Creating A Well-Rounded, Web-Centric Marketing Approach

The internet has changed the marketing priorities of major brands. They have backed away from broadcast advertising options like print, TV, and radio that receive no engagement as well as traditional media advertising options like e-mail blasts and banner ads. While these options still have their place, high engagement mediums of reaching potential customers is the method of choice. Blogs, communities, and social media have revolutionized the marketing field. There is a quick overview of how to develop a web-centric marketing approach. 

Creating a Brand Strategy

Creating your brand strategy is always the first order of business. Branding strategy is what allows you to target your business’ primary audience. Branding themes, logos and graphical components permeate all visual/textual components of this plan. This process is a collaborative effort between you and your agency. For more detailing information on branding strategy see our former blog post. 

Developing Your Web Presence

Your website is the central hub for all marketing efforts. The first step to optimizing your web presence is to establish, collaboratively, your key performance indicators (KPI). Once you know what you are after, you will want to bring the people in. Drive traffic to your site through internet marketing components: SEO, SEM, and Social Media.  You will need to provide audience-specific tools that help build brand awareness and customer loyalty, and, finally, track/measure all marketing/advertising efforts through site analytics.

You will also want to focus on mobile-friendly content for your audience when they are on the go. Why? Because mobile searches lead to conversions. Take these latest stats: 

• Mobile search will overtake desktop search by the middle of 2014
• Mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year according to Google
• Mobile search isn’t just limited to phones. The tablet market will soon overtake laptop sales

HOWEVER, mobile for the sake of mobile isn’t worth the effort. Target high-value site content, and make it mobile-friendly. All mobile efforts should be conversion focused!

Formulate a Search Engine Optimization Plan

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) begins with keyword analysis. Keywords are the search terms that your audience uses to find your web content. This analysis is the basis for not only content development but also branding efforts and marketing efforts. Optimal keywords permeate all content developed throughout this marketing plan. The ultimate goal is to rank on the first page for your most important keywords. Keywords ranked on pages 2-3 are the low-hanging fruit. You will also want to consolidate your web presence. Once two sites are combined, authority and therefor organic rank, will increase. Many keywords on pages 2-3 that can be further optimized to get to page 1.

Public Relations Mixed With Social Media

Public relations has moved from traditional media distribution to online distribution. Social media and blogging can help with PR efforts drastically. You need both online and offline article distribution including white papers and case study development. Additionally, cultivate mailing lists and engage in ongoing email marketing campaigns.

Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising still has it’s place. However, with the higher prices it is important to get it right the first time. The concepts and creative must support your brand strategy. Stay on topic, and make sure the audience understand your message. Offline this can be done in trade publications and online this can be done with PPC,targeted banner, and re-targeting advertising. Consistent visual components and themes must permeate all materials for consistency of message and corporate image. 

Incentive/Loyalty Programs

Audience-specific incentives and loyalty programs create trust, generate leads, and drive action. This could be a rewards system, a member’s only program, a discount program, or a brand evangelist program. Again, stay consistent with your messaging. 

A combination of all of these components will lead to a well-rounded, successful web-marketing approach. However, this is not a one-time thing. Long term success depends on ongoing implementation, management and tracking of plan components. Continue to re-evaluate plan components, themes and market conditions as you go. And don’t be afraid to make adjustments based on the data you collect. 

Understanding and Rocking Content Marketing

98% of all materials and product research begins on the web. For anyone selling products and services, this is an extremely important statistic. Your customers are researching you and your competition before you ever know they exist. If ignored, this can be detrimental to your bottom line. If utilized, you can grow your business at exponential rates. 

Today, your audience wants to first be educated and informed—not sold! When they understand your message, they’ll trust you, rely on you, and they’ll act. Strategic communication is critical to this process. When speaking to different audiences (investors and customers), it’s important to craft different messages. This is the essence of content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content Marketing is a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in order to change or enhance a consumer behavior.” In fact, 95% of B2B marketers are using content marketing to their advantage. 

What Does An Optimized Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

There are a few different types of media used in content marketing: 

An optimized content marketing strategy utilizes all of these media types in harmony with one another. This includes press releases, blogs, keyword articles, feature articles, case studies, SEO, social media, PPC, banner ads, and trade publication ads. 

What Kind Of Content Should You Use? 

This first criteria of good content is that it be fresh. Posting new, non-duplicate content regularly is key. On-site, including keyword optimized content on every page with an emphasis given to the main objective of the page will also improve the page rank. Off-site, fresh content should be posted on Facebook, Google+, and other social networks to help increase overall website authority. 

