Word of Mouth marketing or WoM is an Australian first…

Well believe it or not Word of Mouth Marketing is believed to have originated in Australia in the early 1980′s!

Word of Mouth (WoM) is defined as passing information from person to person with no intermediary or media channel delivering the message, such as a newspaper advertisement. Or you could say it is the most trusted form of business recommendation or the most trusted advice not to choose a business, it works both ways.

A blog like Integrati Marketing can be considered a WoM opportunity for a business and can drive new customers to the business. But there is a key caveat with WoM – your business has to have great products and services to be endorsed by a trusted friend, family or associate.

Even more important, unlike traditional marketing media where the business controls the message in the advertisement, brochure or on the website with WoM you do not have that control at all. This is of course talking about person to person WoM, not on blogs which can actually be “cash for comment” by bloggers.

Word of Mouth has gone through a renaissance of sorts since the fragmentation of media started in the early 1990′s and the reduced importance of Mass Media such as TV and newspapers.

Today, communications options are far greater and new direct channels such as email, websites and blogs exist. These are defined as 1 to 1 or direct marketing media. The WWW is an example of a Direct Channel where people have a 1-to-1 engagement with websites and interact with the information, even creating their own through ‘user generated media’ or blogs like this.

The important issue for business is to be aware of the new effects of eWoM, where customers can discuss your products and service delivery quickly and now with Twitter real-time! These discussions via eWoM on Social Networks and in blogs can be critical to your existing and future potential customers perceptions of your business.

It is important to be aware of just how easy it is to create positive or negative reviews, posts and tweets about your business! And because this media is so open and accessible it means your business needs to take into account what people are saying about your business and your services.

Research companies are now starting to tap into the power of Social Networks to monitor brand perceptions and use this to enhance or repair a company’s brand.

So, are you aware of what your customers are saying about your brand?

Think about this the next time you have a challenging experience with a customer or a brilliant customer service moment.

Till next time, The Integrati team.

Web 2.0 and the Network Effect.

The network effect is the value an exchange medium has (such as, Facebook) by supplying usage (your time) and your information to the service. You must of course, as a ‘user’ receive value from the usage of the service in return. Effectively, the more people who use the service such as; Facebook the more benefit the users will receive from the network. This can be with virtual groups, associations, friends and family. The difference here is again the WWW as you can now connect anywhere in the world with friends or virtual friends.

And wherever there are large numbers of users, business and marketers look to use the medium to engage and interact with the ‘users’ to sell their products and services.

With Facebook it was the simple and effective design of the site and features which colleague students in America started to use. So, with word of mouth and referral, “are you on Facebook?” a process began which was the Network Effect. This is an example of a Positive Network Effect, whereby the users found they had a way to keep in touch and share information with trusted groups or on campus more like trusted tribes!

Just as there are Positive Network Effects there are also Negative Network Effects, I will be a little cheeky here and suggest that the public transport in Melbourne (Trams and Trains) suffers from a serious Negative Network Effect when it rains as it cannot cope with the increased volume and long lines of grumpy wet passengers are the negative result. Not enough capacity = Negative Network Effect.

The classic Positive Network Effect which you will most probably have in your home or on you is the home phone or mobile. The more people connected (phone network) the more efficient and useful the telecommunications network became, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Well, that was true until we had unsolicited telemarketing calls.

So, how do you harness these new forms of The Network Service for your business?

Well there are a couple of really important things you have to have first, and these are;

1. Permission to interact with your customers, preferably by email (for online marketing)

2. The correct strategy to leverage and build a community with these new Network Service Providers such as; Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace without naming all the other web 2.0 possibilities.

3. Customer data (no data – much harder to connect)

4. A strategy to use the networks with a consistent and relevant message for your business.

5. Fun, you have to want to use these to engage with your customers so they enjoy being connected to your business with the benefit that comes with the connection.

So there we go, a few lines on what is the Positive Network Effect. I hope this helps to further understand some of why Sean Parkers presentation from the post “Connect or Die: The Network Service and the future of your business!” is so important for all businesses.

It is in effect digital Word of Mouth or as Advertisers and Marketers like to abbreviate everything WoM! I will talk about Word of Mouth marketing and digital Word of Mouth Marketing in my next post.

Till next time, The Integrati team.

Lead Management

Lead Management is simply creating a business process to understand where your leads are generated from (marketing activity, Social 2.0, Sales etc.), and ascertain how valuable the lead(s) may be to your business and allow the prioritisation of these leads to be ‘worked’ by your sales team to sell more ‘stuff’ to your customers.

By creating a process to rank and measure leads your business (regardless of size) is optimising the investment in activities which drive new business to you. By being able to measure where the ‘hottest’ leads come from and ascertaining how much it cost to generate a lead you will be able to produce Return on Investment (RoI) on your businesses leads process.

Today there are many systems which you can access on the web or you can install a client lead management software to give your business insight into managing the leads funnel.

The important thing here though is, if you are managing your leads today your well on your way to prioritising your resources such as marketing/advertising and sales investment.

If your business is not looking at a Lead Management process and actively measuring what leads are more effective than others from different activities your business may be wasting significant resource.

Take some time out, sit down and have a think about your businesses leads process works today. After that, if you think you may be wasting resource or worse missing out on opportunities then get in contact with the team at Integrati Marketing we will be happy to talk about  how your business could improve your lead management with detailed processes and metrics.

Hello World, and welcome to Integrati Marketing!

Integrati Marketing is a new marketing consultancy which has been launched to address a need in the Australian professional services market for businesses that require marketing expertise on-demand or on fixed retainer.

We provide the expertise for enterprise to be able to outsource specialist skills to develop your marketing activities and drive existing and new business leads to your sales teams or premise.

We specialise in:

• Demand Creation and Brand Awareness
• Online Marketing communications
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Marketing Campaigns
• Website audits SEO-SEM and site optimisation
• Social Networking
• Loyalty analysis
• Marketing planning and strategy
• Testimonial and Case Study creation

We will also be publishing on the Integrati Marketing Blog information which business can use to reduce their costs and improve their marketing communications.

We will also be covering the emerging world and benefits of Software as a Service (Saas) where businesses can subscribe to a range of online tools such as email, productivity, sales databases, campaign tools which will enable enterprise to grow their business without the need to purchase expensive software.