Download Protocol National Marketing

South
Essex
College
Marketing
Agenda for today’s session
9.30am – 3.00pm
• RATEs Marketing
Strategic Marketing in the Google Age
• Who are our Customers?
– Websites
• What do they want?
– Google Maps & Satnav
• How do prospects search?
– Pay Per Click, Alerts etc
Traditional marketing strategies
– The Brochure
– Viral Media Releases
– Social/business networking
– Page One of Google
Break
– Advertising
– Marketing ROI
– Press Releases
– Exhibitions
– Websites
12.30 Lunch
– Getting the media to chase
you
3.00 Close
Who is responsible for marketing?
Everyone – from cleaners to SLT
Who are the Customers?
Rachel Elnaugh
Formed Red Letter Days when only 24
Dragons’ Den Panellist
Rachel knew her customers
Rachel’s typical Red Letter Days
customer was a woman, 35 – 55 years
old who read Vogue ………..
Who is our typical customer?
The businesses and the individuals
Typical customers
Typical customers
Typical customers
Why Do They Buy?
What Difference Does It Make To Them ?
What is the Value of that Difference?
Who are our Ten Best Customers?
80:20 rule
What Makes Them Best?
How Do We Keep in Contact with Them
Do They Know What Else We Offer?
Are they on our database/CRM system?
List 5 Marketing Ideas
What KPIs can we use in
marketing?
Do we use jargon too much?
Don’t we mean …
What can we measure to show we do a good job?
E.g.
Website visitors
Database numbers
Abandonment rate
£
The RATES Marketing Strategy
The RATES Marketing Strategy focuses
on four strategic areas and aims to: • Reduce marketing costs
• Automate significant amounts of your marketing
• Test, Measure & Improve your marketing
strategies
• Engage prospects & customers more effectively
• Simplify our marketing
Reduce marketing costs
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted;
the trouble is I don't know which half.”
John Wannamaker (1838 – 1922)
We don’t have an unlimited marketing budget
We need a high Return On Investment
FREE There are many strategies and tools that are
very low cost or even free to utilise and we need to
ensure that not half, but all of our marketing works.
Automate significant amounts of
your marketing
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–
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We can’t staff the college 24 hours a day
Prioritising means some important items are not on the top of
our list
Automating some of our marketing enables significant cost
savings
Automating ensures a 24 hour service … even over the
Christmas period
Automated systems need not be impersonal and have the
advantage of creating databases of pre-qualified prospects
Automation enables us to populate our CRM systems, send out
newsletters, conduct research systems etc.
Test, measure and improve your
marketing strategies
• It is essential that we test, measure and improve all
aspects of our marketing on a sustained basis.
• This can be as simple as measuring a Call to Action
such as a telephone number, email address or other
response mechanism.
– We can predict response rates.
– Split test different aspects of our marketing
– Over time this can improve response rate many fold and both
save money and time.
• Many tools such as Analytics, Website Optimiser and
Hypertracker are available to help you accurately
measure and improve response rates.
Engage prospects & customers
more effectively
• So many traditional marketing techniques have
consisted of a scatter gun approach that failed to
engage with the recipient.
• People prefer to do business with those they
know, like, trust and respect.
• Both traditional and new marketing strategies
need to be integrated
• We need to build relationships
What do customers seek from
SEC?
Work in pairs – 5 minutes
Feedback
What are our Key Messages?
How do you research and seek
information?
Yellow Pages
Ask a
friend
When
researching
a product or
seeking
information
do you
use…
Newspaper advert
Read a
book or
guide
TV
advert
The traditional prospectus and
brochure
Q. How many prospectuses does SEC
produce? How many are read?
Q. How customer focused is the
prospectus?
• Q. Do we primarily focus on the college and the
courses/services we offer?
• Or do we focus on the needs of the customer and
the benefits our courses and services confer?
• Q. Do we need a prospectus/brochure?
• Could a booklet that details limited information and
promotes our website be more appropriate?
The traditional prospectus and
brochure
Many providers do not use a
prospectus or brochure.
They rely on generic materials
and their websites
Could this principle extend to
SEC?
Probably not totally ….… YET
Traditional advertising strategies
How much do we spend on advertising?
