marketing agency

I had the privilege last week of hosting and moderating a panel session for the #TAGTribe community all about the Connected Customer and Company.

The panel featured JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com, Jon Silk, Head of Digital at Waggener Edstrom London, and For Immediate Release co-host Neville Hobson. We had a wide-ranging discussion with Q&A from the audience that addressed the broad topic of “your connected customer and company”.

You can listen to the audio recording which was broadcast as a ‘For Immediate Release: Speaker and Speeches’ podcast by clicking on the play button below:

You can also enjoy the tweet stream and various photos from the night by browsing the Storify here too:

The event was organised by Bernie Mitchell of Engaging People and hosted by Waggener Edstrom in their London offices. Interestingly “Wag Ed” did some analysis of the evening and found there were 350 positive tweets which reached 75,566 twitter influencers and created 560,745 impressions!

I had the pleasure last night of delivering another marketing planning workshop with friend and colleague Phil Szomszor. We were speaking at the Social Media Engagement 3.0 (SME 3.0) workshop organised by Bernie Mitchell at Moore Stephens‘ offices in London.

This is the second time we’ve put this session together for Bernie. It essentially revolves around the idea that SMEs could and should be much better at planning their marketing. Why do we all think it’s OK to simply start doing, what happened to strategy?

We work with a volunteer company (in this instance Set Square surveyors) to crowd source elements of their marketing plan. We had great feedback from the last edition of this event and so far people seem to have enjoyed last night’s session too (feedback via Bernie’s survey appreciated),

Here are the slides for those of you who’d like to review what we discussed.

Phil and I will be doing this session again later on in the year. If you’d like to volunteer your business, simply drop me a line.

If you want a high level, whistle stop tour of how Google works, check this video out from Google’s very own Matt Cutts.

If you want to start getting your head around search engine optimisation, you’ll find this really quite useful.

One of the key skills we have as an agency is helping brands to find opportunities for their senior execs to speak at conferences in the UK and globally. We’ve worked with some of the world’s largest brands in this area, along with many smaller firms and even consultants.

We’ve been preparing an introductory presentation on the value of speaking opportunities for a new client and I wanted to share the slide on ‘Why?’.

In our opinion speaking opportunities:

So there you have it. Think seriously about building speaking opportunities into your communications mix.

Photo copyright Xtrashot.

I’ve written a lot on the blog about customer feedback. It’s something we view as critical to the success of our business and encourage clients to think the same way.

You might think the challenge is in getting feedback in the first instance. Actually we’ve found by putting a clear and consistent structure in place for collecting feedback, it’s quite a straight forward exercise.

The difficult part is actually deciding what to do with the feedback you collect. I found a great example on YouTube of how a dentist in Florida used some negative feedback to his advantage. He listened to his customer, took action and the result was to turn a dissatisfied customer into long term happy customer. Exactly what you would hope for right.

Watch this video to find out more. It’s around 5 minutes long, but very entertaining, so stick with it to the end.

Let us know some examples of how you have used customer feedback to your advantage.

If you don’t know the answer, it’s about time you did.

Not only are your existing customers keeping your business alive, they are also likely to be a good source of new revenue too. There’s a well known stat from Bain & Co that it’s 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new client than to retain a current one.

There’s a blog post on Big Girl Branding about keeping hold of customers that’s worth a quick read.

With this in mind it’s important you measure your customers’ happiness. We do this regularly through ongoing ad-hoc feedback and we also introduced over a year ago a twice yearly satisfaction survey. Our stance is that of fearless listening which so far has not been as painful as it sounds.

The results of our latest survey are now in and we’re delighted with the results, a sample of which you can see here (the higher the percentage score the better):

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

Average: 90%

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

Average: 87%

Klaxon provides creative ideas and solutions:

Average: 85%

How happy would you be recommending Klaxon?

Average 85%

How happy are your customers?

Image copyright Granit Chartered Architects and Joe Clark Photography

There are times in your career that you meet smart people, people who you know are going to the top. The subject of this week’s ‘Interview with a Marketer’ is one of those folks.

