Zer0 to 5ive

by

Nicole Maziarz

Being a graphic designer, there are many essential tools that I can’t live without. Outside of a computer, design software (Adobe Creative Suite), books (always filled with valuable literature and great sources of inspiration), pencils sketchpads, printer, and scanner, here are a list of “must have” tools for today’s graphic designer:

Lorem Ipsum
http://www.lipsum.com/
This dummy text is great to use in a design when the final copy hasn’t yet been approved by the client. It can give your internal team and client’s alike a good idea of what the finished product will look like even when the content is still in development. This can help speed up the client approval process.

Smashing Magazine
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
This site is filled with great articles, design tools and tips,  from today’s most innovative designers. Whether you are looking for a specific CSS3 question or just some inspiration, this site can be super handy. Be sure to favorite this site to stay up-to-date on today’s best design practices.

Psdtuts
http://psd.tutsplus.com/
If you want to practice and improve your Photoshop skills, this site/blog has incredible tutorials that take you step-by-step in creating great graphics. The site is filled with detailed tutorials, free guides and more. Designers should be constantly improving their Photoshop skills and this site can be a fantastic tutor.

Art Directors Tool Kit
http://www.code-line.com/software/artdirectorstoolkit5/
Just recently, my creative director introduced me to this amazing design tool. It was so helpful and saved me a great deal of time when searching Pantone swatches for color palettes I was creating for a new logo design.  It includes swatch libraries, layout tools and many other solutions for all the hurdles designers are expected to leap each day.

These tools can help you grow as a designer, share this with your team  and creative coworkers today and stay tuned for more tips on making the most of your creative projects.

Nicole is a Graphic Designer at Zer0 to 5ive

Zer0 to 5ive recently added another award to our extensive list of accolades. This time it was the industry coveted PRSA Silver Anvil! Considered the icon of best public relations practices, the Silver Anvil is awarded annually to organizations that meet the highest standards of performance in the industry. Symbolizing the forging of public opinion, the Silver Anvil recognizes successful programs that incorporate sound research, planning, execution and evaluation.

0to5 won this year’s Silver Anvil in Integrated Communications in recognition of their work on CashEdge.Inc’s innovative “Popmoney” campaign.

The campaign was a tremendous success exceeding all goals and ultimately resulting in tremendous media coverage, seven new customers and a pipeline of hundreds of prospects. The campaign achieved more than 250+ million media impressions, including more than 150 articles, 25 interviews, 5,000+ release postings, 85+ tweets and retweets.

Our special thanks goes out to CashEdge Inc. and everyone who helped make this campaign such a smashing success!

By the Zer0 to 5ive Team

by Katie Cannon

Creating a website can be a fun and inspiring project, but can also become a headache if the right steps are not taken. Having an online presence is more important than ever. With more individuals beginning the buying cycle online, an easily findable, informative ans functional website can make a world of difference.

At Zer0 to 5ive, we find developing an effective website is a tightrope walk between creativity and delivering up to the standards mandated by your client. Remember you have been hired by your client and the ultimate creative vision is their’s. This does not mean you cannot be creative or engaging. Communicate the client’s key messages in a professional, yet original and innovative way will help set your site apart from the millions of other .coms in the space.

Here are a few tips I have learned from experience that can help you take your website development to a new level:

• Connect with your client. Get into their mind – what are they looking for? What image and message do they want their website to convey about their company? Connecting with the client from the start is crucial – getting on the same creative page as your client will save you countless headaches down the road and make each stage of design, development and implementation a breeze. Ask them for sample art, photos and other sites to draw inspiration from

• Luckily, there are millions of new Web 2.0 features available for free to no cost. Investigate what features and widgets would help you best achieve your client’s goals. Think about what you can provide to your client that will keep visitors engages. What can you present that will make your client standout in the marketplace? How can you help give your client the WOW factor? Consider social media, embedded videos, click to chat, rss feeds blogs… the list goes on and on.

• Your home or landing page is the first page a consumer sees and without engagement, site visitors will quickly abandoned the site. This is why creativity is so important. Being able to engage or interest the visitor immediately will go a long way. Think outside the box and have fun with the design. Yet, keep in mind that the website should still come across professional, clean and innovative.

