Author: Tim Leon

Climbing the Mountain of Interactive Infographics

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Climbing the Mountain of Interactive Infographics

Creative

I’m a Mount Everest Freak! I’ve read all the survivor books including Into Thin Air and Left for Dead. While my chances of getting to Everest anytime soon are slim (like a snowball’s chance in hell…pardon the pun), I came across one of the most engaging infographics I have ever encountered, called Scaling Everest. It’s an interactive infographic published online by the Washington Post that takes you on a virtual climb up to the peak of Everest – all from a simple click or swipe of your mouse.

In addition to serving up interesting factoids and visual eye candy, the infographic incorporates sound. Three different Everest explorers Lydia Bradey, Pete Ahtans and Suze Kelly were interviewed, and sound bites of their interviews are interspersed throughout your “climb”. Hearing these voices makes your virtual ascent even more memorable and authentic.

I found myself scrolling to the top and absorbing interesting information forgetting that I was staring at a computer screen, engaged in the moment. I finally came out of my trance to rush to an agency meeting (where I was already 5 minutes late – but hey, I was climbing Everest so it was an acceptable excuse).

What I loved about this interactive infographic is that you could “climb” Everest at your own pace. You were in control of the experience. Interactive infographics are starting to appear more often, and I think this particular infographic demonstrates the experiential nature and engagement power of this digital medium.

While video has its place in the digital space, the interactive infographic brings that same engagement, but it isn’t passive. You are more of a participant in the experience. I’m looking forward to bringing this medium to all of my clients, but in the meantime, let me share this awesome Everest experience with you!

Enjoy your climb…then get back to work!!!

Want to talk infographics? Or how about creating meaningful content that engages your audience? Let’s chat. Fill out the form below, and we will get back to you within 48 hours.

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The Hell With Extension, Put Digital Media Advertising First

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

The Hell With Extension, Put Digital Media Advertising First

Advertising

Strategy and Planning to Digital Media Advertising

We conducted a webinar this past week for clients, entitled A Strategic Approach to Digital Media. We included our strategic partner, Goodway Group, in the presentation. It was a successful webinar and it got me thinking about the predictive nature of planning and buying digital media advertising.

Digital Media Advertising
PointRoll developed a helpful infographic showing the evolution of digital advertising.

With the tracking software and tools available today, information about consumers’ online media habits and interests, among other characteristics, are readily accessible to marketers. This information includes the best time of day to serve up digital ads, certain days of the week that the consumer is more likely to be online, frequency of which customer needs to be exposed to ad before taking action and even more.

Taking Advantage of Digital Media Advertising Opportunities

To target prospects, Goodway Group uses a real-time bidding model that serves advertising based on existing consumer data as well as online habits. Instead of buying digital inventory beforehand from media partners with the hopes of reaching the right target audience, Goodway segments audiences and places media where the target is. There’s no guessing game, just getting your message in front of the right people. Digital advertising is then placed/served through behavior targeting, contextual targeting, search retargeting, and more.

In the big scheme of things, I can’t think of a campaign we are working on that DOESN’T have the need for a digital advertising component; the challenge is we can sometimes back ourselves into thinking of digital as only an extension of a campaign. The hell with extension, putting digital first in planning is the key to making digital media advertising a reality in your next integrated marketing communications campaign.

The Impact of Digital Media Advertising

We are seeing digital media advertising everywhere. Consider these facts from the Advertising Age Marketing Fact Pack 2015. Digital advertising was the fastest growing ad medium in 2014 with 18.4% growth. People spend more time on the Internet than watching TV (273 minutes per day for TV vs. 346 minutes for internet). It’s no coincidence, heh?

We partnered with Goodway Group and held our webinar to display our commitment to digital media. Are you interested in learning more about what we do, or what digital media advertising can do? Download your own copy of our Webinar Presentation!

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Why Universities Should Consider a CMO

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Why Universities Should Consider a CMO

Advertising

According to Chris Lucas, VP of Marketing at FormStack, 35% of universities have a chief marketing officer on staff. My belief is that this number will continue to grow in 2015 as universities focus more on their brand and how to bring a consistent brand experience in the highly competitive higher education market.

