Our new location is in Blue Ash Ohio. We moved our marketing agency from Cincinnati's Over the Rhine in December of 2019. If you would like to arrange a meeting, please call us at (513) 463-3429. In order to keep our employees healthy and safe, walk-ins are not currently welcome.
As much as we would always like to have the perfect photograph to accompany your industrial advertising, many times the budget, time and models aren’t available.
Here’s a list of several services that you can obtain rights free images for your industrial marketing advertising.
Let’s pretend we are looking for a photo of a crane cab or construction executives on a job site.
“We’re Death to the Stock Photo. A photo & inspiration haven for creatives crushing their path. From their license, “Under the license, you may display a DTTSP photo as you please, reproduce it, add it to a collection, and make adaptations of it. However, you may not distribute the photo—so don’t include it in any photo packs or give it out for others to use. That’s how we are able to run our business :). Displaying and reproducing the photo on physical or digital products that you distribute is fine.” We signed up for the weekly pack and will see how it goes. We didn’t find any construction shots. This was a nice image.
Growth driven design is a "build it fast and fix it fast" goal focused web site building method. Hubspot is the perfect platform to create Growth Driven Sites. We attended the Cincinnati Hubspotter's Meetup today for soup and a presentation…
(Lohre & Associates and O’Keeffe Public Relations helped launch the American Dream Composite Index and are happy to repost their reports here every chance we get. This index is exactly what it says it is, a measure of the degree that Americans think they have achieved the American Dream. Enjoy.)
What is the ADCI?
The American Dream Composite Index™ (ADCI) is a unique and robust measure of American sentiment that values the American Dream on a monthly basis.
The notion of the American Dream encompasses our behaviors, attitudes and satisfaction with economic conditions, personal well-being, societal and political institutions, cultural diversity, and the physical environment.
The 1980 version, "Lohre & Associates is a full-service ad agency, a member of the Four-A's, a long-established business, in continuous operation in Cincinnati for more than 40 years. We serve a variety of clients in the tri-state, some for…
This is the future I learned of at Inbound 2016, the Hubspot internet marketing conference in Boston last week. Hubspot is a marketing automation software system we have used for the last three years. I listened to stories of hardened industrial…
Today's post is an industrial marketing ideas report from Inbound 2016 in Boston this week. These are my notes from founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah's presentation. Brian Now ad words are 100% above the fold Facebook now has "Pay per lead"…
(Thanks to Christian Naberhaus with Roto-Disc for giving us the opportunity to work on his new expanded processing equipment marketing catalog which includes two new product lines. And his testimonial letter.) 15 September, 2016 Chuck Lohre Lohre & Assoc. 126A…
Though our Cincinnati web design agency tends to advocate repairing and improving cheap, DIY, outdated, or otherwise bad websites wherever and whenever possible, sometimes a new website build or complete website redesign is necessary.
If your company is new to the web, or if your business has a new website to build, it is important to have a solid web design plan in place before moving forward.
If you are hiring a web designer or web design company to do the work, pre-planning can still save an incredible amount of time and frustration, and guide the process toward having the best results from what will likely be your company’s most important sales and lead generation tool for years to come.
In this post we’ll outline the best process to build a great website with the best marketing potential.
Top most important steps toward designing your new web site:
Bad: “Elmo Haletosis Dinglefaartz the IIIrd: drinks lots of gin, and wears an eyepatch. Hates hayrides and squirrels.” Good: “Inigo Montoya: Parking lot mogul and CEO with properties in Cincinnati, Covington, and Newport. Has purchased 15 demolition sites in the downtown area and is looking for concrete to pave them with. He does not want to interact or commit at this time, just wants basic questions answered.”
Step 1: Buyer Personas – Know your website’s ideal visitor
It is easy to go down the path of designing a website for the company itself. Many designers go into web design projects with the company’s image or even their own portfolio in mind first, and already in great danger of turning the website into a very expensive vanity project for the designer and company alike.
In this case, let’s imagine a Concrete company whose website boasts that they are the greatest, oldest, and biggest in the area. They have lots of pages on CEOS, CFOs, pictures of big trucks and big projects, and are wondering why the site fails to generate new leads and customers.
While it is important to impress and even dazzle visitors, it is more important to consider the ideal visitors’ primary needs. Knowing what will bring your ideal visitors to your website, knowing what information they’ll be seeking, knowing how to inform and how to boost confidence, having a plan to help them them become satisfied customers should be the primary focus.
