Our Blog

Luxury Brand : Luxury Customer Service

It was September 2010, I know it has taken some time to document this experience, but I have been busy. I was the owner of a 2001 Lexus IS 200, as a result of seeing my first Lexus IS 200 in 1999 in North Sydney, it was royal blue and I said to myself, I want one of those, it was the rear lights that caught my eye. In 2001 I was given a company car allowance and purchased the car immediately after 3 years I kept the car and ran it as my own, I loved driving the car, the sound was amazing but after 10 years and 125,000 miles it was time for an upgrade. 

As a marketer I understand the power of the brand and also as a consumer I am drawn towards products as a result of strong brand values, in which I can believe and trust. I was a Lexus brand advocate, although when I test drove the Lexus IS 250 the sales man described the owners as older drivers with no-one under the age of 30 considered driving a Lexus, I guess I was the exception to the rule as I bought my first Lexus at 26.

Anyway with the advent of CT 200h and the Kylie Minogue advertising campaign the under 25’s are the next Lexus target market. As I was well over 30 I was quite happy with a used Lexus IS 250. I researched the Lexus Used Car website for a couple of months; I knew my criteria, Black, Low Mileage, Manual and Petrol. It turns out that manual and petrol are the rarest combination when it comes to Lexus Used Car’s so I had to adjust my criteria. On the Lexus site you are offered various symbols for each used vehicle, I clicked on the purple symbol which meant “You can negotiate the price of this vehicle”, I put in an offer and waited to be contacted, I received a confirmation email etc.

I was contacted eventually, and ‘the salesman’ said, “The car owes us more than your offer”, to which I said, “How much more would you accept?” to which he said, “I will speak with my manager, and he hung up” I heard nothing for a week or two, not impressed at this stage, I am a buyer ready to purchase, a salesman's dream I would have thought. I was then called by the service department, my service was due and I mentioned to the young lady I was thinking of upgrading my car, but I never heard back from ‘the salesman’, within 15 minutes I had a call from Martin, “how can I help?” he said. Martin eventually sold me a Black, Low Mileage, Semi Auto and Petrol Lexus IS 250, so 3 out of 4 criteria was an excellent result.

I was called a few days after I picked the car by Lexus Customer service, to rate my customer experience, I rated Lexus a 6 or 7, given my first sales experience or should I say non event (he never called back), to which the agent’s reaction was priceless, she said “oh really, are you sure, we don’t usually receive below 8. I will need to pass your comments on the branch manager and they will follow up with you, if that is OK?” I answered, “Yes that will be fine.”

A couple days later I was emailed and then called by Wendy Preston, General Manager, Lexus Guildford. We had a great conversation whereby Wendy offered a free 40K service because my experience with the sales team did not live up to the ‘The Lexus Experience’. I thought this was very generous, so I gratefully accepted. I was very happy with the speed and generosity of the team at Lexus Guildford. But that was not the end of my experience.

I live in a small remote village in Surrey; some of the access roads are in need of repair. I was driving to an appointment and I felt a knock on my front left tyre and drove on to a safe place to get out and take a look, the road had ripped the tyre completely apart. I called Lexus Roadside Care (you receive 1 year when you buy a Used Car) and out came the AA, he looked at the two front tyres and said “they are both barely legal” you will need a set of new tyres”, to which I replied, “I have only had this car six weeks”.

I contacted Wendy again to inform her of my situation, clearly I was not a happy Lexus Guildford customer. Without hesitation and again true to ‘The Lexus Experience’, Wendy offered (even though the car had passed the MOT before I picked it up) to pay for two new tyres to restore my faith in the Lexus brand and Lexus Guildford. Thank you to Wendy Preston and thank you Lexus Guildford, I think this experience answers my next question, do I stay with Lexus for my next vehicle…

Why is it both important and beneficial to have a Marketing Plan?

If you are a reseller in the telecommunication industry, it is vitally important and beneficial to have a marketing plan as this document will increase the availability of a vendors marketing budget to your business. A vendor is more likely to approve budgets for marketing activities with a partner that has a marketing plan as opposed to a partner that just sends an email or a verbal request.

