There is a lot that can be said about these artists but as a small tribute, we posted this icon of Darth Vader on Dribbble which had us using original concept art as a guide when we began sketching out Darth’s head.

Take a look at the art below and enjoy!

(Special thanks to Luke Plunkett and his blog post)

David Whyte uses an open-source programming language called Processing to build animated gifs. What makes these gifs unique is that they are done with math, not a timeline. (see some of his work at the bottom of this post). Whyte, from Dublin Ireland is a PhD candidate studying the physics of foam. Yes, that’s right. You can check out his Tumblr called Bees & Bombs, as well as his Dribbble account to see more of his work. David is also available for freelance work.

This kind of sophistication with animated gifs got us to thinking about animation on desktop and mobile…

Back in the early days of the web, people would experiment with ways to animate the desktop. In the late 90’s there were Java Applet animations (check out this article from 1996) and animated gifs. Eventually animated gifs were killed off by a company called Macromedia, which came from a merger of Authorware Inc. and MacroMind-Paracomp.

Macromedia Flash (eventually owned by Adobe) became the defacto standard for animations on the web with it’s timeline and the ability to move pixels around the screen, until one fateful letter from Steve Jobs in the spring of 2010. Flash, through nearly ubiquitous across the desktop, was essentially forced to move in to more niche areas (gaming) once mobile (iPhone) came onto the site. Flash was just too cumbersome for mobile. Apple decided to strategically end that run.

But now, animated gifs have been making a strong comeback for the last few years. Why?

Generally speaking, animated gifts are less processor intensive, small in size, simple and allow designers to communicate (and animate) ideas that don’t require a plugin or any specific browser requirements. Brands are also starting to use animated Gifs within HTML emails but this does remind us of days where Flash just became too much for people. Flash’s demise was partially caused by overuse, often taken on for the sake of animation, versus having a specific purpose.

As an agency, we love animation. When executed correctly it helps us:

• Get people’s attention.
• Help communicate a thought or process.
• Adhere to the notion that 65% of consumers are visual learners (Source: Webdam)
• Create a ‘cool factor’.

What we’re not sure of yet, is the future of the animated gif?  Used properly it can be very effective, but time will tell.

From personal experience, though our clients have very strong email databases, there is nothing that even comes close to the effectiveness of email marketing. As with anything else involving digital, the industry is constantly morphing, social continues to dominate people’s time and mobile is becoming more and more of a factor. The state of email marketing will continue to change but for now, it’s still damn effective.

We’ve accumulated some data to shed some light on this oft overlooked form of marketing.

• 66% of online consumers bought something based on an email marketing message. (Direct Marketing Association)
• The most widely used email client is the iPhone at 26%. Think responsively. (emailclientmarketshare.com)
• 64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices. (TopRankBlog)
• 49 percent of marketers are sending more than 500,000 marketing emails annually. (Exact Target)
• Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. (Adestra July 2012 Report)
• When marketed through email, consumers spend 138% more than people who don’t receive email offers. (Source: Convince and Convert)
• 48% of emails are opened on a mobile device. (Source: Litmus)
• Emails that include social sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate. (GetResponse)
• For every $1 spent on email marketing the average return is $44.25 (yes, that’s an ROI of over 4,000%). (Experian)
• Email Marketing and Content Marketing go hand in hand. (Jivaldi)

Still, before you run out and start sending emails to your database, remember that content is important, people don’t like getting spammed, story-telling works, your customers like to feel special, and just be sure you send them something they want.

So let it be written…

There is a lot of talk about content marketing lately. At first glance, it seems just another buzzword that’s being thrown around by various digital marketing sages. Yet, before we (as an agency) position ourselves to be omniscient content wizards, we recently had to ask ourselves “what is content marketing?” – and “how does a company arrive at a content marketing strategy?”

These thoughts prompted even more questions, like:

• Does content marketing consist mostly of writing blog posts?
• Is it making sure that a company posts regularly to Social Media: Facebook, Instagram or Twitter?
• Can you share cool photos and imagery as well as text to ‘officially’ be marketing content?
• Is content marketing defined as getting other people to share your stuff?
• Does the content have to be about your company’s product or service or can it be about something else?
• Does it involve getting people to download a report or white paper?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all of these questions then you are on the right track. This newer form of marketing, as defined by the Content Marketing Institute (yes, there’s an institute), is as follows:

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

There is a good overview article on the Content Marketing Institute’s page about this very topic.

As we looked more closely at the practices of Content Marketing, we came across some information that we found quite interesting. Take a look.

