Laughlin Constable

Questions to Ask When Considering an Influencer Campaign

Laughlin Constable

No longer just buzz words, influencer marketing has become a powerful component of marketing and communications strategies. Brands of all sizes across all verticals are using influencers to increase engagement, expose new audiences to their products and services, and create memorable content. As influencer marketing has evolved, so has the approach to working with influencers. To help get started, here are some questions you should ask yourself when considering an influencer campaign.

1. What is the goal of your campaign?

It’s no surprise that we start with identifying the goal. It’s important to first consider what the purpose of the influencer marketing effort is. Are you launching a new product or service and hoping to drive sales? Or are you looking to engage with brand ambassadors to increase overall brand awareness? Answers to these questions can help you determine what type of influencer you want to work with, the length of the campaign and more.

2. How will you define success?

Of secondary importance to the goal is the results. Determine how you will define and measure success, and what KPIs you will use. Depending on your goals, KPIs could include engagement metrics, referral traffic, and sales or they could be awareness-driven, including metrics like audience growth, hashtag usage or @ mentions, and impressions.

3. What is your budget?

The $ question is never an easy one, but it’s important to consider budget parameters upfront. Influencer marketing is extremely scalable and achievable under nearly any budget. Cost considerations to be aware of include partnership fees for influencers, which range based on the individual’s follower count, engagement rate and the number of posts; any product or in-kind costs that will be part of the campaign; budget for paid amplification; and any platform or agency fees if applicable.

4. What are your parameters for selecting an influencer partner?

With literally millions of options to choose from, it’s important to establish a set of guidelines to help narrow the appropriate partners. Parameters should include things like:

Channel type – Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, blogs, etc.
Engagement rate – Average engagement rate for an influncer should be at least 1.42% according to RivalIQ’s 2021 Social Media Benchmarks for Influencers
Follower count – We categorize influencers as either Mega (1M+), Macro (>1M), Mid-Tier (>500K), Micro (>50K), or Nano (>10K)
Audience demographics and psychographics, including geographic location, age, gender and interests
No existing partnerships with competitors or other conflicting interests
Other brand-specific parameters like authenticity, tone, etc.

Research influencers via your own exploration or working with your agency’s influencer database and research tool or platform, such as Tagger used by Laughlin Constable.

5. What will your content requirements be?

While it’s always best to let an influencer take the lead on what tone resonates best with their audience, it’s also important to discuss any non-negotiable content guidelines ahead of time – like brand parameters, hashtag usage or @ mentions, content review and approval plans, and usage rights.

6. What legal considerations do you need to think of?

The lawyers at your organization will thank us for this one. It’s extremely important to adhere to all the Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guidelines for any influencer campaign (this includes in-kind-only partnerships). The FTC requires a clear disclosure (i.e. #ad, #paid or #sponsored) anytime an influencer receives compensation for a post, review or video about a product or brand. Ask your legal team to review your influencer partnership contract to make sure everything lines up with the appropriate laws.

With these questions answered, you’ll be off and running with a successful influencer marketing partnership in no time! #winning

Paul Brienza
Chief Growth Officer
(414) 270-7175
paul.brienza@laughlin.com

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Second Generation Takes Creative Helm At Laughlin Constable

Laughlin Constable

Jon and Pat Laughlin are taking the creative helm of the agency

Jon Laughlin half jokes that he’s worked at Laughlin Constable for 44 years but in some ways he is right. He and his brother Pat were born into the advertising agency world as their father Steve, a member of the Wisconsin Advertising Hall of Fame, founded and was growing his new agency just as his sons were born. Now, the Laughlin family is again ready to help creatively lead the agency of 45 years, with offices in Chicago and Milwaukee, into the future. Today, Jon Laughlin and Pat Laughlin were named Co-Chief Creative Officers (CCO) of Laughlin Constable.

“For ten years, Jon and Pat have been part of our creative leadership team and as a result, I have continually seen leaps forward in our creative output. Under their leadership, we will continue to push innovative and creative boundaries to meet the needs of our clients across CPG, retail, healthcare, insurance, B2B and other industries,” said Mat Lignel, President and CEO of Laughlin Constable. “As we mark our 45^th anniversary, the time is now to have Jon and Pat lead our creative team.”

Jon Laughlin graduated from Lafayette College and has worked for the firm since 2005. He has been involved with many clients during his time, most recently leading the Yuengling brand. He lists working with Jonathan Banks for a client campaign as a career highlight.