We first came across Miguel when he joined HP’s European communications team and he made an immediate impact on how we as the agency worked and the results we all achieved. Miguel’s background of big brand employers told us he was going to be on the ball and he was exactly that. Since then Miguel has moved to San Diego to market HP’s great looking Smart Marketing Suite product and also spending some time in the printing division too if I’m not mistaken.

Usually not short of conversation, Miguel has answered our interview questions in a quick to the point style, so feel free to ask for more detail in the comments and we may just glean some other pearls of wisdom. (I for one would love to know more about the trials in augmented reality Miguel mentions).

1.      What’s your name and where do you come from?

MIGUEL ADAO, DIRECTOR SMART MARKETING SUITE AMERICAS, HP

HP IS IN THE IT/SOFTWARE/CONSULTING SECTOR

2.       What are the key marketing challenges you’re facing over the next 12 months?

CONVINCING CMO’S THAT HP’S SMART MARKETING SUITE OF PRODUCTS WILL HELP THEM REDUCE MARKETING COSTS, AND IMPROVE MARKETING EFFICIENCY

3.       What marketing tactics have been most effective for you in the last 12 months?

LEVERAGING MY NETWORK OF PARTNERS, BOTH INTERNALLY IN HP AND EXTERNALLY.

4.       What metrics have you been using to measure the success of your marketing campaigns?

INVESTMENT, AND RETURN ($’S SPENT, AND INCREMENTAL $’S EARNED)

5.       How has your marketing strategy evolved with the advent of new social media tools such as twitter and facebook?

FRANKLY, NOT ALL THAT MUCH. MY MARKETING IS MORE AIMED AT LARGE ENTERPRISES, NOT CONSUMERS.

6.       Are you planning on using any new marketing technologies in the next 12 months? (e.g. marketing automation, augmented reality, QR codes)

YES, WE WILL PROBABLY RUN PILOTS WITH ALL OF THOSE

7.       What are the key elements of a strong agency client relationship?

UNDERSTANDING OF EACH OTHER’S OBJECTIVES, PRIORITIES AND PAIN-POINTS

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.

Recently I was sitting with a client (a large comms agency) listening to one of their client service leaders talking about building strong customer relationships and the importance of gaining feedback. The term used was “fearless listening”, the idea that you should not be afraid to ask for feedback in case you think it will be bad. The opposite to burying your head in the sand if you will.

We’ve been encouraging our clients to ask for feedback for as long as we can remember too. In fact we run regular customer satisfaction surveys for one of our longest standing clients. This allows us to track changes in performance, identify trends and highlight any areas where the client needs to raise its game. In the last four years this process alone has helped to improve customer satisfaction significantly.

With this in mind we decided it was high time we conducted some fearless listening ourselves and have begun surveying our customers. It’s been an eye opening experience so far with a huge amount of positives identified, along with one or two areas where we can improve. We have been delighted our Net Promoter Scores that’s for sure.

If you aren’t already asking your customers for feedback, start now. It doesn’t need to be a great big survey, it can be as simple as asking the question ‘are you happy with the service we’re providing?’ The important thing is to start collecting feedback, recording your customers views – both positive and negative – and making sure you take action on any of the areas for improvement. You will be surprised how this can focus your mind on the customer, which after all is what marketing is all about.

Over the years we’ve worked with and for some pretty interesting and impressive marketers. Most of our experience is in the b2b space, but we have also worked with large b2c brands and those SME captains working their magic with much smaller budgets.

The one thing they all share is the ability to perform in the marketing stakes, whether the goal is building brand awareness, generating sales leads, developing new products, or other. They all have some valuable experiences and skill sets we’d like to tap into.

Consequently we’re going to be asking these marketers to share their knowledge with a series of ‘Interviews with a Marketer’ blog posts. We’ll be asking a handful of short questions covering strategy, tactics, measurement / ROI and of course that all important area of social media.

We’re kicking off the series below with Dirk Kelly, Customer Relationship Marketing Manager for Cunard. Dirk’s marketing career ranges from the travel sector, to financial services, sports and home ware and he’s been in the business for over 12 years. We’re confident he has some serious value to add. He also works for one of the great global travel brands.

