Filed under: Marketing
So I stumbled across this article from Techdirt about the 21st century’s upcoming news readers. I guess I’ve been in an article-reading sort of mood! The article brings up the idea that print media and print advertising are certainly not unchanging beasts, specifically the distribution of news is taking a turn toward digital word of mouth. If you don’t believe them (or me) just take a look at social media sites such as Digg or even YouTube. Certainly you can argue from the perspective of professionalism and suggest that people who subscribe to some of these sites do not fit your target market, but that’s difficult to say when the U.S. Department of National Defense was forced to block YouTube because it was just too popular.
Interestingly enough, some of the Emotecomm team participated in a BtoB webinar which presented some thoughts about corporate advertising budgets. Not surprisingly it tended to agree with our conclusions about where marketing was going to be headed over the next several years. Specifically BtoB noted that the largest cuts in advertising budgets and spending for starting 2008 was, for a large majority, looking at cutting back print, while online advertising had a majority of businesses looking for an increase in spending in the same year. Citing some pretty heavy hitters in the marketing industry, Booz Allen, ANA, Forrester and BtoB themselves, the speakers found that about 85% of B2B, US and international marketers all together are looking at increasing online advertising throughout 2008. The trend can potentially bring online advertising above print advertising within the next three years.
The difficulty presented by findings like these is that they herald change. For any size of organization, that means treading on unfamiliar ground and taking a large amount of resources away from the things that organizations do best. With the threat of a recession hanging over North America, these aren’t resources that many organizations are willing to part with. Certainly this is going to mean a much larger dependence upon B2C and B2B marketing companies for those that want to swim through these changes and tough times, and hopefully it will breed even tighter relationships between organizations. And, if I was leaving a cliff hanger it might go here, perhaps there will be a larger focus on marketing efficiency.
Next week I’ll be taking a look at marketing efficiency and how some big businesses are tracking ROI. If you have any questions about today’s article give us a shout at listen@emotecomm.com.
Filed under: Uncategorized
A recent article caught my attention at Growing Business, they’ve taken the time to peruse a Boots study regarding the ability to concentrate at work. It’s a British study, but while the situation might be slightly different in North America it still brings up some important questions. For example, unless you have your workers on commission, you’re paying your workers, on average “151 minutes per worker each day,” which is wasted due to tiredness, and these hours quickly add up. So what can you do to avoid this waste?
In a B2B world, your sales people are likely doing both lead generation and sales, which makes it very difficult to put them on a commission system – it is human nature to find any imbalances in the pay structure and to focus on the higher paying aspect. Even if you did try a commission system, you would have a lot of quirks to work out before it became a safe enough environment to satisfy the modern employee, especially if your sector doesn’t have a high client turnover. The other option is to cut an employees’ work days down to around 5 hours, but that much of a pay cut is not going to go over very well with your sales team either.
So what we’re left with is the idea that you would ultimately prefer to give someone a set amount of money for a set amount of sales, and not have to worry about the efficiency of the team working at it. That’s what made the article so interesting to us at Emotecomm – it’s what we do. The great thing about third-party lead generation is that it’s a contract with a reliable business; all of the details are worked out first, and you know exactly what you’re getting and what you’re paying from the start. It’s the difference between having your son clean your car and bringing it to a car wash. Only your son expects to be paid for chasing you around with the hose.
If you’ve noticed difficulties with your employees or your own concentration, or have any solutions that you’d like to discuss, feel free to post comments or send us an e-mail!
If you’re interested in more information about Emotecomm’s successes, check out the J.C. William’s Group Case Study in the Knowledge Centre.
