In a rapidly evolving industry, marketers sometimes have a hard time remembering that while fun and exciting, the “shiny new thing” is never a silver bullet. Yes, QR codes, remarketing and Twitter are all interesting topics, but in and of themselves they’re not going to help us make our numbers next year.

We’re not here to backwards-engineer strategies from tactics. Strategic marketing requires us to develop resonant messages and useful content first. We then make it available to the market through multiple channels. This gives our most valuable target audiences the ability to interact with our offering on their own terms. This is how we become a useful part of their educational process, build trust, become a consideration in their purchase decision and eventually convert sales.

Regardless of how many years we’ve been in the business, none of us know exactly what messages, content, channels or tactics will work. Markets shift. The behavior of decision makers and influencers is dynamic. Blink and the competition has gained share.

What we can do is always start at the beginning – develop informed hypotheses by asking the right questions, assimilate what others are doing and saying about our industry, and eventually confirm or deny our assumptions through performance.

SQUARE ONE

As we approach the close of another year, we at Signal find ourselves querying executive teams about goals for 2012, asking product managers about innovation initiatives and coursing through online research. We’re implementing surveys and speaking with customers, non-customers, and media. It’s only once we have conducted some version of these exercises (see our scalable process illustrated below) that we are able to craft messaging and develop content that resonates with our customers.

Signal's three-step process to developing a strategic marketing plan.

NOW FOR THE FUN STUFF

It’s now time to develop a tactical plan informed by our strategy. And how will we deliver our messages and content in an effective way? Modern marketing communication programs are definitively web-centric because of the ease of web publishing and the ability to track the activity of users. This analytical ability is what allows us to test our hypotheses and optimize our marketing mixes, but getting relevant traffic to our websites is the trick.

Taking what we would typically consider a business-to-business strategy, designed to generate thought leadership and sales leads, let’s look at an integrated tactical model.

With the website in the middle to provide a platform for easy content publishing and analytics, we turn to the tactical drivers and channels that we consider in our marketing mix. There are an infinite number of ways in which these individual tactics might work together but the results of this process can be staggering:

Example #1
A B2B services organization needed a quick boost at year-end. It turned a $25,000 investment in content development, media relations and advertising into over $1M in potential contracts. This led to a decision to implement the company’s first-ever integrated marketing program.

Example #2
A premier travel and tourism destination needed to maintain rentals and sales in a 32%-down market. An integrated program including content development, web marketing, mobile marketing and social media provided a sales contract volume growth of over 100% from the previous year.

Example #3
A pharmaceutical services company needed to differentiate to survive in an overly commoditized market. By investing roughly $600K in a comprehensive rebranding, the company earned approximately $17M in projected revenue, directly attributable to leads and awareness programs.

While every organization is different, we all benefit from a systematic approach to uncovering and leveraging market opportunities. As we move into a new year, let’s not get dazzled by new, highly publicized tactics. Let’s challenge ourselves to start at square one. All tactics are worth considering but without a sound strategy, we have no basis from which we can form hypotheses or develop effective marketing mixes. We sometimes get lucky but more times than not, jumping to a tactical conclusion and then trying to backwards-engineer a strategy is nothing more than shooting in the dark.

While working on a white paper about hospital and physician marketing, this analogy popped into my head. Now, I’m not trying to play to anyone’s ego here, but this comparison really does lend some insight to positioning your facility in a competitive market.

Living here in Raleigh, North Carolina, there is rarely a day that I don’t drive past the RBC Center. For those of you who are not familiar with it, let me share a few facts:

• It has called Raleigh home since 1999
• It houses over 770,000 square feet of entertainment and sports space
• It seats up to 19,500 fans and has 66 luxury suites
• It has 8,000 parking spaces and is easily accessible from any direction
• It can transform from hardwood court to ice rink in under 6 hours
• It has hosted numerous events from Rodeo to Rock and Roll
• It is home to both the NC State Men’s Basketball team & the Carolina Hurricanes

These are just a few of the things that make the RBC Center a great venue. Unfortunately, none of these things are remotely of interest to the majority of people who descend upon this location each and every week. Well, with the exception of the last two.

It’s not the features of the RBC Center that bring in the crowds. It’s the rock stars, the rodeo riders, the on-ice excitement, and the buzzer beating three point shots that pack this stadium. People come for the events and they come to engage with their idols. They want to be part of the very best doing what they do best. Hmmm…sounds a little bit like the expectations of selecting a hospital.

As healthcare consumers we appreciate convenient locations and ample parking. We appreciate the beautiful façade of the building. We appreciate all the life improving technology that is housed inside. But, what really draws us there is the need to see our own type of rock star, the highly skilled medical provider that is going to make whatever ailment we have better. We are here to engage with a physician.

Keep this most important fact top of mind when developing your presence. Align the strengths of your facility with the skills of your physicians. Make them both inseparable to your community. Insure when someone is searching for either a facility or a physician in your area, both of those searches lead to your front door with a unified message.

