posted by Nicolette Beard @ 1:05 PM
As the economy starts to perk up, more visibly in Houston then in other parts of the country, it may be time to measure your customers’ perception of your company. Most companies will know whether they’ve gained or lost market share. But do you know if you’ve lost “mindshare?”
Knowing where you’re positioned in the marketplace relative to the economic recovery is critical to determining how to shift a brand or if any change is needed at all. This is where a brand audit can help.
A brand audit is a holistic way of looking at your business and how your company’s value proposition matches the way it interacts with the rest of the world.
Essentially, brand audits are designed to sort out perceptions about what your company stands for from both internal (your employees) and external customers. Often, the company President or head of HR is too close to the situation to remain objective, so it’s wise to consider an unbiased third party. (hint.hint.)
Mark Healy, partner at Satov Consultants, identifies 4 key components of a basic brand audit:
- Know what’s included in the scope and what’s going to be left out.
- Design study areas and questions that will yield results (data).
- Decide who conducts the interviews and get going.
- Analyze results. Are there themes or gaps?
The fifth step (which is mine) is assess your company’s brand strengths and weaknesses accurately from the data gathered and apply that knowledge consistently across every communication touch point. Your brand audit is only as good as the strategic thinking behind it.
The complete article can be found at The Globe & Mail.
3.09.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 6:10 PM
As the earth’s resources continue to decline or, more correctly, as the world’s population continues to expand, sustainability is top-of-mind for many industries.
Launch: Water is the first in a series of forums NASA formed in partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. State Department and Nike. Experts will gather at NASA’s Space Center in Florida from March 16 – 18, 2010, to “identify, showcase and support innovative approaches to sustainability.”
Organizers have begun a global search for visionaries whose innovative technologies or programs show promise in making tangible impacts on environmental sustainability including water, air, food, energy, mobility and sustainable cities.
Many in branding and corporate communications roles know that Savage has been creating sustainability reports for years. They’re often known in the industry as Health, Environment & Safety reviews or Corporate Compliance reports. Not too “exciting sounding” compared to LAUNCH: Water. It could be the name of a new Theme Part. The title grabbed my attention.
“NASA offers a culture of problem-solving, deep technical expertise on sustainable systems such as the International Space Station, and a unique capacity to capture and analyze data about our home planet,” said NASA’s Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and host of the forum.
For those unaware of our work in this area, we recently completed both a print and online sustainability report for Sysco Corp. presenting ways they’re reducing miles driven and fuel consumed and broader corporate responsibility initiatives like fighting hunger.
The sustainability forum will be broadcast live.
UPDATE: The folks at SmartPlanet.com have a list of the 10 entrepreneurial innovators in the water sustainability department.
3.08.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 5:43 PM
Five years ago Kodak sold $15 billion of film. This year consumer film sales will be less than $200 million, according to Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO, speaking at a recent Houston Interactive Marketing Assoc. (HiMA) luncheon. How does a 100-year-old company make a comeback when it was identified with a dying consumer product?
Hayzlett started with their core brand message: trust and reliability. He fused that with their historically superb science to a new mission – delivering the soul and science of imaging.
Hayzlett called it “Emotional Technology.”
Their’s a resonance behind that phrase that people can feel. With that value proposition, he captured the hearts and minds of his customers. From there, his team’s purpose was to engage, educate, excite and evangelize its product through every marketing channel, but particularly through social media.
This brand strategy has paid off. With Hayzlett’s laser focus, Kodak has reduced its product-to-market cycle to five months, and 13 of their products rank #1, #2, or #3 in their respective categories, half of which didn’t exist two years ago. One product was launched solely using Twitter at a $70 higher price point and there’s a waiting list to purchase.
Hayzlett said that there’s a lot of talk about ROI when using social media, but his definition is a little different. He measures the “Return on Ignoring.” There’s an old saying, “If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got.” Hayzlett, a supreme marketer to be sure, understood that he had to radically re-engage his customers using technology as his driver.
Ironically, having reinvented itself as a digital imaging firm, 80% of Kodak’s business comes from B2B companies today. Consolidated Graphics, a long time client of Savage, is one of their success stories.
Hayzlett admitted that he has “a seat at the table” and his job is “to create tension inside the company,” so you may be skeptical about your ability to create structural change within your B2B organization.
But, if you knew you would enjoy $10 billion in sales, see record profits and double-digit growth, then would you pursue a bold re-branding strategy? Because that’s exactly what Hayzlett got.
Hear Kodak’s Marketing Transformation talk with Jeffrey Hayzlett. Starts about 19 minutes into the video. (Registration’s required, but the video is free.)
