What Is a Good Tagline For A Balloon Decorating Company?

Names + Taglines

We have just started a balloon decorating company but we are also seasoned performers of many venues. We are mimes, face painters, magicians, balloon twisters and balloon decorators to name a few and need a tagline. Our company is balloonscapes entertainment.

###

Jay’s Answer: My first question is: “Who is your ideal audience?” Looking at your website, I’m going to guess not just children’s parties, but also street fairs, and private events (both business and non-business).

Here are some quick thoughts:

  • A New Twist On Party Entertainment
  • Breathe Fun Into Your Next Party
  • Memorable, Fun Events
  • Creating Parties That People Remember
  • Enliven Your Next Event

What Is a Good Tagline For A London Day Care?

Names + Taglines

I have set up a company called “boys and girls nursery” and we intend to open children’s day care across London and the Home Counties but I am missing a very catchy tagline – any ideas ?

###

Jay’s Answer:

  • Enriching Children’s’ Minds & Bodies
  • Your Kids’ Home Away From Home
  • Safe, Fun, and Smart Play

How To Tell Your Marketing Story

Videos

One of the key skills you should develop for marketing your business is the art of telling your business story. A story is remembered long after your business name, tagline, and contact information are forgotten (but can be used to find you again).

This is a four part series on how to craft/tell a great story by Ira Glass (of “This American Life“). He has developed his own style of storytelling and distilled his years of experience into these great videos.

#1: On the basics…

#2: On finding great stories…

#3: On good taste…

#4: On two common pitfalls…

Unpeeling Your Marketing Onion

Creative Business Ideas, Names + Taglines, Starting Out

Onion
Photo by Darwin Bell

One metaphor I use to describe what a marketing strategy is (and how I work) is a small business onion.

Strategy is focused on the very core of your business: “What makes your offering of interest to your prospective customers?”

The core of your business is the answer to the question: WHO are your prospects and WHY they should care about you. Simply saying, “I want everyone who wants to buy my product/services to know about me” isn’t good enough. You have to be very specific to create the core of your marketing effort.

You build your marketing onion through words (copy) and images (graphics) that both appeal to your targeted market and reinforce your core marketing message. You highlight what makes your business unique, and how you compare with your competition. At all layers in the onion your contact information is prominently featured, to make it easy for people to stop peeling and starting dialoging with you.

The outermost layer of your marketing onion is your business name and tagline. That’s the first thing that people see about your business. If you craft it well, then they want to find out more, peeling away layers of your marketing onion until either they realize they need your offering or deciding that it’s not for them.

A great marketing onion looks great, is juicy, and is easily understood. Extraneous information isn’t added (but is available when people want more details).

If you need to develop your marketing onion (or evaluate what you have), contact me. I’d love to help you develop a strong business model for long-term success.

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

Book Reviews

Buy InfluencerAt the core of all great marketing strategies is to clearly identify who your target market is and what their problem is. This book is about the strategies for solving problems.

The core idea is to identify vital behaviors. A vital behavior is a “high-leverage” specific action that has measurable outcome. The author’s favorite example is Dr. Mimi Silbert, the President and Founder of Delancey Street. Since its inception in 1971, her organization has transformed 14,000 hardened criminals into professionals who earn degrees. Dr. Silbert’s vital behaviors are:

  1. Everyone must take responsibility for someone else’s success.
  2. Everyone must confront everyone else about every single violation.

These behaviors took years to develop, but her results are clear: 90% success rate. Too many behaviors, and no one can remember the rules. One or two of these “tipping-point” behaviors and you get results.

The authors believe that if you want to solve any problem, find the people who are studying best practices for that field. These researchers have already identified what works (and doesn’t). If you need to uncover your own best practices, look for places where your problem should exist but doesn’t. Then, uncover the unique behavior of the group that succeeds.

For example:

Best practices for teaching:

  1. Reward positive (even moderately good) performance.
  2. Alternate between teaching and questioning/testing.

Best practices for weight loss:

  1. Exercise on home equipment.
  2. Eat breakfast.
  3. Weight yourself daily.

Best practices for Guinea worm disease eradication:

  1. Strain water before drinking into clean vessels.
  2. If your neighbor has been infected, tell the community.
  3. Keep the infected person away from contaminating the water supply.

The second part of the book focuses on the six sources of influence (think of them as behavioral cues). These influences are needed in-concert to implement the vital behaviors.

  1. Personal Motivation (“Make the undesirable desirable”): Why should someone care?
  2. Personal Ability (“Surpass your limits”): How do they know it works?
  3. Social Motivation (“Harness peer pressure”): Why should they trust?
  4. Social Ability (“Find strength in numbers”): Why should
  5. Structural Motivation (“Design rewards and demand accountability”)
  6. Structural Ability (“Change the environment”)

I wished the authors had more lists of specific vital behaviors listed. Their website (www.VitalSmarts.com) has some additional surveys that they conducted. But I’d love to see a wiki of vital behaviors.

How To Wear Your Sales Message

Creative Business Ideas

Jay Hamilton-Roth Badge (before)

At a recent conference session I spoke at, an exhibitor came up to me after my presentation and asked a great question: “How can I start a sales conversation with people without being obnoxious?”.

While the conference had an exhibitor hall, the exhibitor was also planning to attend various sessions and wanted some ideas for how to “break the ice”.

My suggestion was to turn their badge into conversation piece. Most conference badges simply have the attendees name, and some brief biographical information (title, company, location). What I suggested was to take some actual colorful parts to their product, and attach them to their badge.

Since everyone else’s badge was “plain”, their badge stood out. And indeed, people started asking about the colorful things on their badge. The ice was broken, naturally.

