change  March 31, 2011

Tony Molinero, Art Director

We designers spend years perfecting our craft and learning how to come up with elegant solutions to creative challenges. We describe our creations using words like aesthetic, gestalt, visual flow, and brand identity.

Do the suit-wearing people who employ us understand our jargon? Many of them understand our words, if not the concepts behind them. But do we understand the jargon of The Suits? As professionals trained in facilitating communication, we certainly ought to.

Now, if you feel the least bit icky about memorizing business acronyms and marketing buzzwords, remember this: when you learn how to talk the talk, you’ll be able to sell your designs much more effectively, thus expanding your creative freedom. The Suits will trust you more. They’ll think you’re a superstar if you can tie your design choices to better business performance.

And you may even be able to reason with that marketing manager who insists you use their favorite color instead of the approved corporate colors.

Sound like a deal? Let’s look at some common business acronyms and analyze what they mean for designers.

RFP (Request for Proposal) – A document put out by a client who needs work done. The RFP essentially tells designers, “Show me what you’ve got.” In response, you’ll want to submit a proposal that makes it clear you can do exactly what they’re looking for. Ideally, you’ll include a price quote that’s cheaper than your competition, but not so low that you end up looking like a rookie.

SOW (Statement of Work) – A contract with the client that explicitly states important project details, such as schedule, project scope, deliverables, and payment schedule. Why bother with a SOW? For one thing, it protects you when a client starts asking for additional deliverables in the middle of a project. By gently yet firmly pointing to the original SOW, you can make it clear that more deliverables will require more time and more money.

ROI (Return on Investment) – The value a client receives for spending their money. Depending on the type of project, this may be expressed in terms of revenue, website traffic, publicity, or sales leads. ROI measurements give clients a way to justify their budget and feel safer about spending cash. (Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tie ROI back to specific design decisions.)

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – A form of advertising that seeks to attract website visitors from search sites (Google is the biggest player). Marketers love SEM because it delivers an easily trackable ROI that’s often directly proportionate to how much they spend. You’ll usually hear about SEM when you design landing pages.

PPC (Pay per click) – The pricing structure used to buy ad placement on a website. The client only pays when a user clicks on their ad or banner – rather than paying for every “impression,” or appearance of their ad on a website. For designers, the upside to PPC banners is that they need to be visually enticing. The downside is that clients often want you to include huge, ugly buttons.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The art of making a website appear as a top result from keyword searches on Google (or any other search engine). Clients who are heavily into SEO will want all the words in your web designs to be HTML text instead of images. They’ll also want you to include a lot of copy in the design.

CTA (Call to Action) – The link or button that urges the reader to click through to the next page. The CTA is often some variation of a big, red, shiny button that says CLICK HERE.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator) – Any really important metric that determines how successful a business is. Typical KPIs include the total number of sales or how many people open an email. Most design projects are intended to improve one or more KPI. The more you can move those numbers, the more they’ll love you.

CMS (Content Management System) – Any system, such as WordPress, in which web pages are created in two parts, with the layout structure handled separately from words and pictures. Most clients love using a CMS because they can update their website without going back to the designer. A CMS also enables you to serve up one website in several different languages, rather than creating several language-specific sites.

You’ll probably hear hundreds of other acronyms tossed around in meetings, but learning the ones on this list will give you an edge in communicating your designs. Once you add this business speak to your design arsenal, perhaps The Suits will accept you as one of their own (but with better fashion sense).

What have I missed? Do you have any business speak that you’ve translated to Designer? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Joel Lockwood, Partner and Chief Marketing Officer

According to research, 64% of marketing and sales executives are dissatisfied with their lead nurturing programs.

Are you one of them? And have you abandoned some or all of your programs as a result?

If so, maybe it’s time you took another look at lead nurturing. Although the process seems like a lot of work, the benefits far outweigh the effort. Here are five reasons why.

1. You’ll find out who really wants to hear from you.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, you can’t take for granted that everyone in your marketing database wants you to send them content. One best practice of lead nurturing is to get explicit permission up front from your recipients.

We at Ozone Online recommend using the double opt-in method, in which you ask your prospects to confirm their original opt-in by responding to an email. Yes, this adds a step to the process and may scare off a few lukewarm prospects – but you’ll end up with a list of subscribers who truly want to hear from you. (You’ll also prove that your organization has the utmost concern for online privacy, which certainly can’t hurt your sales.)

2. You’ll get to know your prospects better.
The lead nurturing process gives you numerous opportunities to ask your prospects for more personal data in exchange for the free information you’re providing. You’ll use this data to build increasingly detailed prospect profiles.

These profiles will not only help you provide the right information to the leads already in your pipeline, but also enable you to refine your lead generation activities in the future. The result? More high-quality leads to pass to Sales.

3. You’ll show customers how you can solve their specific problems.
Some companies figure “anything is better than nothing” and indiscriminately blast content to their entire prospect database. But if you take the time to develop relevant messages that focus on solving specific problems, you’ll differentiate your company from the competition.

Using the information your prospects submit and the actions they take throughout the buying cycle, you can present them with information on the exact products, services, or features that address their needs. You’ll have a chance to call out specific, relevant benefits that you may not have mentioned in your initial lead generation pieces.

