Connect is a marketing & communications firm focused on working with companies who are experiencing challenges with their current marketing, and helping thriving businesses secure that missed opportunity that they did (or even didn't) know about. It's like your business is taking college marketing courses, and we're its favorite professor.
Ever wish people would talk about you when you wanted and only good stuff – yeah us too. Come learn how to know who and where people are talking about your brand, and the best ways to guide the conversations to be a benefit not a nightmare.
PRESENTER John Ream
REGISTERclick here to fill out the registration form
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We’d love to meet your people, click here to invite a peer to the seminar
REVIEWS We know how awesomely beneficial these seminars are, but don’t just take our word for it :
“Great presentation full of unique ideas and approaches to implement in our business. Thanks for sharing your wealth of knowledge with us and we look forward to testing these strategies in our business.” Joel Chamberlain- Chamberlain & Associate
“I really enjoyed this seminar and feel like I gained a lot of good tactics to protect our company’s reputation. I enjoyed learning more about some of the social media monitoring tools and different ways to convert people into brand managers” Angelica Guardia- Parc Management
Social influencers drive sales, and chances are, you’ve been ignoring these people. But here’s the good news: you can capture these people while building loyalty among your existing customers while supporting a worthy cause. Before you know it, you’ll be creating whole new channels of customers you never had. Sound good? We thought so.
In this free seminar, you will learn about this new dimension of marketing and how you can apply online and offline strategies to create customers, and get your customers creating customers. Find your social influence sweet spot by scoping out real-life examples and winning strategies.
FREE It’s our way of giving back.
PRESENTER John Ream
WHEN You tell us! When would you like to hear this seminar? We are always up for speaking at your office building or group meetings.
REGISTERclick here to fill out the registration form.
SHARE We’d love to meet your people, click here to invite a peer to the seminar
Everything happens for a reason. Or, in the case of our client Chem Tech, something wasn’t happening and it was our job to figure out the reason, because that something was sales. Sales were dipping. Chem Tech had built a very successful business manufacturing things like flow valves, flow monitors, switches and another forty plus such products that control the flow of liquids and air in appliances like, refrigerators for example. Their customers are primarily original equipment manufacturers.
Our research showed that the sales reps simply weren’t selling Chem Tech’s products as often as they used to. Why? Through phone interviews, we figured out an important trend — The reps tended to sell the products they knew the most about. So, educate the sales reps and problem solved, right? Not so easy when as independent contractors, the reps have very little incentive to sell the Chem Tech line of products.
To turn things around, we decided to engage the sales reps in various ways, and get Chem Tech’s products on their radar. We created a “Distribution Zone” where we set up contests, question and answer sessions, and we provided an open environment in which the reps could not only be educated about the products, but engage in conversations with each other.
These sales reps had a lot to say. And we were more than happy to listen, and form a new relationship with them, or to use open lines of communication as a way to reconnect them with Chem Tech and their products. You could practically see the sales going up. Well, actually, with trackable and measurable data, we actually did see the sales go up…an astonishing 30 percent in the first year! Those were some fun charts and graphs to fill in. How often can you point to a thirty percent increase in sales and then get to stamp your name on it?
Yeah. This program was so effective, and exciting to watch unfold, that we’re going to push that sales number up even more with a little idea we call: Training Videos. So stay tuned.
One thing was already known when this project began for St. Vincent’s Diagnostic Cardiology Associates. They were among the best of the best in their field. But we noticed that their business model was more common, and with a common problem: how to bring potential patients and the doctors who can help them together? There was no direct response mechanism in place to bring the patients and the hospitals together.
This is what we do. We notice such things. And we are experts in creating awareness and path-to-care channels which bring patient and treatment counts up. So first, we conducted research to get to the reasons why patients weren’t coming to St. Vincent’s in larger numbers. It didn’t take long for our research to uncover two important facts. 1) Patients have gotten very good at doing their own research online. And 2) Patients seek relationships with physicians first, and consider the hospital system they work for second.
Well, the good news is that St. Vincent’s already has a very nice brand campaign selling the hospital system. And this positive brand image will be important to the success of our own campaign. But they needed more. They needed that bridge from patients to the doctors at DCA. So we did the other thing we do, we built the bridge and brought the patients and the doctors together.
In the digital realm, bridges can be built with content. Editorial content that is gobbled up by the patients searching for answers. Articles. Trends. Blogs. Testimonials. And videos, information seekers love videos, our research shows. So we gave them content. Content that connected them to the surgeons. And the bridge began to take shape.
Another interesting thing happens when patients get the information from the doctors themselves, they tend to write emails and make phone calls and visit the links to the websites that link them to the cardiologists at DCA. Best of all, every call, click and visit is track-able and measurable. Inquiries are up. Soon, we’ll be measuring how many procedures actually originated through this campaign.
Every hospital group looking for new patients should have a Connect campaign like this, don’t you think?
How often do you gather your team for a day of brainstorming? These impromptu meetings have become very popular for businesses searching for new ideas. We like to call them freewheeling “ideation sessions,” and they might just produce an idea that leads to your company’s next great feature, product or service.
Connect — Integrated Marketing is a marketing consultancy firm focused on delivering business and consumer insights that lead to evidence-based marketing strategies. Connect’s niche is in market research, identifying who a client’s customers are, how they digest that business’s message and what motivates them to buy a product or service. Once the research is complete, Connect then creates a marketing plan.
Most of Connect’s clients are in the health care, manufacturing, transportation/logistics and food/beverage industries.
“We conduct online and in-person surveys and focus groups when necessary,” President John Ream said. “We also use Web-based tools such as Google Insights, Social … (more…)
Historically, large business empires were founded on solid reputations built by both word-of-mouth referrals and paid advertising. Now that any individual can give instant online feedback on a product or service, even the smallest business must continually work to earn and keep its good reputation.
With savvy consumers going online to find out what others are saying before making any kind of buying decision, business owners and professionals must learn how to manage their reputations and know who is talking about a company’s products or services and exactly what those people are saying.
Connect Integrated Marketing hosts monthly marketing seminars that are open to the public. Reputation management was its most recent topic. (more…)
We are really excited about launching our CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiative in the next few weeks. We designed a program to invite graduating students and out of work marketing and communications professionals participate in some workshop for a few weeks, or as we call it a “semester.” We plan to engage the groups in working sessions that take the things we have learned, show them how to do it, then actually get to launch some programs for us and clients (of course we are going to pay them, can’t leave that out). (more…)
