Blog – Page 11

The Strength of our Labor Force

For many professional services and even in the automotive world, the most expensive component of the products we deliver is the labor. People are paying our businesses for the work that we put into doing what we know.

So, what about our labor force at K2M?

We are proud to have writers, graphic designers, project directors, web designers, editors, sound and video production managers and lots of other vendors and creators who excel in their craft. That is a given. But, we make the extra effort to really differentiate ourselves from others. How do we do that? It is not just that our labor force has knowledge of their specialty area, we also know you.

When you become a client of K2M, we make it our highest priority to be sure that we tell your story to everyone who is working for us. For us, this means more K2M meetings, more discussions with our labor force, and more people in the creative mix, but it’s worth it. When the graphic designer and the sound editor both understand the ethos of your company and your goals for growth, when the video producer and the writers are aware of the challenges that you are facing right now, then we are truly approaching your business needs with a team approach in all of the marketing we do on your behalf.

You may not know all of the names and the faces of everybody on your marketing team, but we know your story.

Camp and Marketing

Many of you, like me, are in the midst of kids leaving for camp, arriving from camp, or happily (we hope) ensconced at camp.

During this time of a few less kids in the house, I began to examine why we choose the camps we do for our kids, as well as other things, their extracurricular activities, their doctors and dentists, even their schools.

In most cases, and certainly in the case of camp, I didn’t choose my children’s summer camp experiences based on the marketing on the part of their camps. I chose their camps based upon the experiences that those camps gave to me as a child or based upon the experiences of other families whose advice and opinions I trusted. I made decisions the way I make other decisions about professional services: do I feel like I or my child could form a relationship with these people? Do I like this camp? Do I like this drum teacher? How do I feel about this dentistry practice?

So, should those camps quit their marketing campaigns? Absolutely not. On the contrary; after I began to formulate my decisions regarding camp, I did go through all the marketing: the brochures, the applications, the websites, the social media, even the embedded marketing involved in the application processes. Additionally, when there was more than one camp in contest for my childrens’ summer time, websites, photos and facebook certainly played a role. Not only did I check them out for information, but also to see pricing, payment options, luggage and packing information, etc. Inbound marketing at work!

So, what’s my take away?

As a client, I would tell you that the most import element to grow your business is to make sure you are cementing good personal relationships with your clients and customers. Then I would try to make sure that all of your inbound marketing components recreate the sense of care you provide. There is no question that with the ease of online research, people will reach out to see how you present yourself.

My Mother Was Right

I’m so not type A. Really, one look inside my purse or my car or most of my closets will assure you of that. Yes, I’m the people person creative type. I was a good science and math student too—but the obsessive parts of me are just not aligned with neatness, order and the like. It’s understandable, I think, that a creative type is one who starts a marketing company. After all, so much of good marketing comes from the capital of intellect and creativity: great new ideas, clever wordsmithing, negotiating and developing ideas with clients, etc.

It doesn’t take long to learn that organized virtual closets are a necessity in a marketing company. We run several projects at a time for any given client. In the beginning, it seemed easy to just go with the flow and finish each project as it came up. Within a short amount of time, it was evident that in order to do the best work for our clients we had to “manage” their projects.

So, what does it mean for us to manage projects? And how can a free wheeling free spirits force themselves to manage them?

Well, it’s not always easy, but the benefits are so clear that we’ve gotten it down to a few important “musts.”

· You must use a project management system. At its most simple, this is a calendar with every project connected to a date and every task and subtask calendared. We like Vertabase project management software, with the ability to organize things by client, to assign tasks to particular people, to sort, to enter even the most tiny subtask, etc.

· Every client project of any size must be entered into the project management system. Really every one. Otherwise life becomes a world of rushed finishes, crazy deadline days and mistakes.

· With religious-like zeal you must adhere to a schedule of meetings about client projects and the calendar. We have found that it is enough to just go through a list client by client of projects, read each one aloud and have a quick chat about due dates and process. What is in process? Who is taking care of it? Is the due date accurate? Do tasks needed to be edited in any way?

That’s it. No magic….just the same lesson my mom tried to teach me a hundred times. Make a list. Check things off. Write down the new stuff. Mom, I wish you could hear this; You were right. It actually works.

Why do so many clients want marketing, but not believe in it?

It’s interesting how often I have a meeting with a client who is interested in purchasing one marketing package or another, yet discusses the improbability of success through marketing. Websites, adwords, direct mail…these things all seem to the client like a scam cooked up to trick the business owners into spending money unnecessarily.

I promise each and every client a straightforward process free of smoke and mirrors. However, even with marketing reports and statistics, there is hesitation. Particularly among professionals who offer a professional service, there is a notion that advertising is base and not really effectual. The comments I hear are, “who would really choose a lawyer based on the internet?” or “nobody really goes to a doctor because they get a postcard in the mail.”

Here are some answers…

Marketing has been around since the beginning of time. There is a super thin line between any kind of persuasion and marketing. Any time one persuades another to buy into a process or to do something, it’s marketing. If marketing didn’t’ work, there’d be no advertising anywhere. Businesses only market when it positively affects their bottom line.

Websites and online marketing? It seems intangible, but if you track your leads or sales it’s not. Asking “How did you hear about our company?” goes a long way to proving what works and what doesn’t.

Marketing Proposals: Transparency vs. Getting Taken

Today I saw a proposal from a market competitor of K2M Creative Media. A friend shared it with me, knowing that because of the many complicated layers of friendships between me and her company, I wouldn’t bid for her firm’s website build, but that I’d give an honest and educated opinion. Well folks…we’re apparently living in the Wild West. I thought things were more under control, but if what I saw today is any indication, I was dead wrong.

