Customer Centric Language versus Internal Terminology

January 27th, 2010 by Niall McKeown

Northern Bank Sell Products

Northern Bank Sell Products

Hands up who has gone to a bank to get a product?  Not many hands I’m guessing.  In this current Northern Bank above the line campaign they have used the strapline “New Charity Savings Products”.

In common parlance bank customers (like me) don’t talk about our savings products, we talk about our savings accounts.  We view the bank as a service provider not a product supplier.  Internally within the bank, when talking about customers and how the bank can sell their services they tie up a list of services and refer to them as a product.

The problem with this campaign is that the Northern Bank has used internal corporate language and assumed that its customers do the same.   The very worthy charity co-sponsoring the campaign wouldn’t write, “Donor Products For Sale” if it was looking for sponsorship – that would be an internal phrase.

It’s not easy to make marketing truly customer centric but in order to be effective an agency and marketing department need to look at it from the customer perspective.

This is particularly true on the web.  It is your customers who dictate the language they use to link and search for you.  Just ask those organisations who waited for people interested in climate change, only to see their target audience search for global warming.  Or those who promoted satellite navigation, and waited in vain for customers whilst the market searched for satnav, or the the low fares airlines whose customers wanted cheap flights.

In a busy world falling over itself with white noise, you get nanoseconds of opportunity to connect with your customers.  Don’t miss the chance by talking in a language they don’t understand.

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Pump Storage Marketing

January 12th, 2010 by Niall McKeown

At Turlough Hill in Co. Wicklow, Ireland there is a Pump Storage power generation plant.  The method of power generation stores energy in the form of water, pumped from a lower elevation reservoir to a higher elevation. Low-cost off-peak electric power is used to run the pumps. During periods of high electrical demand, the stored water is released through turbines. The net effect is that supply of power is constant and the grids ‘additional requirement’ curve starts to smooth.

All service based businesses have periods of high demand and times when they carry manpower costs

Reducing Your Available Capacity With Planed Marketing

Reducing Your Available Capacity With Planned Marketing

without sufficient supply of work. Unlike the national grid, we rarely plan to carry a backup reserve solution.  What our businesses need is a stored supply of work to help smooth our business cost/production graph as very quickly three months of profit can get wiped out by one month of slow orders.

Recently I have been working with two small (20+ people) service businesses, one in the software sector and the other involved in landscaping.  They both had the common problem of employing staff  (incurring necessary cost) when the business wasn’t busy. During times of high staff availability they resorted to the method of panic, taking any job they could in order to cover costs.  The commercial team became diverted from more profitable long term work in search of an early fix. Once orders recovered, the sales team found it hard to recover their value proposition, charging higher fees and securing better quality work.

Upon identification of this business process problem we set about creating a marketing strategy that actually planned for this eventuality.  The marketing process prompted the customer to avail of a low cost solution to non-urgent projects. Customers were encouraged to think of projects that they would like to get done that weren’t urgent and place the order.  The least urgent projects got the lowest price (around £210 per day)  and the projects that were needed within the year got a slightly higher price (£260 per day), but still a fraction of the full price (£520 per day).

The marketing strategy involved communicating the proposition in an open and direct way that the company had special rates to help fill dip-dates. The customer was accepting and immediately understood the proposition as this kind of variable supply/demand pricing is evident in the airline industry among others.

After two months of marketing, the net result was that both organisations had enough work pumped into storage to fill demand shortages for around six months in advance, smoothing their forecasting and cashflow. Customers also started to identify new work that they would like to get produced at a lower cost but at no pre-determined time. At no stage did revenues per client dip or clients move critical work into the ‘nice to have’ delivery method. The order books simply expanded.

Our natural temptation is to market for growth and so we should.  My argument is that taking a longer term view of how we market and preparing for the inevitable demand/supply mismatch may actually help supply the extra energy our businesses need.

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Marketing Need Not Be Expensive

January 6th, 2010 by Niall McKeown

Marketing is the art of creating and telling unique stories that create conversations.  Advertising is about paying for attention.   On occasion good advertising can tell interesting stories thus making good advertising good marketing.

TalkTalk are a UK provider of telephone and broadband services.  It’s difficult for them to create unique stories because they are a highly commoditised business.  There aren’t a lot of unique stories to present to the market to create buzz so instead they spend millions on advertising sponsoring TV hit shows like the X-Factor.