Vendors, in our industry, are now far more constrained with the volume and types of budget available for their partners, when it come to jointly funded marketing campaigns. If you then add the confusing state of discretionary funding as opposed to accrued funding and then if you also take into consideration certification levels, it all becomes a bit of a minefield. And most partners give up…

Just spend the time or employ a professional to develop a credible and useful marketing plan, their cost will be offset by the budgets you receive from the vendor, and if you use the same plan across multiple vendors, it could be a mini bonanza on the marketing funding front. You might need to employ a marketing body to manage the funds and the campaigns, which would be a nice problem to develop.

Anyway getting back to the point, it does all make perfect sense though, because if a business has a business plan, to plan for an increase in sales and growth, a receive a certain sales target for the year with a specific vendor why would they not have a marketing plan to plan for how to achieve that increase in sales and growth via joint marketing initiatives. Marketing is a cost to any business, therefore if costs can be offset by a vendor but the benefit be felt by the partner, then why not try and secure some marketing budget, and write a simple marketing plan.

In the old days some vendors had hundreds of thousands of pounds put aside for business development and lead generation. But now it is more like tens of thousands of pounds which mean this is a smaller and more prized budget to be allocated. We always have to bear in mind that there are strict financial guidelines for global companies to adhere commonly referred to as Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB)rules or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). These will govern the types of activities that will be funded, therefore understand which activities your vendor will fund and then develop a plan around those activities, it is quite simple.

A simple Marketing Plan should cover the following topic areas:

Management Summary 

Budgetary Considerations 

Situation Analysis 

Product Analysis 

SWOT Analysis 

Market Segmentation 

Business Objectives 

Marketing Strategy Options 

Recommendations & Next Steps 

List of Marketing Activities – This should be a GAANT chart with budget requests.

And finally, some leading brands are now starting to address new marketing communication vehicles by either using parts of these funds to help their partners understand the opportunity presented by digital channels through training and provision of tools. They are also looking at interesting incentives to insure these partners start to use these funds properly.

So if you are a reseller in the telecommunication industry, it is vitally important and beneficial to develop or create a current and achievable marketing plan as this document will increase the availability of a vendors marketing budget to your business.

If you would like to know more about this subject please email: andygrant@bowanarrow.com or click on www.bowanarrow.com/services

Vendor Funding: Accrued or Discretionary, what is best for the partners?

During September and October I created a simple Survey Monkey entitled Vendor Funding: Accrued or Discretionary, what is best for the partners? My objective was to receive 50 genuine responses. The primary reason for this survey is that I worked with many funding processes both at Avaya and Nortel and I continually see large vendors from all sectors changing the way that they fund their channel programs. One year it’s accrued and then the next year they change to discretionary, but does anyone ever ask the partners what they want from the program and how this affects their businesses?

I doubt it, so I sent the 7 question survey to as many people in my network of vendors, partners consultants etc. that would (a) be interested in the topic, so as to take part and (b) be even more interested in the results.

I started with a simple question, (1) Where are you employed? This helps set the tone for the survey and how to then interpret the answers to the more in depth questions. The responses were as follows Vendor 38.3%, Reseller 31.9%, Distributor 12.8% or Supplier 17%. Therefore 64% of the responders were from Vendors or Resellers which is the perfect base for answering the remaining questions and providing the insight I required to summarise and interpret the results.

Throughout my vendor careers we were always asked to ensure that the partners were aware of the rules and regulations that governed vendor funding models, my initial view was that not many partners took any notice, but I was wrong as when I asked, (2) Have you ever heard of the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Rules or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance? Surprisingly 72.5% of the responders answered ‘Yes’ and 27.5% answered ‘No’ that is a very positive sign for vendors who are tightly governed by these various policies. This result is very positive for vendors as governance of funding programs is very tight and they need to ensure that everything is managed to the letter of the law.

The next question had to be simple and direct, (3) What is the preferred funding model for partners? I wanted a definitive answer to this question so I only listed 3 possible answers, Accrued (earned as % of revenue), Discretionary (allocated on case by case basis) or other. The results were as follows Accrued 43%, Discretionary 41% and other 16%. There were some additional comments that were added in the other section which I think need a mention and that add to the debate…

1.     “Hybrid, mixing both to support short & long term goals”

2.     “Mixed”

3.     “A mixture of both”.

