Digital Marketing Blog

Why Marketers Should Consider Using Responsive Web Sites

Josh Studley — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 16:25:00 GMT

Apple’s success with the iPhone paved the way for smartphones in every shape and size. According to Morgan Stanley, mobile Internet use is set to match traditional desktop web use by 2014. To meet the demand of these always-connected devices, websites need to be viewable by smartphones, desktops and tablets equally. Responsive web design fills this need by building one site that adapts to all devices.

Responsive web design allows your website to resize itself depending on the screen size of the browser view it. This means visitors don’t need to access separate pages for mobile and desktop browsers, and you can avoid the cost, complexity and margin of error in managing multiple sites. With responsive designs, your site can change its layout, navigation and content to suit the browser. Add to this, different images can be displayed to compensate for the lower screen resolutions common on many mobile devices.

One way developers handle responsive web design is the with the use of a fluid layout. While a fixed layout has fixed dimensions that don't change with the size of a browser, a fluid layout adjusts as the browser resizes.

Some Trade-Offs

Using a fluid layout common in responsive sites helps avoid the use of scrollbars or content disappearing outside of the screen. It also adds complexity for developers to predict how content will adjust on different screen sizes.

Fluid layouts work well on mobile devices but might leave a lot of whitespace and stretched content on larger screens and desktops. A hybrid approach can be used to get the best of both situations: a fixed layout on desktop browsers with a fluid layout on mobile. Creative styling and javascript can move content around the page while hiding as showing others. In the diagram below, the same design (indicated by colored content boxes) can be adapted to multiple browser sizes. From left to right:

iPhone 3
iPad (landscape)
iPad (portrait)
Desktop

StudioPMG’s corporate website uses a hybrid layout approach. Navigation on the mobile site moves from the top of the page to a series of large buttons. The banner is smaller on the mobile site to fit the screen width.

Marketing Considerations for Responsive Sites

Knowing how audiences use websites also helps determine how to present content and navigation. There are a numher of things to consider when deciding whether to use responsive site designs. Here are some guidelines to think about when you create the requirements for a responsive site, including:

Mobile users often are not seated at a desk, but are rather ‘mobile’ and may not have much time to spend on a website. Tailored mobile content needs to show the most important information.
Images and text should be large to make viewing and reading easier. Large buttons allow more surface area to tap instead of text links.
Visitors expect to scroll mobile pages up and down but not left and right.
The screen should fit comfortably between the sides of the screen without the need to ‘pinch-and-zoom’.
Navigation cannot use menus that rely on mouse over actions as smartphones don’t use mice.
Use of mobile friendly words helps users identify calls to action such as the word ‘tap’ instead of ‘click’.
Mobile sites can also leverage the smartphone’s map, GPS and phone for added functionality.
Desktop pages can make use of more complex navigation and present more content. Visitors have more time to spend on the site and will read more content. Visitors will make use of search features more frequently on a desktop browser, as a physical keyboard is easier to use than the virtual keyboard of a smartphone.
Desktop browser navigation can be more complex as well with rollover states and multi-level dropdown menus. Desktop sites have more room for sidebar content and advertising choices.

Without question, mobile ready sites are important today and will gain more importance in the next few years. Future proofing your website with responsive web design can help deliver your content to widest audience possible. How many of you are using or considering responsive websites today? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Our New Digital Marketing Demo Reel

Ryan Malone — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:45:00 GMT

When you're busy doing great work for clients, it's tough to pull away long enough to share what you've created. So we finally got around to sharing some of our recent work in a new demo reel. Enjoy!

4 Ways to Weave Marketing Messages Into Interactive Experiences

Ryan Malone — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:00:00 GMT

As technologies advance, the world of marketing continues to make fundamental tectonic shifts that are rewriting the rules of the industry. It’s not enough to have a clever slogan, catchy jingle or a memorable commercial. New marketing messages require tactics that blend creativity with interactive experiences.

How To Integrate Marketing Messages into Interactive Experiences

QR codes
QR codes are popping up everywhere—magazines, storefronts, brochures, billboards, television ads and more—and with good reason. When used correctly, QR codes can be a major tool that can help enhance the interactive experience of delivering marketing messages for current customers and prospects. Use the codes to help users view your website, connect with your company via a text message or phone call, enroll in a newsletter, acquire more information or even save your company’s contact information into a cell phone. In addition to saving precious space on an ad, QR codes give assured way of connecting with your target customers immediately.

Mobile apps and websites
Mobile apps and marketing is here to stay--many experts (including us) believe it will fundamentally change the way we think about marketing. Mobile sites and apps make it easier for consumers to use or access your products and services, learn industry news or have a enjoyable experience with your brand. The beauty of this technique is that you can use it as a discrete way to introduce marketing messages. For example, a popular fast food chain created a mobile site that allowed users to connect with their highly recognizable mascot by gaining special access to the mascot’s (fake) cell phone contacts and pictures, having the mascot send the user text messages or saving the mascot’s contact information to their own phones. While the core marketing message wasn’t apparently obvious, it ingrained brand recognition and provided a simple way to access more information about the restaurant chain if desired.

In addition, companies can use a mobile app or website to relay a discrete marketing message by providing users with valuable tips, fun experiences (e.g., games), interactive experiences (e.g., the ability to check-in), insider information and more. The key is finding what the target customer values in a mobile experience.

Free products delivered via a mobile or traditional website
Consumers love free products. While giving items away for free can seem counterproductive to a company’s bottom line, such a campaign can actually help an organization save money, increase its reach and conversion rates, and encourage ongoing (paying) business. Free products that companies often offer online include games and downloads, like music, ebooks, how-to guides and informational packets. Freebies can be an ingenious way to build trust, brand recognition and a loyal customer base, as well as establish a company as an industry go-to expert. Plus, every time a consumer uses (and shares) the freebie, the company is associated with the experience and the company's brand is exposed to a new potential customer.

Kiosks that offer a solution
Human interaction isn’t dead when it comes to weaving a marketing message into interactive experiences. Use your presence at an event to give prospects and current consumers an experience they didn’t necessarily expect, but definitely appreciate. Gaming companies that sell consoles and hand-held systems, for example, have used this angle to their advantage by offering a family-bonding experience at public events. By allowing free use of their consoles in an area that was set up like a home living room, the companies captured the opportunity for consumers to try their product. If you have a quality product, conversion rates can be very high with these tactics.

During the holidays, various companies took their marketing message a step further by offering a boredom-busting experience at malls: while the parents shopped, the kids (and significant others) could try out different games on the company’s hand-held game systems free of charge for an unlimited amount of time. This interactive experience allowed for free product testing and a multi-faceted marketing message without having to say (or print) a word.

These are only a few ways to weave marketing messages into interactive experiences. What did we miss? Share your feedback in the comments below.

3 Ways to Use Interactive Games to Increase Marketing Knowledge

Ryan Malone — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:30:00 GMT

A key marketing responsibility involves learning everything you can about your customers. Some marketers ask outright, but if customers find it intrusive, they may stay quiet or feel self-conscious about their answers. Other marketers monitor web behavior, but it can take months to get a clear customer profile--and that still may not provide insights about specific customers.

