Straight to the Point

Volume 3, Issue 2

This Issue's Contents:

The Importance of Marketing Experimentation
It's easy to get excited about new ideas; it's harder to stick to them after the initial flush of "newness" wears off.

Success Story (New Messaging Strategy Frames Home Builder as an Industry Leader)
Kaszas client projects are often rolled out in phases, with each step building upon the last. This was the case with Halliday Homes, a custom manufactured home builder in Carleton Place, Ontario.

Lesson Learned (Thinking Objectively About Your Own Work)
It was a classic case of the cobbler's children going without shoes. Over the past five years, Kaszas has helped numerous clients devise, tweak and revamp their corporate messaging strategies – all the while keeping its own messaging largely unchanged!

---

Marketing Communications Smarts from Kaszas Communications

June 2007

The Importance of Marketing Experimentation

– by Maria Ford

It's easy to get excited about new ideas; it's harder to stick to them after the initial flush of "newness" wears off. We've noticed a trend among some of our smaller clients that it's worth addressing here, both because it is a trend and because it can be dangerous.

The trend looks something like this: when an organization launches a new marketing communications plan or program, they're excited about it. We've done the necessary research and planning for them, and we're all confident that the plan is the best one given all the factors (audience, goals, competition and budget). The initial results may be very rewarding but overtime, some marcom activities inevitably outstrip others in terms of quantifiable returns. The company reviews its marketing expenditures and the results (usually a combination of quantifiable and anecdotal data), and identifies the top–performing marketing tactics. Now comes the dangerous part....

At this stage, a company often decides to cancel most or all of its marketing activities except the one or two that appear to be yielding the best results. This may be done when cash gets tighter, or simply because the company believes that is the responsible thing to do. Rarely do we see the budget from cancelled activities make its way into new programs, and we almost never see it added to the budget that goes toward the top–performing activities.

The Myth of "Now We Know"
The philosophy seems to be, "Well, we tried some useful experiments and now we know where to spend our money. We're going to stick with that." The trouble with this thinking is that it doesn't take into account the way various marketing activities combine to create results – results that may appear to be from a single source. That's the tricky part with marketing – when done well (by which I mean when done in an integrated fashion), the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

The Right Mix
In marketing communications, we talk about the "marcom mix" – it's a concept that refers to establishing the right combination of activities. A good marcom mix reaches various audiences through multiple touch points, and each touch point is in some way related to the others. Heavy pruning can do more damage than it does good – rather than making way for new growth the marketing pruning we often see kills other stems.

Here are some concrete examples:

1. Kaszas is currently running print ads in a local business paper. We also recently added an online assessment tool to our website. When someone completes the assessment tool – whether or not they choose the "please contact me" option – I know it. I have acquired multiple solid leads as well as new business from this tool. The advertising, on the other hand, has led directly to a single fruitless phone call. However, I learned that at least one of the leads from the online assessment tool – one that has already led to new business – browsed my website because they saw the ad.
   
   
2. One of our clients recently asked us to evaluate their ongoing AdWords campaign. While we'd like to spend a bit more on the campaign, the client wasn't convinced that it is still yielding results. Our analysis revealed that not only are conversions from the ad campaign steady, they are having a valuable impact on the company's awareness and reach. The ad campaign is consistently bringing in net–new leads while organic search is drawing primarily return visitors. And, the ad campaign is yielding highly interested leads – we can gauge this by looking at the number of pages these visitors view in an average visit. By taking the time to thoroughly evaluate the campaign (rather than simply cut it based on a "sense" that it wasn't yielding) we were able to demonstrate that the program is indeed getting results and we were able to devise ways to further improve it.

These are just two small and concrete examples of how certain types of marketing communications (like advertising) create awareness (which is hard to measure, takes time to develop, and yields cumulative results over time), while others can be expected to yield almost immediate, concrete results ... but only if awareness exists.

Change is the Only Constant
Another problem with the "let's put all our eggs in this basket" approach is that it often signals that a company is relaxing its attention on marketing. Sometimes we can almost hear the sigh of relief when a client has made the decision to focus on a single top–performing marketing activity. Of course that would make things simpler ... but in marketing you MUST keep innovating.

