Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation Commissions Syl Wilson Marketing for Gala Design

In 2016, the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation commissioned Syl Wilson Marketing to design their Gala program, brochure, social media campaigns and email campaigns. Not only did we design these elements, but we also participated in the Gala and it was OUTSTANDING. The sponsors of the event gave incredible amounts and the night was very special for the children of the Greater East St. Louis area.

Technology used to design: Adobe InDesign, Photoshop
Client: Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation
Industry: Nonprofit

Understanding the gaze of your customer

The design and graphics of your marketing material must support and strengthen the copy message.

• Make it easy to scan
• Have a focal point
• Have an easy transfer of information (easy to read)
• Communicate not decorate

What draws the eye, are warm colors and people. The best place to put your illustration is on the

Picking your PURL for your Direct Mail Campaign

I remember the first direct mail campaign I ever did involving a PURL.  It was for a machine tool that I wanted to show with a great price.  In order to sell machine tools, we tend to not ever show “pricing” on our campaigns and it also just happens to be one of the hardest things to make an ad “sexy”. So we decided to make this particular campaign the campaign that was “Setting Sail” and you didn’t want to miss the boat…What? It was catchy!

The fun part of this campaign was that we put the machines on a boat in the ocean and it looked like they were really setting sail…but we had very low response rate on these mailers.  We also put pricing on these mailers because we decided that perhaps this one time…it could work.  What we found was instead of leading with price, we just needed to lead with what customers really wanted to know about. In our case the audience wants to know why these high dollar capital pieces of equipment were worthy of their almighty dollar in a tight economy.

In another campaign for the same company we chose a waterjet machine (these machines cut steel, titanium, anything with water – very cool stuff – you should learn about this. Click here to watch a short video. Anyway, back to the direct mail piece. What we did was concentrate on the audience more this time. The audience of this machine happens to be into Harley motorcycles and the machine that we were selling just so happens to cut a lot of the parts on the motorcycle “Harley Davidson”. So we did an entire campaign around this and the PURL reflected this. The mailer had a Harley motorcycle on the front of the postcard and so did the landing page that PURL directed the customer to.

Everything is personalized once the cusotmer gets to their site and that’s the beauty of the PURL. They feel like you know them. If you have a good database, you can do this. If you know your audience, which 9 times out of 10 you do, you just need to organize your information into one place, then you can target your customers in a way that makes you seem like you understand your customer and care about them more than your competetion ever could. And in this day and age, that my friends is exactly what we all MUST do!

Hope this is helping someone!