Marketing – Kindling

Product photography lighting techniques for beginners

Alright, Let’s shed some light (pun absolutely intended) on the wild and wonderful world of product photography lighting. We’re about to embark on a journey that’ll take your content from “meh” to “marvelous” faster than you can say “cheese!” (Unless you’re actually photographing cheese, in which case, maybe say “smartphone!” instead.)

First, picture this: It’s 2011, and I’m trying to photograph a client’s new line of… wait for it… glow-in-the-dark garden gnomes. (Yes, that’s a thing. No, I don’t know why anyone needs a luminous lawn ornament, but here we are.) I thought, “Hey, they glow in the dark, so I’ll just turn off all the lights and snap away!”

The result? A bunch of blurry, green blobs that looked more like evidence of alien activity than sellable product photos.

Turns out, even glow-in-the-dark products need proper lighting. Who knew?

So, how do you light your products so they look better than a supermodel on a good hair day? Well, grab your favourite caffeinated beverage (or a glass of wine, I don’t judge), and let’s dive into some lighting techniques that’ll make your products shine brighter than a diamond in a coal mine!

How To Enhance Your Design Studio’s Brand

There are certain businesses that, given the nature of the marketplace they are in, rely more on their branding than on others, and with furniture design studios being in a sector where image plays a huge role, branding is certain to be important. There are many ways to enhance your branding, and if you follow the advice of professional web designers, digital marketing is one of the most effective.

Digital marketing is often associated more with online sales and promoting businesses online, and whilst they certainly are important goals of a digital marketing campaign they are not the only ones. In fact, if you consider that your brand influences potential clients offline, you will recognize that digital marketing can enhance your offline activities immensely. Here are 5 actions that will ensure your digital marketing promotes and augments your brand.

Be Proactive In Seeking Positive Reviews And Testimonials

The internet has changed the ways people buy products enormously. Now, potential customers carry out far more research online than ever before with regard to what they are buying, and crucially, on any company they are considering buying from. That means they look for reviews so one of your priorities to boost your brand and reputation must be to ask your satisfied clientele to post reviews and testimonials on your website and other websites.

Pillars Of An Effective Content Strategy

While creating and publishing content on your website is better than producing no content at all, simply writing blog posts randomly and when it is convenient to do so, is not a strategy that is going to bring many positive SEO results.

Professional SEO companies advise that for your content to have all the positive impacts on your SEO, and the subsequent improvement in your search engine rankings, it needs to be done in a way, that very few other website owners would ever think of implementing.

That way is structured, has end goals, works for your audience, and not just the search engines, and it can be monitored to see if any changes to it have to be made. It consists of 4 components or pillars as we like to call them because they form the cornerstones for your content to be effective and bring results. Here are those 4 pillars…

7 Benefits Of Marketing Your Family Lawyers Business Online

Unless you are in the fortunate, and we dare say, a unique position, that your family lawyers business does not need any new clients, we assume you have some means of attracting prospects. What form that may take will differ somewhat between each family lawyers business, but one which must be considered by all of them is online marketing.

Given the huge expansion in the use of the internet over the past 20 years, coupled with mobile devices now giving access to the internet, any business which does not use online marketing is denying itself a huge commercial opportunity, and that includes family lawyers. Also, any family lawyers business which does not use online marketing is missing out on several benefits, such as the seven which are listed below.

Increased Revenue

It must surely follow that with a properly researched and implemented online marketing campaign, creating a greater number of prospects and generating higher conversion rates, the revenue produced by your family lawyers business will increase accordingly.

Improved Targeting Of Your Ideal Prospects

Several channels that you could use for an online marketing campaign allow you to target an audience that matches the exact demographics of those you seek as new clients. Whether that be by age, marital status, income, or location, rather than the almost zero targeting that some marketing has, e.g. newspaper ads, your online marketing will be seen only by those who are most likely to become clients.

Marketing by Making Decisions

We spend a lot of time working with our Kindling customers to help them build sustainable innovation programs. And no matter how creative or how forward-thinking the organizations we work with prove to be, time and time again we see that the single biggest predictor of success is management’s active commitment to the program.

