Savy’s creative team designed and developed Local Joe a content management system-based, dynamic website that freshened up his brand. Upgrades included newer photography, videos and radio spots, and updates to all the social media profiles, including Facebook, Twitter and a custom YouTube page. We also included a built-in blog for announcing promotions and highlighting new fashion trends.

Local Joe is happy, his website is now well-performing and his brand looks more like his applauded fashions. Thanks Local Joe.

Visit Local Joe Jeans to see the real thing and to find your “perfect fit”.

As a second year sponsor of the Sustainability Awards (Savy partnered with the Environmental Center to design the event’s inaugural collateral, including the logo and color scheme), Savy is happy to partner with like-minded organizations and events.

So who were this year’s winners? Individual: Matt Shinderman, Small Business: Pacific Crest Affordable Housing, Large Business: NorthWest Crossing (West Bend Property Company), Organization: Bend-La Pine Schools, Innovation: Sara Bella* Upcycled and BendBroadband Vault. Looking forward to next year!

The owners of the Sister’s Barclay Estate approached Savy to build them a dynamic, SEO-friendly website to help sell their estate on their own. No brokers, no fees, no middleman. They also didn’t want the hassle of another FSBO-type service, and knew their estate was priced below market value enough that it could move with the right marketing tools. Perfect. We had the tools to help.

Solution

Since the estate is nestled on 3.92 usable acres with barn, riding arena and was home to Sisters’ first rodeo, Savy’s creative and web development teams designed a brand mark for the estate resembling those used on working cattle ranches. The site was built in a full-frame, sophisticated style to highlight the estate’s best assets: Cascade views, wide open land and abundant greenery. We setup trainings on using and updating the site, best practices on the use of the built in blog to schedule property showings and highlight property details, and even helped the owners list the estate on CraigsList and launch a targeted Facebook campaign to help sell their home. The project was a success, the clients were happy and the estate tells its own story at its new website:

SistersBarclayEstate

Contact Rob at 541-306-0264 or rob@savyagency.com for details.

Savy’s creative team developed Robert a photography-focused website that retained the essence of his brand, but jazzed it up a bit, with deeper colors and a revised logo. We loaded all of his images into his new site that was built with a content management system, meaning he could manage the site himself, without the downtime or fees associated with outsourced website management. We included a built in blog with sections where Robert could blog about his photography workshops as well as general “musings” as he calls them, or inspirations on his photographic perspective.

From start to finish, we had Robert’s new site developed and him trained on the site’s usage within 30 days, and he was online with a more distinct, richer and far more dynamic website for his photography portfolio.

If you’re in need of a Central Oregon photographer, Robert Agli just might be your man. RobertAgliPhotography.com

Make choices.

If you emphasize everything, nothing will be important.

Stay Focused.

Once your communication path is chosen, be consistent and find ways to reinforce it, even if that means eliminating other creative possibilities. There are many ways to be creative without adding noise to your communication.

Less is More.

Rethink your content and design, working towards striking, direct and clean. Think creatively and outside of the box with a foot still on the ground.

Design Differential.

Your chosen design must follow your brand’s identity, differential and goals. A great design is the one that is able to communicate who you are and where you want to be.

Design Tips from the Field:

Colors. Stick with your institutional and complementary colors.

Photography. Pick a style that speaks for your brand — and stick with it. Go for unusual, and safe at the same time.

Design Elements. A watermark of your company’s icon and other elements that complement your brand are welcome when used with balance.

Typography. Don’t use more than three different font types in the same creative piece, unless it is your intent and strategy to do so.

Contrast is Key. The human brain loves contrast. Look for opportunities to use contrast with color, size, font thickness and anything else you have to work with. Use contrast to make your product, service or ideas stand out and convey the message.

Have fun out there, and let us know when you need help.

By Luisa Benevento
Design Lead @ The Savy Agency

Do something different.

The quicker you do what you need to, the sooner you can get on with it and do what you enjoy doing. Some call this “eating that frog”, or doing the hardest and most important task of the day first, before anything else.

If you were to sample successful business owners, coaches or enigmatic individuals that you consider successful, you’d generally find they have the results they have because they’re also willing to do what others aren’t to live a life that others don’t. On Tim Ferris blog this morning, I read of a self study by Michael Ellsberg looking at how the best in business do what they do. From Ellsberg’s book “The Education of Millionaires, you find that uber successful people leapfrog their peers without any formal credentials.

Why? Because they do something different.

“In the words of Alfonso Bedoya in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”

I can tell you from my formal undergraduate and graduate studies in business, anything I “got” from the business world, I got by pushing open doors, asking questions that others weren’t and bending the rules.

