Hey mom I'm a blogger

ADDYs 2012. It was glitz, glamour and glowies.

For one amazing evening Central Minnesota’s best and brightest creative minds gathered at the Ritschie Auditorium to celebrate what was cool in advertising in 2011.

It all began just after sunset (because, well, the dark, brooding artsy-fartsy types don’t unearth themselves much in the daylight hours). Upon commencement of primping, spraying and glossing, the martini bar was the first stop. Kelly handed out yellow glow bracelets for all the Gaslight posse to don. After relaxing a bit, we headed to the auditorium. Appetizers in hand, we oohed and ahhed at the gallery of awesome ADDY submissions.

A quick rush into the auditorium and the awards were underway. After the scurry of black-clad creatives clicked across the stage over and over – the dust settled and we found ourselves with 5 ADDY awards in hand. Not bad.

Thank you AdFed committee for a well-run, organized and entertaining evening. Thank you Gaslight clients for your support and creative courage. What a night it was indeed.

Office tidied up. Check.

Beads. Check.

Feathers. Check.

Beads? Feathers? What?

We’re bringing Bourbon Street to meet Germain Street!

Welcome to the Third Floor. We’ll wait a minute for you to catch your breath after 3 flights of stairs or a bit of an apprehensive ascent in the ancient elevator (it’s charming and disarming).

Thanks for attending our St. Cloud Area Chamber of Commerce business after hours – Mardi Gras style! Take a look around. Dig into the Cajun food and Northern beer. Say hello to friends you know and make some new ones!

We love what we do and we are proud to show it to you.

Eat, drink and be merry…for tomorrow we all have to work.

But did we mention? We love what we do! We are Gaslight.

Why Gaslight Creative? Why not Gaslight Marketing? Or Gaslight Communications? Or Gaslight Public Relations?

Why? Because we put our creativity into everything we do.

Creating a marketing plan from the grassroots. From nothing to something, we create a clear direction of how you can allocate your resources and our time for the best possible outcome and impact.

Creating a look. Taking colors, images and typography mashing them up (that’s a technical term) to produce a look you’re thrilled to call your own. A look you proudly display on vehicles, signs, shirts, mugs, notepads and little flashlighty things (another technical term). Oh yeah, and on stress balls employees use to play dodge ball when the boss is gone. Your look. Your colors. It’s all about you.

Creating stuff. (Okay, I’ll stop now with all this technical mumbo-jumbo.) Ads, brochures, flyers, billboards, tear cards, business cards, posters, banners, signs, vehicle graphics, TV ads, Facebook promos, websites, press releases, beer labels, plinko boards (breath). We do it all…well…because we can.

It takes thinking outside the box. It takes treating each client with the unbridled enthusiasm of a fresh-faced, just-out-of-school, not-yet-jaded, rose-colored view of the world tempered with just enough account veteran savy to bring tried-and-true options to the table. And to put it to work for you.

We are Gaslight Creative.

It’s often said that rewards are better than awards.

Great cause. Great client. Warm fuzzies and goose bumps as a result.

Blogging. Go ahead. It’s okay. Everyone’s doing it and you can, too.

For someone who doesn’t write often ‒ or ever ‒ writing a blog can seem overwhelming. Heck, even to writers, it sometimes seem overwhelming. The pressure is on to make it original, helpful or entertaining.

But blogging can be essential to boosting your SEO, gaining recognition as an expert in your field and helping your business ‒ and bottom line ‒ grow.

Here are few tips to help you get blogging.

1. Start by asking yourself a few questions.

• How can I help? What advice or helpful tips can I give to my customers and friends? What have I learned that I can pass on to others?

• What am I good at? What do I like to do? What do I get excited and passionate about?

• What do I absolutely hate? What drives me crazy? What is a pet peeve that I know can be fixed?

2. Make a list

Dave Letterman’s got it right. Top 10 (or 5 or 3) lists are always a hit. They’re easy and quick to ready. (You may not read my whole article, but there’s a good chance you scanned my list!)

3. Be authentic.

We all respond to people who are genuine and earnest. Let your own unique personality shine through. People do business with people they know and like. Let your customers get to know you.

4. Be concise.

People don’t have a lot of time. Just give quick information or a story to get your point across. Leave the college dissertation writing to students. Your purpose here is to help, entertain or promote your business.

