New Business Generation – Has Digital & E-marketing had its day?
With marketing budgets getting tighter ( is that even possible?), unsurprisingly Marketeers must validate and account for every £ or $ they spend. The need to create, qualify and groom new business leads for Sales is the ‘de-facto’ measure for the performance of every marketeer. The Finance Directors challenge of ‘Prove your value to me’ is heard in Boardrooms throughout the land. So as Marketing Management, how do we decide to allocate our budget across the myriad of choices? Clearly the logical place to start is by using those media choices that deliver the most tangible, qualified results. Now no-one ever claimed that solus TV can create sales – more reasonably it can launch and support sales activity, even moving market share points through concerted effort. What TV can never achieve is a 2 way, on-going communication with a Customer, much less a prospect. Anyone remember Radion Automatic?? Launched in a blaze of TV and POS glory, the brand quickly died once TV and retail support was reduced to maintenance levels. When it comes to e-marketing, it’s hard to benchmark your own campaigns against industry norms. It’s even harder to then turn that into real metrics for evaluation of absolute value.
Sometimes the product, offering, target market or even price isn’t right. What is important is that the Client (through Purestone) can see this, react to it, craft different messages & strategies and respond to the results immediately. What other media choice allows you to change and tweak your creative, or copy, or call to action as the campaign goes out? I genuinely believe that e-marketing can make a difference to the business generation capabilities of any organisation. Those that treat e-marketing as a truly strategic media choice through which they make highly personalised, 1 to 1 campaigns can expect to achieve great results. Those that treat e-marketing as ‘blast, forget and hope something sticks’ – well, they still form an unenlightened majority of marketers. Treat your prospects as people, personalise your messaging to distinct groups and, surprise surprise, your results will rapidly improve.
What’s the easiest way to keep your revenue moving forward?
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been involved in a whole lot more discussions with Clients ( and prospective Clients ) about revenue or business generation. My first question is always ‘ Are you maximising your relationships with your existing Customers?’ It seems an obvious point but so many organisations devote huge resources to attracting new customers without first identifying what they can do to retain and excite existing ones.
Its a well quoted fact – its 5 times easier to keep a customer than to attract a new one’. A recent peice of research by Bain and Co. gave a good insight into the impact of Customer retention. A 5% increase in retained customers leads to 75% increase in net customer value ( i.e. once you have stripped out the implied cost of winning a new customer). Secondly, organisations that implement successful customer retention programmes grow at 6 times the average rate.
A key part of servicing exisitng Clients is to understand them. We start off with a huge amount of actual knowledge – who they are, who the key decision makers are, what they’ve previously bought from us ( and when), what we’ve quoted for, who their other suppliers are etc. etc. The biggest challenge is accessing this information and turning it into usable data for communications. This information typically lies in : a finance system ( like Sage, Pegasus, SAP or Oracle ), a contact system ( like ACT, Maximiser, Goldmine, Outlook or even spreadsheets ) and most risky of all – in the heads of our Commercial staff. Just recently, I’ve noticed ( and we have won) a number of deals to bring this knowledge together and make it usable for the Organisation through the implementation of formal Customer Relationship Management ( CRM) programmes. This process gives one view of the Customer, enabling all and any Customer facing staff to see a full picture of a Customer – who they are, what they’ve bought, have they experienced problems before etc. etc.
Providing access to this level of information - both transactional and personal – allows us to engage with them on a ’1-2-1′ level with personalised e-campaigns, personalised web content and genuinely as a person whom we seek to understand.
As the economic situation tightens, I’m backing Companies which spend time understanding their customers and then communicate with them personally to ‘weather the storm’ and keep driving their revenues forwards.