A brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers. Therefore it makes sense to understand that branding is not about getting your target market to choose you over the competition, but it is about getting your prospects to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem.

The objectives that a good brand will achieve include:

• Delivers the message clearly
• Confirms your credibility
• Connects your target prospects emotionally
• Motivates the buyer
• Concretes User Loyalty

To succeed in branding you must understand the needs and wants of your customers and prospects. You do this by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact.

Your brand resides within the hearts and minds of customers, clients, and prospects. It is the sum total of their experiences and perceptions, some of which you can influence, and some that you cannot.

A strong brand is invaluable as the battle for customers intensifies day by day. It's important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all your brand is the source of a promise to your consumer. It's a foundational piece in your marketing communication and one you do not want to be without.

Very simply put, eMarketing or electronic marketing refers to the application of marketing principles and techniques via electronic media and more specifically the Internet.

The terms eMarketing, Internet marketing and online marketing, are frequently interchanged, and can often be considered synonymous. eMarketing is the process of marketing a brand using the Internet. It includes both direct response marketing and indirect marketing elements and uses a range of technologies to help connect businesses to their customers. By such a definition, eMarketing encompasses all the activities a business conducts via the worldwide web with the aim of attracting new business, retaining current business and developing its brand identity.

Why is it important?

When implemented correctly, the return on investment (ROI) from eMarketing can far exceed that of traditional marketing strategies. Whether you’re a “bricks and mortar” business or a concern operating purely online,the Internet is a force that cannot be ignored. It can be a means to reach literally millions of people every year. It’s at the forefront of a redefinition of way businesses interact with their customers.

The benefits of eMarketing over traditional marketing

Reach
The nature of the internet means businesses now have a truly global reach. While traditional media costs limit this kind of reach to huge multinationals, eMarketing opens up new avenues for smaller businesses, on a much smaller budget, to access potential consumers from all over the world.

Scope
Internet marketing allows the marketer to reach consumers in a wide range of ways and enables them to offer a wide range of products and services. eMarketing includes, among other things, information management, public relations, customer service and sales. With the range of new technologies becoming available all the time, this scope can only grow.

Interactivity
Whereas traditional marketing is largely about getting a brand’s message out there, eMarketing facilitates conversations between companies and consumers. With a twoway communication channel, companies can feed off of the responses of their consumers, making them more dynamic and adaptive.

Immediacy
Internet marketing is able to, in ways never before imagined, provide an immediate impact. Imagine you’re reading your favourite magazine. You see a double-page advert for some new product or service, maybe BMW’s latest luxury sedan or Apple’s latest iPod offering. With this kind of traditional media, it’s not that easy for you, the consumer, to take the step from hearing about a product to actual acquisition.

With eMarketing, it’s easy to make that step as simple as possible, meaning that within a few short clicks you could have booked a test drive or ordered the iPod. And all of this can happen regardless of normal office hours. Effectively, Internet marketing makes business hours 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for every week of the year.

By closing the gap between providing information and eliciting a consumer reaction, the consumer’s buying cycle is speeded up and advertising spend can go much further in creating immediate leads.

Adaptivity and closed loop marketing
Closed Loop Marketing requires the constant measurement and analysis of the results of marketing initiatives. By continuously tracking the response and effectiveness of a campaign, the marketer can be far more dynamic in adapting to consumers’ wants and needs.

With eMarketing, responses can be analysed in real-time and campaigns can be tweaked continuously. Combined with the immediacy of the Internet as medium, this means that there’s minimal advertising spend wasted on less than effective campaigns.

Maximum marketing efficiency from eMarketing creates new opportunities to seize strategic competitive advantages. The combination of all these factors results in an improved ROI and ultimately, more customers, happier customers and an improved bottom line.

SOURCE OF ARTICLE : eMarketing 101 PDF

Dynamic, Web and Marketing

DYNAMIC WEB PAGE:

A classic web page design using only HTML or XHTML, provides static content, meaning that a page retrieved by different users at different times is always the same, in the same form.

However, a web page can also provide a live user experience. Content (text, images, form fields, etc.) on a web page can change, in response to different contexts or conditions. In dynamic sites page content and page layout are created separately. The content is retrieved from a database and is placed on a web page only when needed.

DYNAMIC MARKETING:

Dynamic or One-to-one marketing refers to marketing strategies applied directly to a specific consumer.Having the knowledge on the consumer preferences, there are suggested personalized products and promotions to each consumer.

Dynamic marketing is based in four main phases to fulfill its goals: IDENTIFY; DIFFERENTIATE; INTERACT and CUSTOMIZE.

Identify - In this stage the major concern is to get to know the customers, to collect reliable data about their preferences and how their needs can be satisfy.

Differentiate - To get to distinguish the customers in terms of their lifetime value, to know them by their priority in terms of their needs and segment them in more restrict groups.

Interact - In this phase it is needed to know by which communication channel an in which way it is possible to optimize the contact with the client. It is needed to get the customer attention by engaging with him in ways that are known has being the ones that he enjoys the most.