5. Get help if you need to.

Okay, warning. Here’s the shameless plug. If you don’t have time to blog or simply don’t want to, delegate the task. Hire a professional to help you get started. They (we) can help with ideas or give your ideas organization and structure, a.k.a. readability.

I know what you’re thinking. This all sounds good, but what can I really write about my business?

Good question. Here are some examples.

Nursery and landscaping business:
1) Feature a tree, plant or flower every week. Give customers background information about the item, where is grows best, how to care for it, etc.
2) Seasonal tips. i.e. 10 things to do to get your yard ready for winter
3) Share photos of customer landscaping projects and how the reader can achieve a similar look

Accountant:
1) Tips on saving for kid’s college education, retirement, etc.
2) Top 10 write off do’s and don’ts.
3) Case studies: I had a client who… and I helped them by…

There are blog ideas and inspiration everywhere. Now all you need to do is start. Ready. Set. Blog.

#1 Results
There are some companies that get it and some companies that don’t. They get it because they get the importance of brand, they get the importance of marketing their company as opposed to just selling a product. When companies get it and brand themselves the right way, they’re the ones that get the best results.

#2 Save Money
A lot of companies will outsource core functions of their business in order to save money. A lot of companies don’t have their own lawyers, for example, they hire a law firm. They won’t do their own payroll, so they hire an accounting firm. But a lot of companies won’t hire a marketing company, because they think it is going to cost them money. In the end, it actually will save you money.

1. The more people you are hiring externally when you outsource, you’re expensing on your tax returns, so you’re not paying these people internally.

2. A professional marketing firm knows where best to invest your dollars. It is an investment after all. So if they know where to best invest it, you’ll get better results and end up saving you money in the long run.

#3 Growth
A lot of small companies look at advertising and marketing as an expense – paying advertising people, paying for print ads, tv ads, etc, etc. So on the expense side, when times are tough, they tend to cut expenses, and they cut their marketing which is the worst thing you can possibly do. It’s happened in the last few years with the Recession.

Smart companies – companies who get it – think of it as an investment in their growth, an investment in their future, and an investment in their brand. The great thing is that it is actually a little of all these. Depending on the business structure, when you hire a professional marketing firm, you can deduct the cost of hiring the firm on your taxes as well as the expense of the advertising they place on your behalf. So it’s an investment in your future that can also be an expense on your taxes.

#4 Expertise
Marketing professionals are experts in their field. They went to college. They have years and years of experience in their business. I have a friend who is a dentist, I tease her that she is a really good dentist. I’m a really good marketer. If we traded jobs one day, I would probably make a bloody mess doing dentistry work – the same thing that you are doing with your marketing.

If you are an expert in your field, you’ve built your career working in this field, you should stick to that field, that should be your core function. Wearing another hat, like being your own marketer or PR agent, is probably not something you should do.

#5 Outside Perspective
If I have a company that sells widgets, and hire a marketing director to market my widgets, I’m going to tell him or her what I want them to do in order to market those widgets. Their number one goal is to keep their job as a marketing director at the widget factory – not necessarily to market the widget factory in the best way possible.

When you hire a marketing firm outside the company, you not only get the expertise and all the other benefits, you get this really valuable third party perspective. We work with clients, we don’t work for them, so we can give them the best possible advice because we’re not exactly worried about getting our paycheck on Friday.

#6 Your Time is Valuable
Time is money. If you have employees running around doing market research, designing ads, trying to place media and negotiate with various vendors for your events, for your online, for your website, for your sales collateral – that’s a lot of time. So do you want your core employees doing that … or do you want to hire a firm with experts and who can get it done in a lot less time with a lot better result. In the end, you’re not only saving time, you’re saving money.

#7 Distinction is the Heart of Brand
We live in the information age. With information overload, you’ve got to do something to make yourself stand out in the crowd. How is your product or service different than your competitors? That’s what a marketing firm does for you. We help you articulate and communicate your brand essence.

#8 Market Research
Marketing is all about getting the right message, in front of the right people at the right time. If you don’t research the message, you don’t research the people, and you don’t research the scenario, it’s all going to fall flat. Good marketing and good advertising is an investment. Really bad marketing, really bad advertising delivered to the wrong people at the wrong time is a total waste of money. The key is the research that marketing firms conduct.

#9 Relationships
You need to treat your marketing firm as a partner, not a vendor. Your most trusted advisors are your lawyer, your CPA and your financial consultant. You need to add your marketing person to that mix. The value of this relationship is very important. You’ve got to have someone you can trust.

