Straight to the Point

Volume 3, Issue 3

This Issue's Contents:

Why You Need a Living Marketing Communications Plan
To combat the shortcomings of traditional plans, we help many of our clients develop living marketing communications plans. Every living communications plan is different, but I have compiled some tips to help you get started with yours.

Success Story (Merkley Supply)
When Merkley Supply came to Kaszas with a website that wasn’t adequately serving Merkley’s existing customer needs, and didn’t speak to the company’s new target audience of home renovators and landscaping do-it-yourselfers (DIY), we took action.

Lesson Learned (Is Your Website Done?)
Is your website done? If you answered “yes” to that question, it’s time to ask yourself another question: What am I doing wrong? That’s because a good website is a living, evolving entity.

---

Marketing Communications Smarts from Kaszas Communications

September 2007

Why You Need a Living Marketing Communications Plan

– by Maria Ford

In our last newsletter, I discussed why traditional marketing plans almost never work – at least not for the kinds of clientele we work with at Kaszas. By looking too far into the future, discouraging examination of results, and being difficult to modify on the fly, I contended, marketing plans rarely produce their intended results.

To combat the shortcomings of traditional plans, we help many of our clients develop living marketing communications plans. Every living communications plan is different, but I have compiled some tips to help you get started with yours.

• Take a top-level view. We use Excel to structure living comms plans that display a snapshot of what’s coming up and what has passed in a given year. Typically, the columns are labeled with months of the year and rows are labeled with activities divided into categories such as “Events”, “Website”, “Advertising”, “Partner Communication”, etc.,
  
  A sub-level of organization is also often required to show how the plan is covering certain geographies, industries, themes etc. This plan is not the place for low-level details, budgets, goals, etc. – rather, it is an at-a-glance picture of everything that is going on or which has passed. For past activities, we typically fill in the cell with notes related to results or ROI – again, at a very high level.

• Use it as a centerpiece for regular meetings. Project the living comms plan on a screen in your regular marketing/PR meetings. It helps keep everyone focused on the most pressing activities of the moment without losing sight of recent accomplishments and longer term initiatives. Then, send everyone a copy of the plan after it’s been updated in the meeting.
  
  Be disciplined about meeting regularly to review the plan, make adjustments, and record key outcomes so they are easy to refer back to in the future. When the living comms plan is used as a centerpiece for everyone on the team, it encourages integrated marketing by helping everyone see where their piece fits into a bigger picture. It also helps with efficiency and productivity as team members can easily see areas of overlap where materials can be shared or reused

• Be open to change. A living comms plan is flexible and adaptable. It’s a place to record ideas as well as hard-and-fast plans. As timelines change, certain items will need to be moved from one cell to another.
  

• Start somewhere. Take a stab at drafting a living communications plan for your organization then get all the stakeholders involved to review it and provide input into how it may best be structured and what data it will capture. We have provided a sample template from our own files to help get you started. Download it here.

Don’t have the bandwidth to create and manage a living comms plan? It may be time to talk to Kaszas about our Virtual Marcom Management services. Please inquire at (613) 741-9484 x.101

Back to top

---

Success Story

Merkley Supply

As the Ottawa-Carleton region's oldest and most comprehensive masonry boutique, Merkley Supply approached Kaszas with a problem common to many of our new clients: its website was badly out of date. But, the site’s problems were more than skin-deep – it wasn’t adequately serving Merkley’s existing customer needs, and didn’t speak to the company’s new target audience of home renovators and landscaping do-it-yourselfers (DIY).

Before...

Traditionally, Merkley’s primary clientele has been architects, designers and contractors working on commercial or residential building projects. When Merkley first launched its first website 12 years ago, it was one of the first websites in the local industry. Although the site was revamped four times since then, by 2006 it was no longer taking full advantage of the power of the Internet. Offering little more than a supplier and product list, the site’s navigation was not intuitive and did not support online ordering.

More troubling was that the website did not answer the needs of its existing or prospective audiences and did not reflect Merkley Supply’s marketplace dominance. Though Merkley provides materials for 80% of the residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, and home renovation projects in the Ottawa region, you’d never have known it based on the old website. And, in web searches, Merkley performed well only on “brick” and “stone” searches – yet the company offers a much broader product range.

Beyond merely listing products and suppliers, the new site would need to become a resource of helpful information for its new target audience of homeowners looking to undertake their own renovations or landscaping projects. It could no longer be assumed that visitors to the site would know what they were looking for – rather, the site would need to play a role in helping in the DIYer’s online research process and ultimate decision-making.

With proper messaging and a more sophisticated web design, we believed that Merkley could attract and serve its new target customers while better serving its existing customers as well. To improve the site, Kaszas used a three-pronged approach: 

• We prepared a key message strategy that guided us as we developed new content for each page of the website. This strategy identified who Merkley “is”, who it serves, why it is the best choice, and how Merkley could best speak to its target audience of architects, homeowners, builders and trades. The key message development process also helped us devise a new tagline for the company: “First Impressions That Last.” 

• We performed search engine optimization (SEO) research to identify Merkley’s current search performance compared to the most popular search terms used online for masonry and building supply products. Based on our research, we developed a list of prioritized keywords that we included in web copy and website metadata to boost Merkley’s search engine rankings on relevant terms. 

• We re-designed the website and developed a new content architecture to make the site more robust and useful for all Merkley audiences. Featuring a “how to” section complete with videos and installation guides, a project center with photos and project advice, and a virtual showroom tour, the new website provides useful information for both contractors and homeowners at any stage of their building project. Visitors can now able place online orders and will soon be able to use a search function to query the company’s entire product database by name, manufacturer or keyword.

 

After...

As a result of these changes, Merkley Supply’s physical showroom has seen its busiest year to date, with an increase in traffic attributable to the website’s promotion of the showroom as an area open to the public. Customers and suppliers frequently volunteer positive feedback on the revamped site, and the number of online orders has increased each week since the launch. The site’s professional look and feel has also helped it stand apart from competitors and better reflect Merkley’s status as the region’s largest masonry boutique.

To check out the new Merkley Supply website for yourself, visit: www.merkleysupply.com.

 

Back to top

---

Lesson Learned

Is Your Website Done?

If you answered “yes” to that question, it’s time to ask yourself another question: What am I doing wrong? That’s because a good website is a living, evolving entity.

The days when a website was simply an “online brochure” are long past. Users’ expectations of a website – and a search engine’s criteria for ranking the relevance of a website – now take into account dynamism, newness of content, richness of relevant content, links to and from sites with relevant content, and interactive functions.

Although a new website or a site revamp is usually a comprehensive project that can feel exhausting because of the dimensions involved (marketing and sales strategy, positioning, content, design, technical development, etc.), it’s a mistake to breathe a sigh of relief once a site is launched and to think, “Whew! I’m glad that’s over!”

Launching a new online presence is certainly an important accomplishment – but it’s equally important to maintain that investment. This should include:

• Regular (weekly or monthly) updates to the home page, news, events, and resources such as white papers and case studies

• Scheduled reviews of and updates to search optimization of the content and architecture

• Ongoing reviews and updates of online directory listings and cross-links with partners.

If you lack the bandwidth to manage these ongoing activities, talk to Kaszas Communications about how we can help.

 

Back to top