But there's a third way: interactive games that provide plenty of insight but don't put people on the spot.

Games are hugely popular among nearly all market segments. Don't believe me? Take a look at your Facebook wall! We've have seen first-hand that interactive games can help them promote their products. But marketers often don't realize the power these games have in segmenting customers and determining their needs and wants.

If you want to get to know your customers, have them play games. You'll attract more visitors, increase engagement, increase app downloads, and get more insight into how they can grow into your next best customer.

Try out these fun ideas and see for yourself.

Track Behavior and Attitudes Through Simulations

Marketers already use games to measure response rates for various campaigns and products, but they're also useful for finding out how effective certain messages and visuals elements are.

Suppose you create a game where players can build empires or become business tycoons. How players interact with key features tells you a lot about them, including:

Allows players to customize their avatars to discover which items they prefer
Lets players choose from several in-game rewards and determine which incentives most appeal to them
Tracks when and why players buy merchandise to get a better sense of how they make purchasing decisions in real life

Player data helps you assess how people respond to your products, which incentives entice them, and how they ultimately decide what to buy.

Gauge Expertise Through Trivia

Even players who consider themselves experts can fall short in trivia games, but most games cover a wide swath of general knowledge. Games geared specifically to measure players' expertise can show you who really knows their stuff.

Most games come in one format, like true-or-false or fill-in-the-blank. But mixed-format games are more fun and offer more insight. Multiple-choice questions help you measure players' basic knowledge, while open-ended questions provide a more nuanced view. But these games unlock other insights as well. Measuring response times indicates how quickly players can recall facts, demonstrating expertise and uncovering potential keywords for your SEO strategy.

When you understand the player's level of knowledge, you understand how to approach them in future sales and marketing campaigns.

Determine Product Strategies with Content Creation

Players are much more open when they use their imagination. Their ideas tell you a lot about their personalities and what they want from companies they buy from. It helps them segment themselves.

You might offer a game where players build the perfect widget. The game would include fields for drawing the widget and writing descriptions of it. As the player creates, the game stores their choices, verbiage and preferences. This can then be used to create products or product variations that you already know they'd like. The benefits are powerful: the player has fun and your building your product roadmap. Lexus did a fantastic job of this with their Lexus CT200h.

The ideas are endless. Pair yourself with a firm whose team comes from the gaming industry and you can create some really powerful marketing tools.

Interactive games are fun, but they're also valuable for getting to know your customers. Take advantage of interactive games and make segmentation more fun. What creative marketing applications do you have for games? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Sunshine Act Compliance Through Digital Content Fulfillment

Christian Mouritzen — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Convention lead-management systems are increasingly going digital and one of these solutions is especially noteworthy: digital content fulfillment. It enables healthcare, biomed and pharma companies to more cost-effectively capture, qualify, and analyze, trade show leads, while complying with the latest Sunshine Act requirement.

How E-Fulfillment Works

Typically, touchscreen displays in the booth are connected to computers such as iPads loaded with lead-management software. After easy scan (bar code, mag stripe, RFID), the system allows attendees to self-select which documents and videos they want and queue them for delivery.

These systems can instantly e-mail requested information so there is no delay to attendees. Attendees like the ability to have a custom experience rather than a canned presentation, while sales reps get records of the documents that were sent and whether they have been downloaded. This enables a richer follow-up call experience for both reps and attendees. Moreover, being able to track what content was most requested helps trade show marketing managers more effectively focus future exhibits.

Let’s take a closer look at the key benefits offered by a digital content fulfillment system.

1. Regulatory compliance
The Physicians Payments Sunshine Act is part of the sweeping 2009 Affordable Care Act. It requires companies to record and report any physician payments and give-aways worth more than $10.00; this data will be made public yearly. The cost impact will be significant; the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates the Sunshine Act will cost manufacturers collectively $195 million in the first year alone; physicians will spend an extra $24,000 the first year to monitor and review the required reports and $13,000 each year thereafter.

Using a digital content fulfillment system helps companies keep track of any transfers of value across conventions and meetings; most systems enable capture and matching of NPI numbers with badges, matching of hospital affiliation and reporting of items gifted to attendees.

2. Cost savings
A digital content fulfillment solution allows you to stretch exhibit budget dollars. That’s because significant cost savings are realized by decreasing convention literature printing, shipping and drayage costs. No more boxes of literature that end up discarded at the end of the exhibit; no more panic due to lost or misplaced literature shipments before the show.

3. Lead analytics
Today’s increasing demand for metrics to justify marketing programs, including exhibit participation, is a key benefit to a digital content fulfillment system. Many systems include marketing analytics that provide both marketers and sales reps with deeper information on booth attendees.

4. Engaging attraction
Digital content fulfillment offers attendees an interactive experience that moves the engagement from a basic lead-capture situation to a more engaging brand experience. Companies are finding that the volume of digital content offered can spark unexpected conversations and even buying as attendees explore the digital catalog.

What to Look For In a Digital Content Fulfillment System

When seeking a digital contnet fulfillment solution to satisfy the Sunshine Act, consider the following key requirements.

1. Ease-of-use
An intuitive navigation and solution layout that is simple to understand and navigate makes the experience satisfying for attendees.

2. Engaging user experience
You need to draw attendees into your booth to learn about your products. Select a system that will provide a rich, meaningful and memorable experience.

3. CRM/SFA alignment
Look for systems that provide backend integration to CRM and SFA tools. Without this feature, leads can be duplicated while collected data lost because there is no corresponding field for data in your CRM.

4. Sunshine Act compliance features
Your system should enable you to match NPI numbers with attendee badges, include warning systems to prevent accidental illegal gifting, and provide a reporting of items given to attendees.

How is the Sunshine Act affecting your trade show marketing plans? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

8 Tips For Leaving a Quick Creative Brief on Voicemail

Ryan Malone — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:01:00 GMT

You’re in your car on the clogged 405 freeway, heading to the airport to catch a flight to New York. You are mentally crossing off items on your must-do-before-boarding-plane-and-turning-off-cellphone list. With about two minutes left until your flight, there's one last thing on that list – send the details of a creative brief to your digital marketing agency for your next campaign.

A creative brief essentially outlines instructions for work to be done by the agency. It’s an incredibly useful tool for focusing the efforts of the creative team. Here are a few tips to help you deliver a clear and concise voicemail creative brief:

1. Overview – What is the overall project scope and goal? Are you introducing a new product? Reinforcing an existing brand position? Trying to drive traffic to a new digital app or improved online site?

2. Most important concept – This is the key takeaway for the creative team to spring from. What is the big idea? What one key thing do you want to express?

3. Deliverables – Website? Social media campaign? Digital animation video? Mobile app? Say what specific tools you need from your agency.

4. Primary audience – You know your target markets better than anyone; explain who your audience will be for this campaign.

5. Tone – What image are you trying to convey? Do you want to project a friendly/casual tone or one that’s more formal?

6. Top features/benefits – Try to summarize in one sentence the unique value proposition and key features/benefits of your product or service compared to the competition.

7. Budget/schedule – What is the target date for campaign rollout? What is the budget for the project? If you don’t yet have a specific approved dollar number, try to provide a range.