Imagine these ideal customers, give them names, ages, likely job titles, unique needs that brought them to you – and write these down. You are done. These are your buyer personas, and you are ready for the next step:
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Step 2: Consider the buyer’s journey, and draw them a map
Not a very good map for your website
Put yourself in your buyer persona’s shoes. Consider what problems they came seeking solutions for, what questions helped them find you, how you might help them. Realistically define the process. Is your solution one that might require days, even months of decision-making, or a fast and easy choice? Having buyer personas in mind, allows you to map your website accord to their needs.
You might ask yourself these things:
How will I attract my buyer persona?
What information will I need to qualify them as leads?
What solutions will I need to provide them in return for this information?
What further interactions will encourage them to change from leads into customers?
How do I make those customers into return customers?
How do I encourage them to give great reviews and word of mouth promotion?
If you have answered all of these questions in detail, congratulations – you’ve outlined your marketing path, and sales funnel.
This is not a very good sales funnel for your website. Chances are you will not be allowed to put people into actual funnels, or to feed them to bees.
That’s a little bit better… in a very generic and vague way. Show that you really have a plan for this specific site, for this specific business.
Try to design your funnel specifically for your website, not just *any* site. The funnel could demonstrate a strategy for an entire site or a business – but most often, it will center around only one primary offer.
Step 3: Outline and Flow Chart
Outline: Be thorough. Think how many pages and subpages deep this website will need to go. Also be sure to consider landing pages, which might not fall into the base hierarchy of the site.
An outline ensures that content flows in a way that is convenient and helpful to the average visitor. It also helps you to think of the process, and what content the process will require. You may find that you need more pages than you thought, but you might also find pages that can be ommited, or can be combined into one.
I recommend working on this outline in a word processing application, or anyplace where you can easily edit bulleted lists within bulleted lists.
When done, you have all you need to create a basic flowchart. Flow charts are simply graphical outlines for people who prefer flow charts over outlines (most people). Since this is mostly to illustrate how one could go from one page to the next, you don’t need to get very fancy with it – blocks and lines will do (like the very simple web site flow chart to the right).
Outline: Be thorough. Think how many pages and subpages deep this web site will need to go. Also be sure to consider landing pages, which might not fall into the base hierarchy of the site.
Before doing any graphic design, you need to know how the web site and its elements are going to work together – how they are going to present information, which elements need to grab attention, how, and why.
I like to use a styrofoam board, pins, string, construction paper, and multi-colored Post-its on an open wall or large corkboard. A large table will however do, but is not as fun, and you will probably need that table for other things before the project is completed. Don’t worry now about how the website will look. Think instead about how layers will interact or be animated, where slideshows or movies might go, whether sidebars will exist and where, the function of the footer, which pages might have forms, and how they are to be presented.
Use your content outline as a guide. If you have already selected a CMS and templates, you should also consult those from time to time. Content in this stage, might be as simple as sticky notes that read “colorful image to illustrate B2B”, “bulleted list with types of advertising”, “CTA: View our helpful video!”, or as advanced as photos and printed paragraphs.
Chances are you might eventually need something more portable than the crime wall or office table. If so, refine your flow chart based on the work from this stage, print it, and print numbered pages to correspond with each block. These pages and their content should reflect the pages on your wall.
Step 5: Software selection
By now you should a good idea what sort of CMS you will need for your web design project, as well as what you will need plugins and add-ons for. If you are not designing from a theme you have previously made, and don’t plan to build one from scratch, this would be a good time to choose a theme to build from. This is also a good time to search the web for compatibility issues between software, themes, and plugins.
If the company has graphic standards established, they’ll likely require a specific font stack for their website design. Make sure the needed fonts are available as web fonts, and know how much they will cost.
If the company does not have graphic standards established, this is a something you should discuss. Make sure that creating a corporate identity package is in the budget, or that graphic standards will be available by the time design work begins.
You now have a good idea of how the web site will function, know what software you will be using, and that there no known conflicts between. You also know that everything you are proposing to do can be done, how to do it, and have factored in outside costs.
Step 6: Mid-project meeting
No Skeletor, This meeting is not one of those. This is actually a great place to be and a very exciting time… halfway to launch! Source: memegenerator.net
If you are designing this web site for others, or need to consult with your colleagues, this is a great place for a mid-project meeting.
You’ve got a lot of information to share and things to discuss before moving ahead, perhaps too much. You can’t cover everything here, but what is covered here will be shaped by the priorities, concerns, and schedules of those involved.
