Category Archives: Strategy

Open up your marketing plan and change 2010 to 2011

It’s that time of the year again when you, the Marketing Manager, will be working hard to develop a robust marketing plan ready for the start of the new year. This means justifying why you still require a £500,000 budget and why you need to invest in improving internal communication or investing within your own staff so that you can look to explore new channels (social media, email, mobile, web) in 2011. Continue reading

Businesses need to eliminate the ‘gut feeling’ approach when making business decisions

Ever heard your Exec say “My gut feeling is…..” or “I think we should do it because I have a gut feeling that our competitor….”? Many businesses today still operate on creating and making business decisions based on ‘gut feelings’. Scary I know!

I recently had a debate with my Exec on ‘data driven actions’ rather than relying on the HiPPO’s (Highest Paid Persons Opinion) ‘gut feelings’ to drive business actions (which most often turn out to be incorrect or harmful to the business itself). How can anyone drive action through their own ‘gut feelings’ when they have no data to back up their feelings or tell them otherwise? This lead me onto the question:

“How important is data to a business in order to make better business and marketing decisions?”. Continue reading

Forget B2B, try P2P instead!

For so long B2B marketers have had the concept of targeting businesses and corporates with their marketing activities and sucess is ultimately achieved by the number of new businesses acquired by a particular campaign.

But things have changed now.

Yes B2B is still business to business but if you think about it, you have always been targeting a person within that business to influence and direct your messaging towards right? It’s that one person who is seen as an influencer or a decision maker, it’s not the business that makes the decisions it’s that one person (together with the influencer) whether it be a buyer or I.T Manager or an Architect. It’s the one person who either engages with your brand or messaging or passes it on. So is this person to person (P2P) marketing or even business to person (B2P) marketing to be a bit more specific? Continue reading