Experimentation (of the well–informed kind) is crucial because your competitors change tactics, search engines change tactics, publishers change tactics and your target market evolves. These changes alter your customers' expectations and demands, so your marketing and communications to them must stay current. The marketing mix should be examined monthly (and twice per year on a comprehensive scale), if only to confirm that it's working as–is. The process of examination keeps an organization alert and reminds everyone involved what the purpose of marketing is and what everyone is working towards.

As a closing thought, consider this: we get tired of our own marketing at a rate that's probably seven to 12 times faster than our intended audiences do. While we communicate or encounter our own marketing messages every day, our prospects and customers may experience those messages only infrequently. It's no wonder that it has been estimated that it takes about seven years to build a brand – that's seven years of consistently delivering the same message. It pays to stick to it, and it pays to convey it through multiple, constantly evolving vehicles.

Back to top

---

Success Story

New Messaging Strategy Frames Home Builder as an Industry Leader

– by Andrew Symes

Kaszas client projects are often rolled out in phases, with each step building upon the last. This was the case with Halliday Homes, a custom manufactured home builder in Carleton Place, Ontario. Halliday wanted to improve its website, its relationships with resellers (called builder–dealers) and capitalize on its good customer relationships. Based on the returns of our initial work for Halliday, we've followed up with new projects that continue to help the company evolve its marketing and messaging.

Phase 1: Messaging and Communications Update
While Halliday Homes had a satisfied customer and builder–dealer base, it was having difficulty attracting the types of home buyers it was most interested in doing business with. Halliday specializes in building custom prefabricated homes that are energy efficient and environmentally friendly. The majority of its leads, however, did not seem to be interested in the environmental aspects of the homes, seemed to be most concerned about price, and few leads turned into sales.

In looking at the company's website and customer materials, we discovered that Halliday was not telling its story in way that would attract prospects with larger budgets and interests in enviro–friendly building. With proper messaging and higher–end design, we believed that Halliday could start attracting the right buyers and leapfrog ahead of its competitors in the custom prefab home building industry.

We prepared a differentiated communications strategy and key message strategy focusing on Halliday's unique building approach and satisfied customer base. Then, we executed the strategy through new website navigation, content and functionality.

As a fully integrated communications project, the new Halliday web site's text, imagery, calls–to–action and content work together to provide highly relevant and compelling information to Halliday's primary audiences.

"The new approach helped frame us as a leader in terms of being an energy efficient, environmentally conscious builder," says A–J Danis, Chief Operations Officer at Halliday Homes. "We had always been a leader in our industry, but we had never bothered to tell anyone. Now, people know."

The centerpiece of the new site is a professionally designed and photographed Showcase of projects. This high–traffic new area of the site means that Halliday is now able to display the quality of its work and give visitors a better idea of what today's prefabricated homes can be. The net result of the changes was a dramatic improvement in lead quality.

"The quality of leads improved substantially," recalls Danis. "We're now attracting the type of buyer we're looking for – the type who is interested in energy costs, the environmental impact of construction, and best practices in construction. And, most of the leads we get from the web have a high probability of turning into customers because the clients have been able to thoroughly 'check us out' online. The only reason that happens is because of the clarity, quality and organization of our new site."

Phase 2: Website Optimization
Some months after the initial messaging and web redesign project was complete, Halliday returned to Kaszas for additional marketing help. With its shiny new website telling the right story, Halliday wanted to make sure that any interested prospects and builder–dealers would be able to easily find the new site on the web.

Through our website optimization service, we determined the most frequently searched keywords in Halliday's industry and updated the web content to ensure that both the site's meta data and public content worked to help raise Halliday's search engine rankings.

Kaszas also introduced Halliday to the free yet powerful Google Analytics website analytics service, which now helps the company track and analyze how visitors find and use the site. Through its web statistics analyses, Halliday has discovered that web traffic has doubled since the site's redesign, and that people are staying longer and digging deeper into the site than ever before.

Halliday has also been able to expand its business into new geographies by monitoring traffic from international visitors. Since launching its new site, Halliday sales outside of Ontario have increased by a factor of ten, the company has secured a new international vendor, and hopes to partner in the near future with two other international vendors who recently discovered the company online.

