How do you choose your events?

As a marketer you are more than surely going to attend some events at some point in your career. It is quite possible that you will also have to organize events, or at least manage your company's participation at an event. Events are a great way to promote your company's services and products, reinforce your brand, find a new audience, or even just network with like minded people.

So let's look at what types of events are out there and how to find the best fit for you.

Four types of events to attend

• Trade shows: These are the most commonly attended events from most companies. Usually organized by type of industry, trade shows are a great way to showcase your latest products, benchmark your competition and get new leads.


• Conferences: Conferences are slightly different from trade shows, consisting mainly of speeches given by industry professionals. The benefits there are more about education and networking, and for the speakers to show their expertise on a particular subject. Conferences are often tied in with trade shows, with exhibitors having some of their staff deliver a speech.


• Workshops: As much as a conference can be quite passive for a participant (visitor), a workshop is a much more practical event, where small groups of people sit in a room to work on a particular subject.


• Gala dinners and sponsoring events: This is quite a different type of event but something that can work very well in a local community to increase your company's exposure. Be a sponsor in an Awards ceremony, or sponsor a local sports event - but make sure you don't just put a logo on a banner, try to be at the event and participate in some way.

How to add simple text to a photo with Photoshop

In this very short video tutorial, I show you how to add text on top of your images using Photoshop, and how to change the color of the text or resize it.

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3 simple ways to convert your photos to black and white with Photoshop

Black and white photos have something very appealing when done right. Not every photo is suited to be converted to black and white, but when you want your image to stand out in the middle of other colorful messages, using a black and white photo can be a good idea.



In this short video tutorial I show you three simple ways to convert a photo to black and white with Photoshop.

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Basic Photoshop skills: resizing, rotating and cropping photos

Have you ever taken a beautiful photo in a place that you really loved, only to realize later on that your finger was on the camera and that part of the photo was hidden? I did that on holiday, taking a photo of the beach from my towel, only to realize that my knee was on the way.

Luckily, we can crop photos and remove areas we don't want to appear.

Today I am going to show you how to crop a photo with Adobe Photoshop, but also how to rotate the photo to suit a better angle and resize it to the dimensions you need.

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Cropping is a very important feature, and you should always try a few variations of the original photo by cropping certain areas.

How to find beautiful illustrations without ruining yourself

I talked about where to find stunning photos for your marketing material, but illustrations can add a nice touch to your publications and can help explain concepts better than photos. There are different types of illustrations that you can use, for example, cartoon-like drawings, vector images or even icons. I'll give you some ideas of where to find some, but first, I want to explain what a vector image is.

How to find stunning photos for your marketing material

If you want to add some photos on your publications, wether online or printed, you basically have three options to source them:

1. Finding free photos on the web

As we’ve seen before, you need to be careful when using images on your site and make sure that you are allowed to do so. Don’t just google images and choose the ones you like, it might get you into serious trouble.

If you are looking for photos, I’ll give you two reliable sources for finding stunning images for FREE on the web.

Understanding Copyrights on images

A picture is worth a thousand words, we all know that. The web is becoming more and more visual, so our thirst for using images on our sites is growing. But if you want to use photos or illustrations on your website, or any other marketing material, you need to by careful and check that you have the rights to use these images, otherwise you might get into trouble.Typically, an image is either in the public domain, i.e. anyone can use it for free, or it has some kind of usage restrictions defined by the author (the photographer or illustrator).

Using check lists to manage your work

Ever since I started working, I've always been a big fan of To Do lists. I find that if I put things down on paper, and out of my brain, it relaxes me as I know that I don't have to constantly remind myself that I need to do XYZ. But over the years, I changed the way I managed my lists a few times, regularly changing my method, testing it for a while and changing it again to see if I could find something better.

The art of self education

I am a big believer in self education and continuous learning. In fact I already talked about it in a previouspost. I was blessed to have a great education and obtain both a marketing and engineering degree but I value what I've learned by myself even more.

What we learn at school is useful, but we're young when we study. Often we are not sure what we want to do with our lives and we don't have enough experience to understand the fullness of what is taught. Our working life is so long when we compare it to our studies, it would not make sense to completely give up on education at that stage.

photo credit: Mike Rohde via photopin cc

How to love Monday Morning

Are you one of these persons who struggle to get up in the morning and hate going back to work on Mondays after a nice weekend ? I used to be like that, but I changed and now I actually enjoy monday mornings. I really do.

Does this conversation sound familiar to you? "hello, how are you this morning? Oh, you know, like a Monday Morning".

photo credit: ♥KatB Photography♥ via photopin cc

Design trends: understanding responsive web design

I'm not a professional web designer, and I don't expect you to be one either, nor to be very technically aware on the subject. But if you are a serious marketer, you need to understand some basics around web design, and stay aware of trends. Digital is growing very fast, in particular for mobile and tablets, and this changes everything in the way we access content online. So it is crucial that your site reacts well on these devices - one thing that responsive websites do.

What is responsive web design?

Here is the definition from Wikipedia: "Responsive Web Design" is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience - easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling - across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones)".

