Definitions / category: content strategy

How Elexicon helps our clients empower their customers with the knowledge they need to accomplish their goals

I recently heard Elexicon’s Creative Director Mike VerStrat cite the aphorism “knowledge is power” to distill the essence of how we add value for our clients. He pointed out that our work is fundamentally about helping our clients organize, optimize, and deliver knowledge for their customers.

The last part of that phrase got me thinking—something like “knowledge … is power … power … energy … knowledge is energy? We’re an energy company (but not that one).” YMMV, but that’s where my mind went. So.

The Energy Business

Energy companies are in the generation and transmission business. The same is true for Elexicon. You want the knowledge you’re developing, organizing, and delivering to act like a sort of energy, galvanizing your customers to make a purchase or set an appointment or otherwise use your product or service. We can help with that. We also deal in a kind of infrastructure maintenance to support both generation and transmission.

Generation

In the context of a website, content is electricity—it’s necessary for the site to run. And as in regular life, the source of the electricity matters. Is it cheaply produced but toxic in the long run like a spewing well of crude oil? Or is it carefully adapted to the need and sustainable like a wind turbine off a windy shore? Is the byproduct of its production going to pollute the surrounding air and blunt the cognition of its users? Or is it suited to the local topography and prevailing winds, enabling fresh air for smooth comprehension? Elexicon strives for the latter in both cases.

We could help a client get up and running with cheap fuel, but the long-term damage that can do to a brand is never worth it. We’d rather carefully sight out the project and craft an energy solution that is suited to the landscape.

The most important thing in this context is that the customer gets what they need and feels good about the source. Our content services, including strategy, writing, editing, and management, ensure you deliver clean energy to your customers regardless of medium.

Transmission

Energy is no good to anybody if it’s not transmitted where it’s needed, when it’s needed. We understand that. We build delivery systems that get your knowledge where it needs to be, whether on a website, social media platform, trade show booth, or executive report—when it needs to be there.

We can redo your existing wires with a website overhaul or just update them to get up-to-speed with a rebrand. And if the need is an all-new hookup in the form of a spin-off brand or product launch, we’re there too. Whether the infrastructure already exists or needs to be built from scratch, our branding, strategy, design, development services can make sure your project connects.

The Grid

The real life Grid is a hodgepodge network that requires constant upkeep to avoid a system-wide shutdown. It’s in desperate need of modernization. Elexicon’s energy production and delivery systems are held together with more than duct tape and chicken wire. We use modern frameworks that lay down a strong foundation, enabling simpler upkeep and reduced reliance on costly workarounds. And we work with reliable, stable hosts that help us avoid systemic risks analogous to power lines perilously close to tree branches. But if a tree branch falls on a line on a unusually windy day, we’re there to repair the line and restore service.

A bit of a sidenote while on this topic: in terms of real life energy used, we strive to ensure the work we do is lean and makes efficient use of the world’s energy while directing our customers to responsible hosts.

Reducing Energy Loss

Another feature of the real life energy grid is energy loss due to transmission over long distances and at various points from generation to point of service. For our purposes, this translates to anything that increases bounce rates, prevents user action, and, in most cases, reduces time on site. We work to avoid energy leeches in our work, working hard at optimization to enable your users to feed off the energy you produce, interacting with or reacting to it—even adding to it via social media or user-created content.

Power to the People

The phrase “knowledge is power” is a translation from the Latin “scientia potentia est,” where “potentia” is “power.” Without getting too deep into the muck trying to be cool with root words, it’s worth noting the connection to the English word “potential.” Knowledge begins as potential. We can help you make it more than that.

Whatever product or service you offer, you want to enable customers to do something. Like a real energy company, that’s our goal too. We enable you to empower your customers with the knowledge they need to accomplish their goals through your product or service.

What can we help you power?

“From the store windows, the store touchpoints, the website, social media or a magazine – it has to be one pure customer experience, not just to gain market share but to gain mind share.”

-Angela Ahrendts, CEO Burberry

The process of making a website or application is tricky, and not only in regards to design and development. Often just as challenging—and seemingly overlooked—is the process of properly identifying who you’re building for.

When we work on a client project, we’re not really working for the client. We’re working for client’s customers or audience. We’re ultimately working to ensure the experience your customer has with you is a positive one that reinforces your brand’s validity, encourages use, and ultimately shows you a return on your investment with the project.

How do you manage a seamless experience across an always changing and increasing number of content channels, though?

Honestly, you can’t.

But, what you can do is influence your users’ experience by being very intentional about where and how you deliver your brand and content, doing so in a way that is consistent across platforms. When we do this, it’s what we call “designing the experience.”