Recently however, TalkTalk issued a press release that said they would pay selected house owners £250 to change the name of their house to Talk Talk. You can choose:

·      TalkTalk Towers
·      TalkTalk Mansions
·      TalkTalk@ (eg TalkTalk@37 Acacia Avenue)
·      The TalkTalk House
·      The TalkTalk Home

This is hardly the same as sponsoring the Emirates Stadium for £100m but what it does do is create lots of local small-scale conversations.  The cost to TalkTalk is incidental in comparison to the buzz they create.  I think this is true creative marketing and alongside their advertising, gives them the right to claim to be innovators in marketing.

Take Ryanair’s marketing as the alternative to this type of creative thinking. In a recent report by the Office of Fair Trading they were criticised by John Fingleton, the Chairman of the OFT, for exploiting a loophole in the law that allowed them to advertise rates without including the credit card fees.

In response to the allegations, Ryanair took the opportunity to repeat their same mantra about being a low cost airline.  This is a typical Ryanair PR response to negative publicity but it does create a buzz and water cooler conversations about their brand, albeit controversial.  This is an exact quote from Ryanair’s Head of Communications, Stephne McNamara “Ryanair is not for the overpaid John Fingletons of this world but for the everyday Joe Bloggs who opt for Ryanair’s guaranteed lowest fares because we give them the opportunity to fly across 26 European countries for free, £5 and £10.”

Why the BBC published this ‘ad’ verbatim is unknown. The response doesn’t address the allegations set before them and has no context to the article. Nonetheless it is the same subtext told often using different stories.

In the online world it is easier than ever to create positive buzz.  We have established networks and easy conduits to getting our message out via social networks and email marketing.  The hard part is always coming up with the creative idea, response or creating the correct marketing mix. As these examples show however, it need not be expensive.

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When an online strategy backfires

December 22nd, 2009 by Niall McKeown

An interesting incident arose today when Dixons changed the strapline on it’s homepage to read “The last place you want to go”. As the brand is no longer on the high street they wanted the customer to come to their website as the last price comparison they would need.

Unfortunately the plan backfired and many customers thought the site had been hacked.  This lowered confidence in the brand and undoubtedly made customers nervous about shopping there.

Getting tired of answering the phone to explain that it was a part of their online strategy Dixons’ gave in and changed the site and removed the strapline.

A clear case of trying to be a little too clever with an online strategy

dixons_last_place

Dixons - The Last Place You Want to Go

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Email Marketing: Connecting the Reader with the News

December 16th, 2009 by Niall McKeown

Connecting the Reader With Your News

Connecting The Reader With The News

Email Marketing: Connecting the Reader with the News

I often display this picture at seminars I have the good fortune to present at.  After the laughter dies, a serious message follows. When broadcasting your message especially via email marketing, you need to make sure there is a connection between the reader and your news.

Many email newsletters are used for sales and not marketing.  They are easy to spot. They usually have a corny strapline then mention the product/service accompanied by a price, an image and a link to go and buy.  These email broadcasts do work for commoditised products or services but the emphasis is always on price and margins are typically low.  These emails play a numbers game and rarely require much thought. Even good retailers don’t lead with price, they lead with lifestyle promises and create aspirations.  Price lead email selling will give you back what you asked for, low margin sales.

On the other side of the coin we are often tempted to put in news stories about our latest award or accolade, the company golf day out and the chairman’s welcome.  Stories often make our newsletters that have appeared in the mainstream media and are republished verbatim.

As a reader, I often don’t care about your award or golf day (although these activities do play a marketing role just not right now) and I sure as hell don’t need to read another “Welcome to our newsletter/website/snorefest” from the chairman.   And yes, the industry news may be of mild interest to me, but I want you to translate it into what it should mean as features, benefits or drawbacks to me.  I want to know your opinion on the news.

It’s hard to make our email marketing customer centric and not price lead.  Our enthusiasm about what we do is rarely identical to your customers.  As a marketer it is our job to put ourselves in the reader’s position and ask, ‘is there a connection between the reader and the news?’

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Is Online Reputation Management the new Search Engine Optimisation?