You have firmly established purpose, goals, needed software, server requirements, page count, content needs, new challenges, and additional costs. You also have a flow chart that serves as a map to build and design the site by.
This flow chart serves well as an itemized list of textual and graphical content needed for the site. You, the client, or your marketing team should begin creating and collecting the content needed for the completed website – Encourage them to tell their brand story, and to gather and create strong images to illustrate that story with.
Step 7: Installation, Setup, and Testing
Some web designers would jump to the design stage before this, and if you are designing for others you may at least have been asked to make graphical mockups in order to get this far.
If you have that option, get everything installed, behaving properly, and at least semi-configured before wasting everyone’s time on preemptive design. Hypothetical appearances tend to die horribly from compatibility issues, and actual needs.
If you build in a folder on the site’s intended server, and test it, you will know that the site, and plugins work in that environment. This also gives you the ability to design in place, directly working with the actual product of Javascript, HTML, and CSS that the server-to-be will assemble from the CMS, plugins, and themes you chose.
Step 8: Framework
By the end of this stage, using your outline, you should have a good working website with all navigation working, and all proposed pages created. These pages are likely populated with lorem ipsum and placeholder images at this point, and that is okay.
Step 9: Basic Graphic Standards
This is a mini-stage before adding content. At this stage, we are still not out to create any more design elements than we absolutely have to, but we want a good idea of what our content will look like in order to improve upon it, and to design for it.
Whether you are working from an existing theme, or you started off with a structure that was devoid of any styling at all, this is a small stage where you should change colors and fonts to meet with the company’s graphic standards, and remove styles and graphical elements that would compete with this branding.
Finish this stage by adding the company logo, preferably in .SVG format (Scalable Vector Graphics) so that it looks its very best at any size or resolution.
Step 10: Populate!
What? Still no design? Are you crazy?
Realistically, yes, but also consider that you already have a lot of finished design at this point:
If you have branding, you have fonts, a defined color palette, and a logo. You also have your crime lab-style layout from step 4, meaning that you have the user interface mostly planned out. You also know how navigation and pages will work together as a story to guide your visitors through the website.
If you were able to make it to this stage without submitting graphical mockups for revision, revision, and revision of purely-hypothetical concepts, you have an opportunity to think ahead about graphical styles and touches here, and are a very lucky designer for it. If your job is design only, hopefully you’ve been given content by this point, if it isn’t you should focus on your content creation before proceeding.
Add in all of your text with only general styles (h1, h2, h3, p, br, blockquote, etc.), use placeholders in place of images, use bootstrap rules for your general layout so that all elements of fractional widths behave uniformly and responsively. I’d recommend skipping on internal links at this point, else you’ll have to remember which content you were and were not yet able to assign internal links to.
Be sure to consider SEO in your choosing of permalinks as you go. This is easier to do now than to correct later. Don’t obsess on this if it slows you down though, you can always correct with 301s if you have to, and/or a good find & replace job if your website’s structure is data-driven.
Step 11: FINALLY! Design
This is not the stage where design typically happens, but it is the stage where design *should* happen.
Previous ideas and mockups here would have served more as constraint than inspiration. Making the functionality of the web site mesh with designs made information was gathered and framework, would be much like hammering a non-euclidian peg into a two-dimensional hole.
If you are like me, and have reached the point where working with CSS and HTML in place is much like, even easier than laying out a design in Illustrator or Photoshop, then you will likely be doing the bulk of your web site design with your text editor of choice and an FTP client, while keeping Photoshop, Illustrator, and/or GIMP open for making textures, creating graphics, and editing photos.
However you do your design work, having not spent too much time on graphics up to this point, allows for much better use of time every step of the way, and for a web site that is the product of inspired design, not remedial design.
You should be constantly testing, refining, improving, and expanding your site. Beyond testing initial functionality of your website, testing such as A/B testing for different landing pages geared toward different buyer personas is a good place to start.
Blog often, and every time you return to your site, try to think of one small thing to improve on a page or the site itself. If you mark what you changed and when you changed it, you might be able to track these changes against web traffic or visitor behavior.
Always remember: Websites that aren’t growing, are simply dying.
(Thanks to Bob for an always thoughtful editorial. As I read David Eagleman‘s new textbook on the brain and delete anybody who has ideas I don’t like from my social media, Bob brings up some great points, but I don’t think we are a computer program simulation. We’re just on or off, black or white, positive or negative. Now quantum mechanics is something else. Until we know more about the universe, we’re just winging it. I’m praying for the scientists to figure it our before we make a boo-boo like the Egyptians, Easter Islanders, Mayans, etc. Those guys that couldn’t deal with climate change.)
