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How can you design a site that works well at any screen size, keeps SEO and analytics under one URL, and requires less future maintenance?

Introducing…responsive web design. In very basic terms, a responsive design is one where the website adapts to the user’s screen size automatically by resizing images, videos, navigation, text, and more so that it fits nicely at any size.

Responsive design ensures that your content can flow into any device because you’re designing once for all platforms.

Our updated-for-2013 presentation answers the following questions:

• What is it?
• Why should you care?
• What’s the design process?
• Is it right for your site?

View the presentation below and contact us if you want more information! Click bottom right corner for full screen:

91% of B2B companies are diving into content marketing according to eMarketer. It seems that the fat part of the curve is upon us as the corporate world realizes that savvy consumers of all stripes just don’t buy the old advertising game. The new bargain is, if you give me valuable content of some sort, I’ll maybe think better of your company. Seems a bit tenuous, but I’ll vouch that it works, or used to.

We started our first thought-leadership led strategy with IBM back in 2002. We didn’t call it content marketing back then, but IBM had realized that they were not in the blue box business anymore, they were instead in the business consulting business; that’s why they sold their PC operation to the Chinese and bought PwC Consulting.

The problem is that with everyone and their brother buying into marketing automation systems, which need to be fed with content, I’m afraid the marketplace is rapidly going into content overload mode. Enterprise marketers cite producing engaging content as their number one challenge, according to the Content Marketing Institute. That’s code for: “Whoops! We’re making content, but nobody’s looking at it”.

So what’s a marketer to do? Advertising doesn’t work like it used to and the hoi polloi are ruining content marketing for the good guys (that’s us!).

Table stakes today are having a constant flow of content designed to appeal to each of your key personas at every step in the Consumer Decision Journey. This requires doing serious work mapping your consumer’s path to purchase, discovering their key touch points and understanding their psychology at every step. It sounds complex and it is. But if you don’t do this foundational work, you will not have the right content in front of the right consumer at the right time. That, however, just gets you in the game.

The challenge then is to create content that is sufficiently valuable and distinctive that your prospect not only engages with it, but also shares it, and most importantly is intrigued by the company that has produced it.  This is a very high bar and not for the weak of spirit.

Unfortunately, in content marketing today there is no substitute for a living content strategy effort informed by data and analytics and activated by best-in-class content created around valuable consumer insights. Makes you pine for the days of a clever print ad and a scotch and soda.

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3 entries, 3 gold awards.

The Horizon Interactive Awards is a prestigious international competition recognizing outstanding achievement among interactive media producers from all over the world.

CIT

We created a simple narrative in which tiny gifts come to life, in order to help CIT employees connect with their contacts. Production was as follows: First, the team created concept boards, depicting different ideas of how to approach the card. Next, the team got to work with simple storyboards, depicting the basic story and messaging. Then, they created a mock desk set in the studio, shooting 24 still images for each 1 second of video.

The result was an endearing, simple, and concise 30-second stop-motion video. The messaging was then translated into 9 different languages, so that the video could be shared across the world.

Click to see the project: CIT Holiday Card 2012 – Motion Graphics / Effects – Video

Neenah Paper’s Astrobrights

Starting with no fans, we built to over 26,500 Facebook fans and 55 million impressions using social, sweepstakes contests and paid media. A crucial part of this growth came through our bi-weekly crafting contests, which were supported by origami style display ads featuring Neenah Paper’s Astrobrights products. We followed our crafting contest series with a school-based sweepstakes, driven by display ads, UGC and original content created for Astrobrights. The ensuing sweepstakes lead to more brilliant user-generated content—we gained survey response data and over 2,500 email opt-ins for Astrobrights!

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IQ’s “Tax Refunds” social study is an example of what social listening can reveal.

Social listening examines social media including: blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, to find out what people are saying and where they are saying it. It’s one of the ways we glimpse actual consumer behavior (vs. reported behavior), and combines with other forms of qualitative research, and quantitative data, to reveal consumer insights.

Consumer insights are, of course, the jewels that illuminate the critical process of mapping the Consumer Decision Journey*. The idea is to build a complete picture of how consumers are interacting with brands, social touch points and knowledge as they wend their way towards the moment of purchase and then beyond. We do this by understanding who consumers are, their personas, and then what they think and do at each point along the journey. Some of what we learn is what is already happening, but more importantly we are looking for opportunities to serve an unmet need or a perception in a new way that sets our client apart. These insights make social listening a remarkably potent tool.

