Marketing is a term used to define how businesses go about pricing, promoting, placing, and producing their products and services to consumers.
Marketing encompasses every aspect of a business, including brand identity, organizational culture, internal processes, financing, strategy, etc. With this in mind, it is a very vast field, and everyone working within a business or managing their business deals with one or more aspects of marketing. If you are a cashier at a store, you are on the front line of customer service. You are promoting the business with your interpersonal skills and affecting the customers’ experience buying a product. If you are a hair stylist, you are affecting the customers’ experience by the level of service you give to the customer. If you are an accountant, you are directly helping to track the expenses and incomes of the business. This guides decisions in how many products to produce, how many people to hire, and if the business can expand.
I am very interested in the creative aspect of marketing—how businesses can communicate a message to their target market through text, images, colors, videos, feelings, and sounds. It all comes down to communication. We are receiving hundreds of messages daily from businesses. “This product will help you do X.” “Try this product and you will feel like Y.” These messages are attempting to offer a solution to a perceived problem. No one wants a useless product that won’t do anything. We want something that will fulfill a need, help us do something better, make us feel a certain way, and solve our specific problem/problems. I think it is essential to understand the functions of marketing and how every single job in a business is a crucial piece of the whole. Especially if you want to have your own business, you may want to think about how effectively you manage these various aspects and if you need to start outsourcing jobs to other people.
I hope that this gave you a better insight into the marketing field and how it encompasses all areas of the business. As well as how marketing is broken down into specialties and specific functions.
Interview Conducted on November 14th, 2024 by Angel Larson
The Brandon Steakhouse & Lounge is a Brandon, South Dakota restaurant. The business serves steaks, entrees, appetizers, various sides, a senior menu, a kids menu, and a full bar. The Brandon Steakhouse provides a classic old-time feel but has recently improved the floor, seating, and bathrooms. I had the privilege of sitting down with Mark Anderson, the business owner, to ask him about his experience of becoming a business owner. I wanted to learn more about what he does as the owner, how he got to be the owner of the Brandon Steakhouse, and what knowledge and skills he has learned over the years.
What made you interested in owning the Brandon Steakhouse? I started working here the month I turned 16 and stayed on through college. I learned all the ropes, and I knew that the owner, Bob, was getting old and would be passed on to somebody. I asked him if he wanted to sell the Brandon Steakhouse to me, and he said yes.
How did you go about acquiring the Brandon Steakhouse? It was mind-blowing, to be honest with you. I did a contract for deed for the first five years. There are so many licenses you have to have in this business. Every year, I have to get a new lottery and liquor license. I didn’t know about that. I was just told about it when it happened. There are many more bills involved in all seriousness than one would think.
How long have you owned the Brandon Steakhouse now? It’ll be six years in January.
What skills and knowledge did you have to learn to become a successful business owner? I didn’t go to college to be a business owner; I went for conservation science. I was still working here, and when I finished college, I returned and started working full-time. I enjoyed it, and then, at one point, the owner couldn’t do some of the bigger things that were supposed to be done, like cutting the meat, so he taught me how to do what he did. I just took over from there. I learned business skills on-site through experience.
Would you say that being the head cook and the owner of the Brandon Steakhouse has made you more invested in the business? One thing is for sure: when I bought it, I didn’t think I would be putting in the hours I was. Of course, I’m more invested. My first goal when I started was to make things as good as possible. When I bought it, we closed and renovated the whole bar the first month. Time passed, and we made more changes, like remodeling the carpet and making a handicapped bathroom. I’m always trying to improve it and want the business to succeed.
How has the food service industry changed since you started working here? During the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, it was almost impossible to get food. I was always running around trying to get what I needed. Even U.S. Foods could never get meat for me during that time, so that was a learning thing. I had to buckle down and figure things out on my own. I would succeed no matter what, so I’m still here.
Do you think that since the business was already established in the area when you got it, it helped to make it more successful than if you were just to open a completely new restaurant? The Brandon Steakhouse is a well-known place, and when it started, Brandon was a lot smaller. The population now is close to 70,000, so it carries the name. I barely do any advertising because we get a lot of local customers and word of mouth.
What forms of marketing have you used to bring awareness to Brandon Steakhouse? I’ll advertise occasionally in local publications. I considered putting up one of those signs that they have when you’re getting off at the exits on the Interstate, but there wasn’t one available. We could do more advertising if I had more people to work here. The biggest struggle is getting and training cooks.
