How Your Brand Lives Within The Digital World

The consumer “path to purchase” has evolved from a linear, brand-directed model, to one where the consumer can fully leverage the transparency of the market, secure guidance from multiple authorities, and gather feedback from their social graph.   In fact, what once was a tedious, research-based path is now an enlightened buyer’s journey; a consumer-directed, socially influenced, brand-inspired pursuit of truth and opportunity.   The challenge for brands is to utilize content to inform, support and shape this consumer adventure.   Where many brands and agencies fall short is by developing independent content strategies that fail to leverage the fluid tapestry of touch points throughout the buyer’s journey.   Your customer’s don’t think within the silos of SEO, Social Media, Public Relations and Branding – and no longer should you.

How Companies Traditionally Organize Around Content

It’s easy to understand how content strategy, creation, optimization and delivery can fall into the hands of multiple parties and multiple owners given that content crosses so many channels.   In addition, this is still a relatively new marketing strategy for most brands, so it doesn’t quite fit into pre-existing organizational structures, budgets and resources.  As a result, multiple teams may end up developing multiple content strategies that, due to the organization’s lack of internal integration, end up appearing haphazardly along the buyer’s journey as he/she comes into contact with your brand.

If content strategies are not choreographed, brands face a number of issues:

• Consumers interact with inconsistent content which damages the authenticity of brand voice, brand promise and brand relevancy
• SERP’s identify duplicate content which can deplete SEO Value
• The underutilization of content which could be customized for each unique channel
• Underutilized content misses social media opportunities
• Ownership confusion internally and, with your agencies
• Inefficient Resource Management
• Minimized Conversation Opportunities

A Content Integration Model

In Q4 of 2011, Location3 re-organized our SEO, Social Media and Creative Teams into a single “Content Team”, charged with the goal of delivering integrated content strategies and solutions for our clients that were optimized for cross-channel distribution.  After working alongside our clients and their brand and PR agencies, we realized that the deliverables for our respective services not only overlapped, they were inherently reliant upon each other for success.  As obvious as this was, both our clients and their agencies were in great need of an integration model that maximized the impact our collective content efforts could deliver.

For years, all marketers and agencies have been tasked with delivering integrated marketing solutions.  And every agency has their version of a venn diagram to demonstrate their integrated philosophy or process.  But as they say, “It looks good on paper, but paper don’t play”.   The most important aspects of any process, whether it’s for manufacturing airplanes or building a model airplane are: 1) Buy-in 2) Ownership 3) Application and 4) Compliance.  That’s it.  Miss any one of those steps and you have a lot of extra parts sitting around on the floor.

Customer-Centric, Platform-Neutral

“Customer-centric” and “platform-neutral” are not new theories for marketing integration.  But for content integration, they seem to be foreign to the game.  Don’t believe me?  Ask yourselves these two questions:

1)     How many of your or your clients, when asked what purpose their content is intended to serve, have said either “to position us as thought leaders” or “to improve our organic search results”

2)     How often have you seen a brand’s SEO agency, social media agency, and the PR agency in the same room at the same time?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you answered “all the time” and “not enough”.

Thought leadership is a strategy.  Improving organic search results is an outcome. Serving your customers and informing their journey is a purpose.  That’s customer-centric.

Map the buyer’s journey, understand their needs and mindset at each stage, recognize the different sources of information they are turning to at each stage, and develop content that is “journey-driven” vs. driven by agency service offerings. That’s “platform-neutral”.  And if your SEO agency, social media agency and PR agencies are not optimizing against a common set of keywords and brand narrative, not cross-pollinating content, or worse, not working off of a shared content calendar, that’s disaster.

(Digital) Life Is Hard.

Creating a diagram is easy.  Buy-in, Ownership, Application and Compliance are not.  But the first step is to recognize that content is more than SEO juice, accept that it is ultimately how your brand lives within the digital world and respect it’s role in serving your customers above your brand.

The buyer’s journey is a consumer-directed, socially influenced, brand-inspired pursuit of truth and opportunity.

Are you ready for the adventure?