While we do appreciate all the features you have to offer, what will really bring us in is the talent. Specialties are great, but we connect with the specialist. If you want your “venue” to stand out from all the others, focus on the connection between the physicians and your facility. Promote the talent within!

I would love to hear your feedback on this.

The conference is March 24-26 at the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Nashville.  The conference will bring together marketing professionals from service businesses in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee.  There will be many opportunities to learn the latest techniques in service marketing, including branding, social media marketing, and winning the pitch.

Signal will also be attending the conference.  We’re excited to be attending sessions, manning our booth, and giving out fabulous door prizes.

Come on down!

Twitter is a great resource for companies to further market themselves, post company news, drive traffic to their web site and much more. Although tweets are typically viewed as simple text messages, there’s opportunity to create a memorable Twitter landing page that can tie in with an existing web site design or corporate standards.

Backgrounds
Twitter allows you to customize the look of a Twitter homepage by either selecting a provided theme or uploading a custom background image. The latter option gives you the ability to make the Twitter homepage communicate a company’s brand identity, culture or graphic style.

But Twitter backgrounds are a tricky canvas for designing on, because the entire central area of the page will be taken up by Twitter content. In effect, you’re only designing around the edges of the page. The Twitter content area floats on top of the background and remains centered at a width of 763 pixels. In the case of a smaller monitor, the content area could cover up a rather large percent of the background. The most failsafe practice is to create a layout that covers a 1920 x 1200 pixel area. This will accommodate most screen sizes and the design will appear seamless. You also have the ability to tile a smaller background image. Don’t forget that visitors are there for the purpose of sorting and reading the content that dominates the page, so make sure the background is not so loud and distracting that it competes for attention.

One good practice is to work in a company logo, mission statement and contact info into the left side of the background image. See sample below. Bear in mind that these elements could be covered up or cropped when the page is viewed on smaller monitors.

You can find more examples of creative and compelling Twitter backgrounds at the Smashing Magazine site.

Customizing Colors
Within the settings menu you are allowed to make some simple adjustments to change colors in the page layout. Twitter gives you the options to set colors for the background, text, links, sidebar and the sidebar border. This is helpful if you’re trying to match an existing web site, and you can also view these changes instantly.

Picture
The last item I would like to discuss is the personal picture, the thumbnail image that identifies a user on Twitter pages. This is another opportunity to get the corporate branding displayed. The picture image is always square, so make sure when uploading the image or logo that it’s in a square format. Otherwise, the corporate identity may be arbitrarily cropped. The maximum size is 700k and can be a jpg, gif or png file. If a complex or oddly proportioned logo doesn’t work when reduced down to this size and shape, use your judgment to find a tasteful solution — even if that means tweaking the prescribed corporate identity standards just a touch. You might zoom into or isolate a distinctive part of the logomark in a way that that works well and stands out in this format.

Got a Favorite?
We want to hear about your favorite Twitter profile backgrounds – send us a tweet! We’re @signalinc on Twitter.

After clicking the Translate button, visitors see the translations directly on the page.

This can be a great addition to pretty much any site, but particularly useful for site owners who know they have potential with international audiences and may not have the budget to pay professional (human) translators to do a thorough job. Keep in mind Google states that “Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, its not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation.”

If you’re worried Google’s “gist” may do more harm than help, test it! The gadget is powered by Google Translate – test your content here and get an opinion on the quality of the translation. You can also use the Google Translator Toolkit to edit weak areas in the translation of your web pages and set that version as a preferred, global translation.

Site owners should also keep in mind that although this gadget will help make their content more accessible, it will not help them increase visibility in international search engines. And the gadget can’t translate everything. If you’re using elements like text in images or Flash, it’s important to note they will remain in their original language.

On a related note, another new offering from Google Translate is 1-click translations from your browser’s toolbar! Just drag and drop your language from this page (scroll to the bottom) into your browser’s toolbar. Then whenever you want to translate a webpage, just click the new button on your toolbar.

Often when designing a site I find myself spending a good deal of time organizing content and thinking through how the end user can best absorb the information displayed on a page. Recently many companies are beginning to include social media as another method for viewers to become engaged with their site and their company. This becomes another level of content that needs to be well planned before the site moves to the design phase. Below are a few important considerations.

Level of Presence
The first step is to determine which forms of social media the client wants to be involved in. For instance, do they want or have a Facebook, Twitter or YouTube page? Then you need to find out the degree to which this media will feature on their main site. Would they like a simple link or something more attention-getting? You also need to determine whether this needs to be integrated into the landing page or located within a news page.

Adding Social Media Icons
The easiest and most understated approach to show that a company is involved with social media is to include a simple link or icon to the site. This can be placed easily within in a footer or strategically within the main content. Each social media has its own distinctive icon available as a download. Many sites also offer a wide variety of free icon styles from buttons to hand-sketched looks. One good source for finding unique social media icons is Smashing Magazine.

