April 2009

Top ten tips for a successful marketing plan

23 Apr, 2009  No Comment

I saw on someone’s blog the top ten things not to do in your marketing plan. It is not useful to focus on negatives so I didn’t pay too much attention to the advice. However, it did inspire me to think about my top ten tips for a successful marketing plan.

Here they are:

  1. Have a realistic budget!
  2. Be different to your competitors!
  3. Be adventurous – take risks to stand out!
  4. Focus on keeping existing customers!
  5. Have a simple selling proposition!
  6. Understand the needs and wants of your existing customers!
  7. Find the best ways of getting your message to your best prospects!
  8. Make real claims for your product or service – don’t exaggerate!
  9. Have a mix of tactics – don’t put your eggs in one basket!
  10. Make sure you capture and respond to customer feedback!

Good luck!

Tender writing or tender writing

21 Apr, 2009  No Comment

Tender has several meanings in English that come from opposite ends of the spectrum. At one end tender, as an adjective, describes something that is soft, gentle or sympathetic. At the other, as a verb or noun, it is represents the formal offer or presentation of goods, services or currency in a business exchange.

Tender writing then has several usages. The gentle and beautiful writing of John Keats is tender. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale gave the title to F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Tender is the Night:

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,   

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night…

And as poor Keats earlier in the Ode calls to the bartender for his draught of vintage we find ourselves with yet another manifestation of tender as a version of tending, that is looking after or attending to something.The other major usage of tender writing is the difficult job of writing business proposals to meet a specification for a project. This is not something that Keats or Scott Fitzgerald would attempt. It requires a very different style. Tender writing for business is technical and precise but at the same time needs to make a product or service attractive.

Why do we have two very different tender writers? Because the word is a convergence from two different Latin roots.

Keats type of tender comes from the Old French tendre, from the Latin tener ‘tender, delicate’.

Whereas the tender writing that Madrigal Communications undertakes has its origin in the Latin tendere stretch, strive, hold forth. 

PR points for Prime Minister sees red meat

12 Apr, 2009  No Comment

Our Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised for losing his temper on a Royal Australian Air Force flight in January when questioned at the G20 last week. He had lost his temper because he had only been offered red meat as his meal.

It was bad PR for the PM because it overshadowed his participation in the success of the G20. It was made worse because his press secretary had previously denied it.

-6 to Kevin

The RAAF was portrayed as being deliberately disrespectful of the PM as part of a dispute with the Defence Minister.

-2 to the RAAF

For Malcolm Turnbull it was only a minor PR win when it should have been bigger. He is not getting much traction.

+4 to Malcolm

However, the Opposition’s Agriculture spokesman, John Cobb, announced that it was possible that Mr Rudd was just suffering from a lack of iron in his diet:

Farmers probably understand why he might have anger issues or a mental meltdown while on a red meat free diet.

He managed to deflect the potential damage to the livestock industry.

Ten points to John Cobb.

Niches reduce competition

2 Apr, 2009  1 Comment

Niche (pronounced neesh or nitch) is a word used both in ecology and marketing.

Its original use is as a noun to describe a shallow recess, especially one in a wall to display an ornament. It came into English from the French verb nicher to make a nest.

In ecology niche theory describes how an organism or group of organisms is always competing with others for the resources they need to survive. A strategy to reduce competition is to find a niche that other organisms aren’t using or not using very well. Here is a short explanation from Dr Seuss:

And NUH is the letter I use to spell Nutches,
Who live in small caves, known as Niches, for hutches.
These Nutches have troubles, the biggest of which is
The fact there are many more Nutches than Niches.
Each Nutch in a Nich knows that some other Nutch
Would like to move into his Nich very much.
So each Nutch in a Nich has to watch that small Nich
Or Nutches who haven’t got Niches will snitch.

It is similar in business. Your business is competing hard for customers and you have to work very hard to keep them or they will get snitched.

One way to decrease competition is to use a niche marketing strategy, which concentrates on a narrow sub-segment of customers. First you identify the customer needs or wants that are not being satisfied by existing businesses and then develop specialist goods or services that do satisfy them.

A very quick way of estimating whether your business can develop a niche marketing strategy is to look at your most loyal customers. First, determine if your best customers are price sensitive and second work out if they share particular characteristics.

If the core customers are not sensitive to price it means you can create a more specialist product or service that might cost more but will still be desirable.

If the customers share characteristics it means you can create more targeted sales and marketing tactics that will produce a higher return on your marketing budget.