• 75% of internet users perform local searches
• 67% of consumers research online reviews of local businesses before making a purchase
• 88% of mobile searchers take action within the same day*

What do these stats mean for your business? They mean that you can no longer view social media, local search and mobile marketing in isolation.

Join CEO Andrew Beckman (@Andrew_Beckman) and Local Solutions Manager Anne Baum (@SearchDiva) for “Increase Your Findability Using Social, Local and Mobile Convergence,” a DMA SEM Council webinar on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, 1:00-2:00pm EST. Learn how local search marketing, social media and mobile marketing are coming together, how you can leverage them for your national and local business, and what the future holds. National brands and multi-unit businesses alike will benefit from the information shared in this webinar.

Webinar Takeaways:

• How to optimize local map listings to protect the integrity of your data and increase findability
• How to develop localized content and engagement strategies to increase social media engagement
• How to reach and engage on-the-go consumers through their mobile devices
• Understanding of how to integrate campaigns and provide a consistent user experience and message across all platforms
• Insight into industry trends to predict and prepare for future initiatives in local, social and mobile

Save your spot! Register for the webinar today.

*Sources: the Kelsey Group, Deloitte & Touche, Google

But! The powers that be didn’t let a bad snow season keep us from an afternoon of company bonding. After a tasty lunch we all headed off to The 1Up, Denver’s premier barcade. Armed with quarters, PBRs and hope, we stormed the vintage video game haven…

Carol exacts Revenge on Mars for all of mankind

Never get between a developer and an old school Donkey Kong game. Never. Unless you don't like your hands attached to your body anymore.

Creative Director Ryan applies his steady designin' hand to Giant Jenga

But Director of Technology Brandi proves some platforms are just too unstable

Michael, Kris and Tim represent the Nuggets through the years. Sorry about the loss boys.

Nicole, you are definitely doing it wrong.

Integrated Producer Lindsey demonstrates her "What do you mean you missed the deadline?" look.

Did I mention they serve 40's of Mickey's Ice? BYOBB: Bring Your Own Brown Bag

Thanks for a great afternoon of beers, bonding and Baby Pac-Man!

Example of the Account View

Individual Location Edit Functionality

We’ve had some time to play around with the new interface and have some initial feedback and thoughts on the implications of these changes.

Features we love:

• The search bar allowing us to find locations instantly
• The categories are now clearly listed in the help center
• Addition of ad-specific fields into the template for Google Places accounts that are linked to AdWords accounts utilizing ad extensions

Features that we miss/still want:

• Offers (Update:  Offers launched in a new interface however they don’t support offers for more than 100 locations)
• The ability to manually move the map marker for an individual location
• The ability to download your current bulk file
• Reporting on actions, impressions, and clicks so we can analyze consumer interaction with the listings (and the option to export this data) (update: Vanessa in the Google Help Forum mentioned these stats will still be available in the old interface but did not give a time frame)
• The addition of custom content (although the addition of 5 categories will help)
• Option to display more than 15 listings at a time
• Preview option before a listing goes live
• Photo columns in the bulk template (Update: this is available in the interface when you edit the template but the help center says photos can only be edited on an individual basis-testing in progress)

Bugs still getting worked out:

• Adding Youtube videos is hit or miss. Google will give an error due to the format of the URL even though it follows their example URL perfectly. It sometimes has to be pasted 2 or 3 times to work (Update: This seems to have been fixed according to this video by Vanessa, the Google Places Community Manager)
• The tutorial doesn’t load when prompted after signing into the Google Places account
• We found links to two Google Places templates.  One template without ad-specific fields and one template with ad-specific fields

Implications of these changes:

This upgraded interface is just another step in the ever changing world of online strategy that is being propelled forward by consumer behavior.  The recent algorithm changes and the introduction of Google + only reflect that the medium in which consumers are finding businesses is reacting as well. A few thoughts:

The Focus is on Location Management: I think the release of the new Google Places interface indicates that the focus of managing location data is shifting back to the location data.  We all know that businesses want to get found online by new or existing customers.  In order for that to happen they need to:

1) Be present through Google Places
2) Have accurate information to ensure a solid customer experience during the contact phase
3) Be associated to correct business categories to be findable by the right customer.

