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Posts Tagged ‘direct marketing’

Know your digital marketing

Friday, December 17th, 2010

Digital marketing
The future of marketing is undeniably digital – as other marketing and advertising budgets are hit by economic dips, digital marketing shows a continually healthy growth.

We’re also discovering new trends around digital marketing every day; for example, we’re seeing that the old rules based around ratecards and readership are fast becoming obsolete. In cyberspace, the only thing that counts is your imagination – and your grasp of technology. The bread and butter of digital advertising is the banner, or display advert. There are three ways of paying for your banner: per page impression, per click or per action – such as a sale or brochure order. In our opinion banner adverts should be given a wide-birth. Most consumers are banner-blind. Eyeball tracking tests by legendary internet marketer Jakob Nielsen do indeed suggest that surfers rarely glance at banner adverts. The problem with banner advertising comes when defining reach, even worse if you’re paying by ‘potential’ viewers. The issue is that reach is a number born out of the television advertising ere where there was a limited spectrum. As a result, people were forced to watch one of a small number of channels. The internet doesn’t live by the same rules because the digital spectrum is infinite. As an advertiser who should always be seeking maximum impact, you can extract much more value by offering a specific message to a small group, rather than a general message to a large one. So the real value on the internet becomes the ability to segment and target, rather than a ‘broad-brush’ approach, with a hope to reach massive numbers.

Social sites
If boring banner adverts don’t float your boat there are other options, some more established than others. Social media sites offer dozens of possibilities, not forgetting to mention your ability to get quality backlinks.

Wikipedia is a must. More than one in 200 visits on the entire internet are to Wikipedia, so make sure your company’s page is up to scratch. LinkedIn has also recently expanded the company pages section to enable you to upload specific products and services and get real-time recommendations from within your network.

In-game adverts, mobiles, barcodes
In-game advertising is one of the newest forms of digital marketing. If you play ‘Pro Evolution Soccer’ on a PlayStation, you’ll see adverts around the animated pitch for Reebok, Canon and the Daily Mirror.

Mobile marketing is booming too. The Sun has now added the word ‘mobile’ into its strapline – ‘Paper, online, mobile’ – and has agreed to show Premier League goal clips on its mobile site for 50p a time

Barcodes
Barcodes are the latest development. Marketers can text a barcode to smartphones, which are then scanned by laser readers. Supermarkets accept mobile barcodes instead of paper discount vouchers.

Blogging
If these new technologies seem daunting – and expensive – then try the most frugal form of communication: a blog. OK, so there are 106 million blogs in cyberspace, but a good blog can create an emotional tie between your brand and the consumer and certainly helps your SEO rankings.

Also, forum posting can be effective. We post regularly to UKbusinessForums.co.uk – the busiest entrepreneur-focused site in the UK. Phil Williams, founder of Open Mind Commerce, says he gets 90 per cent of new leads by answering queries on UKbusinessforums.co.uk site alone. Whatever digital marketing strategies you choose: – know them, understand them and keep your eyes open as new technologies are developed every month.

Tags: digital marketing, direct marketing
Posted in General Marketing, How To Do... | No Comments »

Cost of Internet Marketing

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Whether you’re just starting out or re-evaluating your online strategy it’s important for you to get both your plan and budget right. To be successful, you need to have a solid internet marketing strategy and be realistic about the true costs of doing it properly. The rule “Build it and they will come” rarely works in online space. For example; too many businesses spend £1000’s on getting a website developed, only to find they have no money left to promote it. Here’s our top 5 list of what you should plan for with any new internet marketing campaign:

1. Microsite/Website development/design & maintenance -The development of a new website or microsite has many variables and overall cost depends on factors such as whether it’s static or dynamic, whether it includes a blog or shopping cart, is the design bespoke or a template. The functionality of your website will be determined by your overall internet marketing strategy. Remember: in the online world, all promotional activity with eventually lead to your website.

2. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation The bottom line is that the majority of website traffic comes from search engines and directories. While the organic search engine traffic is free (no click costs), you do need to invest in some sort of SEO program to ensure you’re maximizing this free search engine traffic.

