MARKETING SERVICES

Each and every business carries its own, unique set of needs as many needs - to that end, there is no one-size fits all CMO - as there is no one-size fits all marketing organization. You need the benefit of experience and knowledge when considering how to build, augment, manage or lead this critical competence. Larger and more established businesses with existing teams may be considering appointing a CMO role - however sometimes this may be cost-prohibitive. Small or medium sized enterprises may need a turn-key marketing solution to 'plug-in' to an existing team. 

Research, analysis and insights elevate you over your competition. There are many reasons why a business seeks to undertake a research effort, and as many subject areas, whether to: 

1. Assert presence as an industry thought leader 
2. Build empirical market models to help strategy and scenario planning or  
3. Forensically define the personas of your key customer stakeholders to help engagement 
4. Competitively track your brand awareness, loyalty and associations  

Industry insight opens doors and broadens access across your customer base. Persona insight helps you better understand and target your customers. These are the cornerstones of marketing as the right message sent at the right time to the right target, informs and motivates action. 

Marketing strategy provides the mechanism to implement your brand and business positioning, helping you reach, engage and win new customers. Too often however planning is unfocused or unaligned to primary business need; or limited by the perceived capabilities of the team rather than on driving the success of the organization. A strong understanding of what contributes most to top-line sales and profit, and which segments are growing fastest ensures the foundation of the strategy is based on business fundamentals. 

Quite apart from establishing a strong narrative and engagement, your Marketing Strategy must also build an emotional link to your target audiences and go on to establish a scalable, customer-centric, approach that can adapt to your changing business reality. It must account for the skillsets, people and marketing tools / technology and be ultimately quantifiable and able to demonstrate impact and return to your business. 

You may have a specific, shorter-term, more tactical need to drive focus into a single area in which a cross section of all these elements are brought to bear on a specific business segment, for example to drive growth; or functional area - such as driving Account-Based or Deal-Based marketing program, to augment a customer acquisition program or enhance win-rates. 

The purpose of product marketing is to bring a product to market and promote it to target customers. Great product marketing however delivers a story, so compelling that your customers become your advocates and storytellers.  

Most of us didn't experience the 1949 unveiling of VW's iconic Camper Van, however through the 50's and 60's and to this day, it still evokes warm images of endless summers, friends and family, and a simpler, more caring time. So was it any surprise that VW's announcement of the new, electric version (ID Buzz) was to an anthem of Simon and Garfunkel's 'Sound of Silence' (electric... silent), to beach imagery and moderno-hippy, environment-conscious, happy-camping family. Sounds like a run-away success, when you can buy one! 

A clear product strategy is essential to delivering a product proposition - especially one that creates a contextually relevant, emotional connection. The more accessible and compelling, the more your salespeople, distribution and customers will understand it and the more successful you will be. 

Messaging fundamentally explains your proposition and the value it adds to your customer. Simple? No. 

"At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock" was possibly the best and most successful message ever used by the business. A quote from the technical editor of The Motor and penned by David Ogilvy, his genius is recognizing these precise words speak to the heart of the buying audience. Somehow a feature-benefit ad talking to the power steering and brakes, or driver-adjustable shock-absorbers just wouldn't do. 

Messaging may serve many purposes and serve more than your buying audience. Simon Sinek asserts 'People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it.' and this is true - it can help shape a longer-term strategy for a more purpose-driven brand. While businesses usually consider their marketing messaging focused on prospective customers, it is equally effective with investors. A glance at Tesla's share price versus their fundamentals suggests shareholder sentiment continues to be bullish - A heavy hand has helped position them as 'the inevitable future', and they have been handsomely rewarded for it.

Your Brand is your identity - an assurance of trust to your customers and quite possibly your strongest differentiation in a cluttered market. It represents the accessible face and personality of your business to your customers, and shapes opinions of prospective customers. We believe it needs to be human, personal and provide your customers an ability to connect with you. 

“We knew very little about marketing or branding when we started Virgin Records, back in 1972. We simply formed the business around our personal values, and went from there. Virgin’s success can be attributed to a lot of different things; however this was the best decision we ever made.” Richard Branson 

And while Virgin has expanded exponentially since its humble beginnings - from vacations, airlines and even space - the essential brand values remain today. 

Consider Apple. Their spacious and un-fussy stores, staffed by t-shirt wearing staff, providing consistently friendly help, advice and recommendations. The environment is focused on the products; the staff on helping you get the most from the products; and even when something goes awry, with a pre-booked slot, it’s generally solved quickly and efficiently. How better to engage with possibly the most successful consumer electronics technology business today? 

Like making life-long friendships, building a credible brand takes time - people trust and verify - It’s a journey, but not one which can’t be helped-along. Brand provides structure, meaning and context, from the values you wish to amplify, your reason for being, all the way down to the forensics of naming of your products. 

When there is a burning question, a search-engine and the internet is often the first place people turn. This behavior has a direct relevance to content marketing for your business and its overall visibility. 

Search engines reward high quality, relevant and authoritative content with higher search rankings and greater visibility. Why is this important? A team researching ahead of a possible RFQ do so anonymously. By the time they actively engage you, the decision-making cycle is mostly complete. By then, new business may already have been lost as you become an ‘also-ran’ in a bidding cycle. Therefore the earlier you can engage during their research process, the higher the probability you’ll convert to your way of thinking and the greater probability you’ll have of winning that new business. 

Content is the first port of call to build new prospects. And it's those new prospects that form your future customer base.

How marketing has changed over the last 15-20 years! Micro-targeting personas, custom-serving ads, building behavioural models and the ability to identify anonymous web traffic, is all a far cry from buying ‘AB, prime-time ad space’ or a ‘Double-page spread in Condé Nast’. 

Supporting the digital revolution of advertising is a vast amount of data, and a wealth of tools, under a banner of ‘MarTech’. A Gartner study of CMO’s across North America and the UK shows more than a quarter of marketing budgets are allocated to Marketing Technology ‘MarTech’ (https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/articles/4-key-findings-in-the-annual-gartner-cmo-spend-survey-2019-2020), and core investment priorities are in data and analytics moving forwards. 

The question is which are the right marketing platforms, processes and organisation, to support your industry, and to deliver the expected user-experience, data insight and learning for your business. 

The answer is dependent on your objectives, current infrastructure, data and expertise, and most often takes shape as a journey the business embarks upon. That journey develops not just marketing technology, but team skills and processes - And as more sophisticated insights evolve, the business starts to ask more sophisticated questions and so it goes on.

‘On average, customers progress nearly 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales rep’ according to CEB.

Today’s buyers are in a stronger position than ever to research and compare competitive offerings. Product performance, service responsiveness and even employee satisfaction are matter of clicks away so that puts the obligation on you to integrate into their research cycle as early as possible.  

A well-trained team backed-up by a robust set of content goes a long-way to add value. So does your CRM serve up content relevant to customer, persona and funnel stage within a sales rep’s dashboard? Do you know what’s been provided to any given customer, whether they have reviewed and if it’s time to follow-up? What’s the process to capture sales-rep’s needs to bridge content gaps?