Changing Marketing Tactics

Introduction

Its interesting to look at how clients are changing their marketing tactics, and in this article, through conversation with our clients, we’ve pulled together some of their current thinking.

Present developments fit into one of two broad categories, either effectiveness improvements, designed to generate greater or more relevant response, or efficiency improvements which streamline the processing and management of the responses.

Focus of Marketing Tactics

Improved Marketing effectiveness

Utilising New Channels

One of our clients recently noted:

"Traditional media [press and paper based] no longer generates the response that it did before the growth in other [new media] channels. We are finding that channels such as the internet are becoming increasingly important for generating response.”

As a result of careful analysis of their campaigns, clients have been able to prove what they have long suspected – traditional media (especially press media) no longer creates the impact it used to. While there is undoubtedly a media recession at present, traditional media owners are also faced with a significant structural change caused by the rise of new channels that generate more response at a lower cost per respondent. Traditional media owners are beginning to no longer be seen as the automatic medium of choice for attracting customers.

This is particularly noticeable within the trade press. A number of Mediahawks B2B users have been reducing their spend on trade media and have not seen a commensurate drop in response levels. In many cases they have increased their direct response by being more efficient with their targeting in other channels.

By accurately measuring response, advertisers are not only reducing their media wastage but are freeing up budget to be more creative and test alternative channels.
Increase Campaign Flexibility

Using instantaneous reporting gives users a much quicker appreciation of whether their media is generating response, particularly important when trialling new methods and channels. As one media agency told us:

“One issue with using new channels is that they’re often unproven, so you need to be able to recognise problems and adjust the campaign quickly if its not working.”

Being flexible with media planning creates a number of benefits:

1) Lower media costs –keeping media schedules more fluid allows users to access last minute deals and therefore stretch their media budget further.

2) Reduced advertising sizes – users are finding that they can reduce their advertising sizes while maintaining their response levels. This means they can have more adverts across more areas which increases the potential reach of a campaign.

3) Improved creative – if a particular piece of creative shows reduced performance, the adverts can be changed quickly to improve performance.

However increasing flexibility during a media campaign creates more work during the campaign itself as creative and schedules are changed on a tactical basis. The results of the extra work often outweighs the extra work involved.
Enhance Dialogue

The upshot of being more flexible and moving to where consumers will respond has increased response rates and driven down customer acquisition costs. In addition this has been increasing sophistication in the use of tools to capture details on prospective clients. Greater focus is being made on maintaining direct contact with prospects rather than relying on third party advertising to create the relationship. As one B2B retailer explained:

“… we’re finding it easier to keep new databases in-house and make better use of our existing customer data. The data usually produces a much more targeted result.”

One of the reasons for advertising in traditional media has been to access the reach media owners provide. However, as companies build their own targeted data, they become less dependent upon this reach and can reduce reliance on third party media channels. Furthermore, some organisations are becoming quasi media owners in their own right with their ability to provide non-competing companies with access to their own interactive audiences.

This is particularly visible in large scale consumer facing organisations (such as Tesco and BT) and in B2B markets where companies increasingly have larger and more accurate data on users and their habits than the media. Unsurprisingly companies are spending money mining their own data intensely to generate response rather than spending it on third party media channels.

Operational efficiencies

In addition to better targeting, clients are reviewing their own operational efficiencies when dealing with the response. Monitoring and reporting of internal and third-party efficiency is important to ensure better response rates are translated into increased sales rather than pure dialogue.

Improve Resourcing

Up-to-date and accurate records of inbound enquiries allows users to change the way they staff their response handling. One of our users has changed their internal operations:

“We had our daily meeting between 9 and 10 every morning, this has been changed now that we have discovered this is the busiest time for receiving calls.”

This type of overlap is more common than might be imagined. Time spent understanding and thinking about response patterns greatly improves Mediahawks clients' ability to handle their customers professionally and effectively.
Third-Party Monitoring

Many companies now outsource some or all of their response handling – this is particularly true of “simple sales” such as for subscription fulfilment, brochure requests or ticket sales. The persistent issue with outsourcing is: “how do I manage quality?”. As one event organiser told us:

“… by knowing which ticket agency had the best performance we were able to improve our relationship with the supplier and direct business away from our lower performing agents.”

Quick, accurate response monitoring provides a useful non contentious overview on how third party agents perform. In some cases this has led to a strengthening of the relationship because the supplier is performing better than expected. In other cases this has led to a changing of the relationship with a significant uplift in sales.

Conclusion

Over the past year Mediahawk has been working across a number of industries on a variety of different campaigns. In answer to the question posed at the beginning “how are clients changing their marketing tactics”, we believe that this is being achieved by careful analysis of what works and then taking the successful factors and repeating them.

Improvements to the effectiveness and efficiency of direct marketing campaigns are achieved by having monitoring systems in place that quickly and accurately show how campaigns are performing.

Once monitoring systems are in place it is possible to make incremental changes to deliver marketing that is more flexible, more successful and better value.