One such blog post dropped into my inbox this morning from Geoffrey James, see  http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=616&tag=nl.e808 Now it is an American post so all you cynical Brits approach with caution but there are some real nuggets in there. The 2 things that I most strongly agree with are (1) Be aggressive, now is not the time to ‘hunker down’ and (2) Get you boss out in front of customers - who better to ’sell’ than the company owner?

If I see more posts that make sense to me as a strategic marketing consultant trying to help business owners and managers then I’ll sign post them for you here.

Now this might seem like common sense - it’s a lots less risky to invest in marketing to customers who have already bought from you that to attempt to acquire new customers - but for many the ‘glamour’ of marketing is in the exciting advertising campaigns that they often generate.

It looks to me that what Marks and Spencer are actually announcing a cut in their advertising spend; we will surely find that the opportunities that Sir Stuart Rose is talking about - such as growing M&S Direct and investing in international business - will lead to increases in marketing in these areas.

One of the never-ending jobs of a marketing consultant is to reassure clients that marketing is more that just advertising. Given that so many marketing directors are investing in customer marketing and loyalty marketing, the message is clearly getting through to business. All that’s left is to get through to the headline writers.

“As market conditions deteriorate, growth is like gold dust. Our research has found that organisations believe that marketing is the driver for growth through its role as a generator of demand. It is now time for marketing to rise to the challenge.”

A total of 81% of all CEO’s contacted by Deloitte identified marketing as a key driver for growth and 85% identified it as crucial to devising corporate strategy. At the same time, only 20% of senior marketers surveyed by Deloitte believed that marketing in their organisation was truly effective. So whilst those at the top regard marketing as key to future success,  it continues to be one of the first budgets to be cut when the going gets tough. Why? Deloitte’s findings show that this is down to a lack of shared understanding of the role of marketing. Sounds familiar? It’s certainly an issue that resonates with us, where we find that all too often “Marketing” is seen as a tactical “cost” - rather than necessary element in defining the future direction - and success - of an organisation.

Those companies who are able to understand where strategic marketing fits into their organisation are those who are then able to fight for growth. Making sure your organisation is fighting fit is never more important than in a tougher ecomonic climate. As marketing strategy consultants, we not only help our customers define where marketing fits within their organisation we then help them develop effective marketing strategies to achieve their objectives for growth.

Time will tell if those companies who were able to use marketing to drive growth weather the storms ahead, but is it really worth the risk? Is it better to be a sitting duck or to come out fighting? To read the full and excellent article from Deloitte, click here.

It really is worth taking the time to walk through each page, following the “persuasion pathways” your customers are following - checking that you are persuading them to do what you want them to do along the way. If you’re website is feeling a little unloved and lacklustre at the moment, it’s time to bite the bullet and get stuck in. Try some of these ideas to get you started:

1. Take your time. It’s not a quick fix. Taking one page at a time will give you time to approach it as your customers do.
2. Does it hold my customers attention and stimulate interest? Don’t bore them with long paragraphs and wordy descriptions. Make sure they can find what they want quickly, without having to click their way to a well-hidden page only the most tenacious of customers can be bothered to find.
3. Does your website talk to your customers? When visitors come to your site, do they get a sense of who you are and what you’re about? Or do you just blend into the background like so many other faceless, bland websites? It’s important for customers to get a feeling for your company, who you are and what you stand for. It builds confidence and forms the basis of developing a relationship.
4. Get to the point. Don’t waffle on about stuff that just isn’t relevant to your customers. Keep it simple - flashy graphics and clutter detract from the message. Keep to the bottom line of what benefits you are able to provide. It’s easier said than done but Occam’s razor is a powerful tool when wielded correctly.
5. Take a look at your site map too, because too many clicks lose customers along the way. Make sure your pathways are clear and well-marked - only the truly bored can be bothered to spend time faffing around dead-ends and are far less likely to be real potential customers anyway.
6. Can your customers actually understand you? Sounds obvious, but even the most technically-minded consumer might struggle with some terminology known only to your inner sanctum. Revisit your site and make sure you have not only spelt out your message to your customers as clearly as possible but also that you hit them over the head with it.
7. Make sure your customers quickly understand what’s in it for them. You know you’re fantastic, but you need to communicate this in benefits for the customer, otherwise you will lose them at the home page.
8. Keep your blog up to date. If your last blog was three months ago, how is a customer going to feel about your company? Not that you should fill it with inane drivel (ahem!) but try to vent your spleen on matters of interest to your customers. It shows a commitment to your website and also provides another opportunity to communicate with your customers.

