Total Marketing Solutions

The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s autumn 2009 Marketing Trends Survey has revealed that optimism amongst the UK’s marketers has grown since reaching a low point in 2008. Apparently, UK marketers are now confident that they’ll see economic growth in 2010. They’re even feeling positive about their own organisation’s prospects in the year ahead.  A total of 51% of the 1198 respondents indicated that they were predicting an improvement in 2010.

Interestingly, a total of 35% of of those surveyed said that the recession had even created some new opportunities for them to exploit. So what new opportunities have you identified - and more importantly, are you ready and able to exploit them to your benefit during 2010? It’s worth taking the time to reassess your current product or service offering to see if any new growth areas warrant a change of focus. As marketing consultants we invest time in understanding our clients’ markets and how they are changing - and - crucially - what that means in terms of new opportunities in the new yet unpredictable economic landscape of 2010.

It’s a question I ask myself many a morning before swinging into blogging action. A business blog like this one is very different from Facebook or twitter – it needs a different tone and feel, whilst adding to the overall value and effectiveness of the website. 

Many of our customers are still to dip their toes in the muddy waters of blogging to add a further dimension to their website. Lack of time and confidence in their writing skills are quoted as the main reasons for their reticence, whilst some still remain unconvinced of the value of blogging.

One of our favourite bloggers from across the Pond is Seth Godin, and he’s noticed the same thing about the different motivations business people have for adopting any new activity - including blogging.  

According to Godin, there are four types of people in the world.People who want to do things because those things are interesting.  People want to do something because everyone else is doing it.  People who are too satisfied, too scared, too shy, or too lazy to do anything anyway.  And then people who want to do things because those things actually work! So, if you’re still hesitating about launching a blog and unsure of the benefits it could bring, try completing the sentence below:

I should blog because…

Blogging helps me bring my message to my niche market.

Blogging’s the latest “thing” and I don’t want to be left behind.

Everybody’s doing it.

I want to improve my online presence.

I can better reach potential customers 

Blogging is just one tactic in my overall marketing plan, but I want to take advantage of every opportunity to help my business.

All of the above????

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to take the plunge and add a new dimension to your website.

When your best marketing efforts remain unsuccessful, you’re understandably left wondering why, why why? So you send out some more direct mail, refresh your website with a tweak here and a bit of SEO there. You might even attend a trade show or buy some advertising, but still you’re left with poor sales.Why is this? The simple answer is that your marketing efforts need to be more than just a random series of tasks. Truly effective marketing is not just a single activity - it’s a well-planned  strategic approach. Here are the top five biggest marketing mistakes we often see companies make along the way:1: MARKETING WITHOUT A STRATEGY Some companies believe their product does everything, that their target market is anyone who has money to spend and that they don’t have competition. But for your marketing to really succeed, you need to define a target market segment where your product/service has the most relevance and the best competitive advantage. Research your competition and their strengths and weaknesses to compare with your own competitive advantage. Once you identify your key advantage over the competition, build this into every marketing activity, choosing marketing vehicles that only cater to a clearly defined group of potential buyers. Now you have a marketing strategy, so now you can develop a calendar of events and associated budget to help you maximise every penny of your marketing budget.2: MARKETING AND SALES GAPEver developed sales materials that never get used by the sales team? Often marketing teams spend time, effort and money creating sales collateral, only for the sales team to reject it because it doesn’t do the job. Not having a clear integration between sales and marketing can result in failed marketing programs, costing you lost revenue opportunities and wasted expenditure.Instead, ask your sales team to participate in marketing planning. Set up a sales advisory committee for both sales management and representatives to provide feedback on proposed marketing programs. Without uniting sales and marketing departments, marketing strategies are only achieving one-half of the equation.3:  INCONSISTENT BRANDINGIn other words, changing your company’s positioning depending on the audience, marketing vehicle used or even person delivering it. This results in a confused audience—unsure of who you are and what your company does. Brand awareness is only built by consistently communicating your company’s position and identity, so that your audience will repeat your positioning exactly as you intend it.To achieve this, it’s important to clearly define who you are and what you offer. Put together a statement that everyone agrees upon, understands and - crucially - supports. This positioning statement must include who you are, what you offer, for whom, for what result and why someone should choose you over anyone else. Then carry out a full audit of all your marketing materials to eliminate any inconsistencies.4: NOT USING THE MARKETING MIX EFFECTIVELY.Using only one marketing vehicle to promote a company and/or its products is a common mistake, especially in this digital age. Many existing marketing plans we see only focus on one activity - direct mail, advertising, public relations - and do not integrate these activities for maximum effect.It’s key to choose a marketing mix that caters specifically to your target market, before creating a schedule to ensure the required coverage across multiple channels. This takes time, but a variety of vehicles, working in concert, will build awareness and generate leads at a far higher rate than any one vehicle alone.5. MARKETING SOMETHING YOU CAN’T DELIVER.Your marketing team has created eye-catching materials and an aggressive campaign for the launch of a new company product or service. The campaign is very successful, but operations cannot handle the demands. They do not have the ability to deliver. Or maybe, the product itself is not available in time, or has production problems. This upsets your customers and demoralizes your sales and marketing team. They stop selling and the pipeline dries up.It’s important to realign the efforts of marketing and operations by assessing what needs to happen to meet any new business demands. If you then create a plan to detail the specific steps required for each team to support existing sales, as well as successfully rolling out the offering to new customers, this will only build confidence within each team and avoid any potential hiccups.

Sometimes two inter-connected stories hit the press on the same day and even the least cynical amongst us must cock an eyebrow in a conspiracy-theory-sort-of-way. Well today is one of those days - firstly it emerges that a computer with personal details of more than one million people (including their account numbers and signatures!) was sold on Ebay for £35. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the Local Government Association launches a campaign to stop access for direct marketers to the electoral roll. Selling addresses from the electoral roll to junk mail companies harms democracy, no less. Add the two together and the conclusion is clear - marketers don’t value personal data and the governement should restrict access to it.

Let’s take each story individually. The computer story seems to involve a catalogue of errors. A company was contracted to archive data for Royal Bank of Scotland. An individual who worked for the company was allowed to take home a decommissioned server. He subsequently sold in on Ebay where the buyer was an IT expert. What’s incredible about this is that no-one in this chain seemed to think that this personal data should be protected. And this from the banking industry that is now telling companies that their data must be protected and encrypted in order to achieve PCI compliance.

The electoral roll story is a bit more obtuse. Any battle against junk mail is bound to receive public support but this one seems to have come about because the hard-pressed Electoral Administrators find it ‘fiddly’ to maintain two registers and don’t earn enough in fees to cover the inconvenience. My initial thought was that, more than anything,  council tax avoidance probably undermines the electoral roll, and 24dash.com lists a number of other oddities with the story. And if the electoral roll allows marketers to increase relevancy, then surely it reduces the possibility of junk. But that’s a fine point that few will be interested in.

So there’s no conspiracy then. But the fact remains that personal data is valuable, both to criminals and to marketers (there are no other connections between the two that I’m aware of). And it’s a story that generates PR, but normally of the negative variety.

As a direct marketing consultant, my advice to clients is simple. Customers trust you with their data and you should respect it. Some of the steps to PCI compliance are fiddly and irritating but its logic is unarguable and you should be doing most of it anyway. Direct marketing (a.k.a junk mail) has a poor reputation and we should do nothing to tarnish it further. We owe it to ourselves and our customers.