The simplified interface with the updated bulk edit capabilities back up these three points by allowing business with multiple locations to easily upload and edit locations.  The expansion from 5 to 10 categories tells me that this association is going to have increased importance in business listing management.

Don’t Ignore your Website:  For years Google has had several initiatives encouraging businesses to build a website including the Get Your Business Online program.  The slow removal of custom fields and expanded content means that business can no longer lean on their Google Places listing as their website but must create their own site whose structure supports both the corporate and local presence.  Fast forward to the release of Google Venice a few months ago, the algorithm change that increased the presence of blended results (places and website location page combined) to account for 67% of listing results.  And in addition, the release of Search Plus Your World which allows Google + users to see personalized search results influenced by multiple factors means that a local SEO strategy is 1) imperative and 2) goes beyond website optimizations and will include  content management and Google + strategies.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the new Google Places interface.

“First of all, from the perspective of the user, Google’s changes mark an evolution of search beyond a tool used to search for information to one used by us to do the things we want to do. It’s moving from using relevance as the sole measure of success to incorporating usefulness.”

Useful is a step beyond relevant.

The other weekend I was building a trellis in the backyard with my two and five year old sons running around (bear with me here). I banged a nail the wrong way and needed a hammer to get it out. If I asked the two year old to grab me a hammer from the nearby tool pile, he might have returned with a claw-less ball peen. His response to my need would be relevant to our conversation, but completely useless for what I was trying to accomplish. He can only respond with a literal interpretation of my query (also, he may have also poked his eye out). However, the older son can take the next cognitive leap. He understands the context of my need based on past behavior. He’s seen me remove nails and remembers that I need the hammer with the “clawy-thing”. As he searches the nearby tools he discards the many items that fit with his indexed concept of what a hammer is and returns with the one tool I actually need.

Google Instant, search history personalization and Search Plus Your World are all Google’s attempts at being as smart as my five year old. They move search engines beyond a reference index to providing specific solutions, often before we even know what we’re looking for.

In the 2010 blog post announcing Google Instant, the company demonstrated that it understood people don’t want search-as-you-type functionality, but rather search-before-you-type predictions. Meaning Google attempts to know what you want before you do. Isn’t that the mark of excellent customer service in any industry? The hotel clerk who sees you are there for a conference provides directions to the venue without asking. The waiter who brings the dessert menu just when your business conversation runs dry. The river rafting guide who puts beer in the bus for the ride back. These people are useful, not just relevant.

The personalized search results introduced with Search Plus Your World this year provide another step from relevant to useful. The backlash to Search Plus Your World feels so familiar to the conversations we all had in 2005 when search history personalization for signed-in Google users appeared. Many people were concerned then with the “filter bubble” only showing us a narrow view of the world. Today, Search Engine Watch reports an Ask Your Target Market Google Search survey asked “Should Google’s search results be personalized based on past searches and information from social networking sites?” Forty-five percent of respondents to said no, compared to 15.5 percent who said yes.

This is the same debate we saw in 2005, and then in 2009 when search history personalization became standard even if you weren’t signed in. More useful results must be results with greater filters. Privacy issues aside, these changes are just using technology to replicate our own thought processes. We all create our own “filter bubbles” subconsciously every day. Our brains train themselves to restrict the sensory input we receive to limit our processing to the most important information. If you asked me what color the vase next to our office’s elevator was, I couldn’t tell you, despite the fact I walk by it every day. It’s not relevant or useful, so my brain doesn’t register it. Ask me how many inches are left in the nice whiskey I bought for my office? 3.5 and going fast. Our new reality is that a tool is allowing these same functions to occur in search.

Our connections to other people also mark the difference between relevant and useful. Is your old friend’s photo of your Senior Trip to Gettysburg what you’re looking for when trying to remember details of American history? No. But they’re more relevant than a stranger’s trip photos and you might take a minute to show your wife your ill-advised attempts at facial hair in high school and make her laugh. That’s always useful.

So what does the shift towards usefulness mean for digital marketers? It’s no longer enough to be the most relevant- you must also be the most useful. Careful placement of keywords and other traditional SEO tactics help signal relevance to search engine’s crawlers. Engagement and sharing of a site or piece of content signals usefulness. This means you have to put in the work, creating content people actually find useful.

