Alt Creative Blog

Conscious is a lifestyle-based print / digital magazine and daily updated website focusing on positive media, solutions journalism and conscious culture. Through narratives, interviews, and collaborations, Conscious features global initiatives, entrepreneur/advocate stories, innovative ideas, creative solutions, conscious culture and more. Conscious highlighted several Austin-based companies, including Alt Creative, in their article Austin, TX: When Conscious […]

As a new business, you know that you have to put your name out there and market yourself, but it isn’t always clear which steps you should take to promote your new business. Between Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, people share information in a myriad of ways. So, where should you start when devising a marketing strategy for your new company?

Email marketing is one of the most powerful forms of marketing around. With a good mailing list in your hands, you have direct access to a potentially engaged customer base, which you can incentivize and motivate in numerous ways.

There’s just one hitch: your potential customers have to actually open those emails in order for them to have any effect. Doing that in an age when inboxes the world over are groaning with the weight of unread marketing emails can be a herculean task, even though your reader actively signed up for your list. Looking at your dismal open rates can make you want to personally call your customers and shout, “Hey, you said you liked us. Why won’t you open us?!”

Turns out, there are many reasons why potential customers don’t open up marketing emails. Whether they’re trying to exert a little more self-control or they’re simply sick of looking at marketing emails, it takes an exceedingly well-targeted and strategic approach to overcome these hurdles and get your emails the attention they deserve. Let’s take a look at the best strategies for getting it right.

Any successful business tracks a wide variety of data in many different ways in many different areas. Decision makers can’t make wise decisions without information, which is provided from actual data. However, not everyone who is interpreting collected data is able to do so with expertise if the data is not manageable. It is critically important for all stakeholders that data is presented in a visually appealing, easily understandable format. It isn’t difficult to get lost in information; consider a well-prepared visual graphic as a map. It’s equally important to integrate all of the available data from all available sources into one concise, efficient presentation.

If there was one new app that had buzz over the summer, it was Periscope, which added ten million users in the first four months of its existence. The creators describe Periscope by saying that it allows you to “explore the world through someone else’s eyes.”

That sounds fantastic! But uh…what does that mean exactly? And what does that possibly have to do with marketing your business? A whole lot!

It takes employees of all generations to make a business succeed, but younger employees often bring a sense of passion, purpose and motivation that can serve your business for years. However, the incoming generation of employees presents a paradox for human resource departments. Upwork reports that millennials will make up the largest slice of the American workforce this year, yet 53 percent of hiring managers express difficulty in finding and retaining millennials as employees. With that in mind, here are some ways to attract young, talented workers to your company and keep them.

Most of us call it the Internet, but when talking about SEO, perhaps it’s more appropriate to call it the World Wide Web. Google refers to its own SEO algorithms as ‘spiders’ after all. It’s not hard to visualize these little spiders moving through the vast webs of information, deciding which sites are the most valuable, and conversely, which sites should be avoided.

Small businesses often have modest marketing budgets. One way to save money and get the most out of search engine optimization is to build a search-engine-friendly site from the get-go. Google’s spiders use sophisticated methods to rank websites, and these methods are always evolving, but there are a few constants that you should remember when building your own SEO-friendly site.

Did we mention how much we love fonts and typefaces? Check out what fonts we’re into this week.

You know the feeling: you’re just sailing along, doing your own thing, scrambling from one task to another as you try to keep your business afloat (and thriving). And then you open your inbox and stumble into a dire situation. Something on your site is broken, and you now have hundreds of angry emails asking you what the deal is.

Sound familiar? If not, then you’ve at least had nightmares about this.

Check out some of the fonts we’re eyeing this week.

According to a report by AT&T and the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, American small-business owners save more than $65 billion a year thanks to mobile technologies. Part of that savings is a result of reduced overhead and increased productivity to work on-the-go. But mobility and accessibility are just a few reasons to focus on mobile technology. Keeping your marketing team connected while in the field means more opportunity to work on your campaigns and a streamlined focus on your bottom line.

This week we roundup more of our favorite typefaces. Check out some of our new favorites.