by Mercedes Westbrook | Oct 7, 2015 | B2B Sales, Business, E-commerce, Firehorse Media
Belinda Taylor, Media Mind at Cape Town based agency Tag 8 discusses their business alignment with digital media buying agency Atmosphere Orange and their programmatic campaign successes to date.
How has working with Atmosphere Orange boosted your business?
“We currently partner with Atmosphere Orange on the digital aspect for two of our clients. We have seen a real boost in business for both our clients. Personally, I enjoy working with programmatic marketing in the digital space. It has reach and offers such a defined target market across a variety of sites. It’s affordable and it’s trackable. It delivers on a brand’s campaign objectives.
For the one campaign we wanted to drive consumers to their website and heighten the amount of conversions. Using visual media and real time bidding (RTB) through MediaMath we got the highest conversions they had had throughout the campaign, and those conversions originated right out of the RTB aspect.
When a client has clearly defined objectives and KPIs they need to meet, we always motivate for RTB if it aligns with the campaigns goals. Our biggest challenge is communicating to our clients what RTB is and how it works; this is central to them understanding its effectiveness. In order to do so, we provide presentations and use case studies to show its relevancy, how it meets those KPIs and how exactly RTB can achieve that.
Were there any surprises in the process or in the results?
With our one client we had a surprise. It was a long campaign and we found there was a drop in click through rates, which was a result of banner fatigue. We went back to creative to reassess before going live again with the next burst.
Weekly reporting is helpful and we always do an end of phase report inclusive of insights, and we always brief creative on the results we get back from the data.
Using data metrics, we can then redefine a route to optimise the campaign. With the client, we decided to rework the banners and change the call to action. Atmosphere Orange also suggested we use AB split testing with two different calls to action to see which worked best and then further optimisation from there.
Has it changed the way you think about either clients, branding, advertising or your business?
Working with Atmosphere Orange has definitely changed our digital strategy. We started noticing it was more important to communicate its effectiveness to the client in order to understand RTB’s importance.
Most brands see digital as an add-on, but we see it as an ‘always on’ aspect to the campaign. It has the ability to achieve other objectives and it should be integrated within the overall media plan, it makes for a more holistic campaign. We get it, but it helps to remember where the client is coming from.
Digital is second nature to us but the forever changing online environment makes it hard for everyone to understand why it is so important. It’s still a traditional marketplace.
We aim to educate that digital is in fact the closest channel to their target market since it’s part of their habitual everyday life. Its the current trend and all brands should use it to connect with their consumers.”
by Gary Simons | Aug 13, 2015 | B2B Sales, Business, E-commerce
Brand is made up of quality and service. The logo is the image of the brand, and people remember it through the experience your business delivered.
Your brand is your reputation — the most valuable thing you possess. A strong brand and the trust it engenders are the only aspects of your company that competitors can’t steal.
Brands are also the most powerful business tools in business as they help customers to understand the positioning of products in their market contexts, and encourage customers to come back for repeat business.
The path to brand awesomeness is 1) a promise 2) a personality and 3) unwavering focus on that promise that will ultimately deliver you brand equity.
What remains key for a brand to be successful in its industry is consistency. It must consistently deliver great services and great results from its product lineup or multiple services.
Research into current trends and your own brand’s data will improve your products and services in the creation of a successful brand, and enable the company to compete efficiently. This is why research and development is a must in any business.
What do great brands share?
- a compelling idea that captures customer’s attention and loyalty by filling an unmet or unsatisfied need.
- A resolute core purpose and supporting values. These remain in place even through the business strategy, where tactics are regularly revised to address and take advantage of the circumstances of the changing business environment.
- A central organisational principle. The brand position, purpose and values are employed as management levers to guide decision-making. This becomes so ingrained in leading organisations that they consciously ask themselves, “How will this decision impact upon the brand?” or “Is this on-brand?” According to Shelly Lazarus, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather: “Once the enterprise understands what the brand is all about, it gives direction to the whole enterprise. You know what products you’re supposed to make and not make. You know how you’re supposed to answer your telephone. You know how you’re going to package things. It gives a set of principles to an entire enterprise.”
- An ability to stay relevant. Leading brands constantly maintain their relevance to a targeted set of customers, ensuring ownership of clear points of differentiation compared to the competition.
Not all brands are successful and successful brands can lose their way, the most common cause being that of lost leadership taking the brand for granted. This usually happens when brand owners treat their asset as a cash cow, eroding the original brand idea and marginalising the customer experience. It goes without saying, a good product is only as good as the accompanying service.
How do you create a great brand?