How has the local community helped the business to thrive? 80% of our customers are from Brandon. It’s probably one of the biggest growing cities in South Dakota, so that’s also helped.
What are your goals for the future for the Brandon Steakhouse? I want to make the steakhouse as good as possible and then sell it so I can retire. I love what I do, but I’m getting older, and I would like to find someone to pass down the Steakhouse Legacy, too.
Design is a very creative field, but it also uses math, logic, and reason to aid in designing. For example, a flyer, advertisement, banner, poster, etc. will all be designed within the dimensions of a page. A common dimension for a flyer would be 8.5″ x 11″ (8.5 inches wide and 11 inches tall) This is the common size of a sheet of paper. Print advertisements and posters are more likely to be in custom sizes that require a more specialized printer.
You can also have dimensions of design in terms of pixels. Pixel sizing is used when you are creating a design that will be displayed on smartwatch, phone, tablet, TV, and computer screens.
Sizing and math is important in terms of the photos you use in your design, the font size, and the sizes of shapes. From small to large sizing there are different challenges you will face with your designs.
Designing on small dimensions means that you will have to make sure your design can still be read and noticed. You may have to have less elements in your design, because there is not as much space to work with. Larger designs mean that the elements must be much larger. You also have to take into consideration how close the viewer will be when looking at your design. If they are going to be looking at it from close up (1-2 feet away) you can get away with making the text very small. If they are going to be looking at it from a far distance and for not very long (for example a billboard on the side of the road) you will need to make the elements very large and easy to take in at a glance.
Sizing is also very important to consistency in your design. You must develop a method to the sizing of your type, shapes, and images. For example you may have a specific size to use for the main heading, sub headings, body copy, and captions within a single design that you will want to stick to.
If you want an element of your design like an image to take up 1/3, 1/4, 1/2, 2/3, or 3/4 of your design space, you can figure this out easily by taking the total length or width of your design and applying the fraction to it. For example, if a graphic you are making is 400 pixels tall and you want the image to take up 3/4 of the space, take 400 divided by 4 (100) and than multiply that number by 3 (300). So to for the image to take up 3/4 of the space vertically it would need to be 300 pixels tall.
This is how you can use a basic understanding of math to help aid you in your designs.
Interview Conducted on September 25th, 2024 by Angel Larson
Click Rain is a people-centered digital agency based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The company provides web solutions and digital marketing strategies that make a difference in any type of business. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Bailey Wood, the associate director of marketing at Click Rain, to ask her about her experiences in the marketing career field. I wanted to learn more about what she does in her position, how she got there, and what is takes to pursue a career in marketing.
Angel: How did you get into the marketing field? Bailey: I first went to school for music education. Being a musician has always been my passion, but I found out that it was just a passion and not a career. At the time I was planning my wedding, and I enjoyed the wedding planning process so much that I was wondering how I could turn it into a professional career. Jobs that deal with people planning, organization, and marketing were one of the first results. I jumped into a program at Iowa State and then discovered how complex and strategy-driven it can be. I love data, research, science, and numbers learning, but I also love to design. I dabble in arts and music and think creatively. With marketing, specifically marketing strategy, those things come together. We rely on the foundation of data, but we also think creatively. How does the message come across? How do we get the look right when we bring all those pieces together? So that’s how I landed here.
Angel:Since you’ve gotten into the marketing field from college, how has it changed? Bailey: It changes every quarter, like what platforms there are. When I first got out of college, Tik-Tok didn’t exist, X was still called Twitter, and we used Instagram differently. Facebook demographics were completely different from a younger millennial generation to now. It changes constantly, and that’s the nature of marketing. There’s also a difference in technology, so there’s a big focus on AI right now that is absolutely impacting the marketing field, and it also impacts things from a privacy perspective. Across many industries, we’re seeing an increase in consumers caring about where their data is being stored, how it’s being used, and what happens when there’s a data breach. How marketing works right now relies heavily on consumer information, so we want to track people from opening an email to clicking on a website. How we interact with that data has changed quite a bit. We have more information, but it also has gotten to the point where, when you think about how you go to purchase as a consumer, it’s not very straightforward. You might see an ad, and then you see a billboard. You might click on something on Facebook, but you don’t make a purchase. So how do we determine which one of those things was the right thing? We used tools like Google Analytics that can see those different paths, and we try to understand which were the most impactful and which of them is the right one for whatever the case is.
