Imagine walking down main street sporting the latest and greatest in fashion-tech sunglasses. As you pan your head around the street, the lenses digitally overlay information about each store or passerby in your field of vision. With a turn of the head the lens refreshes. Yelp reviews, Facebook profiles, movie times, tweets, the price of a latte … the detail of information is catered to your needs and habits.
Sounds like a science-fiction movie, but the technology is here and now. It is Augmented Reality, and your wireless provider has a team dedicated to its strategy and market pollination. Several apps are already available — offering travel-type data overlaid on your phone’s camera display. See Yelp’s iPhone Augmented Reality app. And geo-specific overlays are only one piece of the augmented reality pie. The resource can be used with packaging, clothing, print — you name it.
Augmented Reality (AR), as the name suggests, is the blending of virtual information and 3-D graphics with the real world. To experience it, you need a video device (like the camera on your handheld), a visual cue (a symbol marker or motion that unlocks the animation), and a connection (wifi). Bring the marker into the camera’s view and the 3-dimensional animation is triggered. The fun part is that marker can be as simple as a black and white symbol or as specialized as your product’s packaging. Lego uses AR in a store kiosk to provide a 3-D glimpse of their built models. See the video demo below.
Source: Orlando Attractions Magazine
Beyond the bells and whistles, AR has the power to offer a complete visualization of product, service, or concept. View the United State Postal Service application of AR for selecting the best shipping box. This type of functionality enables the end-user to streamline their postal tasks and eliminate confusion, saving time and money.
An AR component can be appropriate for campaigns ranging in size. Use a marker that is familiar with your audience, keep it simple, and explore the idea of bringing the AR experience beyond your site. Burger King used a dollar bill as the marker for their Dollar Menu campaign, which was implemented across web banners. See Burger King’s Dollar Menu Promotion.
The technology can connect real world experiences with the messages your campaign aims to convey. From taking a demonstration to the next level at a tradeshow to offering a unique visualization of your product online or in store, the opportunity to create an intimate and high-tech brand experience with your consumer can be found with an augmented reality solution. See how Belding Associates can help make Augmented Reality for you!
Determining who are the best prospects to sell your service to and reaching out to them in a way that makes them perceive you as the perfect match for them.
Today’s opportunity:
Bill Builder has a list of architects whom he wants to get work from.
Old School Solution:
Bill goes on each architect’s website, finds out what kinds of projects each architect does, sends out a customized email or direct mail to each one and follows up with a phone call.
Problems with this solution:
Slow
Labor intensive
Information is only as current and complete as the prospect’s website. Bill needs to know what the architect is working on right now and what projects are in the pipeline because those are the jobs that Bill wants to get.
New School Solution:
Bill sends out an automated email campaign once a month with a link to his website (which shows all of the kinds of projects Bill has built.) Bill has a tracker on his computer desktop that notifies him when Art, one of the target architects, opens the email. The tracker shows that Art has now clicked to go to Bill’s site. A chat window opens on Art’s computer with a message, “Hi Art, let me know if you have any questions…” The tracker now shows Art exploring the restaurant renovation pages on Bill’s site and then he leaves the site. Soon thereafter, Bill picks up the phone, calls Art, and says, “Just wanted to follow up on the email I sent. I just finished renovating Chez Suzanne on Geary Street. How about meeting me there for lunch so you can see the quality of my work and we can discuss what you’re working on.”
Advantages:
Automated monthly email campaign prevents “I’m too busy” syndrome.
Know which of your prospects is interested in your service in real time via the tracker.
Be able know what specific service your prospect is interested in right now.
Use chat to initiate a relationship immediately. If you are not viewing your tracker when the prospect is looking at your site, there is a button that opens a form to ask a question which can be answered when you have time.
Since you do not tell your prospect that you are watching their activity on your web site, they do not feel their privacy is invaded. Instead they think that you just happen to do exactly what they need done.
Minimum time required with maximum results.
Summary:
Spend your time doing your business. Use your marketing firm to set up an automatic periodic marketing system and only spend your time on pursuing true prospects.
Communicating in the digital age is instantaneous. It is efficient and virtually impossible to live without. Try imaging a day at work without email. Think about the last time your email server went down and how you were panicking that you might miss something. Now think back.
It was just over a decade ago, when armed with your office phone and Rolodex you thought you could conquer the world. When your lines of communication were limited to just two: phone or in-person. Now we can email a client twenty times a day, or interrupt a co-worker with an IM, all without ever getting up from our desk. So what’s the problem? The problem is we are missing the handshake. We are missing the opportunity to say “I like your new hair cut” or “ have you lost weight?”. We are missing the way we’ve interacted with our friends and associates for centuries. We are missing the face-to-face communication.
As an account executive with Belding, it is imperative that I keep in touch with clients and associates. However, sometimes email is simply not enough. Being able to visit clients in person has enabled me to better communicate our services and more importantly, listen to my clients and better understand their goals and challenges. Things you just can’t get in an email.
