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Mascots hold a strong mental image for most people that come in contact with one. But mascots impact on children is much stronger and profound than with any other age group. Children often react with fondness to mascots that display positive characteristics. A child may be delighted by the way a mascot dances or any funny physical action the mascot engages in. This is especially true if a mascot is the embodiment of a product that a child wants his or her parents to buy for them. Parents are often vulnerable to the marketing industry. This is true since many products such as toys, games, and food items are purchased by parents on behalf of their children.

Children may be very persistent in ensuring that their parents purchase the latest cereal or toy because a mascot said it was great. In addition, children that are not yet literate may really gravitate towards a mascot. Children at this stage of development look for pictures or symbols that represent familiar things to them.

Mascots as Strong Symbols

Children may be the most sensitive of all age groups to mascots and their symbology. An adult may be able to discern if a product or image that a mascot is portraying is worthless, while a child may see something completely different. Before language skills are strongly formed, children tend to remember events and people in snapshots like pictures in their memories. Mascots may be able to grab a place in a child’s mind that will be vivid and hold meaning into adulthood for the child.

Good Vibrations

The positive feelings that mascots elicit from children are often associated with what a mascot does and not just a product itself. In the case of sporting teams the mascots impact on children may be to excite or enthuse them about the team or a game taking place. Not to mention once again, children may be drawn to the mascot on a personal level. Instead of wanting a product lauded by a mascot, children may want something that represents the mascot such as a: stuffed animal, shirt, pennant flag, or pin. Mascots in of themselves can be easily marketed to children to promote team sales. Also, the mascot may encourage a new generation of fans to be realized by the team.

Mascots, Schools, and Self-Image

Elementary schools up to college campuses heavily use mascots to convey team image and help in promoting team spirit. Mascots impact on children may be very strong when dealing with school mascots. Children are exposed to the image usually on a daily basis. The school mascot may be present on the schools’ outside sign or on the wall or floor of the gymnasium. Also, children who play sports may wear uniforms that have the mascot proudly placed upon them. Children may come to see themselves as having many of the same characteristics as the mascot if they participate in team sports. This is why mascots that promote a positive image are very important for school aged children. Negative mascots impact on children may promote negative images of the school or perhaps even affect a child’s self-image.

Responsible Rendering of Mascots

Since mascots impact on children is deeply profound adults have a responsibility to create mascots that send out a warm and positive message. They need to keep the best interest of children in mind when designing the costume for the mascot. Also, the actions of the mascot are very important. The person portraying the mascot has an obligation to act fun and upbeat, while not engaging in any behavior that could have a negative or detrimental connotation. This will only help to paint the team or product in a positive light with not only children, but adults as well.

Loonie Times is a custom manufacturer and provider of mascots and mascot accessories for all of your branding efforts.

You’ve finally landed that highly sought after yet elusive client. Now you must give everything you have to keep them. It seems as though you’ve put forth all of the blood, sweat and tears you could muster just to get this opportunity. Now that you have secured this client, what law firm marketing strategies are you employing to keep them?

Other successful firms have found ways to keep their premium clients. What are you doing to keep yours? Once again, you may feel like banging your head against your desk; frustrated and fed up because it’s just one thing after another. You don’t catch a break just because you’ve landed the client. Now you must figure out how to keep them.

Prepare to bleed more effort into serving your new conquest. The process to make the client happy has only begun. You know the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. Following are some law firm marketing strategies that insure your clients remain in your focus and you must work hard to employ them.

Begin work on the case immediately. As soon as the client signs on, spend some time that day or the next working on the case. This is necessary to protect your client’s best legal interests. It also shows their immediate need for legal help and that you genuinely care about them.

Send them some form of written communication within 48 hours of taking the case. It isn’t enough to start working immediately on their case. You must also show that you are actively working on their case by mailing them a copy of everything you do. Consider time stamping everything so they will see you started on their case almost as soon as you landed it.

Send out a brief client survey within one week of landing the new client. This can be a great way to collect data on vital questions such as:

* Why did they select your firm?
* Who else were they interviewing?
* What do they like best or least about working with you?
* How can you improve?
* How fast was your response time to their initial request?
* How did they find you?
* Do they know of anyone else who could use your services?
* Important dates (birthdays, anniversaries, etc)
* Additional contact information

It’s also a good idea to send out an additional client satisfaction survey when the case is completed. This allows you to gauge their overall satisfaction from start to finish once you have worked on the case.

