Flint Interactive’s Nicole Sandman and I sit down to discuss digital marketing, social media, and the lessons she learned from growing up on a pig farm. She also fills us in on the history of Flint Interactive, how her work has changed in the last seven years, and balancing her career and time at home with her husband and two lovely daughters.
Posts Tagged ‘Interactive’
Marketing 2.0 – The Extreme Makeover Edition
One of my favorite SNL characters is Stuart Smalley, portrayed by Senator Al Franken. He used to look in the mirror and say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” A humorous yet inspirational daily affirmation that reminds us that we are good just the way we are. In the same manner, I confess that I thought marketing was, indeed, beautiful just the way it was—despite its disparate processes and imperfections.
photo by tanakawho on Flickr
But the world went and changed. Communication technologies evolved and altered how we consume media. The next thing I knew, the marketing practices I fell in love with back in college had grown unsightly and questionably obsolete. But have no fear, marketers! Our old friend just needs a little nip-tuck, and she’ll be generating leads and building your brand just like the good ol’ days.
Here are five makeover trends meant to upgrade your marketing strategy.
1. Interruption to Engagement
“Psst. Hey you! Stop what you are doing. Look over here, and listen to what we have to say!” If our marketing efforts could talk, this is what they would be saying.
Our tactics and messages are typically about interrupting our audience in hope of gaining mind share. However, technology allows us to imbed our messages into our consumers’ lives without nearly as much disruption: emails read on smart phones, online pre-roll advertisements before watching your favorite sitcom on Hulu, and rich media banner ads that practically bring your website to your consumer without yanking them away from their current web page. Be where your target audience consumes media. Make it seamless and easy for them to participate with your brand.
2. Awareness to Participation
Did someone say participate? Previous marketing intellect prescribed a healthy dose of “attention grabbing,” taken with a full glass of “awareness building.” While both are still imperative, the latest studies show we need to take our marketing beyond simple awareness. Consumers don’t want to be talked to; they want to engage in a conversation.
Social media is about having a personal voice and sharing it with the world (or connections, friends and followers, depending on the social tool of choice). Successful companies have found ways to transform customers into vocal consumer advocates via Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube and community blogs. Craft your message, provide a platform for discussion, and engage in a dialogue with your audience—they are dying to be heard.
3. Marketer-Centric to Customer-Centric
Bad news. We’re marketers and we have two things going against us: time and subjectivity. First, most of us are strapped and burning the candle at both ends—so we send communications out to consumers when we find the time, or when it’s scheduled on the promotion calendar.
Secondly, we forget to be objective. We force-feed our customers the value prop we’ve defined for our product or service. The reality is, customers don’t care about how smothered your inbox is, and they don’t care about your functionality spec sheet. Customers are looking for relevant information when it’s convenient for them, not you.
Marketing automation technology allows for triggered direct mail, email, and mobile responses which deliver that instant gratification your customers demand. Optimization features in these tools will soon allow us to automatically test and improve results of marketing campaigns for each individual—including collection of time and behavior-based data that will forecast when your customers are most likely to view your marketing communications.
4. Segments to Individuals
Did someone say individual? (I’m getting good at this transition thing). A number of years back, we thought we got smart. We started communicating to our consumer base differently by segmenting them into groups using demographics, firmographics, and purchase history.
We just can’t seem to catch a break. Today, by tracking web-based behavior (website activity, email click-throughs, web form submissions, and social media interaction), we harness the power to completely customize creative and copy for each communication, ensuring the right message is used to resonate with your customer.
Personalized direct mail, email, banner ads, mobile messages are all feasible or on the horizon. It’s not just cool (and a little freaky I’ll admit), it will soon be an imperative in order to break through the “one size fits all” clutter.
5. Business Gets Personal
Business used to be personal. I’m talking small-town bakery personal. Then, mass communication exploded. Service had to scale, and the goal was to reach as many people as possible with a single message.
However, marketing is in a throwback trend. Corporation executives are having interpersonal two-way conversations with their consumers while the world observes. Studies show people trust other people more than any other marketing medium.
Subsequently, organizations are starting to share stories of people impacted by their brand. People listen, people respond with their own story, more people listen and respond. Soon everything becomes marketing. Organic, consumer-driven discussion trumps the carefully crafted corporate message.
Welcome to our Office!
For those of you who have never had the chance to stop by our WestmorelandFlint and Flint Interactive offices in Duluth, we wanted to give you a quick tour. As you’ll see, staff tried hard to look busy. Normally there’s a little more noise and antics, especially on the creative side.
