Voices for Children to Partner with Loop Consulting Group

Children’s Advocacy Group Hopes to Raise Funds, Awareness

Miami, Florida, June 19, 2008: Voices For Children Foundation has selected Loop Consulting Group as their integrated marketing communications partner, in charge of their online communications and rebranding efforts. Voices For Children Foundation (http://www.voices4.org/) is responsible for raising funds to support Miami-Dade’s Guardian Ad Litem (GAL) Program. The ultimate goal of the GAL Program is to provide every abused, abandoned, and neglected child in Miami-Dade with a representative voice to speak in the best interests of dependent children in court proceedings. Additionally, Voices For Children raises money to support the medical, emotional, and social needs of these children.

Nestor Rodriguez, Voices’ Chief Executive Officer stated, “Voices is entering a critical stage in our developmental and organizational growth. We’re very excited about partnering with Loop Consulting Group at this particular time, and look forward to working together to benefit the lives of the abused, abandoned, and neglected children we serve.”

Carolina Schwarz, Voices’ Director of Communications, added, “From our initial meetings, Loop looked at both our developmental and marketing initiatives from a holistic perspective, and asked questions that noted deep interest in our activities. We’re very excited about the ambitious plans already in place for our future online integrated communications initiatives, which will deliver effective fundraising and awareness-raising results.”

Loop Consulting Group’s President, Marcos J. Menendez, also stated, “We’re thrilled to be working together for such a worthy cause. It’s a great honor, and an excellent opportunity for us to give back to the community by using our marketing talents and expertise to help raise awareness for Voices For Children Foundation, which will propel this cause forward.”

Loop Consulting Group is a Miami, FL, based internet marketing firm, dedicated to helping organizations and businesses reach their online sales and communications goals. Loop Consulting Group specializes in Integrated Online Marketing Communications (IOMC), which focuses all online marketing and advertising into a single digital voice. Loop Consulting Group creates powerful winning strategies for organizations and businesses that transition to the online marketplace across all channels.

Integrated Marketing: A Marketer’s Primary Concern

According to a study done by the Association of National Advertisers, “achieving effective IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications) campaigns is a marketer’s primary concern.”

Bob Liodice, President of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), goes on to say, “Although 74% of firms we've surveyed say they are using IMC approaches for most or all of their brands, only 25% rated the quality of their IMC programs "excellent" or "very good" -- underscoring the need to identify best practices and address the barriers that can impede IMC efforts.”

The ANA and Mr. Liodice label the barriers to IMC as:

1. Strategic Consistency

“An IMC campaign should start with a compelling consumer insight that can be translated into a strong, differentiated marketing strategy. This leads to the development of a creative "brand idea" that drives each discipline's tactics.”

Simply put, this means that the message must be consistent across all customer touch points.

2. Common Measurement Process

“Although organizations have become more skilled in crunching numbers, there is no single, consistent set of metrics that transcends discipline-centric measurements.”

This is true for now; all metrics, whether they’re email open rates or website sale conversions, are being gathered by separate sets of systems. What we do at Loop is manually gather the data of the campaigns and organize it in a dashboard format for the client to see. Soon, metric companies will start to design applications that organize all marketing data into one integrated dashboard, but for the time being, we have to make do with manual gathering.

3. Functional Silos

“For too long, marketing functions have been vertically organized by media type. This “silo” approach is mirrored on the agency side, with rewards based on discipline-specific P&L models.”

What Bob is saying is that marketing spending has traditionally been arranged by the type of media to be purchased. Instead of taking an overall look at what the message is meant to say to all customers, we design the message based on the type of media in the budget. For example, if we need to talk about four product features, a TV or email message can mention them all; conversely, you can only fit so much onto an outdoor sign, so the message is altered in exchange for the type of media purchased.

4. Professional Skills

“Achieving strategic integration requires a top-to-bottom reinvention of the marketing organization. This transformation must be led by "renaissance marketers" -- a new breed of holistic professionals who are system thinkers, customer-centric believers, innovators, and dreamers.”

I think top-to-bottom reinvention can be a little drastic, but I do agree with an organizational change in marketing philosophy. In order for a company to truly achieve an integrated message, the company and all its directors must view the message from the customer’s perspective, and then tailor the distribution of the message based on an overall view of all customer touch-points.

Content Relevance Kills Content Perfection

Vin Crosbie of The ClickZ Network on his article Good Enough Triumphs Over Perfection writes “Once content is good enough to be relevant, it needn't be perfect.”

He is referring to the way traditional media (TV, Newspapers and Radio) views the level of quality and perfection needed to distribute a message. Crosbie goes on to saying “YouTube has triumphed over the traditional video networks online, despite all their investments. Wikipedia, despite inaccuracies, has triumphed over Encyclopaedia Britannica and other publishers who attempt perfection. Google News and Yahoo News each have more users than the Web sites of any newspaper or news broadcaster. All because their content, although not perfect, is good enough.”

On the web we don’t seem to mind if the message is not placed on a flawlessly designed website or if the video showing you how to fix your particular problem is not adequately lit as long as we can find what we are looking for.

The reason for this is that all of us use the web for one thing…and that is to find answers to what we are looking to solve. And if we find the answers we don’t seem to care much if they are not presented in the best “paper”.

This does not mean that you should through your brand’s image out the door and forget quality and creativeness, it just makes a point that relevance of message and timing to market are more important that a flawless look.

I'll have a hard time selling this to our designers... : )

37 Things You Should Check Before Sending An Email- Seth Godin’s Email Check List

Author and marketing genius Seth Godin has presented a list of 36 points you should consider before sending out an email to one person or a group. From a marketing perspective my favorite points are:

19. Do I have my contact info at the bottom? (If not, consider adding it).

21. Could this email be shorter?

36. If I had to pay 42 cents to send this email, would I?

I’m going to suggest to Seth one more point, point number 37.

37. Did this email add any value what so ever for the recipient? Did it make them smarter? More informed about something they care about? Did it help improve their professional or personal life in any way?

Inbox attention is getting more and more precious for you and your prospective clients. This mean everyone has to quickly prioritize what they will pay attention to. Make sure that what you deliver is worth their time and attention.