Friday, July 10, 2009

Lead generation now top marketing goal


Publishing the results of market research is always good publicity and the latest survey from the engineering search engine, Globalspec is no exception. Two of the headline findings are that customer acquisition and lead generation have become the primary marketing goals and that 3 of the top marketing channels are now online channels. Those 3 incidentally were online directories/web sites, e-mail and search engine optimisation. Some 29% of businesses polled spend more than 50% of their marketing budget online and 48% advised they were intending to spend a bigger proportion of their marketing budget online. On the other hand only 11% cited brand awareness as their top marketing objective, down from 21% in 2008. Most concurred that they were seeking good quality sales leads.

There are a number of benefits that online marketing brings, in particular greater immediacy and measureability - plus customers are online. It again questions the future of the hard-to-measure display advertising business model in trade publications, which are often more about branding these days than lead generation. Typically published monthly, trade press display advertising is a slower response medium and requires expensive surveys to fully evaluate and measure. By contrast last week we put together an e-mail campaign designed to prompt sales of remaindered product which actually accounted for 25% of all traffic to the client web site that week and resulted in closure on sales that otherwise would have been stock write offs. In fact many traditional marketing channels should be revisited including trade shows and brochures, but all with a note of caution because a mix of marketing methods will still be more effective than over working a single channel. Too many e-mails and customers and prospects switch off. Better to make judicious use of multiple channels many of which can be online. Keep the web site current and here news is a great way to both achieve this and to keep customers interested and informed in a less pressured way. If you do not already have an online news service such as Virtual News Office then this could be a good way of channeling some of the online marketing investment.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Who has control of the company web site?

There is little doubt that the company web site has become the hub of a marketing communications plan. Anecdotal information suggests that investment in good quality brochures is declining, technical data is presented in PDF form rather than print and material that is printed is more often short runs of digital print. Direct face-to-face sales visits are less common than telephone sales, so increasingly it is the role of the web site to provide information and generate sales leads in a process entirely driven by the enquirer and potential prospect. The largest number of visitors arrive at the site via search and consequently the process of search optimisation has spawned its own industry. An industry that is self-perpetuating thanks to the mystery surrounding the actual search parameters rewarded by the search engines and the continually changing techniques to achieve high ranking. To some extent this has not surprisingly led to a focus on the technology of the web site rather than content. Add to this factors such as content management systems and it is easy to see that achieving good results is weighted in favour of getting the technical aspects right and forgetting about the content of the site and visitor experience. There is a danger of the initiative moving towards IT people away from marketing - a dangerous situation. Of course it is important to get the web site technically and operationally correct but the content and process must be marketing led to ensure the conversation with the enquirer takes the right path, that at all stages the visitor can find the information needed, can easily contact the company for further help and most importantly can be guided to the ordering process. And this is a role for marketing that is more important than the underlying technology.