General Business

I read an excellent article in this quarter’s Market Leader written by Mahesh Enjeti from SAI Marketing Counsel in Sydney.

Mahesh reasons that marketers have lost their seat at the top table, frequently relegated from strategic decision making to more tactical promotional and marketing execution roles. The rise of social media and the modern day marketers’ desire to deliver likes, shares and engagement online, has done nothing to raise the profile of marketing at all. It really needs to start conversing at a business / P&L level.

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And would Steve Ballmer have the courage to make such a play?

Here’s my thinking.

Dell and HP until the last few years were the undisputed heavy weights of the PC making world. However with the lower cost base afforded to Acer, Lenovo and co, they have been struggling to keep pace and losing market share in an increasingly commoditised and price sensitive market.

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We regularly survey our clients to make sure we’re delivering what they want and need from an agency.  As part of our commitment to transparency we also report our customer sat scores here on the blog.

These results are from the first half of financial year 2012-2013 – apologies it has taken us a while to publish them. However we are rightly pleased with the scores, although they are not without room for improvement.

Klaxon delivers quality work, on time and with clear communications:

Average: 8.6 / 10

Klaxon offers intelligent advice and consultancy

Average: 8 / 10

Klaxon understands the market place and offers appropriate ideas and counsel:

Average: 8 / 10

Your assessment of Klaxon’s performance overall:

Average: 8 / 10

How happy would you be recommending Klaxon?

Average: 7.5 / 10

It’s Christmas, which means along with over eating and drinking, we’ll all have some time to pause, reflect and recharge ahead of a new year.

2012 has been a real roller coaster for team Klaxon. Challenges from onboarding new clients and losing existing ones. People joining our team and leaving our team.  Breaking into new territories with our first clients in the Netherlands and Slovakia. Bringing in new technology partnerships with Nimble (social CRM) and Pardot (marketing automation).

The list goes on…

It has also been a year of learning for us. We’ve made a few mistakes along the way, but the biggest learning by far has been to focus.  By that I mean to focus on the service areas where we can achieve the most in terms of performance, client satisfaction and ultimately margins.

Those of you who have come across us before will hopefully already have started to see a change in our brand and messaging to reflect this. Anyone notice the new website for example?

Another key learning this year is to ask ourselves ‘Why’?

Prompted by the excellent TED Talk from Simon Sinek (watch below) we’re going to be asking this key question of ourselves.

Why are we running our b2b marketing and lead generation agency? What are we hoping to achieve?

The answer cannot be profits, which as Simon tells you in his excellent talk, is a result of doing business. It’s not a reason why.

Please end the year by watching this talk and start the year by asking yourself that crucial and challenging question. Why?

As it’s Christmas, I wanted to write a an awfully seasonal blog post for you all to enjoy. Without further ado, here goes my 12 Days of Lead Generation

On the first day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
A social media marketing machine.

On the second day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the third day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the fourth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the fifth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Five optimised landing pages,
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the sixth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Six perfect blog posts,
Five optimised landing pages,
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the seventh day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Seven engaging podcasts,
Six perfect blog posts,
Five optimised landing pages,
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the eighth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Eight Payperclick ads,
Seven engaging podcasts,
Six perfect blog posts,
Five optimised landing pages,
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the ninth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Nine brand new webinars,
Eight Payperclick ads,
Seven engaging podcasts,
Six perfect blog posts,
Five optimised landing pages,
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the tenth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Ten twitter research reports,
Nine brand new webinars,
Eight Payperclick ads,
Seven engaging podcasts,
Six perfect blog posts,
Five optimised landing pages,
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

On the eleventh day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Eleven half day workshops,
Ten twitter research reports,
Nine brand new webinars,
Eight Payperclick ads,
Seven engaging podcasts,
Six perfect blog posts,
Five optimised landing pages,
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Twelve email broadcasts,
Eleven half day workshops,
Ten twitter research reports,
Nine brand new webinars,
Eight Payperclick ads,
Seven engaging podcasts,
Six perfect blog posts,
Five optimised landing pages,
Four days of telemarketing,
Three speaking slots,
Two brand new eBooks, and
A social media marketing machine.

 If you’ve got this far well done you. Imagine trying to sing that after a couple of glasses of Sherry on Christmas Day.

And last but not least, enjoy this classic rendition of the Twelve Days of Christmas…

I came across this slide deck from Lingo Social recently on slideshare (via Publicate.it) that has some excellent frameworks to help startups – and any company really – to create a rock solid value proposition.

Unsure what that means? A value proposition is effectively how you tell the market and your target customer what you can do for them. Often referred to as an elevator pitch.

Personally I like Geoff Moore’s framework the most, largely due to it’s simplicity and directness.

If you can’t run through that framework for your business, it’s time you took a long hard look at yourselves. Chances are, if you don’t understand who you are and what you do clearly enough, neither will your target customers.

We found this video in YouTube recently, posted by Hungarian marketing and communications magazine Kreatív.  It explores in a rather lovely way the relationship between good creative work and time.

It can be all to easy to squeeze the timeframe on creative work when in reality, for better results, you need to give your creatives more time to think: whether designing a new logo, drafting some copy, or planning out a story board.

Speaking with a client yesterday, I was a little taken aback when he said he’d not heard of cloud computing. For me it’s a very common term and has been for a couple of years, but I work a lot in the tech sector so this should be expected.

However, cloud computing offers too many opportunities for any company so I wanted to find and share with him an introduction to what it’s all about. As you might expect, Salesforce.com has produced an excellent intro video (see below) which explains the fundamentals in simple terms.

Whether you want to reduce costs by shifting your email infrastructure from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail, or speeding up your customer relationship management with Salesforce.com rather than an expensive enterprise edition of SAP for example, Cloud Computing is definitely a journey you want to go on.

I came across the excellent slide deck below of 101 Awesome Marketing Quotes pulled together by Hubspot.

Well worth a read if you’re looking for some interesting quotes – particularly great if you are in a spot looking for inspiration for a blog post or a presentation for example…