“TREW’s marketing expertise and knowledge of the embedded space make them a trusted advisor to help us drive awareness and demand, as we continue to grow our business and market share,” said Jason Clarke, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Crank Software. “They have a proven track record developing and executing strategic marketing plans that focus on results, and we’re extremely pleased with the results they helped us achieve on our launch of Storyboard Suite 3.0.”

Crank Software specializes in embedded user interface (UI) solutions that enable R&D teams to more quickly develop UIs for resource-constrained embedded devices like in-car graphical displays and animated GPS systems.

When Crank needed to launch the latest version of their flagship software, Storyboard™ Suite, they chose TREW Marketing for our experience in developing product launch plans that target embedded design engineers. Crank sought to increase awareness of Storyboard Suite 3.0, drive web visits and capture leads through software evaluation downloads.

Deliverables:

Marketing communication strategy for the Storyboard Suite 3.0 launch including:

• Media relations strategy and execution
• Search engine optimization and advertising
• Launch email and automated direct marketing
• Social media strategy and execution
• Partner co-marketing with QNX in the Consumer Electronics Show concept car

Results:

• 85% increase in evaluation downloads
• 56% increase in online leads following the launch
• 38% increase in total web traffic following the launch
• 237 news release postings to online sources
• 2 contributed articles in RTC and Embedded Computing Design
• +3-minutes time-on-site to launch landing page
• 2-hours time-on-site generated from Twitter links

Beyond the Storyboard Suite launch, TREW Marketing continues to serve as Crank Software’s marketing partner, providing ongoing strategy consulting, brand and product-level messaging and positioning, media relations, content marketing, partner co-marketing, search engine optimization, search advertising, social media and email marketing services.

Want to learn more about product launches?

So you’ve developed a new product for your technical industry – spent hundreds of hours and undergone multiple rounds of revisions and beta tests, figured out your pricing and distribution model – and now it’s time to bring it to market.

The initial step towards launching your product is to name it.  You’ve invested significant time creating it and it’s your baby — not just any name will do. It needs to be memorable, searchable (particularly on search engines), unique in your industry, and relevant to your target audience.

So where do you begin? First you need to collect ideas. Gather a cross-functional team from across your organization of at least 3, but no more than 10, to brainstorm name ideas. After the initial brainstorm, have a few decision makers come together and decide on the top 5-8 names. Then take those 5-8 names and create an online survey that you can distribute to your internal key decision makers.  From there, you can reduce the options down to the top 3, and vet each one out and make final recommendations.

The following 7 tips will help guide you through items to discuss when narrowing down the choices to a final product name.

1. Determine a naming strategy that you will follow for this and future product names. Two primary strategies exist in the realm of product naming: highly descriptive and suggestive. The former will roll under your company brand and will not be trademarked, the latter may be stand-alone brands or can be linked with your corporate brand and can be trademarked. An example of a descriptive naming strategy is Apple, with its iPod, iPhone, and iPad products. OXO is an example of a suggestive naming strategy with names like GoodGrips, Touchables, and SteeL. While less descriptive than Apple’s product names, the OXO product names still strongly suggest what distinguishes the different line.
2. Use short, descriptive names that are generally three or fewer syllables.
3. Make it easy to spell, pronounce, and remember. Italics and capitalization of different letters make it difficult for people unfamiliar with the product name to remember how to spell it correctly.
4. If the product will be launched and used globally, consider the implications of the product’s name in other countries.
5. Avoid naming a product by an acronym that has to be spelled out in order for the public to understand the mark.
6. Research potential product names by performing online searches for third-party use of an identical or similar name, mark, or description used in connection with similar products
7. If you plan to apply for a trademark, visit www.upto.gov to search the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for third-party applications or registrations of a similar designation for a similar product. If the application or registration has been abandoned or listed as dead, know that the third party still may have rights, where you would want someone in the legal field to review.

Evaluate the potential names with specificity and objectivity. It’s not enough to say, “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Use the following eight categories to understand why a name will or won’t work.

1. Appearance – Is it easy to spell? And how will the name look in a logo, ad, billboard, etc.

2. Distinctive – How different is the name from the relevant product competition?

3. Depth – Names with depth have layers of meaning and association, and keep surprising you with new ideas with each layer.