3. Pay Per Click (PPC) If you’re looking for some quick wins in terms of traffic and results from your website then PPC can offer this. With a well setup Google AdWords campaign, you can have highly targeted visitors delivered to your website almost instantly. It’s a great way to ensure you’re still getting a return on your website investment whilst your SEO and other strategies take effect.

4. Email marketing Email marketing is a very cost effective form of direct marketing. The biggest challenge, especially for start up businesses is finding and building permission based contact lists. So it often comes into its own after a business is up and running for a while, and you’ve had a chance to build a decent subscriber base.

5. Blogs Hosting and authoring your own blog can be extremely refreshing and insightful as it requires a regular analysis and reflection of your business, markets, successes and failures in order to create up-to-date content; all of these are the by-product of blogs, but I think are just as much an important benefit as to the blog itself. Whether used for general news, training, product guides, promotion or notices, blogging is firmly rooted as a favourite tool for internet marketing. Guide to expected costs With the above in mind you now get a much clearer and more realistic picture of what is required in order to get serious about your online marketing. To give you even further insight we have put together a list of average market pricing (at the mid range) for the above services.

Please note this is in no way a firm quotation from Studiowide, but more of an indication of average market costs.

	Cost Guide
Website Development – standard functionality	£700+
SEO – 2 x 6month programs	£2400+
Pay Per Click – 6 months	£720+
Email marketing – 12 months	£1400+
Blog – 12 months (assuming this is linked with Email marketing)	£1000+
TOTAL (Annual cost)	£6220+

Tags: direct marketing, internet marketing strategy, search engine optimisation
Posted in Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

Cautious Customers

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Written by: Carl Da-Costa-Greaves

It’s clear that the current climate has driven consumers to re-evaluate how they spend their budgets. With discounting top of mind, customers are being even more cautious with their spending patterns and are still expecting the same quality and levels of service they’ve become accustomed to in the past.

This poses a challenge to us marketers who are working harder than ever at customer relationship management (CRM), embracing highly targeted marketing techniques geared specifically towards the needs of the customer. There’s nothing new with this scenario, compared to previous recessions, and how targeted marketing campaigns helped businesses to survive. However, this time around, the new age marketers MUST embrace the digital landscape in order to compete and retain the fickle client ready to jump ship at the drop of a competitor’s promotional newsletter.

There are several online and offline marketing strategies businesses should be engaging or planning to engage such as; measuring online activities, using data to track buying habits and direct marketing to specifically target and re-engage, reminding the cautious customer why they should remain a customer of yours.

Key steps:

Ensure customer retention is part of your strategy
Maximise your marketing mix
Listen to your customers
Re-engage lost customers
Become more personalised, relevant and precise
Measure, test and adjust your programmes for greater returns

Tags: Customer Relationship Management, customer retention, direct marketing
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »

Evolution in Internet Marketing

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

By Carl Da-Costa-Greaves

Three key perspectives have emerged indicating the real potential for the Internet as part of market strategy:

• Multi-channelling – The Internet provides a direct marketing and sales channel which sits alongside conventional channels. The issue here is managing the mix of channels so they’re effective from a business point of view and value-enhancing from the customer‘s point of view. Increasingly we see the role of the salespeople to direct some customers towards Web sites; saving the customer time and money and freeing up the sales force time to focus on new customers and large accounts.

• Bricks and Clicks - The combination of the Internet with existing physical resources is incredibly powerful. Tesco Direct has created the most successful Internet grocery business in the world. Not only is Tesco clear that their Internet business is an additional channel that supplements conventional retailing, but the Tesco Web site mirrors the consumer‘s local store experience, and it’s the local store that picks the products from the shelves and delivers them.

• Knowledge Sharing – The Internet itself provides an unprecedented capability for sharing information and knowledge. On the one hand, reviews of online exchanges provides customers with the ability to compare products and prices across all sources of supply, not just locally but throughout the world. On the other hand, the Web supports knowledge sharing globally too – the technician trying to fix a part to a machine in a factory in Brazil can have instant access to the supplier‘s personnel in China who have solved the same problem (it usually involves a hammer).

This piece is based on Nigel Piercy‘s book: Market-Led Strategic Change: A Guide to Transforming the Process of Going To Market (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002).

Tags: direct marketing, Internet Marketing, market strategy
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »