Posted by Scott Mikus

It is common in the medical profession to seek a second opinion on a diagnosis, and the practice works equally well during marketing and communications planning. You establish the first opinion when you draft an integrated marketing plan with strategies and tactics. Then, you can share some plan elements with other stakeholders and ask for feedback.

Building a customer-centric marketing team requires a game plan. Customers can be an important source for feedback, but you’ll want to be thoughtful and intentional about how your team asks for customer feedback.

1. First, do no harm. As with the first rule of medical treatment, you must create a feedback plan that captures customer input while enhancing customer relationships.
2. Consider the competitive environment. Establish parameters that meet your security requirements while fostering a candid, trusting dialogue.
   
3. Create an interactive format. Set up a password-protected survey on your web site so customers and other visitors can share feedback on your branding, messaging or other marketing strategies.
4. One-on-one is best. You will get some of the best insights by engaging customers and would-be buyers in one-on-one interviews, which can serve as the basis for creating buyer personas.  Interviewing is a learned skill, so practice before you start dialing customers.
5. Go social. Social media can be a great way to gather feedback and ideas from your customers and prospective buyers.
6. Be selective. Ask customers to give feedback on selected plan elements or marketing content rather than asking them to review a lengthy document or presentation. Construct questions that solicit opinions or ask customers to choose between alternative approaches or messages.
7. Give feedback on the feedback. Don’t just thank customers for participating. Tell them later how their feedback influenced your plan.

Finally, repeat the feedback process year over year. The insights you get from customer feedback will help you establish benchmarks and best practices and determine which strategies and tactics will deliver the best return on investment.

Posted By Beth Crawford & Scott Mikus

Many organizations put significant time and money into their search optimization and neglect web optimization.

Big mistake. Big mistake. While SEO can help improve search rankings and increase inbound traffic, it’s just as important to spend time optimizing the site’s content, user experience and design.

If you don’t, your website could be a dead-end for would-be prospects. Your SEO initiative could drive more traffic to your site. But once visitors get there, they won’t be able to find the information they’re looking for. After a few seconds, they may leave your site and go hunting for what they need on your competitor’s website.

In working with our clients here at Crawford/Mikus Creative Marketing & Design, we have found that the best websites have a lot in common with large-scale retail or wholesale distribution centers.

Step inside a distribution center. You’ll find a sophisticated inbound and outbound hub for procuring, managing, distributing and tracking products across the entire supply chain—from the point of production to the point of sale. Unfortunately, too many websites resemble outdated warehouses – with aging content and idle inventories.

Does your website provide an effective distribution hub for inbound and outbound marketing, brand-based messages and valuable interactions with prospects and customers? To determine if your website is optimized, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1. Is your website looking tired, with outdated design and content?
2. Is it difficult for visitors to find the latest branding and messaging on your website?
3. Does your website provide a less-than-optimal user experience for the growing number of visitors who will access your site through their smartphones or tablet PCs?
4. Is your website relatively static, lacking a constant stream of fresh content in the formats that your prospects prefer, including text, video, podcasts, blog posts, white papers and eBooks?
5. Is it hard for your prospects to navigate your website and access the information they’re looking for?

If you answered “Yes” to more than one of the above questions, your website could be a good candidate for optimization.

With the right content, the right navigation, the right site structure and the right design, your optimized website can become a high-functioning distribution center for driving your integrated marketing and sales initiatives.

Do you think marketers focus too much time and resources on SEO rather than website optimization? Please share your ideas in the comments or tweet us at @crawfordmikus and let us know what you think.

Our Free Website Optimization Assessment can show you how to transform your site and deliver better results from your integrated marketing and sales campaigns. Learn how by calling us today at 404.875.7753 or emailing Scott Mikus at scottmikus@crawfordmikus.com.

Posted By Beth Crawford & Scott Mikus

Every now and then, I think back to when we were first setting up shop in 1989. If you’re like us and have worked in the creative industry for a decade or two, you’ve seen a lot of changes in your career. For us, one of the most striking changes is in how we look for and manage agency-client relationships.

