Marketing Ability Blog

It’s been a while since the Chartered Institute of Marketing launched its e-Marketing Award. There are loads of courses out there on digital marketing, from half-day freebie sessions to more comprehensive programmes. But what I like about the CIM Award syllabus is that it covers the strategeic AND operational issues.

The strategy stuff is, let’s face it, not as sexy as looking at options for email and YouTube and so on. But you can’t leap into those things unless you have a good strategy in place, and one that properly integrates the online stuff with the overall marketing strategy.

So because we like the CIM syllabus so much we have launched our very own course to enable people to obtain the Award. It comprises three one-day tutorials beginning on Saturday 28 March and is open to anyone who wants to take their understanding of e-Marketing to the next level, picking up a nationally-recognised Award along the way.

More info is at http://www.marketingability.co.uk/e-marketing-award.php

At Marketing Ability we have always been interested in green and sustainability issues, and all of us are involved in the local Chartered Institute of Marketing group. So we are really pleased that the group is holding the ‘Green Marketing Conference 2009′ right here in Peterborough on 12 March.

Peterborough doesn’t always get a good press, and people in Peterborough are often the first to brand the city as not such a good place to live. But the city does have pretty good environmental credentials, with lots of ‘green’ organisations based here and a commitment to becoming the UK’s environment capital.

As for the conference, well it will bring some leading figures in the world of green politics and green business to the city (Johnathon Porritt and John Grant to name just two), as well as hopefully a hundred or more delegates. 

Find out more at www.greenmarketingconference.co.uk

Marketing often has a bad press and the public sometimes treat it like a dirty word too. But listen to the comments of people when asked by reporters about why Woolworths and MFI are in difficulty. Comments were along the lines of “they didn’t give us what we wanted” and “I don’t know why I would shop there” and “other shops do the same thing but better”.

They are in effect saying “they weren’t very good at marketing”. But the public don’t see product development, positionning and so on as marketing. To most people, marketing is of course just about one of the Ps (Promotion) and not the others (Product, Place, Price etc.).

I guess it will always be this way, but it’s frustrating that the public - and even many businesses - have such a very narrow view of marketing. I would like to see all marketers who currently find that all their time is spent on ‘Promotion’ get involved in the other things too. Do it now. Stand up on your chair and shout “I am better than this. I can do more than proof-read brochure copy and decide which colours work best on our new website”. We need a revolution in marketing. Who’s going to start it?

The news this morning that Marks and Spencer is to cut spending on the promotion of its ‘Plan A’ environmental programme poses the question “How to maintain the green marketing agenda in an economic downturn?”

There are numerous other stories doing the rounds that consumers are cutting expenditure and therefore taking price into account as a much more important decision-making factor than whether the products they are buying have a “green” identity. Certainly Justin King, Chief Executive of Sainsbury’s, seems to emphasise this point when it comes to the issue of food-miles judging by this recent news-item from the Daily Telegraph.

But one of the potential positive outcomes is highlighted in this quote from John Grant (author of The Green Marketing Manifesto) in this well-researched article from the Economic Times in India:

“There are very few instances where saving money and saving energy are not compatible, and, in that sense, reducing the impact on the environment is the only silver lining in the recessionary clouds.”

So maybe it’s just that the economic downturn could help focus our thoughts on what’s really important to customers and the need to take innovative steps to satisfying them in a “green” way?

Your own thoughts on this issue would be welcome - how are the two issues of economic downturn and the need to be green affecting your marketing strategy?

Testing the effectiveness of marketing activity has always been a challenge. It’s becoming more important in the current economic climate. So it’s always good to hear about new ways to do it.

Interspire are about to launch the latest version of their Email Marketer tool (http://www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/). This tool, which appears to be priced in a way that even small web and marketing agencies can afford, will now include the ability to split test different email campaigns. (By the way, I have no affiliation or relationship with Interspire.)

You can, for example, run the same email to three lots of 1,000 recipients, with just the subject line different for each group. You can then see which version gets the best response and use that subject line for a much bigger distribution.

This technique is nothing new of course. Direct mail specialists have done testing like this for a long time. But now, with email campagning in the reach of those with a fairly small budget, and especially with tools like this being launched, it has perhaps never been easier to check the effectiveness of our marketing materials.

Marketers now have the opportunity to insist that split testing is a core feature of any email campaign. Why send an email to 20,000 people without first doing some tests? Even a response rate improvement of a few percent could have a big impact on sales.

I have always been unsure about the importance of brand names in the marketing mix. Surely if a product is great then just about any name will do. There are examples of meaningless brand names everywhere. Kodak, Starbucks and Amazon . .  . they mean nothing but the companies are huge.

I haven’t changed my mind altogether, but one brand name has really got me thinking: ‘The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys.’