So fetch me my hammer!

No not that one…

The role of the Project Manager is to plan, execute, and finalize projects on time, on scope, and on budget. This includes acquiring resources and coordinating the efforts of team members in order to deliver  projects according to plan. The Project Manager will oversee quality control throughout its life cycle.

Successful Characteristics

• Optimistic leader
• Highly organized
• Ability to digest data and quickly decide what is significant and what is not
• Ability to prioritize and re-evaluate priorities on the fly
• Ask good questions and listen to stakeholders
• Self-aware enough to understand how their communication comes across to others
• Ability to communicate clearly according to a both prescribed schedule and as-needed
• A level of experience in the area they are project managing
• Ability to cultivate networks internally and externally
• Skilled at conflict management, problem solving, and negotiation

Responsibilities

• Direct and manage project development from beginning to end.
• Define project scope, goals and deliverables that support business goals in collaboration with client leads, senior management and stakeholders.
• Develop full-scale project plans and associated communications documents.
• Effectively communicate project expectations to team members and stakeholders in a timely and clear fashion.
• Liaise with project stakeholders on an ongoing basis.
• Estimate the resources and participants needed to achieve project goals.
• Set and continually manage project expectations with team members and other stakeholders.
• Delegate tasks and responsibilities to appropriate personnel.
• Identify and resolve issues and conflicts within the project team.
• Identify and manage project dependencies and critical path.
• Plan and schedule project timelines and milestones using appropriate tools.
• Track project milestones and deliverables.
• Develop and deliver progress reports, proposals, requirements documentation, and presentations.
• Determine the frequency and content of status reports from the project team, analyze results, and troubleshoot problem areas.
• Proactively manage changes in project scope, identify potential crises, and devise contingency plans.
• Define project success criteria and disseminate them to involved parties throughout project life cycle.
• Conduct project post mortems and create a recommendations report in order to identify successful and unsuccessful project elements.
• Develop best practices and tools for project execution and management.

Position Requirements

• Experience at working both independently and in a team-oriented, collaborative environment is essential.
• Can conform to shifting priorities, demands and timelines through analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
• Reacts to project adjustments and alterations promptly and efficiently.
• Flexible during times of change.
• Ability to read communication styles of team members and clients who come from a broad spectrum of disciplines.
• Persuasive, encouraging, and motivating.
• Ability to elicit cooperation from a wide variety of sources, including upper management, clients, and other departments.
• Ability to defuse tension among project team, should it arise.
• Ability to bring project to successful completion through political sensitivity.
• Strong written and oral communication skills.
• Strong interpersonal skills.
• Adept at conducting research into project-related issues and products.
• Must be able to learn, understand, and apply new technologies.
• Customer service skills an asset.
• Ability to effectively prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment is crucial

When leaders at Location3 Media signed up to attend the 2012 International Franchise Association Conference they decided to come prepared. Not just with an excellent booth, but with primed prospects ready to discuss the benefits of working with a Google-certified agency. An integrated digital marketing campaign was developed to increase Location3’s brand awareness with conference attendees. The results? A major decrease in cost per lead, two 2012 BMA Colorado Gold Key Awards and invaluable insights to help improve client campaigns

“Running campaigns for ourselves serves two purposes: brand awareness and education. The IFA campaign taught us a lot about integrating earned, owned and paid strategies for maximum results. This not only benefitted our business development team, but also provided some fresh insights that we’re excited to pass on to clients,” said Alex Porter (@porter32), president of Location3.

The case study, Selling Before the Sale:  A Pre-Conference Strategy Pays Off, was submitted to the 2012 BMA Colorado Gold Key Awards in two categories and received awards in both.

The first award is a Silver Key in the Digital Marketing: Integrated Online Campaign category. This category requires a minimum of three different digital medias. To promote the brand in conjunction with the IFA Conference, a campaign was developed that included paid search marketing, display advertising and both paid and unpaid social media marketing efforts. New strategies included using dynamic, three-tab SpongeCell display ads that allowed conference visitors to view the Local Search Traffic video, download a franchise whitepaper and set a calendar reminder to visit the Location3 booth at the event. Through the combination of these efforts, Location3’s IFA conference page was viewed 2,374 unique times.