Back in the early days of Crawford/Mikus Creative Marketing & Design, collaborating with clients was the name of the game. We were constantly on the road, meeting with clients about campaign strategies, discussing new projects, sharing layouts and doing press checks.

Fast forward to 2012 and it’s a very different world. We’ve gone from face time to Facebook. Now, days or weeks could go by without seeing a client in their offices or in our studio at Atlanta’s King Plow.

Initial inbound and outbound marketing strategies are still developed face to face. However, from there on out, individual projects rarely involve face-to-face meetings. Instead, projects proceed through a series of follow-up calls and emails. Reason being, many clients are time crunched, struggling under heavier workloads and trying to do more with less.

For several of our larger corporate clients, receiving a new job consists of getting an e-mail “ping,” we go out and pick up the job in a project management app, do the job and then post it on a server. From there, client associates from around the globe give input and mark up the layouts. Then, we make revisions and wrap up the job. Some projects might not involve a single one-to-one call. And we are not talking about one job here; we can be managing as many as 20-30 jobs in this capacity.

From an implementation and execution perspective, working like this leaves the door wide open for assumptions, generalizations and miscommunications. In this environment, it’s a never-ending challenge to manage expectations and client communications – not to mention, the technology hiccups that can occur internally and externally throughout the process.

In terms of flexibility, we don’t have to be tied to the office all day, every day. But it also means we’re tied to our work for longer hours and we’re expected to be electronically accessible virtually all the time. Have you ever tried to conduct business at the zoo or aquarium with your child? Do you ever get frustrated when you lose your mobile signal inside a Target store (it’s the concrete walls!)?

However, the upside is we’re finding more opportunity (and profit) in collaborating with strategic partners and offering a wider breadth of services. We’ve also been able to extend our client base well beyond Atlanta to places like New York, New Jersey, Chicago, California and Florida.

In a recent blog post, we offered 13 tips for client-side marketers on how NOT to choose an agency. We should also write a post for those of us on the agency side about how to choose our client relationships wisely and then to nurture them like we would a well-cared-for garden.

What we have learned from our 20-plus years running an award-winning creative marketing and design studio is that change demands adaptability. We have to be willing to reach out proactively to clients, immerse ourselves more than ever in their corporate culture and make sure we completely understand their business needs and goals.

As project managers, we need to keep an eye on the details. In understanding the client and utilizing both inbound and outbound marketing strategies, we are better able to position ourselves for the long term with a client. We become a partner, not just a vendor. And, those are exactly the kind of agency-client relationships we’re looking for.

All in all, it’s been a wild and exciting ride, and the one thing I can say is, it ain’t over yet!

Beth Crawford and Scott Mikus are principals of Crawford/Mikus Creative Marketing & Design in Atlanta. Follow us on Twitter @CrawfordMikus or subscribe to our blog at www.crawfordmikus.net/blog. A version of this post originally was published in the February/March 2012 issue of Oz Magazine, a business-to-business magazine for and about Atlanta’s visual communication and media industry.

Posted by Scott Mikus and Sheryl Roehl

As a marketer, choosing an agency is probably one of the hardest but most important decisions that you’ll make in your career. Choose well and you’re a rock star in your boss’ eyes. Choose poorly and it could ding you on your next performance review.

It’s not just whom you choose that matters. It’s just as important how you choose. With that in mind – and in honor of Friday the 13th, we’ve assembled our 13 favorite rules for how NOT to choose a marketing agency.

1. Choosing a marketing agency that “can.” Today’s agency landscape is crowded with candidates who say they “can.” As in, “We can do branding” or “We can do social media” or “We can do PR.” But there’s a big difference between “can” and “has.” Remember, your brand will live or die by the experience (or lack thereof) behind it. By way of metaphor, would you want a surgeon just out of med school operating on you? Sure, they have the M.D. next to their name. But wouldn’t you rather have the most experienced pair of hands repairing your hernia – or, in this case, doing your branding and messaging?

2. “I just need my website redesigned.” Sure, a website’s design may be tired and outdated. However, the more important question is: How is the site performing for you? Are visitors converting to leads? Does the content reflect your current positioning? Have you optimized your landing pages? Have you integrated social media into your site beyond just sticking up some icons on your homepage? What about your offline brand — does it need sprucing up, too?