What are Sea Monkeys? They are a kind of brine shrimp that you buy in egg form, sprinkle into a small tank of water and feed once a week. (Take a quick look at http://www.sea-monkey.com/whatarethey.html to see them in action).

Sea Monkeys are great fun and a simple way to introduce kids (even big ones like me) to the joys and responsibilities of pet ownership. They are also an international sensation, with millions sold. But I bet if they called them ‘brine shrimp’ sales wouldn’t be as big.

The brand name is an inherent part of the product. You find yourself asking ‘how are the Sea Monkeys doing today?’. You even get quite attached to the little things. I guess it’s easier to get attached to monkeys than shrimp.

So this old cynic is perhaps mellowing a bit when it comes to brand names. I think I’ll spend a bit more effort the next time I am involved in choosing a brand name. Who knows, I may come up with something as successful as Sea Monkeys.

Earlier this week I was asked to talk at a meeting of the Peterborough Communicators Group - the brief being to stimulate discussion on the use of web resources to:

• communicate with customers and
• to allow staff teams to communicate together

We explored a number of areas such as blogs, wikis, social networking and more - and a number of sites proved particularly interesting to the audience, so I thought I’d share them here!

Blogging

To start a blog without the need for your IT department’s support, you can use one of the online services which provide the complete service - from designing your blog, the blogging interface itself and the hosting of your blog. Two of the best known of these services are:

• www.typepad.com: offers a free 14-day trial; after that, from $4.95 per month (that’s less than £3 at current exchange rates!)
• www.blogger.com: now owned by Google; offers free blogs!

In each case, you can map an existing domain name to your blog so that it appears to be part of your own website.

For blogging software that you download onto your own servers, the choices are wide, but two possibilities are:

• www.wordpress.org: open-source software (meaning that it’s free); this is what we use for the blog you’re reading now!
• www.movabletype.com: owned by the same people as Typepad; a free version is available plus paid-for versions with more facilities

Wikis

There are numerous online wikis that you can control through the use of passwords so that, for example, only certain members of staff can contribute (and more seem to be launching every week! her are two of the established ones:

• www.pbwiki.com: prices depend on the number of users - up to 3 users, it’s free.
• www.wikispaces.com: has a free version with limited facilities and it carries third-party advertising; ad-free versions with more functionality start at $5 per month

Alternatively, just as with blogging software, there are versions you can download onto your own servers; notable among the options here are:

• www.mediawiki.org: open-source software - this is the software behind Wikipedia
• www.twiki.org: also open-source and probably more useful in a business setting as it is what’s described as a “structured wiki”

If you really want to explore the wiki software options, try this site which compares over 100 different packages:

• www.wikimatrix.org

Social networking

I guess everyone is familiar now with www.facebook.com, but not everyone is familiar with the communication possibilities it offers, such as the ability to have a “page” (virtually a mini web site) within Facebook which users can be invited to become a “fan” of. Companies using this at present range from Ferrari (with 301,499 fans at the last count) to Ferrero Rocher (with 354,100 fans) and the i-phone (286,325 fans) to the Economist magazine (41,898 fans). Facebook now also offers the opportunity to show ads (similar to Google ads) to very specific geographic and demographic groups.

When it comes to business networking, the site that is probably most established is www.linkedin.com which in addition to the basic networking function is launching new content such as “Answers” - where members can pose business-related questions for other members to answer. this could develop into an interesting opportunity for experts in their field to display their expertise to a wider audience.

Of course it may be that you’d really like to create a social networking site that only people that you want to invite could join such as a site for staff members or for certain customer groups. One online service that offers just that is www.collectivex.com where you can build what it calls a “groupsite”.

Collaboration sites

Where communication between staff members (particularly at a distance) is important in order to share knowledge for example the following sites offer various levels of online collaboration:

• www.weboffice.com
• www.tommie.co.uk
• www.same-page.com
• www.basecamphq.com

Online market research

Again, many possibilities for designing questionnaires and getting responses online; two of the most established sites are:

• www.zoomerang.com
• www.surveymonkey.com

Both offer free options with limited capability so that you can test them out; the paid versions (from $20 per month upwards) offer sophisticated customisation, design, reporting and analytics.

The customer bites back…

Finally, of course, the expanded possibilities for organisations to communicate online with customers also give customers the opportunity to communicate openly about their experiences with an organisation. This recently launched UK site is giving consumers the chance to complain in a highly structured way:

• www.howtocomplain.com

It estimates that there are 100 million complaints in the UK in any one year and is offering to channel at least some of these through to the organisations involved.

Footnote

Ihe sites mentioned are by no means a comprensive list; nor is their inclusion here an endorsement of them! If you have you used any of these sites or programmes (or others), share your experience by posting your comments - hope to hear from you!