Jay Hamilton-Roth Badge (after)Notice I didn’t suggest creating a billboard out of the badge (“Have Questions About XYZ? Talk To Me!”). That sort of message doesn’t create a dialog. It creates a response to the message itself (and a potential lost opportunity to dialog). Instead, my suggestion provides people a way to approach you with their curiosity piqued, and for you to begin a sales dialog. You can pre-qualify your potential client based on their needs, and not on your specific product or service.

Insure Yourself Against Bad Advertising

Creative Business Ideas, Publicity

Caveman Insurance Advertisement

I received this advertisement in the mail. It begins:

Friends,

Unfortunately GEICO continues to portray Cavemen as inferior and simple-minded in its advertising. For us, it’s been a year of hard work. We took our message of tolerance to the streets, gained national attention in the media by defending our status as equals, and showed how Cavemen are contributing members of society.

However, GEICO stands by its original decision to belittle Cavemen with little regard to how it affects us. In spite of an “apology” and indications that GEICO would cease and desist its public slander of Cavemen, the company continues to use the slogan, “So easy a caveman can do it,” in its advertising…

It was unclear who sent the letter. On the surface, the sender was writing a “political” letter, complaining about the values espoused by the company. Only after reading the small print it became obvious that the letter was in fact sent by the company itself.

The goal of this letter is to build upon the insurance company’s latest advertising imagery and tagline. It’s certainly clever, but misses the goal: getting prospective clients to contact them because they offer best price/service mix.

Here are some suggestions I’d recommend making to this ad:

  • Contact information . As a minimum, create a URL for this campaign, which would redirect to the real company.
  • Focus on benefit . The direct mail piece was intended to be humorous, but it missed the chance to mention the benefits of this company’s products. This is especially important for people who haven’t seen the advertisements before and are only seeing references to other ads.
  • Make it transparent . At the end of the direct mail, show the “punch line”: Who really made this ad? Why they did it. How to contact them. Why the reader should contact them.

What Is The Best Way To Create Online Forms?

eMarketing

Background:::
We host 3 business websites and are in the process of building an intranet for SOP’s. The website’s server (Wintows IIS 2003) is off-premise and resides at the owner home. The Intranet is at the office location.

I have several web based forms (currently .asp) on our websites and plan on developing a test that will be used on our intranet that will consist of multiple choice and essay questions for department specific procedures for new and existing employees.

Problem::
My strength is in design. Coding gives me a migraine! I have several correspondence & appointment forms on our web site. Each time the mail service is moved, the web forms cease working. I have went from CGI | Cold Fusion | PHP & ASP. I have Adobe Acrobat Designer 8 and would love to implement an Adobe Acrobat web form, but haven’t been able to master the code. although have been told it can be done. I haven’t found much help from Adobe.com or Lynda.com on how to execute these forms for the web. Flash Forms are a piece of cake. . . . on a Linux-based operating system {:-(. . . . but that is not an option here. I have stayed away from VB because I use a MAC and “Access” is not available for MAC users. So see, I’m in a spin cycle!

What I need:::
Is a solution to all my forms needs! There are various program packages available and I am asking for recommendations, pro’s, cons, etc. Please, I am not interested in any fly-by-night sortware or a sales pitch. I need a proven fix-all solution that won’t blow-up the next time someone here isn’t happy with a various service and decides to pull the plug without warning.

###

Jay’s Answer: The basic choices you have are ASP or PHP forms.

Here’s a tutorial on using ASP forms (using Dreamweaver)

Or, a tutorial using PHP

Use a form generator (for basic forms): By tele-pro.co.uk or Free Form Maker

Or using PHP

You don’t have to be a technical wizard to do this, it’s pretty straight-forward. It sounds like the problem you’re having isn’t with the forms, but with the data that’s sent when the submit button is pushed. No matter what software solution you use for forms, you still have to solve that technical headache. One way to solve this is to put your forms completely off your site, and use something like Survey Monkey to create a (survey) form, and compile the information. It all depends upon what you’re needs are.

How Can I Get Sponsors For My Documentary Film?

Starting Out

Just finished a documentary film (1 hr.) on breast cancer from survivor ship point of view. CBCF LOVES it but no money to offer us. We want to get this out to the world, and lots of interest so far with people who have seen it, in the world of breast cancer. But so far no one with money. We are looking for $100,000 to buy us out, or smaller investment from a number of companies to support screenings and distribution of film. Looking at every event going on in this city, there are dozens of companies who contribute to such worthy causes. Where do I find these companies and get them a copy? I think they would be thrilled to be involved in this inspiring and educational film, and have their name on a film that will be distributed around the world – SOON.

###

Jay’s Answer: I’m unclear what your strategy is (who is the film’s audience, etc.), and why a sponsor should care about your film.

For example, why not skip the who sponsorship issue, and release the movie online?

Or, release some snippets of your movie online to build viral traffic to your website, where you ask for sponsorships to support distribution (and/or online advertising) of the movie.

An easy way to find sponsors is to look for organizations that have sponsored similar-themed organizations in the past, such as: Shanti or Think Before You Pink

What Is A Good Tagline For a Body Piercing Website?

Names + Taglines

I’m in the latter stages of launching a new site RedBack (logo based on the Australian Redback spider specifically selling body piercing jewelry. To be honest, it’s not the pretty stuff I’m selling either, hence my market is quite niche with a big crossover into the tattoo and body modification markets.
I’m completely stuck for a tagline, largely because I don’t want to sound cheesy or hollow! However, none of my competitors have a tag line and I really see the importance of having one.

###

Jay’s Answer:

  • Celebrate Your Body
  • Design Your Own Body
  • Body Jewelry With A Bite