Formstack’s research goes on to say that universities with CMO’s are 49% more likely to have strategic marketing plans. It makes sense right? A strategic marketing plan ensures a coordinated branding effort across all schools and departments within a university. Not an easy task, but CMO’s in large companies do this all the time. They are quality control for brand, messaging and customer experience. The research report points out that 45% of higher ed professionals think their marketing department needs more focus on brand. No surprise, that’s what CMO’s are wired to do.

Whether its admissions, student relations, alumnae relations, institutional advancement or any other area, it’s one brand and how that brand message translates to each specific area of the university is critically important to how your audiences engage with your university.

Finally CMO’s bring accountability to the marketing function and that’s music to the ears of university administration. CMO’s bring a wealth of knowledge in the areas of CRM and marketing automation. Being data-driven in their roles, they realize the power of technology to nurture relationships and build brand awareness among those ever elusive millennial and adult education target audiences.

As a marketing communications firm who has the opportunity to work with talented CMO’s across a variety of industries, it’s always beneficial to work under a CMO who can clearly define the brand and develop solid strategy against each of the target audiences. So, consider a CMO to elevate your brand and ultimately your enrollment.

Tim Leon is President, Brand Strategist at Geile/Leon Marketing Communications. For more information on our experience in branding for the higher education category, give Tim a call at 314-727-5850.

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Example Personas to Improve Messaging

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Example Personas to Improve Messaging

Advertising

Most marketers focus on traditional target audiences when creating advertising messages, which usually includes age range, gender, income, education level, etc. But, this information doesn’t outline who your target audience truly is. What happens day-to-day that impacts their job, what they buy and who they are as a person? Do they have kids? Are they taking care of their elderly parents? Maybe they are solely focused on climbing the corporate ladder. Whoever they may be, painting a picture of who the person is allows you as a marketer to gain some insight into how your product impacts your customers (and what messaging will impact them). That’s where crafting personas comes in.

At Geile/Leon, we develop personas for our own marketing efforts as well as for our clients. We find that it helps us to create more targeted messages, improve our creative approach and puts us in touch with our clients’ audience. Below are examples of a few of our own personas that we’ve created.

Healthcare_Personas Healthcare_Personas

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Increasing Patient Volume Requires Thinking Like a Patient

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Increasing Patient Volume Requires Thinking Like a Patient

Branding

In this increasingly crazy world of healthcare marketing, it’s easy for healthcare marketers to lose focus on their role in helping increase patient volume. In a recent whitepaper G/L published A Special Report to Healthcare Marketers: Success awaits Those Whose Patient Care Includes Understanding the Cares of Patients, patients respond best to marketing campaigns that elicit confidence and hope in their care and future health. So if healthcare providers want increased volume, they have to appeal to what patients want most from their healthcare experience.

Building patients confidence in your facility can be accomplished by highlighting expertise. That may include clinical expertise of the staff, specialties offered, latest technology/procedures and how well the physicians and nurses communicate with the patients, providing them guidance and support throughout the healthcare experience.

In terms of providing hope, that can be a little esoteric in how you satisfy this emotional need for a prospective patient. It starts with what I mentioned above, as well as with creating an internal campaign that builds a patient-focused culture.

Creating that internal campaign and culture may include customer service training and orientating staff to communicate with patients. Patients want to see the staff’s love for the profession and genuine desire to care for them. Doug Doransky, author of Autumn Sister, chronicles the journey of his brother and terminally ill sister says, “Above all else in my opinion, when people get sick, their automatic and immediate wish is find hope and get well. To achieve that, they wish to find a facility with the highest expertise, geared toward what they have. The level of care and courtesy is important also, but hope and the chance to get well is primary.”

How does this lead to additional volume? Studies that poll consumers as to what motivates their healthcare decisions find word of mouth and healthcare provider websites as ranking the highest. Providing the best experience leads to positive patient reviews, which leads to more patients.

So as you begin plans to increase patient volume now and into next year, think about the patient point of view in developing your plans.

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Children’s Home Society of Missouri

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Children’s Home Society of Missouri

#GLSTL25

I know many of you have charities that call on occasion and offer to pick up used clothing/small household goods. For years, my family has donated to Children’s Home Society of Missouri. I would have to write CHS on the bags/boxes that we put on the porch for pickup, and I always imagined that this was some type of a home for disadvantaged children.

Well, I’ve learned CHS is so much more than that, and recently I was selected to be a member of their board. During my orientation, I was blown away at the breadth of services they offer families and children with disabilities. No one in the St. Louis area is doing more exciting and innovative work in this field. I had a new appreciation for where my clothing was going, and how it was benefitting the organization.