4. Energy – Does the name have life to it? Can it carry an ad campaign on its shoulders?

5. Positioning – How relevant is the name to the positioning of the product?

6. Sound – This is two-fold – how does the name sound and how easily is it spoken to the customer? Word of mouth is a big part of marketing, but if people aren’t comfortable saying the name, the word won’t get out.

7. Trademark – This is easy, is it available? It’s either likely available, may be available, or not available.

8. Web Domain Name – Again, this is easy, is the URL available? If so acquire it before someone else does. If not, determine if the URL is available for your option 2 or option 3 name; or find out who owns the URL and see if you can acquire it from them.

After you have chosen a name for your product. It’s time to launch it. Smart Product Launches for Engineers provides a framework for how to plan, position, and implement a marketing activity plan that generates buzz and drives leads for your new product.

Related Blog Posts:

How to Use a Well-Time PR Launch to Spread Your Message

Practical Steps for Creating a Product Positioning Statement

Want to Marketing Against Your Competitors? Proceed Carefully

Today, TREW Marketing released a new e-book, written specifically for the business owner, product manager, and marketing leader preparing to launch a product targeted to technical audiences in the B2B space. Available for download on our site, Smart Product Launches for Engineers provides a framework for developing your product launch plan, discusses how to position your product in the marketplace, and includes practical tips for choosing, implementing, and measuring smart marketing activities and tools. It also includes case studies of three diverse, successful product launches.

In this guide:

1. Plan the Launch
   You spent a great deal of time and resources developing your product, now you need to launch it to market, but how? You need a plan. Walk through the process of creating a successful product launch plan that can have significant long-term success. Identify your target audience and determine your marketing goals and measurable objectives.

1. Brand Your Product
   With a plan in place, follow our three step process and learn how to define your product brand and position it in the marketplace. Also included are examples that help illustrate the process.

1. Determine the Marketing Mix
   Execute your product launch and achieve your objectives with a smart mix of integrated marketing activities. Review important considerations and explore various activities to determine which marketing channels will make the greatest impact at driving awareness and generating demand.

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

Last month, we gave insight on how to hire a technical marketing manager who can propel your marketing efforts forward and add value to your organization. In Part 1, we focused on prioritizing candidates’ talent, culture fit, and experience, and in Part 2, we gave the practicals for actually hiring your technical marketing manager, based on proven experience.

If you’ve now hired your technical marketing manager, pass along this information to help them understand the breadth and depth of technical marketing. Or, if you’ve just been hired as a new technical marketing manager, congratulations! These 10 keys – which focus on brand, positioning and website plans, content marketing strategy, and awareness and loyalty campaigns – will strengthen the skills and knowledge you need to be a successful technical marketing manager:

Technical Positioning, Brand, and Website Development

1. Create a Successful Marketing Plan

Having an effective marketing plan and following it will be critical to your success as a technical marketing manager. Without a plan, how do you know what you need to do, in priority order, to get there? In busy times, the tendency is to rush and complete any marketing tactic that looks promising at the moment, without taking into consideration your marketing strategy and goals. So, take the time to truly define your marketing goals and measureable objectives.

• Related Post: How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan that Drives Results
• For more about how to create your plan, read about 5 Critical Steps to Developing a Marketing Plan.

A well-defined marketing plan will set the course for your company’s marketing efforts.

2. Position and Brand Your Company Creatively and Carefully

Your brand is of utmost importance to your company, as it conveys who your company is and your unique value proposition. Positioning your brand well will be critical to the long-term success of the business. In marketing terms, your brand is personified both visually – through your company logo and branding style guide – and contextually – through words, such as your mission, vision, and positioning statements; core company and product-level messaging; and company and campaign taglines.

• Related Post: Understand the Components of Brand Messaging
• For more about positioning competitively, read about What Goes into the Decision to Market Against Your Competitors

3. Holistically Evaluate Your Website to Maximize Your Future Time and Spend

Your website will be at the core of your marketing efforts, so before you make any major changes to it, audit your web site so that you can prioritize how to go about making changes and additions to it in the future.

Evaluating your site holistically will help you create a better web experience for all visitors to your website no matter where they are in the buying cycle – those researching your business, learning more about your products and services, preparing to buy, or returning for another purchase.

