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Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category« Previous Entries Next Entries »More Marketing in 2010Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 
Everybody knows that 2009 was a tough year, with marketing budgets in particular feeling the strain. Yet things are looking more promising for 2010 already – and on both sides of the Atlantic! A survey conducted at the end of 2010 in the United States showed good news for marketers after a year in which 60% of b-to-b marketers slashed their budgets. BtoB’s “2010 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans” report, based on an online survey of 376 B2B marketers, found that although almost half plan to maintain their existing budgets, nearly 40% will increase spending in 2010. Just 13% will be reducing their marketing spend this year. As with last year, online marketing – including website development, e-mail marketing, search, social media, online video and webcasts – looks set to see the biggest boosts. This medium is widely acknowledged as being both cost-effective and measurable. Spending on innovative direct marketing and customer events both look set to rise also. More about this report can be found here. Meanwhile, in the UK, the latest IPA/BDO Bellwether report indicates that optimism and confidence are growing. In spite of the report showing a ninth consecutive quarter of declining marketing spend, the rate of decline is clearly slowing. Spend is down only 7% compared to 15% in the previous quarter. Indeed, marketing budgets for 2010 have been set higher than those in 2009 and, with 35% of businesses surveyed seeing improved prospects, companies are the most optimistic they have been for the past five years. As with the trends seen in the US, online advertising budgets were revised upwards for the second quarter running while direct marketing budgets have also increased (by 2.2%) for the first time since 2007. Why not read our white paper, Marketing Strategies in a Recession? More Than Just Fun and GamesThursday, November 5th, 2009 
In his first Thursday Night Insight, Alex Clements illustrates perfectly how keeping a close eye on the competition and being quick to spot opportunities can really strengthen your own market position. Atari, Spectrum, Commodore, Sega, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox. Regardless of your age, you are highly likely to have heard of at least one of these, possibly even all of them. Games consoles have been around for many years and as time goes by the systems become more sophisticated and the games become more complex and realistic. I remember text-based adventure games on the Atari and Commodore 64 which required the player to type a keyword into the console, which would in turn prompt an action on the screen. I remember Bubble Bobble; a game featuring two small, brightly coloured, 2D characters (in fact, little more than a blob of colour) that were supposed to be dragons, where the aim of the game was to blow bubbles which could trap and eliminate enemies such as ghosts and flying purple sharks (yes; flying purple sharks!). Games developers certainly were creative all those years ago and although games are more realistic these days, it doesn’t mean that people in the games industry no longer need to be creative. The video games industry is one which has grown and grown over the years. More users, more games, more consoles, more money and, for the manufacturers, more competition. Now that there is so much on offer to the public, we have a huge amount of choice in the types of video games we play: We can choose a favourite genre, a favourite series of games and we can even choose which console we would prefer to use to play them. Companies who are in competition over the same market need to think very carefully before every move. The games industry is an interest of mine and I commend some of the marketing strategies I have noticed recently. In 2005, the world was due the start of the next generation of video game consoles. There was, predictably, much hype and speculation over what each one would have to offer. The battle had started long before they were released. To this day, the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 still battle for sales, offering similar types of realistic games and modern online services. Meanwhile, Nintendo released the Wii. The Nintendo Wii was released for a unique target market, offering an experience to consumers which was not available from either of its two potential rivals. Instead of competing to be the console with the best graphics, most functions and most realistic games, Nintendo made a console which was for light-hearted family fun: The games aren’t trying to be realistic but, instead, boast colourful cartoon worlds and let users embrace an unusual controller unlike any other, which can be waved at the TV like a magic wand to operate. There is much to think about when marketing a product, but before you even start to plan, you need to understand your product and your target market, and it will be highly advantageous to know the competition. Some very careful (and intelligent) decisions were made over the period of time mentioned above and Nintendo’s adaption to the available market means that more Wii consoles have been sold to date than either the Xbox 360 or PS3, despite being released last. I will conclude my first ever Thursday Night Insight with one more example of an opportunity that was promptly taken. It was, once again, Nintendo and their online marketing strategy for a new handheld console called the “DSi”. Nintendo were aware of their competition at the time, which happened to be Sony’s “PSP go” which was due to be released in the forthcoming months. The two products are similar and have a very similar target market. Upon realisation that Sony had not bought the UK domain name for their new product’s website in preparation for its release, Nintendo decided to step in. The result was that any consumer visiting www.pspgo.co.uk, looking for information on Sony’s product, would be taken directly to the main page of its rival, the Nintendo DSi. Try it yourself and see by clicking on the link above! Underhanded? Or a stroke of genius? It’s probably a bit of both, but the fact still remains that all PSPgo customers aiming for the UK website will land directly on Nintendo’s website, faced with a fresh new product they were not expecting which will undoubtedly only mean positive things for Nintendo’s sales. Let Your Customers Talk To YouThursday, October 22nd, 2009 
As technology – particularly advances in the capabilities of, and access to, the internet – improves so many of our lives in countless ways, we should not forget that ‘traditional’ means of seeking information and making purchases may still very much have a place. According to recent research findings from UK-based telecommunications company Invomo, companies which fail to provide telephone interaction risk alienating their customers. The study of 3,000 adult consumers suggested that nearly 40% of customers insist on making purchases by telephone rather than online, stating that more than a quarter felt more confident when ordering through a call centre and one in five found it more convenient to call than use the internet. Nick Wiley, CEO of Invomo, said: “Companies that only have a web strategy for servicing orders could be missing out on a significant proportion of business. Making sure customers don’t have to hunt the length and breadth of a web site for a contact number and offering a ‘call me back’ option could be a good start to reduce lost orders. Looking beyond short-term fixes, how many companies’ web and call centre operations are gearing up to customers who want their suppliers to really earn their loyalty and have faith in their own ability to deal with these street wise callers?” Find out what your customers really think of your company. Do they find it easy to reach you? Can they easily access all the information they need to enable them to make a purchase decision? What makes them choose you over your competitors? Our customer satisfaction research can help you to ensure you continue to meet their changing needs and increase the likelihood of them buying more from you in the future. How To Get Customers To Spend MoreWednesday, May 6th, 2009
An interesting article appeared recently on AdAge.com. Apparently the major U.S. pizza chains now do around 20% to 30% of their business online, but are keen to make that figure climb a lot higher. While this story clearly relates to consumer markets and may not have any obvious relevance to b-to-b organizations, the reasons why these pizza chains are so keen to improve and increase their online transactions are of potential interest to companies across the board. The online customers of the major pizza chains spend more and are more satisfied than non-online customers. Those who order their food online are also more likely to take advantage of special promotions used to drive interest in new products. As an added bonus, serving online customers is more efficient for each individual store. Pizza Hut expects to do $1 billion in online sales by the end of 2012, which would be an immense increase from $100 million in May 2007. Domino’s, meanwhile, claims that its average online buyer spends $2 more than its customers who order by phone or in person. According to Google’s director of local and B-to-B markets, the major pizza chains have all been quick to take advantage of shifting spending from traditional media to banner ads and search engine optimization. They are also constantly looking for ways to help their customers place their orders more quickly – whether they are first-time users setting up an account or return visitors wishing to repeat a past order. So, while you may not be looking to sell pizzas, their experiences may give you some food for thought. The Cloud With The Silver LiningFriday, April 3rd, 2009
In his latest Thursday Night Insight, Oliver Truman looks in detail at a creeping trend in our personal and business lives that is starting to have a profound impact on the way we interact with technology. Every now and then an innovation comes along that makes you sit up and take notice. Just such an event happened to me (and, I’m sure, thousands of other geekily-minded folks like myself) last week, with the unveiling of OnLive – A new video gaming service in the US, which promises to change the shape of the computer games industry forever. I should perhaps declare at this point that, contrary to appearances, I am not tremendously into computer gaming – I freely admit that the last (and indeed first) games console I owned was a venerable Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 1990s. The reason OnLive caught my eye lies not in the graphics nor the gameplay on offer, rather my interest was captured because it offers one of the most transparent and obvious applications yet of the phenomenon of “cloud computing”. With OnLive, computer games are no longer installed or run on the end user’s machine – this is all left to a powerful web server housed in a central location. Instead, the gamer effectively watches a live, high-definition video stream of what is running on this server using their Internet connection. This means even a low-end computer (or television set, with a small adaptor) can run the most demanding of games. No installation or downloading time is wasted, and customers can dip in and out of a whole array of different titles on a subscription-based model. This essential concept – that application software or user data is no longer stored locally, but remotely somewhere in the “cloud” that is the Internet – is what lies behind cloud computing. And its effect stretches far beyond the world of computer games Moreover, many CRM systems are now web-based, allowing sales teams instant access to client and prospect data, wherever they may be at the time. In a business context, data becomes pervasive and instantly available, in any place and at any time. And away from the sober world of business, cloud computing also allows for services such as Spotify to develop. Spotify is an online music streaming service that allows free, instantaneous access to virtually any song or album from the last 30 years. The storage burden is no longer upon the user’s machine, but is instead taken on by a huge server farm out there in the ether. So how is all this affecting the world of market research?Perhaps the most obvious projection of “the cloud” on the research industry has been in the development of online research techniques. Online surveys, which are increasingly becoming the methodology-de-jour in both consumer and business-to-business markets, are now fairly well established, and it would seem strange to highlight this as a new development. What is different is the melding of the online world with the offline. This is most clearly seen in the latest generation of mixed-methodology data collection software, which allows the simultaneous collection of data online, via the telephone or even face-to-face. This offline element has traditionally been managed by internal systems, run on market research agencies’ own servers that exist quite separately from the world outside. Confirmit Horizons, of which B2B International is the launch customer, is perhaps the most significant of this new breed of data collection software. All the data collection, sample management and data storage is handled by secure, dedicated hardware housed in purpose-built data centres. All this allows for the seamless and instantaneous integration of data collected from anywhere – whether it is online, face-to-face or via the telephone. Results and analysis can then be fed back to our clients live as the data is rolling in. In the realm of qualitative research, just as social networking websites are arguably electronic projections of our personal lives into the online domain, so online focus groups and online communities now complement and enhance the face-to-face tools we once relied on. In short, the cloud is important because it will affect all of our daily lives in so many ways in the future – Not just to play PacMan against your mates (or whatever it is the kids are playing nowadays). « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
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