Be willing to do what others aren’t to live a life that others don’t.

Too many of us are comfortable living mediocre just because we’re not willing to sacrifice a little to gain a lot. I’ve been hard at it since 14, when my friends were busy with freshman cheerleading, and I was entering the corporate world as a young intern eager to get my sneaker in the door at a creative firm whose products I loved. I thankfully got most of my “hard at it” from my father, who while growing up, I watched push his business forward with unrelenting drive and focus that provided results.

When I was in college, I wore a suit during the day and took 20 credits at odd hours to get ahead, often studying until morning, just to get up and repeat the process again. I was able to travel and enjoy life, but in those midnight hours, I was willing to do what most of my peers were not.

What about you?

• Are you OK working hard and missing sleep or something fun if you need to?

• Are you OK pushing the limits and thinking creatively and outside the box?

• Are you OK making goals and sacrifices where you need to get ahead?

If you’re not willing to budge much, that’s OK too, but it won’t be the fault of the industry you’re in – although yes many have dropped off the face of the earth and require making a change – or where you live, the choices you didn’t have growing up or how much things themselves have changed.

Personally, I’m OK with getting up super early when the phones are off, the kiddos are asleep and before our clients wake and expect stellar service from me. I’m OK with shopping on Craigslist to save pennies here and there in exchange for getting more of what I want.

To help get to what you’re OK with, try mapping out a vision for your business, or your passion-turned-business, and figure out what it’s going to take to get there.

Begin taking steps towards your vision every day.

Ask yourself what you want and why – this is the “get you out of bed while others are sleeping” part. Decide to go after it and see it already part of your reality.

What are you OK sacrificing to achieve your goals and kick ass at your business?

Your sacrifice pays off.

To your success!
Christina, Creative Director @ The Savy Agency

1. A sexy, well written hook

The areas where you should be most concerned with are your headline – this should be catchy, create curiosity – and keyword rich. In you’re stuck on what your keywords are, you’ll need to track back to figure out who you’re talking to and how. But for now, it should be click – and search-engaging. Your titles, including your headlines, are where you summarize what the page or site is all about so the engine knows how to categorize your content.

To figure out how much traffic your content is receiving and how well you’ll be able to compete try Wordtracker, SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool, and of course, Google. These tools provide valuable insight into your content terrain before you tread.

2. Anchors up

Google has been talking about lessening the importance of keyword domains for some time. What they’re still juggling is when you have a keyword domain name, you subsequently have great anchor text from links pointing to your site. In many cases, it is not the domain name that is influencing ranking, it is the anchor text that results from a particular domain name. Use anchors well and never, ever resort to ‘click here’s’.

3. Know what you’re gonna say

Knowing what you’re going to say prior to sharpening your pencil, or warming up your keyboard, is a great way to plan the words and phrases you’ll be using in creating your content. Another way of going about this is of course forging full steam into your content and then backtracking to find and optimize your keywords and phrases. My strategy is the former, as it tends to be more, well, strategic, but both work just fine. Give it a try and see which best suits your content writing style.

4. Can I get a human, please?

Continue building human friendly phrases by turning keywords into keyphrases; real ones that your readers will be using to find you. Using keyword rich phrases with consistency will build relevance for your target phrases, while also helping to reduce keyword clutter, which ends up losing you points with the search engines.

5. Optimize deeper

In all of your content, it’s important to go back through and find opportunities to optimize your pages further. Asking the question: “Where can relevance be added?” is a good place to start. You can build links from keywords or keyphrases that match up with words or phrases in the title tag of the page the link is pointing. This external link should be additional content you’ve created. This can point to your blog post, Facebook page, LinkedIn event or poll, Twitter stream, or anywhere else you hang online. If you point to additional links outside of your content realm, you risk losing relevance for your keywords and phrases to the site you’re linking to. Optimizing your onsite content to your offsite content, yet still keeping your readers engaged in your brand, is a win-win strategy for optimizing your pages.

6. Both sides count

Yes, content rules, but good content is only part of the equation. If your content isn’t written in a way that is readable, informative, search-friendly, and actually read and shared, there’s a good chance it won’t be found.

What are your thoughts? Anything we left out? Feel free to chime in, we love a good coffee discussion.

Christina Brown –
Savy, integrated marketing

The one hard fast truth though, is that the web isn’t going anywhere. And social media, not as a term many are still trying to grasp, but as a media, isn’t a fad. Especially looking at Facebook’s recent numbers cited at over 500 million. Whether you love it or hate it, whether you enjoy sharing with the world some of those details you maybe shouldn’t, you can’t deny its power and reach.

