The Situation:

The client, Traditional Life Sciences Inc., was looking to start an online business in the health and wellness space, targeted to Boomers. They wanted a starting-point e-commerce, content management and marketing system that could be managed by 2-5 people but that could handle sales of 5-10 million a year before it required a major overhaul. We were asked to recommend an overall technology strategy and then to submit a proposal for executing the work.

Our Strategy:

1. Use an inexpensive open source CMS. We contemplated WordPress but eventually went with Joomla.
2. Instead of building out all the desired functionality using custom code, we recommended “renting” the functionality by using SaaS applications (also called hosted or cloud applications).
3. We used our Canadian designers to design the Joomla site but then we had it built by overseas coders to keep the cost down.

The Execution:

We call it a web ecosystem because calling it a website is a bit misleading (at least we think so). The ecosystem consists of:

1. A Joomla front-end which manages all the pages, article and the merchandising of the products.  The products are managed through a powerful Joomla component called Virtue Mart which acts as the product database.
2. Infusionsoft is the real power behind the system. Infusionsoft manages the email marketing and marketing automation, the CRM (user/customer database) and the e-commerce. All the actual transactions are processed through Infusionsoft and then sent electronically for order fulfillment. It also provides all the e-commerce sales and order reporting.
3. Customer Hub is an Infusionsoft add-on that allows customers to do self service on their account like updating their credit card information and seeing their past orders.
4. Get Satisfaction is the ultimate in web 2.0 community based support and it powers the support forum.
5. Google Analytics gathers all the visitor and conversion data and allows the client to do detailed conversion and ROI analysis.

Most people working in e-commerce have figured out that building a nice site is just the beginning and that most of the effort actually needs to go into driving traffic to the site, getting visitors into some kind of marketing automation sequence and then testing different offers until they convert. Then you up-sell and cross-sell them, also using marketing automation sequences. So how do you do this with a staff of 2 or 3? If you try do it using Constant Contact or aWeber or any other stand alone email tool you’ll be importing and exporting data every day and spending your life trying to get it to interact with your shopping cart and your customer database. Infusionsoft is really the only application on the market that allows you to manage this kind of marketing automation engine and it’s build for small companies with limited online marketing resources. It’s CRM + email marketing + marketing automation + an e-commerce cart, all in one, all pre-connected and ready to roll.

Cost Savings:

The client mentioned that they had our functionality quoted by an agency that would have built them a custom solution. The quote was for more than triple what they invested using our approach.

Client Feedback:

Getting to the final product as specified, on time, and on budget should be “price of entry”, but in a fairly sophisticated integration like Zwell, cost overages and time creep is likely more often the rule than the exception. Jonathan and the Strategy Cube team hit the timeline, delivered against the budget (while still indicating where options and upgrades were possible), and delivered a result that exceeds our expectation.  Communication throughout was efficient and solid.  We are delighted with the result, and recommend Strategy Cube without reservation.

Rob Carscadden, President & CEO of Traditional Life Sciences Inc. and zwell.ca. June 29, 2010.

The site went live in June 2010. You can visit the site at www.zwell.ca

Screenshots:

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7systems is a small firm run by several athletes who manage the business in their personal time – they all have pretty impressive day jobs. They wanted to run a contest to build awareness of their excellent product among non-users and so they designed a contest that would encourage athletes to tell their story online and then have their friends and family come and vote for them. 7systems didn’t have the budget for a full custom voting application so they asked us to build some inexpensive voting functionality. One of the reasons we love WordPress is the availability of free plugins. We researched and found the WP-Post Ratings plugin and then customized the look & feel as well as the functionality to suit their needs. You can visit the 7systems website here but the voting pages have been removed as the voting period ended June 30th.

Screenshots:

