Recently in In-House Category

by Eric Waldinger
Practice Leader

To develop an online marketing function that will drive ROI for an organization, companies need to understand and know how to leverage a key set of knowledge areas.  Although bringing this online marketing function in-house is the ideal structure, you do not need to hire a large base of as permanent employees, nor can you assume that you can find one person to know all of these areas of online marketing.  You need to be able to know how to access the right talent for the objectives of your campaigns.  

The following knowledge areas have become vital for the marketing management structure to understand and know how to access to create marketing programs utilizing online media in today's marketplace.

These core functions include Online Marketing Management, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization technology strategy, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Online Public Relations and Analytics.

Online Marketing Management

Online marketing management has a key role to identify and evaluate new tactics and channels to drive traffic and grow brand awareness. This function manages online advertising campaigns and marketing programs and maintains relationships with advertising partners.

With any media programs, testing is key to developing an optimal mix. So the marketing management function conceives tests and evaluates the performance of online marketing efforts.

This role is responsible for preparation and monitoring annual advertising budget and creating deals that are at a minimum CPC and in most cases a CPA structure.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) should be the most cost and results effective online marketing medium.    Search engine optimization and vertical key words and landing pages are key to successful search engine marketing. Search engine marketing has emerged as a vital marketing function to leverage search traffic and convert it to leads or purchase.  

The SEM function in an organization should:

•    Promote websites by increasing visibility in search engine result pages.
•    Develop in-depth understanding of keyword advertising & direct marketing.
•    Manage & execute operations across various interactive channels.
•    Manage day-to-day operations of search marketing - keyword bidding, copy & optimization
•    Report & analyze advertising success and ROI

Email Marketing

Just like Direct Mail requires a specialized knowledge base, managing email campaigns has its own set of requirements best practices and specifications that can lead to the best outcomes.  Developing a clear strategy is vital, but many factors in testing and development of email programs from subject lines to offer prominence can drive differing results.  

Core staff should manage the functions of email planning, analytics and strategy, but bringing in specialists to complement your best practices and to execute complex campaigns can drive higher clicks and conversion rates.

The email marketing function in your organization should:
•    Design, quality test, deploy, and report on manual and automated email campaigns for both internal customer databases as well as lead lists.
•    Coordinate and maintain the email marketing communications production schedule to ensure accurate and timely delivery.
•    Assess all email creative to ensure communications are aligned with internal email content policies and compliant with CAN-SPAM legislation.
•    Monitor email volume and track to established budget.
•    Maximize revenue utilizing best practices for direct marketing promotion and 'endorsement' selling optimizes promotions.
•    Maximize the revenue from available web and email marketing banner ad positions through the use of effective analysis, scheduling and creative approaches.

Online Public Relations and Content

This function focuses on Online Reputation Management and Public Relations.  As consumers have increasingly adopted the self-service model companies need to cover key areas of content online throughout new media.   This should address specific questions on products and make sure that the right messaging is going out online.

The Online Public Relations function should:
•    Write, manage, edit, and source website content
•    Improve site engagement through user management, guerilla marketing and leveraging social media groups and in-club marketing initiatives
•    Utilizes content management tools and systems for content, page and document creation
•    Partners with subject matter experts inside and outside the organization
•    Utilizes visitor traffic reporting to analyze site success
•    Contributes to and participants in content planning
•    Maintains in-depth working knowledge of related topics, sources, and trends

As the scope of the current economic downturn expands and evolves, marketers are responding with pragmatism rather than panic. The pragmatic view, as revealed by research conducted by The Dihedral Group (TDG) on behalf of Aquent and the American Marketing Association, is driven by three factors: new technologies; the availability of highly-skilled contractors; and the understanding that organizations must plan for the recession's inevitable end.

Last spring, Aquent and the AMA enlisted TDG to conduct a survey asking marketers about salaries, hiring plans, and their outlook on the future. We turned the results of that survey into a marketing salaries calculator. Since the initial survey asked a lot about plans for 2008, we sponsored a follow up survey to find out what had happened in the intervening six months. Of course, we found that some plans had changed (only about a third of anticipated interactive marketing hires had been completed, for example), but we also found that, despite the severity of the current economic crisis, marketers seem to responding with a forward-looking level-headedness.