People:

• 65% of your audience are visual learners? (Source: Webdam)
• Visual data is processed 60,000 times faster than text. (Source: Webdam)
• People spend more than 50% of their time online looking at content. (Source: AOL)
• 70% of consumers say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company. (Source: CMI)
• 60% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on its site. (Source: Content Plus)

Results:

• Website conversion rate is nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (Source: Aberdeen Group)
• 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI for their inbound marketing. (Source: HubSpot
• Average website conversion for companies with defined (Content Marketing) processes is more than twice that of companies without (5.9% vs 3.8%). (Source: Aberdeen Group)
• 41% of marketers confirm content marketing’s positive ROI. (Source: HubSpot)
• Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. (Source: Demand Metric)

Blogging:

• 61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post. (Source: IgniteSpot)
• B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not blog. (Source: Hubspot)
• Small businesses that embrace blogging see 126% more growth in terms of leads than those that don’t blog. (Source: ThinkCreative)
• Blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. (Source: Content Plus)

In the end, Content Marketing is real and effective if done properly. Companies can certainly bring this effort in-house or hire outside help. In any case, it’s not something that will benefit a company with a half-baked effort. It will require a lot of time, effort and resources, and the gains will only become visible over time. It’s not plug and play folks.

Here’s an info-graphic below on the topic created by Oracle, Eloqua and LookBookHQ

Why?

Because there are so many factors that influence the outcome of digital marketing projects. How you navigate the complexities, inherent risks, and traps of a design and development project will determine what option you choose– success or failure.

Common Mistakes
Even the most savvy marketers encounter problems that can adversely affect project results. Let’s take a look at some of the more common ones associated with digital marketing:

• Asking for the wrong project
  Some companies simply ask for the wrong project. Instead of pursuing a project that is aligned with increasing sales or attracting customers, for example, they can fall victim to their own ideas and ask for things that may seem logical, but that ultimately don’t make sense for the user. In other words, they spend a lot of time and money on a product that people won’t use, download or otherwise convert.
• Understanding the project scope
  It’s easy for a marketing team to kick out a project overview of what they are looking for an application, tool, or website, but the reality is that this vision and amount of work involved will often change. If this fact is ignored during the statement of work and proposal, problems will result. The scope of nearly all projects are inherently mercurial. It is critical that both the client and the agency understand this.
• Not focusing on users
  When egos get involved—and this problem happens on both sides—the project can easily get lost in ideas. As this process plays out, the single most important factor gets lost: the end user! By the time everyone is finished talking about their ideas, both sides have failed to step back, pay attention to the user data they have on hand, and determine the best method to engage their customer. In the end, it’s not about what the business wants, what seems cool, or what the agency thinks would look good in its portfolio–it’s about the user. All involved must not lose site of this!
• Ignoring your best friend: simplicity
  One of the most common errors seen in the digital industry is reluctance to simplify and launch a basic or stripped-down version of the website, app, or whatever is being built. The knowledge gained from your users by having a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in place will far outweigh the time and cost associated with launching a project with every feature on that fleeting target date that has already passed. By simplifying, launching sooner than later, and adjusting as you go, this customer and data-centric approach can reduce timeline and cost significantly when the process is executed correctly.
• Including “everything” in launch
  If the client isn’t ready for a MVP approach, or the product doesn’t support this type of strategy, there are still ways to scale back on those features that will be ready for launch. Even reducing a handful of lower-priority features for launch can have a significant impact on information gained from the product’s initial use and overall user behavior.
• Misaligning budget with scope
  Though self-explanatory, this one should not be overlooked. Every business wants to save money, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. However, the consequences of trying to eke out too much work from a digital team can undermine the creative process and turn the relationship into a contentious one. As with any relationship, both parties must benefit. If both sides take care of each other, creativity and good things will result.
• Understand who you are hiring and for what purpose.
  Attention all marketing directors, CTOs, CEOs, and other decision makers: If you want a designer, hire a designer. If you just need coders, hire a couple of developers. If you need a team of developers and want to cap your costs, there are some very good overseas options available to you. However, if you are looking for thought leadership – a team that thinks on its feet, can bring their experience to the table, and contributes to the success of your digital marketing efforts and overall direction of your business, then hire an agency. An agency should be hired to debate, offer counter-points, and push for directions that make the most sense for your customers. Giving these creative thinkers room to work, you’ll have a legitimate team at your side that will benefit your business.
• Discounting the unforeseen
  How many seasoned project managers can say that their original Statement of Work didn’t change from its original inception? Everyone from the CEO to the marketing director to developers and designers must understand this very basic concept: the scope and nature of the project will change—no doubt about it. Many of these changes come from subjective requests regarding functionality or design; however, a lot of them are attributed to foundational changes that need to be in place. For instance, in the middle of a build you realize your app doesn’t work with an updated version of a mobile operating system. It (shi#t) happens. Don’t forget this.
• Setting an unrealistic timeline
  Everything looks pretty good on paper when the project has been outlined, resources are in place, and the deposit check is in the mail. What could possibly go wrong? How about the marketing director having to tend to a sick child for a couple weeks, then Product Marketing comes down and says they’ve pushed back their launch date by 3 months—and thus, the campaign you are developing is now on the shelf. Then, during this lull, the agency brings on a new big client to fill gaps in its pipeline. Blam! That three-month project just turned into six plus months. Being able to adapt to updated timelines or restructuring the project and deliverables mid-flight are examples of ways that you can inject flexibility into a project and maintain good relations with your agency team. Both sides must work together here!

