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Rise Above the Chaos

Written by admin on . Posted in Omnichannel Marketing.

By Laurie Hileman

The academic researcher—and gifted storyteller—fretted after her 2010 speech, at one point lamenting to a friend, “I just told 500 people I had a breakdown!”

Never did she imagine her talk would become one of TED’s most popular ever, with more than 19 million views (as of this writing).

What Brown understands—and uses so effectively—is the power of stories to inspire and inform, entertain and engage. And businesses are taking note.

In a modern world knuckling under a barrage of noisy marketing messages and relentless communication, a compelling narrative is essential for any organization looking to establish trust and inspire action from employees, customers, prospects, and other stakeholders.

Here’s what you need to know about brand storytelling, developing your own narrative, and how to tell it effectively.

Why storytelling?

“We can all shout from the rooftops about how good we are,” says Mark Masters, author of The Content Revolution: Telling a Better Story to Differentiate from the Competition and owner of The ID Group, a content marketing consultancy based in the United Kingdom.

“We’re very good at using Facebook and Twitter to try to sound more important, but what a story does is it allows people into our worlds. Storytelling is now one of the only differentiators that we have as businesses,” he says.

And differentiate we must.

Every day 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared, 1.8 billion photos are uploaded and shared, 500 million tweets are posted, and 400 million snapchats are sent.* Yes, every day.

“I’m competing with my mum, who’s signed up for a Twitter account!” quips Masters.

Differentiating your business or organization demands a compelling narrative that appeals to a specific audience: yours.

Far better than lifeless facts and figures, or worn-out features and benefits, stories build empathy, create understanding, and motivate people to action. Tell a good story and your audience will perk up. Lean in. Stay when there may be cheaper, better, faster alternatives elsewhere.

Masters warns that having today’s communication tools such as websites, blogs, email newsletters, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts is not enough. “Gone are the days of the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. All that it means in 2015 is that we have a ticket to enter the race,” he says.

What’s my story? 

The race to get content produced and distributed via various communication channels is a fool’s errand without a clear strategy and well-defined target audience. It’s simply not viable to be all things to all people. Says Masters, “You need to stand for something.”

Are you a lawn care business with over-the-top customer service? Are you an accounting firm capable of breaking down complex tax issues in a way even a middle-schooler can understand? Determine what uniquely defines your company, your brand strategy, and your goals.

With a clear picture in mind, think carefully about the audience you are trying to reach. Is it existing customers? Prospects that look just like your best customers? Suppliers? Donors?

Once you have a well-defined audience and strategy in place, it’s time to start developing narratives to support your goals. Look deeply. What problems can you solve? How can you make your customers’ lives better? The goal, Masters says, is to become your customers’ best answer by providing real value.

“A powerful narrative can persuade customers, employees, investors, and stakeholders that your company, product, or idea can help them achieve the success they desire,” writes Carmine Gallo, in his book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.

“People are more engaged with products when they know where those products come from and if they get to know the real people behind those products,” Gallo writes.

Masters suggests capturing your story ideas in an editorial calendar, a document outlining story topics, the intended audience, and marketing channel that will be used.

Getting your story heard.

“Marketing is still the same; the difference is everything is now magnified. There are more channels than ever before,” says Masters. The key is finding what channels resonate most with your audience and inviting them in.

He’s a strong proponent of an owned-media approach, one that is 100-percent owned by the company. Rather than relying heavily on channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn— where you’ve little control over costs or competing messages—focus especially on traditional channels such as custom publications or in-person events, where you maintain complete control of the narrative, or use your website or blog.

“Slowly, you’re creating pockets and spaces that are relevant to that [audience],” says Masters. These are spaces in which relationships are nurtured and grown.

Just as personal relationships develop and strengthen over time, so do brand relationships built on open, honest storytelling. Masters warns against taking a “we’ll try this for three months and see” campaign approach. Instead, he stresses the need for a long-term commitment. “It has to be part of a longer mindset,” he says.

Author and screenwriting lecturer Robert McKee once said: “If you don’t control your story and tell it powerfully, others will tell it for you with less than flattering results. Fair or unfair, stories shape corporate futures.”

Start strengthening your brand and shaping your future with a marketing strategy rich in storytelling. Content that consistently educates, entertains, and engages your audience drives profitable action.

* NewsCred (2015), The Personalization Game: How to Use Content to Drive Marketing ROI [white paper].

Two Clicks and Done

Written by admin on . Posted in B2B E-commerce, Case Study.

By Laurie Hileman

At a hefty 50 pages each, enrollment packets for the 401(k) plans administered by Chemical Bank’s wealth management services team needed a redesign. While strict regulatory requirements govern the bulk of information that must be included within the enrollment packets, Chemical Bank’s wealth management marketing specialist Lovisa Golder felt more could be done to provide participants with a clear and concise roadmap on how to use the enclosed materials.

