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It’s rightly said that one of the biggest factors which ensures that any marketing campaign is a success is a good product to be marketed! A Marketer will consider his job half done if he has a quality product to market.

So before you start planning to chalk out your budget for marketing for your online venture, make sure you have a strong blueprint to get a successful product on hand.

Treat your online presence as if it’s a place in the real world. Then think how you would go about planning and preparing if you had to get a home or a shop built in the physical world. Believe me, the basic checklist remains the same, be it your home sweet home on the Earth or your website on www!

1) Once you have decided whether you need a Bungalow, a penthouse or a Flat the first thing you start looking for is a good location. (I will leave ‘what you need part to you. You are the best judge for what you need!). Similarly once you have decided what niche you want to be in or what business you want to start on the web, you will need to search for a good location, i.e. a good and reliable Hosting Service provider. Make a list of what service you would need, how many email accounts, how much web traffic you expect, etc. Then compare some of the service providers and select a good plan. Don’t fret to invest marginally more for good quality. It’s not everyday that you buy hosting service. And you won’t want to change it every now and then.

2) After finalizing the locality and land, you get down to the blueprint, the map or the drawing of the building (whatever you may call it), the actual layout. You may take help of an architect if you want a detailed drawing.
Similarly, once you have your hosting space done and you are ready for the work on putting into shape your website idea, get an outline of the website done. Take care of factors like the number of pages you want, how are you going to handle the navigation, basically the site map. Leave the beauty part out here. Colors, theme and the visual appeal will appear later.

3) After the architect gets your building blueprint ready, the actual brick and mortar work starts. On the website front that’s the actual coding. One thing to note here: If you are a business person or a non techie, leave the implementation details to your developer. Let him decide what’s best for you : PHP, ASP, joomla or drupal. You don’t tell the construction guy how thick the steel rods should be or what grade cement should be used. He knows it best.

4) Now that your home has a shape and you know how it’s coming up, you start taking care of the finishing, the interiors. What color goes best, should it be white, peach, you know that best. It’s your walls, your taste. Same goes with the website. Keeping some basic principles in mind choose your pages color, the font, the sidebars, the top bars’ colors. What banner goes best with your service or product, your tag line etc.

5) When its all done, its time for celebration, time to invite people, your near and dear ones, your colleagues to your place for housewarming or for just showing off ! This is the ‘internet marketing’ part. But before you do that you should make sure that things at your home are in place, its appealing to the visitors. This translates to the basic on- page SEO to please the Google bots! Ideally this part should be taken care of during the coding phase.

Spend time and efforts on building your product and take my word: You would enjoy the marketing part.

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In the last post, I referred to Brand Identity prism by Kapferer which could be used to determine the brand identity of a product. In this post, the model will be looked closely to understand the nuances and its application.

Before the application of any model, few obvious questions which come to our mind are:-

 What is it?

 When should it be used?

 How to use it?

Now suppose if a product or a brand (taking the liberty of equating product with brand ) was a person, how would he look like? What traits would he have? Would he be warm, cold, aggressive, approachable or smart?

Brand identity prism helps us provide answers to these questions.

Ok so the next logical question is when to use it?

I would say practically everywhere. Understanding of the identity would help design your web presence better, would decide the positioning and have an effect on all marketing collaterals.

The best way to understand the model is to call up a meeting of all department heads and ask questions, lot of questions.

The prism looks something like this:-

As is clearly visible, the model has 6 dimensions on which a brand is to be evaluated.

Physical Facet talks about what the product is, what does it do, how does it add value to customers, how does it fill up the gap in the market.

Brand personality is measured using those traits/features of consumer personality that are directly related to brands. Proper care should be taken not to confuse it with consumer’s reflection.  Brand personality is closely linked with self image and image of the consumer. Questions to be asked are:

 1)    What are the features of consumer personality?

 2)    What are the features of brand if it was a person? This depends on the functional aspect of the product and the gap it would fill.

Brand Culture: As the name signifies, it talks about the culture of the brand. The values and the principles will follow from the culture and it is these values which will bind the customers. Remember HSBC’s “The World’s local bank”.

Questions which need to be asked:-

 1)    Is the brand’s culture global?

2)    What are the values for which the brand stands for?

3)    How would customers take the values of such a brand?

Brand Relationships: No prizes for guessing what would this be about! Yes, after all every brand has to maintain healthy relationships with customers. All marketing collaterals are intended to do just that. Therefore to gauge the identity, this had to feature.

 1)    How would Sales describe the relationship attributes for their customer management process?

2)    How would Customer support describe their approach to increasing customer satisfaction?

3) How does the brand want to be seen by customers in marketing communication?

Customer Reflection: Every product is designed to satisfy some need of the intended customer base. A consumer has to be reflected in a way, which would show how he or she could image himself consuming a particular good. For example, in India anyone consuming Pepsi Cola would imagine himself to be young and Thums up (another cola drink from Coke stable) to be adventurous. For this aspect, questions are to be put to customer experience team about What would the users imagine while using the product?

Customer Self Image: Consumers get attracted to those brands in which they see their own traits, for example, a man who is muscular and strong would smoke Marlboro. This goes hand in hand with brand personality.

All the dimensions on the left side are external factors whereas the right side represents internalization.  I know it is a bit tedious but am sure if applied correctly it can reap huge benefits for corporate.

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One of the things which Management teaches is to do proper planning for any activity. It is often said

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

So today charging up my management cells (if they exist ), I thought to myself about how to plan for blog marketing for a company, does there exist any “What to do list for blog marketing?”