I’ve seen all too often so many companies come to the table with small budgets and tight schedules with a few delusions of grandeur in tow. For example, building a comprehensive social network for less than $20,000, or launching a fully functional, multi-phased web application in 30 days. The stories are endless, but there is hope!

Adopting the “Lean Startup” Methodology
Similar to a business venture—or anything else that requires effort, money, and time to build—a digital marketing project requires thoughtful planning and, perhaps more important, tempered execution.

Marketers would be wise to steal from the wisdom of entrepreneur Eric Ries, who developed the “Lean Startup” methodology for developing businesses and products.

Essentially, this philosophy seeks to eliminate wasteful activity and increase value-producing practices during the development phase, to provide a better chance of success without requiring large sums of money, elaborate plans, or the perfect product right out of the gates.

Customers—and Simplicity—First
One of the more critical elements to lean startup is ensuring that marketers and developers do not invest resources in features that customers don’t want, nor launch an overly functional product. By releasing a MVP that may not yet be finalized, you can leverage customer feedback and other key performance indicators to further develop and refine the product to specific user needs. This type of continuous development, progressive enhancement, and frequent course-correction can help significantly reduce effort, cost, and time—not to mention headaches—of a design and development project.

When in Doubt, Start Simple
If you are considering a large project with an agency, here is a piece of advice that will help you tremendously. It’s the equivalent of going on a date (or two) before you “pop the question”, and it’s an extremely simple concept: hire the agency to do a few small tasks for you. Have them update your site. Heck, pay them for a few consulting hours to simply critique your site or app and offer a few recommendations. Do anything that allows you to start small. The rewards of this are significant and will increase the chances of a lasting relationship.

Bottom Line
Too many digital marketing projects fail because marketers and developers do not understand the wants of their target customers, and because they focus too much time and energy on having the “perfect” product launch. This, combined with the fact that most decisions are being made by people sitting in a meeting room, guided by their own whims and subjective points of view, leads to extended timelines, costs and bloated projects. By starting with users in mind, launching a simplified scope sooner than later, and adjusting along the way, you’ll dramatically increase your chance of success with your next digital marketing project.

Isn’t that a better option?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

As we talked about in the previous post on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), CRO is a tool that is quickly emerging as a cutting edge way to ensure you are getting your money’s worth out of your website or campaign.

In December 2012, Econsultancy, an industry leader in analyzing trends and new strategies in digital marketing and e-commerce, posted an article entitled “Will 2013 be the year of conversion optimisation?” (In case you’re a grammar fanatic like us, that’s the United Kingdom spelling with an “s” there…) The article contains a great quote giving an easy to understand example of why CRO is so important. Craig Sullivan of PRWD, a major trend-setter in the field of Conversion Rate Optimization testing based in the United Kingdom was talking about the fact that too many companies spend too much money attracting customers to their website only to lose them without a sale or “click-through” after the customer has already browsed around their site. He compares you managing your company’s website to you being a manager at a real life retail store saying (remember we’re quoting a Brit, so “queues” at the tills means long lines of people waiting to checkout at the cash register),

“In real life you’d be able to see this (i.e. losing customers)—queues at the tills, narrow entry doors, messy floors, unhelpful staff, bad signposting—and you’d want to do something about it. Conversion rate optimisation lets you see these problems and fix them—so that you maximise the return from any footfall you’ve driven to your site.” (Jivaldi’s parenthetical comments added.)

When you think of CRO in terms of what you’d see in an actual physical store it makes it clear that CRO is something you need to be using for your website.