3.02.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 4:57 PM
Bing will soon be powering Yahoo! search results, leaving advertisers with just two search networks from which to drive traffic. The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice, by eliminating one of the Internet’s biggest search competitors, have ignored the costs this decision will impose on businesses as they continue to acquire new customers online.
On one hand, I suppose this is good news for search optimizers because now we have only two search engines for which to optimize. While the vast majority of B2B marketers use Google, driving more advertisers into fewer networks increases the price of traffic acquisition. Bidding wars over finite inventory were a complaint in the early years of paid search. I suspect we’ll hear howling soon.
It’s consumers and businesses, small business especially, who really lose. Consumers lose a unique Yahoo! search brand and point of view and the cost to market online can only increase over time.
The days of 10-cent clicks are long gone. To compete effectively online requires not only the internal fortitude to embrace the new, but also an understanding of the underpinnings of the Internet.
Links = Relationships
The rise of social media underscores the importance of developing relationships online. It’s no surprise that Google and Yahoo! have started indexing content from Facebook and Twitter. Those links to and from followers, bloggers and websites represent millions of conversations. I don’t think people will stop using search engines any time soon, but I do believe that with the Microhoo deal, we’ll see search market share decline and with it profits. When you take away choice, consumers can be fickle.
People, through their desire for connection, have provided an avenue for businesses to reach out like never before. Will the day come when companies will reach out to online communities directly and bypass the search engines?
We may have come full circle in our sales and marketing efforts. Every business is now a door-to-door salesman: engaging prospects, building rapport and following up.
Is your website up to the challenge?
Source: SEO Theory
UPDATE: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, states at SMX West that Microsoft does *not* now intend to “kill off” Yahoo! Search – he further stated that within the deal agreement, Yahoo! may increase their search share via a wide number of initiatives.
Thanks to Chris Smith for the counter argument.
2.19.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 12:27 PM
One of the most challenging aspects of owning or managing a website is the consistent need for new content.
Unless a website is frequently updating its pages with new product information or service offerings, it will see its influence, with both readers and search engines, decline over time. We talked about the hazards of becoming a “tombstone” web property in a recent post.
I’d like to share ways to generate content that not only will help you maximize your website’s visibility, but also improve its usefulness to your visitors.
Leveraging Your Digital Assets
I’ve borrowed a page from the so-called “Internet marketing gurus,” who’ve mastered the art of re-purposing their “must-have” e-book. You, too, can leverage your existing content and enjoy better search results at the same time.
There are portions of your site that are easy to forget: a letter to shareholders, pictures of the company sales convention, a podcast of a new product demo, etc. You may not realize that this content can be optimized for more search value. These are your digital assets. They took just as much time and money to develop as your user-friendly navigation or your killer app.
Optimizing Images
If you’ve paid for professional photography and own the rights, you need to start earning back the money you paid by optimizing those images for search engines. Allow the search engines to reach the directory they live in, and offer a plain image behind any that are displayed in Flash enhancers, so they can be indexed.
You can also leverage your images in social media profiles such as Flickr or Photobucket. I knew a photographer who had a limited budget but wanted to showcase his fabulous portfolio. His web developer set up an account and linked the website directly to Flickr. Unfortunately, the images were named 0700154scl.jpg – not search friendly at all.
Ideally, you want to include alt tags, a link title tag, a proper title (not some number useful only for filing) and metadata inside the images to better associate them with branded and non-brand keywords.
Re-purposing PDFs & Documents
Besides being a great B2B lead generation tool, white papers can enjoy a shelf-life beyond their initial post date. Most companies spend hours developing sales materials, press releases and collateral material as well. Not only do your visitors see this as valuable content, but search engines do too! They are capable of crawling and indexing this content if you provide a pathway to it.
When you post your PDFs, or similar documents, to your site, make sure they contain at least one link back to your site inside the document, preferably with anchor text pointed to specific pages. This is a great way to leverage “free” downloads of your case studies. You’ve now created an incoming link from web properties that have downloaded and shared your content, which helps lift your pages in search engine results.
YouTube No Longer “Kids Only” Content
YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and a marketing channel not to be ignored. The Diet Coke & Mentos experiments went viral with 11 million views in 3 years. I’m sure every B2B has a “how-to” video just waiting for an audience.
Post the video to your website, and let the search engines get to the files. Give your video its own page with corresponding copy, and submit a simple video sitemap via your robots.txt file.
With these three tactics, you’ve solved the problem of creating new content on a regular basis. Make re-purposing your digital assets a way of life for your business website.
Additional Resources: Optimizing for Universal Search
