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February 2, 2017 by Karey Mackin

Your Inbox is A Total Jerk

Remember when the biggest distraction in your was not your inbox but your office mate’s compulsion for celebrating absolutely everything? “Josh got a promotion! We’re meeting in the break room for cake at 11!” Congratulating Josh – and Karen on her new baby, Dali on her relocation to LA, and Kai on his birthday – really added up in terms of time away from your real work. But still, those time sucks were nothing compared to the amount of time we waste in our inboxes.

And at least there was cake.

Using the Washington Post’s utterly depressing calculator, I figured out how many cake-less hours I’ve spent on emails: Forty thousand, or around four hours a day for the entirety of my career until I finally retire.

In that time, according to the Post, I could have learned two dozen languages or hiked the Appalachian Trail 100 times. Excuse me while I sob at the thought of all I’ve missed. But first, let me check my email. I heard a ping.

There are certainly ways to be better time managers when it comes to your inbox. Like auto-responses that inform your inbox visitors you’ll answer their note at your designated inbox-checking times of 11:00 am and 2:00 pm. Pretty soon, they’ll understand what to expect from you and maybe learn to be a little more intentional with their emails, too.

There are also apps that can help…if you use them. Inbox When Ready is my personal favorite. It hides your incoming and existing messages while you’re composing new ones, distraction free, and has a genius inbox lockout feature that prevents you from checking your inbox until a designated time.

Or, we can take a few tips from the military. That’s right: They’re tough as nails, and good with emails. Kabir Sehgal, US Navy veteran and author, suggests starting with the subject line, using words in all caps that tell the recipient exactly what the intention of the message is:

ACTION: Compulsory for the recipient to take some action.
SIGN: Requires the signature of the recipient
INFO: For informational purposes only, and there is no response or action required.
DECISION: Requires a decision by the recipient.
REQUEST: Seeks permission or approval by the recipient.
COORD: Short for coordination, by or with the recipient is needed.

In a matter of seconds, your recipient knows exactly what your email’s intention is, which may not only help reduce the time you spend writing email, but also save other people’s time, too.

At The Found Gen, we’ve got lots of ideas to maximize your message while minimizing your involvement. Trust us: You’re going to love the time we save you. Meet you on the Appalachian Trail?

December 2, 2015 by Danielle Cantor

The Holiday Hustle: Creative Ways to Keep in Touch with Customers This Season

The nonstop shopping bonanza that has become the holiday season used to be the exclusive domain of the retail category. But the Internet, social media, and the evolving nature of how people view gift giving have all given service- and experience-based businesses equal access to consumer wallets.

That means the holiday season is the perfect time for virtually any business to market itself to customers. Need some holiday promotion inspiration? Here are 5 effective holiday promotion ideas to keep your brand top of mind.

Run a Promotion with a Little Urgency

Even service-oriented businesses can take advantage of deal-minded consumers on Black Friday, Cyber Monday or any other day during the shopping season. This painting company offered a deal to the first ten customers who signed up, among other promotions. It’s a clever way to incentivize shoppers to commit to projects they’ve been putting off for the future.

Host an In-Store Event

Retail shops can host trunk shows, preview parties, ladies’ nights, wine tastings, and cooking demos, but other businesses might need to get a little creative when it comes to keeping customers engaged with the brand. Hotels and inns, especially those with income streams from in-house bars, coffee shops and restaurants, can follow the Austin Four Seasons’s lead. The hotel displayed a “Wild West” Gingerbread Village (with a charity tie-in), which showcased the pastry chef’s talent and appealed to tourists and locals alike with the quirky theme.

Take Your Customers on a Field Trip

For businesses that rely on forming close relationships with repeat customers, hosting an out-of-store adventure is an exciting way to build buzz and foster connections. This floral and events boutique, which regularly hosts in-store classes and events, organized a holiday shopping trip to NYC to teach customers how to navigate the wholesale markets in the city’s flower district.

Provide Gift-Giving Inspiration

Shoppers are always on the hunt for the perfect gift. Whether it’s via email, Pinterest, blog, or direct mail (or all four), turn your business’s bread-and-butter into a giftable package. This hardware store chain created customized Pinterest boards featuring products that would make great gifts (above). A local cheese shop took to Twitter, counting down 25 days of gift inspiration (below). They’re both great holiday promotion ideas that don’t require a huge ad budget.