8. Don’t wants – It’s important for the agency to know anything you definitely don’t want to see in a campaign. If you hate ads with dancing animals or irritating spokespeople, say so.

Now that we’ve passed along these tips, you can concisely deliver a creative brief without sounding like one of those fast-talking radio ads. Tell us about some funny ways you've used voicemail to get your work done? Leave your comments below.

5 Areas in Which to Use Mobile Apps in Healthcare

Ryan Malone — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Mobile health apps are evolving as fast as the platforms upon which they run. The increasing sophistication of platforms like the iPad means that health apps are moving past simple calorie-tracking or exercise-diary programs and into real medical functionality. Pharma and medical device companies are jumping onboard and rolling out mobile applications targeting both medical professionals and their patients. These companies get it – by creating a positive digital brand, they enhance their image and build a solid collaborative relationship among themselves, their customers and the patient end-users.

Healthcare mobile applications are largely organized into five key areas. Let’s take a brief look at some companies bringing innovative mobile products to the market:

1. Monitoring
WellDoc’s Diabetes Manager is a mobile app for diabetes and health management system monitoring that received FDA 510(k) clearance in 2010. Patients can use their mobile phone or iPad to enter blood glucose data, carbohydrates ingested, and medications; physicians access that data, analyze it and provide real-time feedback if needed to adjust care. A recent study found that patients who used this app to help manage their diabetes had better outcomes than those using traditional methods.

2. Diagnosis
Mobile MIM is an FDA-approved app also noted as one of the best for the iOS platform. Mobile MIM is a diagnostic imaging app that physicians and imaging professionals can use away from their workstations to review X-rays, ultrasounds, PETs, CTs, and MRIs. It has tools for viewing and managing images, as well as local and cloud storage capabilities. It enables medical professionals in remote locations to consult with peers on challenging cases.

3. Education
Boston Scientific launched the CardioTeach iPad app late last year for physicians. It is used in patient consults to discuss cardiovascular disease. The app covers a variety of conditions, such as atrial and ventricular arrhythmias, coronary artery disease and heart rhythm disorders. High-quality graphics and user-friendly content help healthcare providers more effectively explain heart disease conditions to patients and their families. It includes anatomical illustrations, the ability to overlay pacemakers onto those illustrations and to email complete graphics and information to patients, caregivers or other healthcare professionals.

4. Treatment
AirStrip Cardiology’s mobile app combines wireless mobile transmission of ECGs, digital visual enhancement and touch screen capabilities as well as automatic access to historical data, enabling more informed and timely treatment decisions by cardiologists. It is both FDA-approved and HIPAA-compliant. Doctors can view an ECG anywhere, anytime and so provide remote patient care.

5. Sales/Marketing
Mobile apps in pharma and device industries aren’t just for physicians and patients. Some well-designed apps for sales reps and marketers help them maximize their efficiency in the field. These apps can increase selling time, provide more consistent presentations across a salesforce, and enhance information exchange with customers. Medtronic has enthusiastically embraced the use of iPads for its employees. ItsMedtronic App Store is a secure website that company employees can access for a variety of business and medical education mobile applications.

Medical apps are here to stay and sure to become fundamental healthcare tools. What experiences and challenges have you faced developing mobile apps for your healthcare, pharma or medical device applications? Leave your comments below.

Three Tactics For Better Medical Device Marketing Engagement

Rick Thrasher — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:00:00 GMT

With health care professionals’ (HCPs) rapid adoption of tablets and smart phones – digital is quickly becoming a powerful option for medical device and pharma marketers to drive more engagement with prospects. This is a boon to sales teams looking for more qualified leads and more sales-ready prospects.

Here are three tactics to help medical device marketing and pharma marketing teams increase customer engagement and improve lead conversion.

Choose the Best Marketing Channels

It’s not quantity – it’s quality. Not how many channels, but making sure you’re on the right channel. In a recent MMA roundtable, experts cited better results and customer engagement when the focus is on using the channels your audiences like.

Today’s HCP is far more likely to read news online or via mobile. According to Fierce Mobile, the average person now spends 65 minutes a day viewing content on a mobile device and about 40 minutes reading print. And with the high adoption rate of iPads (and smartphones among physicians (27% and 72%, respectively), an integrated digital (web and mobile) strategy is a must.

Focus on Engagement

Make them yours. Get them involved with your product and your brand. Get them to participate and interact (see the last paragraph of this article link). This is especially true of complex sales propositions common with new drugs or evolutionary treatments. Use technology to simplify your unique selling proposition and engage the audience. This works for both HCPs and consumers.

Entertaining experiences such as interactive videos, games and educational tools can be quite effective at appealing to the interest of prospects. Combining these tactics together can drive engagement even further. For example: a quick video animation showing a drug’s mechanism of action followed by an interactive educational game and finished off with a short testimonial from a patient or expert HCP.

Educate for a 360-Degree View of the Physician

You’ve taken them through an experience, now take them one step further—or actually closer to you and your brand. Provide content that not only helps them make a decision on your product—but shows them how to ensure high patient satisfaction. This means developing materials that address best recovery tips, best practices, post-treatment regimens and expectations, etc.

By placing these behind a form—or at least identifying the physician downloading the materials—you’ll gain valuable information about what matters to individuals HCPs. And keep it simple. You really only need an email and phone number to continue the dialogue and move the prospect to the next step in the cycle. Physicians will appreciate it. Sales will appreciate you.

What tactics have you used to increase engagement? Leave your comments below and let’s discuss it.

Photo credit: Toca Boca

Success Story: Convention Interactive Marketing in Animal Health

Ryan Malone — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:45:00 GMT

With DTC advertising often so focused on human pharma, it's easy to forget the complexity and broad pet market. Marketers face many of the same challenges targeting veterinarians as they do traditional physicians.

With many of its brands like FRONTLINE® and HEARTGARD® considered to be the gold standard of veterinary medicine, Merial Limited sought an engaging and entertaining interactive solution that would create interest in various drug product lines, particularly at industry conferences where there are opportunities for one-on-one conversations between sales representatives and veterinarians.

To achieve these goals, Merial selected us to create an integrated interactive experience for Merial’s exhibits at major animal health conventions. This integrated experience featured integration of RFID to deliver personalized content for attendees, educational gaming, data capture, marketing analytics and reporting. The interactive experiences included:

Interactive Commitment Wall and Kiosks

Through this user-generated experience, veterinarians and technicians demonstrated to their peers their commitment to animal health. In this unique experience, attendees began at a kiosk in which they had their picture taken, chose a commitment statement and physically signed their support to animal health. These images were combined into a commitment tile that was projected on a large commitment wall—one of the main attractions of the exhibit. As more tiles were completed, the message Healers. Helpers. Heroes. appeared on the mural.

VetQuest Challenge Multiplayer Game

Through this 5-player iPad trivia game, attendees could test their knowledge of Merial products against their peers. The best scores were placed on a leaderboard for the rest of the convention to see. This provided a fun way to learn about the benefits and advantages of various Merial products. TheVetQuest Challenge was successful in bringing veterinarians and technicians back to the Merial booth multiple times to play the game.