The redesign project prompted Golder to step back and evaluate the entire packet preparation process—from start to finish. What she quickly discovered was an opportunity to improve efficiency and reduce costs by jettisoning the time-consuming tasks of printing, collating, and stuffing the finished packets.

Background

The wealth management services team at Chemical Bank, the second largest bank headquartered in Michigan, with more than 180—and growing—banking offices throughout the state’s Lower Peninsula, has been providing investment management, trust services, financial planning, and retirement plan solutions for more than 50 years.

As part of its retirement plan services, Chemical Bank manages the back-end operations of 401(k) and other retirement plans for more than 200 client companies. Employees at those companies who enroll in a retirement plan receive a packet of information put together by Chemical Bank that outlines their company’s plan details and enrollment instructions.

Problem

“All hands on deck.”

It was the battle cry heard round the office when orders for as many as 100 packets came in, recalls Golder. Printing, collating, and stuffing folders would tie up the office’s printer and staff for the better part of a day, depending on the turnaround time required by the client.

“As you can imagine, it was a cumbersome process,” says Golder.

The bank needed a solution that would maintain the integrity of the heavily regulated informational packets but also free up the wealth management team’s time—not to mention the office printer—to serve more pressing client needs.

Solution

Taking a play from their retail banking side, Golder explored the idea of using a digital storefront as a print-on-demand solution for enrollment packets. She worked with Beth Elliott, a sales consultant with The F.P. Horak Company, a Michigan-based full-service printing and marketing communications provider, to establish a seamless process.

Golder pulls together each new 401(k) and retirement plan’s original packet of materials to ensure all regulatory requirements are met. She then sends pdf files along with the name of the corresponding Chemical Bank plan administrator for Elliott and her team to load onto the digital storefront site.

When an order for packets comes in, the plan administrator hops on Chemical Bank’s digital storefront and places an order with two or three easy clicks. The packets are printed, collated, stuffed in folders along with the plan administrator’s business card, and delivered to the appropriate Chemical Bank office—usually with one- or same-day service.

As changes are needed in plan documents, Golder simply sends over new pdfs to be uploaded to the site. No inventory, no rush, no hassle.

Results

“At the time we factored in what we were paying our people [on staff] to do this work versus what we were paying [The F.P. Horak Company], it was without a doubt a much more cost-effective solution,” says Golder.

Folders and reams of paper no longer monopolize office space, the Chemical Bank brand is carefully controlled, and her team can get what they need exactly when they need it.

“Our retirement plan services team loves that they’re not pulling together any more packets,” says Golder. “It frees up time for everybody to focus on our customer service, really delivering the solutions we’re known for delivering. And, we’re not working quite as hard on this end.”

The excitement is starting to catch on. Once the wealth management team’s enrollment packets were up and running, Golder notes some of her other business lines requested their forms be loaded onto the digital storefront. Now that they’ve seen how automatic and easy the process is for ordering, they want in.

“The architecture is so open,” says Elliott, about the digital e-commerce platforms available through F.P. Horak. “We can do so many different things.” She encourages people to take some time to review existing processes, and see where improvements might be made. More often than not, she says, “It’s just so much more efficient and cost-effective in the end.”

The Outer Wrapping Is Just The Beginning

Written by admin on . Posted in Print & Mail.

By Ilene Wolff

We’re all sparring for a consumer’s attention in our overbooked world of too much to do in too little time, whether it’s in their buying a bottle of shampoo or whiskey, or opening a B2B direct mail piece. That’s why packaging designers have become pop psychologists. Armed with knowledge about preferences based on gender, age, and even geography, these largely unsung marketers employ construction and interactive techniques they hope will grab you. They know that once a package’s outer dress has hooked your attention, their client has a chance to reel you in and get you to sniff a scented sticker, peel away a peek-flap, scan a QR code, or visit a personalized URL for more information.

If marketers can get you involved, there’s a much greater chance of landing the catch. If not, you’ll move on along the retailer’s shelf or to the next piece of mail in the pile.

That’s why your product packaging should be front and center and not an afterthought: It’s the best way to get you noticed by your customers.

Who gets it?

So, how do you produce an attention-grabbing package?

“Ask yourself who’s going to buy this product,” says Carol Quade (KWAY-dee), creative director for Impress Creative in Bay City, Michigan. “Who’s the person it’s going to be marketed to?”

For one client’s B2B direct mail package, Impress Creative decided to market to the end recipient’s inner child, daring to buck the rules even though it was selling a financial services firm to potential business clients—potentially a pretty dry setting.