• Related Post: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website
• For more detail on web systems, read about What to Ask Yourself Before You Buy a Web Content Management System

Content Marketing Strategy

4. Show Your Products or Services in Practice with Compelling Case Studies

Customer case studies are a great marketing and sales tool. By reading about how customers have benefitted from using your products and services, prospective clients know they are not the first to choose your company, and can hear from real customers to supplement what they’ve learned from reading your marketing brochure or website. To succeed as a technical marketer, you’ll need to know how to prioritize the most important applications for case studies, tell your customer’s story clearly, ask for permissions from the customer’s company and streamline and leverage your work.

• Related Post: 5 Tips for Developing Customer Case Studies
• For more, read about 8 Quick Tips to Create Great Case Studies

Learn all of the elements that make up a compelling case study.

5. Offer the Technical Data Your Customers Are Searching For

Because your company is trying to generate leads, create opportunities that engage customers, and ultimately close sales, it’s imperative that you offer the data, insight, and information that your prospects need and want. Offering quality content will cause your customers to see your company as an expert in the industry or technology area in which you work, and direct them to your products and services as solutions to their challenges. In addition to case studies, targeted presentations and white papers that cover relevant topics will build credibility, show your company’s experience, and convey a memorable message.

• Related Post: 4 Best Practices for Creating Effective Presentations
• For more on white papers, read about 5 Steps to Writing Effective White Papers

6. Engage with Your Prospects by Making an Investment in Video

Here’s a statistic that will make your head spin: according to Pingdom, a website monitoring firm, more than 800 million web visitors watch online videos per month. And, YouTube is now the second most popular search engine on the planet, just behind Google. Web visitors are drawn to video, so you should be creating videos as a technical marketing manager to add a dimension to the web that text and imagery alone cannot achieve.

• Related Post: Why You Need Video in Your B2B Marketing Mix
• For more about creating videos yourself, see DIY Marketing Videos on a Budget

7. Optimize your Content Marketing with Content Re-Use and SEO

One piece of well-written, well-placed content can have multiple uses. You can blog about it, amplify it as a call-to-action on social media sites, and repackage it in the form of a video, webinar, or white paper with tags and meta data that search engines will see. Just think about how that one piece of content used in multiple ways and channels can drive your search marketing efforts. And, search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking your website to make it more search-engine friendly and earning inbound links through stellar content that others want to reference. Driving inbound marketing will help you widen the funnel of awareness, gain more leads, and convert leads to sales.

• Related Post: Content and SEO Fuel Inbound Marketing Results
• For more about SEO, read about how Killer Keywords are the Secret to Search Engine Success

Loyalty and Awareness Campaigns

8. Increase Customer Engagement Regularly with E-Newsletters

Staying top-of-mind with prospects and customers is a challenge you’ll probably always face. E-newsletters are a great way to maintain a conversation with your target audience, promote valuable content, and help nurture your lead base to increase customer loyalty and move prospects closer to the sale. A corporate e-newsletter, done right, can be one of the most effective and strategic marketing activities a company undertakes. You need to understand all aspects of e-newsletters, from design to content to mailing lists, in order to create ones that build your brand and bring new leads to your company.

• Related Post: Nurture your Leads: Harness the Power of E-Newsletters, Part I
• For more about e-newsletters, read about Nurture Your Leads: Harness the Power of E-Newsletters, Part 2

Use E-newsletter campaigns to stay top-of-mind with customers.

9. Get more Blog Traffic and Grow Your Potential Customer Base

Blogging is a great way to bring more visitors to your website, so you’ll want to constantly be seeking to get more blog traffic (and in turn, get more prospective customers to your site). It takes consistent investment of time, creativity, and ideas to develop a successful blog and reach an increasing percentage of your target audience, but the payoff can be worth it in the long run. Maximize that investment by understanding the potential of your blog, getting discovered, converting readers into subscribers, and finding advocates for your blog.

• Related Post: 4 Ways to Get More Blog Traffic
• For more, read about how you can Improve the ROI of Your Blog

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

10. Grow Awareness and Traffic With Media Coverage

News coverage generates awareness about your company and its products and services, boosts organic search for your company, and drives traffic to your company web site. Quality news coverage starts with strong, longstanding relationships with journalists, so you’ll want to begin building those contacts. Overall, your interactions with the press should be productive if you’re willing to consistently contribute strong and relevant information that they can use to better inform their readers. They’ll come to appreciate your insight and value your relationship as an industry expert as much as you value their ability to widely publicize your company or product name.