So how do you conduct CRO Testing? The concept is simple. Putting the more basic elements into practice on a rudimentary level can be as well. Perhaps you know how to change the color of your website’s “Call to Action” or “Buy Now” button. If you keep track of your “Conversion Rate” you can conduct a very basic test which might give you some useful information. Of course, the problem is that there are many variables that you are not testing in this situation—for example, are you testing the color changes at the same time of the year? How is the overall economy doing? Was there some significant or tragic event in the world that made people buy less or more of your company’s products or services that just happened to coincide with your basic CRO self-test? How many people from Europe clicked on your website when you offer local services in Wyoming so there would be zero expectation that someone in London would actually purchase your services? Is there a difference between a first-time website visitor and a customer who has purchased your products or services previously?

That may make this all sound just too complicated. But it isn’t necessary to start by looking at and analyzing EVERY variable. Valuable information can be learned by just limiting a few of the major variables.

For example, a quick fix is to have your CRO testing at random send an equal number of customers to different webpages covering the same product or service (you can watch the entire 17 minutes of the Dan Siroker video from Jivaldi’s first blog post on CRO to more fully see this concept and others). For example, let’s say you’re selling backpacks. On your website you have a page that shows all your backpacks designed for 5-day backpacking trips and longer. For our hypothetical example, when your potential customers click on a particular backpack to see a fuller description of the product, a true CRO test might automatically divide those customers who “click” on that particular backpack as follows:

• ¼ of the customers go to a page which has a product description, a LARGE PICTURE of the backpack and a “Purchase Now” button on the LEFT side of the screen;
• ¼ of those “clicking” customers would be sent to a page with a product description, a LARGE PICTURE of the backpack in question, and a “Purchase Now” button on the RIGHT side of the screen;
• ¼ of the “clicking” customers would be sent to a page with a product description, a VIDEO REVIEW of the backpack playing, and a “Purchase Now” button on the LEFT; and
• ¼ sent to a page with product description, VIDEO REVIEW playing, and “Purchase Now” on the RIGHT.

So, once you’ve done this for a statistically significant time, you can analyze the data and have some hard facts to work with in deciding how best to configure your website.

There are many websites and blogs that now have helpful hints about CRO. Here are some thoughts that Jivaldi would like you to consider as your business ponders how (and, of course “if” and/or “when”) to integrate CRO Testing into your online marketing strategy–some of which don’t seem to be talked about much in other blogs or articles:

1. Website traffic: CRO Testing tends to be more effective if you, or your web design and analytics consultants, have taken steps to drive web traffic to your site and that you have a solid foundation of traffic from which to work from.
 
2. Website Design AND Analytics Consultants: Having a great web designer that produces some great images for your website can be (and often is) very important. But you are not receiving all the help your business can use if all you have is a beautifully designed and maintained website. A better choice for your digital marketing agency might be a company that not only creates and/or maintains your website, but one that knows how to ask the right questions and test the correct variations in order to optimize your Conversion Rate. Of course, you probably already have a website—or, budgetary constraints may force you to initially hire a web design company that does not do CRO testing just to get a website up and running. If this is the case, PLEASE make sure that the web design company you use has a “humble pride” in their work and places an extremely high value on seeing you build your business. They need to be proud of their work, but humble enough to let a 3rd party company that is experienced in implementing CRO testing come in and manipulate your website (which they built, or are going to build). Make sure they understand your intention to use another company to do CRO testing as soon as possible. If you are your own website designer and you have the time, ability, and analytical expertise to do the CRO testing on your own, go for it. But this may be a good time to take a bit of your hard-won marketing funds and hire someone who can do the CRO testing for you—and maybe even take over some of your website maintenance and improvements. However you choose to do it, having a team that can merge their design skills with CRO testing and real data analysis can have a significant positive impact on your business.
 
3. Trust the CRO Testing: At least initially, the design of any particular website is incredibly subjective by nature–although there really aren’t that many people who are REALLY good at it. CRO testing will move you away from whims and hunches that guide and, unfortunately, often damage, a design process. Trust the data. It may seem unbelievable to you that the expensive video your company produced of the services you offer doesn’t generate as many sales as a still photo of a bucket of water, but if the data says the still photo works, it should be there. Even if that means that whoever initially proposed the video idea has to swallow their pride with a smile on their face.
 
4. Start Simple, But Look At The Big Picture: A testing process can be a very complex process, but it doesn’t need to be. This is especially true during an initial trial of CRO Testing. A small, lower cost project will reduce your risk and exposure as you begin this process. Coincidentally, a smaller, lower cost project also reduces the risk and exposure to your Internet Design and Analytics Consultant. At the beginning of your relationship your Internet Marketing Agency will be worried sick that if they do something simple like switch the “Buy Now” button to say “Add to Cart” and your sales go down a bit that—shall we say– “difficulties” will arise. (Remember Dan Siroker’s “Fail Fast” lessons learned from Jivaldi’s previous blog post on this.) Do all you can to pick a Digital Marketing Agency with a long-term track record, and, when you’ve hired them to do CRO testing “Stay the Course.” By all means give them your input, but the BEAUTY of CRO testing is that it eliminates whims, assumptions that seem correct, and even well-thought out reasoning that happens to be wrong. It gives you hard data to look at that should increase your productivity and profit. Look at the big picture and let the process work for you.
 
