Hypocrite
1  : a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion    2  : a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings

I am a “Creative Dude” turned “Marketing Guy”. Man, I use to hate the thought of being on the account side of advertising but I have had to become the proverbial “suit” because my company in total is a whopping 3 people. Which is fine, we manage to do quite well doing the job of 20 people. That’s the way we like (but that’s a whole different blog). The business of Marketing, and whatever that entails, is something that I have had to re-look at, re-learn, re-understand  and re-absorb from a non-creative view so that I can talk, prepare and plan campaigns and strategies for our wonderful clients. Gone are the day of only understanding typefaces, breaking the grid, color theory, and cool design. Lately it’s been demographics, frequency, touch-points, consumer cycles, and the everyday changes in the advertising world. With the knowledge that I have acquired thus far I have been relieved to say that we have given some sound and damn good plans to our clients and prospects. We have worked to understand their story, brand, and product. Told the powers that be what they need to do to get the word out. And we, with our client partners, have implemented some very successful campaigns. But in the course of my new studies I have to my horror realized that I haven’t done a damn thing that I have preached to all my clients for my own company.

How many times have I told my our clients “get on Facebook, start a WordPress blog, talk with your customers, spend enough money and time to get your story out, out smart your competition, do whatever it takes to let people know who you are”. More times than I can count. And look at me writing my first blog. Shame on me. Tim, my “smarter than me” business partner, asked me to make a diagram of a COMPLETE MARKETING PLAN(see diagram A). You know I have never actually looked at a COMPLETE MARKETING PLAN. I have written the words, but never actually truly grasped the size and complexity of one until I saw it all together on paper. As I made one box and connection after another I realized HUMMINGBIRD IDEAS hasn’t done 95% of this diagram. 95 Percent! Yeah, some advertising genius I am. Really I wanted to slap myself for not “walking the talk”.

DIAGRAM A

working complete marketing plan

Over a beer with my two partners (Crawford & Tim) I let them in on my revelation and with a resounding “YES” we have decided to jump in head first into this world of advertising and design that we have preached for almost six years. We finally looked at ourselves as a CLIENT.
The view from the client side of the fence is alien, scary, exciting and super serious. We will be starting from the beginning. A self reflection:
Who are we?
What do we actually do?
Does anybody actually know we exist?
What do we want people to think about Hummingbird Ideas?
Can we back up that up?
Do we even know what people really think about us?
How much can we spend every month to get people to know we exist?

Needless to say Hummingbird over the next couple of weeks will have some heated discussions and exchanges. But that’s OK. We can argue and we can cooperate with each other very well. It’s a process. This needs to be exciting and heated. It’s our company, it’s important to us and we are very passionate about it. The learning process and growth has already begun.

Here is what I have gathered from my first days from the client side:
• Marketing is how you talk to your customers, your vendors, your workforce, your competitors.
• Marketing and Advertising are a necessity. They’re really important, hard to do, and always changing.
• Marketing needs to be a full time job, not something that you just fit into your job description or when you can.
• Marketing needs to be an everyday task. One hour a day at least.
• Marketing is a lot harder from the client side than from the agency side.
• Marketing needs a true plan and someone needs to make sure all aspects are implemented, executed, and tracked.
• Self reflection: talking about and understanding yourself is difficult and you (we) will need to get some outside perspective to fully see the BIG
PICTURE, warts and all.

Which leads me to this FIRST POST. I will be doing one hour a day of marketing for my company, Hummingbird Ideas. I will start talking and sharing our story, our successes and our failures to anyone that will listen. Notice I said “talk” not tell. I want to learn to create a conversation with my readers, clients, potential clients, vendors , and even competitors. Nobody wants to be lectured to, most people want a nice exchange. I like my company and think we have a great product. I want to scream this from the rooftops like Howard Beale’s disciples in the movie NETWORK. My hope is that I can reveal a true picture of Hummingbird Ideas. Hopefully some of the things I post informs and entertains. Maybe one of my posts might reassure one of our clients with our current relationship or some new prospect might decide to call us to talk about their company and where they want to go. Either way I going to keep you up-to-date on our marketing progress and if you learn something along the way or disagree with me let me know. I really want to talk.