Let Shoppers Create Their Own Wish List

The “wish list” concept can extend beyond goods and products. Last season, one travel company designed an email campaign that invited customers to put virtual stamps in a passport representing all the places they would love to visit, which they could then share on social media. The sales team then used the data to follow up with targeted promotions.

All of this being said, if you don’t normally get a majority of your business between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you probably don’t need any holiday promotion ideas. Just keep doing your normal strategy and stay in contact with your network.

February 23, 2015 by Robyn Saunders

Writing 101: Readability Tools

Bottom line; reading has changed. We skim. We speed read. We skip altogether. Sure, when you are ready to devour the next chapter of your favorite novel like a piece of chocolate cake and are excitedly looking forward to curling up somewhere comfortable and take your time reading each page. But the business blogs you follow? The eNewsletters you receive? The social media you scan periodically? Less like cake, and more like a 5 Hour Energy; a little hit, then move on.

Readability tools ensure that if all they do is glance at your blog post (because you’re writing blogs all the time now, right?), they’ll be able to easily draw out, and remember, the most important points.

The following readability tools are basic, but extremely important. They could be difference between readers digesting your content, or skipping the meal altogether.

Key Readability Tips

Use bold type sparingly and only to help key ideas jump out to the reader. Reiterating key ideas and quotes is often done in magazine articles and is just as effective in online content.
Bullet points are a great way to paraphrase information and draw the reader’s eye to the most important points by pulling them out of the body of your text.
Enumerations, or listing items by number, is more formal than using bullet points, but is best for ordering ideas or data.
Italics, like bold type, help to draw the reader’s eye to important ideas. However, they are most effective when used to highlight negative words like not, no, and but which can often be read incorrectly if the content is only being scanned.

Simple tools? Yes.

Essential tools? Heck yes.

Looking for even more writing tips? Or just plain impressed with the readability of this blog post? Come back and read some more.

January 23, 2015 by Robyn Saunders

Grammar Friday: The Apostrophe

The Apostrophe.

Strong. Silent. Willing to shoulder the grammatical burden of the possessives that choose him, and the heavily accented literary figure. Given responsibilities which often change dramatically and increase in number without warning.

Strives to be taken seriously. And yet, is here to help a lonely ma’am along the way.

Apostrophes do, after all, exist only to aid us in our language. Just like many forms of punctation, the apostrophe is–at times–overused and underappreciated. That’s why we’re taking a moment today to shine a little light and give some much deserved (and needed) attention to this floating friend of ours.

Here’s a quick-to-reference, handy guide for all your apostrophe needs throughout the year (and really, life).

When you do need an apostrophe:

In a possessive singular noun: The girl’s hat.
In possessive plural nouns that don’t end in -s: The women’s movement.
In a possessive plural noun that does end in an -s: The boys’ game.
In contractions which show the omission of letters: Don’t = do not
In a plural, lowercase letter: Minding your p’s and q’s.
In the word ‘it’s’ when it should read “it is”, not when it is the possessive ‘its’: It’s going to be a cold one today.
To indicate non-standard, accented, English: Top ‘o the morning to yee.

When you don’t need an apostrophe:

Plural Nouns:

Yes: Our neighbors, the Johnsons, are away for the weekend.
No: Our neighbors, the Johnson’s, are away for the weekend.

Plural Abbreviated Years:

Yes: The 80s
No: The 80’s

Posessive Pronouns:

Yes: That game is ours.
No: That game is our’s.

These are the basics. The workload of the apostrophe, however, extends well into the late-night-frantic-google-search arena in which you feel utterly confused and reach towards the white light of your computer screen for help. The apostrophe will be there to quell your confusion. But before you type, “how do I refer to my neighbor’s multiple cats in my written request to the board of my apartment building (don’t ask),” into the Google Machine, check out these links for some help:

October 27, 2014 by James Schulman

Character Limits on a Meta Title: Are They In The Right Range?