Using Social Media Widgets
As discussed in a previous blog post, social media widgets provide an easy way for a web site to display a few lines of recent news, drive more site traffic and generate a higher level of awareness of their social media involvement. When including a widget within a site design, it’s important to know how much you can customize these small applications. For instance, can you change the size, background color, text color, etc. to fit your design. Some widgets are more customizable than others, which can help determine which style of widget to use or whether to include one at all. Take the time to show the client how it will appear on the site and what the widget can do. Each method of social media offers its own type of widgets and there’s also opportunity to use third party widgets.

For example: a YouTube Video Bar widget allows users to watch the selected video channels without leaving the site.

Twitter offers a Profile widget that displays recent Twitter updates on the site.

And Facebook offers a Fan Box widget which invites site visitors to become the company’s Facebook fans.

One last thing to note as you begin the site design process is to be aware of and understand this growing form of communication. As designers we need to continually seek out fresh ways to incorporate this media into our layout and adapt our design to fit the customer’s social media needs.

Coming up next: Tips for Designing Twitter Pages

What are widgets? They’re cool, customizable mini-applications that can be embedded directly into to a web page, bringing live feeds, games and user specific information to your visitors. Popular social media sites offer simple chunks of code you can insert on your site to create instant widgets.

For example, by adding a Facebook widget to your company’s site, you immediately have a visually attractive and customized entry point readily available for visitors to connect with you. Via your Facebook widget, visitors can see up-to-the-minute wall postings and become your fan with a click. And of course the widget links directly to your Facebook page.

There is a vast and growing range of widgets available. Below is an example showing how Signal has combined three widgets (including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook) on one “connect with us” page. Visit the Alma Lasers Connect page and see the widgets in action!

The Signal Gang

Starting as a traditional graphic design company, Signal designed its first web site in 1994 for the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau. Over the past 17 years, the agency has evolved to approximately 30 full-time professionals and launched a variety of new service offerings to keep pace with the changing needs of its clients. This includes the rollout of video and multimedia capabilities in 2001, email marketing in 2003, and marketing/brand strategy and a variety of web marketing services (including search engine optimization) in 2004.

“We are proud that our business family has reached this agency milestone. Our diversification of services was essential in enabling Signal to continually grow and evolve into a full-service creative agency that provides clients with integrated design, marketing and technology solutions,” said Rick Haynes, president of Signal.

One key differentiator for Signal is its technology team, which has grown to encompass both traditional web developers and application developers. The technology team is responsible for creating custom web applications for clients. Much of their work focuses on integrating databases with web sites, complex tracking and analytics for marketing campaigns, building intranets/extranets, working with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, surveying tools and mobile applications.

Signal has worked with a broad range of clients and brands throughout the years. The agency got its start designing trading cards and a variety of sports entertainment products for Marvel Comics (“X-Men”), DC Comics, NFL, NBA, Disney (“Toy Story”) and James Bond 007. Signal’s current client roster is diverse and includes industry leaders such as John Deere, GlaxoSmithKline, Bald Head Island, Alma Lasers, Medical Mutual Insurance Group, North Carolina Medical Society, ExperienceOne Homes, Highwoods Properties, Quintiles, McKim & Creed and Syngenta, in association with Gibbs & Soell.

“Signal has been working with many of its core clients for over a decade. A lot has changed during that time. As new technologies and the Internet transform the way our clients connect with their audience, we will continue to evolve to help deliver their message and reach their business goals,” stated Bryan Kristof, Signal’s director of marketing.

“Signal isn’t just another vendor to us, they are a direct extension of our marketing team. They put serious time and effort into getting to know us and our target audience. Year after year, they consistently produce quality creative solutions and fresh thinking for both our print and web efforts. No other creative firm has delivered results in the way that Signal has,” commented Shawn Scott, associate deputy executive vice president for the North Carolina Medical Society.

New Dimock & Weinberg Web Site

Signal announced the launch of a new web site for Dimock & Weinberg, DDS, PA, a pediatric dentistry practice located in Wilmington, NC.

The design of the new web site highlights the fun and child-friendly focus of the practice and features downloadable forms to help simplify new patient registration. The site also features an interactive photo gallery that provides visitors with a virtual office tour, while additional pages provide extensive information on what to expect from a child’s first visit to the dentist.

To view the new Dimock & Weinberg, DDS, PA web site, visit: www.ccpedo.com

As social media titan, Facebook, celebrates its fifth birthday, it seems that the members of the Facebook community are maturing as well. Currently, the fastest growing demographic of site users is women aged 55 and up. A recent tally counted over 717,000 members in this group, marking a 175% increase in number since 2008.

While the growth of this demographic is certainly noteworthy, members of Facebook who are over age 55 account for only 3% of total users. Those who believe that the site is dominated by a much younger crowd, however, might be surprised to learn that teenagers make up only 12% of total users.

To learn more about Facebook’s changing demographics, check out this article written by Helen Leggatt on BizReport.com.