– Brands should look to relevance, differentiation and credibility. Never lose touch with your customer or ignore a potential new audience. Make your customer real. Determine your ideal customer and market to that person.
Be authentic and consistent in your messaging, visuals, and experience. If you claim customer service is your most important differentiator, then return calls and emails in a reasonable amount of time and don’t leave people in an automated telephone maze to get the help they need. If you claim quality, make sure your products are up to scratch.
Bear in mind that people need to experience things multiple times before they stick. Be clear but be consistent – they need to see your message seven times before they are likely to remember it. The Nike swoosh did not see overnight success, it spent years and lots of money making that mark mean something to people. Don’t expect one ad to get you to your sales targets, or a website to get you all your customers. Branding is not the same as direct response marketing – it takes time and it should be integrated across all your customer touch points.
Brands that communicate unique selling propositions are the most convincing to clients and the easiest for them to remember. Ensure all of your communications – not just advertising and marketing pieces – are consistent with your brand. Everything your company distributes must reflect it.
Continually promote, publicise, and invest in your brand. Building a business brand can be compared to training and conditioning an athlete: The harder he works, the better the results.
Who is a brand manager?
Brand-building skills require creative, intelligent, innovative, adventuresome, nurturing, disciplined and service focused managers. Brand managers are role models who portray appropriate behaviour and act in the best interests of the brand and company. Conversely, they must also challenge convention to keep the brand fresh by questioning what has become the status quo. They must be continually searching out what makes the brand unique. Customer preferences, competitive frameworks and market conditions are incredibly dynamic. Renewing and refreshing the brand to ensure continuing relevance, differentiation and credibility are the most strategic tasks and perhaps the most consuming tactically. Brand managers must determine what cannot change and what must change.
The questions CEO’s should be asking are:
How can my company ensure delivery on its brand promises to customers?
How can I meet sustainability concerns and protect brand value?
And how do I develop the type of workforce associated with a world-class brand?
Ultimately, brand custodianship should not just be left in the hands of the brand manager or CEO. Rather, each and every staff member should carry their own brand loyalty through their every spoken word, action and service orientation… at the end of the day it is people who interact with brands and it is their emotional dynamics that the message is tapping directly into.
by Gary Simons | Aug 13, 2015 | Business, Lifestyle
With 11 official languages in South Africa, we live in a culturally diverse society and when you need help, you need help…
I confess. I have never had ability with languages. I struggled with Afrikaans at school and nearly lost my University exemption to it, only to discover to my horror that my chosen career had it listed as one of the required subjects. There I sat after lectures at 19 years of age with a set of headphones on my head repeating after a no-nonsense type of voice the correct syntax of a sentence…
I have always felt a flash of envy when watching translators in action – they possess a freedom of communication that opens borders, cultures and whole networks of business and lives. Effortlessly, they seem able to switch not only languages and accents but the very way the tongue and jaw forms the sounds, mysteriously and instantaneously taking on the haughtiness of a Parisian or the gung-ho adventurism of an Alpine-climbing Bavarian.
What wasn’t so available to me back in my day, was the availability of language learning facilities, and leading-edge technology on offer today that will launch learners into a borderless business world that will encompass the globe.
Whether you are a new learner at just over knee-height or a grizzled CEO stuck behind an oak desk, you have dedicated schools, Universities, private facilities, and corporate and legal business assistance and services at your fingertips.
The Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa (ISASA) carries a list of language specific international schools offering language education in schools, eg the Deutsche Internationale Schule, Lycée Jules Verne, Crawford Preparatory, Waldorf and Redhill schools
Fundamental to learning is the role of publishers. Heinemann Educational Publishers, Van Schaik and Via Afrika Publishers publish academic textbooks in all South Africa’s official languages and in all new learning areas. Projects such as the Reprint of South African Classics in Indigenous Languages promote reading of literature written in African languages even outside the school curriculum. HSRC Press, due to the increasing numbers of computers and diffusion of the internet around the world, looked at localisation of the technology and the content it carries via its book ‘African Languages in a Digital Age: Challenges and opportunities for indigenous language computing’. Localisation includes translation and cultural adaptation of user interfaces and software applications, as well as the creation and translation of internet content in diverse languages.
Other private services include Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg and businesses accredited to train legal translators for our South African Courts.
Along with corporate talks and presentations, Craig Charnock of Ubuntu Bridge, evolves corporates into the ‘new’ South Africa: “”Craig’s classes inspired me more than I ever dreamed Xhosa classes would. The side-effects have been the building of stronger relationships with some of my colleagues, building greater trust, and allowing me to feel genuinely part of the real society of our country,” said Alan Dickinson, HR Director, SunAir International.