Not this time. The firm mailed three small containers of Play-Doh® in a generic white corrugated cardboard box, with a heavy card stock sleeve that was four-color printed, scored, and glued. It bore the message: “We play with a lot of dough. Look inside to see how we make business a little more fun.” The financial services company’s name was also printed on the sleeve, but in a font that looked as though the letters were made of modeling clay.

“Part of the reason why we did this with a sleeve is we could put a variable label on it,” says Quade, explaining that digital printing variable labels makes the package hyper-specific to the recipient. “That’s the goal, to really tailor it to who you’re sending it to. Personally, I think they’re (the recipient) more apt to open it.”

In addition to the Play-Doh, the box held a card letting the recipient know he would receive a call from the sender, and, if the call resulted in a sales presentation meeting being scheduled, the recipient would receive a $100 gift card or equivalent donation to a children’s charity.

Quade agrees that age, gender, and geographic location of the targeted receiver play an important part in the package design process. They help accomplish the goal of surprising and delighting the recipient or buyer.

Quade mentions another B2B mailer package, designed for a company that services credit unions with ATMs. The piece was a clear tube with plastic caps, made to look like the containers financial institutions use in their drive-through banking pneumatic tube systems. Inside was a flyer with a personalized URL (PURL) directing the recipient to visit the financial institution’s website, which had a call to action intended to drum up business. Also inside was a pen rattling around, using sound as a way to pique even more interest.

The Cadillac of packaging

Mark Sng (SING), director of marketing for Neenah Packaging, Alpharetta, Georgia, is an expert on how paper’s texture, color, and weight play into luxury branding. All of these factors, and more, affect the entire user experience of opening a box, something Sng refers to as the “unveiling process.”

“How a person opens a box is an indication of quality,” he says. “A well-designed package will self-guide the user through the process of unboxing, while simultaneously creating a sense of anticipation for what’s inside.”

Sng says, “The quality of the paper, its texture and color, helps create a memorable experience.” Heavier weight paper indicates luxury, and Sng sees a current high demand from clients for the more robust stock.

For example, Sng points to Maker’s Mark® whiskey, a high-end brand in the brown liquor family. The bottle’s label paper is uncoated matte stock and has a textured, craft-type finish that denotes history and heritage, he says.

“The key phrase we use is high-touch,” Sng says. “Textured labels tell a handcrafted story.”

Sng, who has a focus on beer and spirits packaging, says that while some brews really are small-batch and made by hand, other so-called craft brews are actually overseen by national conglomerates, although you’d never know it from outside appearances. That’s where bottle shape, label design, and the quality of the paper stock play their part.

When it comes to packaging color, Sng says gold foil really commands attention, and is used mostly in the beauty industry. Luxury brands also continue to be interested in pearlescent papers and inks for an accent or pop-in color.

Color even becomes part of a company’s brand. For example, consider the iconic Tiffany turquoise.

“Even if you didn’t put that brand name on the box or the bag, the color still denotes luxury,” Sng says.

Interestingly, Tiffany uses a shiny, coated paper for its boxes, but Neenah supplies uncoated paper for its bags. “It adds a certain tactile and weight dimension that a coated paper would not,” Sng explains.

Although some colors, like Tiffany turquoise, have become part of the brand, current trends favor achromatic colors such as whites, browns, and blacks, because they are more natural and organic. Sng says, “I think you could almost argue, is it a trend or is it here to stay?”

Newly added to Neenah’s product line-up are five fashion-forward box wrap colors that are inspired by Pantone’s 10 spring 2015 colors. These Pantone colors, in turn, take their cues from nature: all have a warm, soft, subtle effect, Sng points out.

He advises learning the tricks of the packaging trade and employing them to your best advantage. “Anything that you can gain over your competition helps, whether it’s the shape of a bottle or the texture of a label,” he says.

Remember, the clock is always ticking: You have only a few seconds to make the right impression—and the sale.

Bring the Hammer

Written by admin on . Posted in Omnichannel Marketing.

When it comes to reaching consumers, marketers have a bigger toolbox these days.

A…much…bigger…box.

The advent of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Tumblr have added a surplus of new tools capable of reaching consumers—whenever and wherever—on their mobile devices.

And with more opportunities come more costs, which pull marketers’ budgets in every direction. The question becomes: What tool delivers the most ROI?

According to a Target Marketing Seventh Annual Media Usage Forecast survey of nearly 250 U.S. marketers, the answer is direct mail. Business-to-consumer marketers indicate direct mail continues to deliver the strongest ROI for customer acquisition and retention. For B2B marketers, email—with direct mail not far behind—delivers the customers and retains them.

So, what do you have in your toolbox?

