Richard van Hooijdonk

New! 16 Marketing 2.0 rules to guide you through the recession!

We are in an economic recession. It's something we all have to get through, it's something businesses have to deal with. A recession also offers opportunity: it's when things get rough that people and marketers are forced to critically reflect on what they're doing.

Sales figures are under pressure, and with it so are marketing budgets. Accountability now plays a more important role than ever while attention for existing clients is top priority. I offer 16 rules you can use to face the economic recession. These rules enable you to take a critical look at your current approach, cleaning up your business accordingly. The rules are based on my 'The New Marketing Cycle' model, as well as years of experience with optimization, innovation (video) and start-up companies.  Apply for the free book!

Stay up-to-date, stay sharp

Marketing is changing. Worldwide there are companies, marketers, researchers, marketing agencies and creative minds at work to realise these changes. Every day new brilliant ideas appear, remarkable campaigns appear, cases are thought through carefully, new techniques and opinions emerge. Ten years ago it was difficult to get a hold of this information, but today bloggers, twitters, online video and marketing agents are constantly providing us with an overload of information. Every day, I get up at 6.30am to scan the information, to organize it and process it in my presentations, plans and speeches. It's my job as inspirator and strategist. I develop my own personal vision and share it with the world, I use the vision of others to improve myself. That's how marketing 2.0 works. So to stay up-to-date yourself, to stay sharp with current developments, sign up on http://reader.google.com. Through the RSS reader, you can follow all your favorite weblogs, read articles, share, archive and pass on. You can bookmark your favorite websites at http://www.delicious.com: millions of internet surfers mark their favorite websites daily, tagging them with key words like 'marketing', 'virals' and thousands of other tags. It's an easy way to create an impressive collection of links to articles and research while also profiting from the knowledge and 'bookmarks' from hundreds of thousands of other users. Share your findings with your team every week. Discuss the most interesting developments that are relevant to your company: stay up-to-date, stay sharp.

Don't stop innovating!

Society is changing, consumers and businesses are changing. This means the commercial strategy must constantly evolve as well: standing still means falling behind. The basic principle of marketing is fulfilling the needs of our target audiences in order to reach optimal commercial results. When those needs change, the company needs to change as well to increase marketing strength and uniqueness. Facilitating this constant change requires investing in innovation. Innovation has to become a key element to the organisational processes.

We pay our bills, lease our cars, hire new staff and invest in new computer equipment. Oddly enough, innovation often falls by the wayside. It's something we'll add if, after paying all the other bills, we still have some time, money and tools left over. But if we want to take commercial progress seriously, we must give innovation a place of its own in our business, and invest a certain percentage of our returns or profits into commercial development. Of course, when doing so we'll use succesful business cases. In times of economic recession, innovation offers the opportunity to become cheaper, smarter, better. It's of utmost importance to keep an anticyclical mind and to use bad times to invest in profitable innovation.

Optimize your channels

During the purchasing process, consumers seldomly limit themselves to using just one channel. They get their information online or from stores, they search comparison sites and check out your competition before deciding where to buy. The product is then delivered by mail, clients receive further instructions through e-mail or telephone. Accessories are bought online or at the store, people browse through mail order catalogues and then browse online to find more information. Orders come in through coupon, online forms, telephone; returning items is done by mail; complaints are expressed by phone. Even the average carpenter faces channel innovation. Returning customers place orders by phone or online. Interested prospects check out the website after viewing an online campaign, which included a zip code application to help them find the nearest store location. Any complaints are returned to the carpenter by phone, personally handled by the service department.

These examples show how many different channels can be used during a purchasing process. Your company attracts clients, informs and advises, places transactions, offers support and generally builds upon the relationship with the client. Consumers don't limit themselves to specific channels, so why should you?

To prevent disappointing your clients, it's important to ensure your channel output complies with customer expectations. Walk through your channels and find out which needs and desires are the most important per channel. Analyzing and optimising your channels and purchasing process phases can lead to significant cost reductions and improvements on return.

Develop and activate your distribution channels

Many products are sold through dealerships or networks of interim sales elements tied to the brand name. An important advantage here lies in spreading sales efforts over a larger amount of stores.

A disadvantage lies in controlling the marketing and sales processes. Afterall, these dealerships can choose between multiple products, brands and suppliers. The biggest challenge is gaining and keeping their loyalty. If they're satisfied with the dealer proposition, that may lead to a strong growth of sales across the whole network. A powerful dealer strategy contains at least these elements: the right selection of products, the right margins, training and service, intelligent marketing communication tools, pull marketing and prospect / lead rewards. Time, money and resources are often scarce and profits are the most important target, so segmenting and managing your dealer channels is crucial.

Internet and new distribution insights influence commercial results. Customers don't always stick to one supplier anymore. For instance, they can now buy their health insurance through the local football club, as it's made arrangements with the insurance agency. Their DELL computer is bought at the local supermarket, not the computer store. The grocery store allows credit, national organisations offer cheap law insurances for businesses. Business-to-business markets are showing changes in distribution as well: companies have to pay attention to possible partnerships for certain target segments. It's expected the partner market will be divided over the coming years and considering partnerships are always aimed at the long term, it's of great importance to design a strong distribution strategy. The organisation has to be suited to the distribution strategy. Good distribution partners can allow for larger volumes, new target groups and lower costs.