December 9th, 2009 by Niall McKeown

There is a strong argument that being #1 in the natural search engine results in Google for some industries is no longer what it used to be.  I’m not arguing that search is irrelevant or that a site should not be built optimised for search engines, my argument is that the customer and how they purchase has little to do with being top of Google. Rather, it is how you are represented in terms of your online reputation.  My argument is that online reputation management is fast becoming more important than search engine optimisation in service based industries.  Better still, get your ORM right and the SEO takes care of itself.

Take a hotel for example.  Many hotels work hard to be in the top page of a search result for most of the big search terms like “Hotel in [insert destination]”. The site is built optimised for search.  The text is written with key words appearing frequently within the body of the text. Inbound links are generated artificially to make it appear that the site is relevant under key search terms and the hotel gradually floats north toward the top of the search charts.  So how does Google reward these efforts?

Take the example search term “Hotel in London”:

  • The first 3 links are paid for sponsored links and not influenced by SEO
  • The 4th link is a local business directory link
  • Links 5 to 11 are Google Local links based upon both geography, reviews and other non-SEO related activities
  • Link 12 is a hotel resellers site
  • Link 13 is the Ritz Hotel.  At last a hotel that has focused on SEO! In SEO terms the Ritz is #2 in the natural SEO results.  In real terms it’s not in the race.

SEO Natural Position #1 is Now 13 Links From Top

SEO Natural Position #1 is Now 13 Links From Top

I don’t have the conversation figures of lookers-to-bookers for the Ritz in London or how many people eventually convert from Google generic searches like mine.  What I do have however, are the analytics results of many other hotels in different regions and the results show similarities across the regions and search terms.

Even though most of the hotels, restaurants, shopping centers or any service based destination clients we look after have good natural SEO results for generic terms, around 80% of the searches for their site include their brand name and not simple generic terms like “Hotel in London”.   My guess is that the Ritz is no different and that the vast majority of bookers who find the hotel search for it by name.  It has an enhanced reputation.  This means the visitor is looking specifically for that destination.  They have researched elsewhere and their decision on where to stay is already at a closing stage when googling the hotel name.

If you extrapolate this out further and take the amount of visitors to the site that search by brand name, have clicked on inbound referral links or visitors that have simply typed in the URL of the destination, it vastly outweighs the generic search term in the order of 95% to 5% of visitor traffic.  Unless you have a really generic name like “Smiths of London” appearing #1 for your own brand takes little to no SEO effort.

The question then switches to being “Why do we spend so much time, money and effort on being #1 on Google when less than 5% of the visitors arrive at the site for generic terms?”   Where is the customer taking their influence?  Why am I only getting attention as part of their already filtered field of view? The answer is that the customer is taking the opinion of others that have used these services.  They are reading the reviews of what other people say about the business and believing that before the businesses own marketing message.

If you are in the services industry this is happening to you.  Regardless if you supply stag weekend clay pigeon shooting in Brighton or zorbing in Ballymena, your online reputation management and what is said about you on review sites, forums and blogs is having an enormous influence on your bookings.  ORM takes effort and means focusing on leveraging customer’s good experiences and getting them to publish their positive experiences.  It requires a deep understanding on where your customers or potential customers are taking their influence from and understanding how you can influence that process.  A bi-product of good ORM is that your natural SEO will look after itself.

SEO is still a valid channel and shouldn’t be ignored, however its relevancy in converting lookers-to-bookers is weakening as Google restructures its results pages and customers become more informed and only Google your site as part of the decision making process. The pending introduction of Google Real Time search is set to further enhance the argument that SEO isn’t what it once was.

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Understanding the Culture Within Online Marketing

November 26th, 2009 by Niall McKeown

“They should just put them all in a field and let them duke it out” was often an English man’s solution to the political problems in Northern Ireland in the ‘90s. “Just kick the Brits out” would have been the rhetoric from a New Yorker when sharing a drink in a Manhattan bar.

The problem was much more complex.  To understand Northern Ireland, you just had to live here and as a native, you knew that the outsiders just didn’t understand the culture and complexity of the solution needed.

There is a sculpture  in Northern Ireland’s second city, Derry.  It is called ‘Hands Across The Divide’ and it illustrates the change in Northern Ireland’s culture.  It symbolises how politics has moved from a shouting monologue to an engaging dialogue.  The sculpture shows the need to reach out and understand the differences in culture.