Customize - It is needed to personalize the product or service to the customer individually. The knowledge that a company has of a customers need to be taken into practice and the information about it has to be taken into account in order to be able to give the client exactly what he wants.

A media kit is a pre-packaged set of promotional materials of a person, company, product or organization distributed to members of the media or related industry for promotional use. They are often distributed to announce a release or for press covering.

Common press kit components

- Backgrounder with historical information on the company or individual
- Fact sheet listing specific features, statistics, or benefits
- Biographies of key executives, individuals, artists, etc.
- Past press coverage
- Photos or other images (high resolution) of key executives, logos, products, etc.
- A press release detailing the current news the media kit is sent in reference to
- Media contact information
- A CD, DVD, software title, video, etc.
- Collateral advertising material, such as postcard, brochure, newspaper ad, etc.

Press kit uses

- Product launches
- New company launch
- Mergers and acquisitions
- News conferences
- Large events / Industry trade shows

The DJDS Print Project Manager:
• Acts as your eyes, ears, and voice
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DJDS Print Management Guarantees:
• Critical or consistent color matching
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There are two major differences between images seen on a computer monitor, and images seen on a printed page. The first is resolution. The second is color. Let's talk about resolution.

Resolution is essentially a measure of how much information about the image is present. In traditional dot-based printing (like what you see in a magazine or newspaper) resolution is typically measured as dots per inch, or dpi. Newspapers are almost always printed at a much lower resolution than magazines. Look closely at a newspaper photograph — you can probably see the dots that go to make up the image. Now look at a magazine — you probably can’t see the dots with the naked eye. But if you pulled out a magnifying glass, you could see that they are there, but much smaller than the dots in the newspaper photo, so there are more of them in an inch. Magazine photos are at a higher dpi. Higher dpi means a sharper, clearer image.

Digital images are measured in pixels per inch, or ppi, which roughly corresponds to dpi in printing. Where the difference comes in is that computer monitor displays are very low resolution compared to print — most are only 72 ppi. So, an image that looks terrific on your monitor at 72 ppi may look blurry when printed out. For good print results, 300 ppi images are safe, but images with a ppi as low as 150 may look all right depending on how they are being printed.

If you are sending images to a print provider, find out exactly how they want the images formatted.

The images on most web sites are only 72 ppi. They don’t need to be any higher in resolution to look good on a monitor, and lower resolution equals smaller files that are faster to load, so this makes sense. But it means that you can’t grab your company’s logo from the web page and expect it to look good on your business cards.

That is, unless the image is huge on your web site, and really small on your business cards. For example, an image that is 35 inches wide at 72 ppi can be redefined to be 8.5 inches at 300 ppi. If you have an image from a web site that you would like printed out, try redefining it as a smaller image with a higher resolution, while keeping the total number of pixels the same.

Keeping the total pixel dimensions the same or smaller is very important. Attempting to stretch an image to make it larger nearly always gives poor results. This makes sense if you think about resolution as a measure of image information — on a smaller image, that information has already been discarded, so when you try to enlarge it again you are basically asking your drawing program to invent image information that doesn’t exist.

For important company images, such as your logo, the best advice is to save copies at the highest resolution possible, and know where those images are stored. That way you can always go back to the source.

A domain name is an identification label for a website's IP address. The IP address is the numerical address of the website that tells other computers on the Internet where to find the server host and domain. All sites have an unique address that is a series of numbers to identify them. It would be too complicated , if not impossible for a person to remember "216.239.51.99" when they wanted to do a web search so domain names are the "labels" applied to the complicated address so visitors only have to remember "google.com".

Domain names are often referred to simply as domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as domain owners, although domain name registration with a registrar does not confer any legal ownership of the domain name, only an exclusive right of use for a contracted period.

Domain registration is the process by which a company or individual can secure a website domain, such as www.mydomain.com. Once completed domain registration the domain becomes yours for exclusive use for the period of the contract, usually one year. Before registration expires it must be renewed, or the domain reverts back to being available to the general public.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the international Domain Name Server (DNS) database. ICANN insures that all registered names are unique and map properly to a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. The IP address is the numerical address of the website that tells other computers on the Internet where to find the server host and domain.

Web design is a specialized practice of graphic design intended for development and styling of objects of the Internet's information environment to provide them with consumer ready features and aesthetic qualities. The offered definition separates web design from web programming, emphasizing the functional features of a web site, as well as positioning web design as a kind of graphic design. Web Programming is a separate yet also specialized area necessary in the creation and maintenance of a web site.

Among web professionals, "web development" usually refers to the main non-design aspects of building web sites: writing markup and coding. Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, or social network services. Further, web maintenance, is the practice of maintaining vital elements to insure a 'healthy", cross browser-friendly website , such as updating code to remain compliant with various browser implementations and keeping registrations current and registered.

The elements that supplement the design: text, images, form fields, etc. ....essentially the information. In the absence of information begets the need for copy writing, photography (original or stock).