Total Marketing Solutions

When was the last time you took a good, long look at your website? It’s a process we’re undertaking ourselves at TMS, having realized that our own site was in need of a little attention. So we recognize that we aren’t perfect, but when did you last visit your own website from the perspective of a potential client?

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!

Are you starting to feel the effects of the credit crunch? For your business, will it be a storm in a teacup, or the end of the civilized world as we know it? Whatever your opinion, take a look at few simple suggestions on how to market your business more effectively to minimise any crunching headaches you might have:

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!

What’s the one thing really worth keeping when you’re in business? Yup, your customers, of course. It might seem blindingly obvious but this small yet rather crucial point in our experience is surprisingly overlooked by many companies, both large and small.In a recent post by John Jantsch of Duck Tape Marketing, he argued that there are four ways to grow a business, namely: get more leads, close more deals, increase your average transaction and/or add products or services to your current offering. He was quite right to also point out that a fixation on lead generation as the only way to grow a business inevitably runs your resources dry.But there is one more element to growing business that is not included in his list: stop losing customers - plug the leaky bucket!Many companies continue to win new business, close the deal - and then head for the hills! To get long-term value from all your marketing efforts you have to do all you can to hold onto those precious customers once you have got them.Frederick Reichheld, in his book “The Loyalty Effect” (Harvard Business School Press, 1996), states that a 1% increase in retention will amount to a 17% growth of the bottom line.  Compelling, isn’t it? Even if Reicheld is wrong by a factor of 50% it still demonstrates the value of looking after your customers.By ensuring that customer attrition is reduced as much as possible, all your efforts to secure that hard-won business won’t have been in vain.  As marketing consultants we have worked with a number of customers who have had startling results, simply by turning their attention to addressing their customer churn.  This is truly an effective use of marketing resources as a “lost” customer knows the company and products or services and was prepared to buy from you in the first place.The key to slowing your customer churn is to identify the reasons why customers stop buying from you - and then do something about it. When we looked at our customers’ leaky buckets, we found holes relating to poor customer service, inflexible payment terms and lack of ongoing communication. All these issues can be easily resolved by being focused on the customer and treating them as if they are worth more to you than the value of their last transaction. Keep in touch, keep them interested, make them feel loved and they’ll keep coming back for more.

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.

If life is starting to get a little tougher for you now, then perhaps now is the time to break the mould and redefine how you do business. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut with familiar marketing techniques that have worked well for you in the past, but if they are no longer generating the business they used to then it is time for a rethink.

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.

There are still a great many people even within the marketing community who have not yet really grasped why social media should now be an essential and integral part of the way in which they ‘go-to-market’ with their business. In the following ‘colourful’ presentation, Marta Kagan makes the argument quite convincingly that social media is relevant to us all - that is if we want to continue to thrive and survive in our businesses!!!

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

Back in the old days, that is the 1990’s, when Altavista used to rank web page content solely according to its relevance to the user’s query, bless ‘em, life seemed so much simpler somehow. Since the arrival of Google’s algorithm, content is ranked according to 0ff-the-page elements as much as, if not more than, what is on the page itself. Whilst no-one outside of Google’s hallowed walls knows the exact formula of the algorithm, a whole SEO industry has sprouted up around it and people the world over spend hours a week ensuring that their site is optimised to the hilt. But how can you be sure that a little tweaking here and there will bring results? Here are a few points to bear in mind before you start tinkering with your website:

• 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.

Whilst we are not ones to jump on the next marketing guru’s bandwagon, having read Seth Godin’s “Meatball Sundae - Is your marketing out of sync?”, we felt it had some nuggets in there of particular interest and relevance to our clients at Total Marketing Solutions. As marketing strategy consultancy we have regularly helped our clients with their online marketing strategy and it is clear to us that the whole area of Web 2.0 and how to make it effective is still little understood so here we try and learn from the ‘master’ himself.

The title of the book alludes to how companies undertaking traditional marketing activities [the meatballs] can’t just add cream, chocolate flakes, raspberry sauce [web 2.0 marketing techniques] on the top of what they do to make it into a sundae that is going to work and people are going to like - unfortunately it isn’t that simple!

The book tracks the decline and fall of some traditional marketing activities and outlines the need for companies to use new marketing techniques. But the fundamental message is about authenticity and how web 2.0 can quickly and easily find you out if you don’t act with integrity, honesty and try to create genuine products that give people what they want. The key barrier to this in the most part is the nature of the organisations that are trying to make this change from ‘old marketing’ [ie. TV advertising] to ‘new marketing’ [ie. social networks].

