Being faced with a never ending parade of new social media platforms and other tools for marketing often makes it overwhelming when it's time to create a marketing plan. How do you know what to use and when to use it? Should you just go ahead and use everything to avoid having to make a decision?

A 5-Step Recipe for Creating Successful Marketing Campaigns

There are so many marketing tools and platforms available today, we find that clients are often overwhelmed and don't know what to use and when to use it - much less how to actually create a marketing campaign or plan.

We like to keep things simple, so we created our Sandwich Marketing™ concept to help you break it down into steps.

This is the kind of project we love.

A client that's important to the community, is fun to work with and welcomes creativity, and has ideas of their own so is able to give good feedback and guidance but knows when to turn things over to the pros.

We just recently launched the new website for Halifax County Tourism, including creating a custom illustrated animated map that displays tourism sector information and provides visual site navigation.

For as long as we've been working with the tourism office, director Linda Shepperd has wished for some type of animation that would let visitors "drive" around the county to discover things. Cost, not wishing to use Flash, practicality of the feature, and several other factors always kept us from creating it.

On this site redesign, though, illustrator Erin Kipps Brown came up with a concept to treat the project like a theme park map.

Glerin recently designed the poster for the 33rd Annual Virginia Cantaloupe Festival and brought a whole new look to the event.

Working with the Halifax County Chamber of Commerce, our goal was to start a new tradition of a collectible poster for all festival years beginning with 2013. This year's design has fun with changes in schedule and location from past years.

The festival is being moved to Berry Hill Resort, bringing back memories of the beautiful rolling hills that we enjoyed during the first years when it was originally held in Turbeville. Scheduling a month earlier to avoid the thunderstorms that have plagued past years resulted in a bit of local controversy since Halifax cantaloupes won't be ripe until the next month.

Never fear, though, because each festival-goer will receive a voucher good for one free cantaloupe from local growers.

After throwing around many concepts, we decided to go in a totally different direction than the festival had ever been and, having some fun with the controversy, went with the theme "The Melons Are Coming!"

The design team drew inspiration from old sci-fi movies and "The War of the Worlds" radio drama.

Hope to see you at LopeFest on June 7, 2013!

Continuing our annual tradition, we designed our Christmas card in-house.  This year's card was designed by Erin Kipps Brown, and the front is touched off by cotton to create 3d clouds.

We hope you have a wonderful holiday, and here's to a great 2013!