“I have had the privilege of learning from some of the best creative directors in the business, starting with my dad and most recently with John Maxham. They showed me how important it is to nurture the big idea, and always continue to craft the copy,” said Jon Laughlin.

Pat Laughlin, who also has been with the agency since 2005, holds a bachelor’s degree from Southern Methodist University. His notable work includes the award-winning Lung Cancer Alliance “Deserves to Die” campaign and the Jewelers Mutual “Obsessed” campaign, along with leading the Wisconsin Department of Tourism account, which in 2019 helped produce the best marketing return results in years for the tourism entity.

“This is an exciting time for us. Creative has always been at the heart of Laughlin Constable, and I’m most looking forward to combining our creative firepower with our deep digital roots to create work that’s both emotionally resonant and business driving,” said Pat Laughlin.

Owner Steve Laughlin remains Executive Chairman of the agency’s advisory board. John “Max” Maxham, who held the CCO position at Laughlin Constable for the last two years and helped mentor Jon and Pat Laughlin, is departing the agency to pursue a new opportunity.

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Solving a Business Problem with Sitecore

Laughlin Constable

One of our clients had a pattern of acquiring smaller health care networks and bringing them under their already large umbrella. As their list of locations treating various medical conditions increased, so did the need for a cleaner way to manage and display relevant locations for their 1,300+ service offering content pages.

The Existing Solution

The existing solution was a tab panel component that content authors configured manually by categorizing locations under geographic regions for each of the areas of care offered on the site.

This presented several problems. With the number of locations and areas of care hosted on the site, there was a large potential for human error, and it became a maintenance nightmare to manage this data. Another issue was the region categories were not relevant to the patients; they were considered “inside baseball” and were only relevant to the internal marketing team at the client. Further fueling our urgency to act was that we were visually running out of room. A recent acquisition was going live in the upcoming months and adding a new region wasn’t going to be aesthetically possible.

An Existing Feature to the Rescue!

The 1,300+ service offering pages ranged from top-level categories such as Oncology and Women’s Health, down to more granular medical-condition content like skin cancer, and ectopic pregnancy. This content is simply text inside Sitecore pages with no real back-end mechanism to tie this content to a more concrete definition. We solved this by creating tags such as cancer-care, womens-health, skin-cancer, etc., that could be applied to different content throughout the site and used to define relationships between content. The tagging system was already in place, and the areas of care and locations were already appropriately tagged so the areas of care could be listed on location detail pages.

The New Solution

With tagging in place, we set out to create a component that would automatically populate with relevant locations offering treatment for the specified service on a given content page. This removed the manual maintenance and allowed for an endless number of locations to be displayed on the service offering page. The content author would simply need to drop this new component on a service offering page and ensure that the content was tagged appropriately. The component would list all locations tagged the same as the current page along with an interactive map utilizing MapBox. It would also allow the user to contextually change their location to sort the results based on where the user was searching from.

The Implementation

Our team is no stranger to creating Sitecore components. Our client’s site is heavily component-based, so the implementation of this solution wasn’t difficult. However, as we always try to take great care of our content authors, we knew the challenge of how to spread this component across 1,300+ pages was not something we wanted to subject them to. Our solution was to create a two-part Sitecore PowerShell script. Part one searched all the content in the site that contained the former region-based tab component and injected the new dynamic component beneath it. The second part then performed the same search as part one and removed the old component. In a matter of minutes, the new component had been rolled out to the entire site with no manual intervention by the content authoring team.

Final Thoughts

Our team has had a lot of success in looking at the bigger picture of the site and engineering for future flexibility. This component project was the result of careful planning and execution all while keeping authoring disruption to a minimum. Content authors are often left to just deal with solutions imposed on them by the technology, and this is something we always aim to avoid. They were with us throughout the design and development of this project because they offer valuable input that otherwise might not be recognized. This project is just one of the many successes we had collaborating with multiple stakeholders to solve a business need on an aggressive timeline.

Upgrading Sitecore – A Journey from 8.0 to 9.3

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Migrating Sitecore Indexes – Lucene to Solr

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What to look for in an Agile Sitecore partner

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Leveraging voice recognition tech to find the perfect place to eat

Laughlin Constable

At LC, we pride ourselves in fostering innovative thinking across the board—this applies even to our interns. With voice tech continuing to emerge as an industry mainstay, we tasked our interns with creating their very own Alexa skill.

