Good ol’ testimonial ads still work. So we lined up three long-time subscribers to invite new subscribers in print and television advertising.

”If you include a testimonial in your copy, you make it more credible. Readers find the endorsements of fellow consumers more persuasive than the puffery of anonymous copywriters. Says James Webb Young, one of the best copywriters in history, ‘Every type of advertiser has the same problem: to be believed. The mail-order man knows nothing so potent for this purpose as the testimonial, yet the general advertiser seldom uses it.”  – David Ogilvy

Watch three testimonial TV spots below:

The Bryan Series needed fast turnaround on a modest budget to sell a few thousand seats for its debut at a brand new venue.

The Guilford College speakers’ program, the Bryan Series, is now in its 26^th year and being presented at the almost brand-new Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Greensboro.

Subscription (season tickets) sales for the series felt the impact of the Pandemic. Still strong, but individual ticket sales became a little more important for the program.

King’s English recommended primarily an outdoor campaign as a means of reaching beyond the subscriber audience and prospects, to appeal to consumers on a speaker-by-speaker basis. We wanted the visual impact combined with short provocative copy.

Selling tickets to first-time attendees not only fills seats but can increase the subscriber base once people experience an engaging presentation. The new venue gets high marks for comfort and acoustics, making it an ideal space to spend an hour enjoying a talk.

Our clients at the Bryan Series saw an opportunity to add a small broadcast component to the mix, wisely targeting show business awards viewers, specifically for Kennedy Center Honors broadcast in December and, later, the Academy Awards. Each event features one of the speakers –Steve Martin and Rita Moreno, respectively – so even though broadcast buy is small, it offers impact with impressive ratings and a congruent audience.

The Kennedy Honors spot for Martin (note: his talk has since been rescheduled to May 10) needed to be produced over a weekend and had been done solely with still images shot by Chris English, director of photography at our partner agency on the project, Tigermoth Creative.

We kept it simple and all about Steve:

Newsrooms these days are stretched to the limit. So, don’t take it personally if your non-profit charity presser isn’t picked up as easily as it used to be.

Instead, be helpfully persistent.

We knew we had a powerful and positive story with Ciandress Jackson. She’s a software consultant whose career allows her some time and resources to give back. Her cause is the Be Great Foundation. An organization focused on promoting STEM careers for Black, Latinx and financially disadvantaged students.

Ciandress came to us to promote the Foundations first major fund-raising event, the Victory Lap 5k.

That’s simple enough, but we realized that nobody had heard of the Be Great Foundation in the first place.

The story is strong, loaded with keywords – diversity, STEM, K-12 education, financial empowerment. But again, “we’re the new kids.” We had to work a little harder.

King’s English got together with our colleague, Ivan Saul Cutler, principal of Making Newz and consummate community photographer and publicist.

Ivan’s photos shot at a sort of “soft launch” of Be Great Foundation STEM workshops helped open the media doors. We supplied a package of news-quality high resolution images to local media and the gates opened up.

First, photography of the Foundation in action made the organization more “real” than an introductory press release would ever be able to do. Even television outlets “got the picture” and decided to schedule studio interviews! Second, for print media, we supplied art they could use, without having to use their resources. We placed in three local newspapers as of this writing.

Pretty simple. For “community” stories there’s interest in running it. But papers don’t have the same people power to cover it.

Photographer Ivan Saul Cutler in action.

Above: Executive Development Group places its blog posts on the home page in a slider, displaying current topics that resonate with training and development prospects.

Up-to-date, effective writing that resonnates with your clients is one of the most important factors in attracting website traffic.

One of our clients is getting a third of its website traffic from blog posts, because publish multiple articles each month, with an eye for common sense search phrases and helpful stories that answer likely searches.