Where do we advertise?
Is our advertising cost effective?
How do we know?
What is the true cost of our advertising?
What is our advertising ROI?
Traditional advertising
strategies
Advertising ROI
•A full page B&W advert in a trade magazine costs approx
……………….£2286
•Say you negotiate that down to …………….….……..£1000
•Response rate of, say, 50 people
•Cost per enquiry………………….........……….………£20
•Conversion rate of, say, 25%
•Cost of acquisition
…...……………………………. £80
Press / Media Release strategies
We regularly send out media releases?
•
•
•
•
What percentage are used by the media?
How cost effective are our media releases?
How do you source our stories?
Are there opportunities to get more media
coverage?
Traditional Press Releases v Media
Releases
“I was motivated to be more active in PR and
"free“ publicity to get my business name and
course availability out into the world.
[On] the day of the press release,
a gentleman came in, quoted that
he had seen us in the press, and
wanted some training courses.”
Helen Scourfield,
MD PTP Quality Training Ltd,
Haverford West
Magazine features
Don’t rely solely on sending media releases
Offer articles as well
Traditional exhibition strategies
The exhibitions industry is worth £billions and it is easy to
spend large sums with no measurable return
Why do organisations take stands at
exhibtions?
Exhibitors say ……
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–
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Because our competitors do
To fly the flag
We were approached by the exhibition sales team
Our CEO said we should attend
Our customers expect us to be there
People think we have closed if we don’t attend
Traditional exhibition strategies
Why do we take stands at exhibitions?
– To attract new customers
– To launch a new product or service
– To act as a magnet and filter … contact details
– To build relationships with existing and new
customers
Traditional exhibition strategies
You need a SMART exhibition plan that
details pre-event activity, event activity and
post event activity
– Do ….
–
–
–
–
Research the event
Have an objective
Brief your staff
Promote your
attendance
– Look different
– Get media coverage
– Don’t …..
– Arrive at the last minute
– Fail to set objectives
– Fail to budget
adequately
– Fail to brief staff
– Forget to follow up
quickly
Traditional website strategies
Why do we have a website?
• To provide credibility and information
• To sell
To build relationships & obtain prequalified contact details
Traditional website strategies
How many website visitors do we attract
each month?
Ask yourself:– How many visitors?
– How do we monitor visitors?
– Who monitors the website?
– How does this integrate with the rest of our marketing?
– Why do visitors visit?
– What are their names?
– How do we engage with them?
– What is our conversion rate?
OUR analytics
Strategic Marketing in the Google
Age
Marketing/Emarketing tools include
Website – phone number, Web pages - SEO + content, PPC / Adwords,
Autoresponders, Keywords, Newsletters, Benchmarking, Google Analytics, Media
Releases, Media distribution sites e.g. PRWeb, PR.com, Magazine Features
…..single or series, Letters to Editor, Offers – Discounts, Additional features etc,
Time sensitive offers, Joint Ventures, Newspaper Columns, Email, Word of
Mouth, Ambassadors, Referrals, Social and Business networking sites, Audio,
Surveys, Free help, Public speaking .. Free or fee paying, Advertising in print, on
line, mobile, vehicles, cinema, Satnav etc, Interviews – radio, newspapers,
online, Elevator Pitch, CRM, Guru status, Squeeze page, Testimonials, By line,
Face to Face meetings, Blogs – our own and other peoples, Free Directories,
Word of Mouth, Telephone – Skype, Calendars, Networking – Quality v Quantity,
Trademark / Brand, Incoming inks, Internal links, Anchor text, Affiliates E.g.
Amazon, Guarantees, Google Alerts, Etc
Strategic marketing in the
Google age
Do we: Gather website visitors’ email addresses (via an
autoresponder)?
Check which businesses have recently visited our
website?
Check our site stats at least once a week?
Have an Emarketing Plan?
Appear on Page One of Google for any of our
keywords?
Appear on Google Maps?
Websites that engage people
Do you want website visitors or a sales funnel full of
pre-qualified
prospects that convert to customers and sales?
There are no prizes for getting large numbers
of visitors to your website.
The prize lies in getting pre-qualified visitors
who convert into business.
