Category: Articles 🔎

This was a question Desginsensory was faced with recently. While working on an integrated project with UT Extension to enhance both communities and the lives of its members in four rural west Tennessee counties, we needed a better understanding of our audience and their lifestyles when it came to healthy living. 

We partnered with Lancaster Market Intelligence to facilitate an ethnographic study to better understand the consumers in each of the four counties. An ethnographic study is an approach to qualitative research, which puts emphasis on an entire culture.

According to a survey by Columbia University decision researcher, Sheena Iyengar, the average American makes approximately 70 conscious decisions every day. In addition, a study conducted by MDI showed the number of ads that adults are now exposed to across all five media (TV, radio, Internet, newspapers and magazines) is about 360 per day; of these, only 150-155 are even noted, and far fewer make a strong enough impact to be recalled, make an impression and, ultimately, make a sale.

So, how do we reach and resonate with consumers when they are faced with so many choices? Based on social behavior, it’s easy to make assumptions. However, we knew in order to create messaging, we really needed to dig deep with the use of an ethnography study to understand how the communities live and consume on a daily basis.

“As marketers, we are engaged in a relentless effort to best understand human behavior, opinions and paradigms so effective products, services and communication devices can be developed and employed,” comments Chris Wise, chief research strategist. “We find it advantageous to not only conduct traditional research but to actually study WHAT they do along with what they SAY they do and understand.”

The study conducted by Lancaster allowed them to be fully immersed in the lives of the participants by observing and recording their action for a period of time.

Sixty people within the select counties were recruited to participate in the qualitative study—agreeing to record their sleeping, eating and leisure activities in a written journal and photographically.

 “It is one of the most intimate research tools marketers can use to truly understand and empathize with the population they desire to serve. Additionally, it helps manage any preconceived opinions so as to be ‘spot on’ with marketing activities geared toward the audience,” notes Wise.

The results of the study have given us an in-depth, up-close and personal look at day-to-day activities and key motivators of each community that we otherwise would not have known.

We, at Designsensory, firmly believe in collaborating with our clients to determine the best type of research needed in order to be as strategic and targeted with our brand and messaging as possible.

Content marketing continues to dominate in 2015. It seems that lots of people missed that memo. In fact, issues we regularly face with clients indicate that few people outside the marketing world even know what content marketing is. And, content strategy? They’ve never heard of it. So, let’s take a look at some common client questions.

What is content, anyway?
Isn’t content just a few words on a few pages? Actually, “we’ll be providing our own content” may be the undoing of the thought and hard work you put into your shiny new website or your latest marketing brochure.

Prateek Sarkar, creative director for the Walt Disney Company, has said, “Content is story. And content strategy is storytelling.” So, listen up. After all, who knows how to tell a story better than Disney?  

What’s wrong with our old content?
Perhaps nothing. For example, evergreen content, such as great white papers, is content that stays relevant and can establish you as a thought leader in your field. However, the world changes fast. So does language and the way we use it. And, people don’t buy the same way they did five years ago. With millions of websites competing with yours, you need fresh content to capture and inspire your audience and a strong strategy to sustain audience interest. 

Where do I start?
To tell your story in a way that resonates with readers and pays off at the bank, you have to ask the right questions and set the right priorities.

Margot Bloomstein, in her book Content Strategy at Work, writes, “Prioritization means holding your work and efforts accountable to a bigger plan, a sort of raison d’etre: why this and why now?”

• Why are we doing this website/video/social media plan?
• Who are we trying to reach? (HINT: “Everybody” is not the correct answer.)
• What are we trying to communicate? What is the heart of our story?
• What do we want our intended audience to do?

How do I create good content? 
Paul Grice, a linguist known for studying how people communicate, developed four maxims for conversation—a good place to start when you evaluate current or new content. 

The short version: Give readers content that is appropriate in quality, quantity, relevance and clarity.