5. Think of CRO Testing as “Known” not “Unknown”: As long as humans have walked the planet, the fear of the unknown has been one of the prime motivators for either action or (often) inaction in our daily lives. Obviously, trying something new in a business climate that is currently very tough is somewhat of a scary process. But CRO testing and analysis gives you hard data to guide your decisions. There is actually more “Unknown” to be afraid of if you don’t implement CRO testing. Does the time your company puts into Twitter really help? How many of your Twitter followers are actually going to ever make a purchase? So your company has 1000 friends on your Facebook page—does that really increase your sales? Are you losing sales by having an orange “Buy It Now” button instead of a green one? If you don’t test these things, you don’t know. Remember that quote by Craig Sullivan of PRWD—if your website was a real life store you’d constantly be looking for and correcting small problems as you see them arise to increase the likelihood that your customers purchase today and return to purchase in the future. CRO testing is just looking around your “store” so you KNOW the problems and can fix them. If you are the chief decision-maker, choosing to embrace the “Known” of CRO Testing is relatively easy. If not, get others to buy in to this.

Your start in CRO Testing may just be a small, simple project, but do what you can to wisely start now.

Enjoy.

So I read this article today from NBC News, and it got me thinking. Jivaldi has been in the Digital game for a long time and we come across many personalities as we navigate projects and client relations. In the end, our goal is to naturally serve the clients’ needs and interests but also influence the client in a way that will benefit them, perhaps steer them in a direction in which they weren’t planning. One thing that continuously crosses my mind is how essential women are for making this happen and building a good digital marketing team.

To be a part of a team in a creative and service-oriented environment there are a handful of traits and skill sets that are needed when it comes to thought leadership, project management or  influencing the client so that they take advantage of the experience that a savvy online marketing team brings to the table.

1. Listening & communication skills.
2. Negotiation.
3. Influence.
4. Temperament.

These traits very much come into play when offering day-to-day services. And while us ‘guys’ certainly have these same abilities, I think that women may have an advantage in some of these areas.Why do these four traits help women navigate through digital projects more easily?

Women are:

Protectors:
For one, women are natural protectors, they take care of their own and with a maternal instinct they can be very loyal to their family/team.

Good Listeners:
Sorry guys, we pretty much lose hands-down on this one. Anyone who’s pitched business to that CEO – who may not know the digital space – but acts as if he owns it (no, not you Ryan). Whilst his ego hums like a well-oiled machine, he nods his head yes and is pleasant enough but immediately shuts down any ideas that aren’t his own. As for your team’s suggestion that he should consider options beyond the full screen video of himself – selling his company’s services–sorry, he’s made up his mind.

This, quite simply, is a man that is less likely to ask questions when he doesn’t understand something – a round-about way of saying that women just listen better. A woman will stop you mid-sentence and ask you to explain something she didn’t catch or understand. A man would sooner walk through fire than admit he doesn’t know something about digital, or anything else for that matter.

Less Ego Driven:
One has to understand that in creative, marketing and advertising we are often dealing with the subjective. And though analytics are a very important piece of the digital and advertising mix, we’ll save this topic for another post. Let’s stick to subjectivity for now.

With this ever-present  subjectivity, the agency must exert influence be it directly or indirectly. Women are quite good at this process because they are less likely to involve their ego in this conversation. Once the male caveman personality appears, it’s tough to get rid of (ask my wife!). Keeping the client egos at bay while the agency achieves objectives is absolutely a critical factor in helping the client achieve success online.

So consider this a quick shout-out to all the ladies out there who are pushing through a hectic and challenging digital space! Keep it up girls. As for me and the guys, well, less talking, more listening. As my wife likes to say, “less is more.”

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The end result we figured would be a scene of Yoda looking out of the hut. And now we had to go and create Yoda and the hut.

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Such a handsome old chap!

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We pulled as many pictures as we could find as to the shape of Yoda’s hut and wanted to get that authentic, part-of-a-tree feel for the hut.

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Kind of looks like a book-end or paper weight (wait, a product idea! ;-), but this was helpful in setting up the scene for us.

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It took a bit to get the lighting right, and we exaggerated it a bit, but we wanted to give a feel that the light was coming from a fire.

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And here is the final icon. We added the cracks around the window to give it a mud-hut finish.