Angel:What drew you to working at Click Rain? Bailey: I’m from Omaha. I moved from there about a year and a half ago. I worked remotely for Click Rain for 2 years and then decided that I loved Sioux Falls and the community. I also love working with creative people. I think the thing that drew me in also was the mantra of ours, “metrics that matter.” Sometimes in the marketing field you get a lot of fluff like “We’ll increase your followers by 100%,” but what does that really mean? How does that impact somebody’s business? How are we contributing and making a difference to an overall business? Click Rain really cares and focuses on the metrics that matter, so does it matter to you to increase followers, make sales, or increase customer loyalty? That’s what’s making a real impact on business.
Angel:Has it been easier to work at a company surrounded by the tools they have and the other people, or was it easier to be freelance? Bailey: I’ve worked in in-house marketing, and I’ve done consulting for several different businesses. I would say each comes with unique pros and cons, and it could differ by person and the stage of life you are in. As far as which ones were great for me, I felt like I was hitting a bit of a ceiling when I did 20 things okay by myself. So, what I wanted to do was to focus on an area. When I was a consultant, I would do the strategy, design the ads, write the copy, build websites, and do the tracking. I did good at some, but I’m not a trained designer. I’m not as well versed in media placement as our media team is. So, I focused on the marketing strategy because that’s where I have a competitive advantage. Having the team at Click Rain has helped me learn and grow.
Angel: How did you know when you wanted to switch positions or companies? Bailey: I think it feels like there’s something in your gut saying that you’re ready for a change. I wasn’t seeking; I was just open to possibilities. I saw a Facebook ad for Click Rain, and I read through the description of the role thinking, “Wow, that seems like that would be a great fit that would suit my strengths well.” So, I decided to throw my hat in the ring, and after my first conversations with our HR person, Carissa, who is an amazing human being, I also recognized how amazing the culture is at Click Rain. That was another important component to me, and Click Rain is very top-tier.
Angel: What is your typical workday like? Bailey: It varies a lot. I meet with clients and work through campaign strategy, where we are looking at what our goal is, how we accomplish that goal, and getting the right people and pieces in place on a timeline and budget. I spend time estimating how much things cost. I spend time working on new business initiatives, so I’m looking at if we’re trying to acquire new clients or new partnerships. I also work on department initiatives. As a leader in my department, I help to make sure that the people on my team have their proper tools, resources, and guidance. It’s usually a packed day at a fast pace, which I enjoy.
Angel: How do you manage your busy workflow? Bailey: The key is prioritizing and focusing. Knowing when something can be pushed to a later time or when it’s urgent. We have a project management system that helps us organize our work. That keeps everybody on track with due dates and file management. I also always think hard. I’m very thoughtful and make sure I’m finding the right timing and momentum. Sometimes we might need to turn the heat up on a project, and sometimes we need to turn it down. It’s an art and a science. Utilizing your team is also important. Knowing should I get other people to help with this or can I train somebody, and they can take this on. Sometimes you must let go of the reins. I’ve learned that I can’t be everywhere at once, I can’t do everything all at once, and I can’t see everything.
Angel: How can you make sure that those goals you’re making are specific, measurable, and attainable? Bailey: We use an organizational system called traction, which provides us a framework for how you can operate as a business. As part of traction, we develop an organizational vision for 2025 and how we’re going to work towards that goal. We call it a rock because it takes everyone to push a boulder up a hill. The idea is that everybody takes their part, and we’re able to move really big things. Then we develop your personal rocks. Every trimester I work with my manager and then the people that I’ve managed to come together to figure out how we can collectively contribute to our department and organization to reach those goals. We develop a due date and specific expectations for what we’re going to do to accomplish those goals.
Angel: How can we as marketers try and keep up with the advancing technology and the growing digital landscape? Bailey: We take advantage and stay up to date with several different marketing e-newsletters from companies like Spark Toro. They send a lot of information to your inbox. It’s up to you if that’s relevant or interesting. I’ve gained a lot from conferences and seminars. People love or hate conferences, but I’ve gained so much from them. Getting together with industry professionals, hearing from people who have put together thoughtful presentations, and finding other professionals in the marketing field to interact with are great resources. We do a great job here at sharing between our departments as well. Following people on LinkedIn and keeping up with news can also be helpful.
Angel: Are there any groups or societies for people in marketing that you would recommend? Bailey: The American Marketing Association has a lot of people involved with it. I stay really present with schools. I teach a class at Augustana right now. I’ve presented at student days, like career fairs for SDSU and USD. Sometimes it’s just great to feel like you’re staying connected with marketing professors, and up-and-coming talent is great.