Pharma Marketing Insights From the Larta Institute Panel Discussion

Ryan Malone — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:16:00 GMT

If you've ever seen the Eat This, Not That series of books, you'll know that the author focuses on the behavioral changes that can help you lose weight. Branding is no different. Early-stage biomed companies don't have to "eat" the same as the more established ones.

This week, I had the pleasure of being part of a panel discussion hosted by the Larta Institute and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). If you're not familiar with the Larta Institute, they are a non-profit, professional services firm that helps turn government-funded innovations into commercial enterprises. The Larta Institute works with clients that range of U.S. governmental agencies to regional agencies around the world.

The panel targeted early-stage biomed companies to help them with marketing and branding as part of Larta's commercialization training workshop. Joining me on the panel was Ravi Sawhney, CEO of RKS Design and Scott Fox, author of Internet Riches and e-Riches 2.0.

Like many start-ups, early-stage biomed companies are challenged with how to efficiently allocate marketing budgets and to choose the most effective strategic path with regard to corporate and product branding.

You'll often hear marketers recommend multi-day branding sessions and significant investments in the look and feel of the corporate brand. But this should not be the hard rule for early-stage companies. There is too much to lose by not thinking differently here.

Early-stage companies should consider investing against the grain, focusing initial branding investments on the systems that will enable them to make better decisions tomorrow.

Here are four things early-stage biomed companies should consider:

1. Start measuring enagement now

It's true. Data drives better decision making. Invest early in the ability to capture and interpret marketing analytics. These insights will help you learn more about your customers and how they interact with your message and your products.

Brand impact: Marketing analytics provides you with a distinct understanding of what your customers want and what channels they prefer to receive it.

Marketing impact: The more value you provide customers and prospects, the more loyalty they will have to your brand.

Even if you don't have the bandwidth of resources to act on all these insights, collect them now. The historical insights will be invaluable when you are ready to act.

2. Dig deeper with personas

Early-stage companies are often in a hurry to get to market. While they may invest time in defining the target customer personas, marketers often don't go deep enough.

For example: assume you were bring to market a new cardiac device that was appropriate for certain situations.

By just defining marketing personas as cardiologists, you may be casting a net too wide. Instead include the details about a physician's practice that make them more likely to treat that specific condition.

Brand benefit: Physicians will appreciate your deep understanding of the nuances of their practice, and it will be more likely that you're seen as the expert in that space.

Marketing benefit: By refining these personas, you'll eliminate sales and marketing waste by only targeting those physicians most likely to adopt your product.

3. Mobile is already here. Adopt it.

Many early-stage companies still look at mobile as something that's "around the corner." It's here today, and it can make a huge impact on your business.

Mobile presentation and selling tools lead to more efficient detailing from your reps. Developed properly, they eliminate the calls spent fumbling through folders to find a chart or supporting data. Now with only a few taps, you can quickly get to the materials that make the most impact.

Add analytics to your mobile tools, and you'll indentify the selling best practices that make your best reps...well, the best. Then take this information, and replicate how they approach sales calls. Now you'll have the opportunity to raise the overall performance of your sales team.

Brand impact: Your customers will appreciate your respect for their time and tailored message.

Marketing impact: You'll have a clear view of how your sales team utilizes the tools you've provided. With this data, it's easy to invest more in what works and end-of-life what doesn't.

4. Tap Into Competitve Personalities

Physicians are competive people. They've been competing since undergrad. Combine that with the fact that everyone likes playing games and a unique marketing opportunity presents itself.

Educational games drive message recall. Using educational games that test product or disease, diagnosis and treatment knowledge can be a great way to drive home your marketing message.

Why?

Repeat play. Using public scoreboards or leaderboards, we've seen physicians play games ten or more times to see their name in lights. Considering that each new game attempt exposes the player to your message, message recall will be higher.

Add to this analytics that measures game performance, and your sales reps will know exactly what to focus on during the next visit.

Brand impact: Your physician will appreciate time spent on value-add discussions rather than information he or she is already familiar with.

Marketing impact: You'll ensure your most important messages are driven home to customers and prospects.

What other early-stage tactics have you seen successful with biomed companies?

Two More Awards for the Southern California MS Challenge Walk Documentary

Ryan Malone — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:00:00 GMT

We're happy to announce we received two more awards in the Best Shorts Competition for our pharma marketing work. One Award of Merit was awarded in the short documentary category. The other Award of Merit is in the directing category. Both awards were for work with client Acorda Therapeutics on the Southern California MS Challenge Walk Documentary.

The Best Shorts Competition recognizes film professionals who demonstrate exceptional achievement in craft and creativity, and those who produce standout entertainment or contribute to profound social change. Entries are judged by highly qualified professionals in the film industry.

The Southern California Challenge Walk MS Documentary is about Team OptiMiStic, a group of seven women, five of whom have multiple sclerosis (MS), who walk 50 miles in three days during the 2009 MS Challenge Walk. The documentary follows their progress from Carlsbad to San Diego, California, sharing their personal stories and demonstrating how teamwork and friendship walk hand in hand.

The documentary can be viewed on the I Walk Because website, which was developed by StudioPMG to help its client and movie sponsor, Acorda Therapeutics, increase awareness for the MS Walks fundraising events and provide a forum for people to share their MS experience with others.

The Biomed Convention Walk of Fire [Cartoon]

Ryan Malone — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:30:00 GMT

You don't have to be a ringleader to better engage physicians at medical conventions. With some good interactives and a compelling experience, they'll engage you.

Boston Scientific's SmoothWave: A Medical Device Marketing Case Study

Ryan Malone — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:35:00 GMT

Boston Scientific tasked StudioPMG with creating an interactive educational game to help physicians better understand the advantages of using its new product technology as an option in reducing chronic neuropathic pain in the back, trunk or limbs. Dubbed the SmoothWave™ Challenge, this large touchscreen experience combined educational content, interactive gaming and a leaderboard to increase engagement with physicians.

The SmoothWave Challenge is played on a large touchscreen display presenting an illustration of a patient’s spine and nerves that transmit pain signals. Physicians play the game by touching a contact that sends an electrical impulse to mitigating the pain impulse before it reaches the brain. A metered scoreboard (indicating the amount of pain the “patient” feels) shows how the player is doing during the game.

The game has two modes meant to demonstrate the improved coverage and effectiveness of SmoothWave Technology over conventional neuromodulation. In conventional mode, fewer pain impulses are intercepted, resulting in a higher level of pain and a lower score. In SmoothWave mode, the player can intercept more pain impulses and yield a lower level of pain and a higher score for the player.

The physicians with the highest scores are placed on a leaderboard, demonstrating their expertise to the other physicians at the convention and instilling a sense of competition among them.

Take a look at the video below to see the game in action.

The Legal Review Fast Track [Cartoon]

Ryan Malone — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:20:00 GMT

If you've worked in product management or marketing for a pharma or medical device company, you likely understand the legal and regulatory review process.

Introducing PMG Cartoons.

Here's the first in a series of fun little comics that celebrate marketing within these industries. If you like it, click to the left and pass it along.

Have an idea for a cartoon yourself? Let us know, and join in the laughs.