Know your audience’s needs and tell them what they need to know, not what you want them to know.  Speak to them in language and tone they understand. 

Although Paul Grice didn’t ask me—from an editor’s point of view—I would add consistency to the list. From staying on brand to correctly employing all those pesky commas and apostrophes, errors and inconsistencies can confuse readers and redirect their focus in a negative way.

Why isn’t our SEO better? Or “Shhh! Don’t tell anybody.”
Your Search Engine Optimization depends on good content, thoughtfully written, organized for ease of use, with appropriate links. Cram a lot of keywords into every paragraph, and Google will punish you. “Borrow” from other websites, and, yes, Google will punish you.

One of the most common, and most counterproductive, mistakes we see is burying information deep within the site. Again, Google will punish you. Some clients are strangely shy, even secretive, about what they do. “We sell widgets, but we don’t want those words on the main page. Let’s get people deeper in the site before we start selling them.”

The bad news is twofold: 

1. They won’t get deeper into the site if you don’t give them a reason to go there. 
2. It doesn’t matter if you sell the most righteous widgets on the planet, nobody will buy yours if you don’t talk about them. 

Give them information up front. If your FAQs page is one of your most frequently visited areas, chances are good that you aren’t giving readers adequate information when they first visit your website. 

Above all, make it easy for potential customers to know what you do and why they should give you their business and their money. To do that, you need a marriage of great design, great content and the right medium for the right audience.

When the weather outside is frightful, it’s a good time to daydream about vacations and warmer travel destinations. No matter the season, our team at Designsensory is creating and developing ways to enhance travel, tourism and destination marketing. While some of you reading this may not be in the tourism industry, we’re sure these trends and our best-in-category solutions are insightful for every marketer.

Designsensory knows tourism. It shows throughout our process. From the first concepts we bring to our experienced, collaborative approach, we know how to create a brand that will entice visitors to destinations, intriguing and delighting them once they connect with our content. We’re driven by focusing on results—the results you, as a client, want to see—no matter the size or location of the destination. We’ve designed productive campaigns at the state and regional level, as well as county, city, neighborhood and district initiatives.

We are more than merely part of a conversation with your team. To help get the destination story started, we’re comfortable guiding digital and integrated problem-solving, asking and answering questions, and engaging in a collaborative approach. Let’s look at five trends for destination marketing and what we’re doing to stay ahead of the curve. 

Expand Your Communication Goals
Shift all-important key performance indicators, KPIs, for your digital and integrated efforts from travel guides mailed, heads-in-beds or butts-in-seats to encompass more moments throughout a journey. We’ve helped spur success for destination clients by focusing on measurement categories of demand, engagement and conversion with separate KPIs for each.

Measuring Demand
KPIs: unique visits, inbound links, referrals, social shares, likes

Measuring Engagement
KPIs: time on site, page shares, video views, partner page views (value to partners)

Measuring Conversion
KPIs: vacation requests, itinerary planning, retrospective travel, click-through rates on partners 

Embrace Seamlessly Sharing Your Destination
We know sharing is fundamental to social media. Sharing your story in content and creativity with other Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) can also enhance your destination’s brand efforts. Rather than a singular focus on what your community has to offer, recognize that your location is one of many stops. Showcasing the destination connections helps visitors piece together their larger journey.

Designsensory partnered with the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development to create 16 apps for Tennessee’s Trails and Byways program. DMOs and CVBs across the state collaborated to enhance each trail app, bringing together a seamless, shared story. 

Integrate Communication Efforts
Whether your audience is a tour group, a business looking to relocate, weekend road trippers, conventioneers, locals, the travel press or others, developing an integrated campaign focused on each segment will allow your destination to create moments that connect on any device, from desktop to tablet to mobile and in the spaces and places that matter.

Among other initiatives, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development motivates businesses, musicians, entertainers and filmmakers to live, work and perform in Tennessee. Our integrated campaign efforts to help achieve these goals included original photography, video and development of websites and print pieces.