Angel: How do you manage a good work-life health balance? Bailey: Click Rain has a couple of core values, and one of them is balance. Your human well-being comes first, then your family, and then work. Click Rain does a great job of ensuring that we’re not asked to work outside of normal working hours. We’re able to leave work and go home. That’s #1 of work-life balance—having a company that helps to accommodate that for you. Another thing is not taking things personally. Thinking the best, assuming the best of people, and taking breaks. I’m a person that wants to be obsessed all the time, but I have to walk away sometimes.
Angel: What tips do you have for progressing a career in the marketing field? Bailey: Try to build a community of people in business. Sometimes that’s a vulnerable thing to do. Sometimes we want to do our job and go home, but you gain so much by expanding the people that you know. I got my master’s degree fully funded because I went into an open house at Creighton and I said, “Hey, I’d like to get my MBA, and I’d like to get it for free. Who do I need to talk to about it?” I talked to the lady while she was there for about 40 minutes and gave her my pitch, and two weeks later they called me and said somebody dropped out of the program and would you like to take their spot as a graduate assistant? That would have never happened if I hadn’t put myself out there. Believe in yourself.
Angel: Do you have anything else you want to add? Bailey: If you have a spark to do something, explore it. Do it even if it’s not always super feasible. Sometimes we’ll have a little whisper that will say I’m really interested in this, or this is my dream job or role. Go and pursue it! It takes a bit of courage and vulnerability, but I think you’re so rewarded for taking those risks and doing it. You can get far by working hard and having your products as polished as possible. I try to take a step beyond, and I have seen where that pays off. There’s a lot of opportunity and a great future for marketers.
Now that you have gathered your research data, you will need to organize the data and analyze it. If you don’t have enough responses, you may need to make more efforts to gather the data. You could also try another method to gather data.
Enter your responses into excel.
Turn the data into a table, so that you can re-organize it easily. This is easy to do if there where set responses that the respondents had to fill out. For example yes or no questions, multiple choice questions, or questions where you had to select only one answer. If your respondents where able to fill in the blank to answer the questions, you will have to analyze each response one by one.
Filter the table so that you can see only your target audiences responses. For example, if you are creating an app targeted towards females, organize the list so that it only shows the responses from female or so that they are all together at the top.
You can narrow down your list further as well. If you are targeting your app or website towards females, aged 18-25, who live on their own, and make $30,000-$50,000 per year, you will want to organize the responses in the table so it is only showing the responses from those people.
Once you have narrowed down the responses to only show those who your app or website is targeted towards, analyze their responses carefully. What are they looking for in your intended app or website? What are they like? what are their needs and desires? Are they likely to use an app or website? What do they aspire for?
Once you have analyzed these details from your research, you can move on to creating user personas.
Digital photography can seem very daunting at the start. Once you understand the basics of how to use your camera and what elements go into a photo, you can progress very quickly.
One of the foundations of understanding photography is to understand the exposure triangle. The exposure triangle is a diagram that helps to explain how shutter speed, aperature, and ISO effect the exposure on your camera. Exposure is the way your camera senses and interprets the image you are taking. If your exposure is too high or too low, you may have areas that are too dark or too light and will lose detail.
Shutter speed controls motion and light. Shutter speed is how fast or slow your camera takes and image with a range from 30 seconds to 1/4000th of a second. A slower shutter speed shows motion in an image and can capture more light in an image. If your image is very bright and has a lot of detail (like a landscape) you will need a slower shutter speed in order to capture all of the small details. For images with a shutter speed slower than 1/60th of a second, you will have to use a tripod or stabilizer for your camera. This is because we are not able to hold our cameras perfectly steady and you do not want your image to become blurry. Faster shutter speed freezes action and is used in lower lighting situations. You can work with shutter speed to create motion blur effects as well.
Aperture controls depth of field, light, and can be used to achieve a creative effect. Aperture is measured with f stops, ranging from f/1.4 to f/22 in some cameras. A lower aperture (f/1.4) creates a shallow depth of field, where only a small portion of the image is in focus. With a lower aperture your camera lens is open more, so it will capture more light. The part of the image that is farther away will not be in focus. A larger aperture (f/22) closes the lens more and lets in less light. This will result in a much deeper depth of field, where every part of the image is clear (foreground, subject, background). Overall controlling aperture is important for a photography to be able to focus on what is important in the image and the message they are trying to convey.