Ubuntu Bridge offers free downloadable MP3’s via their newsletter and XHOSA FUNDIS CC, fully accredited with the ETDP SETA started teaching via Twitter in August 2009, with daily Xhosa phrase tweets also appearing on Facebook.
Learn a new language or improve on a current language and access your world.
by Gary Simons | Aug 13, 2015 | Business, Meetings
How often have you left a meeting feeling it was a waste of time; felt unclear as to whether anything had been accomplished; and questioning if all those action items would ever really be followed up?
If you answered yes to any of the above, chances are it’s not you – it’s your outdated meeting routine and lack of collaborative business communication tools at hand.
What makes a meeting effective?
The meeting achieves its objective, it takes up a minimum amount of time, it leaves participants feeling that a sensible process has been followed, it effects decisions, generates collaborative sharing and new ideas, and creates a process, supported by follow up status reports.
Enhanced computer-aided technologies have enabled levels of communication that leaps time and distance. From electronic mail, instant messaging, intranet and extranet links, translation, note-taking, videoconferencing and online training to more custom focussed tools for businesses to meet, share, agree and process business transactions, we have no excuse not to be communicating more precisely, fluidly and efficiently.
Streaming the digital highway
Electronic mail has overtaken the humble dialling tone, with more email addresses in the world than telephone numbers and more people have multiple e-mail addresses than multiple telephone numbers.
Instant messaging (IM) has become essentially real time e-mail, keeping managers in touch with employees and employees in touch with each other, without the delay and inbox clutter of email. The adoption of IM has been at grassroots level, much like the rise of the IPad in the business setting, where workers have carried over the habit from home or social settings in order to add speed and ease to workplace communication and eliminate time typically lost to “telephone tag” or wasted trips to a co-workers office who is absent or otherwise occupied.
Multi-dimensional meetings
Integrated web, audio and video conferencing solutions have not only streamlined, but captivated, audiences of web meetings, webinars, audio conferencing, online training seminars and multi-point video conferencing with the addition of technology that makes the best of sound, light, and emotive influences.
Increasingly sophisticated electronic collaboration tools are further facilitating audience participation by stakeholders regardless of their location and complement face-to-face meetings, email, and teleconferences, by trimming time and expenses and fostering open communication and better evaluation and project management within teams.
Regardless of differences in time zones or work schedules, software integral to the platform provides documentation of threaded discussions, audit history, and other mechanisms designed to capture the efforts of many into a managed content environment be it workflows, projects, deadlines, or sign-off on deliverables. While several well-known commercial electronic collaboration products exist such as SAP and Microsoft’s Sharepoint, there are other customised products available that offer advanced document management and user participation, for example via electronic voting systems that provide proper authentication of votes and assurance of confidentiality.
Meetings with social media
It’s been said that the social media phenomenon really isn’t anything new, it’s just new and better technology. With origins most likely born from e-mail and instant message correspondence, social media is rapidly moving from an emerging communications medium to the mainstream of marketing.
Adding a new dynamic to how we communicate before, during and after meetings and events, social media creates the ‘buzz’, listing who is going to be there and giving participants a reason to go tell others by adding embedded links to specific sites, videos or forums that promote more sharing.
Event professionals know to make sure their venue is well covered with high-speed wireless to ensure attendees will be able to use Twitter and post to blogs and other sites more easily. And they data mine the most active bloggers and attendees via their online profiles so they can invite them to associated groups, blogs and forums. The life of a meeting is then seamlessly extended by building a thriving online community that remains open to further valuable insights, interaction and information.
Fear factor
Digital tools still face the challenge of the human factor – the fear of technology and the resistance to investment in technical knowledge and time, as well as some of the more traditional corporate cultures that do not support open discussions and sharing of power.
What they offer in its place is anywhere (online) capability which avoids travel time and cost, increased participant availability (any place, any time), increased interactivity and participation, more sophisticated analysis and automatic, comprehensive, neutral documentation.
Modern meetings get results. Modern meetings become an action plan with assignments and timelines that are automatically tracked. The visibility of decisions and assignments during the meeting keeps everyone engaged and allow for automatic follow-up resulting in less wasted time and greater accountability.
