Editorial Articles

How can smaller companies compete with megabrands? Malcolm Duckett explores some of the key issues associated with turning investment into conversion

Back when the dot.com boom was the biggest story on the globe, we all thought that marketing was about to be transformed forever. The ability to digitally talk to everyone, everywhere and at any time would make life simple. The dot.com gold-rush dawned. But that was not the end of the story. Merely having a flashy website and millions of hits did not translate into being a profitable business. In the end, we were forced to face the fact that money is the only real measure of success, and so moved towards the end-game where conversion, sales and profits rule.

For many years now the loyalty card programmes developed by pioneers like dunnhumby have shown what personalised ‘relevance marketing’ can do. Without it, Tesco wouldn’t be the online and offline retailing behemoth it is today, and it has now become clear that .com 2.0 actually allows this same strategy to be implemented on-line. It has also demonstrated that it is not necessary to create hugely complex campaigns and segmentations – real-time, trigger-based campaigns that deliver the right message to the right person at the right time can deliver great results. And, by combining the marketing team's experience and knowledge of their customers with the latest marketing technology, the megabrands have shown that truly effective marketing programs that make money for the business are within reach.

But how can smaller companies compete with these megabrands that have millions of pounds and armies of staff at their disposal?

Once you start looking at the marketing spend in today's online business the answer becomes quite clear. Forrester Research tells us that there is a 100:1 relationship between the money marketers are spending on SEO (acquisition) and what they are spending on conversion. Changing this balance is the clue as to how we need to proceed.

Boardrooms around the country are no longer interested in hits and Google PageRanks. Instead, they want to talk about the bottom line. And the freeze that has descended on the broader economy is sharpening that focus, so we need to shift investment into conversion. By doing this we will free up the cash we need to participate in the online marketing arms race, and success in making this change will deliver on the metrics businesses are being measured by today.

The need to optimise and maximise conversion, sales revenue and customer experience, while measuring and understanding online and cross-channel marketing performance and the current and future value of your online community demands an integrated solution that can deal with all the complexity - simply, and in one place. Armed with such a solution, it becomes possible for small to medium businesses (SMBs, and even large organisations) to compete with and operate on a par with the most advanced high-end solutions deployed by the mega brands. Identifying and focusing on the individual, personalising their experience, and delivering vastly improved results - finally delivering on the promise of online marketing to deliver the bottom-line performance business managers demand.

Thinking lifecycle

Analysis of the success stories from the megabrands shows the power of improving the customer experience, implementing relevance marketing and personalisation strategies. This, in turn, allows us to show the technology trends that are important:

Taming big data

The online channel allows us to gather and process huge data sets and to understand visitors as individuals, and if you can exploit this data you will have the customer insight needed to make the right personalisation decisions.

Harnessing cloud computing

The technology that powers Amazon, and their Elastic Computing service, can transform marketing technology operating costs. Five years ago you could spend £50,000 on the equipment to instrument and analyse the visitor behaviour, whereas today it costs us £50 a month to have the same capacity on tap!

Exploiting SaaS

Today software-as-a-service (whether that's Google Apps, Salesforce.com or your email service provider) provides access to the largest and most complex software applications, without an IT team in sight. Coupled with pay-as-you-go pricing and short-term contracts means that you can deploy advanced technology fast, with almost zero risk.

Thinking lifecycle

Rather than viewing each visit as a discrete event, technology now lets you build long-term lifecycle profiles that track where visitors are in their relationship with your business and brand, further enhancing your ability to say the right thing at the right time to the right person via the right channel – delivering almost guaranteed success you can measure!

Malcolm Duckett, CEO, Magiq