Let's take a look at the major marketing trends for 2010 that will affect both business-to-business (B2B) and consumer (B2C) companies so we can update our marketing strategies for 2010.
When something becomes a "hot trend" it does so for two reasons. First, it's a product or activity that has been proven and refined. And, second, it's growing in adoption. The hot marketing trends for 2010 are all visible as we enter the year, and these trends are growing to the point where we need to adjust our marketing communications and sales strategies to take advantage of them.
Some of the hot marketing trends are rather obvious, such as the growing use of social media. But it's important to identify the "big marketing trends" for 2010 that can help define effective marketing strategies for 2010.
Big Marketing Trend #1: Personal — Communicate with individuals to carry on conversations about meeting their needs and solving their problems.
Big Marketing Trend #2: Local — Participate in personal, face-to-face meetings, events, and activities near where your product will be used because fewer customers will be flying to national events and conferences.
Big Marketing Trend #3: Mobile — Reach customers anywhere at any time with the 24/7 connectivity of mobile devices.
These three big marketing trends for 2010 overlap and reinforce each other to provide marketing opportunities to connect with your customers and increase revenue.
Here are four ways you can combine these big marketing trends to create actionable marketing strategies that your competitors may not have thought of yet:
Marketing Trend Opportunity #1: Personal + Mobile — Provide personalized product, service, and solution information when and where customers are thinking about their problems and needs
Marketing Trend Opportunity #2: Personal + Local — Tailor marketing messages based on each person's purchase process, starting with their information gathering and continuing through their searching, purchasing, and reordering.
Marketing Trend Opportunity #3: Mobile + Local — Deliver product and solution information to customers at the location where the purchase decisions are being made using mobile devices and local Internet searches.
Marketing Trend Opportunity #4: Personal + Local + Mobile — Use one-to-one marketing to treat different customers differently — anywhere, anytime, and using any medium they want, whether it's text, telephone, Web, mobile app, or video.
The current economic climate has caused both B2B customers and retail consumers to change how they make purchases in 2010. A longer sales cycle requires greater frequency of contact. Increased price sensitivity requires providing greater value. And, increased customer mobility requires that marketers use new technologies to stay in contact.
The year 2010 will provide marketers with significant opportunities for growth by adopting marketing strategies based on the "new normal" for customer behavior.
Recently, a couple of really savvy guys created a great site that allows us marketers to find the latest blog posts on B-to-B marketing from some top notch marketers. I added B2B Marketing Zone to my blog reader when it launched, and it's made it so much easier to keep up on hot B2B marketing topics.
I'm pleased that my blog has been added to B2B Marketing Zone, so my posts on marketing strategy are now available there, too.
I suggest that you add B2B Marketing Zone to your blog reader, bookmarks, or a Post-it on your computer so you can get in the "Zone" every day.
]]>With today's multiple channels for content to reach potential customers, the art and science of marketing communications has become increasingly important.
The marketing communications function (commonly called "marcom") has many communications tools available. Some companies in an industry might rely on paid advertising in print and online media. While other companies in the same industry might rely on a very different media mix, such as public relations and events.
However, no company can be sure they are using the most efficient media mix without creating a marcom strategy that is aligned with their overall strategic marketing direction.
Once you have settled on a strong positioning statement, you can develop sound strategies for your marcom programs. For most companies this means considering programs such as:
In large companies where each marketing program has its own manager, you can link your main strategic marketing mind map to each program's own planning mind map.
In companies where the whole marcom strategy is implemented by one team, you can add details about marcom programs in the team's main marketing mind map.
The process of creating a marcom strategy has gotten more complex as more marketing activities move to the Internet. This has made it even more important to understand customer segments and how to communicate with those potential customers.
When you develop a marcom strategy based on a sound strategic marketing view of your market your marcom program will be more effective -- and customers will have a better, more consistent brand experience.
Next:
After you have developed your strategic marketing direction, it's time to develop strategies for each of your major marketing functions.
Unfortunately, many companies can't seem to convert their marketing strategy into the marketing plans that guide their day-to-day marketing programs. You've probably seen companies where the advertising didn't match the actual customer experience at the point of sale. This occurs when the manager of each marketing function does their own thing instead of aligning with the company's strategic marketing direction.
Either the company didn't have a strategic marketing plan, or senior management didn't use the plan to guide their marketing program managers. Whatever the cause, the "silo" effect occurs, keeping the marketing managers from working together harmoniously, like a concert orchestra.
This unified approach to developing a company's strategic marketing plan makes it easy for the managers to align their marketing activities with all the other marketing programs.
In other words, this alignment helps ensure that the strategic marketing plan is actually used to guide the day-to-day marketing programs, such as advertising, public relations, social media, and sales.
As we move through this process of creating a strategic marketing plan, two business realities should become clear:
Part of this "best practices" approach to achieving harmony is to develop an internal communications process that ensures that everyone knows their role in communicating with potential customers.
I find it helpful to use a marketing strategy mind map to capture ideas, plans, and relationships so I can present them in review meetings. The marketing strategy mind map can also be used in briefings and brainstorming with your advertising agency, public relations firm, call center, distribution center, and other vendors that affect your customers' experience.
During planning meetings, such as for marketing communications, I encourage brainstorming of all the techniques that the team feels could support the overall strategy, which we add to the mind map.
For example, some companies consider the lead nurturing program to be part of marketing communications until the lead is contacted by a salesperson. However, other companies feel all communication with leads should be handled by the sales department.
Another benefit of using mind map software is that during a review meeting you can focus attention on high level strategies. Then, click an area to "unfold" the diagram to reveal program details and show relationships.
Sharing the mind map within the marketing organization keeps everyone up to date on the company's marketing strategy and implementation plans. Exactly how you distribute mind maps will depend on how your marketing organization is connected. Centralized marketing teams are on the same local area network and file server, while others are distributed across multiple locations and collaborate using the Internet.
After your marketing strategy mind map is made available, expect that program managers will want to develop their own mind map to manage their operation. Most mind mapping software allows you to link to Web pages or local documents (such as other mind maps). This makes it easy to link from the main marketing strategy mind map to each program's own mind map to see their detailed plans, projects, and tasks.
Some mind mapping software products have extensive budgeting and project management features, while others have little or no project management capabilities. Be sure to select a mind mapping product that you can grow into over the next few years.
This unified approach to marketing strategy and program plans can help your marketing team avoid the "silo" problem that affects so many marketing organizations.
When your marketing program managers understand how all marketing programs are implementing the strategic direction, they can align their marketing activities to create a consistent customer experience. And at the best possible cost.
Next:
Not today. Wal-Mart is the low price leader, and Sears is struggling.
What happened to Sears?
During the past 30 years Sears tried several times to change from its successful low-price marketing strategy to an upscale strategy. Each time that Sears added expensive products and changed stores to a sophisticated look, they alienated loyal customer and failed to attract upscale shoppers.
Sears was the Wal-Mart of the '50s and '60s and the largest retailer in the country until the early 1980s. Then the company drifted upwards into the mushy middle. Sears wasn't cheap and it wasn't chic. (Today, Wal-Mart is more than seven times the size of Sears. Furthermore Wal-Mart's net profit margin last year was twice as much as Sears: 3.4% vs. 1.6%.)
At the same time Sam Walton pursued the "low cost leader" strategy that was so successful when Wal-Mart was starting out in rural northwest Arkansas.
Choosing a marketing strategy appropriate for your company starts by analyzing the information you've gathered on your industry, your customers, and your competition.
Then, you'll want to consider questions such as:
Once you've chosen an overall market strategy you can decide on a pricing strategy that fits. You can't have a "high quality and service" market strategy and the lowest prices. You can't make a profit -- and it will confuse your customers. So, choose a pricing strategy that matches your market segments and competitive environment.
Once you have your market strategy and a pricing strategy, you can create a reasonable budget for revenue, expenses, and profit.
I like to capture these decisions in a marketing strategy mind map using a product such as SmartDraw and link it to detailed documents and spreadsheets. This helps senior executives at a company easily see the big picture, then interactively drill down to the their detailed analysis and decisions.
Then, with a sound marketing strategy and budget, you can then develop detailed plans for each of your marketing programs -- from marketing communications to sales, distribution, and service.
Buyers are now shifting from relying on manufacturers for product information to participating in online conversations about a company's products.
Marketers now need to track user generated content on all of the social media sites, forums, blogs, video sharing sites, and other ways the Internet distributes information about your company and brands.
Monitoring these online conversations can help you understand changes in customer behavior and product purchase patterns.
Lots of data by itself doesn't help in creating a marketing strategy. What's needed is a good analysis of the data. In other words, information on how potential customers feel, think, and act. And, it helps to create a good mind map showing customer behavior.
