I think that some genius marketing techniques can give you the edge over your competition, although your budget might have to be up for it.

A good example is Comparethemarket.com using mere cats as their mascot if you can call it that, the good thing is that it works, Confused.com has been beaten well and truly here. They have even created a website for Comparethemerecat.com which incidentally sees a lot of traffic.

Take a look at this picture, who has got the edge, despite the fact they are not in direct competition with each other.

It’s about targeting the right people and existing clients with a tailored email to them rather than trying to increase the size of their databases.

They decided to contact some of their inactive clients in their database by using a different look to them and also some discounted offers in the hope to attract their attention, which proved a success.

“Your inactive subscribers don’t necessarily represent dead wood, uselessly clogging up your database.”

A comment from Marketing Direct .

Marketing to your existing clients is more likely to give you a much better return on your investment ran trying to generate new ones.

The game will allow players to join a race on the motorway and give them some challenging routes that they offer 2 of their main routes like Leeds to Portsmouth and Glasgow to London while on the way they will have to dodge obstacles and pick up passengers.

One of the reasons behind the campaign is that most of all the tickets sold for Megabus are sold online and digital activity is very important to them.

Jodine Milne the marketing manager for Megabus had this to say

“The Megabus key messages, including the £1 fares plus 50p booking fee, are integrated throughout Mega Ride and there is a key link to the site at the end of the game. We are confident this will highlight our great value to potential and returning customers.”

They are hoping that this strong viral campaign will increase the awareness of the brand while at the same time target a wider audience.

They are also reducing their outgoing costs and have decided that the way forward it to bring many of their external costs in and making them in house.

Only a quarter of these businesses said that they would not bring these costs in house while 40 per said they would.

The biggest cost to the marketing budget was the cost of printing then following by their online advertising.

The brand manager for HP Officejet had this to say

“The survey results highlight how businesses are looking to reduce external costs through bringing printing requirements in-house, with the ability to produce professional quality print material themselves, rather than through an external supplier. When measured against equivalent laser printers, our new HP Officejet Pro printer series costs 50 per cent less to print per page, a not insignificant figure when looking at budget restraints and supplier consolidation,”

The language of the customer was the top of the list and then remembering log in and which country the shopper was from came in third.

The head of research said

“What struck me is that the top three items are very much fundamental – log me in, remember my language preference, know where I’m based.”

Companies should consider working with IT firms so that if these are not done they can possibly be integrated.

A simple example of this is if you were selling insurance is to look and see when your clients were up for renewal and prospect them.

Companies would be able to arrange appointment to promote their products and new ones and offer special rates for their existing clients to keep them on board.

A report that was carried out by Return Path called Creating Subscriber Experiences showed that 85% of businesses did not uses any information that their marketing departments found out that could improve their campaigns and in turn increase revenue.

When Microsoft bought aQuantive it also took over Razorfish.

The chief executive of the Publicis Groupe said

“The acquisition of Razorfish is another step forward in realizing our strategic vision of building a world leader in digital communications, a critically important space for our clients,”

After the deal is completed digital communication will account for a quarter of the revenue for Publicis, and some of the clients that Razorfish include are McDonalds and Ford.

The deal is worth £120 million which has allowed Microsoft to buy 1.6% of its stock and also when you consider the business has not made any money yet and is less than 4 years old that’s not a bad result for Facebook.

Kevin Johnson of Microsoft said

“this is a strong statement of confidence in this partnership and in facebook”.

Facebook in the meantime hopes to use advertising to increase the number of traffic to its site allowing friends to connect to each other through messaging, facebook is still behind MySpace but due to it growing faster it hopes to overtake soon.

The aim of the study is to find out what is possibly the most effective media tool they have to deliver the messages to the public.

The director of marketing Farhan Al Marzouqi said “Dubai Municipality offers almost 500 services through its various departments and we would like to know whether people are aware of all our services. Besides, measuring the overall image of the Municipality and how its presence in the eyes of people”

They have divided the study into three parts, to discuss the general institutional identity, the second part is on the public gardens and lastly to pay attention to markets that are related to Dubai municipality.

Over the past month recruitment companies have noticed that there has been a sharp increase in the demand for marketing positions.

During the first part of the year many companies were not spending valuable money on marketing projects and also taking on staff.

Over the last month there has been a massive increase in the demand for jobs in the marketing sector which was a really positive step forward. 20 or so jobs were called for while six months ago were would only have been half that meaning that recruitment agencies had to proactively go out and find the right candidates.

Another encouraging fact is that redundancies have started to slow down also hinting at the economy starting to recover.