Leslee's IMC Blog

Keen Newport H2 Sandals In addition to appealing customers’ sense of functionality and desire for quality, Keen Footwear is appealing to their lifestyle and personal values. It’s been a successful strategy since the company was founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2003, as a wholesale manufacturer offering men’s, women’s and kid’s footwear for work and play. In just 3 months, sales reached $1.5 million and $15 million by the end of the second year! The fast growing ugly-shoes-with-a-bumper-toe sold in stores and online by Amazon, Zappos, etc., but, customer behavior changed with time to a trend of consumers purchasing directly from the manufacturer. Soon, about 10% of Keen’s business – shoes, apparel and accessories – was selling directly to the consumer (Taylor, 2018). Today, sales are more than $200 million (Morell, 2013). To continue meeting goals as consumer behavior changed globally, Keen marketers focused on a new digital presence and strategy for their websites and social me...

Image source: https://firstsiteguide.com/tools/analytics/  There’s always room for improvement and better engagement. Do you want to make changes on your website but not sure what to do? Like everything else in life, it’s tempting to just Google it: “A/B test ideas.” I did. The ideas are endless – 276,000,000 results, in fact. But where do you start – change the page layout, make the home page longer or shorter, a funnier headline, bolder text colors, adjustments to image size and placement, etc? Optimize for voice search? Those are just a few examples to improve the user’s experience (UX), but, well, maybe you should focus on changes to maximize search engine optimization (SEO). But, experts say not to focus too much on the tricks and treats of some SEO tactics or the site’s rankings will actually be penalized. Wow, there’s a lot to consider. We must make changes carefully. To put it simply, your focus for improvement should be to create site/pages that are uniquely ...

Image source: Shutterstock There’s good news spreading around your family, friends and online retailers: you are having your first child! This bundle of joy is creating a lot of chatter on social media, in Google and YouTube Searches and on your Amazon account. The online marketers hear it loudly and are targeting you before you actually need to buy baby bedding, clothes, toys, formula, and cases and cases of diapers…or will it be cloth? They even know you are undecided on that because you’ve researched both, A LOT, but haven’t added either to your Amazon registry. This is a scenario we can all image happening in the retail world. But, there’s another set of marketers that most new parents won’t think of who is vying for their business: local doctors’ offices. In most areas of the country, it’s a competitive service between pediatricians and family care providers. Foremost, the industry relies on personal referrals and recommendations to build their practices, but as more of Ge...

(Photo Illustration by Chesnot/Getty Images) As the social media manager for a mid-sized, non-profit organization, Akron Children's Hospital, I have the luxury of thinking about the topic of social media participation on an ongoing basis. We all use social media – personally, professionally, and for our brands – to inform, entertain, communicate, build relationships, and manage our reputations with key audiences. Akron Children’s Hospital’s marketing/PR team, as well as departmental staff, uses nearly 30 social media channels to inform and engage in conversations with the organization’s patient families, the general public, peers, donors, and employees. Our ultimate goals are to engage and excite our online audiences as well as improve customer service and satisfaction. My biggest concern as the manager is the amount of channels, therefor, causing our team to be spread too thin. This is a very realistic concern for an organization developing its ongoing social media strategy....

Image source: Triad Retail Media Organization/Platform : MasterCard on SamsClub.com Objective : MasterCard-branded experiences encourage signups and customer retention across multiple mediums. Scenario : Triad Retail Media reports assisting MasterCard meet this objective with the following tasks (n.d.):         Content strategy and planning          Design and imagery          App integration          In-store TV custom video          Copywriting and copy-editing          Advanced analytic reporting Chosen metric : Conversion rate, which is the ratio of conversions (the number of times a desired outcome was accomplished) over a relevant denominator. A conversion metric is valuable because it enables the business to evaluate many different call-to-actions as described in the above tasks – app integratio...

Image source: iStock Organization : Akron Children's Hospital What : Traffic to pediatric-focused educational articles on its blog. ( see example )  Scenario :   The marketing team at Akron Children's began to question consumers’ continued interest in its monthly educational e-newsletter, called iGrow. Parents sign up online, at special events or via a brochure/flyer. It was slightly customizable in the fact that they could choose categories of pediatric health articles based on the individual needs (asthma, diabetes, fitness, nutrition) and age groups (pregnancy/infant, toddler, school-age, adolescent, teen) of their children. If birthdates were provided, the database would revise subscriptions as the child(ren) aged to ensure the content continued to be relevant to the reader. Children were aging out. New enrollment was declining. Open rate was declining. (Smith, 2018). Advantages : The e-newsletter’s articles allowed the hospital to highlight and market ...