The Balladerry Inn is one of the premiere bed and breakfasts in historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Owners Judy & Kenny Caudill had a previous working relationship with Pelland Advertising that went back to their former ownership of Gettysburg’s Round Top Campground. The highly-rated inn has been awarded the TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence for two consecutive years. The new responsive website updated and replaced the separate conventional and mobile sites that had previously been built by Pelland Advertising.

Log Village and Grist Mill Campground is a very unique, new campground in a very old setting. Owners Bob and Hilary Oreschnick moved from York, England after a brief vacation near this idyllic New York setting led them to fall in love with the historic gristmill, farmhouse and some 117 acres of surrounding land that has since been reborn as the Log Village and Grist Mill Campground. The campground features luxury yurts and tent camping, as well as facilities for weddings and corporate events.

Our responsive website built for the Law Offices of William MacDonald represents the first Web presence for this prominent personal injury law firm based in Springfield, Massachusetts. Former high school classmates, Attorney MacDonald and Peter Pelland had reconnected through the social media, and the project soon came to fruition. The site features a full Spanish language version, in order to reach out to the firm’s Hispanic clientele, as well as user-friendly contact forms and an online chat feature.

Click here to see the recently updated website portfolio on the Pelland Advertising website. Better yet, contact us today to launch your new responsive website!

The following is a brief excerpt from a recent Pelland Advertising Blog post that previously appeared as a regular column in the Campground Industry E-News. Click here to read the entire post, which includes a link to an even more comprehensive online seminar. If you find this information useful, our blog is regularly updated and filled with precisely this type of timely content.

We would like to encourage campground owners to take photos now, when the time is right. It is already mid-July, with two major holiday weekends and the entire month of June (perhaps the single best time to take photos) already behind us. We have no control over the weather, but you do have control over a tendency to procrastinate.

The excuses range from being too busy and too crowded to not being busy enough. With the exception of three-day holiday weekends, photos generally need to be taken on a Saturday, which eliminates 6 out of the 7 days of the week. Saturdays are the days that are packed with activities, and your occupancy levels insure a ready supply of impromptu models. The weather may be gorgeous on a Wednesday, but empty campsites, an empty playground, and an empty swimming pool do not present a high level of marketing appeal.

Here are a few tips:

• Hire a qualified and skilled commercial photographer. Get a referral, then view the photographer’s portfolio. Portfolios are all online these days. If the photographer shoots babies and weddings, look elsewhere.
• Expect to pay $800.00 to $1,200.00 for a day of commercial photography. Define the day, including the expected start and finish times. If more than 100 miles or so of travel is involved, expect to pay additional travel expenses. Look at the bright side: there are no longer any fees for film and processing!
• Expect your photographer to be using professional equipment (probably a digital SLR), including basic lighting (for interiors like your store and cabins) and a tripod. Professional photographers will always use a tripod.
• Expect the photographer (or an assistant) to take responsibility for model releases.
• The photographer should know how to “style” the shots, moving things around if necessary to improve the composition, but he cannot be expected to mow your lawn, pull weeds, rake your beach, replace burned out light bulbs, repair a torn volleyball net, or paint the side of a building. In other words, prepare in advance for your day of photography. If you were selling your house, would you show it to prospective buyers when the beds were unmade and there was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink? Do not expect everything to be “fixed” in Photoshop!
• Outline in advance how long it will take for you to receive the images taken the day of the shoot and how they will be delivered (most likely on discs). Also determine in advance what usage rights will be provided. Typically, the photographer will retain the actual ownership or copyright to his work, conveying full, royalty-free usage rights to the work that was produced on your behalf. That is a reasonable expectation, particularly these days when there is no original film involved.
• To get the job done right, the photographer you need is almost never going to be the person who you see in the mirror or somebody who addresses you as “Mom” or “Dad”.

Stand out from the crowd! If you are spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on a print advertising campaign, it does not make sense to cut costs on the production of the ad itself. In the case of a one-time insertion, it is not uncommon for the production cost of an ad to equal or exceed the cost of the ad space. In most instances, publishers will try to persuade you to use their in-house ad production services, often at no additional charge; however, if you want your ad to truly stand out, it needs to be independently produced.

Our production fee is a very affordable $390.00 for a full-color half-page ad or smaller (or $540.00 for a full-page ad). This pricing applies to professional advertising production services for any publication, from directories to paid circulation magazines. If you are interested, simply provide us with the size and any changes in content from your current ad, along with any necessary graphics files, and we will take it from there. We will provide a PDF proof for your review and make whatever changes and refinements that may be necessary to insure that you are 100% satisfied with our work, well in advance of the publishing deadline. Press-quality ad copy will then be uploaded directly to the publisher in their precise specifications.

Click here to see additional examples of our magazine and directory ad production on the Pelland Advertising website.

The following is a brief excerpt from a recent Pelland Advertising Blog post. The post, in itself, was a compilation of a two-part series that previously appeared in the Campground Industry E-News. Click here to read the entire post. If you find this information useful, our blog is regularly updated and filled with precisely this type of timely content.

There is a lot of buzz about branding these days. In fact, there is so much indiscriminate use of the term that it sometimes sounds like marketing’s latest pet rock. When properly orchestrated, nothing could be further from the truth. Proper branding can make the difference between success and failure. It is the combination of many facets of marketing, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Your brand is what differentiates you from your competitor across town or down the road. In fact, it is the founding principle behind successful franchises from Hilton to KOA. It is the reason behind the word associations between “four wheel drive” and “Jeep”, “golf clubs” and “Callaway”, and “ketchup” and “Heinz”. It should be your goal to establish that same degree of name association with camping in your area.

To be effective, your branding should be developed with some end strategies in mind. It should distinguish your business from its competitors with its clarity, enhancing the credibility of your business on several levels, some of which will be purely emotional. If your branding is effective enough, you essentially have no competition. Ultimately, you want to establish a sense of loyalty in the minds of your customers to the degree that you are motivating them to take various courses of action.

Your branding should not only reach out to your customers on an emotional level, it should be based upon research into the actual wants and needs of your clientele. It is this identity that will establish the necessary emotional attachment. As a broad example, if the primary appeal of camping at your park is the opportunity to enjoy a memorable family experience in an outdoor setting, you need not concentrate on affordability or ease of access. At other parks, the primary appeal might very well be the affordability or ease of access that are not as important at your park. Do your research to properly define – then build – your brand.

In the final analysis, branding is all about keeping things in focus. Try to ensure that everything that you do that will impact your business is done consistently, in a positive light, in a manner that distinguishes your business, and in a way that will engage your customers or clientele on a powerful emotional level.

If you find the articles in this newsletter useful and timely, you are encouraged to subscribe to the Pelland Advertising Blog. Although our newsletter is published infrequently, posts are generally added to our blog on a weekly basis. It could not be easier to subscribe. Simply click here to visit our blog, where you can scroll through posts or sort by categories. To subscribe to our blog and be notified about new posts, enter your e-mail address in the “Subscribe2” box in the upper right of any post.