3. Branding a la carte. Your brand isn’t just a logo or a website; it’s the sum total of positioning, messaging, awareness, visual identity and the communications architecture of a company. Be sure to choose an agency that understands this core principle and can skillfully build and integrate a brand across multiple disciplines from inbound to outbound marketing and offline to digital. If you take the a la carte approach, you’ll pay for it later in a splintered or fragmented brand.

4. Wow, what a pitch! Sure, the pitch is important. But are the people pitching going to be doing the work after the contract is signed?  In many agencies, the senior-level deal closers move on to close other deals, while the junior account people step up to do the work. See rule #1.

5.  The people you will work with don’t have a clue about your business. Be sure that the people you’ll work with at the agency have at least a solid understanding and interest in your business from the start. If they’ve done their homework, it will show in the questions they ask and the presentation they give. If not, move on to the next candidate.

6. I really, really like them. Chemistry is important. But don’t pick an agency because your friend works there or just because they just make you feel good. Choose the best agency partner because they have the best experience for the job and can deliver results for your company.

7. Don’t tell the agency candidates your budget. If you don’t at least give the agencies competing for your business a ballpark idea of your budget, they’ll probably come back with very different, hard-to-compare proposals. Why not set clear, upfront expectations of what you’re looking for? That way, when the proposals roll in, you can focus on choosing the right partner, not just the lowest bidder?

8. Set impossible deadlines. Tell the prospective agency that you want a web redesign in a month or a direct mail campaign printed and in the mail in 3-5 business days and you’re probably setting the project up for failure or less-than-stellar performance. Why not try to speed up corporate approvals while putting specific deliverables on parallel tracks? You might be surprised how quickly you can get projects delivered – on time and on budget!

9. They don’t speak the language of business. The world is full of creative people who like to design, write, shoot videos or get PR hits, but many of these people don’t really consider themselves business people. Nothing wrong with that if all you want is just pretty good creative, nothing more. But if you want marketing that truly delivers, choose the agency that talks business – the one that talks about building messaging that resonates with buyers or creating campaigns that drive more leads and increase sales.

10. I can just hire an intern to do social media. To do social media right, you should hire an agency that knows how to integrate social and track results as part of your integrated marketing campaigns. Social doesn’t belong as a siloed sideline; it should be part of the mix.

11.  We can do content in-house. Good content is critical to your branding. If you don’t have good writers and content creators in-house, then trust outside experts to help you get the message right. Good agency content marketers and copywriters know how to develop content for different target audiences and different communications. Without good content to support the entire buying cycle, all you have is well-designed brochure or a good-looking shell of a website.

12. Sorry, but we don’t do X. A good agency may not specialize in SEO or PR, for example, but more often than not they will have a healthy Rolodex of strategic partners and colleagues they can call on to help you create a video, get press or help you build a new mobile app. Do they have a can-do spirit or do they just care about what they want to do – not about meeting your overall marketing needs?

13. But the agency is a big-name agency that has won lots of awards. But will you be an important account to them – or merely a minor account that will be shuffled off to the most junior account team that takes three times longer to do half-baked work? Think twice before you choose based on name alone.  And, if they talk more about their awards than how they’ve helped clients achieve their business goals, then they probably can’t help you achieve yours either.  Move on.

It’s not easy choosing an integrated marketing agency for your company. But if you know the pitfalls, you’ll have a much better chance of selecting the right partner for your organization.

What are your personal rules of how NOT to choose an agency partner? Please share your experiences and tips in the comments below.

Scott Mikus is managing partner of Crawford/Mikus, an Atlanta-based creative marketing and design firm founded in 1989.  Sheryl Roehl is principal and co-founder of Avenue L Marketing, an integrated marketing, public relations and social media agency in Atlanta.

Posted by Scott Mikus

How do you keep prospects engaged throughout the sales cycle? Does your sales team typically run out of marketing collateral materials and other content at some point during the selling cycle?

If you check with your colleagues in sales, they will probably tell you they are often unsure how to follow up after they have sent the “standard package” of marketing collateral and their prospects haven’t responded.