5 Question Friday with Mikaela Krenzen, Search Marketing Specialist for the Flint Group
Flint Interactive’s Mikaela Krenzen sits down to discuss SEO and SEM. She also manages to work her true passions into the conversation, shopping and family.
Four reasons your website is like my crazy gelding.
Louie in the early fall of 2009
I have this horse. His name is Louie. He is stunningly handsome. He has a fabulous pedigree full of winning show horses. He was to be my next big time show horse and resale project, but the problem is that he is just a little bit neurotic. What does this have to do with anything related to websites?
1. Building and designing your website can seem like a slow process.
Louie does things at his own pace. When you push him too far or too fast, he’ll fight back. All 1200 lbs of him. I have the broken bones to prove it.
Re-doing a website is a long process. In order to do it correctly, it cannot be rushed. Active participation by key stakeholders is vital to the success of the site. There are generally setbacks and frustrations, but sticking with the process provides a much better outcome than rushing through the steps.
2. Pretty only gets you so far.
In a boarding barn of 20+ horses, Louie is the horse that people notice. Even neophytes appreciate his beauty. However, after most people have known him for a few hours, they wish me good luck and back away slowly. His looks draw people in, but his quirks discourage people from further contact.
Everyone, including the developers, enjoy a pretty site. (We may mutter about drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners, and Internet Explorer 6, but when it all comes together, we appreciate a pretty, functional site as much as the next person.) It is easy to “get lost” in the pretty and forget about functionality. Users are coming to the website for a reason – make sure they are successful. For example, Craig’s List is arguably one of the most successful, least designed sites. It is successful because it’s usable. Sites don’t have to be as plain as Craig’s List, but they should always be easy to use.
3. Building a site isn’t something that has a beginning and an end.
Louie will never be perfect. He’ll never be a quiet trail horse that I can throw my young nieces on for a jaunt around the arena. He’ll always be a work in progress.
Even after a site is live, it needs to continue to be refined. Search engines seek out fresh, relevant content. Don’t update for the sake of updating. Content should be consistent with the theme of your site. News, blogs and articles are ways you can keep your site updated without completely redoing the design.
4. Track your results.
My first goal with Louie was to be able to put a halter on him. It has taken a year, but I can now put his halter on without too much fighting. It was a very small goal that took way longer than I anticipated, but I’m glad to have reached an objective goal with him.
Is your goal to make your site easier to navigate? How are you going to measure if the goal has been reached or not? Be sure your goals are tangible.
Augmented Reality’s Role in Digital Marketing
Augmented reality – is a live view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged/augmented with computer-generated imagery. This is best explained through the video example below.
Augmented reality’s recent presence in digital marketing has been felt with a plethora of head scratching and jaw dropping applications that have been launched in the past year. At the top of my list of favorites is Jack Links Beef Jerky’s “Living Sasquatch.” From the landing page the audience can interact with the illusion of their own personal sasquatch in real time, with which they can control the sasquatch’s actions and mannerisms, record and send to a friend or upload for others to view. The interaction with this application creates a unique, personal and memorable experience.
How does it work? Most web-based applications of AR require a pattern for your camera to detect. The pattern acts as a marker in 3D space for the superimposed elements to base their position off of. The pattern’s relationship to the web cam calculates the distance and tilt of the plane the pattern is on, thus changing in real time the size and angle of the superimposed elements. AR is not new by any means; it has been used by the military, museums and tradeshows for several years. The first time you might have seen AR in action would be watching a football game where they have the yellow line indicating the first down.
Why is it so popular now? This is the first time that general consumer technology has caught up to utilize its capability i.e., web cams, software developments, open source code, and the access to it from home computers / mobile devices. Many companies have jumped on the band wagon producing a wide spectrum of results from baseball cards to full on interactive games.
Game Example:
Although there has been much skepticism on the longevity of AR’s appeal on the general consumer, many consider recent uses of AR to be very gimmicky with no practical use.
One such example is GE’s smart grid technology, where the users hold a piece of paper up to their web cam and a 3D sun and windmill farm emerge out of the paper in their hands. Useful or practical? Not really, but definitely does create a unique experience. I found myself interacting with the internet in a completely new way, by moving back and forth in my chair, getting up and walking as far back as I could to see how far away my web cam would detect the AR’s pattern. Though I think uses of AR such as GE’s smart grid will become outdated soon, purely because of its non-value factor, I do not think AR will go away. Its a fast exciting medium with potential that has only begun to be tapped into.
Media Productions and WestmorelandFlint Partner for Fashion & Fundraising.