#10 Keeping up with the latest and greatest
You’ve got to have a partner that is keeping up with the latest and greatest in technology, in marketing trends, in social media, and so on. If you’re marketing the same way you have for 20 years, it’s time to inject some innovation and knowledge into that process. A marketing firm can do that for you – because it’s our job. Our job is to keep up with the latest and greatest. Now, the latest and greatest may not be the best choice for you, but we’ve been there, done that, tried that, and we use what works.

Kelly

Change.

Yeah, it’s sucks sometimes. But often it leads you to places you’d never thought you’d go or to people you’d never thought you’d meet – or re-meet as the case may be. Recently, we lost a few and we’ve gained a few team members.

To those team members who’ve moved on to blaze new trails, we’re sad to see you go and wish you loads of happiness and adventure.

To our newbies – well – new to Gaslight, welcome aboard! We look forward to all you bring to the creative mosh pit up on St. Germain’s coolest 3rd floor.

First up, Ami Ohmann joins our cast as a Project Manager/Copywriter. Ami brings more than 15 years of marketing and copywriting experience and a veteran navigational know-how of downtown having started out her career in the downtown agency scene (with Kelly).

Next, we added Michael Nelson, a cool comic-book creating (and in high school voted most likely to be tallest at any place he may work – except the NBA) Senior Graphic Designer. His more than a decade of experience in print and web solutions makes him an absolute asset. Plus he helps even out the estrogen-to-testosterone level in the office.

With our team set, we look forward to combining our superpowers to concur evil and misguided marketing and public relations (almost) everywhere. And to keep our citizens and their businesses safe with creative campaigns, eclectic execution and marketing that makes a difference to your bottom line.

Kelly & Jodie

Many small business owners still think they can take a pass on the power of online social media tools, particularly if they reside in seemingly low-tech industries such as plumbing, fishing or lawyering. I found this case study about Jason Brown, a 23-year old co-founder of Brown Lures. Brown Lures sells fishing lures to guys and gals that probably don’t call hanging out at Web 2.0 conferences a good time.

But Brown credits his blog with changing the way people find him. He created a podcast that gives him great “fishing stories” and loyalty from guides up and down the Gulf Coast; he uses RSS and content tagging to automatically produce fresh blog content; and email marketing to blow his competition away at trade shows.

Using social media in industries that are still slow to adopt it is the killer competitive advantage.

In Brown’s words:
“We have been running waiting lists for products for about a year now, and no one has any clue how we are doing it without spending big advertising money.”

Alas, we still hear cries from the cynics:
“We don’t need no stinkin’ social media, we just need more sales.”

Ugh.

– Kelly

Design

• Visually appealing
• Unique to you, your brand
• Easily read information is organized thru hierarchy using design techniques and elements

Function

• Easily navigated (intuitive and load times)
• Search
• Email sign-up
• Mobile optimization
• Social media integration
• Search engine optimization
• Content Management System

Content

• Examples of your work
• Customer Testimonials
• A call to action
• Contact info readily available
• A reason for them to come back – blog

With our 2 year anniversary in mind, we wanted to repurpose our old website and bring it into the next generation with mobile and tablet devices in mind with accessibility. If you remember our old site, it was fun and quirky, but my biggest issue with it personally was that it was pretty much unusable on phones and tablets. I started to develop a mobile version of it but then decided we needed a solution where we didn’t have separate folders and files that needed to be updated.

In comes responsive web design. The idea is that the website will tailor itself to whatever size your browser window is, whether you’re 320px wide on your phone or you’re 1800px wide on your 27″ desktop. Go ahead and give it a try and resize your window (and other pages too).

<link href="/css/mobile.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="/css/desktop.css" media="screen and (min-device-width: 768px)" rel="stylesheet">

If you’re on a desktop you’ll notice the page stops at 768px wide, which is our breaking point from our mobile styling to our desktop styling. What this does is allow us to serve up some of our larger background images for the desktop while saving bandwidth for phones. It’s a mobile first thought process, as we built everything for mobile and then brought in our desktop stylings on top of it.

As technology pushes towards getting information wherever and whenever we can, websites are needing to adapt too. Devices will always be changing, but creating a website that can adapt to those changes will prove to be invaluable.

Some other little nuggets you’ll find will be the animations (using either Safari or Chrome) around the site. Hope you enjoy the site and if you run into any little bugs just let us know.