Project the efforts you have put forth in order to satisfy the client. Give them regular updates on their case, even if it drags out over months or years. Keep the client in your mind at all times and let them know you are always working in their best interests. This shows you care and gives them a reason to appreciate your consistent efforts. Even when nothing is happening with their case, maintain regular contact with your client.

A very important attorney marketing plan is to ensure the client not only sees results, but knows how hard you have worked to obtain those results. Show your client all of the hard work you have put into their case. Even the smallest details or easiest motions you have put forth demonstrate that you care about your client. Show them that you have worked for them to the best of your abilities and did everything you could to serve them well.

If you want to keep your clients happy, begin using these simple law firm marketing strategies now. There are law firm marketing services available to assist you in putting these strategies to use in the most productive ways possible. Contact them and get it right. Don’t bleed that last vein dry without a winning plan to make it worth your efforts.

Stephen Fairley is CEO of The Rainmaker Institute is the nation’s largest law firm marketing company that specializes in helping small law firms generate more and better referrals and create a 7 figure law practice. Over 6,000 attorneys have benefited from our proven Rainmaker Marketing System. Attorneys: claim your FREE legal marketing CD ‘7 Keys to a 7 Figure Law Practice’ at www.toplawfirmmarketingtips.com

Attorneys are famous for wasting their time following up on bad leads. These are prospects who are not a good fit or who are not likely to hire your law firm. Another big mistake lawyers make is targeting the wrong market, usually too large of a market. What percentage of the people you follow up with come to your office for an official interview? And of those, how many actually sign on as clients?

Successful law firm marketing includes determining which people and businesses are not currently interested in your service and which are just not good prospects. Remove these dead ends from your contact lists and don’t waste your time trying to win them over.

You probably have a very low percentage of prospects turned clients. And with the limited hours in your day to get everything done, you simply can’t afford to waste this kind of time! These 5 simple steps will help you turn more prospects into clients. Incorporate these into your law firm marketing strategy and watch your conversion rate grow.

1. Separate Your Contacts from Your Prospects

Learn to identify people who are genuinely interested versus those who simply are not saying “no” out of politeness. Listen for the signals that distinguish a real prospect from someone who is simply price shopping or worse (using you to obtain a lower fee from another lawyer).

Create a list of questions to disqualify contacts focusing on the criteria of “need, want, afford.” Remove those contacts who don’t meet these qualifications, and focus your energy on solid prospects.

2. Interview Your Qualified Prospects Directly.

Are you consistently talking directly to your prospects (versus their gatekeepers and time-wasters) and pitching them your services? What’s your closing ratio? What percentage of people come to the interview versus become clients? Make sure you are speaking to the real decision-maker.

3. Strengthen Your Presentation Skills

Improving your presentation skills will go a long way toward winning over new clients. Strengthen your phone skills and develop better phone scripts. Learn to recognize “buy questions.” Be prepared to ask for the sale at the end of the presentation. Take a presentation skills seminar and focus on benefits and results more than services and features. Work harder at identifying your target’s points of pain and using them clearly and consistently to demonstrate the value of your services. Become more fluent at speaking their language. Develop a list of critical questions to ask prospects you present to. Don’t talk as much: listen more.

4. Give Prospects a Call to Action

After an interview, do you actually ask your prospect to commit to the sale? How soon do you follow up with people after the interview? What do you send them to encourage them to buy from you versus the competitor and buy from you now versus waiting?

Make sure each prospect receives one clear call to action. Make it easy for them to follow. Ask for their business!

5. Follow Up After Your Presentation

Follow up with a thank you letter or e-mail within 24 hours of the interview. Be sure to end every interview with action steps (e.g., what each party agrees to do as next steps and when they will do it by). If you agree to do something, be sure to do it before the deadline. (This may be a way they are testing you to see if you will respond to their needs). If you are a business lawyer, have a process for writing successful proposals. Immediately set a reminder to yourself to contact the hot prospect in a timely manner.