Advanced Marketing Analytics – Part 2: Behaviors Today, Behaviors Tomorrow

Ryan Malone — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:15:00 GMT

In the first post of this eight-part marketing analytics series, I discussed the importance of multichannel analytics in creating a more comprehensive view of customers. In the next few posts, we’ll dig into the different types of insights you can develop from multichannel marketing analytics and their benefit to marketers.

Behavioral Analytics – The Foundation

Behavioral analytics looks at patterns of consumer behavior (defined for the purposes of this article as either customers and prospects) and how those patterns can impact future behaviors.

Put simply, how consumers interact with today has a lot to say about how they will engage tomorrow. What interactions am I referring to? Interactions are events such as user gestures in a mobile application, participation in one more experiences at a convention, how far a consumer progresses through a video online, or which case study or brochure a customer downloads.

When marketers layer these data points together, it can shed significant light on an individuals’ preferences and interests—a key factor in determining future behavior, creating more accurate segmentation and driving better campaign results.

Unfortunately, the broad adoption of web analytics packages like Google Analytics has led many marketers to believe that behavioral analytics are solely web-based—tracking anonymous click-throughs, page exits and aggregate goals as the measures of success. Sure, these web-based tools have their place—even we use Google Analytics for some data analysis. But the real power of behavioral analytics comes when you measure the behavior patterns of individual named consumers across multiple channels—web, mobile, kiosks, games and others—to build a 360-degree view of your customers and prospects.

Example: Behavioral Analytics in Pharma and Medical Device Marketing

With the accelerating adoption of digital and mobile within the pharmaceuticals and medical device industries, many marketers are looking toward analytics to optimize their marketing ROI and selling strategies.

Here’s an example:

A pharmaceutical company invites physicians to a convention to learn about current products and compounds in their pipeline. They re-badge each visitor as they enter the exhibit. As physicians engage with various interactive experiences and kiosks, their interactions with content are recorded—gestures on touch screens, scores from educational games, how much time is spent with current and pipeline data, literature fulfillment requests, etc.

By combining the interactions of each physician across exhibits, marketers build a much better understanding of the type of visit that can help salespeople add more value. Now they can move from simply a “trade show lead” to providing strategic recommendations about how the salesperson can engage most effectively.

Prior to the sales call, the rep personalizes his or her iPad content to match the preferences and interests identified during the convention. As the salesperson shares content with the physician, gestures, content and the time spent with individual pieces of content is measured. These additional insights help marketing refine the message, offer and education materials to increase revenue with this physician and increase their loyalty to the brand.

Better yet, by applying some statistics, marketers can determine which sales behavior and/or marketing content are correlated to the highest revenue contribution. This means being able to eliminate what doesn’t work and double-down on what really moves the revenue needle.

More advanced multichannel analytics solutions integrate directly with existing CRM platforms to ensure that these insights are usable across the sales organizations. They also provide multiple reporting and dashboard options for executive management to visualize high-level trends and key behaviors of their target market.

In the next post in the series, we’ll talk about attitudinal insights and it’s the benefits to marketers.

Think about your own business, customers and prospects. How much behavioral data could you be capturing and optimizing for? How might behavioral analytics improve your marketing returns? Leave your comments below—I’d love to hear from you.

6 Ways Advanced Marketing Analytics Can Predict Better Results (Pt 1)

Ryan Malone — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:09:00 GMT

According to a study by eMarketer.com, online ad spending in the U.S. is projected to climb from 25.8 billion in 2010, to 44.5 billion dollars by 2015.

Marketers are increasingly reaching customers online by leveraging mobile and web applications. Digital is even infiltrating formerly offline channels like print, retail and live events in the form of scannable barcodes, RFID tracking and interactive kiosks and displays. B2B marketers that rely heavily upon mobile devices for education and selling—such as pharmaceuticals and medical device companies—are increasingly looking for ways to develop a more comprehensive view of their customers.

Yet with all of these new data-rich digital marketing channels in play, many companies still struggle with integrating data across channels to extract the insights they need to truly know their customers.

The Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2011, by Ecoconsultancy, studied the use of multichannel analytics across more than 800 clients from 2008 until 2010. According to these results, more than three quarters of businesses surveyed admit they have no current procedure for collecting and leveraging multichannel analytics.

Many companies are spending millions on mobile and web campaigns, but without any data or strategy to back-up that investment. As mobile applications and digital marketing channels continue to grow, it is paramount for businesses to integrate data across these and other channels.

Earlier this month, Nielsen, the leader in audience measurement, recognized the growing need for multichannel analytics when it acquired Marketing Analytics, Inc., a marketing analytics software firm. Founder of the company, Arthur Nielsen, had the prescient knowledge to once say, “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness."

Seeing the Light: True Multichannel Analytics Solutions

Customers interact with brands in different ways. It’s the combination of all of the channels -- web, mobile, live-events, retail and more, and how customers and prospects interact with them, that gives a 360-degree view of the customer.

To fill some of these gaps, many companies are investing in multichannel analytics software solutions that integrate with existing CRM, sales and other platforms to provide a 360-degree view of their customers. Multichannel analytics solutions will aggregate data for each customer and channel and deliver several useful categories of insights. The key is to utilize uses data and historical information to provide forward-looking analytics in these six areas:

1. Behavioral: Captures behavioral data in gestures, clicks, time spent with content to learn how customers interact with marketing content.

2. Attitudinal: Integrates demographic and other insights provided through surveys and response channels to provide a glimpse into the customer's mindset and attitudes to future products and services.

3. Propensity: Uses historical purchase and survey data to predict the likelihood of purchases and attrition.

4. Segmentation: Builds customer profiles based on demographics and user behavior and enables increased targeting and selling accuracy.

5. Geocoding: Provides location-based information to enable custom marketing messages based on audience location, language or regulatory issues.

6. Lead Scoring: Assigns value to previous customer behaviors and determines which customers have the highest (or lowest) probability of buying.

By incorporating multichannel insights, companies can gain the insights they need to increase marketing ROI and sales effectiveness. In subsequent posts, we’ll talk about each of these analytics and why they are important.

What is your experience in using analytics to improve your decision-making? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo credit: griraffe

StudioPMG Grabs 3 Awards for Pharma Marketing Work

Ryan Malone — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:00:00 GMT

It's always great to get feedback from your peers. When you win peer-reviewed awards on behalf of a client, it's even better. In June, we won three awards for our pharma marketing work with Acorda Therapeutics.

Stevie Award - Best Pharmaceutical Website

StudioPMG won a Stevie Award for Best Pharmaceutical Website. Acorda tasked StudioPMG to update the branding and messaging of the site, including a redesign to target Acorda’s core audiences, integrate with its PR and investor relations tools and present a robust grant application system to the community. StudioPMG also developed the website’s design look and feel, user interface, user experience, content and functionality. The site can be viewed at www.acorda.com.

Bronze Telly Award - Documentary

StudioPMG was awarded a Bronze Telly for its Southern California Challenge Walk MS Documentary. The documentary is about Team OptiMiStic, a group of seven women, five of whom have multiple sclerosis (MS), who walk 50 miles in three days during the 2009 MS Challenge Walk. The documentary follows their progress from Carlsbad to San Diego, California, sharing their personal stories and demonstrating how teamwork and friendship walk hand in hand.