1. Guess what? Technology has changed marketing!

Everybody knows that email, the web, and the rise of social media have changed and are continuing to change the practice of marketing, so naturally these are changing the way marketers respond to a downturn in the economy. Specifically, whether companies are faring well or are struggling right now, online marketing plays a key role in their plans to weather the current storm.

They are, however, using the technology for different reasons and to different ends. On the one hand, those companies that experienced growth in 2008 are concentrating on using online capabilities to deepen customer insight, analyze their behavior, and continually improve the effectiveness of their digital marketing efforts. On the other hand, the strugglers are increasing their reliance on interactive marketing for increased efficiency and cost-savings.

You might not expect a graphic designer working as part of a program support center housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to say, "The majority of work I do gives me creative freedom," but that's exactly what Chris Spangler, who is represented by Aquent's Baltimore office, told me when I spoke with him last week.

I gave Chris a call because a poster he had designed on assignment won first prize in the Combined Federal Campaign of the National Capital Area (CFCNCA) Communications Contest. (To see his winning entry, you can click here.) As it turns out, designing posters, which he has done for everything from promoting IT security within the agency to celebrating Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month, is just part of his job at HHS (or, more accurately, SAMHSA/PSC). He has also designed and illustrated annual reports, brochures, and info-packs, he's designed logos and updated brand identities for various governmental programs, and he's even had the chance to serve as photographer at meetings with ambassadors and other functions.

"Working for the government is great job security," Chris says, but what really appeals to him is "... feeling like your making a difference by helping people with the stuff you're creating. I've designed a book on preventing bullying, I worked for a year and half on materials related to 9/11, and I put together a publication on responding to bio-terrorism attacks. You've got to look for different ways to find satisfaction in your work and these types of projects help do that for me."

In this third and final installment of our podcast mini-series, we speak with Carol Burke, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications at AMN Healthcare. Carol discusses how she makes sure that her team is using the marketing channels most preferred by AMN's constituents and what she does to create marketing content with a life beyond marketing.

You may listen to Episode 3 here:

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Image courtesy of pingnews.

In this episode, I speak with Jim Hauptman, Creative Director and Managing Editor at LL Bean. Jim addresses the complexities of "multi-channel" marketing, an approach that seeks to leverage the specific advantages of diverse channels, as opposed to "multiple channel" marketing, which tends to push the same message or content through many channels. He also reveals how winter camping off-sites can lead to great marketing insights.

Listen to Episode 2 here:

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Image courtesy of davelanders..

In conjunction with the webcast we're presenting today, I interviewed a few folks we work with and asked them how they coordinate their marketing messages and programs across a variety of media from print to web and beyond. I then created a three episode podcast mini-series of these interviews.

In this episode Dave Harrell, the Director of Advertising at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, talks about some of the grassroots, infotainment marketing efforts that his group has undertaken recently. In doing so, he also discusses the processes they follow to keep messages and branding consistent from channel to channel and audience to audience.

You can listen to Episode 1 here:

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You can download this podcast by "right clicking" ("control clicking" on the Mac) this link, Episode 1 MP3, or check out The Talent Blog Podcast feed.

Image courtesy of jimbowen0306.

Following last week's AMA webcast, Successful Creative Briefs: Linking Business Objectives and Creative Strategies, sponsored by Aquent, we convened a virtual roundtable to continue the discussion of best practices in producing effective creative briefs. Our panelists were:

Andy Epstein - Director of Graphic Design and Print Production at BMS Studio, the in-house design agency at Bristol-Myers Squibb
David Haskell - Senior Writer at Digitas, a leading interactive and direct marketing agency
Michael Hunter - Marketing Director for Whirlpool's KitchenAid brand
Sheri L. Koetting - Principal/co-founder of MSLK, an award-winning graphic design agency

I moderated the discussion, which lasted a little over half an hour. For your listening convenience, I split the entire thing into three parts as noted below.