The second criteria is “quality over quantity”. While you want to have a regular source and schedule of posting content, you don’t want to just post content without a purpose. Content must be keyword enriched, have a focus, and help make you a global source for industry-related news and information. When speaking to investors and shareholders, you want to speak to the successes, community involvement, and other stories that support your corporate story.

Final Results

All of this effort will have the final result of increased website traffic, lowered bounce rate due to increased quality of on-site content, increased keyword rankings, increased high-quality leads, and increased online authority. Give your audience what they want and they will do the same for your. It’s basic reciprocity! 

A Step-By-Step Guide To Creating a Branding Strategy

Your branding effort is at the heart of your overall marketing approach. It supports your marketing plan and determines how and what materials you need to develop or update. This simple process is the basis for a Th!nk branding effort. Not only will you come away with focused branding tools, but also with data and analysis that will help sustain your current marketing plan.

Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan is your playbook. A means of visualizing the success of your company and its products. While there are many components to a marketing plan, the following key factors are paramount in your branding effort.

• Identify your audience, both internal and external. 
• Identify your marketing mix. 
• Identify your package mix by evaluating existing products and considering removing, repositioning, or recategorizing. 
• Establish the expected life cycle of this plan. 

Your branding strategy is part of your marketing plan. Our approach can be visualized as a pyramid. Each step in the process supporting the previous step by incorporating its goals and findings.

Branding strategy

1. Vision

• Differentiate yourself ourselves from not only the competition, but also in buyer and influencer perception.
• Consistently create and distribute marketing materials that support your Corporate Image Statement throughout the life cycle of our marketing plan.
• Grow by forming new relationships with identified audiences or in new markets.
• Establish market ownership by permeating the lexicon of industry insiders, employees and influencers.

2. Mission

• Increase the product and company recognition. 
• Popularize your product.
• Educate customers, influencers and employees.

3. Objectives

• Establish a brand platform/product offerings.
• Establish a brand architecture/sales model.
• Implement sustainable branding and sub-branding strategies.
• Increase sales, increase market share, increase consumer preference, build brand loyalty, raise relative price.

4. Actions

• Market research: discovery/inventory, internet visibility/presence assessment, SWOT analysis.
• Analyze research: establish findings.
• Concept and development.

5. Core Values

• Your core values are your corporate image
• In many respects, your corporate image is determined by your core values—whether intended or not. This process often reveals core values we didn’t know we had. 

Having a solid approach to branding strategy is key to growth in any company. Follow these steps to find a solid foundation for your marketing plan. 

Adaptive Design Means A Website With High Usability

Websites today are all about ‘authority’. A site’s authority can be measured in many ways; from traffic analytics to third party indices to social media approval to organic rank to conversions, aka sales. Ultimately, the value of an organization’s site is measured by its stakeholders’ performance expectations. It’s the site’s authority on the web, however, that gets you there.

Whether it’s known to them or not, companies considering rebuilding their corporate site are likely dealing with authority issues. Low authority on the web can be caused by many factors such as aging infrastructure, site architecture, usability issues, content issues or all of the above. It all boils down to providing a good quality user experience. 

Delivering A High Quality User Experience

The first step in delivering a quality user experience is knowing your audience. This means we must not only attract our target audiences, but we must retain them on our site. If your target audience visits your site and there’s no spark, there’s no retention. And if there’s no retention then your goals and the expectations of your stakeholders will not be met. If there is one thing we know about most audience, it’s that they love attractive visuals. Engaging these audiences through stunning creative is the key.

Beautiful creative, however, is only part of a quality UI design. The design must also provide a fantastic experience across multiple devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions. This is where Adaptive Design concepts should be applied. If you don’t have a mobile-optimized version of your web site then this is not only a problem from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective as stated by Google (i.e., lower organic rank), but it can result in usability issues on mobile devices such as small tablet devices and smartphones. These usability issues generally result in higher bounce rates and less time on site for mobile visitors. Higher bounce rates also contribute to lower authority.

Solving These Issues With Adaptive Design

Adaptive Design seeks to dynamically adjust you web site’s page content based on the size of the screen or the type of device visitors are using. This methodology results in a smooth user experience regardless of the device being used, plus it adheres to Google’s best practices for high organic rank in mobile searches.

Combining a great user experience with superior functionality is the golden ticket when it comes to achieving authority with your web design. And Adaptive Design is one of the best ways to accomplish this goal. 