• Communicate with your client. Make sure you understand what they want and how they want it done. Website development is a long process – not having a set communication method will only make the process longer. A timeline is crucial during the site launch preparation. Have weekly update meetings to ensure you and your clients are on the same page and creating a friendly repartee with clients can help plant the seeds for future working opportunities.

• Keep it search-friendly. Now-a-day’s an overwhelming number of consumers search through today’s major search engines. If you are building your site in an outdated language implementing other elements that impede search engine rankings, your site will be impossible to find, this means you are missing out on some major dollars! Come download our FREE SEO white paper to learn more about how you can garner visibility on search engine result pages.

• Provide ongoing customer service – it’s all about the experience, and working well together. Your job is not done after launch. A good web-development team will continue to be on hand to assist with any potential bugs, upgrades or staff difficulties.

• Double check all of your work! No website should ever be launched without making sure all your i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed! Use all the resources available to you to proofread site content. Provide internal links to appropriate pages and be sure that every page can be found every time.

If you understand the importance of communicating and connecting with your client, then you should have no problem designing and launching a website together successfully!

Katie Cannon is a Marketing Strategist ant Zer0 to 5ive

by Michael Levey

At Zer0 to 5ive our “out of the box” strategic thinking has really made an impact in our media coverage.  Most recently, it was pitching reporters with briefing times.  We’ve grown accustomed to getting great news from clients less than 24 hours before the news will go live (i.e. a Fujtsu announcement that reached our radar in February right at the start of a 26 inch snowstorm!).   And finding out at the last moment presents a challenge for sending the “last minute” press release to the typical reporter on deadline with two stories and sifting through 47 incoming pitches.

Instead of relying on the press release to reach the reporter, the Zer0 to 5ive team re-forwarded its original emails with the press release to reporters with specific dates and times for a quick 15 minute briefing – no long emails, no deadlines and no demands that the reporter must write a story.  The end result: 11 interviews scheduled within a 24 hour period including PC Mag and even a television personality who has agreed to feature our client in a segment later this month. Our client deserves a special shout out: the CEO’s willingness to share his schedule made this process a smooth one. That’s another great thing about our work – building mutually beneficial relationships with our clients and the media.

We spoke with PC Mag’s Managing Editor Eric Griffith who offered insight into the value of pitching briefing times. “Any time pitches for a briefing can include a variety of times to pick from for a quick phone briefing, that’s always preferred, especially if it comes well ahead of an embargo date/time,” said Griffith.  “It’s no guarantee, but it’s nice to know our time is seen as valuable (and busy).”  We’ve found that most (if not all) reporters who accept briefings write something, whether it is an article or blog post.  Sometimes taking that initial pressure off a reporter to write immediately does the trick. It gives your client a chance to show off a great personality while fostering a longer term relationship with the reporter – and lets all parties in Northern climates enjoy those 26 inches of snow!

Michael Levey is a Senior Strategist at Zer0 to 5ive

Image courtesy of Zer0 to 5ive

by Marybeth Sheppard

Congratulations to our client, Airclic, for the recent launch of their new website and corporate strategy.

Airclic develops mobile software products that dramatically improve the performance of an organization’s supply chain, logistics and field services operations. Airclic’s products save time, money and improve customer satisfaction.

Earlier this year, Airclic saw the opportunity to take advantage of SaaS-based solutions to further drive adoption of mobile software. Their recent launch includes the first of several SaaS-based products.

This marks a major milestone for Airclic and will be an instrumental element for building and sustaining considerable growth and success. With Zer0 to 5ive’s help, Airclic was able to create a new and engaging brand image, promote their core technology to multiple markets and tell a more compelling story.

See for yourself at www.airclic.com

Marybeth is a Principal at Zer0 to 5ive

By Kathleen Fusco

Surveys are an excellent way to gather information about customers and prospects in an intelligent and organized manner. Great surveys have clear objectives, deliver accurate and helpful insight and are a valid representation of the larger target audience.

Below are three aspects of ensuring a successful survey:

1. Outline your survey objectives.

It is important that you are precise about what information you are trying gain from your survey. Sometimes when an organization does a survey, other departments start to chime in with questions they want answers to. Stay focused and specific. Talk to the folks in your organization who will be using the data and align your objectives to meet their needs.