Remember Residents
Destination marketers that stay focused on travelers and tourists may be missing out on one of their most important groups—residents of that community. Even if your website isn’t targeting tourists—rather, focused on the people who live and work in your area—a compelling digital presence can play a key role in community building, promotion and DMO performance.

Designsensory is working with the city of Milton, Georgia, to develop a new website that goes beyond the typical bureaucratic site and promises personalization, highlights the relationship between the city and its residents, and spotlights relevant and timely news.

Create Never-Ending Content Wells
Rarely does anyone want that perfect vacation or destination visit to end. Neither should your content. Social media and content calendars, public relations and other campaign efforts create strong connections. Travel happens in stages: daydreaming, researching, planning, visiting, sharing, decision-making, booking. And, if the experience is wonderful, often we make plans to revisit the destination. When a vacation comes to an end, engagement with that destination and your connection with the experiences can continue.

We’re always proud to celebrate this great state, and its new travel website—as well as producing and developing the state’s most impactful seasonal advertising campaign to date, with original photography and videos spotlighting regions. The experience was an amazing chance to showcase the Volunteer State and welcome everyone to Tennessee. 

Remember, there’s more to tourism marketing than just getting the information out there. Our campaigns work to move people from destination awareness to folks sharing stories, then all the way to planning a return trip. We’re excited to be your travel partner throughout the journey.

We embrace all of our client partnerships, from the well-established brands that have been around for decades to fresh-faced start-ups. Even though Designsensory is approaching 15 years, we believe an entrepreneurial culture is valuable at all stages of business.

The Lean Startup author Eric Ries defines “entrepreneurship” as “the management discipline that deals in a scientific way with situations of high uncertainty.” In a Huffington Post blog, “Lean Startup and Design Thinking,” author Cosmin Gheorghe shares “what Lean Startup and Design Thinking have in common is the focus on the customers and their actual needs.”

According to a Gallup study and associated article “highly successful entrepreneurs can creatively look beyond the present and imagine possible futures for their company. If you are a Creative Thinker, you are driven to steer your business in new directions.”  

The “Great Entrepreneurs Are Creative Thinkers” piece goes on to share seven ways to maximize your creative thinker talent:

1. Balance current and future customer needs. It is easy to be tied down with day-to-day business management and focused on delivering what your customers expect from you. Set aside time to disconnect from the present, and feed your creativity to imagine your customers’ future needs. This will help you dream and plan for the future and maintain your competitive advantage.

2. Use measurement to evaluate your ideas. When weighing which idea to implement, ask yourself, “How can we measure this?” Pick ideas apart to identify issues that could crop up during implementation. If the results show that a project isn’t viable, then modify or abandon the idea and move on to the next one.

3. Minimize potential pitfalls by releasing your new product or service incrementally. Implementing new ideas is risky. Iteration is key. Launch the prototype, gather feedback from customers, make necessary changes, and test again. Using this low-cost approach, you can turn your novel and creative ideas into products or services without much potential downside.

4. Maintain a simple organizational structure. Fewer layers of hierarchy will enable easier information flow between you and your team. A simple organizational structure will also increase employee involvement in implementing ideas, encourage employees’ creativity, and lead to quicker execution and understanding of new ideas.

5. Balance efficiency with creativity. Process management techniques, such as total quality management or Six Sigma, which can increase your growing company’s efficiency and productivity, are also likely to decrease your ability to innovate. Don’t let efficiency-enhancing practices act as barriers to exploring new ideas. Nurture your natural creativity. Continue to invest in new ideas as you increase operational efficiency.

6. Mobilize resources to fuel your innovation process. You need two things for successful innovation: diverse experiences that spark your creativity and resources to drive the innovation process. Tap in to your existing network or build new alliances internally and externally to stimulate your creativity and access shared resources.