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

Since February 2009 I have had the privilege of speaking to over 80 CEOs of Canadian firms through the Presidents of Enterprising Organizations network, the CEO Global Network, the Women Presidents Organization (WPO) and the York Technology Association on the subject of Web 2.0. The companies whose executives have seen the presentation include Lyreco, Energizer, McMillan, Toronto Board of Trade, Consumer Impact Marketing,  Melitta, Tree of Life, Kids Help Phone, Tyco/DSC, Swiss Natural Sources/Swiss Herbal, Wardrop Engineering, Jan Kelley Marketing, Marsulex, Kinectrics, Progistix Solutions/SCI Group, Peerless Electric, Pathway Communications, Glenway Golf & Country Club, Junior Achievement, the College of Massage Therapists of Ontario, RHR Canada, Triumph, Summerlea Office Solutions, LaserNetworks, Soft Care Corp, HostMySite.com, Aseco Integrated Systems, Greenblue Systems, Skyway Wind Energy Group, Torino Drywall, 360 Visibility, StaffClick Personnel, Blazing Design, Amer.com, Beneplan, Blake Jarrett & Company, NCI Marketing, Maracle Press, Melmart Distributors, Freedom 9, National Logistics Services, Industrial Thermo Polymers, Nealanders International, Atria Networks, End to End Networks, The Climate Change Infrastructure Corp. and The DOUG Agency.

Most CEO’s have heard of web 2.0 but they don’t really know what it is. When I ask them they say “it’s Facebook and Twitter and all those kind of web programs my teenagers use.” At the start of every meeting I ask them to share how Web 2.0 makes them feel.  From younger groups (CEOs in their 40s) I hear “exciting, opportunities, possibilities, connections.” From older CEOs (50+) I hear “it’s weird, my kids are into it but I don’t get it, an invasion of my privacy, I feel left behind, I feel a loss of control, I feel overexposed, it’s a big waste of time.”

The big idea I share with CEOs is that Web 2.0 is fundamentally about the shift from publisher generated content to user generated content. Leveraging web 2.0 for your business means harnessing the incredible power of user generated content. But it requires a huge paradigm shift and many companies are getting left behind.

In a July 2009 global survey of 1,700 executives on Web 2.0 by McKinsey & Company “69 percent of respondents report that their companies have gained measurable business benefits [from Web 2.0], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.” Click on the chart to the right to see the details of this.

I quickly realized that the technology aspect of Web 2.0 is of secondary importance and it’s rarely why the implementations fail. The primary issue is always people and their work processes or online habits. The introduction of internally facing web 2.0 technologies into a workplace is fundamentally about changing people’s work processes, the way they get their work done. And if it it’s not planned around and integrated into the way users currently get their work done, then you have a sure recipe for failure.

The other observation I made is that internal web 2.0 applications are often brought on by the IT department to solve a particular problem and are rarely considered in the broader context of the firms business model: how they are organized and how they make money.  Yet when you consider how you might leverage the power of user generated content in the context of a firm’s business model you open up the potential to enable significant profit growth by making strategic changes to the actual business model.

Because of these realizations I have partnered with John Sutherland, a business model design and innovation expert and together we have put together a Web 2.0 consulting offering that is being very well received. We have begun consulting engagements with a number of the firms whose CEO’s saw the Web 2.0 presentation and wanted to go to the next step.

Today most small and mid-sized firms will be able to find ASP/SaaS (ready made) solutions for their Web 2.0 needs. We have spent time researching and engaging with the top ASP/SaaS solution providers for implementations for 5 users all the way up to enterprise installations for thousands of users so we can recommend the best solution for your specific needs. We have also researched the best technology partners for customized solutions if you want to build off your existing Microsoft Sharepoint platform and get more functionality than the ASP solutions provide.

Companies that are finding our services most useful are $10-500 million Canadian companies where the leaders are aware of web 2.0 but don’t understand the opportunities it presents or how to move forward to capitalize on them. Our particular specialty is guiding management teams through the discovery, decision and implementation phases built on a mutual understanding of the firm’s business model.

If you know anyone who fits this description we’d be happy to have a chat with them.

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

We recently launched a Facebook application to support Campbell Canada’s Help Hunger Disappear™ campaign. As of July 27th the app has 12,846 users.

Deliverables:

1. We developed a custom Facebook application to allow users to give their friends virtual cans of Campbell Soup. Campbell Canada will then donate a matching real can for every can given and accepted on Facebook. We focused on making the application simple to use and easy to spread virally.
2. We built Campbell a professionally designed, custom website through which visitors could explore all the parts of the Help Hunger Disappear™ campaign, and be directed to the Facebook application.

Execution:

Click here to go to the application’s homepage on Facebook. You need to be logged in to Facebook for the link to work.

Visit the www.helphungerdisappear.com website.