A funny thing happened last week that highlights what happens when we rely solely on electronic communications. I had recently attended my twentieth high school reunion and a friend had posted some photos from the event on Facebook. An old classmate who wasn’t able to attend the event was viewing the photos and happened across my friend list. She noticed that one my friends on Facebook was a co-worker of hers. She immediately posted a message on my wall, asking how I knew her co-worker. After looking through some old emails, it turns out we (my classmate and I) had been emailing each other for over three years and never made the connection that we were once classmates and dear friends. After a few “OMG’s” and some weak excuses about married names, we both agreed that had we not discovered this connection, we would have gone on for at least another three years emailing each other – never knowing who the other person was.
What’s the moral of the story? Next time you are about to click “send”, think about how you would have communicated this information a decade ago. When possible, get up, walk down the hall, or down the street, and knock on the door. Don’t fear face-to-face interactions. Dust off the Rolodex and call or visit an old contact. You may be surprised to learn who they really are.
Recently I watched as a pre-school teacher was trying to get a child to help with cleaning up a pile of toys. She said that she would put them away on the shelves if he brought them over to her. He began bringing them one by one and the teacher put them on the shelves. However, to make them fit, she soon needed to rearrange them. With every new toy she needed to rearrange again and again. If the child had put all the toys in a nearby wagon and brought them over at once, both the teacher and child would have completed the task much more quickly.
This phenomenon happens frequently in the design world. For many reasons, designers don’t get all the toys at once and we end up “rearranging” over and over again. Frequently, there are good reasons for this. Usually, there is an assumption that the job will get done more quickly if the designer is given ten percent of the information to “get him/her started.” As the example above illustrates, most of the time, that is not a correct assumption.
Years of experience in the design world have taught me one important truth: if I start a project with the content and information in an organized package, the result is better, the cost is lower and the project is completed more quickly.
What does an organized creative project look like?
A concise description of intent
A description of the target audience
A listing of historic considerations
A clear definition of the scope of the project.
What does an organized production project look like?
A clear, detailed description of the project including deliverables, deliverable sizes, and all deliverable attributes.
A hierarchy of what is the most important down to least important
All the assets (images, graphics, required fonts, text content) or clear descriptions of stock images to be searched for.
Any existing corporate brand standards
If the above is presented in an organized package, here is what is gained:
Time and money savings: The project can be completed much more quickly with less time spent on endless email threads
A better product: The design does not need to be patched up to squeeze in those last minute items.
A more creative project: Designers can focus on designing rather than sorting through emails looking for content, etc.
Happy clients: Clients can move on to other projects, confident that their project will be well designed, on time, on budget.
All this sounds great, right? So why is it not done more?
MULTIPLE PLAYERS within the client’s company – all contributing on different schedules
WORKING STYLES – some people like to see a framework so that they can then fill in the “blanks”
HABITS – some people just get in the habit of handing off one element at a time.
How to move toward a more perfect world?
The MULTIPLE PLAYER situation – Clients can identify all players in a project and their roles up front and define one leader. Then the leader can partner with the agency account executive to organize, drive and manage the project.
The WORKING STYLE situation - Agency account executives can paint picture of how different requests can add unnecessary hours. They can make recommendations on how to organize the gathering of information to minimize costs. Personality traits or insights of all parties should be shared with the account executive so he or she can better manage communications.
The HABIT situation – Not gathering all information early on is costly because the designer ends up spending a lot of time organizing and reorganizing the content, keeping track of what is still missing, and reading through multiple emails looking for content. By working closely with the agency account executive at the planning stage, this can be easily avoided. He or she will organize the job with a systematic approach to save time and money.
Most important take-aways?
Gather all content up front
Spend time with your agency account executive up front, as you would with an architect to streamline the work flow of a project and optimize the timeline, budget and deliverable quality.
PDFs are the standard these days for invites, flyers, guides, instructions, and a plethora of other business documents. Why not spice them up a bit? Now this universal file-type can be enhanced with numerous new features. Here are just a few ideas:
Navigation menu: Add a navigation menu to lengthy PDFs for easy navigation between sections. You can design a home page listing all sections, and even create a menu bar at the bottom of each page of the document with “forward” and “back” buttons.
Email integration: Do you want your audience to be able to share the PDF easily? Add the email feature and with a click of the mouse, readers will be able to email the PDF as an attachment through their preferred email client. Another handy email feature allows you to create a form and have the results emailed directly to you – just like any web form. Check out the “Request Brochure” page on our sample.
Embed videos: There are two ways to embed videos into PDFs. One requires an internet connection, but keeps the actual file size down to an easily emailable size. The second method actually saves the full video file in the PDF. This method doesn’t require an internet connection, but the file size can get rather large, depending on how big the video is. Check out our sample for the internet connection-required version.