Part 1 - Best Practices: Thoughts on Putting Together Great Creative Briefs

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Part 2 - What Creative Briefs Can (and Can't) Do

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Part 3: Using Creative Briefs to Manage the Creative Development Process

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Thanks for listening. Please feel free to share all comments and criticisms with me, Matthew Grant!

"How do you like me now?"

John Moore of TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE fame led a breakout session called, Growing a Brand. Growing a Team, at the 2006 In-HOWse Designer Conference mentioned in a previous post. During this session, the participants discussed how to spot what I'll call, people you really don't want to work with (they had a much more colorful and evocative name for them), during interviews.

The session came up with something dubbed, "The 'I' Exam," the underlying principle of which is that people who are not "likeable" will tend to take undue credit for work they did on projects or as part of teams by claiming, "I did this" or "I did that." "Likeables," or "people you really want to work with," will stress the "we" of what they've done even when describing their experiences as team or project leaders.

While the reliability of this "exam" is debatable, it does highlight something very important about job interviews. Interviewers are not only curious about your credentials and the skills you will bring to the job. They also want to figure out if it will drive them crazy to be around you for an extended period of time! In other words, whether they admit it or not, interviewers are deciding whether or not they "like" you.

The obvious recommendation that you should use "we" when talking about work you have accomplished with others is irrelevant here. Indeed, there is very little you can do to make yourself more "likeable" (apparently, human beings make that sort of decision within the first seconds of meeting someone). This human tendency to evaluate others based primarily on first impressions leads many companies, and even government agencies, to institute explicitly structured methods of interviewing, which work to decrease the emphasis on "likeablity" and increase focus on competencies essential to success in a particular role. [More on preparing for structured and behavior-based interviewing in a future post. If you want to read what the United States General Accounting Office says on this subject, go here - Matt]

There is at least one lesson to be drawn from this. In the interest of taking a more active approach to interviewing, it's critical that you use the interview as an opportunity to consider whether or not you like the people you'll be working with, the role itself, and the overall work environment. Considering whether the position you are interviewing for fits into your career goals and meets your personal ambitions constitutes a different sort of "I" Exam along the lines of, "Do I see myself professionally satisfied in this place with these colleagues working on these projects for the foreseeable future?" Though that might come-off as "egocentric" and borderline "unlikeable," it is the mindframe that separates the active Job Seeker from the relatively passive Job Applicant.

In-house creative studios have a mixed reputation. Detractors discount them based on the assumption that agencies have cornered the market on high-end design (and believe that in-house just can't do it). Champions extol their unparalleled familiarity with the brand and the significant cost-savings they often provide. Some designers shy away from jobs on in-house teams for fear that it will limit the type and range of projects they encounter. Other designers appreciate the work-life balance that an in-house career can afford, and come to realize that the variety of work they are exposed to has more to do with the business and design philosophy of the parent company, than it does with the designation "in-house."

Whether it's true that at an agency you'll always work on the coolest things, or that "in-house" you'll go to seed creatively (which I don't believe is true, btw), is beside the point. The fact is that more and more marketing organizations are turning to in-house groups to design and execute a wide variety of marketing programs. They have a growing professional association, InSource, and the folks at HOW Magazine just hosted a sold-out conference built around the issues faced by In-House Creative Managers.

As it turns out, the consulting group at the company I work for has an idea or two about how marketing organizations can increase their own effectiveness by leveraging the capabilities of in-house creative groups. The president of Aquent Consulting, Nina Eigerman, presented these ideas during an AMA webcast entitled, aptly enough, How to Maximize Marketing Spend by Increasing the Role of Internal Creative Services, on Thursday, November 9, 2006. To view this webcast, go here.

If you are a marketer and want to know what in-house can accomplish for you, or if you are a designer working for or managing an in-house group and would like to know how to improve its performance (and even it grow it), then you should definitely check this out.