Businesses everywhere are struggling now more than ever to keep up with the fast pace of technology and its impact on advertising. These days the answers to everyone’s questions rest in search engine results, and getting your business’s message to appear near the top of Google results depends on how strong your meta title (and meta description) is.

What’s a Meta Title?

Put simply, meta titles show the name of a web page. It’s the headline that you see on Google and are a main factor in correctly indexing a given page on your website.

What’s a Meta Description?

Meta descriptions are the HTML attributes used to summarize in what your website is all about. They are literally the text you see in the results that appear after you have entered a search. For example, if you were to ask Google “Who sings that Italian song from ‘The Sopranos’?”, among your mixed results you would find several blue hyperlinks (meta-titles) to various websites with a few words (meta-descriptions) that give you a little more information about what the site contains, all before you eventually were able to discover and put “Con te Partito” on repeat and identify with Carmela.

The goal here is obviously to get your message as close to the top as possible and persuade users to trust that message enough to click on it.

How to optimize your meta title and meta description

Brevity is the soul of wit, and the programmers responsible for social media and search engines know this. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, et al know their audience and distinguish themselves from Polonius by putting limits on their content, appealing to short attention spans everywhere. Search engine giants are no different. Just type “what happens to hamlet” in any search engine, and of the 4,690,000 results that come back in 0.34 seconds, some number of the top 10 will have meta-titles and descriptions that both spoil a wonderful story and are cut off and shortened by ellipses…

This is because search engines truncate results that are too long. When filling in your meta-data, use your keywords intelligently but economically. Create a compelling and concise description—ideally between 150-160 characters long—that is both readable and relevant to increase click-through rates and get the most out of your search marketing.

It’s worth noting that the meta description tag is not something Google’s algorithm takes into consideration when delivering results. It’s real marketing value rests in the people who actually read it, for oftentimes it is the first thing people will read about your business.

So keep it short and sweet and describe the content as accurately and colorfully as you can. If you need more help coming up with a meta-tag to boost your search marketing results, feel free to give us a call today.

June 12, 2014 by James Schulman

What the World Cup Can Teach Us About Marketing Strategy

As one witty person at ESPN said, ‘Every Four Years, The World Has One Time Zone.’

The kind of rapt attention the World Cup generates, where the world grinds to a halt and billions of people become glued to their phones, tablets and TVs, is a marketers dream. This is why so many of the largest companies spend millions to become corporate sponsors of the Cup to get their logo front and center. But this doesn’t mean small and medium sized businesses are relegated to the sidelines without any recourse. In fact, the World Cup has quite a few lessons it can teach even the smallest businesses about marketing strategy. Here’s where to start:

Follow the Crowd

There are few things that are like watching a game with 80,000 of your closest friends. Everyone is on the same wavelength and has the same goal in mind.

With your marketing strategy, do some research and see what your clients are paying attention to. Is it a specific website or trade publication? If so, find a way to become a guest blogger on that site. If it’s a trade show, make sure you are front and center: get involved and make sure you’re part of the executive committee to put on their next event.

Getting that exposure not only cements your status as an expert in front of your current clients, but it also puts you in front their entire industry.

Pull their heartstrings

Very few things can bring nations of grown men to tears or spark generations to remember where they were for 90 minutes decades later.

Go beyond identifying pain points and your solutions to them. Focus your marketing on getting an emotional response from your target audience.

Be Willing to Shift Your Marketing Strategy

From tough draws and injuries to missteps and howlers, there are always hiccups to the plan. To win, you have to roll with the punches and improvise on the fly.

Marketing, and online marketing in particular, is an ever-changing industry. What was a brilliant white-hat SEO strategy in 2010 will get you delisted today. To stay on top, you need to not only keep your long-term goals in mind but also be willing to change your strategy based on the data you have available. For example, if you’ve stopped getting returns on your Facebook marketing, shift your resources to another platform.

Most importantly, keep at it. The team that is going to win this cup isn’t thinking about hoisting the trophy today; they’re thinking of their next match. Marketing is the same. It can feel like a slog at times (everyone has had the thought, ‘is this blog post really going to bring someone in the door?’) but focusing on doing the best job today is the best way to ensure success over the long-term.