These 7 tips will help you build marketing content that supports your inbound and outbound marketing efforts and helps advance the sales cycle:

1. Make a plan to develop a full set of marketing materials. Salespeople need a reason to make their second, third and fourth contacts with prospects, and they can’t keep sending the same materials time after time. Prepare a step-by-step approach for sharing information with prospects — from initial requests for information through follow-up contacts.

2.  Build flexible marketing content. Salespeople need to have sales tools they can customize and package in different ways to meet customers’ specific business needs or to fit a particular sales situation.

3. Engage buyers early. A recent study indicates that before B2B buyers ever talk to a sales rep, they are already 57 percent of the way to a buying decision based on information they learn from peers, web searches, online forums or social media. Make sure your web content and blogs speak to your buyers’ business pains and address the industry trends and topics that will get them to consider your company’s products and services.

4. Involve the team. To ensure sales and marketing efforts are aligned, seek out direct input from sales team members who are responsible for contacting prospects and managing customers. Use their first-hand experiences to identify content and design considerations and set priorities.

5. Analyze the selling cycle. Remember the principle that form follows function. Consider the types of sales tools that work best in each selling situation. Decide which media and messages are best for first contacts and those that work best for follow-up contacts with your target audience.

6. Go beyond the standard package. Develop materials to cover the full range of follow up contacts required to close the sale. Prepare a variety of sizes and types of content that can be deployed across a range of media, including marketing collateral, sales demos, flash animations, blog posts, white papers and video.

7. Welcome new customers. The sales cycle doesn’t end with the sale. Consider how your organization can handle the transition from prospect to new customers. You may need a package of welcome materials or a customer orientation package to continue nurturing the relationship and reinforcing the buy decision after the sale.

Many sales deals can take longer to close than anticipated. Today’s marketing content must educate buyers during every phase in the sales cycle — from prospect through new customer and beyond.

How do you make sure you have enough marketing collateral and other content to support sales and persuade buyers to choose your products and services?

Posted by Scott Mikus

As social media swept aside many old marketing assumptions, many companies have discovered they have a lot less control over their brands than they used to.  Today’s consumers and B2B customers wield enormous power to define the market’s perceptions of brands through their online and offline conversations.

In this new era, Marketing Linkage becomes vital to your organization’s survival. To maximize the impact of your initiatives, you need to bring together inbound and outbound marketing, internal and external communications, employees as brand ambassadors and your solutions into an integrated marketing strategy that we call Marketing Linkage.

Inbound Linkage. To elevate your brand and engage your target audience, your digital strategy should utilize inbound marketing, social media and content marketing. And by integrating communications across multiple platforms, you can blend web optimization, lead capture programs and the power of public relations to heighten your site’s visibility, drive traffic and increase conversions.

Outbound Linkage. Outbound marketing picks up where inbound leaves off with high-touch communications focused on the individual buyer’s needs. Have you taken a close look at your brand recently? How consistent and integrated are your offline and online brands? How well are you using marketing automation to align your initiatives with the sales team?

Internal Linkage. When your sales and marketing teams are aligned, they can speak to prospects and customers with a unified message. And by breaking down internal silos, you open up new possibilities for collaboration and activation strategies for profiling, ranking leads, assigning priorities and following up with top prospects.

Employee Linkage. By building a purpose-driven brand and culture, your company will attract people to work for the organization, drive engagement and improve retention. Think of it as Employee 2.0, where HR and marketing come together to help employees become brand ambassadors and deliver consistent, “on message, on strategy” communications via social media and offline interactions with their networks.

Solution Linkage. When you have a deep understanding of buyers’ points of pain, you can build solution sets that meet client/customer needs. By elevating your message, you can set your company apart from the competition and convey the value your product/service offers to prospects.

So how about you? What other examples of Marketing Linkage do you think are important? How have you built Marketing Linkage in your organization?  Please share your perspective to to help other marketers in the comments below.

Crawford/Mikus Creative Marketing & Design is offering a Free Marketing Linkage assessment to help you spot linkage gaps and discover how to drive value and bottom-line results for your company. To schedule your Free Marketing Linkage assessment, please email me at scottmikus@crawfordmikus.com.