Isn’t it time to rethink your ‘meeting of minds’?
by Gary Simons | Aug 13, 2015 | B2B Sales, Business
In order to gain the most profitability from your customer base, you will need to drill down into each client’s portfolio and deliver on a well-defined service and product strategy
Many companies today still approach their client base with a ‘one size fits all’ mind-set when it comes to their supply chain processes and policies, over serving some customers and underserving others. Through the analyses of your profit profiles of both your customers and products, you can custom-build a more profitable CRM supply chain strategy to each client and thereby increase the overall profitability of their individual portfolios. In order to do so, you will need to consider the following:
1: Understand your products
Whether you are selling stationery, automation, Jan/San or furniture – or all of the above – you need to understand exactly which products give you the most profit, are best sellers, give a boost to another sale or are losing traction with customers. In a competitive market, this knowledge will be your mainstay of which products you should be promoting or not.
Use your CRM system to help you make your business decisions, tell you past behaviours and generate return sales in similar product lines. Your sales reports will show you which products are giving you the best margins, allowing you to further maximise your profits by finding where they can dovetail with other best-selling products. For example, who has purchased a mop but no cleaning fluid in the past month? While the mop itself may not deliver on the best margins, cleaning fluid can and will. Sales reports that deliver demand and cost-to-serve analysis* can help sales people to cross-sell additional product lines or undercut your competitors on a lower cost item since you are able to regain the profit from the second sale.
Technology will also assist you in scrutinising the different market segments and identify where to put your focus, i.e. which companies are looking to outsource their Jan/San servicing to a contractor; or the exponential growth in the number of educational facilities and the health care market which are seeing growth in cleanable space. It might also tell you that paper towels, facial tissue and toilet tissue are still the leading seller in this category, and that bin liners are the next hottest selling item, along with hard floor chemicals and cleaners and degreasers.
By understanding both your customers and your product combinations you can identify which are winners and which are losers, and then structure your supply chain policies so that some or all of the losers are turned into winners. For example, a stationery supplier which provides the same one-day lead time for both A customers and D customers may want to change the policy to three days for the D customers. This would move the inventory buffer point upstream in the supply chain, reducing overall inventory. The upstream buffer would hold a larger pool of inventory, thus increasing the odds that downstream demand will be satisfied with the exact product required. This change may have the effect of turning D customers into B customers.
2. Repeat versus new customers
It’s a well-known fact that it costs seven times more to grow a new customer than to retain an existing one. For the majority of businesses which see recurring revenue, these existing customers don’t just fuel growth, they represent all of the businesses’ profits.
With customer expectations higher today than ever before, the client also knows they have a choice to move over to your competitor if you don’t deliver. The simple 80/20 principle will serve you best here in identifying your most profitable customers instead of wasting efforts in chasing new customers. Identify which of your customers generate 80% of your sales, this will generally be about 20% of your current customer base.
This will also prove a strategy for SMEs facing competition from the big-box stores which win over those customers who are price shopping. By differentiating yourself from the box-movers by providing value on the back-end of purchases you can woo back price-conscious end users. Ensure your focus is on retaining customers by identifying which need reigniting, along with strategies to cross-sell, upsell and link-sell to your customer base.
In order to speed up your sales process, have a slightly different script for your different types of prospects which focusses on their problems. Then spend time making them feel special enough to become loyal to you. Ensure your service levels are excellent and your sales follow up on a par. People don’t buy products they buy solutions – people also buy from people – so make your contact personal and build their trust. The happier and more valued your current customer base feels, the more likely they will make repeat purchases and increase spend with you and not your competitor.
3. Be switched on, all the time
Use today’s technology tools to boost productivity and leverage it in order to simplify operations, improve service levels and at the same time reduce internal costs. Cloud based tools will ensure you stay connected to customer data, accounts, price lists, and current stock levels and will streamline communication and other processes, such as document revisions, so the team has more time to sell. Most importantly all data will be backed up all the time.
Since the best way to handle an economic downturn is to sell your way out of it, hire more sales staff to recoup lost margins and let them hit the road running to win more business. While your investment in technology will streamline your processes and productivity, your investment in human capital is the best asset in which to create revenue.
With mobile employees backed by the Cloud’s mobile technology you can save money in increasing efficiency and traveling time and shortening the sales cycle. At any chosen moment, a sales rep is able to see what orders a client placed last year, what stock has been delivered or not and instantly identify what the customer bought this year compared to last year. By placing your CRM in the cloud, you are afforded better scalability without time-consuming updates and licensing issues or loss of data due to power outages; and for SMEs the Cloud often ensures more security that they might have on their current IT systems. With big data the new watchword, you will need to adapt to these new technologies in order to boost your business decisions. If you think it is not for you, consider Amazon. They were one of the first companies to adopt business intelligence to analyse their customer’s buying behaviour through big data.