Seth goes on to identify some key trends, including:

The need for an authentic story as the number of information sources available increases: Telling true stories is the only way to spread messages on the unforgivable medium of the internet. Those being economical with the truth will be found out and their brand will suffer or be destroyed.

Extremely short attention spans due to clutter: This speaks for itself - organisations have to get over the fact that they can’t engage individuals unless they are totally relevant at a specific moment in time

Outsourcing: The internet has delivered a global supply of resources, skills and talent and enables all companies to outsource the stuff they can’t do or don’t do well enough.

Google and the dicing of everything: Search engines have enabled consumers to buy everything they need in component form, such as holidays, ultimately eliminating whole service sectors.

Infinite channels of communication: With new platforms and web sites being developed almost daily it is key to keep abreast of what is going on, what works and what doesn’t. Internet experiences will need to become entirely tailored to the individual [web 3.0].

Direct communication and commerce between consumers and consumers: Customers now gravitate towards each other via social networks, sharing experiences and creating communities of interest who can exert pressure on organisations.

The shift from “how many” to “who”: One of Seth’s previous work, Flipping the Funnel, covered this subject. The use of technologies like Google Adwords have put individual consumers in touch with companies rather than companies having to find them through uneconomical techniques.

New gatekeepers, no gatekeepers: The rise of the likes of YouTube has broken down the barriers to communicating with audiences and blogging community are becoming influential in the spread of messages.

The book is meant as a warning to organisations expecting the new marketing techniques to just replace traditional communication channels and effectively just ‘plug and play’ into their marketing strategies. As ever with Mr. Godin, there’s a good range of case studies, reference sites and examples to explain and support his argument, including one of his own companies, Squidoo, which features quite heavily.

If you’re already employing web 2.0 marketing techniques, or “new marketing”, with some degree of measurable success then this book may well inspire you to build what you’ve learnt into other aspects of your business. If you haven’t started yet you may well find the premise of the book quite daunting, in terms of how your organisation may have to change before you can exploit these techniques.

Either way, it’s well worth taking the time to explore how best to plot your future route through web 2.0.

What does MSN’s announcement of cashback for users of its live search mean for PPC advertisers and online marketing consultants?
In a previous post, I mentioned advertisers who spend significant amounts with Google Adwords but do not use Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCenter. The main reason for this is that, for most companies, neither Yahoo nor MSN deliver enough volume to make the effort worthwhile. (It’s also worth saying that neither has an interface as easy-to-use as Google’s.) And in the volume game, MSN finishes a poor third for UK advertisers.
So hats off to MSN. This is an innovative attempt to shake up a market that is at risk of becoming a monopoly. Anyone who is familiar with Affiliate Marketing will recognise the concept immediately – but instead of the advertiser paying the commission to the affiliate, the search engine will pay commission to the customer. It will only work if searchers like the concept, and more of them defect to MSN – and stay with MSN, increasing their share of the market. And they will only stay with MSN if the search results, and in the case the paid results, deliver relevant results. So it’s back to square one, because most searchers use Google because they believe that the results it delivers are more relevant. For my part, I think this cashback initiative is just the first step in the next phase of the search war, following Microsoft’s failed bid for Yahoo. I believe that Yahoo and Google will fight back, and at this stage my money’s still on Google to keep its lead in the battle.

Sustainable marketing is good, Greenwash is bad. That seems to be the gist of recent articles on this blog and elsewhere including the Sunday Times. So how exactly do they differ? How do you undertake marketing without running the risk of tokenism?
Most of the targets of activists are large corporate organisations, who generally use a product launch to boast about its green credentials without considering the company’s wider environmental strategy. Environmentalists, and many customers, find it difficult to reconcile the “green” messages with the company’s other activities or its history. One of the great rules of marketing is that you have to deliver on your promise and customers do not see these companies delivering.
So as a marketing consultant there are a few simples rules that I recommend to clients undertaking sustainable marketing :
- Try to make it more than a gimmick. Take steps to make sustainability a strategy of your organisation, not a marketing tactic. Customer s will see through anything less.
- Make sure it’s real. If you promise to offset your carbon emissions, then do it.
- And don’t let concerns about greenwash put you off from doing the right thing. That’s akin to not recycling your newspapers because you’re worried that you drive a 4×4. So if in doubt, just do it!