Here are some examples of bad survey objectives:
o What are customers thinking about
o Why don’t prospects respond to our marketing efforts
o Maybe we should explore different vertical markets

Good survey objectives:
o Identify the top three concerns our customers have with their service
o Determine the need for extended customer service hours
o Validate our new product features

Once you have your objectives, you can determine if a survey is the best way to get this information. Try to answer your questions through secondary research first. This will help you develop more informed questions and may even provide answers to some of your questions.

2. Survey people whose opinions count.

Make sure that the audience you are polling is your primary target audience. Too often, surveys ask for job title and screen out respondents who are actually your targets. For example, a technology company looking to survey decision makers might only look for CIOs to answer their survey. This is often not the best strategy because they may be excluding decision makers at prospective organizations who don’t hold the title “CIO”, but are still key influencers or buyers.

To make sure you are surveying the appropriate people, ask what their role is in making decisions. So in the example of a tech company looking for decision makers, you might ask questions like:

Please indicate your role in making technology-purchasing decisions for your organization:
I do not play a role (Screen out)
I support decision making (Potentially screen out)
I am responsible for technology purchasing decisions
I make recommendations for technology purchases

3. Ask objective questions in an appropriate order.

In order to ensure your survey is effective, begin with screening questions to route irrelevant people out of the survey. After these, drop in open-ended questions. It is best to have these early on when the surveyor is most alert. This helps avoid “annoying” respondents with asking open-ended questions later on in the survey. Obviously, sometimes this cannot be avoided, but the beginning is a great time to ask a question like: “What, if anything, do you like about xyz?” Getting these opinions early is vital as later questions may influence their original thoughts.

At this point, asking more general questions is a good strategy. These questions can then branch into specific questions depending on how they responded to the general questions. This requires “skip” patterns, which can be applied easily in a online software platforms like Zoomerang.

Follow these specific questions with more demographical questions to profile the respondents, allowing you to cross-tabulate and compare responses. It is a smart strategy to ask these questions at the end of the survey because they are more tedious and at times intrusive.

Lastly, it is always good to ask for final comments and the permission to follow up on a specific item or topic from the survey.

Points to Remember

Sloppy questions will lead to sloppy data. Make sure that your audience isn’t able to determine your view on a specific topic and avoid leading questions like: “What do you like about xyz?” It is better to say “what, if anything, do you like?”

Avoid asking confusing questions like “How would you rank our support and product?”

When asking questions that require a scale, respondents overwhelmingly prefer labeled scales. These also have greater reliability. Five- and 7-point scales have been proven to have the greatest reliability and validity.

Surveys are extremely effective tools for marketing and communications programs. The data revealed in a survey can help support public relations, thought leadership and innovation within an organization. Doing it right the first time will save you time, money and effort.

Kathleen Fusco is a Senior Strategist at 0to5

Marketing has its March Madness that is almost as crazy and exciting as basketball’s. March is the month that the numbers start to matter: Are we meeting sales projections for the first quarter? Is our PR working? Are our leads real? Are our communities engaged? Has our product launch worked?

At Zer0 to 5ive we work hard to establish metrics for the work we do – it’s in our best interest and our clients. We often use the end of March as the time to evaluate the strategies and tactics that we have implemented. It’s easy to adjust strategy, take advantage of the things that are working and try new ideas. Measurement and flexibility go hand in hand. Ultimately, marketing and communications is about conditioning the environment for sales and customer loyalty. Those are metrics that you can take to the bank!

Here are a few of the things you can measure and some ideas of how you can measure them:

• PR – perception, message pick up, volume/awareness, quality of coverage, leads (occasionally)
• Direct mail – leads
• Email – opens, click-throughs, quality of list, leads
• Advertising – leads, visits to web site or calls
• Social media – re-tweets, volume, engagement, interest, buzz
• SEO – rankings

Michelle Pujadas is the Founder and C0-CEO of Zer0 to 5ive

I was recently asked to answer that question as part of an article that ran in the NY Report — and as you might guess, the answer is “it depends.”

Web sites run the gamut from strictly brochure-ware with little interaction to fully interactive, highly complex data gathering entities. At the heart of every web site development, however, are the questions: what are my objectives and who is my audience.

Check out the article written by my friend and former boss and mentor, Paul McKeon. Also, don’t forget to download our SEO white paper, so that you can get maximum “bang” for your online “buck”!