Social media can also assist in identifying what the market feels about your company and highlight issues with other suppliers. In addition, it can help you ‘read’ your crowd, for example which companies are focussing on sustainability and therefore interested in green cleaning products and equipment such as floor scrubbers that use less chemical products and machines that ionize water to help lift dirt particles.Today’s technology offers solutions such as e-commerce, back office automation, delivery optimisation and Internet purchasing and will empower you to handle more business and serve a greater number of customers using fewer resources – without the right technology, expect to be left behind.
*Cost to serve analysis: calculates the profitability of products, customers and routes to market, and provides a fact-based focus for decision making on service mix and operational changes for each customer.
by Gary Simons | Jun 15, 2015 | Business, E-commerce
As South African e-commerce gains momentum, retailers can expand their reach significantly by adding online and mobile channels.
According to a 2012 report by technology research company World Wide Worx (WWW), e-commerce growth is accelerating. The study predicts that the Internet economy will increase its contribution to the overall economy from 2% in 2011 (R59-billion), to as much as 2.5% by 2016.
The authors say this can be explained at the hand of a ‘digital participation curve’. “It takes up to five years before new Internet users gain the confidence and experience in the medium to become active participants in the Internet economy. With the number of Internet users having accelerated from 2008, the number of experienced users will begin accelerating in 2013.”
This trend will continue until 2018, the authors say.
In the trenches
The experience of Cape-based e-commerce developer Realmdigital broadly corroborates this, says Wesley Lynch, CEO. “South Africans are becoming far more comfortable buying online, with value offerings like Groupon’s group buying playing a crucial role in making it more attractive.
“The natural appeal of e-commerce is the accessibility it gives products, something that store-only retailers cannot offer. The convenience of buying from anywhere in the world and having a physical product delivered at your doorstep is hard to beat.”
The market for digital products has further grown substantially, with music, books and other downloads leading the way, he adds. “The instant gratification of a digital download is even more of an incentive to buy online.”
Online boost
Academic book retailer Van Schaik confirms excellent uptake of its online presence, www.vanschaik.com as well as a significant change in trading patterns and a net growth in sales.
The company says a massive increase in website traffic occurred after Realmdigital took over its development in 2011. “From 5 000 unique visitors per month 12 months ago, the site now registers on average 340 000 visitors per month,” says digital manager Melvin Kaabwe , adding that the company has had to invest in considerable extra capacity to manage the load.
Besides the effect of a new partner, he puts it down to a combination of progressively cheaper Internet access over time and the proliferation of non-PC devices sold with data bundles.
The prevalence of low-cost BlackBerrys on campuses – for two years the youth’s favourite phone according to the Sunday Times Generation Next survey – has also helped. “We view mobile commerce as key to accessing this market, and a boon for our serious entry into e-commerce as an academic resource. Making the site as accessible as possible to mobile users was one of the formative briefs for the site, and Realmdigital did that for us.”
Opportunity
If retailers dither about the online investment and the additional cost of selling (including distribution to customers), they should consider the spike in volumes they are likely to experience, says Lynch.
While Van Schaik’s increase in online sales has been less pronounced than its increase in visitors (30% up year-on-year in February), Lynch says retailers must not expect to be Amazons overnight. “That is a healthy increase in anyone’s terms,” he says. “In addition, online retail is now pretty competitive, with Kalahari, Loot, Wantitall and others all making their mark – and there can be no clearer argument for getting online now.”
Kaabwe concedes other extraneous factors. “Only about 2% of South Africans are shopping online ‘properly’, in the sense of using credit cards. The course most likely to lend itself to card purchases is the MBA – students are a more affluent demographic.”
Future
With e-commerce finally shaping up to be the force it was always expected to become, real-world retailers will have to work out how to compete with a new generation of leaders – Amazon, Kalahari, Wantitall, Loot and many others.
At the heart of embarking on this new direction will be choosing the right digital partner, one that can greatly assist with working out a winning e-commerce and marketing strategy that will get the volumes to justify the leap into new territory.
With competition intensifying, Van Schaik is currently piloting a number of initiatives that will give it an edge over competitors, including multiple digital entry points to the company’s catalogue, any-device downloads of texts, same-day delivery and extra call centre capacity.
Acknowledgment:
Realmdigital is a top South African e-business strategy and technology partner, specialising in Internet and mobile platforms. Contact Wesley Lynch on Tel: +27 (0)21 975 0959, Cell: +27 (0)82 784 4905, Email: wlynch@realmdigital.co.za
Or visit www.realmdigital.co.za