Deploying an online marketing strategy for an organisation is a lot like ‘The Divide’.  There is a temptation to use monologue techniques and try and advertise your thoughts, opinions and prices. This technique fails as it did in the old politics in Northern Ireland.   There is a temptation to think your message is all that counts and that everyone should listen.  There is a temptation to use traditional marketing speak and convince others that your products or services are worth their attention.  This is not the culture of new marketing.

New marketing, like the statue depicts is about understanding, listening and engaging.  It is about talking to your followers in their language and convincing them that you are worth engaging with, by respecting the culture of online marketing and showing some understanding. This cultural understanding can’t be taught.  To  truly understand the online conversation you need to get immersed in it and live it!

Hands Across the Divide in Derry.

Hands Across the Divide in Derry.

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Do you have a self-serving or subservient website?

November 18th, 2009 by Niall McKeown

Ballymena Council and Fermanagh Council websites have been listed among the worst in the UK by government website comparison company, Site Morse.  At the same time Belfast and North Down Councils rank among the elite of the 450+ local council sites compared.

Site Morse ranks sites on over 400 technical criteria.  What they can’t tell is the relevancy of the content to the reader. After spending a couple of hours poking around the best and worst council sites, it appears that the councils that have put the effort into getting a technically attuned website have also put the effort into creating a customer focused site.

Take the navigation of the Ballymena Council website for example:

No - I didn't cut out their logo. There isn't one on the site!

No - I didn't cut out their logo. There isn't one on the site!

The top line navigation includes ‘News’ which is the same as the home page, ‘Council Projects’ which was last updated in 2007 and ‘Print Page’.  Who on earth looks in the navigation when they want to print a page?

Their sub-navigation starts with ‘Corporate Documents’, the council ‘History’ and includes information about councillors and their committee structure.

These are all areas of interest for councillors but not necessarily the public they serve. If for example, a member of the public wants to know when their bin is due for collection, that information is not available on the website.  This website is self-serving.  It is made for the councillors, not the citizen.

Now take a look at Belfast City Council, some 40 miles from Ballymena.  This website is subservient. It is made for the customer, in this case the citizens of Belfast.

In this site, the City Council has established what areas are popular with their citizens and has brought them to the fore.  They understand the need for advice and have featured this in the main navigation and central areas of the page.

Subservient architecture built around the reader, not the site owner

Subservient architecture built around the reader, not the site owner

The ‘Council’ tab on the Belfast City Council website gives lots of details on how the council can work for the citizen.

What Belfast Council can do for you

What Belfast Council can do for you

The Ballymena equivalent has photos of the councillors.

Ballymena Councillors

Ballymena Councillors

A subservient website is created when the marketing team shows leadership. They push back on ideas that are not customer-centric and say “no” when the content is not relevant to the majority.   A self-serving website is created when the marketer is under pressure to do the bidding of their peers.

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Three £1,000 Web Startup Ideas

November 6th, 2009 by Niall McKeown

This could as easily have been entitled the €1,000 or $1,000 startup…

Time rich and cash strapped? What unique online business could you start for 1000 big ones?

1. The Usage Policy Store
A friend of mine who owns a small business asked me just last week if I had a standard Social Media Usage Policy, Computer Network Usage Policy and Mobile Usage Policy he could add into his company handbook. He understood that his organisation needed social media, but didn’t really know what the parameters should be.

Gavin understands that the usage policy will simply act as guidance for his staff but he didn’t want to invest in a consultant, legal professional or HR professional to make minor adjustments to his working practices. What Gavin wants is an easily edited template that he can pick and choose terms from and insert into his company handbook.

The policy store can extend to cover obscure chapters dispensing advice on tattoos, online gaming and using the company greenhouse (if working in Sciences). The more obscure, the higher the price.

The startup entrepreneur will need to have:

  • Legal background
  • HR experience
  • Be IT savvy

The Model
The 10 most popular usage policies give a light version for free. Sell the full popular usage policies @ £50 each. Add in a videoconference appointment for 15 minutes to discuss @ £50. Sell custom usage policies for around £500, depending on complexity and research required.