Direct Mail Pounds the Competition

When it comes to customer acquisition and retention, direct mail beats all other tools.

  • For customer acquisition, direct mail tops the list (31.3%), with email (16.7%) and social marketing engagement (12.5%) rounding out the top three.
  • For customer retention, again, direct mail is the top choice of respondents (37.5%), followed by email (29.2%), and trailed by social medial (10.4%).

In Good Company

80% – Number of  business-to-consumer marketers using direct mail.

Tools Change with Time

When Target Marketing first conducted its annual survey of marketers’ media spending plans in 2007, social marketing engagement wasn’t even a topic listed on the survey. Today, it is the third most effective tool.

Business-to-consumer marketers indicate direct mail continues to deliver the strongest ROI for customer acquisition and retention.

Media Delivering the Strongest ROI

charts

Ideas that Work: Casket Company Implements Web-to-print Ordering

Written by admin on . Posted in B2B E-commerce, Case Study.

By Holly Case

Any business knows that customers are more loyal and feel appreciated when you personalize their buying experience to them, but customizing your sales materials to each customer can be time-consuming and inefficient. Aurora Casket realized that it needed a custom way to show potential customers how they could help them.

The Background

The Aurora Casket Company has built caskets in downtown Aurora, Ind., since the company’s founding in 1890. For more than 100 years, the business has sold its continually expanding product line (which now includes urns and cremation products, memory keepsakes, ceremony planning services, and memorials) to funeral homes nationwide.

And while times and the tools used for doing business have changed in the past century, the funeral services and supplies industry, of which Aurora Casket is a part, is considered to be conservative. Businesses within the industry have not necessarily embraced change rapidly, especially in identifying how technology applications can positively affect marketing and sales efforts.

The Problem

Aurora Casket’s marketing department knew that the company’s funeral home customers across diverse local markets did not always have the same availability of items to purchase in stock. They needed a way to create catalogs of available product offerings for different funeral homes in different markets.

“It was difficult for our marketing department to create printed sales catalogs that supported disparate local inventory. When we created national catalogs, we found ourselves putting ‘not available’ decals on products to reflect local inventory. Or, worse yet, simply not using the [promotional] pieces we created,” says Marty Strohofer, Aurora’s vice president of marketing and product development.

The company tried to compensate for this problem, but the low-technology methods it used at first created as many problems as it solved. The first effort to address this problem required marketing employees to prepare image binders with 8.5-inch-by-11-inch pictures of caskets. When Aurora’s business-to-business customers ordered image binders, the marketing staff would choose images from a database of more than 4,000 potential caskets and compile the images with description pages and a unique table of contents.

Not surprisingly, this process was inefficient and time-consuming. Marketing employees were spending so much time creating product binders that it diverted from cultivating new sales. “Creating ‘one-off’ customer product catalogs or presentation guides took a great deal of time and effort,” Strohofer says.

Yet in keeping with the values of the company’s founder, Aurora had always tried to personalize solutions for its customers. “We wanted to empower our sales professionals to create tailored product catalogs for our customers,” says Strohofer. But how to do this efficiently?

The Solution

Strohofer and Aurora Casket staff met with Winn Adams, a sales executive with Prograde (a limited liability corporation of The F.P. Horak Company), a West Chester, Ohio-based company that engineers e-commerce and print solutions. It didn’t take long for Strohofer to see that a web-ordering site would save Aurora time, effort, and money—and provide the personalized approach it wanted for its customers. Working with Prograde, Aurora implemented a web-based platform that allowed the company to truly customize materials for each customer. Custom programming enabled users to complete the order process through a seamless interface between the Prograde site and Aurora’s system, ensuring that specific caskets advertised as being in inventory were available in a funeral home’s region.

“Now, using the web-to-print platform, we have empowered our sales reps to configure and order custom-tailored catalogs or presentation guides as they need them,” says Strohofer. “The team at Prograde partnered with us to create an interface-to-inventory system so that our reps could have an easy-to-use, self-service method for creating these high-impact sales tools.”

The Results

After adopting the new system, Aurora Casket found that it was able to provide personalized attention to detail for each client in a much more streamlined manner, eliminating much of the waste and inefficiency in the old model.

“We have provided new marketing and sales tools that help our representatives and customers succeed. We are continuing to explore new ways to leverage the platform and partnership we’ve created with Prograde,” says Strohofer.

Adopting the web-to-print platform has been so successful for Aurora Casket that the company warmed up to considering new ways that technology can improve its business. For example, Strohofer says, “We are evaluating new mobile and tablet-based presentation tools and additional point-of-sale displays.”

Even well-established businesses in traditionally conservative industries can benefit from the ways that technology can make sales and marketing operations more efficient. Aurora Casket has moved its business efficiency into the future while holding on to the values that built the company’s reputation for success through the past century.