4.     “Split 50/50 between the 2”

5.     “Mix of earned and specific projects”

6.     “To run both in parallel is particularly useful. The accrued approach provides an element of predictability but there are occasions where the vendor can collaborate with you on activities with mutual benefit above and beyond the accrued %, as long as you are a 'clean' user of accruals!”

7.     “most reseller too small for accrued funds to be meaningful”

8.     “they want to see a mixture of both”

9.     “Discretionary allocated on long term agreed plan

The audience is almost split on which system is preferable, plus a decent number advocate a mixed approach which might well be worth exploring for future vendor program changes.

In the next question, (4) what are the barriers to spending? I created a multiple choice question because I know people have more than one reason for not being able to spend their allocated Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF). I was interested to see where the answers would rank, and here they are in order of response:

a.     Claiming Process (time consuming)

b.     Types of activities allowed (restrictive)

c.     Not enough funds to make it worthwhile

d.     Guidelines change too often

e.     Terms & Conditions (unclear)

f.      Percentage of assistance

Clearly vendors need to address all of the items listed, but I would say the top two were easily the area of most focus from the responders. If vendors make it easier for partners to claim on activities that they would like to execute the utilisation rate would increase and everyone would be happy, but this seems to be where there is a gap, and everything slows down and momentum is lost from creating and executing joint marketing programs funded by the vendor.

Next I wanted to find out if people thought, (5) if marketing funding levels should be linked to a partners status within the Vendor’s Certification Program? And we would accept a simple, Yes 75%, No 10% or No Preference 15%. The consensus here makes perfect sense, if a vendor has a certification program, a benefit of that program and achieving a higher level of certification should be rewarded with more Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF) than lower certified partners. But that does not always happen which I find a little bit odd.

The next question was (6) Should Partners match Vendor’s funding with contribution of their own to an activity? And the answers were a little surprising nearly 32% of responders were from resellers. The answers were Yes 36%, No 7% and Depends on the activity 57%. This is a really interesting result as it shows vendors that resellers are open to new ideas and approaches, so if you are changing your partner program don’t just serve up the same old program rewards and guidelines, think outside the box and stimulate growth with your partners who are asking for a new approach.

And finally, let’s talk about how to get access to these Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF) statements. The question was (7) Are the online Marketing funding portals you have experience of easy to use?And the answers came back were Yes 20%, No 48% and Varies 32%. I think we can safely say that as nearly 50% of the responders were negative in response to this question then the vendors seriously need to take a look at the platforms that are used to access the fund balance and create the transactions. We must bear in mind that the vendors may be constrained by using a global system, but if the system is not used by the partners, then clearly changes are required.

In conclusion, this is just a snapshot with 51 individual opinions on the 7 simple topics that  admittedly only covers a fraction of this topic, but I think it gives us a genuinely good indication of the thoughts within our industry Re: Vendor Funding: Accrued or Discretionary, what is best for the partners? As a next step I would encourage vendors that are thinking of changing the way they reward their partners to investigate the pros and cons thoroughly before making any changes, and most importantly consult your audience. If a vendor changes from discretionary to accrued it takes smaller partners at least 6 months to earn enough funds to afford to roll out a single activity, if the program then changes back they lose out again as the more highly certified partners will most likely always receive the discretionary allocations. Vendors need to think carefully around this topic, as they can help to make or break quarters and most importantly channel relationships and coverage.

Are events still effective marketing activities?

If you asked any sales director in IT and telecommunications the question, are events still effective marketing activities? I believe you would receive a variation of the same response, “I think so but I don’t know for certain, I would have to ask my marketing team”.

That is a fair response because again I would hazard a guess that most decisions within organisations of whether or not to run an event is based on the theory, “we did it last year and it seemed to work well”, or the very similar, “we have always run events, our customers expect it”.  These could be very valid reasons, especially if they create the bulk of your sale opportunities, but I challenge anyone involved in creating, managing, running or funding events to stop and ask a few simple questions before agreeing to run another event.