Active commitment can be best demonstrated by actively making decisions around participants’ contributions. And we’ve found that by communicating these decisions is the best marketing for the program itself.

Show and Tell
We always emphasize that an internal marketing effort can make a huge difference for the program. On a basic level, this means selecting a name for the program, establishing a visual language, creating posters and other giveaways, and offering encouragement and rewards. The goal for this generalized marketing of the innovation program is to make sure that the participants, who are invariably super-busy, know that the program exists and what the goals and expectations are for participating. We think of this as the broadcasting of a mass message, or as general advertising for your program.

Drive Your Social Media Content with Kindling

At Kindling we use the Kindling application to discuss and evaluate potential product features, to address engineering issues, to develop strategic goals,—we’ve even opened up a Category to our customers so that they can contribute their ideas to the development of the Kindling application. Nice. And we use Kindling to cultivate our brand and develop marketing ideas, including social media content.

Every organization can use Kindling to develop a workflow of ideas for social media which the entire company can participate in. This is how we did it.

Beginning earlier this year one of our key efforts in marketing has been to systematically generate meaningful content that could be useful to people concerned with innovation and tasked with running an innovation program, for which our software is elegantly useful. In this interest I wanted to simplify and make our Twitter content more coherent while providing clear channels for our people to contribute to. I identified 3 hashtags (for these channels) for us to use:

#kindlingapp, about the company and product, including writings about Kindling in relation to innovation best practices;
#kindlingtips, for tips on how to use Kindling, especially in relation to an innovation program, culled from Kindling Academy and our Best Practices guides;
and #kindlingreads.

Design as Mission

Design Not Decoration
Design has been “misconstrued as decoration or as an embellishment.”  —Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator and Director of Research and Development, MoMA, in an interview.

It happens in many fields—whether in the production of a brochure, the renovation of an interior, or the building of an application feature—that “design” is often brought late to the table to prettify, decorate, or add “touch and feel” to something that was always already designed. Because the moment you begin to lay out the content, structure, and form of something, you are engaged in the act of design whether you know it or not and whether or not you are any good at it.

Bringing someone in later, after key decisions are made, someone with special competence in doing those things, to fix or make look good the outcome of those decisions, will almost always waste time, lead to deep frustration, and ultimately make it difficult to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish in the first place. Because design is about all those decisions, and making them at the right time—design is not “decorative sauce poured on top of content” (to paraphrase the photographer Stephen Shore).

What’s New in Kindling?

We’re working towards some great new features that will ship later this year, but I wanted to review some of the new capabilities that we’ve added to Kindling in the last few months. These features were a collaborative effort between our Product & Development Teams and our customers. We hope you like them!

Support for Media on Posts
We continue to make additions to Kindling for decision-makers to make it easier for users of Kindling to share media of any type in the application. With this week’s release you can now attach any media to Posts and multiple files to a Post, just as you’ve been able to do for Ideas.

This allows you to share that PDF, add images or take a video of your CIO describing the cost savings from the latest implemented idea.

A New Idea for Marketers: Learn from Your Development Team

I spent most of last week at HubSpot’s Inbound conference in Boston. It was an inspiring series of speakers, presentations, and sessions with action items that I plan to implement at Kindling over the next few months. I left fired up about our marketing program and the ways to use HubSpot (and yes, I’ve already put the dates for next year’s Inbound conference in my calendar).

Do you remember the enthusiastic telemarketers who called around dinner time in the ‘90s announcing “This is a courtesy call from Company X?” When we were growing up, my brother and I used to call these interruptions “discourtesy calls” and as soon our family got callerID, we stopped answering them. The Do Not Call list limited this form of telemarketing in 2003, and Inbound highlighted that it’s not just telemarketing that’s over – we’re moving away from all unsolicited “interruption” marketing. Today’s consumers are accustomed to finding the information they want, when they want it, and Marketers need to use the data we can now collect about our customers to provide them with the right solution for their needs, formatted for the device of their choice.