Using cartoons can help brand your
marketing and drive home important messages. Although surprisingly
inexpensive to acquire, humor can be one of your most powerful marketing
tools.
Humor puts your readers at ease. Readers appreciate
a touch of humor in an otherwise overly serious world.
Humor operates on an emotional level, driving home
your message in a far more memorable way than words alone. Humor makes
sensitive topics more approachable while summarizing and reinforcing
points that would otherwise be lost.
Different types of humor work best in different
contexts. Many speakers begin with a joke to put the audience at
ease, or a story about ‘a funny thing that happened on the
way to the meeting.’
But jokes and stories are less appropriate for written
communications. Jokes can be misinterpreted and depend on delivery
and timing for their effectiveness. Stories can take too long to tell.
Cartoons are perfect for print communications. Readers
who typically check them out before reading the adjacent articles
appreciate cartoons.
More important, cartoons communicate at a glance.
A cartoon can attract your reader’s attention and drive home
an important point in a memorable way.
The editorial page of any newspaper shows how effective humor can
be in simplifying complex subjects and driving home a point of view.
Humor also adds a visual dimension to your marketing,
differentiating your message from your competitor’s. Cartoons
encourage readers to look at topics they might otherwise skip.
Where do you get cartoons? One of the best sources
is the Cartoon Bank, www.cartoonbank.com. Here, you can license reproduction
rights to cartoons that originally appeared in the New Yorker Magazine.
You can select from tens of thousands of cartoons. You can search
by topic or keyword. After choosing an appropriate cartoon, you can
find out how much it will cost to license it, and then you can download
it.
Licensing fees are surprisingly reasonable for most business applications.
For example, you can license New Yorker cartoons for use in presentations
for just $19.95! For other purposes, the cost depends on where you’re
going to use it and how many people will see it.
There are, of course, other sources of cartoons.
If you see a cartoon you like in a newspaper or magazine, write the
cartoonist in care of the publication and ask about availability and
pricing. If there is a particular cartoonist whose style you like,
contact the cartoonist about a custom cartoon.
This has worked very well for me and I owned total rights to use the
cartoon any way I wanted.
Cartoons are great for the home page of your website,
newsletters, training materials and presentation visuals.
In each case, the unexpectedness of a cartoon immediately captures
your audience or reader’s attention and visually reinforces
your message.
Here are some suggestions for marketing with cartoons:
1. When in doubt, leave it out. If the cartoon does
not perfectly support your point,leave it out.
2. Always add the copyright information described
in the licensing agreement.
3. Never run a cartoon without first obtaining a
license to reproduce it.
4. Optimization. After downloading, resize and sharpen
the cartoon in an image-editing program like Photoshop and export
it in the proper file format.
Using humor in the form of cartoons is a
powerful way to brand your marketing and drive home important messages
to your prospects and clients. About The Author Roger C. Parker is the $32,000,000 author with over 1.6 million
books in print. Do you make these marketing and design mistakes? Find
out at www.gmarketing-design.com
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