Questions like… Are physical events more successful than virtual events, like webinars? When I say successful I mean with a positive return on investment for the company. Do we know the results; have we got the metrics from previous events to give us insight? What role do these events play in the sales cycle? What has changed, are customers, prospects, partners, vendors still coming out to events? What will the audience learn at our event? Will they actually turn up to our events? Who is the target audience and finally can we actually resource this event?

In my opinion, webinars are popular with vendors because they are a recurring information resource that be accessed 24/7 on their website, but I do question how many people actually watch or listen to each and every webinar in its entirety? Whereas at a physical event, you can tell who is engaged and who is not engaged plus your sales people should be able to focus upon building relationships with the attendees that look to be engaged. It is a good test to see which of your sales people are natural networkers, and can actually sell. Another benefit of physical events is when customers sell to other customers or event better to prospects; you can’t get that from a webinar.

So how do you make your events more effective? First think about the elements that contribute to successful marketing events. The three essential items are venue, content and presenter. A successful event will be set in a great location, it will have character, be easily accessible and relate directly to the topic of the day, for example if the theme is higher education, why not use a state of the art university or for architects you would use architecturally inspired building, it will be an immediate talking point. The content must be current and relevant, plus try and build in some type of exclusive content as this will answer the initial question of what will the audience learn at our event? Finally, please ensure you use tried and tested presenters; this can make or break an event. Ensure they are rehearsed and briefed not to go off script or make any inappropriate comments. Please also check all the slides to ensure they are legible and not repetitive. These three simple elements require preparation, as with any marketing activity, but the benefits will be enormous and measureable.

Events can take a lot of time and resource, sometimes more than creating a direct marketing campaign. Here is a simple approach to actually making it happen. We can look at three main areas which are planning & organising, running the event and post event. Firstly create a team and develop an actual plan that has dates, deadlines, budgets and areas of responsibility. Next decide on a theme, venue and most importantly a date (try to avoid any holidays or anything that could harm your attendee numbers). On the day the team must all know their roles for an event to be successful; as once it starts it cannot stop it. Ensure you have the correct signage, the AV and presentations have been tested and the food and drink are suitable for the audience. Finally post event, you may have decided to create a feedback form to handout on the day of the event, with an incentive of a gift for its return or as an email the next day, either is acceptable.

This final step is the most critical to the overall success of the event and the purpose of running the event, lead generation. I would advise that the team have a verbal debrief – preferably face to face, to discuss all aspects of the event, what worked well, what didn’t work and how are the leads going to be handled? Event follow up is often forgotten, as most marketers think that an event is completed once you say good bye to the last delegate and put the final box back in the car. This is actually where the real work begins - closed loop marketing.

One final point to consider in the marketing mix is the number of events you plan to run in a given year, what percentage of the budget and activity plan is taken up with events, is it 30% or 50% or even 80%. Just step back and think about it for a moment so it is clear what events are essential and generate the bulk of the business and what contribution these events are making to your business. It may help make the decision, along with the marketing metrics, on whether or not to run the next event.

Case Study: ShoreTel UK Marketing Master Class

Overview:

As technology vendors have both developed and refined their channel marketing strategies over the past few years the need for a refined yet bespoke marketing approach has emerged as top priority. The vendor who manages to encourage, educate and inspire their partners to create and execute joint marketing activities will be the big winner with increased brand awareness plus channel based return in the marketing funnel. Accelerate is a 100% fully funded, managed program of packaged marketing activities and collateral that focuses upon delivering joint sales opportunities. ShoreTel’s Accelerate Marketing Knowledge Series was developed upon the premise of educating channel marketing professionals with the very latest industry ideas, concepts and practises. ShoreTel’s approach is based on developing marketing skills and learning’s from one event to the next with two driving factors; ensuring partners attend all events to aid personal development, and building a community that is both competitive but also able to differentiate themselves (from a marketing perspective) in order to address more of the market. The events were run in November 2010 and April 2011, the agenda being developed collaboratively with some of the best industry marketers e.g. Chris Wilson, Richard Robinson, Ed Weatherall, Lisa Hutt and Richard Bush.

Objectives:

This program had two specific goals: to increase the marketing skill levels of ShoreTel partners while also increasing awareness, consideration and marketing pipeline for ShoreTel via an increased number of joint marketing campaigns.

