Graphic Design Firms in the New Orleans Area
The most important aspect of any graphic design effort is the visual impact that your business imagery creates to the viewer. Unfortunately, many parts of New Orleans are less than photogenic for the time being, which makes the impact you can create with your company logos, product branding, signage, and marketing literature and brochures that much more crucial.
For many businesses in the New Orleans area, the way to survive the calamity of Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath has been to maintain or establish a quickly reopened storefront. Even if your business was not directly affected by the 2005 storms, the impact to business conditions as the city emptied has been felt everywhere.
Fortunately, with reconstruction well underway, the greater New Orleans area is experiencing a phenomenal rate of growth. This makes for a competitive business environment, as you work to establish your presence in New Orleans or to tell the world that you’re still open for business.
Building and maintaining a quality and reliable presence with professional marketing efforts is just one way your business can bounce back. Professional graphic design and printed material is one route to reaching your target market, which is so difficult to pinpoint with inconsistent population figures, and irregular areas of rebuilding.
Depending on what field you’re in, there well be may be a lot of potential business out there for you, if only you can reach your customer with consistent and smart marketing materials.
Your physical presence is at least as important in most areas, and much more important in some. Contracting the services of a professional graphic design firm in the New Orleans area is essential to the success of your marketing efforts.
In addition to designing sales copy with strong visual impact, good graphic design firms have ready access to all the printing, copying, and production equipment needed for a marketing campaign of any size, great or small.
When choosing a suitable graphic design firm in New Orleans, you should make sure they can organize these parts of the job too. This is one area that can easily distinguish a professional design firm from a kid working on a laptop in his Mom’s attic.
Once the design phase of your work is finished, you need to quickly and efficiently have your branding, signage, fliers, or brochures professional produced and printed.
Good firms give you the option of conducting business face to face at their company offices, over the phone, or exclusively online. One service that is often essential is the ability to send any graphics you may have available, whether they be your existing business logos or marketing images, photos of the business, or work you’ve done to your design firm by email.
This makes collaborating with the graphic designers easier and more effective, allowing you to instantly review work they’ve produced, request changes, and eventually be delivered a final product that you’re happy with before it’s finalized in print.
Professional firms should also offer estimates or quotes for work before beginning, which makes email collaboration that much more valuable. In this way, you can send your starting materials over along with more precise specifications than you may be able to do over the phone, which makes the job of the design firm staff easier, and delivers you a higher quality product.
Utilizing the services of a professional graphic design firm could make the difference between your business going unnoticed, and getting the visual edge needed to make an impact to your audience, and take full advantage of the record growth New Orleans is experiencing to catapult your business far beyond where you might otherwise land.
When you need a graphic design firm in New Orleans, you want a professional designer who is familiar with the unprecedented marketing challenges in the local area. At H & H Print, they are proud of their strong roots in New Orleans. Visit http://www.hhprint.com/
Digital Signage: Traditional Media Show More Signs of Weakness, But OOH Ad Networks May Offer Hope
More signs of the uncertain times ahead for traditional media in this country have emerged over the past few weeks.
Belo, which owns newspapers like the Dallas Morning News, the Providence Journal, and the Press Enterprise, as well as owns and operates 20 TV stations, said Oct. 1 it was splitting its holdings into two companies: The New A. H. Belo Corp., dedicated to the print properties, and Belo Corp., which will run the TV business.
Then E.W. Scripps said it would take a similar path Oct. 16 when it announced that it would break into two companies: E.W. Scripps Co., which will consist of about 20 newspapers and local television stations, and Scripps Networks Interactive, consisting of Home & Garden Television, the Food Network and Shopzilla.
At about the same time as the Scripps announcement, McClatchy Co., the third largest newspaper company in the United States, said its quarterly profits dropped 55 percent for the third quarter, a result of a weakening advertising market.
It’s clear traditional media companies are suffering a significant decline in readership and advertising lineage. Many of the dollars once spent on newspaper ads are being redirected into emerging new media like the Internet as media consumers increasingly log on to online sources to catch up on their world. Hence, companies like Belo and Scripps are separating business units into stand alone companies to cordon off the drag on their revenue and sustain shareholder value and interest.
These are among the largest media companies in the nation. If they aren’t impervious to the change brought on by new digital media, it’s unlikely other traditional media companies will be able to continue down the same path they’re on without making some course corrections along the way.
To be sure, Internet advertising is taking a sizeable bite out of the dollars once devoted to traditional newspaper, television, radio and magazine advertising. Another emerging digital media competing for its piece of the ad budget is out-of-home advertising, and more specifically out of home video advertising on digital signage networks.
In late January, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau (OVAB) formally launched with the mission of helping to provide standards and best practices for the newly emerging slice of the advertising industry. It was created by many of the largest out-of-home video advertising networks to remove impediments to the growth of the new ad medium.
One of the chief missions of the group is to help advertisers and those who run out-of-home video advertising networks work together “to plan, buy and evaluate the effectiveness of these mediums,” said Mike DiFranza, president and general manager of Captivate Network, one of the 10 companies that founded the group.
