Archives for April 2014

Social Media—Risky Business or Filled With Opportunities?

April 30, 2014 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Oh, No. Managing Risk and Compliance

One of the first things I hear when talking to insurance and trust companies about social media is “managing risk and compliance.” Oddly enough, nearly half of these prospects don’t have social media guidelines or internal procedures to handle a social media meltdown, should one occur. What should you do when a client or prospect starts badmouthing you or your company? What’s been successful in the industry, and what should you be doing? To me, not being able to answer these questions sounds like the ultimate risk.

So, what’s the solution for managing social media for insurance agents or financial advisors? “I’ve got it,” shouts one of your over-zealous team members. “Let’s hire a college grad (with a hint of sarcasm)! They know this stuff and interact on social media all the time.”

Well that’s a heck of a plan (again, sarcasm) because, in most cases, your new social media “guru” doesn’t have knowledge of your brand, industry regulations, business-level social media platforms, or any real marketing experience to act on your behalf. Doesn’t this sound like a risky compliance nightmare, too?

So, Where Do You Start?

Start with a Social Media Strategy. What do you actually hope to accomplish with social media? Do you plan to be proactive with acquiring new clients or just limit the compliance risks?
Set your own internal “insurance policy” by getting social media guidelines in place. In most cases, this should’ve happened yesterday.
Protect your brand from negative claims and reviews with social media procedures (and don’t forget to claim all your assets).

Social Media: The Land of Opportunity

Whether you’re an individual agent/advisor or part of a company, you need to get involved with your prospects and customers. Insurance and trust companies often have internal sources or agencies working to develop the brand, but agents typically miss the boat on social media. In my opinion, insurance agents and financial advisors should be building their personal brand at the local level as everything else comes together. Don’t forget—even if you move on to greener pastures, you can always take your personal brand (and your existing relationships) with you.

Engage with your prospects and clients to build relationships as well as your visibility among their connections. Social media is a great way to listen for new opportunities, new trends, and your competitors. For example: One of your clients announces on social that they’re having a baby. Isn’t that a green light for life insurance, college savings plan (529), or an update to their beneficiaries?

Put simply, not engaging in social media is risky business. The fact of the matter is that your prospects, clients, and competitors are already there, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t be.

Got questions? Tweet our team @dabrianmarket or me (@daniellawsjr). Let’s keep the conversation going!

Safe not Sorry: A Guide to Project Problem Planning

April 23, 2014 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Come to Me with Solutions, Not Problems

I know, I know, I’ve mentioned proactively planning before. So why bother project problem planning when you can just tag an “I’ll deal with that if it happens,” or a “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” onto your risk assessments? While the answer might seem obvious, upper management will appreciate it when you present them with how you solved the problem instead of the problem itself. Check out some of the following examples and solutions of problems that may arise for your team:

Jane Doe Doesn’t Work Here Anymore

It’s never a fun situation, but it happens: Jane Doe missed one too many deadlines, decided to move to Wisconsin, or married her lifelong Antarctic-dwelling scientist boyfriend and now her desk is empty—now what? Step one-make sure everyone on your team (including part-timers and interns) knows. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as not finding out a co-worker has moved on until two weeks after the rest of the office. Step two-tell your clients. Neither your team nor your clients need specific details—just let them know that Jane Doe is no longer with Company X and that all communication can be directed to John Smith until otherwise instructed. When the time is right, the third and final step is introducing Jane’s replacement to the client. Don’t do this until her replacement is ready for the influx of communication that will surely fill their inbox.

Client X Still Hasn’t Gotten Back to Me

It’s quite possible that one of the reasons your client hired your agency is because they don’t have the time/resources to do the work internally, so is it much of a surprise when they don’t have the time to respond to you every waking moment? Nope. Don’t be discouraged—chances are high they have an email open 24/7 that they’re consistently responding to you in and that perhaps someday they’ll send. In the interim, create a process (as exemplified in the flowchart below) for following up:

If your main form of client communication (your PM system in this example) doesn’t receive a response, follow up with a weekly email (either via the PM system or standard email) and a bi-weekly phone call until you get a response (it’ll happen eventually, I promise!). If you get a response, carry on!