The Southern California Challenge Walk MS Documentary can be viewed on the I Walk Because” website at http://www.iwalkbecause.org/, which was developed by StudioPMG to help its client and movie sponsor, Acorda Therapeutics, increase awareness for the MS Walks fundraising events and provide a forum for people to share their MS experience with others.

Bronze Telly Award for Public Relations

StudioPMG also won a Bronze Telly in the public relations category for its “Employee Profiles" video content on the Acorda.com website. The “Employee Profiles” campaign is a series of videos introducing Acorda employees to the company’s web audience in an effort to show the company's nationwide presence.

The short videos showcase the human side of Acorda, its passion for and commitment to the patient, and the ability for the employees to bring their diverse expertise together toward the goal of bringing remarkable new therapies to patients and physicians. The “Employee Profiles” videos can be viewed at http://www.acorda.com/About/OurEmployees.aspx.

4 Content Management Problems Solved by Native Mobile CMS

Ryan Malone — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:30:00 GMT

The discussion of mobile websites vs. native mobile apps comes up frequently with both clients and prospects. While this debate is fodder for a separate post, the vast majority of clients choose to utilize native mobile apps rather than mobile-friendly websites.

Going the native mobile apps route offers a far more rich experience through videos, images, games and more interactive experiences. However, with this rich media come sizable applications that can present several content management challenges.

Fortunately, advances in content management system (CMS) technology are helping marketers address some significant issues to ensure mobile content reaches its destination. It helps marketers achieve their goal of moving toward native apps without the trade-offs.

Here are four major challenges solved by native mobile CMS solutions:

1. Low upgrade rates

Apps that contain rich media—the kind that perform best in many mobile and sales environments—can be large. A new application may take hours to download, even with the best 3G/4G connection. As a result, mobile workers are less likely to download the new app. This means a field team that is not in step with the latest tools, content, pricing and resources.

Fortunately, native mobile CMS solutions address this problem by upgrading only new or updated content. This means faster downloads and less inconvenience for reps. The result is higher upgrade rates and better alignment with the home office. More advanced solutions will queue content based on file size and bandwidth—holding the largest files until it detects a broadband connection.

2. Obsolete customer insights

Successful salespeople will tell you to collect a new piece of market intelligence during every call. Mobile apps help formalize this process by reminding reps to log responses when they visit a client. Unfortunately, without the ability to rotate new questions, you’ll be limited in the amount of marketing insights you can collect—and the ones you’ve already collected may be stale by the time you upgrade the app.

Native mobile CMS enables you to rotate survey questions in the same fashion as content, creating an opportunity to collect real-time marketing insights that represent the pulse of the market. This can mean the different between success and failure in many industries.

3. Poor integration with CRM

CRM solutions (e.g., salesforce.com) are critical for most sales executives. As a result, many companies require apps that integrate with CRMs to ensure that any activities and customer insights are attributed to the correct lead, contact, opportunity or account. However, it often doesn’t make sense to import all insights into the CRM. This means synchronizing contacts between the CRM and the mobile app becomes critical. Unfortunately, without the ability to dynamically update customer and prospect lists on the device, salespeople are forced to download the entire app (see problem #1) and can quickly fall out of sync. And missing contacts mean missed sales.

Fortunately, native mobile CMS addresses this issue by continuously updating customer lists and the unique identifiers that link them with the CRM. This gives reps a real-time view of their customer base and access to the most current sales tools—without inconvenience or painful app updates.

4. Integration with existing CMS systems

Mobile apps are still relatively new to most organizations. While companies have invested heavily in traditional web CMS systems, many of these systems don’t extend well to native mobile apps. Worse yet, many companies have also refined processes for versioning, approvals and publishing content to various websites.

So how do you integrate the two? Many native mobile CMS solutions are designed to offer full CMS functionality independently or integrate with their enterprise web counterparts. This means a seamless system that leverages existing process to deliver content to the field.

As mobile apps continue their penetration into the enterprise, these challenges will only get amplified. What are your thoughts? Leave your commends below.

Award-Winning Walk MS Documentary Debuts on the Big Screen

Joe McBride — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:35:00 GMT

The Southern California Challenge Walk MS Documentary debuted at the Anthology Dinner Theatre in San Diego on Monday, June 13th. The documentary is about Team OptiMiStic, a group of seven women, five of whom have multiple sclerosis (MS), who walk 50 miles in three days during the 2009 MS Challenge Walk. The documentary follows their progress from Carlsbad to San Diego, California, sharing their personal stories and demonstrating how teamwork and friendship walk hand in hand.

It was a much-anticipated evening designed to showcase the film which was produced by StudioPMG and is a winner of a Bronze Telly Award. The event commenced with a red carpet reception as the over 100 guests excitedly reconnected and mingled. The women from Team Optimistic were accompanied by their families and friends, and were also joined by representatives from the National MS Society and from the project’s sponsor, Acorda Therapeutics.

Promptly at 8pm, the crowd was seated and I had the pleasure of introducing the key individuals who brought the film to life including Acorda team members Maria Verastegui, Erica Wishner, Tierney Saccovino, and NMSS Special Events Director, Jennifer West.

Watching the audience enjoy the film was very rewarding for me. The audience experienced a range of emotion from laughter to tears as they were immersed in the 42-minute video that chronicles the challenges these women face. In many ways, the challenges these women face living with MS parallels the 3-day, 50-mile journey.

The evening was capped off when the stars of the documentary—Team Optimistic themselves--took the stage and shared further details about the events that transpired in the film and their plans for the future.

To see some fantastic photos of the evening, visit out our Facebook page. We’d love to hear what you think.

The Telly Award-winning documentary Southern California Challenge Walk MS Documentary is now live at http://www.iwalkbecause.org.

I also want to thank some notable attendees who helped make this premier the wonderful event it was.

Team Optimistic: Carlyn Shaw; Rachel Williams; Kelly Aydolette; Mellissa Walsh; Rabiah Coon; Alynn Etzler; and Portia Smith

Acorda Therapeutics: Maria Verastegui, Creative Director, and driving force behind this documentary; Erica Wishner, Director of Consumer Communications and Outreach; and Tierney Saccavino Senior Vice President of Communications

National MS Society: Richard Israel; Jennifer West; Larissa Roman; Julie Litchfield; Sarah Janssen; Jessica Read; and Debra Gruen

9 Ways Educational Gaming Increases Biomed Marketing Results

Christian Mouritzen — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:07:00 GMT

With the increased penetration of iPads, Xooms, SmartPhones, and fast Internet access, expectations for entertainment are exploding in the consumer space. Consumers expectations about brand experience are driving several B2B industries to embrace these engaging experiences as part of their marketing and sales programs.

Biomed -- the pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostics and biotech industries – is quickly adopting experiences that are more interactive and create a strong brand connection with physicians. As biomed shifts from traditional tactics such as text-heavy websites, laptops, handouts, light boxes, and flat screen monitors at events, significant opportunities exist for biomed companies to build rapport with physicians—and with it, brand awareness and sales.