• Related Post: 4 Steps to Building Meaningful Relationships with Journalists
• For about interacting with the media, read about Trade Show Media Relations Do’s and Don’ts

Want deeper insight?

Based on our decades of experience building hundreds of customized marketing programs targeted to engineers and scientists, we have written this guide to help you get started in your technical marketing career.

Download Smart Marketing for Engineers – an e-book that helps technical business leaders build and execute an efficient and effective marketing program where every dollar and every hour spent drives results.

Trek Global Chooses Agency for Technical Focus and Breadth of Marketing, PR, Web Expertise

AUSTIN, Texas – June 11, 2012 – Trek Global today announced its selection of Austin-based TREW Marketing, a specialized science, engineering, and technology marketing firm, as its brand and marketing communications agency. The partnership includes a business re-naming project, corporate positioning and messaging, and a website redesign, as well as ongoing technical content development, search engine marketing, and public relations.

Trek Global delivers ERP solutions for mid-size distribution companies that need to order, shelve, assemble, and ship their products efficiently. The company’s open source approach to ERP offers customers a cost-effective, low risk solution that harnesses the benefits of top-tier ERP systems, like Oracle and SAP, without the typical restrictions and expenses. Trek Global’s growth in North America drove a desire for integrated marketing communications to match its level of expertise and high standards for quality.

“Trek Global was founded by leading developers of open-source ERP and they have a clear and differentiated position in the marketplace,” said Wendy Covey, Principal and Co-Founder of TREW Marketing. “From our early branding and messaging work to an integrated strategy that drives traffic, engagement, and conversion, we are excited to increase marketing ROI for Trek Global.”

The partnership entails marketing projects including:

• Corporate-level branding brain and messaging
• Marketing communications strategy and campaign-based activity plans
• Marketing content development – white papers, case studies
• Website redesign
• Public relations strategy and execution

“The TREW team is passionate about marketing to technical audiences. Their diverse marketing experiences and the synergy between their team and ours creates a high-performing and high-character partnership. We consider TREW to be an integral part of our success and team,” said Chuck Boecking, Director of Education and Marketing at Trek Global.

Click to tweet: New from @Trewmarketing: ERP Integrator Selects TREW Marketing for Brand and Marketing Communications http://ow.ly/bfwQo

About Trek Global

Trek Global delivers powerful ERP solutions for mid-size distribution companies that need to order, shelve, assemble, and ship their products efficiently. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and with staff in five countries, the Trek Global team of system integrators and developers has more than a century of combined experience in enterprise software architecture and implementation. Trek Global’s software, based on the open source ADempiere platform, offers the benefits of top-tier ERP systems like Oracle or SAP without the restrictions or cost. With a focus on product and system training through Guided Implementation, customer education is Trek Global’s passion.

About TREW Marketing

TREW Marketing, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a full-service B2B marketing firm uniquely serving leading engineering and scientific companies that target technical markets. TREW uses decades of specialized experience to create custom marketing programs that help customers efficiently and effectively achieve their business and sales. TREW takes an integrated approach using a wide array of marketing services, including market research, brand identity, positioning and messaging, product launch planning, website strategy and design, search marketing and public relations.

Read additional coverage in Austin Business Journal here.

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

Brainstorm notes on hotel bar napkins.

Conversations that take you so far down tangents you’ve forgotten what your company does.

You need something that’s memorable but not too off-the-wall, specific but not excluding, and exciting but accurate …

Your tagline.

While it is a semantic branding piece that helps you in your overall messaging, tagline development doesn’t have to stop you in your tracks for months. Here are five practical tips you should consider as you’re creating your tagline:

1. Intrigue

You want your tagline to resonate at a potential customer’s first glance of your company, to draw a customer in and to make them want to know more about you and what you offer. You want it to enhance your brand, not cause a reader to question what it is that you’re doing or selling.

Starmount’s is a great example of an intriguing tagline:

Starmount sells a suite of software for mobile selling tools, digital signage, and interactive kiosks. The company wanted to give the idea that their software helps retailers transform the complete shopping experience from solitary and disconnected to personal and mobile, and their tagline shows it. The light alliteration makes the tagline easy to read and say, and the play on “making sense” makes it familiar and friendly, just like their customers want shoppers to feel when they approach in-store displays.