CHS was founded in 1891 providing children with a permanent, safe and loving home. The founders Herman Bollman and Reverend C.W. Williams were pioneers in the emerging field of child welfare and envisioned a society that would provide homes for neglected and abused children. Since its founding, the organization has grown and has recently moved to a new location to house their expanding clientele and services.

In addition to offering residential and respite care for children with developmental disabilities, CHS offers education/counseling services for adoptive parents and children, foster parents and children as well as pregnancy counseling and parenting skills education for teen moms who have a child diagnosed with a developmental disability.

They do AWESOME work. And they need our support. So back to the clothing thing! Please get on the list for charity clothing pickups. Make sure to designate CHS as your Charity Preference. Or you can call 314.416.1300 and let the telephone operator know that you want to schedule a pickup for Children’s Home Society. You will receive notification when they are in your neighborhood.

CHS has their annual dinner auction coming up and the theme is Big Hopes, Big Dreams…Big Easy Dinner Auction. It’s on Saturday, August 23, and it will be my first time attending. The event provides critical resources that help support the over 1,000 children and families who received services at CHS. If you want to join me, here’s more information. Hope to see you there.

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It’s Brandolicious

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

It’s Brandolicious

Branding

I read an interesting article in the New York Times recently on the growing trend of marketers making up words of their own in place of real words. They’re disregarding all those great “real” words from the Webster College Dictionary (all 988,968 of them) and generating new, more interesting and memorable invented words in order to create some ownership and branded terminology. But why?

While there’s nothing new in the marketing world about making up words that describe your brand or brand identity, it’s interesting why there has been such resurgence. Sprint’s solution to a “friends and family” calling plan is simply called, ‘Framily.’ TJ Maxx coined the word ‘Maxxinista’ to describe their fashion-forward, value conscious customer. I’m one of them!

There are a couple techniques to creating a brilliant made up word and using it to build your brand. First, take two common words and smash them together. Take the word turkey and vegetarian, and you have the famous Butterball “turketarian” campaign. Easy. Or take a portion of the brand name and use it as a verb, like in the case of Mountain Dew – “This is How we Dew.” How about “Lets Go Krogering” or “Google it.” It’s fun and memorable. And many times, it’s an effective strategy to strongly tying in the brand promise or key brand messaging

There seems to be a strong digital advantage to these made up words, which could contribute to this resurgence. The New York Times article quotesMick McCabe, Chief Strategy Officer at Leo Burnett USA in Chicago, who said, “What’s different is the speed and velocity of the cultural uptake of language. Social and digital platforms provide the ability for something to become a widespread cultural phenomenon very quickly. It’s a feeding frenzy for material that the world of technology provides.”

So start thinking about a new word to describe your brand or brand experience. It may not make the Webster Dictionary, but you may create a valuable asset that helps give your brand a much-needed “lift.

As far as that Butterball “Turketarian” campaign, according to Bill Klump, Senior VP of Marketing at Butterball, the campaign — in print, radio and social media — “is working so well that we’re expanding into TV spots, starting next month.”

That is brandolicious in my book.

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Understand People & You’ll Understand Business

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Understand People & You’ll Understand Business

Advertising

Simon SinekA little over a week ago, a couple G/Lers and I attended an event at COCA (Center of Creative Arts) with world-renowned marketing and leadership thought leader, Simon Sinek. To my surprise, the discussion focused on a compelling topic separate from his book Start with Why. Sinek raised the question: What makes great leaders and great management teams? (more…)

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Making It Mean Something For 23 Years

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Making It Mean Something For 23 Years

Branding

This past Saturday, November 3, marked 23 years in business for Geile/Leon Marketing Communications. We celebrated with employees on Friday with a lunch and a presentation from our management team titled, Make It Mean Something.  (more…)

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Celebrity Spokesperson: Can they benefit the brand?

Tim Leon
President/Brand Strategist

Celebrity Spokesperson: Can they benefit the brand?

Advertising

With the popularity of branding today, the question becomes—can a celebrity spokesperson enhance brand image and positively predispose customers to the brand. There is no right or wrong answer here, but our belief is that you have to pick the right spokesperson. Here’s some insight on how to do just that! (more…)

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