The contrast couldn’t be more apparent: On the one hand, many traditional media are scrambling to restructure so they can decouple business units with the potential to be profitable from those suffering from the re-allocation of advertising dollars to new digital media. On the other, a group like OVAB has emerged to help the fledgling medium of out-of-home video advertising build the advertising “street cred” that traditional media long ago mastered.
While it’s a long shot, perhaps there’s an opportunity for traditional media and emerging media, like out-of-home video advertising networks, to help each other. Why shouldn’t traditional media integrate out-of-home advertising networks into their media offering? Certainly, they have the ability to generate content for the medium, they have the relationships with local businesses to both sell the advertising and secure locations for new signs on the network, and they have well-established market research resources to assist in building new audience measurement metrics. Conversely, why shouldn’t emerging new advertising markets welcome the participation of tradition media, which can leverage its strengths to assist the new medium in its maturation?
David Little is a digital signage enthusiast with 20 years of experience helping professionals use technology to more effectively communicate their messages. Keywest Technology specializes in technology for digital signage. Visit http://www.keywesttechnology.com and expand your marketing horizons.
The Powers Of Advertising
Ever wondered why there are more images of attractive women, wearing very little clothing, on public display stands, than there are images of attractive men? Sometimes when I am travelling on the underground tube, I find myself staring blankly at a poster that is supposed to be advertising a new car but instead it has an unnecessary picture of a celebrity supermodel in her underwear. The new car is conveniently tucked away behind in a blur.
Tactful Images
If I am going to be completely honest most of the time, I walk pass large display stands and not even notice what had been displayed. Yet for some reason I seem to think of the image later on in the day and it continues to play on my mind for a short while. This is the power of advertising; they use subliminal messages and psychology to grab the attentions of the individual so they never forget the product and then go out to buy it whether they need it or not (in my case not!).
Often I like to see people’s reaction to specific display stands that may appear offensive to some people. The design of the display may not always be intended to cause offense, however more often than none they fall into the trap of being labelled inappropriate when they may just be ironic or humorous.
Recently I have found that displays are becoming more creative, adding colour and vibrancy entrancing passersby, causing them to stop and stare. Often I find those kinds of people most annoying especially when they stop dead in front of you, when you are clearly in a rush to get to work. Amazing how much effort these advertisers put in when trying to sell their products, most of it being absolute rubbish.
Display Designs
Display banners and stands alike are unfortunate enough to be victims of graffiti and vandalism. Take for examples the large roll-over display stands at the bus-stop, just when you actually take notice of what is being displayed some miscreant individual has spray painted some form of profanity or defamatory words. It is lucky that the posters are safe behind a thick piece of Perspex!
The best display stands are ones elaborately decorated, designed on high budget and often-digital images are those at exhibitions. The most recent exhibition I had visited was The Good Food Show in London. The event was thriving with people, catering for well-over 30,000 visitors and displaying very large poster images of our favourite chef as well as some fancy gourmet foods. I have often wondered what it would be like to see a large image of myself displayed so brightly in front of thousands of people – quite frightening the thought!
Now when I travel along the underground and stand behind other passengers on the escalators, I cannot help but notice the digital displays along the walls. Before they were print posters with chewing stuck on them, now they have added clever digital images that change every five seconds or so. They make the journey from the bottom of the escalator to the top more interesting, and vice-versa.
Poster and display enthusiast Shaun Parker looks into display stands design and the power of advertising. To find out more please visit http://www.displays-online.com/
What Is The Best Form Of Internet Advertising
Are you trying to get visitors to your website? This is known as getting traffic and it is becoming harder and harder to do because the number of competitors you have is growing everyday.
Here is the best form of internet advertising to help you come out on top.
I really want to concentrate on 2 things in this article and discuss how they tie together to affect your success.
1. Master one form of internet advertising before taking on another one.
2. Finding something you enjoy and stick to it.
Here is what I see. Bob builds a website. Not just any old website either. This is the best looking website in his niche, whatever that means. Kind of like building a restaurant in the mountains and hiring the best chef in the world to come and cook. Except you forget to tell everyone how to find you.
So it dawns on Bob that he is going to have to advertise or no one will come. He reads that ezine advertising is a good thing, so he runs an ad and does not make one sale. He is not even sure if anyone actually came to his site.
Next he hears about how people are buying 10,000 hits for $29 so he thinks this must be the best form of internet advertising. He buys the hits, gets a report showing that all 10,000 have been done and he still has not made one sale.
Now he is getting mad. He reads about how great pay per click advertising is, so without really understanding what he is doing he sets up a small campaign and gives out his credit card. Next day he wakes up and finds he has spent $500 in 12 hours to make just one sale.
We could go on and on. This is not the best way to advertise online. You are better to learn as many free or nearly free methods of promoting your business first. Then branch into paid methods as you learn what you like to do and what is working for you.
If you like to write try article marketing. If you like people try social networking and forum marketing. If you do not like to type try traffic exchanges. You will find what you enjoy and you will do more of it. As you master that then branch out.
Your business will become profitable and you will not jump around spending time and money and finally giving up and quitting.
Dr. Daniel Trainor is an established internet marketer and mentor. To find out how Dr. Trainor can help you make money from home go to http://www.friendswinbuilder.com