2. Differentiation

Focus on what makes you unique. To do this, think about your last 5-10 customer wins. What was it that made customers ultimately choose to do business with you and not a competitor? Maybe it was your company culture, specific aspects of your technology, your service, or your process or approach. Define what those differentiators are, and use them in your tagline.

Kline Technical Consulting is a security integrator that develops advanced security systems, from tracking enemy forces to leading anti-piracy efforts to securing special compounds and assets to implementing large cyber warfare networks.

Kline Technical Consulting’s differentiator is that they’re experienced in fierce, airtight security solutions that are engineered to meet very specific scenarios, and you easily understand that when you read their tagline.

3. Precision

Most likely there are words that are overdone in your industry. Maybe it’s the idea of “value” or ”quality,” or even generic nouns like “tools” or “systems.” Leave these words out of your tagline. You only get a small phrase to make an impact, and using words considered jargon are a waste of space.

At one point, multiple airlines had almost identical taglines:

And:

Western Airlines – The only way to fly. Delta – You’ll love the way we fly

Consequently, we know that there’s a way to fly and every airline thinks they’re it. The organizations aren’t willing to differentiate and none of the taglines are memorable.

Later, Southwest Airlines revved up a campaign saying, “Southwest Airlines. THE low fare airline.” Though a blunt statement and a bold stance, Southwest picked a differentiator and stood by it, and consequently, they avoided the “way to fly” jargon and created a memorable position in the market.

Seek not just to say the same phrase a different way, but to really decide what it is that makes your company different, and stand confident in that differentiation with your tagline.

4. Action

When your company offering is primarily a service, use an action verb to immediately bring your customers into what it is that you do for them. It would be easy to create a tagline that focuses on an end result, but if your value add is the way you approach a solution, convey that in your tagline.

Trek Global creates open-source-based ERP solutions for $50-250M businesses.

Their tagline gives you the idea that they walk through the ERP process with you, and don’t just deliver a standard, COTS solution. And their differentiator is just that – they guide customers through the process of evaluating and developing an ERP system that’s just right for each customer’s needs. A tagline that focused on the end results with no action verb (for example, “The right ERP system for you”) would lose emphasis on the whole process, and thus the differentiator.

5. Few Words

As a best practice, make your tagline 5-6 words or less. Keeping your tagline short will help it to be memorable, force you to hone in on your differentiator, and make it easy to integrate with your logo.

Alfamation is a global provider of functional test products and solutions for the automotive, consumer electronics, telecom, and medical industries. Alfamation services many industries, but their key thread is that they work with customers to create solutions for next-generation test systems.

The company’s concise tagline fits will with its logo and says just what it is that it offers – with Alfamation, you can make a reality that test solution that you can now only imagine.

In Summary: Best Practices

When you’re developing a tagline, brainstorm and then take a step back. Leave your notes aside for a few days and see what you think when you read the taglines again with a clear mind, as a prospective customer would for the first time. Reflect, and ask yourself:

1. Who is your target audience? Would these words capture their attention?
2. Is it specific to your company, or could it easily be the tagline of any of your competitors?
3. Does it contain words that are overused?
4. If you offer a service, does the tagline explain what you help customers achieve?
5. Is it too long?

When you need a break from brainstorming a tagline, take a look at these other posts about messaging development and advertising at first-glance:

TREW Helps Create Your Brain

Make Sure Your Print Ad Passes the 2-Second Test

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

Last weekend, The Austin American-Statesman featured TREW Marketing in the “Statesman Startup Spotlight.” In a Q&A-style, the article highlights TREW’s startup roots, planted by co-founders and long time friends and colleagues, Wendy Covey and Rebecca Geier. The two shared many discussions over lunchtime workouts and combined their individual passions to form the agency uniquely focused in B2B science, engineering, and IT industries.

The Statesman Startup Spotlight shows that in a crowded marketplace of marketing and advertising agencies, TREW distinguishes itself from competitors by staying true to our niche and using smart, collaborative business tactics. For instance, TREW organizes into small teams to meet clients’ marketing needs, where one team may be executing an entire Web redesign for a customer in Germany, another is leading a product press tour in New England, and a third in Silicon Valley for a trade show – leading event PR, social media, and developing new business for the company. In these ways, TREW has been able to grow in our industry and maintain close relationships with our customers, many of whom have been with TREW since our founding.