This Project is Already Over-Budget

It’s Friday afternoon and everyone is caught up logging their hours to the appropriate project when, dun dun dun—you see the budget turn from green to red. What’s next? Unfortunately, there are really only two options (both of which require you to pull up the statement of work): let the client know you’re over budget and will begin billing for all incremental work, or let the client know you’re over budget and eat the cost for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Planning is Important

The long and short of it–expecting the best but planning for the worst is a great way to maintain your team’s sanity (and upper management’s happiness) and uphold the tenets of Project Management: on-task, on time, and on budget.

Do you plan for problems? Have you experienced a problem you hadn’t planned for? Tell us your story in the comments!

Hospitality Marketing That’s Actually “Hospitable”

April 16, 2014 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Digital channels sometimes get a bad rap when it comes to the hospitality industry (i.e. local restaurants, hotels, travel, and the like). It doesn’t take too much effort to search for an article criticizing companies that participate in what is deemed “empty” social media engagement or “stale” brand messaging.

It’s high-time to rise up from the sea of bandwagoners and gun-jumpers and use digital to both differentiate and stand out in the eyes of your customers. It’s not as hard as you might think, and this week, we’re gonna show you how.

Construct a Policy for Managing Online Reviews

First off, let’s revisit those brands that completely miss the boat when it comes to their more (ahem) vocal customers on the web. Whether you’re at the helm of a locally-lauded restaurant or a national hotel chain, you should never ignore your clientele (online or off). Review websites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Google Reviews have eliminated the gap between a single user’s opinion and every brand serving him.

The great part about setting up review profiles is that it’s relatively easy. The downside is that few businesses take the time to reply and/or respond when the digital flood gates are opened. With dedicated resources and a feedback management/issue resolution policy, you can assure one isolated incident doesn’t spin out of control. Here are a few high-level tips to get you started:

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst: You never know how your customers will react to the equivalent of an open forum
The ol’ strategic stand-by’s: test, measure, optimize: Make plans to re-evaluate your process and define your success in plain, measurable terms
Use the feedback you’ll inevitably receive: Address your customers’ major concerns in your next budget meeting or planning session and develop action items

Tap into the Digital Community

Don’t you worry. With your customers’ newfound agency, they’ll definitely be in touch. But these conversations shouldn’t be reduced to one-way streets. One of the best ways hospitality marketers can make the most of digital channels is to play an active role in the community they’ve just entered. The best part? Gauging your customers’ opinions online can yield far better results than a printed survey on their receipt.

On a local level, a restaurant may post its daily specials to an official Twitter account. With a single hashtag, a hotel chain can collect honest, concise reviews from its visitors. A theme park debuting a new ride can have fans and followers vote on its name, logo, or color scheme. In short, a business can participate in existing digital communities while, at the same time, work to create one of its own.

By embracing the digital environment, you’ve empowered your customers to reach out when they have a positive (or not-so-positive) experience. In short, you’ve given them a voice. Just make sure you’re always listening.

Is there a business that absolutely sets the bar high online? Share it with us in the comments!

A Prognosis for Healthcare Digital Advertising

April 10, 2014 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Some Background

More often than not, our team members‘ inboxes are flooded with newsletters and other subscriptions as a way to remain in the proverbial industry loop. This information gives us the ability to spot trends and generally provide more informed recommendations for the businesses with which we work. Some of the DMG crew subscribes to information about the pharmaceutical and life science industry (which is convenient, considering we have custom solutions specifically for those folks). Chief among these resources is PM360, which recently featured these articles in its publication:

This week, we’re going to offer our input among these articles, one by one. Feel free to click the links above, read each article, and come back for our thoughts.

Ready? Let’s get started!

Getting and Analyzing Big Data: How Pharma and Med Device Marketers Benefit

If you’re fully subscribed to the hot topic of big data, that means you’re talking about information from online advertising, traditional marketing, patients, electronic medical records (EMR), caregivers, medical devices, vendors, and healthcare professionals (HCP). Certainly there’s no question that pharma marketers can benefit from big data or any “real” data. But let’s be realistic. In most cases, “big data” is subject to interpretation. Everyone seems to be talking about “crunching” this information to make it usable, but no one’s talking about how it’s acquired or, more importantly, how to analyze it and derive action from it. Getting valid data and analyzing it within a specific context (such as among certain target audience segments) is a missed opportunity and a neglected part of the larger analytical picture.

