Coherent Marketing has been working with the African Leadership Institute to integrate its digital infrastructure and systematically improve its online visibility.
The institute was created to change the continent by creating and supporting a new generation of young, visionary, ethical, strategic leaders across Africa. Their candidates are from all spheres of society and every country. AFLI offers a powerful learning experience run in partnership with Oxford University. Only 20-25 carefully chosen candidates, nominated from across Africa, are selected each year. Among their alumni are a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, a candidate for President, technology leaders and other high-calibre leaders. What was needed was a way to enable all the alumni to better support each other.
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Coherent Marketing was hired to build a new website for the small business startup, Modell Testing. The company is a veteran-owned, DOT-compliant drug and alcohol testing facility. It provides DOT compliant 5-panel drug and alcohol tests on-site or as a mobile service. The Fayetteville-based company serves all federal, state, local, non-profit and for-profit entities who seek to comply with federal regulations that mandate safe and drug-free environments. The site needed to establish the company as authentic and capable, and it needed an online booking capability with the ability to accept credit card payments. We set up the site for online bookings in half hour slots and provided several hours of training to the owner on how to further configure the site's booking software so that as date availability changed, the site could be kept up to date.
A significant proportion of the time Coherent Marketing spent with this client - and many of our other clients - is on training.
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Today, Coherent Marketing is officially four years old, although in real terms, activities began in 2011. Birthdays provide a milestone in time to think back at where you came from and what the road ahead might bring. Used strategically, reflection has the ability to improve what's working further, cut what isn't and improve practices and habits.
I'd like to thank all my clients for choosing my company; I now count many of you as not just colleagues but also as friends. I've always tried to give the best possible service, along with options and my reasons for a course of action or solution. For my #smallbusiness clients, this approach has been empowering, because it has allowed them to factor that thinking into their other strategic decision-making. Giving options and their implications has also been especially important when I have been called in to consult on and troubleshoot failed communications approaches.
My company has clients here in NC, in various locations in the US, in Canada, the UK, and Africa. Among my successes I count a statewide advanced manufacturing workforce development initiative that attracted more than $1.8 billion in new capital investments and expansions in rural counties. That project also saw these areas create more than 6,600 jobs - a massive ROI for their communications budget.
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A communications project with which Coherent Marketing was involved for four years is at risk. The visibility our communications afforded the initiative attracted more than $1.2 billion in new investments and expansions to North Carolina in the advanced manufacturing sector and helped create more than 6,000 new jobs. You could have read about it on the website, but the website is down, returning a Fatal error.
At the heart of the project was a website that supported the advanced manufacturing training departments of 10 community colleges. The statewide training initiative showcased the specialized equipment, close collaborations with industry, instructor credentials, and technical curricula. It also provided successful examples of how graduates and students were placed as interns in the workplace at facilities across the state. This information gave industry a risk-free method to find candidates for advanced manufacturing positions - a win-win for both candidates and industry. In the same way as complex multi-axis machine tools need maintenance, so too do websites based on database-driven content management systems.
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Many community colleges have extremely limited communications budgets and personnel and have not invested in the capacity needed to provide communications and positioning that results in transformative economic development in their communities. A project with which Coherent Marketing has been involved for several years shows how smart, sustained strategic communications can dramatically impact economic development in 21st Century job sectors.
The North Carolina Advanced Manufacturing Alliance received an $18 million US DOL grant to upgrade equipment and curricula for specialized advanced manufacturing training at 10 community colleges in largely rural counties that had lost jobs to offshoring. Integrated Media Strategies was brought on early in the project in 2011, and provided branding, marketing and communications support. We developed a website and social media accounts and worked with college instructors and staff to sustainably create content in line with strategic positioning goals.
In September of 2015, the return on investment (ROI) on the $18 million has been more than $1.3 billion in new capital investments and expansions in the counties the colleges serve and more 6,600 jobs created.
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Each year, the African Leadership Institute picks some of Africa's top up-and-coming young leaders for an intensive week-long leadership programme. Coherent Marketing arranged for all of the 25 Fellows to be interviewed on topical leadership issues and the challenges facing Africa. Those interviews now form the basis for an integrated communications campaign that will assist in promoting the work and legacy of the institute, as well as the personal profiles of the Fellows themselves.
The interviews have been broken up into short, bite-sized interviews covering a single subject, topic or issue. These are being uploaded to YouTube and will then be embedded in individualized video pages on the institute's website with all the usual SEO associated with these kinds of pages. These pages will then be shared on social media over time in a staggered roll-out, providing sustained interest and content for the insitute. In total, about 70 videos will be produced, so the rollout over social media will last at least three months.
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