The Internet: Addictive Nuisance or Global Opportunity?

The internet will celebrate its 25th birthday this March, and it has left no one unaffected. Ask almost anyone, and they will be able to list the pros and cons of living in such a connected world. For marketing professionals, the advent of the internet has provided both new challenges and fantastic opportunities. So, what does your audience think? Are they as impressed by this brave new world? The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has the answer. 

Who Is Using The Internet?

Pew issued a survey which found that 87% of Americans use the Internet in 2014. This percentage has increased every year: up from 14% in 1995 and 46% in 2000. We have reached near saturation with internet usage in the US. This is a great thing for marketers, because we can be certain that we will find our target audience somewhere on the web. These numbers get even higher when we look at the users with the most buying power. In fact, 99% of those with household incomes of more than $75,000 are frequent internet users.

And Are They Happy With What They Find?

Most internet users plan to continue their habits for the foreseeable future. 53% of internet users claimed that it would be “very hard” to stop using the internet. This is a larger number than the 34% who said it would be “very hard” to give up television, a flip flop from past years. Internet users are integrating streaming, communication, news, and social sharing into their internet experience. Other individual services are losing their importance. 

You could argue that this is because of the “internet addiction” so often bemoaned. However, most users have a different perspective. 90% say the internet is good for them personally and 76% say that it’s good for society as well. 

Conclusion? Your target audience is using the internet, enjoying the internet, has plays to keep using the internet, and has a positive impression of the internet. It’s no wonder that it has so drastically changed the way we market our brands. 

photo credit: Martin Deutsch via photopin cc

Think Agency Handles Central Florida Media Efforts for Harvest Power

Think Agency has been handling the media efforts on behalf of Harvest Power Orlando, a company that turns food waste into clean energy through a process known as anaerobic digestion. Harvest Power partners with restaurants, schools, supermarkets, theme parks, and resorts around Central Florida to produce biogas that can  be used by the community. This facility is the first of its kind in North America.

Harvest Power’s Energy Garden is located in Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID). This facility had the power to process more than 120,000 tons of organic materials a year and produce 5.4 megawatts of heat and power. 

Last week Think Agency worked with Harvest to host a media event to introduce the Orlando facility and the Orlando OrLandfill campaign to the Central Florida community. Harvest Power gave interviews and plant tours to local television news and print media.  

As a result of these efforts we have been featured in the Orlando Sentinel and The Orlando Business Journal. Harvest Power has also been featured on both WFTV and FOX 35 explaining anaerobic digestion and giving an overview of the plant. 

For any questions or comments, our media contact is Steve Rainwater. He can be reached at steve@thinkagency.com. 

Public Relations Has Hit a Wall. And That Wall is the Internet..

“Times change. In the 1990’s, trade magazines were almost the only route from manufacturer to potential customer, but the rise of the web finished that. Today, it sometimes seems as though companies are looking to reach customers by any route other than B2B magazines. And the press briefing is an increasingly rare event.” Graham Pitcher, Group Editor, New Electronics

PR tasks are no longer executed using the same methods or media. Because of the Internet, PR professionals employ tactics that are as much about the medium delivering the message as they are about the readers receiving the message on other end. PR in it’s traditional form has become so unrecognizable, that even the methods used to measure it’s success sound more like internet marketing terms than they do public relations terms. Why?

Because the Internet has inexorably changed PR.

But surely the trifecta of all PR tactics remains unchanged, correct? I mean, all you have to do is 1.) tell a good story, 2.) engage in a moderate media buy, and 3.) have personal relationships with the editors—and that’s it, right? Well, two out of three ain’t bad…

Yes! Your Message Still Needs To Be “NEWSWORTHY”

Not just good—newsworthy. There’s a difference. When discussing traditional PR channels, such as trade publications, editors must consider whether or not the content that is received offers intrinsic value to their readership. This is as true for product or press releases as it is for article inclusion.

Trade publications have been decreasing in number, since the recession of 2008, due to a variety of factors, the leading of which is increasing publishing costs and diminishing ad revenues. Many pubs have gone away completely, some have tried abandoning print and offering digital-only versions (most of which have failed), while a few others have been taken over by larger publishers. Whatever the reasons, the opportunities for traditional PR placement are becoming fewer and fewer.