ISO is the light sensitivity of your camera and will affect your image quality. Normally it is good to use the lowest ISO setting on your camera, because it will be the maximum quality. However, when it is darker you may have to turn your ISO up in order to see the image more clearly. A lower ISO (100) will turn your light sensitivity all the way down and is great for very bright, outdoor images. A higher ISO is used for indoor lighting or lighting at night, where it is much darker and harder to capture details. This will turn your light sensitivity all the way up, but may result in lower quality images.
In manual mode, you will want to adjust shutter speed, aperture, and ISO to achieve a 0 on the exposure scales. This is measured where negative numbers are under exposed, positive numbers are over exposed, and 0 is the perfect exposure. There may be some circumstances though, where you will intentionally want the exposure to not be a perfect 0. It is important to make sure though, that there are no parts of your images that are too dark or too bright to see.
You can use a DSLR simulator online to practice these concepts for free, before you go out with your camera.
Another important concept to understand for photography is white balance. White balance controls how your camera interprets colors, as not all lighting achieves the same color tones. Different light sources emit light at different color temperatures, causing a color cast on your image. Lower color temperatures are warmer, shifting towards red. Higher color temperatures are colder, and shift towards blue. The Kelvin Scale is used to measured light temperature. This scale goes from candlelight, tungsten bulb, sunrise/sunset (clear sky), fluorescent lamps, electric flash, daylight with clear sky (sun overhead), moderately overcast sky, to shade or heavily overcast skies.
You can either use the auto white balance setting, custom setting, or preset options from your camera to set the white balance. Setting your camera to the appropriate white balance setting ensures that your colors will turn out accurately in your photos. Or these settings can be used to create a creative effect where you change the color tone of your photo. My camera includes a tungsten setting, fluorescent setting, daylight setting, flash setting, cloudy setting, and shade setting for white balance preset options. You can also set a custom white balance by taking a photo of a card or paper in the setting you are taking photos in, and then setting this image as your white balance in the custom options.
I hope that this post has helped you to understand some of the basics of how your camera works and how you can use these settings to change the result of your images.
In fall 2023, I took a digital photography class. I was not at all prepared for what this class would be like, or what I would be learning. Overall though, it was a very fun and challenging experience that I would recommend to anyone interested in photography or design.
I am fortunate that my older sister is a professional photographer and has a backup camera that I can use. Before, she never trusted me with her camera. When I told her I was taking a digital photography class though, she was excited to let me borrow her equipment and camera. I have been using her Cannon T6i Rebel Camera, which includes a variety of lenses, multiple camera batteries, a large and small tripod, light reflectors, camera bag, sd cards, and a black & white backdrop. She did require me to get her some new lens covers and I bought a white card, along with some lens cleaners.
Working with an expensive pieces of equipment, you must make sure to store your camera and lenses properly. The lens caps and camera cover also insure that minimal dust/debris will get into your equipment, making it last longer. It was very daunting working with this equipment at first, as you also have to make sure not to drop anything and keep it away from wetness. With the cannon, you can also turn the screen inwards when you are not using it.
After my sister explained all the buttons on the camera to me and how to use it properly, I still had no idea how to take an ideal photo. The digital photography class was what taught me the basic skills and knowledge I needed to progress my photography skills. We first started by learning the basics about exposure, and how it is achieved through shutter speed, ISO, and aperture. It is critical to learn about these concepts as well as white balance in order to achieve different creative photo styles/effects and become a master of photography.
Digital photography not only helps you to take beautiful and unique photos but also can help you in a manner of other design applications. These applications include, commercial photography, landscape photography, portrait photography, digital imaging, and creating unique content for videos, ads, layouts, or websites. On this blog I will be sharing the things I have learned in this digital photography class as well as other classes and context that this design and technical knowledge has become useful. Topics will include: depth of field, white balance, high key images, low key images, HDR composites, macro photography, motion blur, portrait lighting, underwater photography, sunset silhouettes, and civil twilight photography.
Thank you to Sylvia Larson for letting me continue to use her camera and equipment. I have learned so much and photography can be so much fun! I fully intend to buy this equipment from her before I graduate, and continue to experiment more with photography for my own personal interest as well as creative projects. That you to my professor for being a great guide and influence on our learning journey as students, by providing knowledge and experiences in photography for us. At the start I really didn’t think I would be cut out for the digital photography class, but over time I have become a lot more confident in my skills and abilities.