4. You’ll know exactly when prospects are ready to talk to Sales.
As your leads move through the buying cycle, it’s key to set up a lead scoring process. Just make sure your process is based on your most important demographic and behavioral characteristics. These may include:

• Company size
• Title
• Purchase timeline
• Budget
• Downloaded white paper
• Used product comparison charts
• Attended webinar
• Downloaded product trial
• Watched video
• Commented on a blog
• Called your 800 number
• Visited your tradeshow booth

So, when do you pass a lead to Sales? It’s simple. Just assign point values to each of these characteristics and activities, and then set a trigger point for passing along the lead. You’ll continue to adjust your point values and trigger point over time, as Sales gives you feedback on the quality of your leads.

5. You’ll get results.
You may be pleasantly surprised at the numbers you see in your lead nurturing program. In one program documented by Marketing Sherpa, IBM Cognos recorded impressive results:

• About 11% of website visitors completed a registration form, compared to an industry average of 3%.
• Open rates for nurturing emails increased to 33.3%, compared to 13.2% for the company’s traditional multi-touch campaigns.
• Click-through rate increased from 0.09% to 15.5%.
• Response rate increased from 0.05% to 17.5%.

Tap an Untapped Resource
Leads that sit in the marketing pipeline month after month are wasted opportunities. And in this economy, nobody can afford to waste an opportunity.

By implementing even the simplest lead nurturing program, you tap an untapped resource – the leads you already have – and squeeze value out of marketing programs you ran in previous months and years. As your program grows and gains sophistication, it can deliver results that more than pay for its cost.

Ridge Sampson, CEO

Anyone who knows Ozone Online knows that we’re a dog-centric company. Dogs are amazing creatures. Mine, Luke the dog (aka Cool Hand Luke), is a working dog who delivers newspapers and performs tricks for unsuspecting tourists and clients. 

What you may not know is that I’m a reluctant adopter of social media. From the start, I’ve struggled with the notion that it may all just be a fad. I’ve also wondered, how does social media actually help our customers grow their businesses? Do people really have time to consume all this content? Do these little blips of information really make any difference?

But over the past few weeks, I’ve been converted from “reluctant adopter” to “rabid fan” ...with the help of a bunch of dogs.

It all started two weeks ago when I decided to follow Luke one morning as he was making his rounds to say hi to everyone in the office. During our rounds, Vanessa called me into her office to show me a video. Lo and behold, there was Luke up on the screen! While Luke and I were wandering around the Marina over the weekend, someone had taken a short video of Luke doing what he does best: performing a few tricks. The video was now posted on this guy’s humor blog. That began my transformation.

In addition to being a project manager, Vanessa happens to be our Social Media Analyst. Within minutes, she had posted the video link to our Facebook page and Twitter feed, and added it to Luke’s bio on our website.

“Great,” I thought. “That was fun. It’s a topic of conversation, and now it’s out in the Twitterverse, whatever that is.” But then it was out of my mind. Yes, I could see that social media is entertaining... but is it useful? I still wasn’t convinced.

This past week, my outlook changed. All that social media stuff triggered one of my friends to send me yet another dog video (they all like to send me dog videos). This one was an amazing video by the band OK Go! Knowing dogs as I do, I can appreciate what an impressive feat it was to get numerous shapes, sizes, and breeds to perform so well together – and with a band, to boot. But to top it all off, the entire video was shot in a single take. Robert Altman would be proud! I recall the opening scene of The Player being around 8 minutes long. One of the actors actually comments on the length of cuts in the scene.

I’ve since learned that OK Go! has a unique style that combines the zaniness of a Rube Goldberg performance with great music. Needless to say, I started sending the link out to everyone I know. I also fired up iTunes after realizing I liked the song almost as much as the video. I sampled a couple of tracks, and I bought an EP and a couple of singles.

Wow, social media works! Not only that, but it worked on me.

I had never even heard of OK Go! But now I own a bunch of their music. A viral video convinced me to buy, but that would be a boring post if it ended there – unless you watch the video.

Another thing most people know about me is that I am an Apple fan (OK, fine. A fanatic.). So of course, I also “liked” the songs on my Ping profile in iTunes.

I told Vanessa the story today, and she pointed out how effective social media is and how comfortable with it I have already become without even trying. The first key to this story was that I am a follower of the people around me both online and offline, so when Vanessa showed me the blog with Luke, I was listening to an advocate I trust.

Next, when we tweeted the blog posting, we as Ozone amplified the message. Because my followers now knew that I had a preference not only for dogs, but for dogs doing tricks, they reflected back a viral video to my preferences. The video was not explicitly an advertisement, but it drove me to purchase.

Lastly, Apple made it possible for me to create a follow-up message for my Ping followers to find next time they logged in, when they could see I “liked” OK Go!

It would be interesting to know exactly how many sales eventually result from the cascading effect of that original video of Luke doing tricks. How many people will ultimately end up becoming OK Go! Fans? Out of those, think of how many will continue to amplify the message. Remember those Breck Shampoo commercials? “...and she told two friends, and they told two friends, and on, and on...” That was sort of a caveman tutorial on how to be viral – and, I guess you could say, social.

So, I now must admit that social media is here and it works on many levels. It has the ability to drive sales, and to build new brands or support existing ones. Our social media team officially gets to say, “See, I told ya so.” Of course, I’m a sucker for a good dog video, so the deck was partially stacked. But now look what they’ve done – they’ve actually got me blogging!

Share your comments and tell us how you liked OK Go!