Posted by Scott Mikus

Today’s inbound marketing can deliver measurable, reliable information about the success of your initiatives.

Call it the echo effect. What you send out can come back as real-time statistical data you can use to improve your marketing results. Think of it as customer-centric marketing – understanding buyers’ online and offline behavior, building that insight into your marketing campaigns, and connecting it to the bottom line.

From social media to email campaigns to Google Adwords, today’s marketing tools are interactive and immediate, so you can capture valuable information whenever users browse, click, respond and convert.

With the right tools, the right strategies and the right content targeting your prospects, you can create an echo effect with your inbound and outbound communications.

Here are 10 tips to take the guesswork out of customer feedback:

1) Present an unified brand across multiple touchpoints – whether it’s on the web, social media, mobile, events or collateral. According to a recent Forbes survey of CMOs, one of Marketing’s biggest challenges is ensuring a consistent customer (and prospect) experience. While customer acquisition, conversion and retention continue to be top business priorities, investing in consistent branding is critical to the success of all your marketing initiatives.

2) Understand your target audience. Besides analyzing web, email and social media analytics to better understand buyer behavior, don’t forget offline research methods like buyer personas, trade shows, customer advisory panels, win-loss analysis, and customer case study interviews. Skip this step, and you’ll most certainly fall short of your campaign goals.

3) Put content at the heart of your B2B or B2C marketing campaigns. That starts with delivering a compelling message that will motivate your target audience. But how do you make it persuasive?  Crafting well-written content isn’t enough, though it’s important.  Your messaging must hit prospects’ pain points and priorities – and it must motivate your audience to take the next step in the buying process.

4) Define your visual voice. Support your message with designs that command attention, reinforce key points and enhance your brand identity. If you look and sound like everybody else, guess what? Your prospect won’t be able to differentiate you from the competition.

5) Customize your outbound communications. Deliver personalized messages to each customer or prospect – or targeted messages to segments of your audience. Customers and prospects will benefit from this narrowcasting because they will receive messages and offers that are more relevant to their interests, while you will get better results from your marketing campaigns.

6) Go for quality, not quantity. As marketing strategist Ardath Albee points out, if your lead-generation campaign produces 150 leads, but only 20 are high-quality leads, is it really better than another campaign that produces 20 high-quality leads? Are more clicks and more leads really the end goal if you’re spending all your time trying to sift the wheat from the chaff – or trying in vain to get sales to follow up on all those leads?

7) Repurpose content and deliver it multiple formats. Prepare electronic and print versions of your outbound communications to maximize your reach without adding substantial production costs. Deliver your message in the formats your audiences prefer.

8) PURL makes perfect. Email, web and social media can deliver the echo effect. For example, add a PURL to your direct mail or email campaign to track and measure audience responses in real time – while you generate leads and collect valuable information about your prospects.

9) Measure, tweak, measure, tweak. Use all that statistical data you’ve gathered to measure your performance, adjust your communication strategies based on what you learn and justify investments in marketing initiatives.

10) What goes out can come back. With the right combination of inbound marketing and outbound marketing initiatives, you’ll command attention and communicate with more impact. You’ll also capture valuable feedback, convert more prospects, build better customer relationships and demonstrate a positive return on your marketing investment.

I welcome your ideas and tips in the comments section below, or shoot me an email at scottmikus@crawfordmikus.com.

Scott Mikus is a managing partner of Crawford/Mikus Creative Marketing & Design.

Posted by Scott Mikus

Retailers and wholesalers maintain large-scale distribution centers as part of their supply chain systems. Thanks to improvements in logistics technology, these distribution centers are more than mere warehouses. They are sophisticated inbound and outbound hubs for procuring, managing, distributing and tracking products across the entire supply chain—from the point of production to the point of sale.

Lately we’ve been thinking about how a high-functioning website has characteristics in common with a distribution center. The best websites are hubs for distributing content and services to customers through a variety of devices and applications. Site visitors can access the content and services at the times and places that are most convenient for them—and in the formats they prefer.