The Facebook Application:

The www.helphungerdisappear website

Commentary:

Facebook users have not reacted that positively to overtly branded applications. Brian Morrissey mentions a few of the high profile brand failures in this article from ADWEEK. As I wondered as to why this might be (and how to avoid becoming another statistic) I hypothesized the following:

• Facebook users care most about how their network perceives them. Social status is the currency of Facebook.
• Most actions on Facebook are done by users to enhance how their network feels about them. i.e. they send their friends a funny video, a photo or a fun game so they can be seen as the source of humour. They post photos of the hot guy kissing the new girl at the party so that they can be seen as the source of news, gossip etc. See the graph from McKinsey & Company below.

• Activities that allow the user to increase their social status are likely to do well.
• On judgment, I thought that many Facebook users would think that being seen donating to the foodbank was good for their social status as long as the application did not look like purely a shameless sales pitch.

In 3 weeks the app reached over 8,100 users starting from two people and spreading virally. The app has reach 12,846 users as of July 27th.

We’d appreciate any comments or feedback you may have on the application.

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

The Problem:

The team at 7 Systems had a nice looking website but they were finding it expensive and frustrating to update the site because it required them to pay the agency who built it to make all changes and updates. They wanted to enable several of their people to easily add content and make text edits themselves without having to pay the agency every time.

Our Solution:

I shared with them how rebuilding the site on a WordPress system would give them a content management system (CMS) so they could update the content themselves and it would also give them a blog so that various members of the team could contribute stories to help sell the 7systems products. It would also help their site be found more easily in search engines because Google loves WordPress blogs because of how they are structured and organized. Many of our clients find their WordPress blogs get 2 to 4 times the traffic than their HTML site gets.

Recently 7systems wanted to run a contest so they asked us to design an inexpensive contest mechanism into WordPress so that they could create Athlete profiles and then have visitors register and vote for their favorite athlete story. See some screenshots here.

Client Feedback:

“Strategy Cube was a true strategic advisor.  Jonathan effectively presented a recommendation and then helped every step of the way in making sure the execution delivered on the ideas presented.  We’re seeing double the traffic and saving major money because we don’t have to rely on an agency for the constant updates we make to our pages and our blog.” Martin Rydlo, Co-Founder, 7systems.ca.

Execution:

You can visit the WordPress powered site we built for them at www.7systems.ca

The Situation:

My client is a new safety training firm and they required ground-up brand development and marketing to be able to present themselves professionally and generate awareness of their services.

Objective:

1. Develop a compelling brand identity for a small safety training company.
2. Acquire new clients for Insight Safety Services by making prospective clients aware of them and their services.

Strategy:

1. Start with developing a compelling brand identity integrating the concept of “people” as the object of the training and a contemporary design that communicates up-to-date expertise.
2. Build Insight Safety Services a professionally designed, custom website through which visitors from the ad campaigns can explore the company and its services and be encouraged to call or email for more information.
3. Add to the website an easy to use WordPress blog with a CSS template that matches the existing site. Teach the principal of Insight Safety Systems to use the blog to post articles and expert advice on safety training. Use our favorite WordPress Plugins to 1) automatically optimize posts for SEO and publish new blog posts to google and Yahoo, and 2) send the blog post content via RSS to Feedburner and other blog sites to drive additional exposure on the web.
4. Use locally targeted google adwords and facebook ad campaigns to drive targeted traffic based on keyword searches and content placement to the new ISS website. Also register the company with Google for visibility on Google Maps.

Execution:

Logo & Brand Identity:

Business Cards:

Brand Guidelines:

We created an 8 page set of Brand Guidelines to ensure continuity of the brand over time and different executions. Some example pages are shown here.

Website:

The website is live at www.insightsafety.com

Google AdWords Campaign:

Facebook Ad Campaign:

Other Print Collateral:

We also developed:

• Printed letterhead and envelope artwork
• Printed desk cards for training sessions
• An HTML email template
• A Word document letterhead template
• A Powerpoint template for presentations

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

The Situation:

My client is a 7 person physiotherapy clinic in Aurora, ON and until October 2008 they had a holding page for a website and were running no online advertising.

Objective:

Acquire new clients for LifeSpring Physiotherapy by making prospective clients aware of the physiotherapy clinic and its services.

Strategy:

1. Use locally targeted google adwords and facebook ad campaigns to drive targeted traffic based on keyword searches and content placement to a new LifeSpring website.
2. Build LifeSpring a beautifully designed but cost effective website through which visitors from the ad campaigns can explore the clinic and its services and make a decision to call or visit.