Page-turning animation: Make your PDF look like a magazine or book with the page turning animation feature. This feature will change the end format to a SWF file, but you can design and create the entire document in Adobe.
Last week I attended a 2-day Second Wind seminar on how to improve daily workflow and efficiency within a marketing agency with the hopes of in return providing clients with stronger, more creative campaigns. The seminar provided many great tips and strategies that when implemented can save the agency and most importantly our clients valuable dollars.
One main area of focus of the seminar was to improve overall communications within the agency and with clients. In analyzing the daily activities and occurrences in the work place, it is eye opening to see how much time can be lost to unnecessary meetings, constant interruptions, and miscommunications. By simply streamlining communications both with clients and within our agency we not only save time but more importantly it will allow account executives to be more strategic in campaigns and creative teams to be more innovative with designs, thus producing deliverables that will increase the client’s ROI.
Although cliche, we often forget that communication is a two way street. As a client, you maximize your investment in an agency by providing clear and concise direction. Be sure to clearly think through what you want your marketing campaign to achieve prior to engaging the agency. Doing this leg work and then communicating it clearly will allow the agency to creatively develop a successful campaign rather then trying to pull something together based on vague direction. Vague direction usually results in more time and more money in the end. Also, be specific on your feedback to agency. Saying you don’t like a certain aspect of a design is a start, but what specifically would you like changed? Is the copy? The image? The color scheme?
On the agency’s side, expect your agency to clearly and accurately identify project goals and establish creative direction based on your clear, concise project brief at the beginning stages of a project. Your account executive should communicate the production expectations and project timeline so that both you and the agency are in accordance with what you want the marketing campaign to achieve. Additionally, the account executive should be updating you throughout the project as to where the project stands in terms of budget and should submit any change orders for your approval if the project is going beyond the original scope of work.
Actively practicing good communication skills on a daily basis will prove to save agencies and clients time, money, and unnecessary headaches.
As marketing budgets have decreased, many marketing managers are faced with the dilemma of trying to get more for less. And, even just the same for less. One way to make your budget work is by creating templates for a set of collateral pieces. I have been working with a handful of clients to create custom templates for invites and electronic brochures. Best of all, the template concept works across platforms – from digital to print alike.
Depending on the template modules, you can reduce design hours by as much as 90% per version.
The first step to creating a template is determining what facets of the piece are static. What will be uniform across each version? For invites, some items to consider that might not change are: agenda, title, location and the description. Once you have decided what will be static, you can proceed with creating a design that will require minimum design time to customize each version.
The key concept for templates is that there are little, if any, exceptions to the rules. Try to make each version fit into the predetermined parameters. Once you make an exception for one version, you’ll find yourself bending the rules more and more; adjusting things here and there.
For larger documents and brochures, you’ll need to go through the same process. Decide what can stay the same. Will the table of contents and/or page structure be the same? Can you re-use some pages across multiple versions?
While in an ideal world, we have time and all the information needed for a project from the get-go, this is often not the case. It does take some forward thinking to design a template program, but this up-front effort is well worth it in the long run. Not only will you be able to leverage the template to create multiple versions, saving time and cost, but you will build a stronger brand identity by creating assets that have a uniform look and feel.
We are constantly adding resources, skills, partners, vendors and every other tool to our knowledge base and service offering. From time to time we feel some of these resources may be useful to more than just our clients, but to a wider audience – like all of you! This is why I’m sharing with you info on MeHype, they are a word of mouth marketing tool that connects people to create branded video content at a fraction of traditional production costs. Through their network, everyday consumers can earn cash spreading their sponsored videos through their personal and professional social networks. Check them out at mehype.com or contact us to incorporate their offering in your next campaign.
I’ve come to the realization that in my 25 plus years in the graphics and marketing/advertising world that the more things change, the more things remain the same. We can do so much more now, in less time and for less dollars than we could ever have imagined in the marketing world of yesteryear. However there are basic principles of business that even the “old guys” are finding to be not only acceptable, but vital – and this is regarding the new networking. Again, I’m sounding old, but it wasn’t long ago when designs, contracts, referrals and many facets of business were conducted in a restaurant on a bar napkin! That face-to-face time, along with an extended lunch allowed for enough time to determine the character of someone to see if he or she was worthy to work with. That cocktail napkin is now the blog, being tagged on Facebook, being connected on LinkedIn or any of many other social marketing sites where we expose ourselves for all to see. Sure some of the initial closeness may be gone, however we can scale our presence to be in front of thousands of people instead of just a few. and those who trust us can stand up for us for all strangers to see and “friend us”, “endorse us” or whatever else is needed to show their vote of confidence. So there is no reason for ANY business or any person not to incorporate social marketing in to their mix of ways to increase exposure.
flyers, guides, instructions, and a plethora of other business documents. Why not spice them up a bit? Now this universal file-type can be enhanced with numerous new features. Here are just a few ideas: