Feb 27, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Social media is a part of the marketing toolbox, an increasingly important one, so why does it so often get shuffled out to the side, assigned to the 20 year old intern, when it can have a profound impact on your customers and market?.
Marketing is all about demand generation, it is a very wide set of activities, behaviors, and attitudes that build an expectation of brand and pr0oduct performance. It covers everything from the usual promotional and advertising stuff people think about, to the little things, the cleanliness of the company logoed delivery truck, ( I always recall the shiny red Arnotts vans, to me they are a metaphor for the brand, sadly, there is not even a good photo on the web) to the way the receptionist answers the phone, and many other things. The “welcome quotient” of the brand.
We do all this stuff in the real world, but ignore much of it in the digital one, simply by ignoring the expectation that visitors want to feel as welcome digitally as they are personally.
Many websites are distinctly unwelcoming, muddled, untidy, hard to navigate and offering little encouragement to engage further. This post by Jay Baer lists 11 reasons people do not engage, and is a great list of the common problems I see, most of which are r4elatively easily addressed.
Feb 26, 2013 | Change, Management, Sales
Sales, or as I prefer to call it, “Revenue generation” is the core of every business. No sales, no business. However, the thinking around performance assessment and management of sales is generally pretty superficial.
The demarcation of sales and marketing has also changed enormously with the collaboration and automation marketing tools that have emerged over the last few years. Cold calling is dead, replaced by an array of digital tools and techniques which are generally managed by marketing personnel.
Sales performance is under the microscope, and rightly so as it consumes significant resources, and provides the cash upon which survival depends. Why is it then that the measurement of sales has not evolved to the level of sophistication displayed in other functions.?
My thesis is that the obvious measures have been pretty effective to date, and are simple to use, so little thought has gone into it.
However, for the future, the old tools are not enough, so here is a shot at a framework with 3 axes that seek to acknowledge the huge changes that have occurred in the last 10 years
1. Management of the sales pipeline. There are three basic measures of the pipeline,
- The number and type of opportunities
- Value of those opportunities
- Progress through the pipeline, including the drop-out/re-introduction rates, velocity, closure times, resource consumption rates, and most importantly, conversion rates.
2. Where do the dollars go, and what are the returns. The granularity of the management here is simply a function of where the value is. In large businesses with a widely spread sales force, the detail can be extraordinarily useful as a management and motivational tool of both the way people spend their time, and what they spend their time doing.
3. Sales force optimisation. have the right people doing the right things, in priority order. Pretty simple, except that:
- we are dealing with people, and each one should be managed individually. I have never seen a salesforce that is not a mix of personality and work styles, matching the job to be done to the person is an art that comes only with experience.
- Ensuring execution of strategy at the coal face, where the fancy words, clichés and metaphors hold no water, and what counts are the real personal interactions that occur.
Feb 25, 2013 | Leadership
I am constantly struck by the so called “failure of leadership” displayed in all sorts of places from the top of our political, economic and social system, to the bottom. People who reach positions of power, positions that have as an inherent component that power to coerce, and who fail despite all the advantages.
On the other hand, we see people around us who inspire us into a course of action, who make us think, to make a commitment to course of action. Sometimes these people have no trappings of any office, but sometimes they do, but their powers of coercion are rarely used, they are not necessary.
There are leaders, and there are those who lead. Never has the difference between the two been so starkly highlighted as with the gaggle that currently inhabits our political corridors of power.
Feb 22, 2013 | Collaboration, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
David Ogilvy, fount of Intellectual Capital and the orginal “Madman”
Business is based on relationships, and generally the relationship comes before the business. As a result, you have to find a way to identify those with whom a commercially sustainable relationship is possible, then offer them sufficient value for them to buy from you.
Broadly there are four common ways to go about this:
Meet them in person
Meet them over the phone
Beat them over the head with advertising (primarily a consumer strategy rather than B2B)
Meet them via some sort of social media.
However, a fifth option is emerging rapidly:
Engage them via some sort of attractive e-content, that encourages them to come to you. If you can actually figure out how to achieve this outcome, the return on your investment in content will be huge.
So, the real question is what do you need to do to make the content compelling. Pretty simple, basic marketing stuff, perhaps so simple that most just gloss over it, offering insufficient thought, so here goes with a list:
- Define who your ideal customer is, and “e-talk” to them, in their language, looking at your offering from their perspective, not yours.
- Make sure the content interesting, informative, offers distinctive Intellectual Capital that conveys your proposition clearly.
- Be clear about the value they will derive from a relationship
- Ensure the post, blog, whatever it is, can be easily shared, and encourage that sharing
- Have a call to action, the Rule number 1 of direct marketing!
- Relentlessly monitor responses, and experiment with the message and they way it is packaged.
When you are doing all that, you are being smart at blogging, or social media, does not matter what you call it, you are using the power of the digital age to engage, and create the opportunity for a sale.
Feb 20, 2013 | Change, Communication, Social Media
Nearly 500 years ago, March 1517 to be exact, Social media was born, and rapidly demonstrated its power. On that warm spring day, Martin Luther “posted” his list of “95 Theses on the power and efficacy of Indulgences” on the local social media site, the church door, and inadvertently started a movement that would split the church. His individual action was just a single one, protesting at the aggressive marketing of Indulgences by church authorities, but to have the effect it did, required a whole bunch of other things to be aligned to take off. Similarly, the self immolation of shopkeeper Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia in 2011 focused the unrest in Tunisia , that led to the replacement of the Tunisian dictator.
Martin Luther was outraged that locals could buy “indulgences” sold by church clerics, which acted as paid confessions, removing the ritual of the confession and contrition, and wanted to stimulate a debate at the university on the topic. What happened is that a local printer who had one of these new fangled printing presses reproduced the 95 theses, and sold them, rapidly creating a movement that had all the hallmarks of a modern social media movement.
As Clay Shirky tells it, there are three conditions that lead to a social media led change:
Everyone knows the system is broken
Everyone knows that everyone knows the system is broken
Everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows the system is broken.
When you get to this third level, it all blows up apart, and that is exactly what happened in Germany in 1517, and again in 1989 when the wall fell, in Tunisia in 2011, and is still rolling through the Arab world.
The tools of social media have changed, but the nature of human activity and collaboration has not. In the 21st century we want the same things our forebears wanted, and are prepared to fight for them, it is just that the tools are a bit different.
