Thursday, January 27, 2011

Restaurant.com project

Restaurant.com is a web-based ecommerce site that sells discounted gift certificates to local restaurants and we are doing a project with them. We will act as affiliates and drive traffic to their site. A portion of the proceeds will be then donated to charity. Restaurant.com uses most of the media channels we have talked about in class in driving traffic to its site.

In the project we ask you to plan, implement and measure the results of two media channels. What types of media channels are most effective today? We will see next week that companies are working to integrate information across channels so marketers can measure more effectively.

Salesgenie.com and salesforce.com

This week we used both salesgenie.com and salesforce.com to pull down leads (salesgenie) and upload them into a contact management software (salesforce). Leads can be purchased or just acquired through natural interaction. I meet a lot of people and save their business cards so I can contact them later. I talked about how in my program I then transfer information into Exact Target, send emails and track back to salesforce.

These types of marketing automation programs often require transferring files in CSV (comma separated values) and we showed how to create those files in excel and work with them. This process may seem like a thankless task but is often how we get set up to do the marketing programs that we need to implement. Is there a better way?

Demand Generation

Marketing has evolved from just a few media channels to many and the customer is the focus as marketers move from push to pull. Demand generation refers to getting high quality leads into the top of the sales funnel. Leads may come from search, social, trade shows, in other words, a variety of marketing channels. Effective demand generation fuels growth.

In B2C, Dreamfield's Pasta uses SEO, PPC and WOM to attract customers and then uses email and social to continue involvement. The result has been growth in what might be considered a commodity product line, pasta.

B2B buyers are increasingly using search and word-of-mouth to make their purchasing decisions and involving the sales force at the end of the sales process. In this type of scenario, it becomes Marketing's responsibility to nurture the leads via multiple interactions and get the 'ripe' lead to the sales person at the right time. Sales and Marketing must work closer together than ever. How can companies overcome the traditional rivalry between the two groups?

Branding and positioning to create value

Marketing has evolved from mass to direct to interactive communication. However, the future is definitely in collaborative interaction with customers. Customers are interacting with us in many new and different media channels, which makes the issue of branding even more important to marketers. Customers search first, interact and then purchase and are more likely to work with a brand that they know or hear about from frineds. Companies that are going out of business today are those that most likely have not been able to demonstrate a clear point of difference. Think Circuit City vs. Best Buy or Kmart/Sears vs. Walmart.

The best way to make money is stil to offer new/existing benefits by which we are differentiated fromt he competition and offer benefits that are valued by the consumer. Branding positioning is the specific, intended meaning of your brand in the mind of the customer and we looked at a specific format for the brand psoitioning statement: To the Target Customer, our brand is the Category that Point-of-Difference. Although both low-cost and differentiation are ways to position a brand, low-cost is hard to sustain and even Wal-Mart appears to be moving away from that strict low-cost positioning.

We looked at four retail web sites, Wal-Mart, KMart, Nordstrom and Target and analyzed if the web site was consistent with their brand positioning. Do you have any other examples of web sites where the brand positioning and the web site are in synch?