The Cost
policy-store

2. An Online Reputational Risk Analyst
The Financial Services Authority has warned Banks to keep on top of social media sites as they suspect another run on a bank could be triggered by tweets.

Many PR firms offer their customers crisis management services but their contracts are built to react to the local press or television and not the Internet. They work in the same time zones and react at the speed of old media. They need a service capable of alerting them of client problems at the same speed as new media.

Many Marketers’ worst nightmare is that something big happens at a branch or franchise and starts to go viral and the first time they hear about it is 8am the next morning when their CEO calls to ask what the response should be.

A 24-hour social media monitor and reaction task force will soon be a service that banks, PR firms and larger marketing departments will pay for. A professional company with really detailed crisis management procedures will soon be in demand. This firm will not just identify the problem as it happens but assess threat levels, have escalation procedures, dark websites ready to go live in response to pre-planed crises and know when it is time to make that 3am call to the brand owner.

The start up entrepreneur will need to have:

  • An eye for detail and a love of procedure
  • An understanding of, and ability to use free alert services to keep you on your toes
  • A convincing gravitas
  • Round the clock availability – no kids, no booze, no social life until established

Cost and Returns
postit

3. Hyper-local Postcode Mashup Paper

This idea is in desperate need of an acronym!

The UK Government, like many western governments are starting to publish non-personal information that traditionally sat in information silos. The content includes topics around allotments, recycling, crime figures, education, healthcare etc. The content is indexed around post-codes and is easy to sort and search.

The Government has kindly created an API (a method to query this data in real time). This means that it is possible to automatically query this changing data and publish it on your own website or print publication. This link is to a little project that experimented with such an idea.

Statistics show that extremely local publications are still in high demand. So what would happen if you created a website for your postcode area that automatically updated with this government data feed? To give the site personality and engage the audience, you make it your business to video interview different residents around the topics published and post them to your website via YouTube.

Next, create a series of social media hot topic forums using Twitter and Facebook designed to stimulate debate and community spirit. Mash these technologies together and finally show leadership and lead the debate around the hot topics that affect your community.

If you manage to get 5,000 avid community contributors and readers you have the ability to mobilize and affect change. Your ability to influence is powerful and this will reveal revenue opportunities. Crack this model, make it a franchise, and find a willing, engaging and enthusiastic entrepreneur for the next postcode over and repeat!

Talents needed include:

  • A skill for journalism and finding the story that resonates with the community
  • Web development skills including XML parser experience
  • Web design skills
  • An ability to lead and take the inevitable criticism that will follow
  • An entrepreneurial ability to turn your following into cold cash. This may not necessarily be by advertising. It could be by online PR and Google juice value you gain.

fag-packet2

If you take up any of these ideas let me know. I’m sure with a little more thought there could be the start of something profitable.

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From Corn to Unicorn: Commodity or Value Proposition

October 28th, 2009 by Niall McKeown

“It’s all about price, the lower the price the more units I shift”.  This is a common statement I hear and it is actually quite an accurate statement that many companies I work with make.  The one variable many manufacturers and service-based companies can easily adjust to create demand is the price.

The problem with tweaking the variable of price (besides lowering margin) is what happens when the competition does the same?   The problem with relying solely on price as the driver for demand for a product or service is that once the sale price matches that of the cost of production, the only variables left to change affects quality.

Online, the drive to a lower price happens much quicker than in the off-line world as it is so easy to compare like-with-like.  Goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market, such as corn, milk or copper, all have a universal price derived by forces external to the producer.  Commoditisation occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its’ supply base.

When considering lowering price perhaps it may be wiser to try and create differentiation. A little thought in to how to move your offering from being a price sensitive commodity like corn and creating a unique story or proposition will transform the fortunes of an online marketing campaign.  Our evidence based research into our customers’ online marketing campaigns backs this up.  Those that lead with a unique story make more money than those that lead with price.

Corn is a commodity. A unicorn is a wonderful and unique story that has intrigue and interest.  If your business had a unicorn product or service, people would talk about it and your price could reflect the difference from the competitors that just sold corn.  Corn or Unicorn, they are both still “corn” but our perceptions of the value of each are very different.

Marketing Challange: Creating A Differentiator

Marketing Challange: Creating A Differentiator

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