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August 2009, Issue 66 |
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Lead-Generation Best Practices Give a New Hat to a Co-worker (and Other Tips for Responding to an Evolving Marketing Landscape) Q&A from Case Study: How Strategic Planning Helped One Company Refine Their Message and Target the Right Audience, with Ahmed Taleb, Senior Director of Strategic Planning, Bulldog Solutions; and Michael Rapp, Manager of eMedia for Fujitsu Network Communications 
In this Q&A from the July 22 Online Marketing Connect Webinar, Ahmed Taleb of Bulldog Solutions and Michael Rapp of Fujitsu Network Communications answered questions about how to target audiences and implement best practices in the midst of a rapidly evolving marketing environment. View the on-demand Webinar.
Q: Equipped with persona information, how can I get to know what media or venues to best reach my target?
 Michael Rapp, Manager of eMedia, Fujitsu Network Communications: You start by looking at how you get your information resources and then you can do some informal polling in a constituency group, if you have that opportunity. If you don’t, you can take your buyer persona to an agency that is better equipped to deal with buys on a national scale.
You can then leverage the information you have (knowing who you want to talk to) into buying the correct list from the correct agency.  Ahmed Taleb, Senior Director of Strategic Planning, Bulldog Solutions: The approach we use at Bulldog is to triangulate these pieces.
First, as Michael said, using an inside-out approach: What do we know already from past interactions with these prospects and companies that will help us refine our thinking? Second, when we're looking at buying research, media companies have a tremendous depth of knowledge about this because they buy and place across a wide variety of verticals. Your media partners are a very valuable resource to help validate your thoughts and even provide you with new directions. Last, what we try to do is look to partners—even competitors in some cases—in order to understand where their media placements are. It's relatively easy to spend a little bit of research time to forensically go across Web sites and understand where different kinds of placements are, even look at some of the print publications that come across your desk. If your competitors appear anywhere in these channels, that's almost a validation that those are relevant channels because your competitors are hunting for the same people you are. Q: Have you observed the shift in staffing and resources to engage marketing changes, or are we simply "rebranding" current staff to respond to this evolving environment? Ahmed Taleb: What I'm seeing with many of the clients we work with is that there's a perception of need for a different skill set. Quite often that need is not being met by bringing new heads into the organization, but instead, giving a new hat to an existing employee. A lot of the ways we help clients, particularly in terms of technology, is by asking, "How can we build a set of tools around an individual to help them succeed, because they're on a very steep learning curve nine times out of ten with no prior experience?" Michael Rapp: Just because I'm an ex-techno-geek in terms of working through things, I'm going to relate this to what it used to be like to break out your Super 8 camera and shoot film and then try to get people to watch it. Whereas now you can sit down with iMovie and make a vacation extravaganza in 30 minutes from your three-week vacation. You do rebrand your staff, and there's a shift in having people adapt to what they're doing. But it's more effective. So you're able to do a lot more with your current staff for fewer resources than you might previously have been able to do with a large agency in trying to data-mine and plot where you're going without any instantaneous feedback. Ahmed Taleb: The rebranding of your existing staff brings one very valuable asset to the table: an understanding of your business. With any new employee, there's a ramp-up period for them, and I've found that once the technology hurdles or unfamiliarity with a new tool is overcome, the benefits are delivered in spades, because that person already understands your business and how to apply it. Q: How do you balance your always changing, always emerging issues and challenges with going back to basics in terms of best practices? Michael Rapp: The best thing about best practices is they don't evolve quite as fast as changing needs and requirements. If you have a strong core and a good foundation built, you're more readily able to adapt to the changes and fluxes intelligently. You're able to respond far more strategically if you've got a good foundation built than if you were just leaping from one fire to the next. Ahmed Taleb: My favorite analogy is a Formula One analogy. A team will put a car out there and they'll go through the process of refining it and testing it, and they'll get this car performing to the best of its capabilities, but it will only be that way for a very short period of time, as other teams evolve faster and track conditions change. What ultimately happens is the retained knowledge of optimizing gets put back into tearing this whole thing down to a bare frame and starting from scratch to meet a different set of objectives. But As Michael said, if there's a solid strategy and approach to how this is done—it's not a 'throwing everything out and starting from the beginning' approach—but instead asking, "How can we go back to basics and engage in the same set of activities to help address a new challenge or a new need?" My favorite example is social media. The BtoB industry is collectively scratching our heads around how we can engage in a social media space. Organizationally, if we have taken on the challenge of identifying audiences, developing the right messaging and understanding what channels are appropriate, those same sets of activities can be leveraged to define what a social media strategy looks like the same way it can define a traditional media strategy.
Return to MWJ Home Ahmed Taleb is senior director of Strategic Planning, Bulldog Solutions. Michael Rapp is manager of eMedia, Fujitsu Network Communications. Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing. |
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