The Fight Against Fakes

Written by admin on . Posted in Print & Mail.

By Laurie Hileman

Governments and businesses deploy defensive, high-tech paper and printing techniques to combat document fraud

The gritty battle to maintain document integrity is a never-ending sequence of strikes and counter-strikes. Low-cost digital computers, copiers, scanners, and printers make so-called “desktop counterfeiters” a constant threat to negotiable and non-negotiable secure documents such as passports, drivers’ licenses, vehicle titles, transcripts, checks, and money orders.

And while document fraud itself may seem relatively harmless, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement considers it a “gateway crime” that paves the way for more sinister offenses such as identity theft, human smuggling and trafficking, gang activity, financial fraud, illegal immigration, terrorism, and other national security threats.

In response, the paper and printing industries are continually creating new overt and covert security features, the likes of which would make James Bond drool. By layering paper-based and print-based security features, their goal is to preserve the integrity and authenticity of important documents.

6 Common Security Features

Security Paper: embedded threads and watermarks

Special Inks and Coatings: color shifting and fluorescent inks or coatings

Complex Imaging: fine line graphical backgrounds and borders, and micro-printing

Secure Appliqués: holographic or prismatic images, and foils

Add-ons: magnetic stripes and RFID chips that contain bearer or other unique information

Changeable Content: check digit numbering and images that alter after copying

45

Number of different statutes in the U. S. Criminal Code covering frauds such forgery and counterfeiting.

$600 Billion

Estimated cost to businesses from lost income due to counterfeiting, forgery, and other forms of document fraud according to the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition.

The (Fake) Benjamin Reigns Supreme

While the most heavily counterfeited banknote in the United States is the $20 bill, outside our borders it’s all about the Benjamin.

  • Two-thirds of the $100 notes in circulation circulate outside the U.S.
  • Of the US$1.15 trillion in general currency in public use, roughly 1 percent of that figure is believed to be counterfeit.

Sources: www.ice.gov/document-benefit-fraud

www.gpo.gov/pdfs/customers/security_glossary.pdf

www.banknotenews.com/files/f1de3ad2e3cec2ddf0a2422a8f48aa43-2903.php

When Selling Less Means Selling More

Written by admin on . Posted in Print & Mail.

By Ilene Wolff

When staff members of the Catholic Diocese of Saginaw (Mich.) have new print projects, they lay out their budget and goals to their sales consultant with The F.P. Horak Company, Fred Zingg. Often, Zingg will suggest ideas for greater efficiency or a lower cost, says the diocese’s Mary Beth Curtiss. He does so even though many sales people make it their mission to sell more, not less.

“That’s where the trust comes in,” explains Curtiss.

Zingg may not know it, but he’s following tip No. 3 of blogger and peak performance coach Paul Morin’s rules for becoming a trusted business adviser. Look at the relationship with a view toward the long term, Morin advises, and avoid the pitfall of trying to get the most money out of a client every time.

“They (clients) need to know that you will always do the right thing by them, in the short-term, long-term, and any other timeframe you can think of,” he writes on his blog, www.companyfounder.com.

Zingg’s focus on saving his client money vs. making a quick hit may be why Curtiss describes her relationship with The F.P. Horak Company, a Saginaw, Mich.-based full-service printing and marketing solutions provider, as a “partnership.”
Curious about Morin’s other tips for success as a trusted business adviser? Read on.

Do what you say you are going to do

Zingg had to postpone the interview for this story twice when the Saginaw Diocese’s 75th Anniversary Mass was two days away and his company needed to complete and deliver a 32-page worship aid booklet for the event. Even after the interview finally got underway, Zingg had to excuse himself again—not once, but twice—to answer his cell phone.

“Most of the time if the phone rang, I would let it go to voicemail,” Zingg explains apologetically. But not with a client’s deadline just two days away.

Happily, everything worked out fine: The booklets arrived the morning of the event and were “beautiful,” Curtiss says.

Do not over-commit

Just as he was truthful with a reporter about needing to take care of details on the Mass booklet, Zingg is also honest when it comes to fulfilling last-minute client requests.

“If there’s no way, I’m upfront with them,” he says. “I don’t take a job I can’t deliver on.”

Treat everyone well

Zingg has sold printing for The F.P. Horak Company for 21 years. Prior to that, his training ground was a large national corporation where he had great mentors among the sales staff.

“Those are guys that had been in the business a long time and they taught me an awful lot,” he says.

For example, Zingg learned to pay attention to the little things, like being friendly and getting to know the receptionists in his clients’ front offices. “That receptionist could be a buyer a year from now,” Zingg says.