We’re building almost all sites now in WordPress and for most clients, the blog function (used as a traditional blog or for other site content) is a powerful tool in three important ways:

1) Keeping the site fresh in a way that defines the brand,

2) Providing an archive of marketing documents for easy access by the client and

3) Attracting more traffic with good search engine optimization  and links shared via social media as with this example by Dr. Lily Kelly-Radord:

LEAP Leadership’s webiste uses the WordPress blog function to currate an experience that’s like a trade journal. Then, the company’s principal, Dr. Kelly-Radford, shares the content on social media. With LinkedIn alone she’s getting thousands of views by posting the story and her site’s traffic spikes whenever she does.

What is content forward?

Fresh content–

Twenty years ago, sites were developed to wow visitors with technical prowess and dazzling aesthetics. Today, our sites are still attractive, but the focus has shifted. Our philosophy holds that website is a conduit or vessel for a brand’s messaging. Design’s still important for all kinds of reasons but up-to-date information wins out if you’re trying to be a problem solver for prospective clients.

Handy archive–

Also 20 years ago, businesses burned through cases of expensive brochures and folders and informational sheets. They would dedicate entire rooms to housing all this collateral material. Now it can all be archived in what amounts to a searchable and easily shared electronic file cabinet in the sky that everyone in your organization has access to, anywhere they go. So, if a salesperson needs an example of some project successes to show to a prospect, they can pull it from the blog and send it.

Information destination–

Search engines are getting more intelligent by the day. Thankfully, now the best way to get found is simply with good writing. Google responds well to natural language and helps searchers find honest to goodness sources for highly nuanced search phrases. A simple well written description of something related to what you sell can be found by the people who need it most.

Go live, then cultivate

King’s English is deploying websites faster and more economically than ever, partly with the advancement of web design solutions, but also because of this content forward strategy. Our approach is to go live as quickly as possible to start cultivating content.

When you make your site a dispenser of information that your customers need, simplicity is foremost. With current content that defines your competitive advantages and solves peoples’ problems customers will find you and your own sales team will have all the collateral it needs.

Branding a city is usually a challenge. Too often, municipalities imagine their own PR—subjectively—and end up grinding out a promise that simply can’t be kept. That, or it’s so diluted with every facet the burg has to offer, so no factions are offended, until it looks like a chamber of commerce parody. (Cue the smooth saxophone solo.)

We think it’s about the fans. We’ve got ’em. They like coming here. We feed them in bars and restaurants where the games are always on. In Greensboro, Tournament Town, we say Fans First!

Branding a city is one thing, but branding an authentic tradition that helps define the city can be much more focused.

Take Tournament Town. That’s the Greensboro Sports Foundation’s brand for Greensboro, North Carolina that is based on a set of proven facts. Greensboro has a long legacy of hosting college basketball tournaments. Greensboro is a big college town with around 40,000 students in residence. The tournament venue is set up for a college experience: the Greensboro Coliseum allows tailgating and has plenty of parking space for over-the-top school spirit. Then there’s the city’s hospitality services that thrive on and cater to the sports traffic.

Greensboro Sports Foundation came to us with the challenge of validating and promoting Tournament Town this year because the collegiate sports stars aligned to give Tournament Town THREE major basketball events: the ACC Women’s Tournament, the ACC’s Men’s Tournament, and the first two rounds of the NCAA “March Madness” men’s tournament. This year, they’re also throwing parties around town with free concerts, family fun in the downtown parks, and an outdoor viewing party on the Tanger Center giant video screen.

The Foundation wants to position Greensboro as the spiritual center of the Atlantic Coast Conference and as a major contender for the NCAA championship games. How do you say this?

We think it’s about the fans. We’ve got ’em. They like coming here. We feed them in bars and restaurants where the games are always on. In Greensboro, Tournament Town, we say Fans First!

The campaign has the media muscle of the Greensboro Coliseum, so you’ll see the ads in print, online, on NC roadways, and stuck on buildings around down.

Click through the gallery below to see how it’s playing out.

Campaign Gallery