Prospective clients often ask for a snapshot of the kinds of services we provide. Our development services include:
Search engine marketing (SEO/SEM). We built our company helping clients implement natural search programs and paid search media campaigns. We’re experts in both areas, and we’ve proven that managing them as an integrated program produces better results. With more search specialists than any other digital marketing firm, we help clients master all elements of their search performance, using better technology to help us manage programs more efficiently and effectively. So if you need search engine optimization, or need to optimize press releases, images, videos or other assets, we can help. We can do them all, from managing pay-per-click, paid inclusion and feed management programs, to integrating natural and paid campaigns. Just ask us and we’ll deliver.
Display and rich media advertising. Our creative teams and media experts work together to develop campaigns to achieve our clients’ marketing goals. We can handle all the elements you’d expect, from creating banner ads, page takeovers and rich media experiences, to negotiating partnerships, sponsorships and other innovative approaches to digital media. We develop both branding campaigns and response- driven campaigns, providing value and producing a desirable ROI for our clients. It’s part of our DNA. We measure each campaign, determine what works best, then feed performance results back into the process for improved success.
Email marketing. Like search marketing, email is a permission-based medium. Your prospects and customers give you the right to talk to them. And unless you interact with them in ways they find valuable, you may not have that right for very long. We can develop email programs that integrate with your site experience, leverage our industry expertise, and follow best practices. All to produce results that should exceed expectations. We also harness linguistic insights from our search programs to optimize campaign performance.
Mobile marketing and site development. The third screen is becoming an increasingly important part of the customer experience. Our experience shows that “usefulness” is the critical element of any mobile program. Mobile advertising and mobile sites will only be successful when users are able to get instant value out of the experience. And just like with websites, a “build-it-and-they-will-come” mentality won’t yield success. How your site is found in a mobile environment is critical. So, we help clients in three areas that drive success in the mobile arena: mobile advertising (SMS messaging and mobile display advertising), mobile search optimization and mobile site development.
Website development. Is your site designed for visibility from the get go? Is it designed to connect to different users in different ways, depending on who they are, where they are in the relationship cycle, or where they’re coming from? Anyone should be able to build a website, right? The simple answer is yes. But simple answers aren’t enough when it comes to building a site that’s fully integrated into your marketing and servicing programs. We deliver brand and user experiences in ways other agencies don’t. We do this by designing websites from the ground up to create visibility. Our insight-driven creative teams generate ideas based on a deep understanding of the customer, and then bring those ideas to life.
Social Media Campaign Development. Harnessing social media is what many good marketers are looking to do today. It isn’t easy. Social media is causing brands to recalibrate the way they market, moving from disruption and intrusion, to attention and dialogue. We help our clients execute social programs that are authentic, and that are aligned with the brand personality and the marketing goals. We help our clients embrace the social networks that already exist around their brands, energize their loyal customers who will continue to talk, and support those customers who might be misinformed or struggling to get answers. We help clients engage with existing communities, to develop new ones and proactively take their knowledge out to where the conversations are already happening.
Emerging media development. The digital marketing landscape continues to change rapidly, with new forms of digital marketing cropping up every day. Meanwhile, even traditional media is becoming digital. Billboards are turning into networked digital displays and elevators are getting LCD screens with network-served news, weather and ads. The digitization of all marketing is well underway. We work with our clients to keep them abreast of the latest opportunities, and share relevant findings with them so they can stay ahead of the competition. Then based on opportunities that make sense, we can execute programs using these media to learn and gain results.
Primary customer research. We use a variety of proprietary research tools, coupled with industry-standard techniques to gain a highly-detailed understanding of your customers. We use those insights to drive the creation of successful marketing programs. Some of our services include conducting linguistic profiling to understand the customer vernacular, and experiential mapping to understand the customer decision process.
Competitive and market research. You can learn things from your competitors. Sometimes even knowing who you are competing against can be tough to figure out. We can help. We investigate the campaign strategies and performance of the competitors you do know, and have a variety of tools to help us find competitors you didn’t think you had. Campaign analysis, positioning analysis, heuristic evaluations of their websites and customer experience are all components of how we understand the threats to our success.
Persona development. Personas are all the rage in Web development and experience design these days. But our approach is different. We combine qualitative and quantitative data, campaign data, search linguistic data, and primary research to develop rich, fact-based personas that truly inform the marketing programs we develop. And we evolve those personas over time, looking at performance data to re-define clusters and optimize the experiences we create.
Digital marketing strategy. Maybe you need help with online visibility or acquisition, or you want to provide your customers with a better Web experience. We help with that. Our collaborative teams gather data from a variety of sources, analyze the current situation, lead workshops with you and your teams, identify opportunities and develop strategies that are actionable, and work. Whatever your marketing goals are, we can help you achieve them.
Integrated search marketing strategy. Users of search engines experience a search results page as a singular experience. Doesn’t it make sense to think about how to manage your natural search and paid search strategies in an integrated fashion? We think so. In fact, we know so. We have proven we can drive lift in clicks, interactions and conversions. Our experience consistently shows that there is greater value in developing a search strategy that integrates natural optimization efforts with your paid media services than in planning each component in individual silos.
Social media/word-of-mouth strategy. Customers will share bad news three times more often than they’ll spread good news. With all the consumer-generated content on blogs, video-sharing sites, Wikis, bookmarking sites, discussion boards, website forums and newsgroups, do you want to take a chance on how the news they’re sharing will affect their perception of your brand? We find and map the active communities that your key customers visit regularly. We listen to what’s being said, helping you to identify areas of potential risk as well as opportunities. Finally, we develop strategies to help you embrace, energize or support those communities. Maybe the solution is joining the existing conversations, maybe it’s developing a private community for your loyal customers, or maybe it’s just listening. We’ll help you set the right course.
Mobile marketing strategy. Is mobile marketing marginal, mainstream or somewhere in the middle? It’s hard to separate the hype from reality. At iCrossing we have our feet planted firmly on the ground (as we’re walking down the street, phones against ears) when it comes to mobile solutions. Our mobile experts will work with you to define opportunities to exploit mobile technologies to achieve your marketing goals. Maybe SMS alerts can help you connect to customers, or perhaps context-specific ads on in mobile search environments could be effective. We’ll help you sort it out.
Analytics and performance planning. At the end of the day, it often comes down to a few simple questions: How well did the campaign do, did we make money and what did we learn from it? Instead, you’re often flooded with data, and lacking real answers. That’s where we come in. Our commitment to results led us to make significant investments in a suite of proprietary tools that are unmatched in the industry, and to develop expertise in other industry-leading tools. Campaign and site-side analytics, segmentation modeling, optimization, integrated offline-to-online campaign reporting – you name it, we can help.
Marketing intelligence dashboarding. Digital dashboards that provide clients with an integrated view of all their marketing efforts are rarely developed in ways that meet or exceed initial expectations. Marketers have dreams of seeing all their performance data in one easily-digestible view, but never quite seem to get a solution that delivers against that vision. We can do it because we’ve been creating custom Web-based views for some of the best brands in the world. Online campaign data, offline data, in-house data and third-party data. We integrate it all, and deliver it to you the way you need to see it – as insights, not just data.