I came up with the following list. I am sure that this list is not complete and there is lot which can be added to it.

1) The Objective: Before any marketing campaign, it is important to understand the objective behind it. Its knowledge would also help to determine the success criteria for the campaign. Same goes for blog marketing. One must gauge what is the objective behind blog marketing. Is it lead generation, Is it for brand building or is it a platform to share information with the customers (both internal and external). Since the success criterions for each of these objectives are different, the clear understanding of the objective would go a long way in making the campaign a success.

2) Internet Usage Pattern of Target Customers: Tons of literature has been written about customer centric marketing, about understanding customers’ behaviour before designing any product. So naturally this had to feature in the list. J On a serious note, for blog marketing to become a success, it is imperative that internet usage pattern of target customers is studied. This would include:

i. Studying what the target audience is looking for. What is the kind of information they search for, what are the web sites do they visit, what sort of social media do they visit.

ii. What kind of language is being used on those web sites to engage the users.

Understanding of internet usage pattern would help in 2 ways:

i. Identify the keywords which target customers are using to search the information. Help from tools like wordtracker or hitTail could be used.

ii. The kind of language which would engage them.

3) Identify the identity: For a corporate blog, it becomes very important to find out the identity who would be writing the blog. Identification of identity for the blog would drive the attitude and hence the language. Clues could be taken from Brand identity prism by Kapferer which helps an organisation to identify the brand identity. I will cover the model in next post in great details.

4) Style Guide for the blog: After putting the pieces of objective, internet usage pattern and identity in the Jigsaw puzzle, it is the time for style guide of the blog. This would include the format, the design and the color combinations. By format I mean would it be like a simple diary like or magazine style or something else. Many would say magazine style or simple diary format is just an aesthetic issue and does not matter. I agree to an extent to that argument but the difference comes in at the perspective level. The thought process has to be clear before taking up any kind of format since that would be reflected in the blog as well. Design and color combinations have to go hand in hand with the objective and the identity. Here again Brand identity prism could be referred for help.

5) User Experience: You would say how could one plan something intangible and then put it into tangible form? Well I also used to think the same way till sometime ago but now I am learning how to put rich user experience into your web presence. There are many ways by which user experience could be increased. I will share one simple method of navigation. It has been found out in a research that users like to read vertical than horizontal and eye moves from left to right.

Now those are facts. But what do they signify?

Following are some of the implications:

i. It is preferred to have vertical navigation bar rather than the horizontal one. Vertical bar would make it easier for users to glance at the information.

ii. If pictures are to be included in the post, then it would be better if those are included in the upper left corner of the post as it would attract the user.

iii. Try to include the kind of words which the user is likely to use in his daily parlance. This would make him feel at ease while reading the post.

These are just the planning steps which should go (according to me ) into any blog marketing campaign. If will be more than happy if you have anything to add to this list to make it much more comprehensive.

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It was a treat to read the conversation between 2 giants of internet industry in the form of an interview. Guy Kawasaki interviewed Darren Rowse of Problogger. Out of the several things which Darren mentioned, one of particular interest was use of “No comment policy” by Seth Godin as a potential viral marketing strategy. He goes on to mention that it may work for an established personality like Seth but may backfire for small bloggers.

This insight charged up my grey cells and forced me to think about how to use “No comment policy” for viral effects. Since the interview appeared on Sun’s Place for Small and Medium Businesses, I thought to myself, Is there any way by which small and medium enterprises involved in blogging for building brand can use this policy? Or is it only for thought leaders who define the contours of the industry?

I am not too sure about its usability for SMEs but would love to learn from you all.

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Recently Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog conducted a survey on “How Online Marketing Blog readers use twitter?” The survey has 220 respondents which is a decent number and results are also pretty much in line with the expectations.

To read more about the survey and result, please visit Top 10 Uses of twitter and Tools.

One of the uses which Lee mentions in the last part of the post is “Customer Support and Customer Outreach“.

I would go a step ahead than Customer Support and Customer Outreach and would talk about Engaging customers with Twitter. Customer support is a product’s view of marketing where customers are seen as a burden and hence the word “support”.

Today businesses talk about customer centric marketing and believe in relationships. For maintaining relationships, it is important to engage customers rather than supporting them. But how does one engage customers?

Customers get engaged when they have an ecosystem where they have the freedom to not only provide feedback, express their concerns and complaints but also partner in designing better value proposition for them i.e. better products and services for themselves. The engaging ecosystem also provides a platform for businesses to offer their services in a fun manner which in this case is 140 words tweets. J And above all, it comes free.

To provide an example of engaging customers through twitter, assume an online internet based marketing club which offers its services to small and medium enterprises. Now being a small company itself, it can’t afford to invest much on marketing collaterals or feedback channels. Also since the industry is so dynamic, it becomes imperative for the company to partner the customers in designing value proposition rather them delivering them a product.

Keeping all these things in mind, what should the company do? How should it make sure that it engages its customers in the true sense?

It uses twitter as a platform for feedback where customers can complain, if they have any and then they are taken good care of (and not Support). The company also uses twitter to provide consulting to its customers as telephone sessions across the globe would cost much more. Community is built around twitter for people to interact, communicate and share. Above all, it provides a medium to the company to make their customers, partner in designing better value proposition in future. Customers could be reached directly and requested to provide invaluable insights on products before the actual launch.

Conclusion

Uses like customer support are product’s view of marketing and not good for any business. Today for businesses to thrive, it has become imperative for companies to talk about engaging customers rather than satisfying them or just meeting their needs. And Twitter provides a perfect platform to companies to do just that Engage Customers.

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