TREW has also been named a BtoB Top Agency in 2012 in the small agency category. To compile the list of Top Agencies, BtoB Magazine surveyed agencies in its database through an online form in four categories (small, midsize, large, and interactive). The finalists in each category were selected based on percentage of total business that is B2B, revenue growth, client wins, and innovative work. We were included in the Top Agency Special Report for achievements in the following marketing programs:

• Product launch success with 125% more media coverage than any launch in the client’s history
• Search advertising program with an 82% increase in AdWord click-through-rates and a 60% decrease in pay-per-click spending
• Product launch with media coverage in top trade magazines Test & Measurement World, Design News, ECN Magazine, Design World, and Engineering TV of Dynacar, the world’s first fully validated vehicle model simulator by Wineman Technology and Tecnalia Research
• Web Redesign for DISTek Integration which received a 37% YOY Web traffic increase, 68% increase of time spent on site by visitors, and 92% increase of organic search traffic
• Consistent visual and textual branding for communications and 12-month marketing plan for DISTek Integration

• 34% YOY revenue growth from 2010 to 2011
• 179% increase in site web traffic to trewmarketing.com
• Launched an award-winning e-book, Smart Marketing for Engineers, that resulted in a 600% increase in web traffic for TREW
• Online and print coverage in the Wall Street Journal for being a finalist in the publication’s “Small Business, Big Innovation” national competition

Completing Q1 of 2012, TREW is off to an impressive start to the year. In addition to these features, TREW has increased first quarter revenue earnings by 145% from 2011, and also was recently covered by The Austin Business Journal for a marketing partnership with Kline Technical Consulting.

To read the full article on TREW’s Startup Spotlight from Austin American-Statesman, click here.

Your brand is your company’s control center, or what we like at TREW to call “the brain”. It is the collective set of experiences over many years that shape who your company is and its unique value proposition. In marketing terms, your brand is personified both visually – through your company logo and branding styleguide – and contextually – through words, such as your mission, vision, and positioning statements; core company and product-level messaging; and company and campaign taglines.

With a smart, creative approach, TREW Marketing brings years of experience helping companies shape their brand and identity with a service we call the Branding Brain. Below are elements illustrating our approach and Branding Brain success with three client examples – The Hogg Foundation, Starmount Systems, and Alfamation.

To Develop the Brain, First Know the Heart

To position a company, both visually and contextually, it’s important to first know about the company’s heart. What is the company and its team uniquely passionate about and capable of delivering that no other company can? This requires a lot of listening – in person, via research, and persistent studying.

For The Hogg Foundation, TREW conducted an in-depth market research project, focused on internal leadership and staff, as well as external groups of stakeholders and consumers.

Market research included:

• 21 hours of qualitative in-person interviews with all staff
• Over 800 external quantitative online surveys
• Research analysis and findings

Following this market research, TREW Marketing gained honest stakeholder insights that led to recommendations for branding, messaging, and communications.

Starmount, a retail software solutions provider was undergoing an entire brand redesign, and partnered with TREW to develop core branding elements, including mission, vision and positioning statements; tagline concepts; and company and product-level core messaging. The TREW team worked closely with company business, technical and marketing leadership and conducted qualitative competitive analysis over several months to understand Starmount’s unique value proposition in a highly competitive retail software marketplace.

Alfamation, a test and measurement solutions provider, selected TREW to manage their rebranding efforts by crafting their “brain,” including company logo and brand guidelines; product logo creation; creative guidance for software, hardware packaging; core company and product level positioning and messaging; and mission statement and tagline. TREW began this process by interviewing company business and sales leaders and key partners as well as studying the competitive landscape and market opportunities.

Listen Actively and Patiently

Choosing words in branding statements is a slow, methodical, creative and patient process. For the Hogg Foundation, through our deliberate process, a key vision crystallized – to move from speaking about mental illness or recovery, to the more progressive, all-encompassing term, mental wellness. It was also important to emphasize their mission’s focus in the state of Texas, while being mindful of their strong awareness and influence nationally.

Through much research and group discussions, TREW developed the following mission and vision statements for the foundation:

Mission: The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health advances mental wellness of the people of Texas as an impactful grantmaker and catalyst for change

Vision: The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health will invest our knowledge and resources to move Texas forward in achieving mental wellness

Although Starmount serves a completely different market place of retail Chief Information Officers (CIO) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) at large retailers such as Urban Outfitters or Home Depot, getting to their unique value proposition and company positioning followed a similar process: rolling up our sleeves, listening and asking many, many questions, to ultimately get to the Starmount heart.

