The Nitty Gritty

It's been real... it's been fun... But it's time to get on to next quarter! Closer to graduation let's go kids. So since the beginning, our random rants and raves haven't really been random at all. It's been leading up to one thing: Marketing Plan. It's also helped me weed out what will and what won't work for Good Sign. There's been a lot of good ideas out there, but only a few will work for Good Sign.

Let's rewind for a hot minute. What have we talked about these past 9 weeks?! No worries. I've got it covered: Experiential Marketing & On-Demand Viewing, Search Engine Optimization, Communal Marketing, Gaming, Mobile Marketing, and last but not least Branded Entertainment. Things I'm throwing away and never looking back at (at least for Good Sign that is) Gaming and possibly Branded Entertainment... not really in the works for us. However, I think we have a pretty good handle on the rest.

The 3 that I'm really going to look into: Experiential Marketing, Communal Marketing, and Mobile Marketing. Mostly because we've basically done it all, but of course things can be drastically improved, except for mobile marketing. We haven't even gotten close to touching mobile marketing. I think it's a good avenue to take with Good Sign.

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Experiential Marketing
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Getting consumers involved with a brand, and having them EXPERIENCE your brand. Basically like guerrilla marketing, which Good Sign is already doing. 

We've got a Facebook Page, and are currently working on the website, but we encourage the Good Sign Community to post pictures of good signs, whether it be a beautiful background with someone holding up our Sign, or something that brought someone happiness that day. We're sticking Good Sign stickers everywhere! We want to continue doing that, as well as leaving our signs in random places for people to pick up, read, and pass on the message. It's giving the community a chance to interact with our brand.


Communal Marketing
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It's all about getting the consumers involved with your brand, personally. Good Sign has built a pretty tight-nit community. I like to call them the Good Sign Community. Communal marketing is actually giving your consumers the right to mold and build your campaign or brand. How awesome is that? We're kind of already doing that.

Good Sign will start a campaign built around taking pictures with our Good *Sign* in the most extreme places. It's up to the Good Sign Community to determine what extremes they will go to just for a picture to possibly end up on our homepage of the website, or become the center of our next campaign. Get them involved!



Mobile Marketing
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Good Sign going mobile! It's time to take Good Sign with you, even on your phone.

An application that is downloadable to your smart phone. It will include inspirational quotes from consumers or the Good Sign community, events that Team Good Sign will be involved with, pictures of Team Good Sign, and pictures that are linked from our website all within the app itself.

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This is a Good Sign

Creative Brief

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Who we are
Good Sign is about spreading inspiration and encouragement wherever we go. Our mission is to initiate a movement towards communal harmony and optimism, through the use of visual reminders and personal interactions.

The idea is to place a sticker on anything that creates those warm and fuzzy feelings and share it with the world. One Good Sign may inspire another.

With the use of guerrilla marketing, merchandising and social media, we wish to spread Good Signs throughout the globe.
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Our Objective
We are wanting to expand Good Signs globally, and want to become involved and known within other communities. We cannot rely purely on our current guerilla marketing campaign. It's time to take it a step further.
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Target Audience
Our target audience is a bit broad. Male and female, any age, any ethnicity. Mostly outdoor enthusiasts and festival goers.

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Why Good Sign
We bring a message of hope and encouragement to people when they most need it, not by simply telling them to be positive or optimistic about their given situation. We are providing an inspirational icon to allow them to experience the feeling for themselves and more importantly to spread it to others.

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Why Believe This 
The Good Sign Movement is currently spreading all over the world in the form of stickers, articles, word of mouth, merchandise, and organizational endorsements.
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What Personality Do We Want to Convey
Our hope is to show the viewer through experience that they ARE empowered and can have control over their perception of a situation at any given time. Good Signs are a visual reminder to focus more on the good in life.
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O mann...

Have you ever noticed when you're watching a tv show and a character looks at his/her phone it'll say "Verizon Wireless" or have some kind of brand that's terribly noticeable? Ooo hello product placement. And to top it off... celebrity endorsement. Ugh! Kill me. I think we've gone overload on those. My favorite is when a musician (who can't act for crap) do a commercial and just blow it. Sometimes I can't even watch, it makes me cringe. Any ways, to the point.

Okay so kind of the opposite of Branded Entertainment. Jersey Shore. We're all familiar with that show. Am I right?  So, Mike (the Situation, he disgusts me by the way) has been offered by Abercrombie & Fitch to NOT wear their clothes. He was giving them a bad name. I would pay him not to wear my brand too! I would even pay him to stay so many feet away from my store if I had to. 