7. Learn from your failures. When carefully planned new initiatives fail, the potential to learn from them is immense. Don’t let this learning opportunity go to waste. Conduct a post-mortem, make sense of what happened, and add what you have learned to your knowledge base. Fostering intelligent failures will help you learn what not to do as you dream about the future.

Innovation and entrepreneurship often go hand in hand. James Dyson, founder of Dyson, has shared, “We are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.”

How are you celebrating an entrepreneurial culture and creative thinking in your business?

Unless your business strives to be mundane and introverted, we’d like to think that your brand has something newsworthy to share. It’s safe to say that every day may not bring a front page article, evening news story or online coverage reaching millions. However, utilizing the power of public relations can help connect moments of truth to momentum for your brand.

Simply defined, PR is about creating and growing relationships with people who will help share your messages.

In a recent Fast Company article, “How To Spice Up Your PR When Your Business Isn’t Sexy,” Leron Kornreich answers four questions to help guide PR strategy:

1. What TRULY interesting story can you tell?

Your product may be of interest to a narrow audience, but your PR need not be limited to product announcements.

Consider the story you can tell. Sometimes the focus should be on customers: Is your product or service enabling a small business, nonprofit, or large enterprise to succeed in ways that were not possible before?

2. Who are the top influencers in your space?

If your company produces products that are of interest to only a limited niche, seek out that audience.

3. Who cares?

Ask yourself: Who cares about our product or services? Don’t give the cop-out answer of “everybody” because that’s disingenuous. Getting covered in numerous irrelevant publications will not get your business the traction that a smaller number of media hits in highly relevant publications will garner.

4. Are there ways to reach your audience beyond traditional media?

We launched a series of original eBooks that were sent to customers and potential customers alike, and were well received because we made sure they answered questions our audience was curious about.

Public relations—when applied creatively and strategically—can be a low-cost but highly effective aspect of a successful marketing program.

Is your business newsworthy? How are you sharing that news? Talk to our PR team about your ideas and needs.

The words “social strategy” may leave some of us cold but the connections that fire between client and brand as a result of social engagement will warm and inspire even the coldest keyboard. The benefits of engaging in conversations with your clients are multifold, and those conversations were never more relevant than in 2014. We’re using Nordstrom as an example since its social strategy is netting the merchant significant customer traffic. However, the basics and the practice of employing a social strategy are readily applicable to most businesses.

Facebook
Nordstrom has attracted 2.4 million Facebook “Likes.” The Nordstrom FB page has an simple yet enticing header image. By posting several updates daily, it shamelessly directs traffic to its e-commerce store. Most posts are product-focused, with a line of text and a hyperlink to the category page on the website, and the typical post attracts several thousand “Likes” and more than 100 comments. Nordstrom is faithful in responding to queries and comments, with product advice or simply making conversation.

Twitter
Nordstrom posts several marketing tweets a day, the vast majority linking back to its e-commerce store. Its Twitter feed efficiently repurposes Facebook content, as well, and makes effective use of the Twitter image preview window so images appear in followers’ feeds—a great way to snag more screen space. Nordstorm responds to Twitter @mentions and converses with users, ranging from product questions to complaints to casual brand mentions. Another brand that is getting considerable Twitter thumbs up is American Airlines, with customer service reps answering questions and taking care of problems via tweets. The company’s Social Media Specialist Stephanie Scott says, “We’re able to take probably about 50 percent of customer issues and turn them around. We can resolve issues and make people happy. The company believes it’s an important new tool for helping people.”

Pinterest
With almost five million Pinterest followers, Nordstrom uses the social network to highlight products displayed in-store. Going one further, the retailer utilizes Pinterest as a decision maker in which products it merchandises in its brick-and-mortar stores. Store products that receive the most pins get a red “P” tag, drawing a link between the offline and online worlds.

If the words “social strategy” still give you a chill, substitute the word “community.” It’s all about building a conversation and a community with clients.