Marketing quotes/bids ought not to be part of a game of smoke and mirrors. I remember when I was a little girl my mother wanted my father to come along to the car mechanic with her. She was pretty certain that if she went alone, she’d get a hiked price, or be sold repairs she didn’t know she didn’t need. It seems that marketing and web design (and other online services for that matter) put consumers in a similar situation. Because they are a commodity that can be made to seem mysterious, they can be vastly inflated in terms of price.

Here’s the thing…when you go to the doctor and you need surgery, s/he can tell you and show you exactly what they are going to do to you….and your bill can be itemized. In fact I have witnessed even the most complicated neurological medical information being explained to laypeople. This happens in court cases, for example, all of the time—something unique, complicated and/or exceptional gets explained in terms that any regular person can understand. Your marketing agency should be able to do the same thing for you.

In a website build, there are elements in a bid that are “tangible” parts of the process and there are those that are less so. Consider the difference between designing the sitemap of the website (what the “layout” and flow should be) versus the concept of the user experience (what the user of the site should feel when they are on the website—welcomed, excited about many choices, educated about the content, etc.) It is easy to see and/or understand the process and result of creating a sitemap, but the process and result of conceptualizing a user experience can be difficult to see. So much of it happens in the creative process of the expert/marketer/designer.

This kind of creative time and thought is truly hard to “show” but may be the most important part of some bids. In fact, it can be the most expensive part of a bid as well and rightly so—if the creative expertise were not needed, everyone could just do all of their own marketing equally well (and there’d be no Super Bowl commercials!)

However, there should never be a bid that is unintelligible to a consumer. Jargon and fancy fake fluffy words don’t belong in a quote without explanation.

The bid I saw was for thousands and thousands of dollars for nothing. The quote was broken down with charges for the most ridiculous parts of the process so as to justify the expense. It would be the equivalent of my charging not only to write a blog for someone, but also for clicking “save” at the end.

Don’t be afraid to ask the company that is pitching you to explain every detail of the fees. I’m not suggesting that the price will necessarily go down—brain power may cost you. But at least you’ll know what you’re paying for. And if the company can’t explain it to you—dollar by dollar, then know you’re being taken for a ride.

And since it’s my soap box and I’m harping on this quote I saw…if the web development company, or marketing company quotes you for SEO, or other things that help you get found online, but you can’t find them online…well, just turn and run the other way!

Images and Identity

In the past couple of months I had to take a look at K2M Creative Media’s website. After launching Phase I of the new site a few months ago, it was time to assess the images. Although I liked the original imagery, I was becoming less satisfied with the stock image choices on the site.

Over the past years I have been both in charge of and part of selecting images for countless client projects. It has always been an acknowledged time-consuming but crucial component of creating materials and expressing the brand for a client. Occasionally, the image is so central to the message and so impossible to find in stock resources that we have created our own art for the project.

I realized again in accomplishing this task for my own business how important images are to marketing materials and how difficult it can sometimes be to see the forest for the trees. It took what felt like forever to choose images I love for our website. The process began over two months ago when I first started image shopping. I had to engage some help in order to narrow the field! The easy online accessibility of images and the huge volume of them made it even more difficult somehow—there were so many choices….an endless menu of possibilities, each one offering up a different message to clients about our company.

Trying to express such a personal thing as one’s own website through images was a great exercise. I have always thought that a professional of any kind ought to experience his/her own business from the client’s perspective once in a while. It’s analogous to every doctor needing to be a patient in order to understand the experience.

I am so glad I recently worked on reimagining our site. It reminded me how important it is to choose images well, and how difficult the process can be—especially for oneself.

I hope you enjoy our choices and feel as inspired by them as I do.

Why Did I Start K2M?

At a recent family gathering a cousin asked me, not for the first time, if I was still working in a particular job. It’s been several years…so, no, I’m not. How and why I started my business became the focus of our conversation. I enjoyed putting into words what motivated me to create K2M Creative Media.

I saw a need in the professional service providers with whom I interacted personally. For example, my own dentist’s office needed certain marketing products and services but was too busy with providing excellent dental care and office management to handle the time needed to work on marketing. A friend who worked in a non-profit was too busy running the programming to invest the time, or to wait for the volunteer to fulfill promises, but needed some marketing. A local author, who happened to be my father, wrote two sweet children’s books but needed collateral with which to promote them. All around me were professionals who would and could not afford the prices of large marketing companies with slick language and high overhead, translated into high prices.

Mission accepted: create marketing company and service these kinds of strapped professionals, who are excellent at their professions, who see value in marketing, but who do not take—or cannot take the time to work on their own marketing initiatives. Furthermore, many of them acknowledge that the skills necessary to market their business are not necessarily their own best skills. A seasoned and excellent attorney, for example, may not be the best at writing accessible language for his website or marketing materials. And I don’t claim to be suited to write a legal brief.

So…there it is: Mission accomplished, in the way of happy and satisfied professional clients enjoying increased business and revenue because of the marketing efforts of K2M Creative Media.

Interactive Online

Ideas morph faster in interactive media than anywhere. The interactive space reinvents itself daily–sometimes faster. But for all the change, some constants exist. Great interactive work is more about utility than advertising, more about conversation than message and more about people than products.

It’s less about delivering brand message and more about delivering invitations to participate in your brand. In this rapidly changing and expanding space, interactive marketing strategies have evolved. Where once the focus was solely on driving traffic to web sites, we now also seek ways for content and applications to reach people wherever they are, however they want and whenever they need. The user experience now includes e-commerce, web design, search marketing, social media, mobile marketing and rich internet applications. It is important to reach and serve customers throughout the expanding interactive universe.

Marketers are micro-publishers and hyper-disseminators. An exciting new horizon!