Direct agency Digital Cement is expanding and we’re looking for someone just like you.  Well, that’s assuming you’re a passionate, hardworking, fun individual!  We’re looking to fill six positions immediately:

• Account Director
• Project Manager
• SEM Specialist
• SEO Specialist
• Senior Value Analyst
• Strategist

To get more details visit the jobs section at DigitalCement.com!

Cheers & Good Luck!

Jill

Social media, mobile marketing, digital marketing, blogs and cross-channel Integration – all of these are buzzwords you hear on a daily basis from the marketing industry; but it’s what you make of them that’s important. 

Today at Digital Cement we went through a creative exercise for a campaign and started talking buzzwords.  The conversation quickly went to specific examples of great social media, mobile and digital campaigns – I’m sure we can all name a few – but what does it take to enjoy the same successes?  To make a splash it’s about paving your own way, creating compelling creative and cultivating a story that is different from the rest.

Marketers are often told, “We went to a conference and we need to integrate the brand in more digital channels. Do it.” This is a bit of a daunting task, and you may start by checking out past campaigns and competitors’ profiles. In the end, you just need to get it done and it often happens with no real planning. Unfortunately each channel has their own set of ‘unwritten rules’ and we’ve all heard of the companies that crashed and burned, especially on social media!

I believe that when buzzwords are thrown around it’s not a matter of looking at campaigns, it’s a matter of taking what you have to offer and making it the best within the channel you choose.  Don’t jump on the social media train because everyone else is, don’t build an app when you don’t need to and definitely don’t fall for a buzzword that doesn’t mean anything to your brand.  Go to the channel that you’ll succeed in, or do the proper research to understand where your brand or company fits in.  Listen, learn and create within that channel to make yourself memorable to everyone.

Buzzwords have been around for ages. At one time, they included “radio” and “television.” Channels have changed, message delivery has changed and being more direct and interactive takes center stage.

What recent buzzword has caught your attention and why?

Cheers!

Author’s note: This article originally appeared on MobileMarketer.com. While it references a discussion that happened several months ago now, the fundamentals are still all highly relevant for any brand examining their mobile web presence. Enjoy!
------------------------------------------
I sat recently on a panel about mobile marketing analytics at the eMetrics Toronto conference.  It was a wide ranging discussion on marketers’ use of mobile advertising, the mobile web, apps and even SMS, as well as a debate on how mobile campaign success should be defined and measured.

While my fellow panellists and I were not short on opinions, it was an audience comment that struck me as particularly revealing and raised a number of important issues for brands building their mobile web properties.

The comment went something like this:

“We’ve built a number of mobile websites for clients but we find that when mobile users visit the full web version, they stay on that version of the site even when presented with an option to switch to a mobile optimized view.”

Scary stuff if you’re invested in the mobile web space. But let’s unpack this observation a bit as there’s a lot we can learn here.

Now, it wasn’t the right forum to ask a ton of follow up questions and I didn’t get to speak to the gentleman who posed the question after the panel, so I’m going to make a couple of assumptions:

•    The full web version of the site is served up as default regardless of whether the visitor comes from a computer or a mobile phone.
•    Most visitors tracked or referenced had devices with full web capable browsers such as an iPhone or Android device.

There’s also some important information that we just don’t know:

•    Who are the clients in question? What is their business, what are their products or services?
•    How are the full web sites built? Flash heavy? Mostly HTML?
•    How prominently was the ‘mobile view’ link displayed?
•    What is the content being consumed by mobile visitors and how does that compare to a wired visitor?
•    How do mobile visitor site visit times, page views per visit and bounce rates compare to wired visitors?

When I heard the remark, I proposed that this situation actually created a great testing point for him and his clients. Instead of having the full web version set as default for mobile browsers, use device detection and serve up the mobile optimized version and see how many switch to the full web version.

With this type of A/B test, you can now see how a mobile-friendly version impacts content consumption, visit times, page views and bounce rates and then bake that information back into your content strategy and site design.

If your mobile site is already well designed with a data-driven content strategy, you should see improvement across page views and bounce rates. What happens to your visit times will depend more on the content you’re offering and the nature of your business. Is the information ‘snackable’ or response-driven like it would be for a retailer? Or, are you a publisher whose content naturally demands more sustained consumption?