This is how we do it.

Identify Your Audience.

You may already know your audience, or you may need help determining who they are. If you do know, it can be worth it to do the research anyway. The goal is to focus the project’s direction by identifying the audience: your customers, current and/or potential.

Gaining a better understanding of your customers can be accomplished through the process of user and A/B testing, market research, and other early-stage research methods.

It’s very possible that you already have a good understanding of who your audience is, but it’s equally important to know your audience’s why and how. Why will your audience be interested in what you’re doing? How will that affect the way they view your brand? How do you keep your audience returning and engaging?

Gain Perspective.

Now that you understand your audience, you need to know who within your audience you’re designing for.

During the discovery phase of any project, it’s important to keep in mind how the design, functionality, and content will affect your customer. This often means putting aside personal preferences, putting away egos, and establishing a cohesive direction between the client and the agency. That requires clear direction and communication from the client, and a sense of trust that the agency has the (client’s) customer’s best interests in mind.

It’s the agency’s job to combine that with a clear understanding of what will work best from an industry perspective and ultimately enrich the customer’s overall experience.

Just because you want to create an app doesn’t mean that your customers are going to install and use it even once, let alone on a regular basis.

Or visit that website.

Or ingest that content, evoking the desired response.

Understanding the why behind your customer’s need (implied or apparent) will ultimately be a gauge for design decisions along the way.

Set Measurable Goals.

We see it all the time: client wants a project completed, comes to an agency. Agency creates the project, hopefully to the client’s liking. End of story… right?

Not here, at least.

It’s important, especially early on, that the client and agency sit down and set measurable goals for what they want to accomplish with their project. Hardly ever is just launching the site or application the measure of success—nor should it be. 

Setting measurable project goals does a few things.

First, it gives the client a baseline to measure a project’s success against once it’s completed.

Second, it provides a foundation upon which they could build in the future if a change in direction is required.

Third, it gives the agency a framework to work within to provide a solution.

After all, an equation can’t be solved without first having a problem, right?

Walk, Don’t Run.

This next point might seem a little blunt, but it’s important.  Because we care. Really.

Don’t be too anxious to jump right into design and production, at least initially.  

It’s pretty normal, and honestly expected, that a client will come to the table with what they feel to be a pretty solid understanding of exactly what needs to be done and created, but without taking preliminary steps of discovery and planning. The thing is, discovery and planning can make the difference for a successful project.

Even if it’s not within your project budget to account for variations of the steps listed above, it’s good to be at least open to sitting down and having an honest conversation about the project. Give your agency a chance to really make the project work for your customers. In doing so, you may find that your good idea really has the potential to be great.

In the end, we’re all on the same team, playing for the same goal: hitting a home run for your customers by providing the most seamless possible experience that enforces your brand’s integrity and messaging, leading to engagement, sales and growth.

It’s the Elexicon way.

You’ve just been put in a room with 4 other people and it’s dark. Can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face kind of dark.

Each of you have been told that there’s an item directly in front of you, and that you need to describe it.

You reach out and place your hand on what feels like a hard, leathery, textured wall. The person nearest to you describes a long, protruding spike that’s smooth and solid. Another feels a vine-like hairy rope.

Who’s right, and how can you decide what it is?

Without seeing the whole picture or knowing in advance, each person can’t communicate with the other that what they’re actually describing is a rhino.

On-boarding and communicating your digital strategy within your company’s team structure can often feel like trying to describe something in the dark that has many facets and attributes:

If you’re in marketing, a digital strategy likely involves your website, social media, online campaigns, and design approach.

If you’re a stakeholder, you’re likely more focused on analytics and ROI.

If you’re in IT or data networking, you’re likely focused on things like information and data processing, storage and backups, etc.

If you’re in sales you’re likely concerned with the integrity of your CRM database, making sure it’s reliable, and with conversions.

With so many ways your company’s digital strategy can be approached, it can feel overwhelming. This shows in companies even today where everything seems to be online.

The 2016 Report on the State of Digital Business found that

• 62% of survey respondents felt their companies were in denial about the need to transform their business approach digitally,
• 55% were worried that they would have only a year or less to make the proper steps before they would suffer both financially and competitively, and
• 59% were worried that it was already too late to start the process of creating a digital strategy.

(Hopefully since the report’s release the companies that were surveyed have taken necessary steps.)

There’s no denying that an effective digital strategy in your business or organization is important. But how do you personally implement a digital strategy well? What’s the difference between having a digital strategy, and just creating digital products?

We’re here to help answer those questions.

