July 2009 Archives

I was reading about an online fancy dress supplier who wanted to promote their services at Christmas time. They implemented an online promotional game which captured the imagination of their market. That promotional message was spread rapidly by the recipients at little cost to the supplier and generated ...50k visitors to a landing page, 20% of which went on to purchase - not a bad ROI!

This of course is an example of a 'viral marketing' promotion which really is a marketer's dream -  having your message passed on by your market at little cost to you. Another good case study comes from the world of agriculture publishing, when the team at Farmers Weekly wanted to tell their marketplaces that "Agriculture is evolving, and so is FWi".  In this example, they used video to get their message out; seeding the promotion in social media sites. Again, they successfully managed to achieve huge awareness as well as database of names and addresses to build relationships with.   See what you think of the angry cow promotion.
 
However, before you get excited and leap in too quickly - there are a few points to note which... in the desire to go to market quickly, can often be forgotten:

1. A 'viral' is just a promotion with a mechanism to facilitate distribution and capture demographics
2. The promotion needs to suite your product, message and target market. In other words, there needs to be a clear connection to your product or service
3. Like any promotion - a great idea must be at the heart of it - videos and games tend to work well..funny and controversial are top themes
4. Remember, viral by its very nature is difficult to control - once it's out there, it's out there
5. Plan what to do with the response once it comes in so that you have a whole campaign based around the single idea

A couple more examples:

Little Gordon

Top 10 viral campaigns

To paraphrase the words of Angus Phillipson, the founder and director of eShopworks, one of the positive things that will come out of a recession is the fact that the pressure on resources will force everyone to continuously look at the way things are done, work smarter and stretch marketing investment as far as possible. Take a look at Angus's 'quick win' measures which is aimed specifically at an audience of online publishers, but are applicable to anyone who has a website and wants to optimise that website for both search engines and users.

It's interesting how things change gradually and then when you look back, you appreciate that an enormous change has occurred. There are lots of examples of this, but I was reminded of a specific one the other day when I logged onto my computer, glanced at the 47 promotional emails in my in-box and and then noticed the two pieces of direct mail on my desk. Interesting, almost 50 emails and yet only two pieces of direct mail!

My point of course is that in these recessionary times.. and indeed in any time, as well as learning and experimenting with new channels and technologies, an existing way of doing things can often be looked at with new eyes and reinvented for a new audience.

Here's an example of someone who did just that, taken from the world of marketing magazine subscriptions - a world I know well. Before the web (BTW)..if such a time existed..the majority of new magazine subscribers signed up after receiving a piece of well targeted direct mail. This approach usually took a month to execute and the cost of acquiring new customers was quite high.  Nonetheless, given the right proposition and a strong focus on detail and measurement, these campaigns worked and resulted in thousands of new subscribers signing up - and then signing-up again year after year.

Then came the web and we were suddenly able to email our messages directly into the in-boxes of recipients at a fraction of the cost of direct mail ..and, on top of that,  responses came in that same day!  Direct mail's days looked numbered - and it had to change. So, in terms of magazine subscription campaigns, the creative changed -  colourful leaflets were replaced with invoice style statements,  frequency changed and the number of people who could be reached also changed in a downward direction. 

However, today,  direct mail is still an important route to market that continues to work for b2b audiences who's email boxes are increasingly cluttered. This year, the team at RBI for example, have been able to reduce costs further by consolidating the production and distribution of mailings across multiple markets. In other words, through good planning and the creation of a standard template; fulfillment, data processing and postage costs have been saved and that money has been used to reach 30% more people and reduce the cost of sale by 50%. The channel is used very differently to the past, directing users to the web to order or more information.

On a similar topic, here's another example of an old idea reinvented for a new age. I've noticed that advertorials are starting to appear more frequently in magazines of all types, allowing a marketer to get their message across in quite an effective way often than other types of creative. As a marketer myself, I'm always on the look-out for tactics that work on me - so when i found myself reading an advertorial about a new pair of running shoes recently, it made me think - 'that could work' to help guide prospective customers.  A couple of examples for reference.

 

Here's another study demonstrating some of the benefits of integrated media campaigns. I've written before on this topic as logic tells you that customers are people; people use lots of different channels to get information and therefore marketing campaigns that can communicate a single & consistent message across digital and offline channels will achieving a higher ROI.


BIMA_DL_CrossMedia_Sept07.pdf

Here are 10 tips for improving the user experience of your landing pages or websites. Building and optimising a website is a big under-taking and like any development or innovation, an obsession with the user experience makes a clear difference between success and failure. Website creatiion and optimisation do take up enormous resources, and this shouldn't be underestimated. However, the commercial benefits of getting it right are signifant, so take a read of these top tips  and let me know what you think.

I attended a useful workshop yesterday on content marketing and how it is being used to achieve commercial objectives. Technology marketers have been applying this kind of messaging for some while now, positioning themselves as thought leaders by producing and promoting content packaged as white papers, webinars and videos.