Ewww. Woomp woomp woooomp. Until next time... Get your learn on.

I prefer Yoshi.

Gaming... I will confess. I loved playing my Nintendo 64... Mario Cart (I was undefeated and always chose Yoshi, he was the best duh!), 007 Golden Eye (on DK mode you all know what I'm talking about. Don't deny it.). These days it's all about the Xbox and Wii. I do play Xbox with my little sister all the time. Call it, our "bonding time."


Any ways. I don't know exactly how I would pertain gaming to Good Sign. I don't think that involving gaming would be much of a good idea, to be completely honest. It kind of goes against our "Get out there and be involved with the community" movement, deal. Too bad my subject wasn't Jack Daniels Honey! Hello drinking games. Super easy.


Good Sign isn't about gaming. It's about spreading good vibes and inspiration. Gaming kind of secludes you a bit. Depending on what kind of gaming you're talking about. In my case, any kind of gaming just wouldn't work. But, now that I think about it... is an app consider gaming? If so. I think an app would be a great idea for Good Sign. We're trying to incorporate quotes from people who are involved with the Good Sign Community within the website. I'm thinking an app that has inspirational quotes, events, and pictures of Team Good Sign, etc. would be something to think about. More so in the future than now. We need to have our website up and running before we start doing anything extra.

 

Only 2 more weeks of this Summer Quarter guys!! We can do it! Until next time... get your learn on. 

Let them... Get involved!

So for some reason it was difficult for me to wrap my head around what exactly Communal Marketing is. It took Amber to make up some nice examples for me. Thanks, Amber!! Life saverrrr!

So communal marketing is all about getting the public involved and shape your company or current marketing/advertising campaign. I guess I would say that Good Sign is all about the communal marketing. We've basically created a community, the Good Sign Community, take pictures wherever they are with the Good Sign in them. They've made our guerilla marketing campaign happen and have kept it going.

So it seems like communal marketing wont be that much of a challenge for Team Good Sign. But I think that we could try to take it a step further, as usual. How? Instead of the Good Sign Community simply taking pictures with the Good Sign sign, we will start a new campaign, or contest have you, where the people of Good Sign Community start taking pictures with the sign in the most ridiculous places. Kind of like how people started this planking deal in odd places, we would apply that, but with the Good Sign sign.

Crazy right? Except, we would expect even more extreme pictures from our Good Sign kids. Here's to being an extreme... err Good Sign photo taker?? Until next time... Get your learn on.

META what?

S.E.O. Search Engine Optimization. I'm not going to talk too long about it because it really just bores me to death. Why does it bore me to death? S.E.O. used to run my life! From 2009 to 2010 I worked for an S.E.O. marketing agency. It was an internship that turned into a part-time job. Awesome company and loved working for them... S.E.O. just wasn't for me. I basically sat on my butt all day in front of a computer screen and came up with different ways to say things for meta keywords, meta tags, meta titles, meta everything. I used to get tunnel vision and dizzy because I would literally stare at a screen for hours on end without looking away.

It's pretty cool that you can optimize your website to gain a better ranking on Google or other search engines. So when you enter some kind of search into Google, someone's page is either at the top or not even searchable. Funny thing is that S.E.O. is fairly new. People are still learning about it and don't think that it's that important to have. Thank God the big businesses see the importance in page rank. The Internet is a fairly new thing people. I remember when we got our first at home computer. It was a HUGE deal. I was the first of my friends to get one and an AOL name. O yeah, I remember it. LuckyRossetti. Why? Because I was obsessed with 101 Dalmatians at the time.  Yeah, don't deny it... you remember Pongo and the crew. If not, I have your little visual. 

Any ways. Being the first website to pop up after a search is a great thing. People tend to not even click "next page" on Google searches. If they didn't find what they were looking for within the first page, they're going to re-word their keyword search. So where does this fit in with Good Sign? Well, we lucked up. You type in "good sign" and we're the first to pop up. 

Looks like we've got the S.E.O. covered... Not really. Yeah, we pop up first when you type in "good sign." But that doesn't mean that we can't target other keywords. It's better that way. Getting creative with keywords is the key to great S.E.O. Meta titles, meta descriptions, and other meta things is how you're going to get an even better search engine rating. Time to dig a bit deeper kids. 