Target Audience:

ShoreTel’s Accelerate Marketing Knowledge Series was aimed at those people within ShoreTel’s partner community who influence or perform a marketing function. The agenda topics and speakers were designed to appeal to Managing Directors, Sales Directors, Marketing Directors, Marketing Managers and Executives. The agenda items, timings and presenters were deliberately designed to be both compelling and action orientated.

For channel marketers to gain access to the knowledge and learn from the experience of these industry leaders is unprecedented for a technology vendor to offer at no cost to their partners. This important element helped to create a successful set of events simply with the calibre of presenters who also attended free of charge

Results:

ShoreTel had just launched the Accelerate Partner Program in the UK when development of the ShoreTel Accelerate Marketing Knowledge Series began in September 2010. It was always Tom Perry’s vision to create a partner community under the Accelerate banner and provide bi-annual knowledge and action events to drive increased marketing activity through his channel partners. The initial event objective was to get 35 attendees, 25 partner registrations per event plus 10 other participants (Presenters or ShoreTel employees). We received 19 and 21 partner attendees respectively to the November and April events.

As a result of the calibre of presenters, content and the exclusive offer made at the November event, ShoreTel agreed to fund and develop 7 new joint marketing campaigns. In addition to these activities ShoreTel identified and agreed to fund another 15 joint campaigns after the recent April event. Therefore ShoreTel have over 25 joint marketing campaigns agreed and underway in the UK channel as a direct result of the ShoreTel Accelerate Marketing Knowledge series

The ShoreTel Accelerate Marketing Knowledge series gives the partner the knowledge and the courage combined with a generous 100% funding offer to take a chance and create a ShoreTel joint marketing campaign that demonstrates the true value of partnership.

Marketing in the Channel Skills Gap?

As the world of digital business communication and social media strategy is moving so fast, I think it is vitally important for companies to invest in developing the skills of their marketing individuals and teams to ensure that their company ranks on page one of Google’s organic search and also that their online presence reflects their already developed reputation and corporate messages.

I will be the first to admit that marketing has changed an awful lot since I left Swinburne University of Technology www.swinburne.edu.au with my Marketing Degree in hand back in 1996. We did cover services and international marketing but not cover complex subjects like digital business communication and social media strategy (because they didn’t really exist), I say complex because these subjects can be interpreted in may different ways depending on your business and your need to embrace this new wave of communication with customer, partners and the industry.

New graduates coming into the workforce will of course have a good grip on digital communication and social media from their personal life experiences, in some instances they will choose their future employers based on the companies grip or acceptance of digital communication and social media. The difference will be the way these communication mediums are used for business need to be treated differently. At the same time we need also to ensure the seasoned marketer also has access to the latest training, to keep them current and effective in their current their roles or to gain the knowledge and experience to move into newly created roles within their companies.

Digital business communication and social media creates opportunities for businesses on all fronts, just ask your peers or other business owners about their experience with social media and see if it has helped their business, has it created any revenue? To help understand the enormity of the social media landscape check out this website: www.fredcavazza.net, you can see the landscape and the platforms and I bet there are names you will never have heard of but they exist and someone is using them otherwise they would be listed.

So the landscape is huge, the world wide web is permanent, anything published is available to most people around the world so this business of digital business communication and social media needs to be taken seriously. Therefore training is vital for the development of employees but also to allow them to check out the competition and pick up ideas for other companies in other industries and from people they may never come across and the most important element it will teach them the basics and the discipline required to make these communication mediums work for your business.

My final word of advice that if within your business or role as a marketing professional you actively use digital business communication and social media but you don’t have an agreed and published (internally) process or strategy, stop now, and develop a strategy, it will focus the purpose and objective of the activity and will bring your business better results in the long run. 

Strategic Marketing Planning

I was recently commissioned to write, develop and deliver a marketing fundamentals training course for a worldwide software vendors channel partners. An initiative that I leapt at, for a couple of reasons, a vendor investing time, money and resource in their channel, I want to be a part of that, and a vendor investing in the marketing skills of their channel partners, I definitely want to be a part of that program.