So what about blogs and blogging?

It’s no secret. Savy does it a little different regarding blogs and how we set our clients up for success. But we still commonly get the question, “But what exactly is a blog?” Generally followed by the “I still don’t get it’s”, “I don’t wanna do it’s” and the “Can you do it for me’s”. Nope we can’t, you should. Here’s why.

If you consider what blogging has allowed us to do after its entrance as a personal publishing platform, providing the ability for anyone to conjure up brilliance, put it on screen and publish it online, has and continues to change the world of publishing, journalism and the media. Fast forward to today, where we’re publishing images, audio and video on the fly, sharing instagrams and using nifty apps and dashboards to connect with others in a “right now” manner. But blogging – the art of putting thoughts on screen and publishing them for others, should still be part of your overall marketing and communications strategy.

From a recent Blogosphere report, “Despite the success of other social media venues such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, blog readership has increased steadily and is expected to continue on an upward path.” Just over half of U.S. Internet users are now reading blogs at least once a month, and this percentage will climb to 60 percent in the next four years. The main drivers are the prevalence of blogs in the mainstream media, the increased use of blogs for corporate marketing and the easy-to-use personal blogging platforms.” Mainstream media is pushing this platform forward to create and publish content, generate followers, communities and fans, links, tags and relevance, faster and in real-time.

“Blogging is just a form of social media that has become a viable, respected and tremendously influential channel for all sorts of communications.”

Tired of the meaningless jargon

Blogs seem to work because deep down people want other people, such as companies, brands, or journalists, to speak their language, sans the meaningless jargon. People want to know that those they give their time, energy or business to are there with them. People want more, and blogs can give them just that. The New York Times operates around 50 public-facing blogs that are linked into and out of the paper’s coverage. There is a near seamless connection between the traditional coverage and the blog posts.

Blog with meaning

You have the ideas and expertise. You now have the ability to project them in a way that has more meaning than the static pages of your website.

Companies that truly “get” blogging and do so in a way that has meaning, increase traffic and build community, ultimately increasing sales and customer loyalty. You can use your blog to build a bridge with customers by dedicating a portion of your website to engage with people. Your people might include customers, employees, peers, competitors, or just about anyone in between that your style connects with.

It’s important to acknowledge the “connecting with” part. Blogs are personal, not corporate. People like them because they’re the fluff-removed, plug-free, stripped-down, good, bad and ugly that emanates from a voice – a standpoint that you stand behind. If you gain followers, they’re following a conversation that you’ve begun.

Since there’s a smorgasbord of people that may connect with your blog, it’s important to write a variation of posts that engage with different interests. Use your blog as an avenue to identify needs and deliver your take on solutions in a direct, personal and, well, naked fashion. You have the ability to expose the true personality and value of your brand to facilitate genuine communications, ones that conversations are made of.

A great book for further reading is called Blogging Naked: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. Although it was published 5 years ago, its discussion on how blogs, bloggers and the blogosphere are changing how businesses communicate with their consumers is still as relevant as ever, encouraging businesses about the best and most successful ways of blogging

What’s your take on the value of blogging or ways of blogging naked that work for your brand or business? Anything we’ve left out?

Christina Brown,
Creative, The Savy Agency

Drilled down to its basics, an integrated marketing campaign combines the medium, e.g., print/broadcast advertising, public relations, direct marketing, email, digital and in-store promotions, and multiple stages in a promotional campaign to ensure that the marketing message is consistently received by the greatest possible number of people in the target market

For example, a radio station has commercials as a platform, they should have a listener database with email addresses for an email blast campaign. The station can increase revenue by selling Google AdWords campaigns to its clients and managing that part of the marketing, plus they can display or video advertising platforms on their website to complete the integrated campaign….

Alan Kercinik, now at Ogilvy Public Relations, said yesterday, November 8, “Communications and marketing channels continue to converge, which means agencies need to tap diverse expertise and experience to build engaging, creative campaigns. I was attracted to the model and the team’s ability to provide clients with high-level strategic thinking, creative excellence and integrated programs.”

On Facebook, Coca-Cola has received more than 35 million “likes,” and Coke’s senior vice president of integrated marketing who oversees the social media effort, says having all those fans respond to Coke is meaningful. Letting fans be fans on Facebook, instead of turning the page into a corporate mouthpiece, has paid off, says Jedrzejewski. “People are savvy enough to know when a Facebook page is contrived and manufactured.”

My takehome for you, small to medium sized brands still working to get a foothold and engage a new type of market: “If you’ve got people who are passionate about your brand, you’re over half way there,”