So pencil in some time to revisit your website - if you can’t be bothered, then why should your customers? A little time spent rekindling your relationship with your site will soon start to pay and you might fall in love with it all over again!

1. Customers - following on from last week’s post, make the most of your customer base by reactivating lapsed customers and increasing sales from existing ones. Get in touch again to tell them what you have been doing and give them reasons to buy from you again. Make sure your database is cleaned before embarking on any communications campaign and expand contact details regularly. An email newsletter is not only cost-effective, you can tailor your message to different market sectors and measure responses.

2. Shake some hands - whilst you may have avoided joining any kind of association like the plague, now could be a good time to overcome your shyness/disdain and bite the bullet. Many industry associations are now professionally-run, high profile organisations, which offer excellent networking opportunities and insights into your industry. 

3. Get  above the parapet - It’s time to get out there and spread the word. A well-run, targetted workshop can be a highly effective way to meet potential customers and generate new business, or indeed rekindle any lapsed relationships.  Whilst time-consuming, if you have something interesting to say, the rewards can be high. If you’re unable to schedule a face-to-face event, how about running a series of webinars? For the technophobe, more and more people are happy to participate in an online forum. More cost-effective than holding a workshop, more flexible in terms of geography, you still get to communicate with your customers and build relationships, which should generate future business.

4. Its ‘Terrier time’ - once you get a lead, hold on to it, follow it through and don’t let go. You’ve worked hard to generate a new lead, make sure you don’t lose it somewhere in “the system.” Make sure you continue to communicate effectively with your new leads, convincing them at every point of contact that you are the right person to do business with. 

5.  Get together - if you are struggling to think of how best to drive your business forward, perhaps there might be another company who could complement your existing products or services? Forming an alliance with another company might just open up new avenues for both of you. A little lateral thinking could save the day!

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.

As strategic marketing consultants, we are used to seeing companies who have come up against a brick wall - their tried and trusted approach no longer able to take them through to the next phase in their development. We believe that you need to start by by taking a look at the world around you to understand the underlying issues that you are facing.

Perhaps you can see some trends developing, which will need to be tackled head-on and managed in the months to come. Inside your organisation, what are your own financial strengths and weaknesses and how can you manage them better? What impact will this have on how you manage your marketing? Once you have taken a close look at how the current climate is affecting your business, your competitors and your customers, you can then decide what course of action to take:

• A defensive stance - a case of battening down the hatches, keeping the competitors at bay and keeping your customers buying from you.
• An offensive strategy- an altogether braver move to exploit any opportunities and take advantage of your competitor’s vulnerability.

We strongly believe in the latter course of action in most cases as it is a trueism that those companies that continue to invest and innovate in their marketing activity and approach in tougher economic times are the very same companies that will emerge stronger and bigger when the economy improves.

Take a look & see what you think - please address any comments on the language used directly to Marta!

• How to play the ranking game: There are two types of ranking factor: query dependent or query independent. Query dependent criteria - these assess content acccording to the relevance of content in the original search request. It not only assesses frequency of key words but more importantly where and how they appear. Query independent factors - these are pieces of information a search engine already knows about a page, like Google’s PageRank, which measures a web document’s popularity based on among other things the number of links that point to it. The assessment of inbound links to your webpage is now the most important element of most search engine technologies and should be ignored at your peril.

• Don’t be an online potato: Whilst “Search” has been the main technology for getting your information online since all this SEO fun started, the advent of Web 2.0 - since broadband speeds enabled the internet to become a 2-way medium - has changed this forever. Now, potential customers can upload content rather than just passively receive it and has changed the way people spend their time online. This can encompass everything from keeping your blog up to date in order to interact with your target audience to incorporating Web 2.0 marketing methods into your future marketing strategies.

One thing’s for sure, nothing is going to stay the same for very long and the better we are as marketers and online marketing consultants at embracing all new channels at our disposal, the rosier our future - and that of our clients - will look.