Pay attention to individual customer profiles

Eisting clients are five times as profitable as new clients. This means we have to pay extra attention to our eisting group of clients. I already noted I believe mass media will disappear eventually. This means something else will take its place. The existing customer and prospect database plays a big role here. They're your ambassadors, your clients, your network. They chose to become your client or at least show interest in becoming your client. It's not about how large your database is though, it's about the information stored within and the connection between you and your client. A big list of names is useless, but when we combine the list with profiles and preferable attitudes toward our company, we're in business.

A customer profile is a dynamic entity and will have to be kept up-to-date continuously. Using intelligent '2.0' techniques, our relationships set their own preferences and intelligently, we design new questions for clients to answer each month, wrapping them up in games, virals and online interviews. This means we can playfully extend our individual client knowledge base. We extrapolate and enrichen our databases with external information and browsing behavior.

A large group of loyal, 'profiled' relationships is an important source of power for any company. These clients create revenue, new clients, feedback, cost control (cheaper revenue), positive buzz and social branding. If we can build a profile and store behavioral information as well, we can use this information for a personalized approach. Based on browsing behavior, purchases and client- induced buzz, we can create personalized websites, event driven marketing or reward systems.

Customer profiles are accurately turned into an effective marketing approach, lower costs and a source for new clients. That makes individual customer profiles an imporant cost saving tool, excellent for times of recession

Obtain real-time insights in campaign results

Many companies fail to obtain the required insight in their campaigns' marketing results. It's not that hard to get those insights though, and it's impossible to properly adjust your actions without realizing the crossmedial results your campaigns are returning. My experience is that good insights in customer value and campaign results directly lead to better decisions. It doesn't matter if you're spending millions or just a couple thousand dollars on marketing: with the right insights, you can adjust quicker, make better decisions and be ready to strike when the market shows opportunities. Companies who do obtain real-time insights in campaign results, will perform better than their competitors.

I'd even go so far as to say a campaign should not be launched, if its results cannot be presented: it's the most important investment for any commercial organisation.

Create a website that inspires and 'sticks'

For years, website conversion has been stuck at 3%. This means 97% of all visitors does not buy, does not download or does not sign up.

Despite all of our knowledge and techniques, we're still not able to improve this figure. Visitors are quick to leave: online, we have five to ten seconds at most to inspire a visitor. If we don't, he's gone. This 'inspiration' could be anything ranging from a personal video, interactivity or games to surprising content based on behavioral targeting or profile information.

After 'inspiration' (marketer seduces client to stay) follow 'connection' (marketer poses a question), 'dialogue' (marketer and consumer talk) and 'conversion' (consumer buys from marketer). We have to facilitate each of these phases online to improve the results from our web presence. Online visitors have to be placed in an environment and atmosphere that puts them at ease and gently pushes them toward wanting to do what we want them to do: I call this the 'pre-experience'. It allows visitors to almost experience online what they'll experience when they've bought our product or service, stimulating conversion. If a website visitor can almost feel or experience our product or service online as if it were the real thing, our website results will be significantly higher than the 'digital brochures' most companies call their websites.

So pay attention to your 'pre-experience' and think about what kind of experience could raise conversion. Just think of what you'd do when you're talking with a client: you shake your client or prospect's hand, you use your charm and playfully find out his desires or needs. That's how you get that final signature beneath the contract. Translating these interactions to an online environment, we're looking at video Q&A, personal
avatars and behavioral targeting. There are more examples. For instance, think of the excitement and energy of people in a rollercoaster ride, on a beautiful summer's day. Could you grab that feeling, grab that energy, personalize it and unleash it in an online environment? Yes, yes you can! Just look at Nike, Adidas or Meez, who let you create your own online avatar, bringing the shopping experience to your computer monitor.

Remaking' your current website can be very interesting, if coupled with concrete targets. Websites are more and more becoming commercially important tools and we've got to prove that. It's not just sales goals though. We may be looking for profiles (containing client information), e-mail addresses, research data, or
leads and prospects. Those other data are valuable too. Putting those in our business case, it'll pave the road toward getting the budgets you need for serious Webpresence 2.0.

Affect behavior by event driven marketing

By nature, I'm a bit of a lazy guy. I'll gladly invest time, money and effort into a project, but if there are no solid returns to look forward to I won't bother. My laziness also means I'll automate everything I can, leaving me time for smarter, more fun things to do. Marketing communication is one of the areas where automating can be used to great extent, especially when it comes to lead-, cross- and upsell processes. Our automating process starts with the marketing database. Here we find the triggers for actions we'd like to see automatised. There are clients who purchased, clients who didn't, clients who bought a lot of groups of relations we've not heard from for a while. We see birthdays, surfing behavior, newsletter requests or participation in online games. We see certain target groups reaching certain customer values, we see complaints or unpaid bills. All of these things are triggers, and we've got dozens or perhaps even hundreds of them. It makes sense that event driven marketing brings the strongest results. Afterall, it's the client's own actions (an order, complaint, download...) that invite interaction. We can't imagine a better time to act, so long as the interaction is relevent and brought at the right time using the right tools. Based on set triggers, we can design event driven campaigns, startedautomatically when a certain action occurs.