Their response was a skill that helps with a tried-and-true food dilemma: what restaurant does one choose when going out to eat? Introducing, the Restaurant Finder. This is a skill that allows users to specify the location, type of food and price range to search for when at an eating-out impasse. Skill co-creator and current LC intern Paige Rosynek states, “Technology should be used to solve problems, no matter how small. And voice recognition technology definitely has a huge potential to solve problems of all sizes in numerous fields.”

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Upgrading Sitecore – A Journey from 8.0 to 9.3

Laughlin Constable

One of our larger clients was using Sitecore 8.0 rev5 on-prem for their website, and their SLA was out of compliance. For this reason, as well as being many versions behind, the client opted to upgrade the site. What follows is a high-level account of the journey our development team took to get them from Sitecore 8.0 to Sitecore 9.3.

Getting the Lay of the Land

In taking on a project of this magnitude, our team wanted to get a clear picture of what the upgrade would look like. This was a very large site consisting of over 13,000 content pages and 5,000 products, spread across 500 locations. There were also many integration points with external data sources such as:

Physicians (Client API)
Classes and events (LVM Weblink)
Locations (Client API)
A large repository of patient mortality chart data (HighCharts)
Newsfeeds (Meltwater API)

Not only were we tasked with making sure content remained unchanged, but we also did our best to clean up technical debt and improve performance where possible. We identified bugs that would be fixed by the new version and took advantage of a parallel project to convert from Lucene to Solr. We deprecated old indexes in favor of the built-in Sitecore indexes. We converted their Web Forms for Marketers content to the new built-in Sitecore Forms. This site also fed data to their native mobile app which needed to function the same after the upgrade. This was a massive project, for both the development and testing sides.

Infrastructure

The client’s 8.0 website was still live and in production, and the upgrade was going to be a long-running project. We needed to maintain an environment to code bug-fixes and maintenance items while simultaneously working on the upgrade. Thus, we stood up an entirely new set of hardware to host the 9.3 infrastructure. This included a DEV integration server; a UAT content manager; two load-balanced UAT content delivery servers; a production content manager; and two load-balanced, production content delivery servers. We also needed to stand up a Solr server for both UAT and production. Once the infrastructure was in place, it was time to install Sitecore 9.3. The installation and configuration of Sitecore is no easy task. There are many moving parts, including but not limited to, the core website, XConnect, Identity Server, databases, certificates, and Solr integration. This is all managed by a rather large and unwieldy PowerShell installation script. Throughout the installation process, developers on our team encountered a varying array of issues, sometimes with completely different error messages based on which machine the install was being run. This led us to develop our own Sitecore installation wiki with common errors and their related solutions. After documenting these issues, our team was able to collectively solve the common errors we were seeing. Our blank Sitecore 9.3 website had been created, and it could be accessed in a browser.

Content Migration

With a new blank Sitecore 9.3 website set up, our next challenge was to migrate the content into the new site without disrupting our highly componentized architecture. The 8.0 site was utilizing a popular community-supported solution for dynamic placeholders, which allowed content authors to drop multiple components with nested placeholders onto their pages. However, this came with its own set of problems. Mainly, content authors had to use workarounds to get content to display in the correct order, and in some cases could not format their content in the order they needed to. Sitecore 9.3 offered built-in dynamic placeholders which solved these issues, but there was a breaking change in how these were implemented. This led to our team needing to create some sophisticated PowerShell scripts to convert presentation details on 13,000+ pieces of content from the old format to the new. Following this, a massive ongoing QA effort was required that utilized a third-party tool called Percy to continuously compare both sites, flag differences, and create work items for the team to investigate and fix.

Technical Debt and Other Updates

During this project, we took the time to clean up some technical debt that had been accrued since the implementation of the original 8.0 site. We put effort into shifting much of the in-memory query logic for site search and physicians into the Sitecore API so the heavy lifting could be handled by a dedicated Solr cloud instance. This resulted in a site-search that could take 10+ seconds to retrieve its data being reduced to less than one second. In turn, we also reorganized the indexing and other site config files. Sitecore 9+ utilizes a different structure on the file system for its config files, creating a perfect opportunity to clean up and centralize files for when future maintenance is required.

Final Thoughts

This project was an absolute success and a win for so many of the parties involved. The entire soft launch took about an hour to complete and went live with virtually no defects related to the upgrade. Unfortunately, we were not able to implement Helix principles due to the large amount of existing code and the timeline of the project. With the lessons we’ve learned from this upgrade as well as good documentation in our wiki, we have the blueprint for the next upgrade when we move to Sitecore 10+.