The Importance of Educational Gaming

One of the most intriguing trends for biomeds is educational gaming. According to the Today’s Gamer International Gamers’ Survey 2010, consumers over age 50 are one of the fastest growing gamer segments. Combined with the already high number of 30 to 40 year old gamers, these gamers can be physicians, prospective patients or both.

Educational games allow the user to experience product features and benefits in a gaming environment—whether online, at events, or on a sales rep’s iPad. By playing, the player is learning about health issues, products and services and the best way to benefit from them.

Here are 9 ways educational games increase marketing results:

It’s often much more fun to learn about a product’s benefits by playing a game rather than reading literature--whether it’s on paper or on a screen.
Educational games are new and a refreshing way to learn compared to the traditional means.
It's easy to integrate competitive comparisons in educational games as part of game levels and experiences by focusing on specific product benefits.
When playing a game, the user is usually more engaged, paying close attention to what's required to maximize the score.
The time to absorb concepts can be much faster with a game than with paper materials because they utilize multiple senses.
Prospects are more open to providing contact information due to the value-exchange of the game experience.
Interactive games allow you to offer value-added information by drilling down through content, enabling the player to learn at their own pace and style.
The interactive nature of games enable marketers to identify the information prospects find the most compelling—valuable information for future sales calls and interactions with customers.
It’s much less bothersome for a rep to approach a prospect with a game than with a product presentation or literature.

Educational Games Should Be Medically Relevant

There is at least one critical issue to keep in mind when creating educational games for biomed companies: make sure the game provides realistic and medically accurate experiences or risk being seen as just another marketing gimmick.

While many interactive agencies claim expertise at educational gaming, it is important to utilize an agency who understands biomed and the challenges that are inherent in FDA regulations, accurate 3D modeling, and understanding medical product benefits.

Learn how to benefit from educational games

Compelling educational games can create a simpe, yet powerful differentiator for biomed companies looking to increase brand awareness and create affinity with physicians.

SCHEDULE A GAMING CAPABILITIES PRESENTATION

Biomed Success Story: Leveraging iPad Apps for Awareness and Advocacy

Ryan Malone — Mon, 02 May 2011 21:05:00 GMT

Last week, we announced a partnership with CHI—California Health Institute to develop a biomed iPad platform to help them grow their membership and promote industry growth. CHI represents California’s biomed industry—a group that includes leading innovators in pharmaceuticals, biotech, medical devices, diagnostics and research and academia.

According to CHI’s chief executive officer, David L. Gollaher, Ph.D., “StudioPMG and our new iPad app have helped staff members and members of our board become significantly more effective at communicating the mission and value of the organization.”

To learn more, read CHI’s biomed success story or view the video below.

5 Ways Content Planning Creates Better Interactive Marketing Experiences

Mark Johnson — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:00:00 GMT

It probably goes without saying: the goal of any interactive experience is to get the right message to the target audience. As simple as this is in theory, many marketers often find it difficult to achieve.

A major stumbling block occurs when other facets of the project supersede the content. Defining the content first enables marketers to establish key and specific objectives prior to production and ensures a higher probability of successful campaigns.

Content is King…Really

We are all probably familiar with this old axiom, but it often gets overlooked in practice. Other marketing initiatives or subjective priorities often guide the direction of our projects—often at the expense of the target audience.

Instead of a final product that clearly represents the marketing message, marketers often receive a strong interactive experience that fails to connect with the consumer.

Don't make your campaigns a gamble. Here are five content tips to consider when planning your next experience.

1. Don’t Start Creative Without Content

Creative is a critical part of the message, but often and unfortunately, ends up preceding content creation and planning. One of benefits of content planning is having more clarity of the volume, depth, and breadth of the content being presented. A designer tasked with developing creative for content that doesn’t yet exist winds up guessing at how it will reside in their designs. The result: those pages that looked so wonderful with “lorem ipsum” text now look too crowded (or too thin). Worse yet, you can end up with navigations that won’t work, poor usability, or forcing content into pages when there is no need.

2. Let Content Determine the Platform

Working within the framework of a content management system (CMS) is often beneficial and necessary. But for some initiatives, forcing the content into an existing CMS can cripple your message’s effectiveness. When determining whether a CMS is required, it is vital to consider the content, frequency of updates and cost of implementing a CMS. In many cases, it is more efficient and cost-effective to make updates manually or build a simple CMS for a specific task.

3. Long Forms Hide Content From Your Audience

As marketers, we’re often tempted with letting our own goals overshadow the needs of our audience. Remembering that the audience is focused on their own needs—not ours—is critical. Sometimes it’s that extra survey question, maybe its too much copy. We need to think of audience engagement as a fragile continuum that can be broken at any time. The greater a burden we place on the target audience without providing clear value, the more likely we are to see them disengage.

4. Don’t Break Content For SEO

SEO is a necessary part of any content marketing campaign, but forcing it can result in a poor experience for the audience. We have all seen pages that were obviously designed purely for search engines—often to the point of being unreadable. The key is to focus on audience needs first and accommodate SEO after that. Content planning should allow for the utilization of SEO but should not be entirely guided by it. Putting content first—even at the expense of search engine ranking—makes our pages more valuable to our audience.

5. Choose the Best Channels for the Audience

Content planning allows us to coordinate content across multiple channels such as mobile apps, kiosks, events or web. It lets us efficiently deliver marking messages for all platforms. Focusing on a single channel at the expense of all others affects usability and consistency between them. For instance, if we develop an experience on a kiosk, web site, and mobile device but focus our production on just one of those platforms, we can easily paint ourselves into a corner when the time comes to migrate the experience to the next channel. Content planning allows us to think ahead and maintain uniformity between channels and deliver the most compelling experience to the audience.

Bottom line: Let the content lead the strategy. You should be able to look at your final product and see it presented clearly and directly to your audience—across all relevant channels. If you spend more time on content planning—and resist the temptation to start creative too early—you can be confident your campaigns will have a much higher probability of success.

What other content planning tricks to you use to deliver the best campaigns? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo: Conorwithonen

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5 Digital Marketing Benefits of Games

Ryan Malone — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Games have been around since the beginning of time. I guess it’s our competitive spirit that attracts us to them. Without games, there would be no sports, no chess masters and no Monopoly. There’d be no Xbox 360 and no reality TV.

According to Dr. Jeffrey Taekman, director of Duke University’s Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center, “gaming platforms will offer an interactive way for students to learn and apply information in context.” For marketers, “students” can be customers, prospects and other influencers.

Whether through games of cooperation for team-based applications or educational games that test physicians’ understanding and diagnoses of diseases, games offer a medium that is highly engaging and a natural vehicle to deliver compelling content. And without engagement, learning is far more difficult.

Games can be equally as effective for on-the-job training. In a class at Loyalist College in Ontario, Canada, border patrol students were able to increase test scores from 56% to 95% through the use of games. Just imagine how effective an interactive surgery game would be at educating physicians on how to utilize a new medical device.

Aside from the educational and training aspect of games, they also provide significant marketing benefits by engaging consumers with a brand in a way that is entertaining and rewarding.