Please friend us on FACEBOOK

Please follow us on TWITTER

To see our work: hummingbirdideas.com

4 Strategies to Create Customer Dialogs

SUMMARY: Personalizing your email newsletters for an individual customers’ interest can creates a more relevant communication. The more relevant your content, the more likely subscribers are to engage with your messages.

The marketing team at Sprint revamped its customer email newsletter with dynamic features that deliver targeted content based on subscribers’ wireless devices, service plans, locations and preferences. These changes, combined with testing, have achieved double the clicks of the team’s other campaigns, and are generating sales without being overtly promotional.

THE CHALLENGE: Over the past several years, the marketing team at Sprint has gradually shifted its Sprint Connection email newsletter strategy away from promotional content. So, when they planned another revamp of the newsletter in December 2007, they wanted to complete the product’s evolution from a promotional vehicle to a customer-loyalty tool.

The purpose behind the new email structure focuses on new content and features to make the newsletter a benefit for existing customers. And they wanted to offer the most relevant information — personalized content targeting each subscriber’s needs and interests. “We knew there were specific, one-to-one dialogs we wanted to initiate with our customers,” says Pam Messier, Marketing Manager, Email Programs.

THE CAMPAIGN: The team began using dynamic content features that would deliver a customized, highly targeted version of the newsletter to each customer, based on their wireless device, service plan and interest areas from their existing, highly detailed customer database. They also adopted a rigorous testing strategy to optimize layout, content selection and subject lines.

These are four strategies they used to guide the changes:

Strategy #1. Create template for newsletter content: The team organized monthly newsletter content according to a new template. Each newsletter featured:

• A table of contents above the fold
• Customer handset and account details
• A news item
• A monthly tip for customers’ handsets or service plans (with what they owned)
• A customer perk, such as a free offer from Sprint or partners
• Interactive features, such as polls, sweepstakes, online chats and Q&A

Strategy #2. Use dynamic content to personalize newsletters: Working within that template, the team designated several areas that would be filled with relevant content, based on a customer’s handset and account details, location, and customer preferences.

The majority of the personalization data came from the customers’ existing account information. That meant the team didn’t need to ask for too much additional information on the newsletter opt-in form.

The opt-in form asked customers for their:

• ZIP code
• Email address
• Preferred language (English or Spanish)
• Carrier (Sprint, Nextel or Other)
• Personal interests, such as NFL or NASCAR news

The team then used that information, along with account details, to provide dynamic content for the following sections:

• Customer tips based on the user’s handset or carrier plan.
• Perks centered on the customer’s location or preferences, such as NFL promotions.
• Interactive or community features, such as links to online forums dedicated to the customer’s handset.
• Account details, such as:
  1. Image of the customer’s handset and link to a device tutorial
  2. Network coverage maps and updates
  3. Helpful links for plan upgrades and recommended accessories

The team provided standard content for all subscribers in the following sections:

• News items, such as company announcements and new product launches
• Self-service links for customer-service inquiries, such as updating PINs and finding Sprint store locations

Strategy #3. Incorporate video content: The team also wanted to include multimedia features in its latest newsletter redesign. They turned to video segments to give customers an in-depth look at important issues related to Sprint’s operations or services:

- The team looked for opportunities to create videos that matched the theme of that month’s newsletter.

For example, when the company launched a new BlackBerry with Nextel’s Direct Connect feature, they created a video that featured members of Sprint and RIM’s development team discussing the handset’s new features. They also used videos to convey corporate messages to customers. For example, one video featured a member of the company’s corporate real estate division discussing Sprint’s environmental sustainability practices.

At the end of 2008, they also created video of CEO Dan Hesse discussing the year’s important milestones. They promoted the videos with an image of the speaker in a mock video screen. However, they did not stream videos directly through the email message. Instead, they included a link that took viewers to a landing page where they could watch the video. (i.e. your YouTube Channel)

Strategy #4. Employ testing to optimize layout and usability: Testing was an essential component of the team’s redesign process, and continues with each month’s newsletter send.