In other words, when your website is responsive, it will adapt itself to the type of device used by the reader: menu elements might go from a horizontal alignment to a vertical one, images will scale themselves, etc.. It all happens in a very dynamic way without the viewer needing to scale anything or click a button to access the mobile version of the site.

Perform a health check of your website in 5 steps

Whether your website has been around for 6 months or 8 years, it is important that you regularly review its performance, to know what can be improved or what needs to be changed. There are several ways of assessing the quality and the effectiveness of your website, and I will give you 5 simple steps to do so:

1. Review your website statistics with Google Analytics

The first thing you can do to know how your site is doing is to look at your statistics. This step can be very quick and will give you a really good idea of your performance: how much traffic you get, which content is worth publishing, etc..

2. View your site as a first timer

When we spend a lot of time working on something, we usually become blind of a few details. How many times have you written a short note only to realize once you sent it that there was a major typo in it? With the same approach, try to put yourself in the shoes of a new visitor, and note everything that you experience and feel as you browse the site. Do you struggle to find the menu, are there too many clicks to go from one section to another, is the site really slow to load, etc..?

3. Review your objectives

You don't have a website just because it's a trend to be on the web. Your website is a great tool to promote your company or your brand, it's here to work for you, it has some clear objectives to reach: increase the number of leads, help sell a book, etc.. Review your objectives and see if there are any actions you can take today to reach them faster. For example, if the main objective of your site was to get people to register to your newsletter, but your list is not growing well, you might want to declutter your site and make this one call to action very obvious on the site "register to our newsletter".

4. Check your social performance

Statistics are a great way to check how well your site is doing, but interactions from your readers are just as valuable. If you added some social sharing buttons on your site, check how many times people shared your content. Which pages are shared most? That will tell you the type of content they like. Also look at the number of comments on your blog if you have one, never forget to read through them. Conversations that happen there are often just as interesting as the post itself.

5. Don't forget the design

Design to me is still a very important part of the equation. I get turned down immediately when I land on an ugly site, or one that looks like the sites we created years ago. Not everyone is like me, but it pays to review your design and keep it tidy, modern and in line with your branding. After all, it's well accepted that the state of your reception area says a lot about your office, so what about your website? You send a strong message there if you don't put any effort in your site's look and feel.

So roll up your sleeves, get to work on your site, and let me know what you find out!

You can't manage what you can't measure

I've heard a lot of people use this quote lately: "You can't manage what you can't measure", and you have to agree that it makes perfect sense, in particular for something that you can measure easily, like the performance of your website.

The question is what to measure exactly, or how do you define performance? I guess it depends on your objectives, which by the way I hope you already set for your website.

Here are some things your can measure easily:

• Unique visitors: How many people come to your site every day?


• Page views: How many pages have been viewed on your site?


• Average duration: How long do your visitors stay on your site? You might have hundreds come in on one day, but if they stay 20s and leave it might mean that they arrived there by mistake or didn't like what they saw.


• Top pages: Which pages on your site get the most visits?


• Sources: Does your traffic come from search engines or from referrals?


• Keywords: What are people searching when land on your site?

With that in mind, I was amazed a couple of months ago at work when I met one of our web agencies and they told me that they never configured Google Analytics for our site. Or any other tool. Shocking.

So if you don't have any tool installed yet to analyze the stats of your website, I suggest you take action today and install Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool graciously offered by Google to help you check the performance statistics of your website.


If you don't want to get in the technical details of the installation, or if you don't have access to the back engine of your site, you can ask your agency to do it for you. Then all you need to do is create an account with Google and login with Google Analytics. But make sure you know what's happening with your site.

Question: Do you measure your website statistics? Which tool do you use?

 

Top 5 websites to learn Adobe Indesign

This week I've been talking about Adobe Indesign, a desktop publishing software from the Adobe suite that I love very much. If you're new to the tool and want to learn the basics, then I can recommend these 5 resources:

Adobe Indesign website: Help and Tutorials

The first place to check would be the actual Adobe website, in their help menu. The community is well developed there and you can find a regular help menu, text and video tutorials, FAQs, and community support.

VectorTuts

I've already mentioned this website when I talked about Photoshop because this site is a gold mine. I've been following its tutorials for years and really came to love their network of sites (they have sites for tutorials, templates, stock images, etc). If you're looking for Indesign tutorials, then head to the category Tutorials > Layout, and you'll have more than enough. There is also the option to pay a membership fee to have access to some premium content, but I already struggle to keep up with the free articles!

Layers Magazine

Layers Magazine is also a nice website I've been browsing for a while. When you land on it you can immediately notice the Adobe icons and choose which one interests you, so in this case Indesign.

Lynda

If you're serious about learning Indesign, then you might want to consider Lynda. Lynda is a membership site where you can learn almost anything (be it web, business or design) from video tutorials. I've never tried it but it seems very comprehensive.

Youtube

Finally, I don't think you can avoid going to Youtube with its thousands of videos. Just search for Indesign tutorials and you'll have more than enough. The only thing is to find quality videos there, so look at the number of views a video has, or find a channel with plenty of videos on the same subject.