Make Digital Marketing Work

In discussion with prospects and clients, there seems to be one question that keeps returning no matter how many years go by and that is whether to sell directly online with eCommerce or to support existing sales channels.  Rather than deciding on how your sales channel is to be fed.  I think a better way of approaching this is whether your campaign is transactional (ie I can buy it more easily online) or non transactional (I want them to go and buy it somewhere else because that is easier for them and me).  It fits quite neatly into direct response and brand building.

If I sell music from my store of vintage vinyl, it will help me a lot if I offer this as an online order service and therefore provide direct response media that tells me what albums to wrap up and send where all across the world.  Direct response is perfect for me.  It is also playing to one of the Web’s strengths where time and place do not matter.  It means that me as a tiny little store in the middle of nowhere can compete as if I was an international company with a presence on every street corner.  I can be open 24 hours a day, every day and everybody in the world can access my store front.  This is why tiny niche offers can do so well online.  There may only be a million people in the entre world who need my product but through the web I can access every single one of them just as easily as I can access the three who live in my area.

If I am selling chocolate that can be bought on every street corner, direct response isn’t a lot of use to me because every customer can cross the street and buy my product a lot faster than I can send it by mail or courier.  I’ve also got this huge infrastructure in place that makes it available across the world.  Why would I want to compete with such a well established sales channel?  My task here is to support and strengthen my existing sales channels through all the means at my disposal of which online is one.

In this scenario conducting brand building marketing activity is a lot more beneficial.  I might try promoting why my chocolate is better than everybody else’s or give a special promotion code online so that customers can take it into their store to get added value.  I might ask my customers which of my chocolate they prefer at a given time and ask them for examples.  Do they cook with it, show me.  Is there some way I can make it better, tell me.  All these things combine to help me and my customer know each other better and help my distribution partners sell more of my product.

This is only scratching the surface though because I have assumed that simply advertising the fact that I have a product to sell is enough to get customers to buy it, when  organisations are starting to recognise the importance of an end to end online marketing strategy, which engages and builds trust to maximise the chances of a prospect becoming a customer.

This morning I received an email from a company selling an online service that enables virtual meetings to take place.  The title of the email was

“When travel halts, online meetings keep business running”

It began with the an emboldened heading Iceland Volcano Cloud: The Economic Impact and a link to the BBC news article with the same title.

The general gist was a standard sales structure where a problem is highlighted (travel plans disrupted), the effects of this problem are explored (people cannot get business done due to lack of mobility and face to face meetings), and then a solution offered (virtual meetings online).  The technique is called SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, and Needs), and is as old as the hills.

My issues with this email are pretty comprehensive and go beyond the ambulance chasing nature of its “Oh look, natural disaster, buy my product” cynical premise.

The Link on the BBC site concentrates on the businesses hardest hit by the volcano, namely airlines and travel companies.  No mention of this is made in the email.  Their losses are enormous compared to the fairly minimal losses that are expected to hit other sectors such as those targeted in the email.

We live in a world where voice and video are available on technology in our pockets and where email enables instant exchange of information.  There is nothing ground breaking about virtual meetings in 2010, and I hope that their ill conceived attempts at using email marketing to take advantage of a crisis situation fails, with resultant loss of reputation.  I am not frightened to name them.  I simply do not want to give them any publicity.

Email marketing has a bad reputation amongst a lot of people.  My argument has always been that it isn’t email advertising that is bad, it is clueless marketers who use it badly, and this is a perfect (and very sad) example of this.  Email is an incredibly powerful tool and an essential part of the Interactive Marketing Mix, but it should be treated with more respect than my inbox was treated to this morning.

We have written before about how the word strategy is abused within the world of digital marketing and the temptation to rely on tactics, but one of the biggest casualties is often the Marketing Process.  To explain it I need to define terms.

• A marketing strategy is the big picture plan that looks at the resources available to you.  That can include the budget, available channels, your skill set, the prevailing market conditions, distribution, your customers themselves and of course all of the 4 Ps from the marketing Mix.  Collectively these  form a battle plan of how to create customer satisfaction, product sales, and secure revenue for the organisation.
• A Marketing process is the application of this strategy as a turnkey solution.  It consists of a series of tactics.  Imagine a machine that you turn the handle and it produces results out the other end, so that whenever the process is activated, you can predict the results of what will happen each time.

As an example, a process could consist of writing a blog post about your products and then promoting the blog post on Twitter and Facebook.  Each time you do that, you can expect a number of people to click on the promotional links and read your blog post.

This is definitely a process, but it isn’t a strategy and nor is it strategic because it only gets people reading your blog post.  It delivers nothing in product sales and it can’t legitimately claim to have secured any profit for the organisation.  If it has a bill attached to the activity it has in fact cost you money.  The best you can say is that a few people have now heard of you.

That kind of process can only be considered tactical and the sad fact is that tactics are what an awful lot of digital agencies offer to clients.  The results can be hugely disappointing.  As a strategic digital agency, we appreciates the need for bottom line results  and work across the various digital channels such as Search, Social Media, User experience, Web Design, Email, eCRM, analytics, and advertising.  Because of this we have a different proposition to make to clients than traditional tactical digital agencies.  That can be a little difficult to appreciate because the focus for us is on customers and the bottom line rather than technical disciplines.

An awful lot of online activity results in a lot of noise that ultimately achieves very little.  To avoid this. your online marketing strategy must place a focus on the commercial needs of the organisation and engages prospects, It should also plan the route through to a point where customers are created nurtured and retained.  That is why an online marketing strategy should be the basis for online marketing processes, and should also be a priority for all organisations.

The first commercial use of the internet was by business looking to expand their marketplace.  It stands to reason that a local company looking to expand their business into national and global markets could find a fantastic medium online.  Anyone who could ship their products to the customer had a wealth of opportunity open to them and this is how eCommerce was born.

On the other hand, a traditional bricks and mortar local business that relies on local custom, can find the internet to be a baffling place. Dentists, hair salons, doctors, guitar teachers, mechanics and a whole host of other business types all fall into this bracket where their location is an important part of their appeal. Similarly their customers often make decisions based on location in tandem with their reputation and perceived value.  Location therefore becomes a hugely important factor.  Correlating this to an environment where time and place do not matter was a perplexing problem for a very long time.

I’ve heard advice given to local hairdressers to get involved in eCommerce operations which effectively meant they should abandon a business they knew for one they had no idea about.  That kind of advice is thankfully consigned to history now but some very big companies served up that kind of rubbish for a very long time.

The problem is that nobody is going to drive the length of the country to visit a dentist regularly, and the concept of the visiting dentist to London that comes to you from the Outer Hebrides didn’t catch on as far as I am aware.

For business such as these the online marketing strategy should include Google Local Search.  Other search engines also offer local search inclusion but Google is by far and away the simplest to set up in my view. By adding your details to the mapping anyone that uses location as a search term will see your information. There is still the need for it to be entered correctly and a marketer who is experienced in these things will be able to help you.  The results can be significantly better (and the costs significantly lower) using this method rather than trying to get to the top of Google’s rankings for the term “dentist”.  When you think about it, that is a pretty pointless goal to begin with.

All local businesses should be looking at Local Search as a promotional tactic.