The case for having a mobile site has been well stated elsewhere and there’s plenty of evidence supporting the development of a tailored mobile experience to account for unique mobile behavioral dimensions and device capabilities.

The real outcome of this exchange, for me, was a clear, broad definition of how to road-map your mobile web development from an analytics gathering to development input perspective. Here’s a four-step high level view:

Step 1: Use existing web analytics to gain a view into mobile visitor devices, content preferences and usage patterns.

Step 2: Develop a content strategy based on content preferences and consumption patterns. Develop a design strategy based on device and OS trends. Consider how content consumption relates to a user’s context.

Step 3: Leverage device capabilities (e.g. GPS, accelerometer, camera, and messaging) based on content strategy and contextual relevance. Wherever possible, build in response mechanisms.

Step 4: Test the mobile version against wired web norms and mobile content and design premises using mobile-centric analytics. If behavior fails to validate premises, adjust accordingly.

Just because something is working, doesn’t mean it is delivering maximum performance. A streamlined mobile version of your website will likely do a better job at delivering against KPIs than a full web version viewed on the device. To make sure it does, use the data you already have at your fingertips.

OK, so Google’s already in our daily lives isn’t it? It’s hard to deny the impact of a company when their name becomes part of the English vernacular. In fact, the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines Google / Googled / Googling as using “the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web”.

More than just search though, Google is becoming a force in mainstream applications that affect our lives away outside the computer or mobile devices we’re used to. Consider Google TV. Announced in May of this year, Google TV promises “the best of TV and the best of the web in one seem-less experience”. By integrating the Google Chrome browser into the TV, users can quickly and easily switch between television and the web. Your TV is no longer limited to just showing video, but instead can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and more. And of course, Google has obtained the support of leading manufacturers like Sony, Logitech and Intel to make Google TV a reality in the not-so-distant future.

And how about one of our other favourite/necessary pastimes; driving? In recent months, both OnStar (General Motors) and SYNC (Ford) have announced plans to allow drivers to select a destination on Google Maps and then send the turn-by-turn navigation directions to their vehicle. Once in the vehicle, the driver confirms the request to download the Google Maps destination into the vehicle. The optimal route is calculated by Google using the latest available traffic information, downloaded to the vehicle and navigation guidance begins. Far from a pipe-dream, this capability will be released to the marketplace this summer.

Finally, Google Living Stories is a pilot project in presenting news, in conjunction with the New York Times and the Washington Post. The idea is to present complete coverage of an on-going news story prioritized and organized in one URL. Each story has an evolving summary of current developments as a well as an interactive timeline of critical events. And updates to the story are highlighted each time you come back, and older news is summarized.

So while Google continues its mission to own the web, it’s also moving away from the computer to touch more aspects of our lives every day. And if what we’ve seen from them so far is any indication, we can expect a steady stream of innovative products and services in the future. Bring it on!

-Paul

We've seen the Oscars, the Grammys, the Tonys, even the Daytime Emmys but no awards show season would be complete without the inclusion of the Brickies!

Last night Digital Cement let loose, noshed and celebrated the 2nd Annual Brickie Awards.  This is our night to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts, special talents and hard work of our co-workers.

This year's awards included The Mister Bright Side - which went to our 'eager beaver' project manager Marc Boileau for his amazing personality, work effort and true passion for the industry - and the Octopus Award - given to our application development manager,  Alina Stanca for her ability to multi-task like no one's business.  Twelve awards in total were given out, with one being a team honor for our creative team.  To see their handy work check out, www.digitalcement.com and the fantastic fun buttons!  The night was a smashing success and we're already looking forward to the 3rd Annual Brickie Awards!

Snapshots from the evening:

"Pre-dinner/awards fun"

"The Team Award - Equipped with a Uni-Cat!"

"Enjoying the night out!"

"Our Mr. Bright Side"

"The beautiful awards all hand painted by Joyce"

"Post Award Ceremony Chatter"

Thank you to all who organized the event!

Cheers,

Jill

If we accept that consumers, ultimately, choose when and where they interact with your brand, then the goal of marketing is to be there and doing your best to nudge or entice them towards that interaction.