There is also a thing called Black Hat S.E.O. and White Hat S.E.O. Clearly Black Hat is bad and White Hat is good. So what is Black Hat all about? Well people, back in the day, used to hide keywords in their backgrounds. Which, in turn, would help them rank first, such as some kids MySpace page. Crazy right? Well Google and other search engines caught on. People would get their pages taken down, and some would never be able to be accessed again. Here's to White Hat S.E.O. You've got to be careful when creating decent S.E.O. work, you can accidentally make what you think White Hate, into Black Hat and eventually get your domain name taken away from you. Until next time... Get your learn on.

Jump on the band wagon!

So last week I was supposed to teach the class about Experiential Marketing AND On-Demand Viewing. Being the wonderful teacher that I am, I forgot to talk about On-Demand Viewing (I'm going to call this ODV). Of course, story of my life. There goes 2 points off of my grade. Nice, Shae... real nice.


At first I really had no idea what on demand viewing was... I thought it had something to do with the whole Dish Network "On-Demand" deal. Well turns out, I was sort of right. Have you ever been watching tv (during a commercial) and a little pop up banner comes up, either on the top or bottom of the screen, saying something like, "To watch National Geographic, press the select key on your remote." Or something along those lines. That's basically ODV. 


If you ask me, I think it's pretty smart. People aren't watching tv these days. They have Tivo or Dish On-Demand, so they're fast forwarding through all of those obnoxious commercials. How are we (advertisers) supposed to get the message out to the masses? We WANT them to want what we're selling! Ooo what up ODV?!  

I'm a huge outdoor junkie, for those who know me, and all of my ad/marketing projects have always involved an outdoor company or some kind of outdoor product (building up the portfolio). So, let's say that Backcountry Outdoors has less than a 30 second spot on TV and they're having this massive gear sale. Clearly it's a bit difficult to say/show everything that they have in such a short amount of time. Here's when ODV comes into play. Backcountry's main commercial throws the general idea, "Hey we're having a gear sale and everything we have is kind of awesome so check it out," kind of thing. During this commercial the little pop up banner will come into play, telling the viewer to press "select" on their remote control to learn more about the sale. When the viewer presses select, they will be taken to a new screen, where they could interact with the page and see everything that's in the sale. Pretty simple and a great, new way for viewers to get involved.


Enough of the boring talk. Let's get to something that's more interesting... at least to me. Experiential marketing. Like I said in the previous post it's about getting consumers involved in the brand and/or product. There are sooo many things you can do with it. It's kind of amazing, if you ask me. Any ways. I'll leave you with some nice visuals:

Until next time... Get your learn on.

This is Clearly... a Good Sign.

I've recently become part of Team Good Sign and have actually been appointed (or trusted with) the title "Marketing Director." Good Sign is just now taking off and is pretty new. It was founded by Eric Dennis in 2010 in the attempt to bring communities together, but then Dennis decided to up the antes a bit and wanted to reach out to communities in a time of need. 

Team Good Sign is wanting to get involved and give back a little, we don't just want to be a brand name, we want to make a difference in communities all over the world. Side note: For some odd reason, This is a Good Sign really took off in Brazil, insane. This means we've gone international. Bring. It. On. This is when that whole viral marketing thing would do us reeeaaal nice like (in my Southern accent that doesn't exist). So how am I going to apply experiential marketing to This is a Good Sign? Ohhh the creative juices are flowing.

It's time to get the Good Sign community involved. Yeah, we already have a facebook page. There are 2,223 "likes" and the fans, err... I mean the Good Sign Community, are clearly involved with the page. They're posting pictures, liking statuses, writing on the wall, and commenting on pictures that others post on the Good Sign facebook. The Good Sign Community is clearly getting involved. The website, however, is a different question. We want people to utilize the website more often.... (Right now it's a bit of a mess, and I wouldn't even want to navigate through it.) We also have a Twitter page. I'm not the social profile manager so I don't know how many "followers" there are. Last, but not least, there is a blog that somehow ties into the website (I'll be fixing that later on). Has there been any advertisements? Why of course! Before I became apart of the team they had already taken on guerilla marketing. Interesting to say the least... Our stickers and signs are everywhere! They were even on The Today Show. Check it:

If you ask me... I'd say that's pretty cool. Now, it's just time to actually make things come together and mesh, maybe even throw in a little surprise? Until next time... Get Your Learn On.