The ability to reach consumers at every stage of their journeys has helped social media marketing become the most powerful factor in their purchasing decisions. Social has accelerated the speed of culture, and your brand’s ability to keep pace in this environment is central to its long-term success. That’s why we use data and insights to drive the quality of the content we create and the efficacy of the messages we craft. With this as our basis, we are able to forge memorable emotional connections that amplify results across earned, owned and paid channels.

A DATA-DRIVEN ECOSYSTEM

Friends, relatives, news publications, celebrities, and brands all compete simultaneously for the social consumer’s attention. In order to rise above the fray, we must determine what value your brand can provide to its audience; what will make them pause, take notice, and react to the content we place in front of them? Answering that question begins with a deep-dive look at how consumers are congregating, communicating, and consuming information in digital, and then using that data to inform activity across your ecosystem:

Owned

What differentiates your brand from its competitors and provides benefit to consumers? How are we communicating the brand’s purpose within each social channel?

Earned

How are we driving engagement and conversation among consumers, advocates and influencers?

Paid

Who is the right audience, at the right price, at the right time? How are we amplifying content to reach new audiences? We achieve best results by integrating each of these into a holistic strategy that supports a single shared objective. Using data and analytics, we then create frameworks to optimize the program in real-time and track success against the brand’s predetermined marketing objectives.

THE COMPONENTS OF SOCIAL SUCCESS

INSIGHTS & DISCOVERY: EXAMINING BRAND CULTURE

What are consumers saying? What resonates with them? Who do they admire in this space? Our process begins with an investigation into your brand’s historical conversation trends and an analysis of content performance to date. Armed with this data, we are able to form category insights and an understanding of your brand’s consumer culture. We examine these findings in relation to influential voices in the surrounding culture, along with studying search intent and consumer behavior. Based on all of these findings, we generate an assignment brief that outlines the purpose, direction, and business challenges to be solved. This brief will drive the development of social media marketing strategy, channel specific plans, and paid media support.

STRATEGIC PLANNING: DEVELOPING THE BIG IDEA

The insights and discovery guide us as we craft The Big Idea – a single unifying theme that will be the foundation for all programs and campaigns across owned, earned and paid channels. This primary theme allows us to develop your brand’s character and tone of voice, while outlining how to best activate it on each social platform. We will also map out your brand’s media amplification plan, determining whose influence it will seek to leverage, which consumers can be enlisted as advocates, and which audiences are ripe for targeting through paid media.

CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT: BRINGING THE CAMPAIGN TO LIFE

With The Big Idea firmly established, we now look to stretch across all possible touch points to maximize its impact. Campaign plans and strategy will provide an overview for editorial communications, and a defined content production schedule for generating compelling communications on a day-to-day basis will be outlined, along with launch timing and dependencies.

ONGOING IMPLEMENTATION: ACTIVATION AND BEYOND

Next, we begin implementing the agenda laid out in our plan –producing and reviewing content, shooting video, reaching out to influencers, establishing community management, and pursuing paid social amplification. Our creative team begins to develop content for specific audiences, based upon specific behaviors and trends, for specific social platforms. As our pipeline fills, we begin to build and train a social organization and launch content distribution. The result is a holistic social presence that maximizes your brand’s relationship with its consumers and fans.

MEASUREMENT: ANALYZING & OPTIMIZING

As our program rolls out, we continually measure content performance and conversation across the digital ecosystem. This data provides real-time insights to help us optimize KPI’s in relation to business objectives. We capture this analysis in daily, weekly, monthly, and campaign reporting that provides insights to fuel future marketing activities.

Modern brands are powered by robust technology that drives business growth 24/7. Digital platforms propel your brand’s entire ecosystem, connecting behavioral, CRM, media and location data to personalize content and experiences so your brand is relevant, timely, and contextually useful.

We create content with a strong communications purpose, grounded in research and consumer insights. We then build elegant, durable solutions to key business challenges across all touchpoints, screens, and devices.

INTEGRATED COLLABORATION

Beyond just designing and developing, we create content for communication that is crafted to move consumers and propel measurable business outcomes. Our integrated approach to web and mobile emphasizes cross-team collaboration for maximum output. Our unique Experience Design discipline brings together teams comprising experts from User Experience Architecture, Visual Design, Content Strategy and Tech backgrounds. Under the leadership of an Experience Director, these teams work together at each stage in the process.

We utilize an agile interdisciplinary process that can adapt to each brand’s unique culture, speed, needs and is geared towards maximizing speed to market. This nimble, fast-paced workflow enables us to build experiences quickly, measure their ensuing performance, and adjust as needed to meet the brand’s pre-defined goals.

Content Strategy

Our content strategy practice develops a communications plan for each journey, providing a clear emotional shift required at each touch point, to be built into each experience. For content marketing, content strategy establishes a foundation of which topics and actions a brand has true authority to feature as behavior - then, find common ties between that brand foundation and the target audience’s needs and plights.

During this phase, we audit and analyze existing infrastructure and technology, research competition, and perform comparative analyses and technical proofs of concept on new components. The result of validating these findings is a full project brief outlining the purpose and direction to solve the highest value business challenge.

Based on our strategic insights, we begin developing high level user journeys, an architectural plan, an overarching content strategy, and a design framework upon which the resulting web and/or mobile experience will be built.

User Experience

Our UX practice is hyper-focused on providing the best possible user experience to both end users and internal users. UX doesn’t end with the wire-framing process, it’s a through-line across the entire project cycle that advocates for product excellence at every phase.

Visual Design

Design is in our blood, and we obsess over every comp, keyframe, click, and comma. But ultimately when we talk about our creative work, we consider the experience as a whole. Because design isn't just about aesthetics. It’s about finding the best way to tell a compelling story—visually, thematically, and interactively—in a way that best suits each audience and medium.

Tech Development

Our technology team represents a wide array of backgrounds and is dedicated to unlocking the creative freedom of our UX and Design teams. We always strive to deliver high-quality, maintainable code no matter how trivial the application through a mobile- first responsive approach to Application UI and modular JavaScript architecture. Our server-side development team is well versed in a variety of commercial and open-source platforms and evaluates and selects the best tool to meet current and future needs.

Marketing Technology

At the end of the day, we’re still a marketing company, full of marketing technology experts. We can work across any digital touchpoint with pretty much any marketing technology service provider. We’ve worked with the top Marketing Technology providers from HubSpot to Eloqua. An integrated campaign should run like a well-oiled machine.
Our services range from CRM and API integrations to rich media, email and landing page template development. We have streamlined processes specifically for integrated campaign work so that speed to market does not hinder creativity.

Intergration & QA

Finally, we integrate all the individual feature sprints into a completed viable release candidate. Once we’re confident that any issues around those integration points have been smoothed out, we validate our quality assurance test plan and begin the process of final bug regression.
Once the site has passed through a rigorous combination of automated testing, black box user testing, and cross-browser validation, we release the project to the public.

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