A social psychologist, Garner, researched the behavior of post-it notes attached to a advert. So how do you get more response by using a post-it? I’ll explain…

Of course you want to measure the responses of you marketing campaign. You don’t only want to get results from your loyal customers. No, also from your customers that aren’t that dedicated to your company. Especially this last group will respond far lesser then your loyal customers.

Social Psychologist Garner did some tests on how to get the largest percentage of your customers to respond to an marketing advert. He conducted three different mailings. One of them had a personal message written on a letter that was added to the mailing. The other one didn’t have a personal message at all and one of them had a post-it on it with a personal message.

This last one had a great impact. More then 75% of the customers responded it to that mailing. The mailing which had a personal message in the letter scored 48% and the mailing without a personal message at all got only 36% response.

Garner wasn’t convinced and did a second test. Again he did three mailings. One with a post-it and a hand written message on it, one with a blank post-it and one with no post-it at all. Again the hand written, personalized post-it mailing got the most response! 69% responded to that mailing. Only 43% responded on the mailing with the blank post-it. The mailing with no post-it at all just got 34% response.

And there were more positive effects. People responded faster then normal and did a lot of more work to even get to respond. This will work not only for mailings, but also for brochures, flyer’s and questionnaires. Try it yourself and find out the result yourself!

The university of Amsterdam conducted a research on how Magazine advertisements are read and how they can attract the reader. The results are nice to keep in kind when creating your own magazine advertisement.

The results were collected with the help of eye tracking. This way every eye movement readers had were recorded. It was possible to get an exact idea on what was looked at.

The results aren’t really that shocking. But they’re useful to use when designing that top advertisement of yours.

• The surroundings from the advertisement are important to get attention from the reader. For example, the color red on the page next to your advert will get more attention. This is also the case when there’s a lot of text on the other side. So it’s important to always ask what’s on the page next to your advert.
• It’s better to put your advertisement on the right page. It gets 8% more attention on a right page then on a left page.
• Big adverts get more attention then small ones (Yes! Really =)). If you can afford it choose the biggest size you can get. Advertisement that cover half of the page are getting 20% of the readers attention. A whole page gets 42% and a double page advertisements gets 70% of your readers attention!
• Use a lot of different colors in your design. Blue does get less attention (only 42%) then green, red or white (49%).
• A heading rule in your design get attention, use it!

So if your designing a advertisement for a magazine, it’s smart to pay attention to the things above. In short, get the biggest possible size available in the magazine next to a page with a low amount of text and no red colors on it.

During my weekly SEO activity’s I found searchengineland.com again. It’s been a while since I’d been there and thought it would be wise to look into search term researching on that specific website. Turns out they have a list with easy to use, mostly free tools for search term researching! With these tools it’s easier to get you keywords right. Below the list of tools you’ll find every article searchengineland has related to the topic!

You can find the list & articles @ http://searchengineland.com/library/search-marketing/search-marketing-search-term-research

Photo retouching is something I barely do in Photoshop. I just don’t get to starting of with. It’s one of the things however I really like to see and would like to do. So in my spare time I try as much tutorials about the topic. Of course I can’t keep those tutorials for my own good, so below you’ll find my top 10.

Professional Photo Retouch – Photoshop® CS4

Not a real tutorial, but it shows the possibilities to me and the end result is very nice.

Glamorous Glowing Model Effect on Your Image

This tutorial is short and easy. Even a beginner can do some real nice stuff after he follows this tutorial. That’s at least my opinion. With some really simple options and modifications your picture will get more glamorous.

Professional Photoshop retouching tutorial

This tutorial goes significantly deeper into the retouching. It explains to you what happens and you get to see how this guy does it.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly

Not the retouching you might think of. The techniques used however can come in handy when retouching your own photo’s. On the other side, creating these kind of compositions is a specialty on it’s own.

Create a High Clarity Photo (Dave Hill style)

Everybody knows Dave Hill, at least you should! He always creates some nice HDR photo’s. You can accomplish something similar on your own photo’s with this tutorial.

These days everybody wants to be on some kind of social media. Big company’s are jumping into it like flies on a sugar cake. And if the company itself isn’t actively participating in social media, the company’s customers and fans will. I wondered how bigger company’s use social media in their marketing and went searching. I found some really useful links that will help you to implement similar things in your own social media marketing activities.

• 25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips
  This blog asks 25 company’s, and there in-house social media marketers, what there success story’s are when looking at social media in their businesses.
• How To Promote Your Business On Social Media
  Just like the title states, how can you promote your business on social media. It provides explanations about it.
• 8 Social Media Marketing Tips for Companies
  Same as above. The blog explains what 8 things you can do to start with when beginning your social media journey.

On the 8th of June this year, we organized a kart event for all our customers. They had to race for 100 rounds, including switching between riders and of course getting some fuel in time. Afterwards there was a BBQ which closed the event.

The whole marketing around the Q4YOU! event was made by myself as you may have seen in my earlier post about the invitation. Today we finished the photo folders. We sent these afterwards every time we have a Q4YOU!. It features a DVD with all pictures from the event and some printed photo’s which are personalized for every client. Below you can find the end result. Let me know what you think of it.