The second award is also a Silver Key in the Social Media: Integrated Social Media Campaign category, which requires the integration of three or more social media channels. The IFA campaign utilized Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Location3’s blog. Location3 placed a tip on the check-in service Foursquare to remind conference attendees of the company’s booth number when they checked in to the conference. The Promoted Tweets campaign resulted in a traffic spike on the IFA blog post, 80 percent of which were new site visitors.

Most importantly, the business development team came away from the IFA conference with quality leads. Overall, Location3’s marketing campaign resulted in a more than 21% increase in lead quality, 186% increase in lead volume and 45% decrease in cost per lead.

The 2012 BMA Colorado Gold Key Awards celebration will be held in the main hall of the Denver Art Museum on Friday, May 4th. The awards are judged by a panel of marketing professionals representing the different sides of the marketing community, both agency and corporate. The judges all have extensive B2B marketing experience. They score entries on four categories: creativity, production, selling proposition and results.

Location3 has received recognition from BMA Colorado in previous years as well. The interactive Local Search Traffic commercial won the 2011 Silver Key Award and a WildBlue Communications local search campaign won the 2007 Gold Key Award.

For more information, contact Angie Pascale: apascale { at } location3.com | 720.881.8528 | @angiepascale.

Of course a pack of savvy digital marketers uses the internet to find what they need. As we go through our daily lives we inevitably need to locate essentials like rifles, reliable baby/pet sitters, cat wigs, mail-order steaks and clothes. Lots of clothes. Examining our own online behavior in the pursuit of goods and services helps us define paths to purchase, identify which brands are doing it right and see what strategies totally fizzle.

For most ladies, the path to purchase for a bathing suit is a rocky one. It usually starts in a terribly-lit dressing room and rarely ends in complete satisfaction (aka looking and feeling good on the beach with a Mai Tai). Throw in the variables of not being able to try on bathing suits online and the path gets downright treacherous. So let’s see where I ended up when I attempted it…

Looking at our own PTPs helps illuminate the variables that a brand can and cannot control. At the start of my shopping, a friend told me Macy’s has good bathing suits. There’s a sales woman at my local Macy’s that reminds me of Evil Mrs. Borris, the 7th grade English teacher who kicked me out of class for arguing that Hamlet’s uncle wasn’t such a bad guy. Through no fault of the brand, I won’t go to Macy’s.

On the other hand, Victoria’s Secret has been sending me an obscene amount of free item coupons in the mail since giving them permission to contact me on an online order. To the point that my husband has asked suspiciously if I somehow earned a sponsorship. I’m sure Vicky C’s strategy is to lure me into the store, tempt me into purchasing something else and get rid of excess out-of-season merchandise at the same time. I only get the free item in store, but what do you think was my first stop on the Great Online Bathing Suit Hunt of 2012? Victoriassecret.com. However, what I found wasn’t encouraging.

No thanks, Victoria. Looking for a brand that’s trying to help women find the right fit online landed me at Lands’ End. They at least attempted to provide online bathing suit shoppers with interactive content to get the fit right the first time. They made news in the early 2000′s by launching a My Virtual Model feature. This allowed women to submit their measurements and coloring and then see how the various bathing suits will look on them. In a 2004 interview Sam Taylor, vice president of e-commerce for Lands’ End stated,”Our conversion rates on orders associated with My Virtual Model are 34% higher and the average order value is 8% higher.” However, I couldn’t actually find this feature on the site, so I started a live chat with the customer service department:

Fascinating, Allan. So despite the initial positive data, ultimately complaints from women who didn’t like how the software rendered their bodies drove this feature off the site. Lands’ End saw a content gap and created an interactive tool to fit the need, theoretically making all the right moves. Instead, fragile egos were insulted by the tool instead of encouraged to purchase. This is a great example of a seemingly perfect piece of interactive content ultimately being useless because the consumer didn’t like how it made them feel.

