My mission

Seize the story and ambition of a company in order to architect their brand and digital commerce strategies, modeled by innovation, impact and efficiency, to achieve highly relevant, quality and value-driven customer experiences through a multi-channel journey that deliver measurable gains, targeted outcomes and an inspired path forward, reaching an ideal future state.

vision statement

Passionate pursuit of business goals and positioning, skillfully shaping the brand and digital landscape with agility, technical expertise, data insights, and trailblazing design and creativity that will raise performance, transform sales velocity, accelerate the growth playbook, and influence the human heart.

My Purpose

Elevate an enterprise’s digital presence and potency by designing intuitive, captivating and highly persuasive experiences that visually engage, compel interest, affirm value and trigger actions that can be monetized and expand market reach, ultimately realizing key business objectives and my brand promise.

connect with me

Digitization Demands Agility

Being adaptive is a core element of business growth, scalability and sustainability in today’s digital environment. Three primary drivers are:

(1) Technology

Enterprise systems must be designed to adapt to shifting business needs, new operational requirements, connected data and utilization of cloud services. The architecture of the technology stack must have the flexibility to introduce processes, create accesses, integrate with multiple data sources, and handle extensible implementations. To compete in this digital age, a company’s infrastructure must be able to rapidly perform iterative experiments, modeling, and data analysis. For the many variables that exist, build IT to be lean, adjustable and cross-functional.

(2) Sales & Marketing

The capability to quickly pivot business development activities will allow for far greater performance, transactions and generation of leads. With emerging channels, changing social sentiments, and the demand for relevancy and value, sales & marketing teams must pursue an adaptive customer experience. The advantage of digital is that behaviors, actions and outcomes can be continuously tested and measured. In addition, running data through machine learning algorithms will offer insights and predictions for better decision-making and more targeted campaigns.

(3) Leadership

More and more organizations are recognizing the strength and benefit of adaptive leaders. An openness to the ideas of others, an elasticity of strategic thinking, and a versatility in process are now viewed as tremendous assets to a leader’s skill set. To encourage a team and oneself to stretch and be enlightened is a fundamental tenet of an agile workplace. Why? Because it improves the culture, morale, production and deliverables.

Albert Einstein said it best… “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

Evolve. Iterate. Experiment. Respond. These will fuel Innovation.

Dominate the Brand Voice & Message (the C’s)

To effectively communicate your offer, authority or opportunity, you must take an approach that will influence and intrigue your target audience. Apply these practices:

Conveyance
Command
Correlation
Clarity
Concise
Compelling
Creative
Cadence

“People signal their intent in a myriad of actions, words, behaviors, and cues. It’s up to you to net their indicators, and aggregate them, utilizing that insight brilliantly.”

Triggers and Motivators

The origin of our internal triggers and motivators is an emotional reaction. Something resonates, astounds the senses, touches our deepest core, brings back meaningful memories, makes us laugh out loud or ignites a spirited drive.

Tapping the essence of our inner-being requires setting aside common quips, popular pitches and standard sentiments. Craft your message as though you’re writing to the person you most admire and frame your words visually. Use a rhythm that ripples across the surface at first, and then reverberates down into sanctified places – our minds, hearts, self-perceptions, social awareness, and most saturated desires.

Focus on the I of AI

One can easily be lost in the maze of data science jargon. Can AI really benefit a moderately sized business? In truth, every organization has a spectrum of selling, branding and marketing functions occurring every day. It’s time to explore where incremental advancements can be made using integrated, value-based, data-centric tactics.

The best approach is to (1) be measurable in scope, (2) start with a single customer objective or problem to be solved, (3) establish a simplistic algorithm with an ‘if this, then that’ equation, (4) make the goal to optimize current processes and procedures, and (5) look for efficiencies and automation which will offer a clear reasoning to utilize AI.

Thoughts lead to habits and beliefs drive behaviors. Having a mindset of positive momentum and constant pursuit of strategic and creative concepts is paramount to advancing performance.