There is a useful prediction from 1989 (Laurel Cutler, quoted in Phillip Kotler 1997 Marketing Management p251):

There will be no market for products that everybody likes a little, only for products that somebody likes a lot.

Beginners’ guide to making money with Twitter

2 Apr, 2009  2 Comments

This article is a product of my professional interest in Twitter, which I am following with great curiosity (Twitter name is madcom, if you want to find me) as well as with some healthy scepticism. Friends, even those familiar with social networking sites, such as Facebook, ask me what is it all about. This is part of an answer for Twitter beginners.

Social network marketing

I have spent a lot of time on Twitter in the last few weeks. It is a fascinating world, as is the whole online social networking universe, but I am still trying to find out what the whole thing is truly about.

I won’t explain the workings of Twitter. It is simple and written about elsewhere, try Wikipedia, but what I will attempt to explain is how Twitter is operating in social network marketing and how it can be used to make money.

Twitter operates as part of the social media marketing machine so you need to understand social media marketing to understand Twitter’s uses.

Social network marketing or social media marketing are terms that are less understood and perhaps poorly defined. Social media marketing involves engaging with online communities to create brand awareness, to create opportunities through partnerships, to generate targeted traffic and, ultimately, to generate sales.

Back to marketing basics

To understand social network marketing lets start with the basics of marketing. Marketing is a process to match products or services to the needs or wants of the customers in a way that provides a profit for an organisation.

Marketing uses market testing methods to work out what the customers want, then develops a product or service to meet that want, and then promotes and advertises the product to attract the customers. Simple!

So how does Twitter help in these processes? Lets break the marketing process down to these three components: finding out what the customer wants, creating the perfect product, and then selling it. Looked at in these terms Twitter has a lot to offer.

Monitoring mindshare

Mindshare is a term that is being used in the online social networking world to explain what the recognition level of a product is in the population. By following keywords (identified by hashes) or other search terms on monitoring sites you can monitor the Twitterverse (all that is happening on Twitter) for every mention of your product or company. Twitter because of its immediacy is an important indicator of the online mindshare.

This is a metric for a brand’s share of the collective mind! There are lots of other and more sophisticated methods to measure keywords that are being used across the online world to include Google and other important search engines.

Developing the perfect product

Monitoring mindshare provides the intelligence or information to develop the product or promotional message that will make the product more saleable. This is the product monitoring and product development part.

Monetising Twitter

This is the Holy Grail for Twitter. How is Twitter going to make money out of the whole Twitter world. No-one really knows how Twitter will make money but everyone seems to know about how it can be used to make YOU money.

How to make money using Twitter

Twitter CAN make you money in quite a few ways. It is a medium for getting messages out there so can be used as a great promotional and advertising tool particularly for international brands. Therefore you should be using it if you work for an advertising agency.

Twitter is a good method for building international brand. It will not work so well if you are a local business or in a niche market unless, as in all things marketing, you are creative.

Direct selling on Twitter is not encouraged. This is not so much because it is rude but mostly because it is too hard sell and therefore ineffective. The Twitter tweet is a short message and therefore does not allow anything more than headline-style persuasion, it is soft sell. However, the tweet can be used to direct people to websites or blogs where a more persuasive, promotional message can be used to persuade people to buy products. This is, of course, all about creating and driving website traffic.

Affiliate marketing

Companies either use their own marketers to drive traffic or they use affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing is where the originator of the traffic gets paid for each customer or visitor to the owner’s site. This is where many people seek to make money online.

Affiliate marketing on Twitter requires that the originating marketer has enough influence with the Twitter community that they can direct large traffic volumes. This is why developing large followings on Twitter is so important. (It is one of the contradictions in Twitter that there is an expectation of a mutual exchange of messages between users. Those that have thousands of followers are unlikely to read the tweets of their followers.)

Providing help and expertise

The other way to make money on Twitter is to provide help to others to make money out of Twitter. Expertise in social network marketing is a rare commodity and there are those offering to sell that expertise. There are social networking gurus who can help you get traffic to your site or your affiliate’s site (I am not pretending to be one of them).

Get Twittering for money

So what does this mean for you if you want to make money from Twitter? You have several options:

  1. you can use Twitter as part of a larger branding and advertising strategy within your agency or company,

  2. you can develop an affiliate marketing strategy by developing a large enough Twitter following that you can direct significant, qualified traffic to target sites, or

  3. you can make yourself into an expert and sell your services to those that need it.

Thanks for reading this blog – no money required.