For over 20 years, we’ve specialized in working alongside companies to design, establish, and successfully execute digital strategies, both internally and externally company-facing. The way that we see this played out most commonly for our clients is through a combination of website content, social media, mobile and application development, email/CRM/CMS integration, and project data analytics, among others.

Each of these are often seamlessly woven together into the client’s existing business ecosystem. This means that our clients don’t have to start from the ground up when implementing their digital strategy. We’re working alongside them to help keep their ongoing business momentum while merging a digital strategy into those processes.

It starts with a conversation.

Your needs aren’t your competitor’s needs. Your business is uniquely your own, and your digital strategy shouldn’t be a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach.

The backbone between us and our clients is always our relationship, and part of establishing that relationship is working with the client to determine their unique needs, and how our team of experts can come alongside their existing internal teams to aid in the implementation of their digital strategy, or work with them to open up this channel of content where they might not be capable to do so on their own. We explore what our clients are doing digitally currently that they feel is effective, what their goals are, and areas that they’re feeling pressure to evolve their approach. Based on this information, we’re able to communicate a solution that works for our clients, as well as offer recommendations to approaches they might also look to consider.

It’s more than just a product.

As I mentioned, your digital strategy is more than just a product. Your website isn’t your digital strategy. Your CRM database and promotional email schedule isn’t your digital strategy. Your social media channels and content aren’t your digital strategy. These are all pieces of a greater mechanism that we like to look at with you and create a way that all these tools (and more) can work  seamlessly together—making you more noticeable, your online business more effective and measurable, and your future digital initiatives more scalable.

Analyzing your effectiveness.

Although the concept isn’t new, a major buzzword over the last half-decade has been ‘UX’ or ‘user experience’. Its implementation on the digital landscape in your company ultimately comes down to your ‘digital equation’ — adopting data analytics and metrics to build up your analytical thinking which will help drive your digital business decisions.

We see this play out a number of ways. We can help you implement tools and show you how you can analyze data and insights for your current online systems, or for new products, which help you deliver better, more responsive services to your customers. Through user research, A/B testing, persona research, and user feedback, we can fine-tune your website, software, and applications to better suit the user, quicker and more effectively than ever before. We set up our digital products in a way that allows us to build, execute, analyze, and optimize as we go.

Digital Strategy at Work.

For your consideration, a recent example of digital strategy at work in a project completed for one of our clients.

Two years ago we were tasked to work alongside the Amway Global team to develop a digital experience for their media guide that, to that point, lived solely in a print publication. The desire was to have a single, long-scroll page that would keep the user’s attention, divide the content up into digestible, navigable chunks of content, and that was high-design and interactive. The client also desired to have data they could analyze to see what information was being consumed and where users were gravitating to on the page.

We worked with Amway to not only meet these expectations, but to throw in some additional features along the way.

The digital solution we crafted was a long-scroll page that was managed by a content management system where the team could easily edit the content of the page, move content around the page, and manage multiple levels of in-page navigation to access that content in an experience that was immersive and effective. The client had the ability to track what sections of the page were being clicked on and which products were most popular. This all wrapped into a single, 30,000+ pixel long, mobile-optimized page.

The foundational strategy of the page also was that we wanted the solution to be scalable and manageable. Because of the pre-planning and work that went into this strategy, the next year we were able to update the content and look and feel of the page at a fraction of the cost that it would of taken to start over, or go a different direction. What originally took months to design and develop in 2017 took a matter of days to update with a fresh look and content for 2018.

Regardless of your company or organization’s size, you can’t afford to be unfocused in your digital strategy. Tackling it on your own can be a daunting task, and this can cause you to fall behind your competition and to put you into a cycle of feeling the need to always be catching up. We’re ready to partner alongside you to build your digital strategy. Whether you need a team of professionals to hit the ground running on something new, or need someone to work alongside your internal team to help see your initiatives through effective completion, we’ve got your back.

If you work in consumer-facing health communications, you face the considerable challenges of language barriers and health literacy gaps. Here’s how the US Department of Health and Human Services assessed it:

Only 12 percent of adults have Proficient health literacy, according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. In other words, nearly nine out of ten adults may lack the skills needed to manage their health and prevent disease.

That level of health illiteracy is of course concerning, because health is related to everything we do. Our health is affected by the amount of sleep we get, the nutrition we put into our bodies, the amount of social interaction we have with friends or family in a week, and even the way we sit in a chair. All of these factors impact our overall health.

So, how do health communications professionals work on this issue? How can they create content that is more understandable, and then spread that information as far and wide as possible? How does a healthcare brand make its important communications ‘contagious’?

Contagious

Contagious is a sublime book written by Jonah Berger. He goes into six “STEPPS” that can help your content go viral. His framework can be incorporated into health communications and help professionals work smarter—not harder—with their content.