A couple of courses into the schedule and I am amazed at how many channel sales / marketing people that I have talked to recently who do not have a marketing plan in their business, or at least a plan that is written down and agreed with management. I would hazard a guess that most business leaders / owners would not dream of not creating a business plan or a sales plan, so why not have at least a very basic marketing plan. Furthermore I discovered through a few carefully guided questions, if the partners do say that they have a plan it is very organic in the sense of it is understood but not written down so they can change it regularly. I would call that more tactical than strategic.

Planning is crucial to the success of any business or even marketing activity or endeavour. It is also a part of the course where I have been most surprised, in the sense that I thought it was a given that in order to justify spending budget as a marketing department you would need to create a plan, with at the very least targets and ROI objectives.  This plan with marketing goals would then need to be presented and approved by management before any spending commenced.

With this in mind I just wanted to reinforce the need for Strategic Marketing Planning and one of the best ways that I have summed it recently is with the aid of The Direct Marketing Guide © 1998, published back in 1998 by the recently rebranded The Institute of Direct Marketing www.theidm.com

The nine major benefits of a good strategic marketing plan

•          Forces three dimensional thinking

•          Allows specialists to perceive inter-functional relationships otherwise missed

•          Generates an extraordinary enthusiasm that improves tactical creativity

•          Allows resources to impact on the most profitable potential

•          Creates benchmarks for future decisions

•          Improves staff quality – control and deadline performance

•          Elicits improved vendor performance

•          Enables faster roll-outs of successful programmes and faster shut off failures

•          Saves top and middle management time and stress during implementation stage

Once you have digested the first part and then come to write the plan please use these six simple steps.

The six qualities of a good strategic marketing plan

•          Easy to understand

•          Precise but detailed, to avoid confusion

•          Adaptable to change

•          Realistic in application

•          Covers all significant market factors

•          Clearly identifies responsibilities

If you work in a channel partner and have influence in the marketing function for your business please remember these simple words; planning prevents, poor performance. 

B2B marketer as B2B customer, blurred boundary or insightful opportunity?

Back in the late 90s I worked for 3Com, they had 13 divisions, and we even sold external US Robotics modems, yes they did exist. I was lucky I worked for the Palm Division and our directive was to grow market share. The appetite was right in the market and we had a far superior product to the Psion, our only competition at the time. My team travelled from technology event to event and just had to remember four Palm functions; email, notes, contacts and diary plus the USP – you could ‘sync’ your emails, that was it sold, we increased market share to over 60% in the first year, the Palm 3 and then 5 sold themselves, the market was just evolving.

Now let’s move to February 2010. I have a choice to make as I set up my own consultancy business, which mobile phone or device should I buy to suit my business and communication needs? I have used a wide range of devices, obviously the Palm III & V, several base function Nokias, Qualcomm CDMA, Siemens, early model HTCs, e- Series Nokias, Palm Treo and finally the BlackBerry Pearl. Everyone is readily available to give you advice on which device to purchase particularly given the recent change in dynamics of the major players and the devices on offer. For me it came down to a choice of two the iPhone or a BlackBerry Curve.

In the 90s I attended all these trade shows and industry events. Being on the Palm stands for days on end, I cannot tell you how many people (very technical people) I spoke to who had developed apps for the Palm OS, and yes they had to show me how it worked and why it was better than something similar, this was an industry in its own right. You see, the Apple App Store is not a new concept, it’s just that Apple bring products to market that link all aspects of the market from day one. Yes, there may be some technical glitches now and then, but they seem to get it right 99% of the time, hence their massive shift in size and profitability over the past decade.

My point is that as the customer you have the choice and you have helped to shape this market. As B2B marketers, we’re also B2B customers. Boundaries are more blurred than ever before – but that could be an opportunity in itself!

What was my choice in the end? I wanted a business function communication device, not an app hungry entertainment machine, so I chose a BlackBerry Curve.

Marketing Channels: Direct Mail, Email or Telemarketing?

As an active member of the IDM B2B Council I get asked this question often. There are advantages and disadvantages to every channel of direct marketing because as a marketing manager you need to take into consideration a couple of crucial factors when deciding upon which path to take; cost, frequency, data, segment, desired results and timeline. All these factors can change the focus of any direct marketing campaign depending upon the weighting given to these six elements.