Good market researchers are skilled in the art of spotting patterns in the data and highlighting significant relationships between marketing activities and purchase behavior. In other words, market researchers turn data into the information that's needed to make sound marketing strategy decisions.
Gathering data on the industry, market, and your customers is the first step in formulating an effective strategic marketing plan.
It's especially challenging to do this in marketing for two reasons:
These challenges have made it difficult to connect a set of marketing strategies with day-to-day marketing programs.
At the same time, potential customers are being influenced by these multiple marketing channels. This means that marketers need to take advantage of the marketing leverage that an integrated marketing program can provide.
It's too easy to become focused on a few tactical marketing activities -- and miss other opportunities to influence potential customers.
The immediate benefit of using a strategic marketing mind map is that every manager knows how their team fits into the overall strategy -- and what they need to do to support that marketing strategy. In other words, everyone understands how the marketing strategy is related to their marketing tactics.
Mind mapping is a process of starting with a central concept and graphically adding links to greater and greater details. Most mind maps are drawn around the central concept, but, mind maps are drawn in lots of ways, such as a traditional organization chart.
Basically, a mind map is visual way to show a hierarchy. You'd think that an outliner, like in Microsoft Word, would work well. However, it turns out that with graphical mind maps you can more easily see both the high level view plus the details -- and the relationships -- better than with a linear outline. Of course, some times the linear, prioritized nature of an outline is better, but in marketing so many programs affect other programs that the multi-dimensional approach of mind maps works very well.
There are many mind map software tools available today, such as SmartDraw (which is more than just a mind map tool). And, there are a number of good Web-based systems that create mind maps, too.
But mind mapping is more than a way to draw charts. Unlike flowchart and other presentation software products, mind mapping software is used to capture ideas and concepts as they are discovered, and show their relationships. The actual mind map drawing is just a way to visually express those thoughts and make them more meaningful.
For example, I have several mind maps that I add to every few days as I learn a new details about a topic. It turns out that this approach makes it faster to organize related concepts than making individual notes and later trying to organize them.
For brainstorming groups, a mind map tool can capture and display ideas, and help a group quickly drill down to the details.
In some organizations every manager and team leader uses a mind mapping tool, which creates a common way of communicating projects, plans, and performance.
Mind maps are also used as an interactive knowledge tool because most mind map software products have free "player" products that allow others to expand and contract the mind maps you send to them. In addition, a few mind map products have a Web-based player that allows a Web user to explore your mind map interactively.
There are many facets to creating a gem of a marketing plan. So, over the next several weeks I'll show how I use this detailed strategic marketing mind map template to help companies create their comprehensive strategic marketing plan. Here are the current posts:
The sales manager is likely to tell the marketing manager, "I found a new market we can sell to!"
Two questions about that market come to mind:
It's great to find a new market, but it's important for new markets to be profitable. Knowing the size of a market gives you a clue to how successful you can be in that market.
So, when you're working on the marketing plan for a new product, budget resources for the market research that can help answer the questions that come after, "What is it?"
A high-tech community like this also has many bloggers and Web-based news outlets that cover our companies, venture capital, and events -- plus a number of advisers who help technologies entrepreneurial companies grow.
It's been difficult to keep up on all aspects of the technology sector in Southern California. There are several journalistic Web sites that do a great job of covering the news about SoCal companies. However, it's been hard to find the thoughtful bloggers who provide interesting commentary on what's happening and are advising high growth entrepreneurs.
The Technology Council of Southern California and TechEmpower have created Southern California Tech Central, a new Web site that makes it much easier to keep up with the whole technology sector in Southern California.
For example, here's a page on that site that summaries my recent blog posts:
http://cc.tcosc.org/&source=cliff-allen-on-marketing
One of the unique features of the site is that the links on that page refine the search deeper and deeper, without having to master any complex search language.
Check out the Southern California Tech Central -- and keep up with Southern California.
Gartner reports that through 2012 more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business markets due to under investment in the information infrastructure and business user tools.
And SAS, the statistics and analytics company, divides the market into eight levels of analytics. Take a look at the list to see where you are. Then, look down the list to see how to expand and improve your use of marketing analytics.
Here are slide presentations from representatives of three large brands on how they have used social media marketing:
In addition, here are slide presentations from two social media consultants who presented examples of clients they've helped:
These presentations show what's possible by using social media to raise awareness of brands.
I recently attended the one-day Gravity Summit seminar on social media marketing.