Marketing strategy and media planning are focused on understanding your target consumer:
•    Where they live, work and play;
•    Why do (or would) they care about your product or service;
•    What triggers buying decisions;
•    What media will be most effective reaching that consumer
•    When they interact with that media
•    How to communicate a message or create an experience that leverages that channel’s attributes and resonates with the consumer.

My proposal is that mobile marketing, properly targeted and balanced with genuine customer value, is a hugely underdeveloped and underutilized channel by the majority of brand marketers.

General trends see brand marketing dollars slowly shifting away from traditional media channels like TV and print but they still command the lion’s share of total media spend.  I want to give you three good reasons for accelerating your own brand’s digital shift and embracing mobile as a vital direct to customer channel.

THE HOOK:
Mobile penetration and activity levels are reaching an effective saturation point.  According the CTIA, there are over 285 million wireless subscribers representing over 90% of the total U.S. population.  This is a massive audience.  According to just released data from the Pew Internet & American Life project mobile use continues to grow dramatically year over year.  For example, the % of cell phone owners that had sent or received a text message grew from 65% to 72% between April 2009 and May 2010 and mobile internet access grew from 25% to 38%.

Though mobile feature use varies from channel to channel and demographic to demographic, the bottom line remains the same.  Mobile is increasingly and deeply integrated into the lives of very attractive consumer demographics.

Your customers are on these devices. Is your brand?

THE LINE:
The line with mobile isn’t a single mode of connectivity like television or print but a honeycomb of channels that can operate independently or as bridges between each other.  I count at least nine customer engagement and leverage points within the mobile platform:
1.    Voice
2.    Text and Picture Messaging
3.    Email
4.    Media (video, audio, still photos)
5.    The Internet
6.    Applications
7.    Advertising
8.    Image Recognition
9.    Location

What is most powerful about this connectivity is what mobile offers not just as siloed experiences within these channels but also how they can bridge between each other and enable sharing among peer groups creating powerful trusted referrals.

THE SINKER:
The sinker for mobile, that thing that will add weight to marketing efforts and create the conditions for success (remember you caught fish floating on the surface) is data. Mobile offers a treasure chest of measurement and analytics opportunities. While, admittedly, unified measurement standards are still emerging, marketers who are interested in data-driven decisions and campaign success will find plenty to get excited about.

Each channel (SMS, mobile advertising, mobile internet, etc...) offers its own unique measurement dimensions.  Along with familiar measures such as media response rates, digital property engagement rates and conversion or acquisition rates, you get the added layers of that only mobile can offer such as location, device and granular time-based interaction data.

A good mobile campaign will tell you exactly when, where, and how a customer interacted with your brand experience and in many cases offer the ability to optimize campaigns in-flight to leverage that information.

So if you want to reach, engage and convert target consumers into customers start taking a closer look at mobile. It’s everywhere your customer is.

When many businesses look into using social media they try to find the "big idea" or find a new way to promote their business, but to be successful they don't have to.  I am a social media specialist, but I am also a consumer who uses the channels available to me to talk to the brands and companies that I have questions for - this is a common use of social media by consumers.  I don't expect anything earth shattering, if I have a question I don't need anything free, just answers.  Recently I had an exchange with the Twitter handle @Overstock, and I could not have scripted it better myself.  The person in charge of this account helped and answered my questions beyond my expectations.  See for yourself:

There are so many posts available telling businesses how to build a social media presence and make it successful.  Yes, you do need to learn the tools, but like this example and many others - do what you do best as a company and stand out that way.

Thank you Overstock.com for a great customer service experience!

Cheers,

Jill

Ken Wong, one of North America’s leading marketing academics, recently spoke at the CMA’s 2010 National Convention in Toronto.  In his keynote, Ken made an astounding and disconcerting observation:  senior executives today don’t care about marketing.  Simple as that.  He explained that when compared to a host of other levers that contribute to the bottom line performance of their business, executives consistently rank marketing and marketing-related activities at or near the bottom of the list. 

Without mincing words, he said it's our fault.

