RJM's
Insights

Jackson-based marketing and advertising agency, RJM, is giving away $42,000 in expert marketing services to a Michigan non-profit in celebration of its 42nd anniversary!

RJM understands the importance of non-profits in the folds of our communities. As a champion for bettering communities and helping the businesses within them reach their full potential, RJM wants to give its time and talent in print and digital marketing or web development to a deserving nonprofit. Any 501(c)(3) in the mid-Michigan area should apply now at rjm.marketing/non-profit-marketing-giveaway. 

Even today, when dealing with the senior market, digital marketing solutions can often be seen as "too new". Public perception of seniors is that they haven’t needed to, or aren’t interested in adapting to new technologies such as social media, smartphones, tablets, or online shopping. But inside senior living, we know that’s not the case.

Continuing care retirement communities and independent living campuses have seen their active seniors participate in learning sessions for iPads, join social media to keep up with grandchildren, and insist on fast and reliable Wi-Fi and broadband access.

RJM, a marketing agency based in Jackson, Michigan, was recently presented with several prestigious advertising awards at the 2019 Marketing Communications Agency Network (MCAN) annual ceremony held on January 20, 2020, in New Orleans, LA. The awards were granted for marketing & advertising projects encompassing a variety of categories, including television, radio, publication, print advertising, and consumer direct mailer campaign. In all, RJM was recognized for marketing efforts in 16 different categories for clients throughout the United States, including Broadmead, County National Bank, Experience Jackson, da Vinci, and others.

The Community Bankers of Michigan (CBM) are excited to announce a new partnership for strategic marketing and development help with RJM, headquartered in Jackson, MI.

The new partnership will help CBM to improve upon the mission of ensuring that community banks have an equal voice and an equal place in the financial industry. As a core component of each community across Michigan, community banks play a vital role in the economy, and strengthening their resources is crucial to further economic development.

It’s easy to knock direct mail. Associated with incredibly low response rates, rising postage costs, and customer frustrations, direct mail fell to the bottom of the marketing mix in favor of more digital executions. For the senior living market, however, direct mail remains a crucial part of the marketing plan – with the right creative spin.

You can recognize companies where social media really matters. Their social media managers are some of the highest paid employees in the company and they have a seat at the executive table.

If you’re one of those companies, congratulations, you’ve cracked the code. Feel free to stop reading.

Last week we hung a new poster on our office wall. No matter how much I like it, this is relevant now only because of what it says: “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”

If marketing is nothing more than a gigantic chicken and egg problem, this quote from Herb Kelleher (former CEO of Southwest Airlines) solves the chicken side. Don’t stop. Just live. Go forward and adjust on the way.

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report is out!

“Mary who?” you ask?

A partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, she has been covering the emerging technology markets since early in her career. Serving on the boards of companies such as Square and DocuSign, she releases a yearly report on trends on the Internet. And the report is no light reading – this year’s spans 294 slides and covers everything from monthly active users for social media to the U.S. GDP and unemployment rates.

Released on May 30, we understand if you haven’t spent the time to go through all 294 slides quite yet. So, we thought we’d take a moment to pull out the important points that we saw.

With a world that changes as quickly as ours does, it’s appropriate to reevaluate your marketing plan each year. And while many activities slowly decrease over time, or drop off completely, there is one that we have seen stick around since 1851.

Okay, we haven’t personally seen it stick around since 1851 – we’re not that old after all. But we’ve seen it in marketing plans since we started in 1980 and companies continue to use it to grow their customers. And that’s tradeshows.

This is not a political discussion. We’re an advertising agency.

But with the amount of every company’s budget that has shifted to digital advertising in the last few years, it’s hard to ignore all of the issues going on in social media these days from a purely marketing standpoint. Because when it comes down to it, social media is us. It’s our customers. And that’s what we’re focused on. The customers.

While it may be easy to blow off all of these stories in the news today swirling around Facebook, Google and Amazon, we must pay attention. Too many companies have invested into building large marketing infrastructure around these platforms to pass these stories off as pure political fluff.