The speakers from Sony, Sprint, and Yahoo presented excellent examples on how major brands can generate attention for a product by using social media. And, representatives from social media marketing agencies described how they help clients plan, implement, and monitor a social media marketing campaign.
One of the challenges facing management when considering a social media campaign is the amount of time required either by the company's marketing team or an outsourced social media agency. In general, the social media marketing process typically used is to:
There are other steps in the process, such as interacting with individuals, friends, followers, etc. And it's important to create a fresh flow of new content for the social media team to promote.
So, how can management decide if a social media marketing campaign will be worthwhile? The best way is to estimate the ROI of the campaign the same way that other marketing campaigns are evaluated.
It can be hard to estimate the cost of a social media marketing campaign, but a speaker at the conference from a social media agency suggested a budget of at least $50 thousand.
If the gross profit on a product is 50%, then a company would need to sell $100 thousand to break even on a $50 thousand social media marketing campaign. Any revenue over $100 thousand would generate additional gross profit at the rate of about 50% that could be applied to G&A expenses.
By using a company's traditional traffic-to-revenue metrics, it would be easy to estimate the minimum amount of traffic to the product Web site needed to break even. It's the minimum amount of Web traffic needed because visitors from a social media marketing campaign are primarily looking for entertainment, and will secondarily be exposed to the brand.
This means that your traffic-to-revenue metrics for direct marketing campaigns, such as search engine marketing, will produce a minimum traffic figure that's too low.
Instead, you'll need to use metrics on how well a branding campaign typically generates revenue to estimate how much traffic will actually be needed.
In other words, if your Web site normally serves 1,000 page views per sale from a direct marketing campaign, a social media branding campaign may need to generate 3-10 times that much traffic to generate a sale.
By using this approach to estimating the amount of Web traffic needed to break even, your social media marketing consultant can decide if they can generate sufficient traffic to make the project pay for itself.
Update: Here are the Gravity Summit slide presentations.
A lot has been written about using company blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, but It's hard to sift through all of that to develop a complete, consistent, and concise social media marketing strategy.
On February 25th the Gravity Summit at UCLA will give marketers a full day of guidance on social media marketing. Here is what the seminar organizers say:
Gravity Summit is designed to educate and inform the business community on how to use social media to foster customer engagement, provide internal productivity tools, and further online branding for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
The speakers at the Gravity Summit are from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Yahoo, Sony, Sprint, and others:
• David Reis, CEO DEI Worldwide and Founding Member of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association)
• Justin Goldsborough, Social Media Manager, Sprint
• Ann Glenn, Senior Web Producer, Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive
• Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo
• Ricardo Bueno, Blog Director, Real Estate Tomato
• Renée Barrett, Principal of Awareness, Action, Accountability
• Karl Kasca, CEO, Kasca & Associates
The descriptions of each speaker's presentation looks very good:
I'm looking forward to learning from each speaker at the seminar. If you're going to attend, let me know so we can chat face-to-face.
Political consultants have used survey statistics for a long time to help their candidate tailor campaign messages. However, small survey samples resulted in imprecise analysis, and messages that were not always on target.
Today, marketers can obtain access to comprehensive databases about what people have bought, which gives some insight into how they make decisions.
Stephen Baker's article What Data Crunchers Did for Obama highlights how the Obama campaign used a consulting firm that helps politicians understand the core values of individual voters.
Marketers have used similar differentiation and segmentation services services, such as PRIZM from Claritas, which creates 66 demographically and behaviorally distinct segments of consumers based on Census and other types of data.
However, the firm Obama's team used "grouped nearly every American of voting age—175 million of us—into 10 'values' tribes."
Obama's use of the market segmentation techniques at the voter level is key to successful one-to-one marketing. By grouping individual people by behavioral traits -- instead of relying just on demographics -- marketers can better understand what people in each group are feeling, thinking, and doing. And once you know that, it's easier to explain why they should buy your product (or candidate) in terms that they will understand.
Deborah Kania and her team at Brightworks Interactive have just released results of their survey of marketing executives' plans for 2009. The survey covered both B-to-B and B-to-C companies, as well as a mix of large, medium, and small businesses, so the survey results represent a good cross-section of marketers.
Here are nine marketing trends you can expect during 2009:
You can get a complete copy of their marketing survey "Marketing 2009 and Marketing Resolutions To Keep In the New Year" at their Web site: www.brightworksinteractive.com/marketing-survey.html.