Add these five simple steps into your law firm marketing plan now. You’ll see

Stephen Fairley is CEO of The Rainmaker Institute is the nation’s largest law firm marketing company that specializes in helping small law firms generate more and better referrals and create a 7 figure law practice. Over 6,000 attorneys have benefited from our proven Rainmaker Marketing System. Attorneys: claim your FREE legal marketing CD ‘7 Keys to a 7 Figure Law Practice’ at www.toplawfirmmarketingtips.com

Leaflet distribution is an extremely effective method of getting a message directly to a market. Leaflet distribution places a message into the hands or letterboxes of a target market. It is an extremely popular form of marketing that is particularly effective for promoting services or products that are specific to particular regions. The process of getting the leaflets out is fairly rudimentary. The leaflets are delivery by hand to addresses that are supplied or alternatively are given by hand to people walking down a street.

The flyer distributor is likely to place their flyers into the hands of key demographic market groups. If the flyers promote a party event for young people the flyers will be handed to young people that look like they are up for a party whilst if the flyers promote female clothes then the distributors will pass the flyers on to women. Leaflet drops have in the past been very popular methods of distributing political messages.

Political messages are often difficult to get to their target audience. In many situations it has been the case that anti government political groups struggle to get press coverage for their messages - in fear of repercussions and as a result the most effective method of delivering messages to people was to distribute them through flyers and leaflets. This has been considered an extremely effective method of delivering a message and one of the more horrific examples of how successful it was is the use of leaflet distribution by the Nazi government during the Second World War.

The Nazi government used leaflet distribution to spread false information about the Jewish community. This is said to have contributed to a shift in public opinion and helped to facilitate the atrocities that followed.
There is also a long history of leaflet distribution taking place in a range of different wars and times of political instability.

It has been used in a wide variety of controversial situations including what is known as psychological warfare. The role of leaflets is to alter the behaviour of people in a war torn area to support the cause that a particular group are pursuing. In many of these cases the leaflets are dropped into the area through airborne leaflet drops.

These leaflets are then meant to be read by people in the area with a view of changing their opinions on a matter or encouraging them to perform a certain action. These leaflets are highly politicised and although they often attempt to appear like they are delivering a balanced message almost always have a strong emphasis on one side of an argument.

The role of leaflet propaganda has been defined into six different categories. These categories are said to be distinct from one another and they have been used in the past century. Leaflets have been used to threaten people or troops that they would be targeted. Leaflets have been sent out calling for people to surrender and give up their resistance.

They have also been sent out to offer rewards and have appealed for information that would show the opposition in a bad light. Leaflets have also been used to encourage communication between feuding groups and have expressed the need for peace. There have also been a number of examples of flyers that have been distributed in humanitarian programmes with the aim of informing people of how to find aid and support.

Shaun Parker knows a lot about leaflet distribution. He shares his knowledge to help people make the most of leaflet delivery and door to door marketing campaigns.

In the old days of the Internet, there were no SEO Consultants, automated systems, or all that high technology stuff. A few years ago, in fact, the term ‘Search Engine Optimization’ did not even exist! Website owners struggled with ways and means to get the much-needed hits to their website (never mind if it was not targeted) to hopefully generate the needed revenues. Those were the days of IBM (or ‘It’s Best done Manually) and Organic SEO.

Organic SEO still refers to the processes and strategies that are undertaken to optimize a website so that it gets good relevance ratings based on the keywords that the site is responsive to. The only difference between Organic SEO and the SEO we now know is that Organic SEO is a manual process vs. the current automated processes of page submission and alteration that characterizes ‘modern’ SEO. Organic SEO, if you really think about is a ‘purist’ approach to website optimization because nothing is a ‘black box’. As a practitioner of Organic SEO, you know optimization; you don’t just blindly trust it.

Organic SEO is based on a clear understanding of fundamental concepts, including:

- Search engines and how they work
Obviously, you cannot practice Organic SEO if you don’t even know how the first two letters of SEO (i.e., Search Engine) works. A search engine is a web site that provides the visitor a list of recommended websites to go to, based on a specific keyword or keywords. The rank of a website is statistically determined by what is termed as ‘key word density’ or the ratio of keywords to the total number of words of content in a website. The gatherer of this statistical data is what is called a ’spider’ or ’spider bot’, which is a program whose function is to count the number of times a keyword appears in a website through a process called ‘crawling’.