Ken went on to say that we, as the marketing community, are to blame for the fact that the relationship between marketing expenditures (I prefer to view them as investments) and profit is, on the whole, poorly understood.  It is our fault that the link between business strategy, customer strategy and marketing activity is not clear to everyone, business executives in particular.

My experience leads me to believe that Ken is absolutely right.  As my career transitioned from the realm of corporate strategy to marketing strategy, I was very surprised to observe that the marketing line item on corporate P&Ls didn’t bear the same scrutiny as other line items.  That, often, the decisions to grow or shrink marketing budgets were often made on a whim rather than based on the same rigorous business case analysis used to evaluate manufacturing, operations, staffing and capital investment decisions.  And certainly decisions as to HOW to spend those marketing dollars have been based on fancy rather than ROI calculations more often than not.

Ken then issued a challenge:  he hopes to next year report a reversal of this concerning trend of apathy towards marketing in the Executive suite.  He proposes the creation of a strategy certification for marketers as means to get us to better connect our actions to the business strategy and ultimate financial performance of our clients/our employers.  I think that’s a great start, but we shouldn’t wait for that to happen.

As marketers, it is important we approach this discipline we’re so passionate about as just that:  a discipline.  We should begin to apply more analytical rigour when making decisions as to how we are going to invest in our customers.  Those of us on the agency side should help our clients build business cases and ROI models when we table new ideas.  We should all be able to answer a few simple questions:
1.    For every dollar spent (invested) in marketing to customers, what is the expected financial return?
2.    How will our marketing plan contribute to the overall business objectives of the firm?
3.    Does our current marketing plan optimize ROI? 
4.    If the channel mix were changed or the targeting strategy altered, how would this affect the financial return?
5.    Are my marketing investments creating a lasting customer asset that will yield ongoing returns, or is it simply a passing campaign that stops working when campaign is over?

The tactics we use to engage our customers are certainly where the rubber hits the road.  However, if we don’t ground our plans in business strategy, CFOs and CEOs won’t give us the opportunity to bring great ideas to market.  Without this discipline, I’m afraid what Ken is going to report next year.

“Business success is always defined by the quality of the overall customer experience.”
— Forrester Research, 2001

The best consumer experiences are designed to empathize with consumers, allowing them to complete tasks efficiently and get them out of the way – whether they involve interacting with physical objects or digital interfaces such as a website or mobile application.

Experiences that put user needs first are useful, usable and desirable. They not only solve problems but make it easy in the process. By using research to impart the right affordances, they increase consumer propensity to engage, respond and recommend. Ultimately, this leads to solving business needs while addressing their own in the process. User-first experiences are designed to turn casual users into valuable advocates.

But how do you develop these types of experiences while balancing business objectives? In practice it’s not really that difficult but requires a clear vision and a more nuanced approach in communicating value to pull it off completely.

What constitutes a great experience?

The first step to understanding how to develop great user-first experiences is to answer the question of “what constitutes a great experience?” Although the specifics can be quite subjective, they’re most often qualified by three main characteristics:

• Usefulness
• Usability
• Desirability

Although there are no universal rules that fit every case, the overarching principle is that great experiences deliver on user needs by striking a balance between how something works and how it looks. From there, the key is to constantly iterate around those themes.

“Websites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue and erode brands.”
— Forrester Research, 1998

Great user-first experiences require time, careful consideration and prioritize tasks over features in their execution. They recognize that getting the basics right, doing the right thing by default, and not attempting to be everything to everyone is critical. User-first experiences often do less, but what they do, they do better. Everything else strengthens the base while increasing value and desirability.

Like all truly great design, a hallmark of user-first experiences is that they’re better for things deliberately removed than for those added. Just ask Dieter Rams or Steve Jobs.

Opinionated to the Core

I’d be willing to bet nearly everyone can name at least one or two companies whose products or services fall into the realm of user-first experiences. For example, Dyson, Zappos, Amazon, Google and of course, Apple to name just a few. Their products and services surprise and delight consumers around the world and are more than just “lipstick on a pig” solutions.

In many cases, products from these companies themselves are not wholly new or revolutionary — vacuum cleaner, online shoe and book retailers, web-based applications and computer software/hardware. Rather it’s the unique, almost singular point of view, voice and user-focused approach they apply that make them great.

