loud-clear-blog

In-source versus outsource (The B2B Marketing Department)

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:18:29 +0100

Recently I had an interesting debate with a CEO who has built her business sustainably and profitably over a long period of time. She has a lot to be proud of and has done this without any on-board marketing expertise.

Her view point was that she wanted to build a marketing function slowly within her own business, a laudable ‘roll your sleeves up’ attitude. Mine was that having worked for many a large organisation, and quite a few small ones, I have rarely seen this work successfully. Here are a few reasons why:

Designers – lose their creativity and stop thinking from the target client perspective. The work becomes stale and it is hard to rise above the emotional baggage gained along the way.

Copywriters – get too close to the copy, have their words pulled apart by everyone in the business and often don’t start from the view point of the wider target market.

PRs – Can’t possibly create enough juicy content (or be useful enough) to keep all their journalistic contacts interested, taking their calls and covering the organisation in the media.

I could go on...

Don’t just see “all the cost and none of the value”

In general it is difficult for in-house staff to stay abreast of current trends and marketing developments without a) a boss that lets them out of the building occasionally and b), a training and expenses budget.

The usual driver for building an in-house team is that those holding the purse strings see “all the cost and none of the value” in external suppliers. And as a side issue the same people tend to proclaim: “How can agencies possibly know my business as well as someone from within it?” They can’t. That is however precisely my point.... one can lose all sense of perspective as a permanent employee.

External agencies, because of their spread of clients and differing peaks and troughs in workloads, can offer highly specialist skills at the right time, for what’s actually not very much extra money.

The pay-off?

Marketing Communications that kick-arse every time, oh sorry, I mean, deliver significantly higher response rates due to their: insight of the target audience; appreciation of the competitive landscape; enhanced creativity; use of modern techniques; application of lessons learnt on other clients work etc. etc. etc.

What do you need? Some seriously talented, multi-facetted, in-house marketing execs that report to an even more wonderous marketing manager/director. Oh, and leaders with vision.

Wishing you a very merry Christmas!

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:35:26 +0100

Twitter User/Usage Stats via @theWallUK

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:59:01 +0100

Social Media Training

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:15:14 +0100

Social Media Training

On your premises – 2 hours – max 10 people

For a couple of years now I have been delivering social media training, this is for a few reasons: I get terribly passionate about it the moment someone gets me started on the subject; I have attended a number of other social media talks and found them to be quite misguided; I did well in the social media module on my digital marketing certificate and, folk keep asking me to!

What the training includes:

- understand the power of social media and why it is important
- the kinds of things you should be talking about
- who are you talking to?
- the goals of social media
- how social impacts search
- how 'it' works, who owns your brand?
- the risks involved in social media
- the barriers to engaging in social media
- the rules of social media and dealing with a crisis

The training takes 2 hours and can be given to up to 10 people at a time and so far has always taken place on the client site, but if you need a different model please just say so.

Please contact me today to find out how I can help you.

Wikipedia: Did you know?

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:17:35 +0100

Wikipedia: Did you know?

Yesterday I attended an ExactTarget event in London. The event had a keynote from the Founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. He had some interesting insights into Wikipedia to share....

- Wikipedia gets 408M unique visitors per month, this dwarfs most top newspapers combined
- There are 20M entries in 270 languages on Wikipedia worldwide
- Wikipedia has an 87% male audience with an average age of 26
- The Wikipedia audience has twice as many phd’s than that of the general public
- Wikipedia is a registered charity and it's aim is to provide a free encyclopaedia that is available to everyone.

Klout - social media news

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:53:39 +0100

This week Klout hit the tech news as it changed its algorithm (see TechCrunch article, no body gives a damn about your Klout score) but I'm guessing many of you don't even know what Klout is, so here is an amusing video posted by @theWallUK.

Klout is an online social network reputation and reach (influence) monitoring tool, producing a score for people who create an account with them. BTW - my score is 17 today... (31st Oct)

Now it's: 45!!! (22nd November)

Get Creative – a picture is worth a thousand words

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 08:27:28 +0100

Get Creative – a picture is worth a thousand words

Do you know about iStock? Sign up to their monthly newsletter for beautiful images and the occasional free one!

They have something called ‘lightbox’ functionality – this means you can select images that you would like to share with others and simply point those people to a web address where they can see all the images you have selected.

This can be a handy starting point when you are trying to work out how to develop a campaigns creative element. In my experience it can be hard to describe how you would like something to look, you can use the lightbox tool to explain it for you.

A creative element to every campaign is really important to help you stand out from the crowd and it can say a lot about who you are (what your business stands for), who you are targeting, are you cheap/expensive etc. See my previous blog: 6 things to do before you engage the designer.

Grow your campaign and get creative, example free iStock image:

QR Code Relevancy

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:11:25 +0100

QR code relevancy - Linking to a site’s home page.....

The whole point of a QR code is that is saves the user typing in a laborious URL to your phone, in general I’m not so lazy that I couldn’t make it to your home page if I wanted to (as home page URL's are generally quite short). If the advert is targeted and relevant to me, please get the QR code to take me to the specific page, that way I don't have to deal with .com/blog/qr-code-relevancy on a small keyboard.

...Unless of course you have a really long web address like: www.loudandclearmarketing.com ;0)

No signal also poses a problem, London Underground billboards and aeroplane magazines, think about where you are placing them....

Dragons Den – the supportive and encouraging kind

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:11:15 +0100

I just wanted to share an experience I had last week. I was invited to be an ‘expert’ on a panel of business people who spent a day with Clifton College students helping them to prepare and pitch a business idea. During the day the ‘dragons’ were asked to meet with the students on three occasions. The first and second time was spent coaching and supporting them with their idea and the third to listen to a pitch on their idea.

The day was really rewarding and the students seemed to get a lot of value from it. In some cases this was their first experience of meeting anyone from the business community.

Those that won pitches were given real life money!

The day didn’t require any preparation from the experts, we just turned up and helped out.I’d encourage anyone that can spare a day to put something back, to get in touch with Working Knowledge.

These kids are our future and hopefully we may just have encouraged some entrepreneurial spirit.

Visit: http://www.workingknowledge.org.uk/ for more info.

Brand Identity for Services Firms

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:11:29 +0100

Look out for the new paper coming soon: Brand Identity for Services Firms