Innovation isn’t limited to Silicon Valley. It’s on display every day in the building and construction industry. Whether you’re sitting in the marketing department of a general contractor, construction manager, subcontractor or building products supplier, your project teams no doubt innovate every day – working through things that haven’t been done before, solving problems not yet solved, finding cost efficiencies that didn’t exist yesterday.

The problem is that while the building and construction is excellent at innovating, they’re far less experienced at recognizing and promoting it. And in such a competitive environment, the ability to innovate is a likely tiebreaker for prospective clients as they decide between your company and another. But as a savvy marketer, you can capitalize on this scenario by capturing innovation and selling it as one of your company’s differentiating qualities.

To capture innovation, you must first cultivate an environment that recognizes it and allows it to percolate to the surface. And it’s often up to marketing to create this environment. You’re in a unique position. While project managers are often totally immersed in “getting the job done,” you’re in a position to recognize when innovation – marketable innovation – occurs. You’re often the best qualified to know what will and won’t have marketing legs. You know how to tease out the details in a way that will resonate with the media, prospective clients and other industry stakeholders.

So how do you find innovation? Start by asking questions. Project team brainstorms, sit-downs with your managing director, or weekly (or bi-weekly, or whatever your company favors) project status meetings are the perfect spots for this.

Start with:

• What was the challenge you needed to overcome?
• How did people traditionally address that challenge?
• How did you do it?
• What led you to that approach?
• Why do you think people didn’t do it that way before?
• How will this improve the position of the client?

Once you can get your team to reflect in this manner, examples of innovation will flow. And then you can use your skills to turn that innovation into marketing gold.

As innovative as your company may be, prospective clients and industry influencers won’t give you any credit for it if you don’t first recognize it yourself, and then promote it through the proper channels. For many in the building and construction industry, this might seem a bigger challenge than building a skyscraper, but it’s one that must be overcome to ensure future marketing success.

What do you think? Is this a familiar story in your company? Have you run into similar challenges? We’d love to hear how you addressed them and transformed them into marketing opportunities.

I recently sat down with the marketing department of a good-sized, and successful, medical device and diagnostics company. They had a fairly straightforward question: “Is it time we build an app, and what could it do?” After all, each member of their sales force has an iPad. Would building an iPad app make them more successful?

It’s certainly a question on the minds of many marketers these days. In a global study of chief marketing officers recently conducted by IBM, channel/device proliferation and keeping up with the technology curve were identified as two of the top four concerns CMOs had about leading their organizations’ future marketing efforts. When asked more specifically about their digital concerns, mobile/app design experience ranked number two on the list. And most said they felt ill equipped to deal with these challenges.

For a medical device company like this one, there are certainly compelling reasons to build an app. Content could be continuously updated and pushed to salespeople’s devices, eliminating the worry of old materials floating around out there. Leads could be captured and cataloged. Products demonstrated via video. Trade shows brought to life right in a surgeon’s office. And that’s just the obvious list of possibilities.

But ultimately, for them and any other marketer, the question isn’t, “Is it time we build an app, and what kind of cool stuff can we stick in it?” The discussion needs to start as a research and insights question. Start with, “Is an app the best way to achieve our business goals at this time?” An app might be the right solution, but before making a substantial investment, we as marketers need to do our due diligence.

So, consider these steps as you begin to deliberate moving your marketing onto a new digital platform:

• Talk with your salespeople. Understand what a day in their life is like. What works well for them? What causes them problems?
• Talk one-on-one with the people they’re selling to – doctors, nursing staff, hospital procurement. You want to better understand these stakeholders’ perceptions of your product. Understand how they like to receive information. What’s the best way to communicate with them given their busy schedules? What aren’t they getting from your company’s communication efforts now that they wish they were?
• Assemble focus groups or panels comprised of your target consumers. Brainstorm your digital concepts. See what they have to say.
• Test your preliminary ideas and assumptions through further qualitative and quantitative research. Make sure your concept will resonate before you make a significant investment.
• Tap into secondary research. Some of these questions may have already been answered for you. No need to re-research the wheel.