Take a look at the attached webinar which covers the principles of content marketing as well as examples of execution. It's a great example of how content marketing is used to engage and educate a user and ultimately helping them to move through the key stages of decidiing what to buy: awareness, consideration, trial and loyalty.

Insightful webinar on the role that digital content plays in supporting B2B decision-making. It has been produced by the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and has been written for an audience of b2b publishers. That said, the research highlights how end-users are increasingly using digital content in their working days and, how in these challenging times,  b2b marketers have an opportunity to save time and money by working with these specialist providers rather than trying to learn everything about digital publishing and marketing on their own.

Successful marketing in a downturn isn't just about resource mgmt, optimisation and ROI. Sure these things are important and will keep you afloat in the short-term, helping your marketing investments go as far as possible.  However success in the longer-term will come from innovation, which is something which can often be abandoned when times are tough and resources slim. Downturns of course do not mean that no one is buying anything. To contrary, people are still buying, but in general are more cautious and risk adverse and the onus on suppliers is to ensure that true value is being delivered, and innovate around customer needs.

If you're keen to innovate, but don't know where to start,  here's quite a good innovation process to follow for technology projects.

Also, WHATIF!, have quite a few resources to help create the right environment for fresh thinking. Their book: Sticky Wisdom is certainly worth a look.

When time is of the essence, tools like tagcrowd  will come in really handly, providing you with a visual way for visualising the frequency of words. It's free and you can find out more about it here.

I was at a Future of Digital Marketing Conference a couple of weeks ago. As expected, social media was a big theme. Mirko Behnert from Venere showed an interesting slide outling the two 2 sides digital marketing. Whilst traditionally, one side is industrialized and focused on data and optimisation which works well in a campaign-driven environment where tiny changes can make an enormous difference. The other side is less predictable and requires some different skills to engage. The results are not always predictable.

 

Brain.doc 

 

Here's a useful article on buyer personas and how important it is to understand your target audience, not just who and where they are, but how they think and speak. If buyers are broken into distinct groups and then everything we know about each one is catalogued, it's far easier to create content targeted to each demographic. That means that a marketer targeting IT people will have different buyer personas for different functions within that group.

I've been trialing some new marketing automation software from Marketo. Aimed at B2B marketers, in essence the tool aligns sales and marketing in the interest of the customer. In other words, a marketer will be able to able to plan multi-sequence campaigns which trigger when a user takes a specific action. To give you an example, ICIS, a chemical information provider, was able to implement a sequence of 11 emails, landing pages and forms and achieve qualified leads within two or three weeks.  Marketo have many FREE RESOURCES on their website for your reference. Prospective customers receive far more relevant content based on their needs at that moment, hence the campaign results (leads) that are passed and followed-through by a sales team will be qualified not just on their demographics, but by the fact that they have downloaded content and taken other relevant actions. Marketo is a good example of a piece of technology that is transforming the way direct marketing works. Blanket mailings where one size fits all will become less and less frequent as marketers learn how to use these new tools and refine campaigns based on the analytics.

A nice, step=by step case study of how a health care IT marketer applied many of the principles of how to market through a recession and launched a coordinated PR, branding and lead-generation campaign. Using well-placed thought-leadership articles, direct mail, and targeted emails customized for each prospects' very specific pain point, they're filling their pipeline with warm leads at a time when others are holding back. Read the full case study here. 

What would you do in this situation?

You're working in a nut booth, you know the type, selling a selection of pick and mix nuts to the public at stations. Your one is based at Wimbeldon in South West London. A customer comes in and selects some nuts. You weigh them and it comes to 0.74p. The customer is a regular customer, you recognize him. As he goes to pay, a £1 coin falls from his bag onto the counter and promptly disappears. You both search under the counters, in between the pre-packed packs...everywhere, but it can't be found.

You have a choice:

1. Tell the customer that you'll find it later on and not to worry, letting the customer keep the nuts and take the change too
2. Tell the customer not to worry, keep the nuts, but no change
3. Ask the customer for the 0.74p as you can't find the £1 and you're not sure what the coin was anyway

My point. In any business environment, it's important to join up the functions that touch a customer. It's all very well being masters of lead generation and marketing communciations, but if the customer experience falls down, all of that effort will be in vein.

Planning and organisation are key skills for every marketer and for years, I have tried to figure out how to improve productivity and squeeze as much into a day as possible. In a recession or in a start-up environment, where there are less resources overall, this challenge becomes even more important. Great books and training courses on time-management have discussed the principles - all of which makes sense - but today we have free software tools to help us organise our time and collaborate with others. The next challenge is which tool to use as there are so many tools and it's quite easy to go from tool to tool whcih realising the benefit that comes from focusing on just a couple. I have tested quite a few of these tools over the last couple of years and the two that I have found to work for me are a combination of www.evernote.com and www.rememberthemilk.com. Like any of these tools, you need to build up a competence in using them, but they do cut down on planning and organisation time considerably.