Some examples. A customer could automatically receive an invitation to a seminar after having purchased a certain product. A customer who hires a car could automatically receive directions through a text message. A health insurance agency could automatically offer additional insurances, such as dental care for the kids, when a client buys a basic insurance package. How did you know the client had kids? Why, it was in your marketing database of course, which in turn you've coupled to your event driven marketing
systems!
Theater visitors can be connected to their favorite artists: before the show, during the show, and after the show. Amusement park visitors often buy tickets online. So two weeks before they visit your park, you send them an exciting overview of your amusement park, invite them for an online game, you let them share their results with friends and they can receive a small prize at the amusement park.

Event driven marketing offers endless ways of automatised interaction with target groups, sending every client his own personal campaign, with the right content at the right time. Text, direct mail, personal mini sites, e-mail or personal contact can all be used to interact with the client. Coincidentally, this builds on a company's promise to open a dialogue with the client. If done well, this dialogue is bound to raise loyalty and boost buzz among clients and prospects. I believe that with event driven marketing, 60 to 80% of your
cross- and upsell can be fully automatised, while most of your lead management can be automatised through 'thank you's, comfirmations and phonecalls.

When considering effective marketing and cost reducing measures, event driven marketing comes to mind. Another challenge where event driven marketing works very well, is structurally improving customer value, an otherwise difficult task during recessions. Customer value is where a company gets its profits, and this way we execute our marketing at the most effective moment, automatically!

Event driven marketing ensures we stimulate the company / customer dialogue and ensures we don't miss any sales moments, because all phases of our customer relationship are detected by the automatic triggers. Our IT is ready for it: several campaign management systems support event driven marketing. It's up to us marketers to develop the campaigns and identify the triggers.

Always choose for a crossmedial communication chain aimed at your target audience

Your client uses multiple media simultaneously. This is no longer limited to offline media such as print, radio and television. Consumers have become fully crossmedial, exposing themselves to all crossmedial stimuli before choosing to convert. Today's consumer combines radio and internet, television and print, a phone conversation and the direct mail they receive. The ultimate combination of crossmedial instruments is the combination that gives the best returns, and it may not always be the most obvious combination. It takes creativity, a lot of testing and analyzing to figure out your perfect crossmedia combination, and it won't be the same for different target groups.
A communication chain for a young target group will contain a lot more online media, while an older target group will prefer more offline media. An interesting fact however, is that online sales in Q3 and Q4 are largely determined by the latter category: older people do find their way online. When setting up your crossmedial communication chain, make sure to put your channels in the right order. Study the customer insights and find out which instruments are used. Study the combinations used and the results. Once you've figured out which instruments to use, you can determine their functions, content and connection. For instance, you could launch a teaser through text messages: the content will have to be interesting and connected to the follow-up direct mail or e-mail. A similar procedure can be used for television and radio commercials, a mini website, specific online campaigns or telesales. For each target group and for each action, you engage the right instruments. Having done so, it's time to take a look at the campaign management system and keep track of the results in a crossmedial campaign dashboard. Often, executing a campaign using your own 'systems' is impossible: new techniques or possibilities are limited when a marketer's own IT department is not up-to-date. When it comes to crossmedial campaigns, outsourcing is often a viable if not the only solution. The costs are worth it: in return you gain speed and flexibility. Smart crossmedial campaigns can lead to very significant and very large results. Keep in mind though, as said in a previous article, when it comes to innovations and launching new processes: start small, finish big!

Ensure unique core values and prove them!

Brands have to be unique, generate trust, and enjoy preference and appreciation from customers. Those are four core values we've all seen in marketing literature. These brands now have to comply to several new demands, put forth by the marketing economy. Brands now have to also be honest and transparent. They have to be co-operative and accessible. The problem is, many companies already believe they're unique and offer the best product and serivce. We're all trustworthy, we're all 'your partner in...'. The core values form the basics for our companies, but they also form the input to our creative processes before leading to product or brand communication. Brands can be dynamic, exciting, passionate, sensible, inspiring or naughty. After establishing the core values, we have to prove them. What is it that makes us dynamic, exciting or sensible? What proof do we have of being passionate or inspiring?

When brands prove their core values time and again, this will have a strong effect on a customer's brand appreciation. Highly appreciated brands can ask more from consumers, because these brands 'manage' the perceptions a client has when making his purchasing decision. The higher margins can then be used to invest in even more brand stability. In times of economic recession, clients look for solid ground and often
end up with the brands they know will do what they promise. In following articles, I'll show you that building a brand doesn't have to be expensive.