Direct mail can take many forms and in the large part is a cost effective channel to reach a target market but if you need to repeat the exercise or you send to a large and old database you are wasting your time and your budget. To gain maximum cut through DM needs to be highly targeted, segment your data, and I particularly like high end direct mail plus personalised direct mail. Like a mobile device that is set up with the targets details or a book printed with the targets name on the front, I think they are simple yet powerful DM pieces. I also believe that personalisation gives the recipient a greater desire to open the dm piece and read the contents, a) because it is nice to see your name in print and b) if they got my name right it might be worth reading their message. As a marketer that is what we are trying to achieve, to illicit a response from a target market that has the desire to purchase the product or service thus the call to action then needs to be strong enough to get us to the next level of response.

E-mail is a very cost effective and quick channel to market. With email you can achieve instant results, like opens and click through, which are great internal statistics to provide to support the launch of a campaign. Be aware of the relevant data protection laws and the opt in; opt out criteria that needs to be adhered to with email campaigns. Please ensure you work with an agency or database supplier that is regulated or a member of a recognised marketing body in the UK, like the DMA or IDM. Emails are easy to send but also easy to delete, where as a direct mail piece has a longer life in the hand of the target.

Telemarketing is an excellent marketing practise and can gain the best results as part of an integrated marketing campaign. It can also be used to clean data, invite people to register or confirmation participants for an event. I think the investment in TM will draw the best ROI when the campaign is planned and TM is used to follow up on the DM piece in the same language and message as the DM or Email piece, this providing both continuity and relevance to the target receiving the DM and the phone call. Plus you must think of the agent, make their job a little easier by trying to warm the target up for a call on the product or service in question. The call centre agent is a great testing ground but it also can be unforgiving, so plan the campaign and brief all the elements of the campaign to run like a smoothly greased wheel and then you should get the results you have promised the sales teams. 

Business Transformation: Social Media Planning

With Hollywood jumping on the bandwagon and creating such blockbuster films as ‘The Social Network’ and winning four Golden Globes including Best Film, there is no escape from the hype of Social Media. But like so many mediums and in fact so many technology mediums let’s face it, Social Media could be here one day and gone the next, just think back to Friends Reunited, MySpace or BEBO, so this begs the questions should you get involved and will this help you win business?

Like any new technology people either choose to jump straight in and see what happens or they wait, and watch and see how other are using and benefiting from using this technology. I think the former is fine when you are using the social element of the media to keep in touch with family and friends but I would err on the side of caution when thinking about using the tools for business. Just like a website this is another shop window to your business and anyone in the world can take a peek inside.

Creating a social media strategy should be classed as a Business Transformation function and I would urge any business owner that has say to their staff we must be on Twitter, Linked In and Facebook ASAP, just do it, to stop and read your sites and then you will see why you need to create a plan. Social media is instant and with the ease of a click an innocent message, picture or post can be shared with the world without the consent of the original author. When developing a Social Media Strategy take a look at your competitors, read what they are saying and see what they are posting and decide if this really is an area where you want your business to participate?

Once you decide that you want to get your business involved please remember the plan. Another very important point about developing a presence for your business via these sites is that content is king and even more importantly fresh content is king, so within the job roles of the business you will need to create a plan of content and publication and stick to it, otherwise your presence will diminish and potential customers will stop following and consider other options, maybe your competitor. Make the decision and treat it just like an investment, are you in or are you out and there is no harm in being out at this stage of the Social Media evolution.

I would like to share my social media story: It was late August 2010 and even though I had been in business since February I had not been using twitter for very long. I think I had about 9 followers and one of those was Tom Perry, EMEA Marketing Director, ShoreTel. Tom had been on my target list for a little while and I thought I really need to find a creative way to get a meeting. I was getting to know Twitter and its functionality and I thought I would try out a ‘direct message’. Given you have just 140 characters to get your message across it is a great tool for teaching you to be succinct. It worked and we had a brief exchange of direct messages resulting in a date in the diary. So there it was I had secured my first new business meeting via social media. I met with Tom we had a great conversation and understood how we could help each other and before we knew it, we had agreed two projects together. I am sure meetings of every kind are being set up all over the world via twitter but I just thought I would share my experience as it quite liberating and profitable. 

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next