Richard van Hooijdonk

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.

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

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.

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.

Let your customers create your products (co- creation)

Who are you to know what your clients need? Aren't they the ones who know what they want, and aren't you the one to use that information? A lot has been said and written about co-creation, where you use large groups of customers or consumers to develop new products. The basics are simple: you can take a certain starting point and let your clients work from there to come up with something better.

Using a special 'interaction model', all those new ideas are then classified and turned into specific product scenarios. It's an excellent way to obtain and use customer insights!

In following articles, we'll take a closer look at the 'stage-gate' development process, a process that allows you to efficiently turn a market scan into a new product launch. In recent years I've used this method to launch many new products and services, almost always with great results!

Marketeer fails to properly utilize client data

There may be a wealth of information available on clients, marketeers still don't make proper use of the resources they have at their disposal. Consulting agency De Informatiegroep assigned MarketResponse to research how well marketeers use the data they obtain from their clients. MarketResponse questioned both marketeers and executives on the availability, quality and usage of marketing data. Less than three out of ten said they have full insight in the desires of their clients.

 

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are very common among businesses, yet marketeers remain unaware on how to properly extract useful information from the software. Valuable information is frequently stored but rarely made to good use. Instead of working out how to make the most of CRM systems, marketeers all too often stick to more familiar methods such as traditional market research. When collecting data on clients or competitors, it's clear many marketeers aren't working as efficiently as they should.

Strategic tools reinvent customer value

Before the introduction of this tool, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) was used to measure customer value. CLV however does not allow for Customer Referral Value (CRV) to be taken into account. CRV includes customer satisfaction and word-of-mouth advertising by the customer.

The new tool allows clients to be categorized in four different groups. The CLV, CRV and value of the purchases are all measured. The first category of customers is the afluents. These customers purchase regularly, but don't advertise. The second category is the advocates. They purchase less, but do a lot of word-of-mouth advertising. The third category is the cham pions: they purchase a lot and adv ertise regularly as well. The  fourth and final category is the missers: customers who rarely purchase or advertise, if at all.

Research shows that returns are higher than investments when companies base their marketing efforts upon segmentation. The new strategic tools offer marketers a helpful hand in making their decisions.

Customer reviews prove profitable

An increasing number of businesses is finding out it can sway online reviews in its favor by posing as customers and positively reviewing its own products. Meanwhile, consumers are catching on to these questionable business practices and keep in mind that online reviews aren't always 100% trustworthy. Nonetheless, online customer reviews have a positive influence on buying behavior. Online clothing store Netshops and the University of Nebraska conducted a study on the effects of online customer reviews and concluded that online reviews stimulate online purchases.

For twelve months, sales figures and review scores were kept track of in order to analyze the relationship between the two. Seasonal influences and changes to websites were eliminated as potential disruptive factors. As it turned out, customer reviews proved very profitable: product reviews pushed sales resulting in a 26% turnover increase!

Marketeer fails to properly utilize client data

There may be a wealth of information available on clients, marketeers still don't make proper use of the resources they have at their disposal. Consulting agency De Informatiegroep assigned MarketResponse to research how well marketeers use the data they obtain from their clients. MarketResponse questioned both marketeers and executives on the availability, quality and usage of marketing data. Less than three out of ten said they have full insight in the desires of their clients.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are very common among businesses, yet marketeers remain unaware on how to properly extract useful information from the software. Valuable information is frequently stored but rarely made to good use. Instead of working out how to make the most of CRM systems, marketeers all too often stick to more familiar methods such as traditional market research. When collecting data on clients or competitors, it's clear many marketeers aren't working as efficiently as they should.