Enjoy and please add your comments and questions below.

1. What’s your name and where do you come from?

Dirk Kelly, Customer Relationship Marketing Manager, Cunard Line, Travel sector.

2. What are the key marketing challenges you’re facing over the next 12 months?

With our new vessel, Queen Elizabeth, which entered service in October 2010 we have the challenge of filling an extra 36% of capacity in a touch economic climate. Key for us therefore over the next 12 months is getting the right level of newcomers into the business while ensuring our existing guests rebook in sufficient volume early to maintain yields and brand values.

As an international brand with passengers sourced from four keys markets – UK, North America, Germany and Australia – changes in oil prices, political unrest etc. adversely affect our business model and thus the challenge is to keep nimble so if things change we can adapt to fill our ships.

3. What marketing tactics have been most effective for you in the last 12 months?

Our traditional marketing tactics such as Advertising and DM are still where we invest the vast majority of our marketing spend and continue to produce the greatest return on investment. However we have seen some great results through email, PPC, SEO and with our social media channels.

We recently sponsored an area at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show with early indications that this has been successful and met our objectives.

All in all we still largely operate within traditional means, but with the new marketing tactics increasingly coming to the fore. Already next year we will be investing more in PPC and SEO than ever before. Competitions also work well for us.

However if we could launch a new ship every year we would. Nothing compares to the PR and airtime (both tv and radio) that we get worldwide when a new Cunard Queen enters service!

4. What metrics have you been using to measure the success of your marketing campaigns?

We use a whole suite of metrics to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns. We’re a B2C company and we’re fortunate to get all of our customers’ data, allowing us to track and attribute results to the correct channel.

Direct Mail: We use a variety depending on the campaign – booking conversion to numbers mailed, revenue, £ ROI, %ROI, number of voyages featured vs. £ ROI from each voyage.

Email: Cost per booking, booking conversion to numbers emailed, revenue, open rate, click rate and click to open rates.

Brand Website: Total visits, unique visits, time on site, conversion rate (direct bookings) and lead generation.

SEO: Cost per click, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, click through rate, conversion rate (direct bookings).

Advertising: Cost per booking, cost per lead, cost per acquisition and number of brochure requests.

Social Media: number of likes, followers and watchers, number of times we were mentioned in posts and the number of people who would see that, number of tweets we were mentioned in, number of our tweets that were seen and retweeted, clicks to links, number of bookings and revenue generated.

5. How has your marketing strategy evolved with the advent of new social media tools such as twitter and facebook?

As a business we have fully embraced the new world of social media and have a dedicated full time resource managing our social media strategy across all platforms – blog, facebook, twitter and YouTube.

We fully believe in letting our guests and newcomers talk to us when, where and how they want. Over the last few years more time and investment has been put into social media and our strategy has changed according to developments in the social media space, in some instances feeding off the traditional marketing we are doing and vice versa.

For example recently we have held interactive voyages where our social media executive and some key bloggers travelled on board a voyage. We asked our followers to dictate what they did on board and they reported back via blog post updates during the journey. This was spectacularly successful for us in terms of content, interaction and number of likes and followers, but we also utilised the content in our emails, DM and loyalty magazine with successful results.

6. Are you planning on using any new marketing technologies in the next 12 months?

We aim to be more customer centric in our approach to communicating with our database. As such in the next few months we will be implementing a new database that covers all Carnival UK brands (P&O Cruises, Princess Cruises, Cunard Line and Ocean Village) into a single customer view.

A result of this is that we are purchasing SmartFocus to plug into our new CRM system to drive our communications strategy. We hope this will get us to a place where we are talking to our guests and providing them with the information they want, when they want it, that is relevant and personalised. We expect this to translate to improvements in both acquisition and retention metrics.

This new technology enable us to capture a great wealth of customer data in one place, providing us with a greater understanding our guests and the ability to improve the targeting of our marketing campaigns. It has been a four year project and only now coming to fruition.

7. What are the key elements of a strong agency client relationship?

Trust and open and honest communications.