Help people without expecting anything in return

While Curtiss has worked for the Catholic Diocese of Saginaw about four years, her acquaintance with Zingg started years before that when he was a volunteer soccer coach for one of her daughters.

And even though Zingg is not big into wining and dining clients, he always plans to attend the events that are important to his clients, like the 75th Anniversary Mass.

Remember that the client must be satisfied

Zingg also learned from his mentors that customer service is key in his very competitive business.

“My clients are my No. 1 priority,” he says. “If we don’t take care of our clients the way they need and expect to be taken care of, they’ll go somewhere else.”

Critical to Zingg’s success in having satisfied clients is being an effective liaison between his customers and his company. At the start of any project, it’s his responsibility to get inside the client’s head to understand the job. What are their objectives? What are they looking to accomplishment? Who is their target audience? What is their budget for the project? How does a particular project fit into the strategic plan? “You have to understand what their needs are,” Zingg says.

Just as Zingg is committed to doing, a business advisor should listen closely and make recommendations that take the client’s objectives to heart. Another example from a Catholic Diocese of Saginaw project underscores the value a trusted business advisor—rather than a traditional “salesperson”—can bring to a customer’s bottom line.

At times the diocese needs to send different sets of materials to its various member parishes. That’s different versions of multiple print pieces being accurately and simultaneously delivered to geographically diverse audiences. What could be a logistics headache for the diocese is something Zingg and The F.P. Horak Company efficiently sort out on behalf of their client. They set up a system for every new project and handle each step, from A to Z.

In a similar turnkey approach, Zingg and the Horak team recently assisted a school district client with student recruitment for its schools. Not only did Horak research and buy a mailing list for the project, it created and sent personalized notices to parents, set up personalized URLs to gather their responses, and reported the results to the client. The comprehensive from start-to-finish campaign saved the client considerable time in what could have been their need to manage each phase individually.

ROI on many levels

“Creating such strong, trusting relationships with your clients is rewarding on many levels,” Morin writes on his blog. “You will not regret the effort you must put in to make it happen.

“Trust me.”

To Market, To Market with a Unified Brand

Written by admin on . Posted in Case Study, Omnichannel Marketing.

By Ilene Wolff with Kathryn Will

Forward-thinking health care organizations are quickly turning to comprehensive marketing campaigns—including social media, printed products, websites, branding efforts, and more—to promote their hospitals.

But now more than ever before, health care organizations want turnkey solutions with a fast turnaround and proven return on investment.

Of course, any hospital wants to keep a steady stream of patients walking in its doors in order to stay in business, and many hospitals already command a large share of their primary market, but new, multi-platform campaigns are aimed at keeping the public informed of the organization’s news, trends, quality outcomes, and cost-control initiatives.

That may be smart thinking. Just because a patient is loyal to a hospital today, that’s no reason to assume the relationship will last indefinitely. Most health care centers today count at least three nearby hospitals among their direct competitors.

“People today ‘shop’ hospitals and health care providers,” says Mimi Bell, editorial director for Great Lakes Bay Publishing, a firm that specializes in custom publications for health care systems. “When a hospital delivers timely and useful wellness information, it positions itself as the trusted authority, developing a relationship with health care consumers and earning their business.”

Though, as more hospitals are expected to do more with less, carrying out such a project in-house can be difficult, if possible at all, especially as shrinking health care marketing staffs have their hands full with media relations, events planning, and other day-to-day operations.

Still, with a bit of planning and the right people, it is possible.

Using a company with specialized divisions, such as custom publishing, creative services, and website development, to create a multi-platform marketing campaign helps to simplify the process and eliminates having to divert hospital talent from other initiatives across the system.

A solid foundation

Even though they might not realize it, many hospitals already have a strong foundation for a solid marketing campaign in the form of an internal or external newsletter. They may be created in-house or otherwise, but they can serve as a great base from which to launch a new, comprehensive campaign. Using these existing materials, Great Lakes Bay Publishing and its parent company, The F.P. Horak Company, craft campaigns that include print, web-based, and social media components for health care clients throughout the Midwest.

Great Lakes Bay Publishing and Horak also offer the one-stop shopping, turnkey experience most hospitals need.

“I knew there were other companies out there, but I wanted someone who could do the whole package,” a chief marketing officer from one Midwestern health care system says.

In tandem, Great Lakes Bay Publishing and Horak can provide any part of or an entire comprehensive marketing communications campaign.

“Our approach is more of an umbrella campaign, so it covers every way of communicating to every generation,” says Marisa Belotti, chief marketing officer for The F.P. Horak Company. “In addition, you need to have the same message across all platforms, so everyone’s hearing that one message.”