Execution:

The website is live at www.lifespringclinics.ca

Google AdWords Campaign:

Facebook Ad Campaign:

4″X9″ Rack Card brochure:

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One of our clients wanted to improve the marketing on two of their online brands (websites). After an initial audit, we determined that the right starting point was to create Marketing Strategy Templates for each of the brands that would clarify the marketing choices on the brand and serve as a key reference tool for the program managers for several years to come.

The template applied best practices from the Consumer Packaged Goods industry modified to suit a much smaller organization with scarce marketing resources. It included:

1. Targeting
2. Brand Equity Messages: Benefit/Unique Selling Proposition, Brand Character, Taglines
3. A Tactical Advertising Plan with a focus on online media, specifically Google AdWords and Facebook and the purchase of ad space in opt-in email newsletters.

We then executed the marketing plan including buying the media and then optimized the campaigns through test and roll-out period. So far the programs that are running as a result of these Strat-Plans have acquired new registrants at the lowest cost yet seen by the client.

This summer we have done many hours of training for our clients including:

• Leadership training. The course covered what leadership at different levels in an organization looks like, especially among entry level positions, and it focused specifically on the importance of “leading upwards” or “leading your management’s thinking.” This was done over two 2-hour “Lunch and Learn’s” with about 12 staff in each session.
• How to write a recommendation: This course was aimed at solving the common problem of staff bringing unsolved problems to their manager, expecting their manager to solve them and the manager becoming a bottleneck for decision-making. The course teaches the organization how to push problem solving down to the staff closest to the issues and to force them to think through the problem (analysis), come up with a solution, gain alignment from their colleagues and then put it all down succinctly on paper. The discipline of writing is necessary because the act of writing clarifies thinking and produces better recommendations which take less time for senior managers to approve. This was done over a 2-hour “Lunch and Learn” with about 13 staff in attendance.
• Marketing 101: This course covered the basics of branding, targeting, positioning and messaging. We provided templates commonly used in Tier 1 Packaged Goods Companies to lay out marketing strategies. We explained the most common key measures for marketing programs including CPC, CPM, CPA, Cost of Acquisition and Lifetime Value of a Customer. We discussed how and why to write a good Creative Brief when working with an agency and we provided a good template. We also covered off how to use your annual marketing budget to “test and learn” in a disciplined way so as to become a learning organization capable of making better marketing choices over time. This was done over a 2-hour “Lunch and Learn” with about 14 staff in attendance.
• Google AdWords and Facebook campaigns: We trained 6 staff members of one of our clients in how to create, run and optimize both Google AdWords and Facebook ad campaigns. We also covered how to use the Google Analytics tool to measure Cost of Acquisition for key acquisition marketing programs.

One of Jonathan’s passions is the use of technology to solve problems and make organizations more efficient. We have recently researched vendors and implemented solutions including deploying the program without IT resources and training all the staff for the following:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Because our client had very lean IT resources we only looked at online, hosted CRM solutions. We examined NetSuite, salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics and Entellium over a 2-month period. We ultimately chose salesforce.com based on the client’s unique needs.

Mass email management

Our client needed to send several thousand emails every 2 months and used to have a staff member spend several days preparing the lists in Excel and then sending out the emails using Outlook in batches of 100 email addresses in the BCC field. They didn’t know that most of these email will never reach the intended recipient because they will get stopped by spam filters that look for multiple addresses in the BCC field. We looked at Constant Contact, Campaigner and Vertical Response and ultimately chose and rolled out Vertical Response because of their offer of 10,000 free emails a month for registered non-profits, which our client was. The client recently sent out a far more professional looking mass email and it took the staff member a fraction of the time to send it. They are extremely happy with the solution.

Event management

One of our clients runs several live conferences a year. These events are a huge drain on the staff for the weeks leading up to the event. They used to manage all the registrations manually via phone and email and capture the data in a spreadsheet. Fees were processed through a special online merchant account but the data did not connect to any internal system. All outbound communication to attendees was handled manually.

We researched several online event management solutions and chose RegOnline.com for them. RegOnline is a hosted, pay per use, solution that automates almost every conceivable aspect of running a large event and massively reduces the staff required to pull the event off.

Web conferencing & archiving

The same client as above also wanted to know how much it would cost to have a company come to their live events, capture the audio and video, stream it out via the web to a disparate audience, allow for Q&A with online attendees and then archive it online for later on-demand viewing. We researched several providers and found a Toronto based company that provides this service at the right level of cost and quality for our clients needs.