The same holds true for all other forms of print publishing as well. Newsweek recently ceased the newsstand version of their publication and is now offering digital-only subscriptions. Brick & mortar bookstores are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Many of these have closed or on the verge of closing. Amazon now sells more e-books than hard copy books. With consumer acceptance of iPads and other digital tablets, the print world (in all forms) is declining in popularity and struggling for it’s continued existence, trade or otherwise.

Fewer traditional publications mean fewer editors, and fewer editorial opportunities for free publicity. Editors have tightened-up considerably the type of PR releases that will be accepted or published. They are under more and more pressure to consider the “newsworthiness” of every release, or article opportunity.

So, when you have items that are deemed to be newsworthy and relevant, PR firms have a better chance of getting “hits” in traditional pubs.

Yes! You Still Need To Be A Large Advertiser

Or, at minimum, are you perceived to be a potential advertiser by the editor or publication?

There was a day when sales and editorial decisions had very little effect on one another. That has really become more and more prevalent, primarily due to the conditions of the marketplace as described earlier. Advertisers (especially large ones), are now able to wield more and more influence on editorial content, and they use it. Not only as a carrot to promote their brand, but also as a stick to punish if the publication that promotes the competition too vigorously.

No! Editor Relationships Don’t Mean What They Used To

Naturally, good relationships with industry publications are great for calling in the occasional ‘favor’. However, if your story is weak and you’re not a large advertiser, the ‘favors’ will likely be few and far between—no matter how consistently you call to wish the editor a happy birthday each year.

Additionally, calling in favors is a short term fix and shouldn’t be the basis for a PR campaign.
So that’s it then—an endless stream of media buys, new plant openings and P.T. Barnum-esque PR stunts to keep the message ‘newsworthy’, right? Well, you could try that, as that might be what it takes to yield substantive results from traditional PR tactics in today’s media-rich environment. Or, you could embrace that ‘immovable’ object for the immeasurable benefits it brings.

Respond By Changing Your Approach To Media

Even if you operate among a highly traditional and conservative industry, media and communication haven’t necessarily waited for you to catch up, nor has it gotten beyond your reach. Media, considered as the primary means of mass communication has evolved in the B2B world. At the moment, B2B public relations is most easily discussed in light of four primary media categories.

1. Earned Media

The traditional coverage earned by PR, in mass media owned / controlled by third parties. You pitch a story to the media, they run it. You send a news release, the publication prints your news.

2. Paid Media

Print and digital advertising, webinars, events, etc. Designed to get a big message out quickly and clearly to a specific target audience. In the B2B world often highly specific markets designated within third party publications. Easy to target, easy to purchase, difficult to measure. Custom publications can fall in this category when they’re done by third parties.

3. Owned Media

Companies have their own web sites, newsletters, e-news, micro sites, white papers. Custom publications also share this category when they’re done in house. Much of what happens here can be measured. There is great opportunity for control of messaging and content. This is part of your brand.

4. Shared Media

Social media, blogs forums, anywhere where there is community and immediate feedback. Today this is Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest. It is industry forums. It is blogs where you leave room for open or moderated response.

Depending on your marketing priorities, the media you choose for focusing your efforts will depend on your communication capabilities, your audience of choice, and your budget.

Public Relations in 2014 is a moving target. It’s not what it used to be. Traditional public relations functioned in the arena of earned media coverage. The media used to be where everyone got their information. The media controlled the information. PR practitioners pitched stories to the media, and worked to get the media to run the story. In the B2B world, the goal was for your information to become part of what they presented to their audience. This dynamic still exists today but it has been relegated to a less prominent position of priority and importance.

In the traditional way, the audience came to the media. In the new way, the audience gets to make demands. We still create valuable content that attracts them, but now the media has to go to the audience. We have to take the message to where the audience is, and they now have more choices than just the trade media.

Today PR is changing as quickly as the media is changing. 

"Editors of a certain vintage will remember the ‘good old days’ of the printed press release. Every day, we’d see – and open – hundreds of press releases... the press release was our life blood. In the days when product books and product pages swayed the placement of advertising revenue, we needed them." Graham Pitcher, Group Editor, New Electronics

PR has always been about brand building, trust building and sharing information and it continues to be today. However, all these things should take place in a media where the audience can be found for optimum results.

You not only have to be able to move as trends change, but to be able to tell your story in every category of media. This requires an understanding of both content creation and distribution but also a firm understanding of applications and technologies through which the content will be served.

It’s true, the Internet has inexorably changed PR—but for the better. And Think Agency isn’t a lone voice in this charge. It can be heard in the voices of the entire PR community. And they’re not just saying it—they’re screaming it.