"Of course the website can't close a sale," says Danis. "But when you combine it with our common business practices, our closing rate is very high. The website tells the right story in the right way for the audiences we are trying to attract, and makes us a preferred vendor in the eyes of the client. Provided that we do our job well at first sales contact, we will win the business."

You can check out Halliday Homes at www.hallidayhomes.ca.

Back to top

---

Lesson Learned

Thinking Objectively About Your Own Work

– by Maria Ford

It was a classic case of the cobbler's children going without shoes. Over the past five years, Kaszas has helped numerous clients devise, tweak and revamp their corporate messaging strategies – all the while keeping its own messaging largely unchanged! By the middle of 2006, it was clear to me that an updated Kaszas communications strategy was overdue.

With new services to offer, a desire to attract new business, and a goal to better inform existing customers of Kaszas offerings, we knew – in broad terms – what we wanted to accomplish. We also knew that reaching our goal would likely require an update to our website and collateral and a new advertising and customer communications strategy.

Once we sat down and started work on exactly how we would update our messaging, we discovered how difficult it can be to think objectively about your own business.

The Curse of Knowledge
Chip Heath, co–author of the book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die has said:

"... Here's the great Curse of Knowledge: the better we get at generating great ideas – new insights and novel solutions – in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly."

In our case, it wasn't so much that I wasn't able to clearly communicate the ideas, it was that it was difficult for me to apply the same scrutiny to my own business that I would when working with a client. I had to put a number of implicit assumptions, fears and biases aside and truly enter the process with an open mind.

I took advantage of the fact that I had a new employee (Andrew) with a relatively objective view of the business and had him engage Kaszas' own process on Kaszas.

Self–Assessment
Following Kaszas' own marketing communications process, Andrew's first project at Kaszas was to research the competition to update our competitive knowledge and to interview a representative sample of our client base. I was especially interested to learn how much knowledge our clients had about our new and existing service offerings. Most clients only use one or two of our services, and through the interviews we learned that few had an awareness of our full service line. Clients only knew about the Kaszas services they were using.

Analyzing our client communications activities, we realized why they didn't know much about Kaszas – customer communications were infrequent and needed to be improved. That's one of the reasons why we decided to re–launch this very newsletter. Two years ago, I had replaced the newsletter with a relatively new corporate communications tool: a blog. A blog, however, is not a proactive communication vehicle and a newsletter is. By offering a newsletter, we can provide our clients one more way to hear from us and keep tabs on what we do.

Taking a Good, Hard Look
Perhaps the most difficult part of the Kaszas marcom revamp was the website update. We found out just how easy it is to say that the text on an existing website is "good enough" and how difficult it is to truly start something from scratch. We forced ourselves to step back and keep our "big picture" goals in mind when discussing any strategy or tactic.

Andrew also made sure to scrutinize our existing activities (looking at every page of the website, for example) to determine which activities were necessary and which could be tweaked or cut.

We relied on our web design/development partners to translate our findings and new goals into creative that really delivers the message effectively. The result of our collective work is a more visually appealing website that better reflects our current offerings and philosophy, contains more prospect calls–to–action, and provides inspiration for the first Kaszas print advertisements (currently running in the Ottawa Business Journal.) Already the new advertising and website have resulted in inquiries from new prospects who would otherwise never have learned of Kaszas.

Lessons Learned
Importantly, we also have a new appreciation for what our clients experience during a messaging or web update – for example, it's a little bit scary to let a third party interview your customers! You want to know what they have to say ...and yet you're worried about it, too. While I have always approached this activity with care and respect both for my clients and their customers, experiencing it myself has reminded me just how important that is.

Above all, the process gave us a renewed confidence in the value that our third–party objectivity brings to our client projects. Although we're the messaging and positioning experts, I couldn't have interviewed my own clients effectively and could not have asked them to be as honest with me as they were with a more objective "stranger". I would also not have had the kinds of interpretations and insights into the competitive and customer research that Andrew did – again because he provided an objective, big–picture viewpoint that it's nearly impossible for a business owner or executive to have.

Good marketers always strive to gain a deep understanding of their audience, and this internal project gave us a chance to learn a bit about what our clients experience when they call in Kaszas for marketing help. That experience has given us additional confidence in our process and an even greater appreciation of the trust and confidence our clients put in us with each project.

Back to top