled to share. According to a Hubspot study of 3000+ B2B businesses, 63% were not generating leads from their social media channels. Hubspot posted 5 tips to show B2B marketers how to generate more leads through social media:

1. Include landing pages on your website with forms to collect new leads – Each landing page should include a specific offer so visitors give their information (don’t make too many fields mandatory).
2. Lead visitors to a form from your home page –Drive visitors to a landing page in your site from the home page to collect their information. Offer something of value such as an e-book or consultation.
3. Make sure every piece of content published through social media channels has a call-to-action – It is important to drive people to a landing page through everything you promote. For example, make sure you have a CTA leading to a form when promoting a webinar or blog.
4. Directly promote landing pages through social media – Contrary to what some people believe, it’s okay to promote landing pages with an offer.
5. 10-4-1 – This is a content rule when engaging in social media. For every 15 updates through a social media outlet, 10 should be pieces of content from others, 4 should be your blog articles, and 1 should be a landing page.

Are you generating leads through social media? If so, do you follow these suggestions? If not, give these a try and keep us posted on your success!

http://bit.ly/b2bandsocialmedia

Below are 5 innovations that will change computing this year:

1. Eye Control: Systems will allow users to have control of computer functions with their eyes. Scrolling down a page, zooming in and out, and navigating the Internet will be accomplished with just a look.
2. Motion Control: Using any ordinary 2D camera, the gesture control system will recognize hand gestures up to 17 feet away. For example, users can scroll through photo albums on Facebook with a flick of a hand.
3. Complex Touchscreen Control: One flaw with the increasingly popular tablets is the lack of a way to access complex functions and menu options that are available with a mouse. A new device called the “Ringbow” offers multiple inputs that we are familiar with such as the right click on a mouse.
4. Glove Input Device: The Keyglove is a wearable wireless mouse that allows the user increased flexibility for computer applications. This Keyglove offers one-handed navigation of numerous systems and software.
5. Speech Control: Speech recognition is increasing in popularity and is being implemented into countless devices such as Siri in the iPhone 4s.

What we once thought of as “futuristic technology” is now working its way into our every day lives. Controlling our computer systems is moving from the mouse, to our bodies  – eyes, hands, voice.

For more details on each innovation visit: http://mashable.com/2012/03/26/computing-tech-innovations/#545851-Eye-Control

1. Valuable tweets – Think before you tweet. Always ask: how is this tweet benefitting my followers?
2. Short and sweet – Make sure you allow enough characters for a retweet. Each tweet has 160 characters so your followers need enough of those characters to include “RT @Yourusername” and your original tweet.
3. Show your personality – Twitter is a social network. Let your personality show through your tweets for a genuine connection.
4. Work with the #hashtag – This is where the conversation is! Follow trending topics to share your content, or create your own.
5. Insert links – this is a perfect way to drive followers to your website, or provide more information and resources on a specific topic.
6. Shorten those links – you don’t’ want a link to take up your entire tweet
7. Incorporate Twitter everywhere – you will gain more followers if you share your Twitter username on your website, business card, Facebook account etc.
8. Create your own hashtag – once you have a base of followers, engage them by creating your own hashtag to start new conversations.
9. Thank followers – If a follower mentions you on Twitter, thank them! Showing your appreciation will go a long way.
10. Monitor your industry – look for questions or discussions within your industry on Twitter and respond! This will gain the attention of others involved.

Be sure to follow @Booth_Bay on Twitter and “like us” on Facebook!

Since digital marketing is constantly evolving, agencies are starting to rethink their strategies and are partnering with experts or hiring technology savvy professionals.  Once you fully understand how to leverage this medium, you can bring new ideas to your clients to illustrate your value and versatility. It is essential to show clients how they can successfully implement the latest trends in this digital marketplace.

With this said, is your agency engaging in the latest marketing practices? Smartphones are quickly becoming the primary form of communication. Is your agency prepared to reap the benefits?

http://www.dmnews.com/agencies-must-keep-up-with-mobile/article/228901/

With that said, Google has found a new and interesting way to stream information in real time. Google is set to release glasses later this year that will include a small screen a few inches from the wearer’s eye. The glasses will be Android-based and run on a 3G or 4G connection with motion and GPS sensors. The built-in camera will monitor the world in real time and provide information to users based on their surroundings. Users will no longer need to waste time reaching for a smartphone – it will be on their face.

This brings new meaning to “always connected”. How do you think this will affect our culture? What will change from a marketing perspective?

Read the full story: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/google-to-sell-terminator-style-glasses-by-years-end/