What you’re looking for are the insights to make a much better business case for, or against, an app. Will it increase productivity? Help move more product? Generate a return on investment? Once you know these answers, then you’re at the point to discuss whether you need an app – or a mobile site, or maybe even new print collateral. Once you’ve answered these questions, then you can ask yourself, “Is it time we build an app, and what could it do?”

How about you? Have you been through this process with your marketing department? What did you learn?

With individuals flocking to niche social platforms in droves, this means your retail brand needs to be there, too, right? Well, not necessarily.

True, when the 2012 retrospectives start popping up in December, it’s quite possible that one of the taglines could very well turn out to be “the year of the niche social network.”

Case in point: Pinterest. The buzz surrounding Pinterest hit a fever pitch earlier this year, culminating in Pinterest becoming the third most popular social network in the U.S. in March 2012, based on number of visits, according to Experian.

Instagram shed its iPhone-only status in early April with the release of an Android-compatible version of the photo-sharing app. Instagram for Android hit 1 million downloads less than 24 hours after its release and, by the end of April, the photo-sharing app boasted over 50 million users. And, of course, we’re all aware of its subsequent $1 Billion acquisition by Facebook.

However, one of these popular new platforms will not solve your marketing challenges automatically. Before you start setting up that new account, you need to first look at your strategy and target audience.

At this stage in the game, your retail brand should have a social media strategy in place. So ask yourself, “Will having an active presence on this new social network help reach the goals and objectives identified in my social media strategy? How does this new social network tie into the other channels I’m currently using?”

Moreover, does the audience you are targeting even exist on this new social network? If it doesn’t, can you make the case why your audience would add this platform to its social media mix if you built a community in this space?

Other questions to ask yourself:

• Can you provide real value to members and your brand with this new social platform?
• Is the user experience of this social platform a high-quality one?
• Does this new social platform allow members and hosts the opportunity to cultivate a sense of enthusiasm and passion?

An explosion in registered users and an obscenely high number of monthly page views is enticing, but if this new social platform isn’t a good match for your strategy or your audience, those numbers mean nothing.

I am looking forward to seeing how the rest of 2012 shakes out. Which niche social network will have its moment in the sun next? Which players will still be around a year from now? Whatever develops, as long as you keep your target audience and social media strategy in mind, you will navigate these choppy waters just fine.

What has your process for evaluating emerging social networks looked like? Have you added any to your marketing mix? Which have worked well for you? Tell us about it.

My last post took a look at how doctors can utilize patient-centered marketing (i.e., consumer relationship management, telemedicine, etc.) to build long-lasting relationships. Which would lead many people to reason, “Well, of course, that’s good for business.” But did you know that more and more studies are showing that good doctor-patient communication can positively impact a patient’s health?

Newsweek recently ran an article citing many studies that have found this all-too-often missing link can actually affect a patient’s sense of well-being, number of symptoms and overall health. Newsweek specifically noted a Canadian study which audiotaped more than 300 office visits by 39 primary care physicians. Afterward, patients were asked to rate the visit when it came to their doctor-patient relationship. The researchers then followed the patients’ health over time.

“When patients reported that their doctors focused on their feelings and listened to them carefully, they not only felt better, but objective measures showed they had fewer symptoms of the disease,” wrote Shannon Brownlee, Newsweek contributor.

These days, what used to be called a good beside manner is being referred to as a “therapeutic relationship.” Google it and you’ll see it’s often used in the context of psychiatry – engaging the patient, listening, empathy, support, sincerity, etc.

There are lessons here for us as healthcare marketers as well. Forging a relationship based on listening, engagement, empathy and support shouldn’t start with the provider, it should start with us – the marketers. If you think about it, a relationship is really what patients want from all of their doctors and healthcare providers, isn’t it? And establishing this tone in your marketing message right from the beginning isn’t just good business, it just might be good for the patient’s health as well.

In short, when it comes to patient communications, whether it’s doctor-patient communications or a communications plan, it all comes back full circle to one very important thing: trust.

Have you infused your healthcare marketing with this relationship-first approach? Have anything you’d like to add? We’d love to hear it.