by Marcus Ledbetter | Mar 20, 2015 | Blogging Ideas, Email Campaigns, Facebook, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Managers
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Dominos Edible Box – April Fools Day 2014
Many companies struggle with how to make their somewhat boring business get passed around social media. Let’s face it, tax preparers are not usually Facebook sensations.
But April 1st is one day that they can be.
Let’s look at some April Fools marketing ideas for your business. We’ll talk about a few general guidelines and then 10 specific examples and ideas to make your April Fools Day hoax a hit. If the list below isn’t enough for you, check out Hoaxes.org. (Yes, there is an entire database of April Fools Day hoaxes.)
General Guidelines
- Hit Your Market – If you are a local company, consider anchoring your hoax to a local landmark or recent news item.
- Tie In Your Product Or Service – Name recognition in your market is good and that may be all you get from your hoax, but for added marketing value, tie in your product or service.
- Get The Right People Involved – If you have an office prankster, enlist that person to generate ideas and get a couple of marketing-minded folks to refine it and make sure everyone agrees that it’s going to be a hit.
10 Ideas For Your Company’s April Fool’s Day Hoax
- Un-innovation – Take your industry back a decade or two. Un-innovation can be quite amusing. Check out Conan Obrien on the Future of Twitter.
- Give People What They Hate – Design-minded folk love to make fun of the Comic Sans font. Google took that font and ran with it, introducing the “Comic Sans for Everyone” extension in 2011.
- Advertise A Ridiculous Job Opening – If you are clever, you can find a way to tie the job opening to a product feature you want to show off. Check out how Google offered to hire “autocompleters”, again in 2011.
- Reinforce Your Company Stereotype – The Virgin group’s high-profile founder Sir Richard Branson is known for making media splashes with crazy stunts. It was almost believable when the company announced that he had bought Pluto and reinstated it as a planet. Of course, this also played into Virgin Galactic’s marketing as they continued to commercialize space travel.
- Talk Politics – You’ve probably heard that it’s good to steer clear of politics as a company. April 1st could be an exception. BMW didn’t align themselves with a party, but did give their customers a chance to do so with a customized tag in 2010.
- 1-Up A Competitor’s Hoax – Hotels.com offered rooms on the moon in 2009. Competitor Expedia.com bettered their competitor by offering rooms on Mars.
- Photoshop Phun. OK, this illustration is not business-related, but you can use your imagination to apply it to your business. The picture below is my family Christmas picture from last year. These things can get passed around social media quite a lot. How about your company president in a dangerous situation, your product morphed into something disgusting, your building with a giant spider crawling up the wall.
- Bring Back A Villain – We wouldn’t advise going too villainous, but a somewhat more harmless villain might work. NPR announced that Richard Nixon would be entering the presidential race of 1992.
- Serve The Lefties – Burger King claimed they were making adjustments to the Whopper to make it more left-hand friendly. If you are a dentist, why not advertise that you are getting new state-of-the-art dentist chairs for left-handed patients? Here’s a whole list of fake left-handed products.
- Go Big And Small – Take your product or service and make it ridiculously big or small. Starbucks claimed they were making both tiny and monstrous cup sizes in this April Fools Day prank. Insurance Company? Offer to insure car keys.
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Once you come up with the perfect idea, you need to put a plan in place for how to spread the word. It could be a social media post, email campaign, blog post, or full blown paid media advertisement.
If you pull off a great April Fool’s Day Hoax, let us know how it went in the comments.
Oh, and stop back by on April 1. There’s a good chance something will be a little off here at ITD Interactive.
by Marcus Ledbetter | Dec 10, 2013 | Facebook, Social Media Marketing
If you have a Facebook page with a solid number of followers, you might have noticed that your posts haven’t been reaching as many people as before.
Facebook has just admitted that they are decreasing Page “reach” in the news feed algorithm and that trend will continue. They are suggesting that Page owners “boost” reach by paying for the boost through sponsored posts.
If you’ve paid for your fans, you’re probably ticked off. You paid to get the fans, now you have to pay again to reach the fans you already paid to get! Frustrating, aint it.
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by Marcus Ledbetter | May 21, 2013 | Author Rank, Consumer Trends, Email Campaigns, Facebook, Google, Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Managers, Marketing ROI, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, Web Marketing
In this post, we’ll explore 15 surprising digital marketing trends that you need to know. The charts below are pulled from Google Trends and show search interest over the last decade.
Inbound Marketing
This is the phrase that is changing the way marketing is done. You’ll see a VERY close resemblance to the graph below for “HubSpot”, the all-in-one Inbound Marketing software (and marketing content giant). (more…)
by Marcus Ledbetter | May 6, 2013 | Facebook, Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking
Enough with the cute kittens and pictures of what you are eating for lunch!
Grumpy Cat is Frustrated with Social Media
In the last installment, we looked at reasons that business owners and marketers are often frustrated with SEO, and the lack of results they see from their efforts. We concluded that the main problem was that the primary goals associated with SEO alone, were not in line with the overall goals a successful marketing plan will exhibit. In the same way, many business owners and marketers are frustrated with social media. They are frustrated with keeping up with it, as well as seeing the apparent lack of results for their effort. If the solution lies in realigning our social media goals with sound marketing goals, how do we go about doing that? That is the topic of this post.
Social Media, by itself, is not a marketing strategy.
The wisdom of the day used to sound something like this. “You need to engage your customers in meaningful conversation through social media channels to build interest in, and loyalty to your brand.” Countless books and manifestos were written on this subject. Conversation and engagement were the big buzzwords during the early days of the social media revolution. But, what exactly does conversation and engagement get you? The goal of generating this type of buzz about your company int he social media channels is to gain exposure – or in social media terms, reach. The simplified version of this is if you have 10 friends who are talking about products to at least 10 of their friends, then all of a sudden – you have reached an audience of 100. This is the viral power of social media, and this is why it is an integral part of a comprehensive inbound marketing plan What is reach, though, and does this “reach” put any money in your pockets? Here is where we have to hone our social media strategy into a sound marketing strategy, and here is how we do it. (more…)
by Marcus Ledbetter | Apr 5, 2013 | Consumer Trends, Email Campaigns, Facebook, Google, Inbound Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing, The Gravity Strategy, Twitter, Web Marketing
We are pleased to introduce a new video we produced to go along with The Gravity Strategy eBook and blog posts. We are excited about this concept because it makes it super easy to explain Inbound Marketing and it’s benefits for your business. Enjoy!
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by Marcus Ledbetter | Jan 24, 2013 | Author Rank, Facebook, Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Small Business, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, Twitter
Want to know how Google is going to get users to leave Facebook and use Google Plus? They are going to pay them to do it (indirectly).
Author Rank is only being talked about in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing circles at the moment, but the effects of the coming SEO earthquake it causes could be felt by everybody before it is over. It is not just a tool to improve their search engine. It is an asset they intend to use to take over social media. I’ll explain . . .
If you’ve followed social media over the last few years, you’ve seen Google launch round after round of social platforms, each with a characteristic belly-flop ending — Friend Connect, Lively, Wave, Buzz, and Plus. But slow down. Maybe we’ve written Plus off too quickly.
A Bunch Looked, The Geeks Stayed
Plus launched in 2011 and didn’t gain a lot of marketshare. The tool itself seems to be excellent, but there wasn’t a good enough reason to leave Facebook and Twitter for the (more…)