Plan, Prepare, Then Change

One sure-fire way to stay in a box and miss openings and possibilities is to stick with your plan. A valuable lesson that I’ve learned in the digital arena is that flexibility is essential. Adapting and shifting course are critical to take advantage of opportunities gleaned from three primary sources:

Campaign and Application testing results
Listening to your audience
Output, patterns and insights from data analysis

Making the Journey

Condition Thinking and Influence Actions

Map touch points in sequence and in order of priority

Identify catalysts through the channel mix

Create gestures and stimuli to optimize the experience

Decisions are Custom-Made

Many factors move a person from consideration to interest and finally to purchase.

For engagement to progress to an action or order requires a persuasion path that is dramatically different for each buyer persona. The message, insight, visual experience, incentive, and the resonating transition from passive to active, are distinctive between types of prospects.

Often, too much focus is placed on the offer, the features, or the benefits of the product, service or opportunity. What is most important – and unique – to each of us are attributed value, our own level of need & the precision of timing.

Profit-Producing Projects

Marketers have a pivotal role and a fundamental responsibility to contribute to bottom-line numbers. To be an earnings asset, a marketing leader must execute auspicious projects.

get insights

Narrow the Intent

The motivation of a consumer may be commercial (to buy), informational, emotional or driven by a specific need. The elasticity of intent is measured by how expansive and paramount the impetus. Avoid being so concise in your presentation that a person cannot transfer it to their unique impulses.

Content must be designed to spur – not demand – provocation and inspire thinking that carries forward a notion that your product or service is aligned with what they value. Pay attention to their acuity to your brand.

Touch to interact. Touch to link, like and listen. Touch to qualify, compare, and make a distinction. Touch to leave a potent impression, not an indentation.

Make clear the reason… the ‘because’.

Be tactical in how you take your product or service to the public ecosystem – target audiences with tailored messaging that has meaning to them, provide powerful visual engagement, and cue the key differentiators.

Digital Science for Marketing

Read Blog

content

In So Many Words

Curating content is a challenge for marketing teams of all sizes. Generating value-add, highly relevant, forward-thinking verbiage requires strong intent, skills and, often elusive, time. A few practices to consider for your editorial program:

Aggregate, correlate and repurpose content across touch points
Establish a publishing rhythm and cadence that yields audience confidence
Pay close attention to assonance, grammar and spelling
Limit emphatics (i.e. really, very) and eliminate redundant words
Apply truth framing and an authentic voice

While content is critical, be concise and format for readability. Brief, compelling and influential. Make that the messaging mantra.

Your Real Ambassador – Design

Design is a vital piece of the Marketing spectrum, influencing an audience by evoking thoughts and emotions and driving performance. A brand expresses itself through design, aiming to attract and engage people for whom the visual experience is resonating and appealing.

Read Blog

Digital Noise

In this new decade, Sales & Marketing strategies are far more sophisticated and cutting-edge than a mere 5 years ago. We are moving at a rapid pace with digital trends and technologies including mobile, storytelling, live stream video, voice search, IoT, AI, chatbots, blockchain, virtual reality and others. New channels and apps are seeking the attention of users at a relentless pace.

From that digital chorus, there is one critical fact – a company must utilize business intelligence, machine learning models and data analytics to develop deeper insights and understanding, striving to put its products and services in front of their target audience, in the channels they most visit, and in a way they most actively consume. Then a marketer must test effectiveness and behaviors exhaustively, and listen socially, to gain insight on affinities and aversions first-hand.

Start with your objective, define the strategy, set goals on execution, measure and assess, and then optimize or pivot based on outcome. To be innovative means to have a core foundation of knowledge from which a diverse team can tactically brainstorm, push boundaries and pursue new ideas with a clear consensus that process and results matter.

Power of a Purpose

Many enterprises curate a Mission, Vision Statement and Values that define their brand identity to share with their team, customers, the industry, and markets they serve. These declarations are carefully crafted, weighing key aspects such as tenets, ideals, ethics and fortitude.

A business may miss the mark on ‘Purpose’. Having a principled purpose brings unique meaning and aligned responsibility. With a purposeful mindset, employees persevere together for a collective reasoning to perform at their best. While a mission, vision and values are essential foundations that add brilliant colors to the company’s canvas, a purpose leads the way in how hues are selected and applied to the overall portrait.

Compose your purpose from these business factors: your competitive advantage, distinguishing market drivers, sustainable characteristics, target audience, value features, dynamics of your offerings, and influential social elements.

Art of Digital Commerce

Anna Ink’d