Most organizations give attention to search engine optimization. They are concerned with site traffic and conversions—driving visitors to the site and capturing their contact information. Fewer organizations are attentive to the outbound functions of activation, outreach and planning. Their content is aging and their inventory is idle.

We see the website as a distribution hub for sharing brand-based messages and establishing value-based interactions with prospects and customers. We’ve developed our Website Optimization Model to describe the wider range of valuable inbound and outbound site functions.

We believe a high-functioning website is itself an engine for driving a wide range of integrated marketing, communication and sales initiatives. Instead of addressing only search engines, we’re now focusing on site engines—because we’re convinced that the right site with the right content and the right capabilities can deliver the goods.

Posted by Scott Mikus

In a competitive environment you need superior strategies to differentiate your brand, reach new prospects and retain your existing customers—all while your target audiences are being bombarded with information.

You need clear messages and compelling media to cut through the clutter and connect with impact.

You may want to consider Quick Response (QR) barcodes as a medium for delivering high-value messages at the times and places that are most convenient for your target audiences. When users scan QR codes with their smartphone cameras they are instantly directed to your messages.

• You can locate QR codes almost anywhere—in an ad, on a billboard, on a menu or even on a t-shirt—so you’re connecting with users one on one.
• You can drive users to your web site—or to a promotion, a coupon, a demo, an email message or a Google map of your location.

QR codes are interactive, so you can market to individuals. When users visit your web site you can track the responses, convert the responses to sales leads and calculate a direct return on your investment. And with an integrated marketing strategy you can leverage the full range of interactive media to get more value from your web site, sales collateral, print ads and trade shows.

Executing an integrated communication strategy across multiple media platforms is challenging, but at Crawford/Mikus it’s our business. We do everything from brand identity to selling tools—from concept to execution. With Crawford/Mikus as your partner you can reach your target audiences, increase your brand awareness and meet the demands of a competitive environment.

Posted by Beth Crawford

From the moment prospects land on your website for the first time to the day they sign the contract with you, your brand makes a promise.  How well you keep that promise will determine the long-term health of your brand, reinforce the strength of your customer relationships, and will impact the profitability of your organization.

Every brand has a lifecycle. That’s why it’s a good idea to monitor your brand along the way – before sales dip. A comprehensive brand audit* can help you reveal new growth opportunities and identify new ways to make your brand resonate with target customers.

Here are five key factors to consider when taking stock of your brand as part of a brand audit:

Performance. The market evaluates your brand performance every day. Over time, your brand thrives or declines based on how well your business keeps its promises. Sometimes, sales may begin to slide because customers no longer put their faith in the brand’s value proposition or they may have moved on – to a competitor or to the next new priority. While your visual identity can quickly communicate your organization’s presence and personality, your brand is based on how well it performs and delivers value to customers.

Identity. Your brand identity is a type of visual shorthand that uses logos, design, colors and slogans instantly to communicate your organization’s presence, character and personality. Do prospects and customers know what your brand stands for? A brand audit can help you get a reality check on your brand identity — how well the personality of your brand is resonating.

Messaging. While visual consistency is critical, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Analyze what your brand actually communicates to prospects, customers and other stakeholders. What is the messaging that guides your marketing communications? Do all of your communications deliver a consistent message?

Positioning. Your brand positioning is based on a set of promises you make to your prospects, customers and other stakeholders. A brand stands for what an organization does for its customers and how it makes them feel. It’s an intangible asset that your business must sustain by delivering consistent value.  In evaluating your positioning, ask yourself these questions: What does your brand promise? Is it still relevant to customers? Does it reflect a competitive advantage?

Communications. Your brand positioning is an ongoing effort to define and communicate the brand promise. How well does your organization deliver on its differentiated promises and reinforce them through external marketing communications? How well does it deploy internal communications to reinforce the brand promise with internal stakeholders and team members?

Ultimately, you will enhance your brand (or not) over time based on 1) how well your organization performs, 2) how well it delivers on its value promises, and 3) how well it uses communications to remind customers of the value created and delivered.

What factors do you consider in evaluating and auditing your brand? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

*To qualify for a free brand audit, contact Scott Mikus at scottmikus@crawfordmikus.com.