Lands’ End continues to make valiant attempts at providing fit information for women shopping for a bathing suit online. The Swim Resource Center provides detailed information about sizing, styles, and how to accurately take measurements. They advertise “swim experts” available via chat or phone. The brand obviously gets that women struggle with finding the right bathing suit online and is providing content and resources to smooth their path to purchase. Well done, Lands’ End, I’d consider buying from you in a decade or two.

You would think with the improvements in modeling programs and webcams, other companies would have developed and incorporated virtual bathing suit try ons. Instead, a search only pulled up an upcoming site, My Virtual Model (which failed to actually take me to Facebook to try it) and a weight loss simulator. Sidenote: I look really fit as a 200 pound man. Maybe brands learned a lesson from Lands’ End, or did their own market research and determined that just because women say they want an accurate picture doesn’t mean giving them an accurate picture helps sell bathing suits.

Back to the path, this month’s Real Simple magazine had an entire spread of new bathing suits. I saw one I liked from H&M and blithely stopped by the store to try it on. The suit was cut to fit a pre-pubescent scarecrow and in the drafty, flourescent-lit changing rooms it was truly horrifying. I quickly texted my friends that they should never, ever try on a bathing suit at H&M (likely impacting their bathing suit paths to purchase since I sounded so traumatized). The lesson? Editorial product placement still brings people into brick-and-mortar stores and news of negative experiences travels fast these days.

Another friend recommended J. Crew for a reliable fit and excellent durability. The no-frills ecommerce site provides front and back views, and not much else. Cute stuff, but not nearly enough information to part with $80 per swim piece. I saw a Groupon deal for $80 worth of Juicy swimwear for $40, but it was right before payday and I don’t want to part with $40 before the offer expired.

I’ve hit a dead end. Not all paths lead to purchase. This is why I still have the same red, white and green bathing suit I was wearing when Italy won the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Don’t ask.

Women of the Internet, I ask you: is it possible to find the perfect bathing suit online? Is there a magical site somewhere that provides options in all styles, at all pricepoints, and allows you to get at least a vague sense of what it will look like in action? If so, help me out. If not, let’s get together and build one.

Disclaimer: I swear am not using this blog topic as an excuse to bathing suit shop at work. This is serious research people. I also definitely did not use Location3-issued scissors to cut out this picture for my desk.

On May 7, Andrew will be guest lecturing for a group of graduate students at NYU. The course is E-commerce Marketing in the Integrated Marketing Master’s Degree program. Andrew will be driving discussion around high-level digital marketing strategies and the integration of different digital efforts and platforms. The students are looking forward to getting a glimpse into the day-to-day operations of a successful digital agency, and Andrew is thrilled to have this opportunity to help shape the next generation of digital marketers.

1. Simple beats pretty – limits on data plans and sometimes spotty internet and data connections means that users don’t always load images.
2. Be Brief – mobile screens are small and each line counts. For display ads, this means getting to the point quickly. Brands can chose to include their logo rather than name to save space.
3. Mobile is local – users are more likely to be searching for something local on their mobile device. Stats for how many searches are localized vary from 33% to 53% depending on the source. Regardless, the key takeaway here is that mobile brings a unique situation where users are browsing online and the physical world at the same time and a strong mobile strategy aids users in this process.
4. Search queries are focused and timely – as surprising as this might sound, search queries on mobile devices tend to be long-tailed and specific. According to Microsoft data, “70% of PC search tasks are completed in one week, while 70% of mobile search tasks are done in one hour”. What this means for advertisers is that it is increasingly important to be specific and granular with mobile campaigns.
5. Make it easy to share the love – think about how people are going to share your content across mobile, tablet and desktop devices. Using short and easy-to-remember URL’s can aid with this.
6. Mobile searchers make mistakes – People have fat-fingers. Mobile keyboards are much smaller than desktop and misspellings are common. A good trick to determine what misspellings to include in your campaign is to turn off your auto correct and type your top 10 keywords.
7. Optimize your user experience for mobile – make sure you have great mobile experience. Without a mobile optimized site, you run the risk of lost conversions. Don’t make users work to find what they are looking for. If a user can’t find what they are looking for instantly on a mobile device, they will go somewhere else where they can.

Read the whole article here. Let us know what you think!