Berger’s STEPPS are as follows:

• Social Currency
• Triggers
• Emotion
• Public
• Practical Value
• Stories

Understanding these can help you plan your content to make it a ‘social epidemic.’ If you want to spread your information fast and become top-of-mind, then you need to think about how to apply each of Berger’s STEPPS into your marketing campaigns.

Step 1: Social Currency

Social currency is the knowledge you have to add value to a conversation. The more you know, the more “status” you often have in society.

People are always talking about what was on the news and what they saw on social media. They use this information to start conversations at work, among friends and family, and even with total strangers. When we do this and share the right type of information, we gain social currency.

According to research cited by Buffer, there are two main reasons people share content:

1. “to give others a better sense of who they are and what they care about”
2. “to stay connected to people.”

The research showcases that people want to be liked. Berger explains that “[the] desire for social approval is fundamental human motivation.” With this knowledge, health organizations need handcrafted, creative content so people can engage with it.

Health organizations need to dive deeper into their target audience(s) and find valuable content based on the consumer’s interests and motivations. The content also needs to be remarkable. According to Berger:

“Remarkable content provides social currency because they make people who talk about them seem more, well, remarkable.”

In healthcare communications, you should almost always provide an example or visual to help explain the health-related concept. This will not only help with readers with lower health literacy rates, but it will also boost the attention and social currency value of the content.

Step 2: Triggers

Triggers are prompts that keep people talking about your brand or product. Berger provided a great example of triggers that may help you understand this concept better.

Rebecca Black’s song, “Friday”, has a prevalent trigger associated with it. Can you take a guess on what it is?

Drum roll please… the song’s title, “Friday”, is the trigger! When this song was popular, every Friday people would turn on this song because it was Friday.

Health organizations could easily take advantage of triggers because health is related to everything you do. Content could be focused on everyday health and wellness topics to prompt healthier decisions and lifestyle habits.

Step 3: Emotion

If you make someone feel an emotion with your content, you will create a bond with the recipient of your message. This person then has the ability to share your message with their network and spread your brand to potential new customers of your products or services.

According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, purchase decisions, brand loyalty, and customer engagement are directly related to the subconscious mind. Emotional benefits can overpower the rational benefits of a product or service because people care about how they feel with a product or service.

Healthcare organizations should be factoring in how they can make people feel. A prime example of doing this step right, is Health Beat, a brand journalism publication of Spectrum Health. Health Beat publishes inspiring patient stories of hardship, hope, love, joy, and excitement that spark a range of emotions in their readers, leading them to share those stories on social media so others can share in that emotional connection.

Step 4: Public

Another step that is crucial is “public.” A key factor of this step is observability — meaning if people see something, they will engage with it. How far the engagement goes depends on the content and the person.

Berger also relates this concept to “social proof.” Social proof can be seen in how people wait in line for an overpriced cup of coffee. People assume the longer the line, the better the coffee. But in reality, they are herding to “social influence.” Social influence has a big effect on behavior.

Health organizations can take advantage of this step, but have to be careful what topics they promote and educate about.

For example, Berger discussed how anti-drug ads aren’t always the best tactic to prevent people from using them. Although the aim of these ads is to prevent young adults from using drugs, the response was often the opposite. Berger informs us that anti-drug ads promote drugs as bad, but clearly showcase that people are using them.

Showing the drug use creates visibility and social proof that can increase the appeal of drug use among teens, and even create a larger problem. It is important to remember this example as a cautionary tale when moving forward with health-related campaigns.

Step 5: Practical Value

People share practically valuable information to help others. This includes useful information.

Useful content is different for every person. It could be a tutorial video on how to prepare a meal, or an infographic giving consumers useful, relevant information. The opportunities to create useful informative content in healthcare are endless.

So, how do you know if your content has value? Ask yourself if the content provides a functional or emotional benefit to someone. If it does, you have your answer.

Step 6: Stories

Stories carry things — a lesson or moral; information or a take-home message. According to Berger, stories “provide a quick and easy way for people to acquire lots of knowledge in a vivid and engaging fashion.”

So how do you know if you are creating a good or bad story?

Good stories provide social currency, emotion, and practical value. Bad stories do not.

Final Thoughts

If you want to create desirable, shareable content in healthcare you need to put these STEPPS into action.

• Social Currency
• Triggers
• Emotion
• Public
• Practical Value
• Stories

Think about how your message could be woven into these important considerations, and then wait for your consumers to engage with it or not. Then make adjustments and try again.

Remember, you can’t make something viral, but your audience can.