Out of this process and a collective understanding of Starmount’s unique software products and services and very talented and experienced team of retail software developers, we were then able to develop the brain, including the following mission and vision statements:

Mission: “Starmount software brings the power of online retail to create relevant, engaging in-store shopping experiences”

Vision: “To transform the in-person shopping experience and make retail stores relevant”

For Alfamation, the TREW team sought to capture their passion and scientific knowledge for creating out-of-the-box products and services for design, test, and manufacturing engineers and managers in the automotive, consumer electronics, telecom, and medical industries. It was important for the mission, tagline, and logo to convey their innovative culture and present the company’s broad family of software and hardware products to customers globally. Through our same deliberative process, we developed their brain, including these elements:

Mission: “We leverage our scientific passion and knowledge to imagine and create new ways to engineer functional test systems”

Tagline: “Imagine a better test solution”

Live Your Brand – Everyday. Everyway.

Building off the core ”brain” elements, The Hogg Foundation and TREW created and prioritized organizational goals, core values, and made their branding elements visible at all touch points in the organization through activities that included:

• 4 organizational goals and detailed recommendations
• Re-designed website with robust content management system and clear navigation
• E-newsletter template extending the web design brand experience
• Established core values embraced by The Hogg Foundation’s internal and external audiences

Starmount’s “brain” came to life with a custom, integrated 12 –month marketing strategy and activity plan, resulting in:

• Communications Brain used as messaging guide for primary company and product communication
• Consistency and efficiency gains by using Brain vs. reinventing messaging with each new activity
• Scalable and integrated mix of low- and high-cost media investments to generate demand

Once Alfamation’s core elements of the “brain” were developed, TREW integrated their branding across all marketing disciplines with a 12-month marketing plan, including:

• Website re-design which resulted in 100% increase of pages viewed from previous site

• Leveraging the company and product level positioning and messaging “brain” with the design and production of Alfamation’s booth at NI Week; developing their promotional strategy; and creating technical product brochures

• Compelling email marketing campaign that extended their trade show success, and generated a response rate 2.6 times greater than the industry average

December is here and will quickly fly by.  If you have marketing budget dollars to spend before the year’s end, you are feeling the pressure.  We’ve put together a list of quick, effective marketing investments for you to consider.

1.  Invest in Google Adwords.  Not only are Adwords ideal for reaching a very specific audience, and easy to measure; you can have them live within 24 hours using your corporate credit card.  Be sure to follow best practices — see our Spotlight blog post on this topic for more details.

2.  Reach out to your database. Send an end-of-year email to your customers and prospects.  Be sure the message is not too sales-oriented…offer valuable information such as tech tips and industry news.  Or simply say thank you for their business.  Have not been keeping up with your database?  Use December to update your records, determine ways to segment your target audiences, and perhaps begin plans for a 2010 quarterly newsletter.

3.  Start a blog. December is a great time to set up the back-end mechanics of your new company blog (which would launch in 2010).  These include creating a WordPress account and feeding that account into your website.  Your blog should match the look and feel of your website, which likely means a small amount of creative work.

4.  Refresh content on your website. Conduct a head-to-toe sweep of your website, updating messages and improving your writing (active voice, tighten phrases, etc.).  While looking through your site, uncover lead acquisition opportunities, such as existing white papers and presentations, and post them behind short forms for web visitors to complete.  TREW Marketing writers/editors can be a great resource for this work.

5.  Thank your staff. Has your team gone above and beyond to meet their goals this year?  Be sure they are recognized for their efforts.  This can range from the very simple, such as bringing in bagels and coffee for a surprise treat, to gift certificates or a formal holiday/appreciation event.  An appreciated team will be a motivated team for you in 2010.

6. Gather 2010 marketing plan feedback from an expert. This is an ideal time to bring in a TREW Marketing consultant as a sounding board for your 2010 plans.  During the one or two-day session, we review goals, major marketing campaigns, core messages, and investment by media.  We uncover ways to strengthen your messages, integrate innovative marketing tactics, and measure impact and success.

Contact TREW Marketing and put your December and 2010 marketing plans in motion.