DIY SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
SEO is often thought to be expensive
– Effective DIY SEO can be carried out in-house at
virtually no cost
– Firstly we need to ensure the search engines can
index your website.
– We need to understand that search engines do NOT
index websites …… they index webpages and every
one must be different
– We need to provide a “route map” to find each page
– We need relevant content
Websites that engage people
• Your website needs to have an address that is
unique e.g. www.YourProvider.ac.uk
• It needs to have relevant metatags: – Pages with relevant page titles
– Page descriptors that adequately describe what is on the
page
– Keywords that are relevant and unique to individual
pages
Attracting Web Traffic & Providing
LinkBait
Beware IT Lies
Proxy search engines provide a true picture
X
X
X
Dynamic results ..
That keep
changing
Last year Google
made <500
changes to the 200
elements in the
search algorithm
What are keywords?
Keywords (and keyword phrases) are a vital
component of your strategy to get pre-qualified visitors
to your website
• They are the words/phrases that people search for when seeking
information from search engines
• They need to be very specific if you are to be found amongst the
millions of webpages being searched
• E.g. Employer = 89,000, 000 pages
•
Employer Engagement = 779,000 pages
•
Employer Engagement Strategies = 263, 000 pages
•
College Employer Engagement Strategies = 233,000 pages
SEO or CRO
• Having obtained high volumes of highly
qualified traffic you need to be able to
convert them into customers.
• CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is rarely
mentioned by SEO experts.
• We need a measurable Call to Action that can be
measured, benchmarked and improved over a
period of time.
Measuring CRO with Analytics
Google Maps, Google Earth and
Satnav
• More searchers are using Google Maps to
search for hotels, restaurants, garages, gyms
etc. because results are displayed
geographically, contain reviews and telephone
numbers.
• Searches on Satnav will navigate you to the
garage, college restaurant, training centre etc.
• http://maps.google.com
More online strategies
• Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) , Google
Alerts, Social Networking etc.
• Microsoft Adcenter and Google Adwords are both forms
of PPC.
• PPC is part of an advertising revolution that allows you to
target your adverts at searchers that have effectively prequalified themselves by virtue of the keywords they have
used in their search.
• PPC, when correctly used, is very fast to set up, very cost
effective, allows you to segment your market, target
geographically, manage your budget, conduct research
and test, measure & improve your advertising campaigns.
The “Key” to Adwords
• The key to Adwords are your keywords,
bid price, CTR and page quality score
• Adwords work on the keywords people are
searching on
• How much you pay depends not on bid
price alone but upon: – How much you bid
– Your Click Through Rate (CTR)
– Your Quality Score
• Adwords are the modern equivalent to
print advertising but with much more
predictability and much lower cost.
•
•
•
•
Direct Mail response rate
1-2%
Nationally Adwords response rates are 0.8 - 0.9%
Overall campaign figures of 2-4 % are very
common, 10-20% is not unusual with 100% being
possible for individual keywords.
Adword search
Adwords screen
Google Alerts
Who is talking about you online?
What are they saying?
Which papers and websites are covering your stories?
What are your customers & competitors up to?
Google Alerts
Media release strategies that go viral
Press releases are dead
Today, as well as thinking about the domestic press,
we need to think about search engines and going viral
with our Media Releases
A well written media release can serve the local press
and search engines equally as well. Just think about
the keywords you use when writing the media release
and, as well as sending it to your usual outlets, put it
on a news distribution site, e.g. PR.com or one of the
100+ alternatives.
Social and business networking
strategies
How can social and business networking
sites be used to grow a training business?
Additional strategies to get the
media to chase you
Where do journalists find experts?
• www.Expertsources.co.uk
How many experts?
• College merger
• Shared Services
Colleges
4
Exams
11
College Merger
0
Employer engagement 1
Students
4
Learners
0
Food
22
??????
28
Review
There are hundreds of marketing tools available to us and we
have demonstrated a small handful today.
Many are low cost or free; many can be used to automate our
marketing; many can be used to test, measure & improve our
marketing and many will effectively engage our prospects and
customers.
All of the tools available can be utilised within a RATES
marketing strategy.
We need to integrate the traditional with the new.
Review
How you learnt something new?
What actions should we be taking?
List 5 actions
Questions and close