Can We Define Digital That Delivers?

We talk about design and creation, placement and targeting, and measuring for success, but so rarely do we discuss this success in the context of a high-level business goal. It seems we’re more concerned with “delivering success,” but we miss opportunities to test, optimize, and determine why a digital tactic delivered a desired result. I think all of the comments in this piece are valid, but to continue delivering in this manner, we need to examine not only the “why,” but what individual tactics or channels contributed to the goal behavior (via a measurement tactic like attribution modeling, for example).

Social Media Gone Bad: How Lack of Engagement Can Ruin Your Business

The purpose of social media is to share, communicate, and engage with people. And that includes patients, caregivers, and HCPs. In our experience, people with medical conditions have a strong sense of community among themselves and want to protect each other. They’re going to talk and share their experiences, but the question is: “Are you listening and engaging in the conversation?” Pharmaceutical companies have ad agencies, compliance, the FDA, and other regulatory issues to contend with. You would think companies would have guidelines and internal procedures to address issues when they arise (notice we didn’t say “if” there). If you’re not engaging, you’re not communicating with the same people for which you spent millions to develop your products and services. Without that communication, you’re at a disadvantage to make you products and services better to the people that matter most.

And Now, To Sum Everything Up

A dissatisfied patient can certainly ruin your business, but only if you let their concerns go unanswered by not listening or communicating with them. Gaining valid data and analyzing it will help to a degree, but the data needs to be tied to action to have the greatest impact. And finally, you can only give your brand(s) a true prognosis when you listen to your patients, analyze the available information, optimize digital tactics to yield favorable behaviors, and understand why it all worked to inform future initiatives.

What’s your take on the current state of pharma marketing? Let us know in the comments!

Widows, Orphans, Rivers, and Rags

April 3, 2014 by Mark Mapp 1 Comment

Introduction:

In my last blog we discussed the importance of kerning and tracking in creative design. We explained their meanings and differences; in addition we gave visual examples of each. Besides kerning and tracking there are other key factors to keep in mind when formatting text in creative design. The key factors I decided to focus on in this blog are: widows, orphans, rivers (also known as text rivers), and rags. Although these issues are very common in print design, they can also be as problematic in a digital design space.

Definitions:

We will begin by defining these terms. First, widows are paragraph-closing lines which were pushed to the next page/column and left dangling and separated from the rest of the paragraph. Second, orphans (which are often confused with widows) are paragraph-opening lines that appear by themselves itself at the bottom of a page/column. In addition, it can be a word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph. Orphans can result in too much white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page. Third, rivers (or text rivers) are the white gaps (or white space) that can appear in columns of type (especially justified text), when there is too much space between words on consecutive lines of text. Rivers are particularly common in narrow columns of text, where the type size is relatively large. Last but not least, rags can be defined as the imbalanced alignment of text lines. Ragged is the opposite of flush. A text block may be formatted (or justified) to be evenly flush (align) right and unevenly aligned (ragged) on the left. Now that we have defined these terms let us now view visual examples of these terms so that they make more sense.

How to avoid or fix these four issues:

Some techniques you may use to avoid or fix widows and orphans are by forcing an early page break, hence making the page shorter, adjusting the kerning and/or tracking to produce tighter or looser paragraphs, or even adjust the hyphenation of words within a paragraph. Rivers, or text rivers can be avoided or fixed by adjusting the hyphenation and justification settings, commonly called the “H&J” settings, which can be found in most high end creative design suites. Also note that H&J settings can vary from one program to the next. Like rivers, rags can also be minimized or fixed with the use of H&J settings. You may also want to avoid using justified type as much as humanly possible.

Conclusion:

In this blog we defined widows, orphans, rivers, and rags, we also went over some differences and similarities among these terms. Although they several different ways to minimize or avoid these issues in creative design, I came across three ways which I thought were pretty consistent throughout my research on these issues. First, it is best to rewrite portions of the text so your copy can fit the way you intended it to fit. Second, utilize the H&J setting within the design program you are using. Last by not least, adding kerning and tracking values to text maybe the most common practice when dealing with these issues.