NY Report: The Cost of a Small Business Website

Post by Zer0 to 5ive CEO Michelle Pujadas

As more and more magazines, newspapers and trade publications move into the digital space, public relation firms can leverage SEO tactics to gain greater exposure for their clients.

Journalists and bloggers are using search engines and tweeting and blogging today’s hottest topics. The majority of online content is redistributed content; bloggers and online writers find content and re-post or rehash it. This means that making your PR materials SEO friendly can help you generate continued pick-up online and gain your clients further exposure.

For many traditional public relation firms, SEO may be a new challenge. However, it’s one that must be adopted for greatest success. Here is broad overview of the components that make a press release SEO friendly. Look for future blog posts that dive deeper into each of these areas and download our free SEO Guide to maximize your search presence.

Select Smart Keywords: What are the key search terms that are relevant to your content or your client? Choose 3 or 4 terms that are most relevant to the piece. Keywords with higher search volume are more competitive and harder to rank for, so be selective of the keywords you want to target. Including geo-specific terms can help you eliminate competition. For example, “Philadelphia PR Firm”, “Philadelphia Online Marketing”, or “PA Integrated Marketing” would be targeted terms that Zer0 to 5ive would like to have visibility for. The term “Public Relations” has a far larger scope but may be too competitive to rank for.

Include Keywords: Once you select the best search terms for your content, include them in the piece as much as possible without detracting from the piece’s clarity. Including the phrase verbatim in the title is key, as this title will often have an H1 Tag (an html component in the copy of a webpage) and be included in the Title Tag (html code that displays at the top of a webpage)once brought onto other website domains.

If your client posts the release to their website, be sure to tell their IT team to include the keyword phrases in their Title Tags, Description Tags, and Keyword Tags. Also tell the programmer to use header tags in the copy when the phrase is used. Provide the piece in plain html; do not use it as a PDF or image. This will help search engines see what words you are relevant for.

Use Links: Including links in your materials can be a savvy SEO practice. When you use a keyword in the body of the press release, hyperlink it back to the client’s website. When the content is picked up on a new URL, this link will help boost the SEO of your client’s website.

You can even link the article to itself if it is hosted on the client’s website. Again it is important to be selective. Covering your materials with links can detract from the flow of the piece and make it look spammy. Linking in a boiler plate or author bio section is a good technique for maintaining your credibility and gaining an SEO edge.

Utilize Linking Resources: If you have a Facebook page, Twitter account or blog, include a keyword rich link to the article once it is hosted on the client’s website. For example: Zer0 to 5ive PR Firm Tackles SEO. Remember to use keywords in the anchor text.

All of these tactics can help your piece make its way onto search engine result pages. Use the checklist below and look out for future posts that explain these components in full-detail. Keep all of these tips and the checklist below in mind for your next release and let Google do some pitching for you!

SEO Checklist

• Research keywords for your target audience/subject matter

• Select 3-4 keywords or phrases to target in the release

• Add these keywords to your release title and sub-titles (Header tags if possible)

• Add keywords strategically within the body of your release

• Add 3-4 links that point to the client’s website, by hyper linking a targeted keyword (this can be done in the body of the release or in the boilerplates)

• Have links pointing to the content from any blog or social media outlet available

Post by Zer0 to 5ive’s SEO Strategist Ryan Purtill

The start of every year brims with opportunities for great marketing and results. Here are some key take-aways from 2009 as we move into 2010.

Key Marketing Take-Aways From 2009

1. Your message and brand fundamentals are as critical as ever

2. The addition of a multitude of new channels via social media only means that it is more important than ever to understand who your audience is and where they get their information

3. The press release is not dead – in fact it is more versatile and useful than ever before

4. SEO is critical, but it must be aligned with traditional marketing strategies

5. Customers and prospects still love – and react to – great creative in all its forms

6. Customers will tell you what you want to know if you ask the right questions

7. In an age of electronic communications, a phone call or hand-written note goes a long way. Along those lines, bulky direct mail gets opened

8. Despite the decline of print media, nothing makes a client more excited than seeing their name in print

9. A great customer reference is invaluable

10. Measurement in all its forms continues to be a challenge – but it can be done and with the growth of web analytic, instant metrics are becoming an industry standard.

And, as always, an integrated strategic communications plan that takes into account all facets of marketing and public relations always delivers the best results! Begin 2010 with a resolution to make your marketing count.

Post by Zer0 to 5ive CEO Michelle Pujadas