- Search Engine Optimization
You can’t have Organic SEO without the SEO part, which stands what Search Engine Optimization. SEO’s main goal is simple: bring as many visitors to your website as possible by exerting influence on the search engine to position your website as close to the top of the list as possible. As a result of having more visitors, it is hoped that your website will generate business for you. This result is every Organic SEO practitioner’s clear measure of success.

- Viral Marketing
This is an important concept to understand if you are serious about becoming a good Organic SEO practitioner. Viral Marketing is a strategy to exponentially increase the number of visitors to your website from a small base that you have developed from your initial Organic SEO strategy. An example of Viral Marketing is to offer visitors to your website an opportunity to generate income from their own website by simply putting in your website’s link on theirs so that when people visit their website, then there is a good chance that they will visit yours. This strategy is certainly a handy component of the arsenal of a practitioner of Organic SEO.

- Optimized Domain Names
One of the simplest concepts to understand, yet also one that is not as easy to implement. Getting a keyword-rich domain name is every Organic SEO practitioner’s dream because it carries so much weight in the relevance scale. If you domain name is exactly what you are selling, you will be able to smoothly sail on without much of a problem in the rankings. The problem, of course, is that there is a very high likelihood that the ‘good’ domain names already belong to someone, and this makes an Organic SEO practitioner’s life more difficult.

- Keyword Research
This is the first step on the list of to-dos for an Organic SEO practitioner because it plays a major role in determining your optimization strategy. Since it takes months for any optimization strategy to take effect, an Organic SEO practitioner’s efforts will be wasted if he makes the mistake of optimizing a website based on keywords that are not as popular as he assumed.

Becoming an Organic SEO practitioner is not an easy task at all because it requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals that those utilizing automated systems take for granted. There is a major advantage, however, of Organic SEO vs. the ‘lazy man’s SEO: A clear understanding of the concepts allows you to analyze SEO situations more accurately and come up with strategies that are more appropriate and responsive to your website’s needs.

Seomul Evans is a SEO Services consultant specializing with leading dallas SEO Consulting.

Leaflet distribution is a method of delivering a message to a target audience. It can be a cost effective method of delivering a message directly to people that might be interested. It is an extremely popular method of marketing that is used to help businesses promote products and services that they offer.

It is used to promote thoughts and feelings of different political groups and has been used in a number of different situations as a method of creating awareness and support for a cause. It is a method of creating interest or spreading a message that has become extremely popular throughout the years and is unremittingly popular with businesses, governments and other organisations. The method of distributing leaflets is usually done in one of two ways. The leaflets are either delivered by hand to an individual or they are placed in a particular geographical region or in the case of business leaflet distribution they are placed in the door of potential clients or under car windscreen wipers.

There are a number of different methods in which leaflet distribution has been used in a political capacity. Some of these reasons are as follows. One of the most common uses of leaflet drops is to provide people with information to counter information that has been delivered by opposition. The leaflets can also be used to threaten people with an attack. This is particularly likely in conflicts in which armies can inform enemy troops that they will invade if no action is taken. The leaflets in war situations are often used to encourage the opposition to surrender and if how to go about surrendering without facilitating a retaliation.

The propaganda leaflets are also used to offer rewards. The leaflets have also been used for a number of less damaging methods of propaganda such as facilitating communication and they are also often used for humanitarian situations such as telling people where they can find aid or support when there is a humanitarian crisis.

The use of leaflet distribution as a method of war has been around for hundreds of years. One of the examples of this took place in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. In this case the French sent a balloon over the Russian troops and dropped flyers encouraging them to stop warring. The Italo-Turkish war saw the first example of leaflets being dropped using aeroplanes. A great deal of them were distributed during the second world war and leaflet drops were also successfully used during the Korean war. It was said that over a billion leaflets were dropped in Korea and a comparatively smaller thirty one million articles were distributed in the war in Iraq. They have also been a useful tool in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Leaflets have also been a very effective tool in political movements but in recent years it has been exploited by terrorist groups as a method of killing people. Bombs have been placed under a stack of propaganda leaflets and detonated when people are in close proximity to the leaflets. The most recent examples of this come from Latin America. The El Salvador FMLN group placed a bomb under leaflets and placed in very public places such as public parks and markets.

Shaun Parker knows a lot about leaflet distribution. He shares his knowledge to help people make the most of leaflet delivery and door to door marketing campaigns.