Several weeks ago, Media Productions and WestmorelandFlint helped maurices, a national fashion retailer with corporate headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota and 700+ stores in 43 states, launch Rescues & Runways. Rescues and Runways is a national campaign that paired fashion and fundraising to help animal shelters and the homeless pets they serve. It was the first in a series of similar events to be staged at maurices stores nationwide. The Duluth event not only helped needy animals find new homes, but it also treated eager onlookers to animals strutting their stuff down the runway, each escorted by a well-dressed model.
The event was staged in the Miller Hill Mall in Duluth, in front of the maurices’ store. The venue offered a unique set of challenges for the Media Productions team. A 20’ x 20’ skylight was located directly above the best location in the mall to produce the event. The team climbed to the roof and covered the skylight with heavy gauge black plastic to block out the sunlight and allow for creative and colorful lighting on the style show stage. Sound also required creative attention to overcome the echo-prone environment of a shopping mall.
Media Productions designed and assembled all production elements needed for the show including staging, scenery, audio, lighting, and even pipe & drape to build dressing rooms for the models.
WestmorelandFlint helped coordinate promotional aspects of the event to garner an abundance of regional and national media coverage. Additionally, Flint Interactive built the website that promoted the event and is being used nationwide as the other 700+ maurices stores hold their events.
The results of the first event were outstanding. Nearly 50 cats and dogs who were being cared for by Animal Allies found new homes as a result of the event. Donations for local animal shelters poured in for a full month following the event—brought in by people in exchange for a 20 percent-off coupon to maurices. The event and campaign raised awareness and increased volunteerism for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the local shelter. And as a result, maurices became synonymous with a great cause.
To see videos, please click here. For more photos of the event, click here.
Flash and SEO – Do they play together?
I wish I could tell you the answer is simply yes or no, but, in fact, it is a little more difficult than that.
There has been a lot of discussion about Flash and search engine optimization. Google has made announcements that they have made improvements in their ability to index Flash movies on websites. In the past, there had been some limitations, but recently Google noted it is now able to work with external files, including XML, HTML and other Flash files.
While Google has made strides in indexing Flash content, Yahoo and Bing have limited ability to crawl the files to get content.
Who uses what search engine?
Recent studies by StatCounter show that Google has about 80% of the search engine market share, while Bing has about 8.5%, and Yahoo! comes in at around 9.4% from United States visitors. Google’s dominance grows when stats include international visitors.
Flash Indexing Fallbacks
Some items to note about crawling Flash movies include:
- The content in the Flash file must be text-based in order to be rendered.
- Search engines don’t process most JavaScript. If your Flash movie is placed in the page with JavaScript and you provide alternate content beforehand, the search engines may not see your Flash movie.
- If a Flash movie contains multiple scenes or keyframes based on clicks, a user cannot get directly to that content from the search engine. For example, if you have a Flash-based site that contains a page about services that generates some search engine ranking, the user is going to have to go to the beginning of the Flash and figure out how to get to that page that contains the search terms that they are looking for, rather than going directly to the content. A good online example of this can be found by completing a search on Google for “intro.swf”. The first result is a Flash presentation with multiple slides. There is no way to get directly from the search engine results to the eighth page without having to click through all of the other pages.
A Search Engine Example
Check out the Google search for “nasa deep impact animation”. The second result brings up a Flash movie, as noted by the [FLASH] display in front of the result. The title is not helpful at all, as it contains the text “Loading Data” and then some ActionScript code. The description does give you a brief summary of what you might find in the movie.
Taking that same search term to Bing, the Flash file was located in the twentieth position, lacking a description and containing a very generic title.
Let’s take a peek at Yahoo! It returns the same results Bing did; however, in the sixth position.
To summarize, Flash and SEO compatibility are starting to play nice; however, Flash is still best used on a limited basis or for items that are not content and keyword rich. There are many other ways to improve search engine ranking, such as the use of optimized content for the HTML page title, meta tags and copy on the site.
Flint Interactive Launches Cartier Agency Website
Flint Interactive would like to announce the launch of the redesigned Cartier Agency website. Flint Interactive has worked with the Cartier Agency over the past few months on developing a new website that would set them apart from their local competitors.
Technologies used include:
- Flash rotation highlighting business areas they offer services in
- AJAX sign-up form in the footer
- ThickBox used as an alternative to a pop-up window for a few sections of the site, such as news
- Animated Collapsible DIV v2.0: This jQuery plug-in allowed us to expand and contract content for a more fluid look and feel. View Sample
Visit: www.caduluth.com