Here are 5 benefits of using interactive games in marketing campaigns:

1. Attract Visitors

Games are intriguing. Whether at a convention or consumer event, games attract people. They tap our curiosity. By utilizing games as a primary attraction for your events, you’re more likely to pull people from the crowd and engage them in the rest of your experiences. Even if they’re just spectators, you’re still delivering marketing messages with a good degree of focus.

2. Test product knowledge

Trivia games are a great way to tap into consumers’ competitiveness while testing their knowledge of a product or concept. Planned properly, a 10-15 question trivia game can identify the player’s knowledge of your products. Incorrect answers or long delays between answers can illustrate areas where sales should focus future calls. As a result, sales reps have the insights to make more focused sales calls that yield better outcomes.

3. Increase engagement

Head-to-head games are proven to increase player engagement—especially when the winner’s name is shown in lights. Using leaderboards that show high scores are effective at driving participants to play the game multiple times. Remember all the times you played Ms. Pac-Man to hit the high score? The same logic applies here, but if these players are customers or prospects that repeatedly experience the same marketing messages, the results can be significant.

4. Measure messaging effectiveness

Choose-your-own adventure games enable players to navigate the game based on the prompts they receive. From a marketing perspective, you can use choose-your-own-adventure games to test the importance of marketing messages such as features or benefits. Imagine a game where the player is asked to describe an object from a choice of three descriptions. With a large enough sample size, marketers can determine which of those messages resonates the most.

5 – Gather insights

Games that involve user-generated content serve to gather insights about the player. An example: We developed an iPad application for Lexus that enables consumers to create personalized artwork by mixing a landscape, a color and trim and using contrast and color adjustments to create their art. Consumers often select the preferences that they identify with the most. Using this data, marketers can segment consumers based on how they identify themselves—eco vs. sport or city vs. beach. This increases marketers’ targeting effectiveness and increases marketing ROI.

The application of interactive games for marketing purposed is almost limitless. What interactive games have you seen that make great marketing tools? Share your feedback in the comments below.

Coordinating Marketing Analytics Between Mobile Apps and Live Events

Jon Moss — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:40:00 GMT

You've just launched your mobile application. You survived the App Store approval process, or have published to the Android Market. You used industry mobile apps best practices to ensure that you'll quickly and effectively reach your target audience.

Your apps may even be capturing basic usage data: page views, ad impressions, social network interaction, registration, or demographics. And you may have the processes and software systems in place to load this data into your CRM or business intelligence tools.

Live Events are Powerful

But businesses require human interaction, too. You also communicate with your customers in live environments such as consumer intercept events, professional trade shows, retail environments. You're likely gathering valuable marketing insights here as well. You know how many attendees visited the event and can pull reports on demographics and booth traffic. You may even be measuring traffic patterns and heat maps on your kiosks to ensure your experience improves from event to event.

Your next step is building a complete picture of your customer or prospect as he interacts with both the digital and physical worlds.

How can you, or your digital marketing agency, easily correlate mobile marketing data with interaction in a live environment? Below are several tactics that will help marketing and sales professionals build a comprehensive view of each potential customer by combining mobile usage data with live event analytics.

It’s All About the Data

The first step in analytics is gathering data.

Let’s look at online applications first. Each interaction point within an application must have hooks into a data capture system—every time a user views an article, every time he shares content with his social network, every time he closes the application.

And this data must be tied to unique users across multiple platforms. A typical pattern is to incentivize registration before allowing access to certain features of the application such as content sharing and creation, localized searches, ratings or social interaction.

Much of this analysis is common—although some companies collect more useful data than others.

As an example, consider an application that allows users to search for targeted content based on current location. If I'm in Southern California for a cycling event, I'll want to search for repair shops, healthy restaurants and retail locations. And I won't be disappointed to see a few sponsored links show up in my search results.

Each impression and click-through on these search results can be tracked and tied to my user account. Interactions with featured and sponsored links can be weighted to show greater significance than just generic click stats.

What About Live Events?

Marketers in a live environment collect customer information in a different manner. At trade shows and conventions, attendees must register to attend. At consumer events, attendees register to receive giveaways or to participate in certain sections of the event. In retail environments, attendees can use registered gift cards or can sign up for mailing lists.

In many of these cases, the registration process can be simplified, leaving the participant more time and energy to interact with the rest of the environment. By using a physical tag or indicator that can be read by a mobile device, an attendee can quickly engage the physical environment without being burdened by additional registration.

Some common tags include 1-dimensional barcodes like those used to store retail SKUs, or QR codes that can store short messages or URLs. Each of these tactics are easily integrated into existing mobile applications and can be read in seconds.

Following the example above, imagine I am training for a marathon. I choose to eat at a healthy restaurant -- a restaurant that appeared first as a sponsored link in the search results. As I walk into the restaurant, the front door or host stand has a QR code placed on it. When I scan that QR code with my phone, it opens a page in the application providing information about menu options that fit into my personalized training plan.

Tie It Together

With data collection in the two environments -- mobile and physical -- tied together with a simple QR code, marketers can now gain deeper insight into customer behavior. Many leading marketing analytics tools will show customer interest and demographics over time, and can use this data to predict purchasing trends.

In our cycling example, the sponsor that paid for a top search result now has direct return on investment. I viewed the sponsor's link, and then traveled to the restaurant to complete my purchase. And as the app provider, I’ve delivered an integrated experience that provides the user the tools to run a better race.

Now the marketing team that developed that app can show a direct path between ad impressions on a mobile device and conversion activity in the physical world.

Don’t Forget Usability

The above points are proven tactics for marketers to gain the most value from interactions in a physical space. But all customer-facing applications have an important intermediate goal: providing value for the user, both as he uses the application and as he travels through the event or retail location.

Popular takeaways for consumers involve tying actions to a social network or to a product discount. Applications like Foursquare provide benefit as more users check in at a given physical location, applications like Groupon sell local retail discounts when a fixed number of users purchase, and applications like StickyBits combine the two patterns.

Companies who spend time upfront mapping the value of the collected data have an easier time delivering a cohesive consumer experience that generates return.

What Do You Think?

The tactics listed here are just a starting point. Drop a comment below if you have any thoughts about or experiences with using mobile applications in the physical world.

Photo credit: Plantronics Germany

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Share Your Insights in the 2011 Mobile Application Market Report

Chris Atkinson — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:50:00 GMT

You've undoubtedly read about or experienced the power of mobile applications. From iPhone/iPad to Android to Blackberry, mobile applications are fundamentally changing the way companies and individuals do business.

But many questions still remain:

What are the underlying reasons companies build applications?
What are the problems they want to solve?
What expectations do companies have when developing and marketing mobile apps--time, cost, distribution?
In what ways are companies integrating mobile apps with social media?
What is the dominant development model for mobile apps?

To answer these questions, StudioPMG is conducting research to create the2011 Mobile Application Market Report. This survey will take between 5-7 minutes.

The results will be provided under Creative Commons--in other words, you get the data for anything non-commercial.

All responses are 100% confidential.

Thank you for your participation and helping us all understand the power of mobile apps that much better.

The more participation the better, so your helping spreading the word via social media or forwarding the blog is appreciated!

TAKE THE SURVEY