Important tests included:

1. Eye-tracking test to optimize new design and layout. The team used eye-tracking to determine the best layout for its new email template. They monitored existing customers interacting with a dynamically generated personalized email to determine layout decisions. One of the most significant insights from the test was the decision to include a table of contents at the top of each message, which featured links to the content that would appear below the fold on viewers’ screens
2. Monthly subject-line tests. Each month, the team prepared two to four different subject lines for a new newsletter. One day before sending the newsletter, they randomly selected roughly 20% of the opt-in list to receive one of the test subject lines. The subject line that achieved the best response rate during that test was then sent to the remainder of the list.
3. Monthly test of dynamic content features. Prior to each newsletter send, the team also tested its dynamic-content features to ensure subscribers received the right content. They created a profile grid that assigned dynamic-content pieces and images to a specific customer group. Then, they sent a test email to addresses assigned to those customers.

THE RESULTS: The new template and personalized content have made the newsletter one of the team’s best-performing email campaigns:

• Click-through rates are typically twice as high as those achieved through Sprint’s promotional email blasts.
• Dynamic content is a large contributor to the monthly results. For example, the personalized image of a subscriber’s phone (that links to that phone’s support page) tends to be one of the most clicked links each month.
• Clicks are evenly distributed throughout the newsletter’s content pieces, thanks to the table of contents and other layout decisions informed by eye-tracking tests.

Although the newsletter is positioned as a customer-loyalty tool, it is outperforming the company’s promotional email campaigns:

- The newsletter produces more than double the number of phone purchases and plan upgrades as that of promotional email campaigns.

“The fact that people are purchasing after reading these emails says a lot about our customer loyalty and the value of the services and features we’re providing,” says Messier.

First off, if you have a company, you need a website. Secondly if you have a message to say then you need YouTube.

YouTube is an excellent annd free way to get your message out to the world. Almost everyone knows about Youtube, which is proven by the roughly 200 million unique visits that the site receives each month. Many do not know that this site is an excellent way to get the word out about yourself, product or service and re-link that video of yourself back to your website. Thus placing your message in 2 places at once and create another link (via Google since they are now the owners of YouTube) to help boost your search engine results.

Making a video is fairly easy – as seen in the above video – and most cameras and cell phone come with a video application to allow for amateur video production. It’s really that easy and just another way to get a message out there and make your own website just a little more dynamic.

The days of a whiz-bang website with lots of sound and motion and annoyance is coming to an end. Sure these types of sites will still exist sometimes, but they will be nothing more than a digital online brochure. In our new web world people are thirsty for content – more web-users now use Google to look up a phone number than actually picking up the Yellow Pages.

No people these days want something that they can go to to find information that’s constantly updated. If you have some flash site out there that someone has seen before, chances are they aren’t coming back to the site unless it’s to show a buddy. Look at the most popular sites online – Drudge Report, MySpace, YouTube – these are sites that have users who are constantly updating material all the time.

I think that people will still use Flash a little, just maybe not for web. Heck, I think that the entire iTunes program is Flash based, but it is better suited for that type of software in my opinion. It’s more software friendly than web friendly. Here’s where these 2 thoughts meet. Flash is not searchable content for the web. More people type in a company name in Google to find the site than actually typing in the company’s URL. If you have a Flash based site it will not show up in Google when search because there is no readable web content, only an uploaded Flash file.

In a nutshell what I am saying is that if you have a Flash site, you need an HTML or XML site – period. If you’re a smaller company who is looking for a smaller website where you are just looking to have a nice design and content that does not need to be updated frequently I would just stick with good ol’ fashioned HTML. It’s easy to update on a small scale and it’s easily searchable when looked for through a search engine. If you’re larger company I would strongly suggest a content heavy site thats easily updated with a Content Management System (or CMS). Just log-in and change away.

Oh, not to pitch myself or my company (but it’s my blog so I will) I can work with you to set up any of the above mentioned content. Just shoot me an email at tim@hbirdideas.com – Thanks.

Tim Dozier ~ Senior Designer at Hummingbird Ideas (hbirdideas.com)

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us anytime. Our info can be found at www.hbirdideas.com.