By Robert Brooks, from FOUNDRY MANAGEMENT & TECHNOLOGY, June 2016
“Customization” simplifies things so that the world will seem to meet each of us on our terms. That doesn’t make us exceptional, and it doesn’t change the truth.
A constructed, programmed universe
Watch, and wait
Responsibility of being human
We select a channel, lower the volume, and check in occasionally to see what’s happening. At that moment, it doesn’t seem to matter if there is some artificial intelligence controlling the universe. Some of us might prefer that.
Visionary industrialist and omni-genius Elon Musk recently let forth his belief that all of us are all living within a constructed and programmed universe, powered by computers and guided by some form of intelligence. It’s a startling claim, even from one who seems to have a propensity to startle, but it’s also a remarkably familiar theory about the place of humanity in the universe. Allowing for obvious distinctions, 16th Century Calvinists had a similar view of the human condition, and it’s a beguiling argument now for anyone who wonders about the sources of knowledge, or who is challenged by all the vital and trivial information that connects us to each other, or stressed by the changes we sense happening to us and to the world around us
How could anyone not wonder about all this? Understanding and managing the universe we inhabit is the mission of humanity, and as a species we have made extraordinary progress in that effort. If we never seem to satisfy the initial curiosity it’s perhaps because each of us has a different starting point. I know where my understanding of the universe started, but lately I’ve begun to think we have altered it in some fundamental way.
We moved to new offices a few months ago and among of the improvements offered in our new ‘space’ are several large flat-screen monitors. Being somewhat recusant about new technology and the gadgets that go with it, these are not especially impressive to me but I am reminded by colleagues that we are professional communicators, and the screens allow us to conduct videoconferences, or to watch different informational or instructional programs. All true. Usually, though, the screens are showing a Web-only channel now offered by a traditional network news division. What’s on view doesn’t seem to be news as much as a looping review of political and financial commentary, dishing over and over again something some candidate or office holder has said or done in the past 12 hours. In form and content, it’s gossip, though I cannot state this categorically because the displays here usually are muted (we’re working, after all.)
The human and financial resources leveraged over decades to achieve all this are impressive by any standard, and I accept the practical value of such a connection, but I wonder why people seem to want that linkage available all the time. The office TV (sorry, that’s what it is) is not the only example; people keep smartphones and tablet devices in position so they can be informed at a glance, checking in to what they’ve missed. Others move about with the Bluetooth clipped in place for some immediate update, or they keep an IM or mail window open in the background, ready to receive. Similar arrangements are seen in homes, stores, on the street, in cars and planes, everywhere. Always.
Let me make clear that I am not discounting the value of data networks or intelligent systems, and I know that life as we know it now depends on machinery and information technology. At the risk of contradicting Musk though, I am reaffirming the central role of humanity in this universe: we built this complex of devices and systems, we filled it with information, and we can manage it if we accept the responsibility, even though we seem to be losing enthusiasm for that role.
True, the system is vast, and it grows ever more complex. What it reveals about our circumstances is often unwelcome or disturbing. Of course, it’s preferable to keep some distance, and let the system do whatever it’s designed to do. We select a channel, lower the volume, and check in occasionally to see what’s happening. At that moment, it doesn’t seem to matter if there is some artificial intelligence controlling the universe.
“Customization” — currently a craze in manufacturing as it has been in tech and consumer products for decades — allows us to simplify ideas and messages so that the universe will then seem to meet each of us on our individual terms. Then, there is no pressure to acknowledge facts or conditions we don’t find welcome, and we can choose to believe that makes us the center of it all. That doesn’t make it true.
The falsity may be found, as ever, in the temptation to see oneself as a distinct being able to subsist in that customized environment, rather than what we are: individuals charged with improving the civilization we have been provided.
Learn more about our marketing philosophy at our Marketing Handbook page.
(What’s on our plate, any given day. Just saw this matched our internet news stream and found it matches our day to day work. Enjoy. The ad came from a review we did of Chemical Processing’s ads for Baxter Research. Heard recently that Emerson just let go a bunch of engineers. My friend retired just in time. From the looks of the ad, I’m sorry to see they are trying to sell Artificial Intelligence. They’re better at selling Real Intelligence.)
Though our Cincinnati 
Some web designers would jump to the design stage before this, and if you are designing for others you may at least have been asked to make graphical mockups in order to get this far.
