Latest Posts

Winterfest ’09

Fort Lauderdale’s annual Winterfest celebration is best known for one thing:  it’s one-of-a-kind boat parade. In its 38th year, the parade has been tagged the “Greatest Show on H2O” and “The World’s Most Watched Boat Parade” and – for good reason. Comprised of over 100 festively decorated boats, this illuminated armada leisurely makes its way up 12 miles of Fort Lauderdale intracoastal waterway, entertaining over one million spectators plus millions more via television. As always, it is a great way to celebrate the season with friends, family and associates.

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Greater Fort Lauderdale and Starmark Win Three Flagler Awards

This summer, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau (GFLCVB) and Starmark took home three 2009 Flagler Awards, given out at the 42nd Annual Governors Conference on Tourism. The GFLCVB’s Vacation Planner, out-of-home advertising on the Long Island Expressway and post-election ad were all winners.

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Social Bookmarking & Sharing Cheat Sheet

Earlier this week, the Harvard Business Blog published a short article about the six social media trends for 2010. One of the featured trends states that ‘sharing no longer means email’.  (the other 5 can be found at http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org).

What this means is that virtually every website, and almost all information on the web, will need the ability to be easily shared by readers and visitors across their social graphs or social networks and connections. Each page or ‘chunk’ of information (whether that’s a video, a blog post, or a web page) will have associated links to share the information across Facebook, Twitter, and a myriad of other social platforms. You’ve probably noticed these links and icons showing up on the web sites you visit.
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Starmark Celebrates Guten News and Guten Times at Oktoberfest

On the evening of October 22nd, more than 50 guests joined Starmark’s Oktoberfest celebration at the StarBar, the agency’s onsite Networking Center. The spread featured Bavarian fare like bratwurst, sauerkraut, pfeffernusse cookies and genuine German beers, all with very long names. Guests included Starmark clients, employees, business associates and local leaders in business, the arts, education and politics, such as Broward County Mayor Ken Keechl.
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Mobile Tagging (QR Codes, Microsoft Tags, Datamatrix, SnapTell) The Chicken or the Egg?

Mobile tags are like barcodes that you can place anywhere, and which users “snap” with the camera on their mobile phones. When they do, the tag typically links to online information that can be as simple as a website, or as complex as a deep and engaging storytelling experience.

There is a lot of potential for advertorial uses with these tags:

    • Snapping a tag for a cab company sends a VCard to your phone so you can one-touch dial their cabs.
    • A magazine ad for a destination could use a tag to push the latest discounts and offers.
    • Snap a real estate sign to see details about the home, other homes handled by that agent or information about the neighborhood.

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Use keywords in your headline tags to improve search rankings

Headline tags – or “H” tags – are among several behind-the-scenes heroes that speak to search engines in order to improve your search engine rankings. These HTML tags are used to create a hierarchy of the key words on your web page, from H1 (most important) to H6 (least important).

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Starmark Hires Justice Mitchell as Interactive Creative Director

Starmark international has hired Justice Mitchell, an award winning Interactive Creative Director, as the firm’s new Interactive Creative Director.

Mitchell joins Starmark from Luckie & Co., where he served as Vice President of Interactive & New Media Services and Group Creative Director. During his tenure with Luckie he lead the interactive creative strategy for top brands like Little Debbie; Bayer Advanced, a retail division of Bayer Crop Science; AT&T and Regions Bank. Other digital brand and social media campaign development experience includes State of Alabama Tourism, Audi USA, Wynn Resorts, Levi Strauss & Co. and multiple Walt Disney® World Companies.

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Peggy Nordeen Honored by Bill Nelson

Congratulations to Starmark’s CEO, Peggy Nordeen, who this week was named the Chair of the Broward Alliance and was honored by the South Florida Business Journal as a Diamond Award winner. The Diamond Awards recognize ten outstanding South Florida CEOs for their dedicated service to business and the community. We are proud of you!

Breadcrumbs keep your consumers on the right path

The deeper you go into a website, the trickier it can be to find your way back. For example, Jill Consumer has been shopping for an automobile on your website for 30 minutes, but now she’d like to go back to a vehicle she saw 20 pages ago. She doesn’t necessarily want to hit the back button 20 times or open up her History and figure out which page it was. That’s where breadcrumb navigation, or selection list navigation, comes in.

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Use direct mail to reach your clients’ mailbox as well as their inbox.

Even in the web world, print is still your friend. That’s why it’s a good idea to use a direct mail campaign to reinforce your web marketing. For example, send a printed piece to your mailing list to alert them they will soon receive an email announcing a big sale, new inventory and so on. Likewise, you can send out direct mail to follow-up on your email marketing.

When we have done this for our clients, we have seen as much as a 24% boost in the overall return.

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A Case Study in Guerilla Marketing – The IWearYourShirt Experiment

A t-shirt can be much more than a fashion statement – it can be a billboard seen by almost half a million people a month. This is the premise of Jason Sadler’s brainchild, IWearYourShirt.com.

In This Economy, He Wears Shirts Well
Sadler had the ingenious idea to sell the upper-half of his wardrobe throughout 2009, using his chest as a billboard to promote whatever company paid for the privilege. The price he charges corresponds to the day of the year, with January 1 a bargain at just one dollar and December 31 going for $365, the maximum.

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Take the guesswork out of your web marketing with A/B Testing

In creating a web presence, there are a lot of different ways to go in terms of layout, text, images, colors, offers and so on. So how do you know which direction will help you achieve your goals? AB Testing allows you to test two variations of a web page or email blast in order to determine which is more successful. (Think of it like bracketing for the NCAA finals.) For example, does an orange “buy now” button work better than a green one? Does a subject line with a freebie offer work better than one with a discount offer? Is it more effective to place the navigation bar at the top or on the left? These may seem like trivial differences. However, once your AB Testing results come in, you’ll discover they’re huge.

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