Shaping businesses with intelligent marketing strategies
To generate leads and maintain interest in your brand, product or service, a little bit of pushing and pulling doesn’t hurt anyone.
Push marketing strategy
Push strategies (pushing your message to the audience) employ the traditional direct response advertising, direct mail, print media channels used since the 1970s. There is still a valuable role for traditional media within any Direct Marketing Strategy.
Some digital media might also be considered ‘push’ – Email can be pushed at an audience and has the benefit of being tracked. The age old question however, ‘which part of my marketing budget is working?’, remains predominantly unanswered with push strategies – you push it out without really knowing what’s going to come back. Even email (increasingly) struggles to deliver value.
Ask yourself what your company is actually learning about your customers and prospects from your email communications?
Pull marketing strategy
Pull strategies, by contrast, (enabling your customers/prospects to ‘pull’ the information they’re looking for) are newer, almost exclusively electronic, are untapped in the B2B space and for most B2B organisations remain untested. This represents a challenge for clients and agencies – but it also offers the greatest opportunity. SEO, (search engine optimisation) for example, now represents over 50% of online marketing spend and is predicted to reach up to 45% of the total marketing budget by 2010.
One day soon, the B2B space will recognise the opportunity and potential benefits of social media – connection, transparent and honest conversation with customers in real time. Managing customer relationships.
B2B social media
Social media is already emerging for B2B brands. Yes, we hear you, social media for business… never, what a waste of money. You’d be surprised. It’s reported that Dell has achieved over £1million in revenue from the microblogging service Twitter. Crikey!
Follow us on Twitter and be part of the conversation with Scot McKee.
Channel Neutral
Birddog does not project channel-bias (favouring one medium over another because that’s where our strengths lie). We work in a channel neutral environment because every business is different. A printed newsletter four times a year isn’t unlikely to be the best solution for everyone. Or anyone. Similarly, Twitter is not a panacea.
Whilst many B2B agencies have crushed themselves in the stampede to establish a separate, ‘specialist’ digital business or division, Birddog has built its digital speciality within our existing brand framework – we integrate digital and direct marketing strategies to improve lead generation. We take each business, each business problem and each target market individually to work out the most effective, most efficient strategy for your budget.
Check point for success in 2009
Ask yourself the following questions if you’re wanting to develop effective marketing communications in 2009, which we all know and are bored of hearing is going to be a difficult year.
- Do you have a lead nurturing strategy in place for 2009?
- Or do all your leads go straight into a spreadsheet, one spreadsheet and delivered straight to sales?
- Do you have a social media strategy? Do you know how social media channels can benefit your business?
- Do you know what your customers are saying about you within their networks?
- Do you have a plan to implement website content updates to keep your content fresh and keep people coming back to your site?
- Are you tracking what your readers are reading in the countless emails you keep sending them?
- Are you employing new media to communicate your message online?
- How many videos does your company publish each month spreading your brand message across the internet in bite sized pieces of relevant content?
- What does your website look like? What does it say about your brand?
- Can your users find what they need on your site?
- Does it make sense to them or is your call centre flooded with calls for information that’s already on the website?
- How are you using your webstats to provide business and marketing intelligence?
If you can’t answer any of the above questions in a way that you feel comfortable that you’ve got the right strategy in place and are using the right technology to help you make improvements to your business, then contact Scot McKee for a chat on +44 (0)207 323 6666.
Come to think of it, does our site make sense to you? Tell us what you think about our site.