According to a recent study from the PEW Research Center, 72 percent of Internet users said they looked online for health information in 2012. The same study found 11 percent of users said they signed up to receive email alerts or updates about health or medical issues, and that 52 percent of smartphone owners have looked up health information on their phone. This means that now, more than ever, health and hospital systems need to be thinking “print plus digital media” in order to provide consumers with the helpful and relevant content they are looking for.

Effective, coordinated marketing campaigns frequently include consumer print newsletters for households within a hospital’s market area and print internal newsletters for staff, with specific versions for practitioners. Doctors may also want the practitioner newsletter delivered to them in electronic form, but they don’t want to forgo their print copy. Consumer newsletter content can be re-formatted for blog entries, posted on a hospital’s Facebook page, or supplied for its Twitter feed. Savvy hospital marketers then can add in direct mail, media advertising, e-marketing solutions, and social media tactics.

“Print newsletters are the springboard for—and an integral part of—a broader content-marketing strategy that includes social media, e-marketing, and more,” says Bell.

Consumer newsletters can include anything from stories about bicycle safety toward preventing head injuries, orthopedic services, using balance assessments to prevent falls, allergies, board certification for doctors, recipes for healthy eating, and a calendar of hospital events.

“…All of which is branded content that is delivered directly to the information-seeking health care consumer,” says Bell.

Health care systems benefit when they promote across all platform areas in which they’re excelling.

Print newsletters can easily carry over to interactive campaigns aimed at the hospital’s patients and the community at large. Unique URLs allow people to register and specify what health topics interest them. With that information, hospitals can push information to registrants that’s tailored to their particular needs.

An app for that

Considering that hospitals also are trying to remain relevant as more members of the communities they serve are turning to their smartphones for research and to make important decisions, multi-platform marketing campaigns should also include integrated mobile applications, or “apps,” too.

A hospital-wide mobile app can easily be created by assessing the most popular searches on a hospital’s website—job openings, physician referrals, health information, and event details.

Such an app allows users to interact with the hospital from the palms of their hands.

Other apps can require more planning. A custom family birthplace app has functions to keep track of the birthing process, such as the number of contractions, and child care, including doctor appointments, infant vaccinations, weight, height, food intake, and more. The app can email all of the tracked information to the mother’s or child’s doctor.

The app could also include the specific hospital’s birthing book, plus links to health information from such venerable sites as the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Some pushback about creating an app that could potentially take users away from a hospital’s website is possible, but the goal always is to be sure users get the best information possible. Leading users to outside health-information sites also relieves a hospital of the responsibility of keeping information on its website updated.

“I really like this app (custom family birthplace) because it has everything a new mom needs,” Belotti says.

For health systems with many hospitals, the apps could be tweaked—“re-skinned” in industry parlance—for their use. Coincidentally, parenting apps could lead to uniform branding of the system’s birthing units.

If one hospital in a system commissions the app, and other sister hospitals decide to re-skin the apps for their use, the originating hospital often can recoup some of the cost of development and work in collaboration with colleagues in a unified branding approach that has even greater reach.

Tying the Knot

Written by admin on . Posted in Omnichannel Marketing.

By Lorrie Bryan

Las Vegas is known as the marriage capital of the world because it’s easy and affordable to get hitched there. You can get a marriage license downtown any day before midnight without a blood test (or sobriety test), and there are thousands of affordable, readily available wedding options: drive-thru weddings, Elvis-themed weddings, helicopter weddings. The latest trend—recently spotlighted on the Shark Tank TV series—is the Wedding Wagon. Touted to be as easy as ordering a pizza, you can place your order online and the company sends a van—adorned with purple curtains, an LED-lit altar, and cascading flowers—a licensed minister, and a professional photographer to the Las Vegas location of your choice for only $129.

Recent studies indicate that there is no correlation between the cost of the wedding and the length of the marriage; however, there is plenty of reason to believe that longer courtships—much longer than a Vegas weekend—lead to longer marriages. One of the country’s leading experts on corporate mergers, Andrew J. Sherman, asserts that merging corporations could benefit from longer courtships as well.

Beating the odds

Most mergers begin with high hopes, but then the reality sets in. “Reports are indicating that 60 to 70 percent of mergers fail to meet pre-closing objectives within three years of closing. If that is true, that’s horrendous. We have got to do better than that,” says Sherman, who has served as a legal and strategic advisor to dozens of Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of emerging growth companies. “A good merger is like a good marriage, but these days some mergers are more like Vegas weddings. Sometimes you have to act fast. But we need to get back to longer courtships with time for the corporations to get to know each other and make sure that the merger makes sense.”

What should companies be focusing on during courtship? Sherman, a senior partner at Jones Day, a prominent international law firm, and author of Acquisitions and Mergers from A to Z, says there are three things that are essential for a successful merger: added stakeholder value, a clear plan for accretiveness, and a post-merger integration plan.