These companies take every opportunity to reinforce the three key characteristics of a great user-first experience throughout a customer’s lifecycle, whether online or offline. To that point, another example of a company that understands great user experiences is Disney.

The Disney experience is one where every minute experience is connected — their movies, theme parks, merchandise and shopping experiences are designed to create a world that you can’t help but be engaged with. They vigorously carry the company’s vision through every interaction. People of all ages love them for it, just as people do for companies such as Apple.

Practical Tips

Ok, so how about some practical suggestions? As I mentioned, getting the basics right is the best place to start — so here are a few high level and tactical starting points to consider.

• Know and understand your audience(s) needs and motivations to find an optimal balance that addresses their pain points while still being able to achieve often competing business objectives.
• Test and iterate on concepts with real users using simple low-cost paper or wireframe prototypes.
• Figure out how something should work and look like before building anything.
• Use research to facilitate design decisions around navigation and information architecture, layout, typography, accessibility controls, etc.
• Follow common interface and interaction paradigms to help lower learning curves.
• Set expectations by using direct and appropriate language to explain how something works.
• Ease users into an experience by making tasks as simple as possible.
• Make completing forms painless by requesting only information that is absolutely necessary for a task.
• Break complex interactions into multiple steps and guide users through the entire process.
• Eliminate anything unnecessary and utilize progressive disclosure to provide a focused experience.
• Avoid alienating customers by utilizing progressive enhancement to ensure that content is accessible to everyone first.

Where Next?

Great user experiences take time, involve clear objective prioritization, and require businesses to empathize with customers, thereby putting their needs first. By starting from a strong foundation, businesses save time and money, which in turn reduces the risk of large-scale redesigns later. An offshoot benefit of great experiences is that they’re designed to help develop strong communities of engaged customers that will advocate on the business’ behalf. And who doesn’t want that?

On June 4, 2010, the CMA posted the revised definition of Direct Marketing as:

Direct Marketing generates profitable business results by using targeted communications to engage specific audiences through a combination of relevant messaging and offers that can be tracked, measured, analyzed, stored and leveraged to drive future marketing initiatives.

http://www.canadianmarketingblog.com/

As a member of the CMA Direct Marketing Council, I am glad to say that I had the opportunity to be a contributing member of this revised definition.  With that being said, I feel that we landed on a definition that meets the minimum requirements to represent our discipline but there were a few points that myself and a couple of others were trying to champion that didn’t make the cut.

1.    What about channel?  One of the fundamental challenges of direct marketing today is that there is still a strong latent perception that direct marketing equals direct mail.  Without including a definition of channels (email, direct mail, web, mobile, DRTV (or radio), demand generation/social) or stating that direct marketing is absolutely channel agnostic, are we going to re-align marketing’s understanding of direct?

2.    To Digital Cement, we agree that the number one objective of direct is to generate profitable business results for our clients.  But secondary to that, or perhaps the means to that end, in our opinion, is to help our clients create on-going relationships with their customers.  The CMA definition of direct stops short of that, at targeted communications.  Perhaps this is to appease direct mail marketers like banks and telco’s in their targeted mass mailing efforts – but is this really direct?  Without acknowledging and encouraging customers into the marketing cycle, will companies lose out to those companies who find a way to engage conversation?

3.    The impact of new technology also plays a tremendous role in what direct marketing is going to look like in the near future.  Social/community can be defined in the brand/traditional marketing space where a company is looking to use the channels to influence product perception, but maybe there is also a deeper connection with direct.  Data around social monitoring, the ability to directly drive behaviour with demand generation through SEM and the relationships through facebook, twitter, etc. is in fact are actually direct methods.  Without including the role of social as a strategy to affect customer behaviour through direct activities, I also feel that our council definition remains conservative.

To that end, perhaps it is not the role of the CMA to push the boundaries.  Maybe that responsibility falls on us to build up trust with our clients, encourage them to jointly take the risk with us to jump into new channels and technologies and bring these new pilot activities forward to gain recognition at awards shows, marketing magazines create a ton of word of mouth ‘buzz’.  Let’s find ways to use our “New Direct” to do cool stuff and if those ‘Old School’ marketers want to stay with their targeted mass... let them get left behind.