Discovering what your customers and prospects are saying, and equally important where they are saying it, reveals actionable clues, insights and opportunities, social locations that brands should be present, the impact of campaigns, and the effect  of culture and seasonality on consumer behavior.

This study we just released on tax refunds is an example of how what you learn when you start to listen can be surprising. We discovered that an overwhelming 65% actually had plans to go shopping with their refunds, so we dug deeper.

What we ended up with delivered clear insights about what Americans wanted to do with the money. While it wasn’t surprising to see all the plans to buy Apple products, it was a surprise to see how many people planned on purchasing a new tattoo.

Overall the report was good news for retailers with 65% of tweeters having immediate spending plans for their refund in the following categories:

* 14% electronics spending
* 11% fashion spending
* 11% car spending
* 10% food and beverage spending
* 7% travel spending
* 7% event spending
* 5% music retail spending

The research also showed that sober responsibility was still alive and well in America with 35% of tweeters saying they plan to save their refund money or pay bills.

Click to view on Visual.ly:

Want some insights of your own? Call 678-449-2004 or email T.R. Wilhoit at tr.wilhoit@iqagency.com

We get asked a lot of questions by clients, friends, students, colleagues, you name it, so we want to bring our knowledge to the masses.

This Thursday (3/21) from 1:00 – 2:00PM EST, Laurie Vitas, a lead developer at IQ, will answer any questions you have related to web development, responsive design, HTML, CSS, and more! This will be the first of a series of Q&A sessions over a range of topics.

Tweet @IQ_Agency with the hash tag #TalkIQ and you’ll receive a quick response from a true expert in the field!  

As captured on video, IQ’s CEO & founder Tony Quin braved the mechanical bull at the annual SXSW SoDA (Society of Digital Agencies) party. Tony, who chairs the board of SoDA, said nothing but his dignity was bruised and he is ready for a rematch as soon as he finds the same bartender who prepared him for this outing.

We don’t just love our clients, we live and breathe their products. Here, for example, is “Pennington Grass Seed” from our client Central Garden & Pet,  in full bloom. This stuff grows so fast account director Kevin Smith can barely keep up with it!!

Don’t Waste Your Website

Back in 2010 I wrote an article called “Back to the Future. The dotcom in 2010” for the SoDA report  (the Society of Digital Agencies). Since then the digital marketing world has kept marching on and our heads have been turned by many new things, most of them in social media. But even after all this time the old brand website still wears its crown as the center of digital brand ecosystem.

As Pete Blackshaw, Exec VP of Incite, a joint venture between Nielsen & McKinsey, writes in a superb article on the role of websites “Importantly, if we’re truly entering a POEM (paid, owned, earned) media mix model, brand websites are key. They anchor the owned, reinforce the paid and incubate the earned.

Think about it. Where can a brand make as powerful and complete a pitch as it can on its website? Where else does a brand have as much control over the experience? Other brand touchpoints have bits of the puzzle and can certainly have influence, but only the brand site can be designed to take a prospect from curiosity all the way to SOLD and beyond. Of course brand sites may not be as sexy as a Pinterest page or a mobile app on the fad scale, but think about what they can accomplish.

Whenever we create interest with an ad or a piece of content we need to do something with that awareness. We always need a next step that can move the prospect closer to the sale, and nothing can do that better than the brand site. So don’t waste your brand site. Make it the next step for all your marketing and equip it to be a conversion machine.

A brand site should therefore be designed with three primary missions in mind:

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To coincide with Valentine’s Day, IQ’s social media team scanned 2.1 million online conversations to produce the “State of Love Report”; the first ever ranking of romance for each state in the nation.

“This is an example of how we can monitor millions of conversations online to give us unique insights into how Americans feel about issues, brands and ideas,” says Tony Quin, CEO of IQ Agency. “We wanted to have some fun with the data and give America its first look at which states are the best to find love this Valentine’s Day.”

Highlights from the “State of Love” Report include:

• Top 5 Romantic States: 1) California 2) Wyoming 3) Texas 4) Utah 5) Hawaii
• Best State to Find Love: New York
• National sentiment toward Valentine’s Day: 37% Positive, 23% Indifferent, 40% Negative.

Produced in association with Crimson Hexagon, a leading provider of Big Data analysis software and social media analytics, the report presents the results of continuous social listening analysis of conversations across Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs and other Internet properties for a 14 day period prior to Valentine’s Day 2013.

Download the full report to see where your state ranks in romance: www.iqagency.com/StateofLove