Stakeholder value

The key principle behind merging two companies is to create shareholder value over and above that of the sum of the two companies, but that objective is not enough to ensure ultimate success.  “It has to drive stakeholder value as well. The world is now defined more broadly than just the shareholders of this company. You have to consider whether the deal makes sense for the various stakeholders in the ecosystem—employees, customers, and suppliers as well as investors. That is always a complex situation and requires some lengthy analysis,” advises Sherman.

Accretiveness

A transaction that results in profitability for the acquirer is classified as accretive, whereas one that does not, either early on or later, is more dilutive. “There has to be a clear path to accretiveness,” Sherman says. “When considering a merger, you need to know what the game plan is: the business proposition for accretiveness.”

Post-merger Integration

Vegas elopements aside, many couples get so engrossed in planning their wedding that they forget about planning their marriage. The same can be said of corporate marriages; companies focus on the legal transactions and fail to develop a strategy for handling post-merger challenges. Most deals look great on paper, but few organizations pay proper attention to the integration process—that is, how the deal will actually work once all the paperwork is signed. It is often at this critical time that mergers fail, Sherman affirms. “Culture, leadership, governance, IT systems, compensation packages, basic logistics—all of these issues are challenges that need to be considered before the merger is finalized.”

A longer courtship will also give companies a chance to get to know each other better and determine if they are compatible. The country’s leading relationship services provider, eHarmony, uses a patented Compatibility Matching System® to pair eHarmony members most likely to enjoy a long-term relationship. Sherman suggests that companies slated for merger should put more emphasis on compatibility, and cites the unsuccessful AOL-Time Warner merger. “It failed due to lack of good implementation. The company cultures were very different, and there was no way to get them the same, even though it looked like a match made in heaven on paper,” he says. Incompatible technologies can also lead to dissolution. In 2005, eBay decided to buy Skype for $2.6 billion, and sold it four years later for $1.9 billion. Unfortunately, as PC World reported, eBay and Skype were unable to successfully integrate their technological systems.

Happily ever after

One of the largest ($75.3 billion) and most successful mergers in recent history, the Exxon-Mobile merger of 1999, reflects not only the length of the courtship, but the depth and breadth, Sherman notes. “One of the keys to the success was an extensive detailed post-integration plan with a checklist that was thousands of pages long.” Exxon-Mobil went on to post the biggest annual profits in U.S. corporate history with earnings of $45.2 billion in 2008, and nearly broke that record in 2012 with $44.9 billion.

Merging can be an alluring way to grow your business, but the most successful companies are willing to take a step back and explore whether M&A is the best option before racing to tie the knot. Sometimes, building your capacity through internal research and development or borrowing resources through strategic partnerships or alliances is a much better bet. “If you rush into something, you may wake up the next day wondering what you were thinking,” Sherman adds.

Time for a Makeover?

Written by admin on . Posted in Omnichannel Marketing.

By Holly Case

The image your business portrays is almost as important to your success as the services you provide. Sure, people don’t choose a product based on its logo, but seemingly small details make a big difference in customer perception.

You may have been thinking for a while that your company could benefit from rebranding your corporate identity, starting with your logo. “Once you have identified that it’s time for an update, you’ll have to make some big decisions,” says Alayna Partaka, creative director for The F.P. Horak Company, a Midwestern printing and marketing solutions firm that develops concepts through integrated marketing campaigns for clients from multiple industry sectors.

She suggests you start the process by asking yourself: Do you want to refresh your existing logo, or totally rebrand yourself?” Depending on your answer, here are some factors to consider.

Is it the right time for a change?

Has your company changed its name, possibly to reflect changes in the services you offer? A new logo is not only necessary when you change your company name or merge with another company, it’s also a great time to create a clear symbol that proudly displays what your business is all about.

“You may have expanded into new markets where your logo doesn’t fit, or maybe it’s just grown outdated over the years. An outdated logo may give the impression of an outdated company,” says Partaka. “However, it can be difficult to identify when it is time to revitalize your brand when you haven’t changed your name or merged with another company.”

Proceed with caution

Is your brand identity strongly linked to your logo? When Gap considered changing its iconic logo, customer backlash was so intense that the company scrapped the plans. Customer loyalty is often deeply linked to your corporate identity, including your logo. Dig deeper before making hasty changes.

Seek help from the pros

“This is a great time to consult with a team of marketing and design professionals,” says Partaka. “Through in-depth research on your industry, marketing goals, and target audience, a skilled team of professionals can help you make the right decision.”

Armed with the right research and assistance, your company can move into the future with your best face forward.