February 2013_ Marketing Brekky

Marketing Brekky

Monthly/Quarterly I run the 'Marketing Breakfast Club' which includes a beautiful bunch of smart marketing professionals brought together by a fine breakfast spread at the Merchant on Beaufort St in Mount Lawley. The breakfast has been running for over 2 years and started as a way of bringing together interesting people offering a forum to bounce ideas off each other and discuss the wonderful world of marketing. It’s a great opportunity to learn about many different industries and raise your marketing dilemmas. We’ve also made great contacts and friends from this too.

FEBRUARY 2013
This month we discussed all things marketing from the dilemmas of communicating to completely different markets to social media faux pas…

In Detail:

·       Marketing incorporates everything including your office look and feel and the events you run

·       Recently the Oil and Gas Expo was run at the Perth Convention Centre; a way that many in that industry relate and communicate their message to their target audience

·       Discussing the dilemma of communicating to conflicting markets. For example in the radio communications industry often similar equipment is utilised by the humanitarian and tactical/military markets. The conflict arises as the humanitarian market is not happy to deal with a company also supplying the tactical market. In the fertiliser market environmental conflicts arise as some believe that turf utilises too much precious water. It is difficult when supplying turf products and communicating to that market and then the conflicting market of horticulturalists that consider turf wasting resources. In the online marketing sphere, its more about very different needs and these can be somewhat conflicting. E.g. your marketing message to an ASX company is very different from that to a B2B professional services provider or a retail client. For ASX you would promote a very different benefit such as raising the share prices and image of the company, B2B or wholesalers are all about raising profile and targeting a specific group and retail cater for smaller mum and dad customers.

·       Another source of conflict in marketing is when you are marketing two separate companies and do not want to promote that they are related. E.g. in the mining/civil traffic industry you may have one company that provides a service and has many competitors and another company that supplies to your first company as well as your competitors. The challenge then arises of keeping those identities separate in an ethical way.

·       Another challenge when you have so many different client levels is to keep them separate e.g. Membership pricing and not overtly promoting that you sell direct to avoid upsetting resellers.

·       Linked In; fast becoming an incredible business tool for HR, sourcing leads, sourcing partners, building your profile and relationships. It is also a fantastic way to promote events- if you do it properly.

·       Social Media faux pas: mass, generic mail outs that cause members to delete you. Overcome this by reading their profile and explaining why they would be interested. E.g. Momentum Wealth tends to market events well.

·       How to link into your market via Facebook: frowned upon to commandeer the fan pages that your target market is interested in to promote your own agenda. Instead build relationships with related organisations and either directly get their permission to cross promote or do it when it is reasonable e.g. you already have a joint venture.

·       Linked has an upgrade feature allowing you to head hunt and contact people you wouldn’t normally contact.

·       With Linked In you can see who has been looking at your profile.

·       You can turn this feature off so you can secretly stalk other profiles. 

·        ·       This article talks about this feature: http://www.thesocialpath.com/2012/10/who-viewed-your-linkedin-profile.html

·       Login to your linked in and click this link to change what others see when you’ve viewed their profile: https://www.linkedin.com/settings/wvmp-visibility?goback=%2Enas_*1_*1_*1


*only issue is if you disable this for yourself it stops you from seeing who views your profile

·       Linked In success: business profile vs personal. A well-optimised profile works very well as often people relate better to a face of a company rather than a faceless organisation.

·       Other uses for Linked In: Company profile on Linked In allows a company with multiple branches in other countries to keep in touch with what is happening there, similar to how you keep up with friends overseas via Facebook

·       EXA does regular Facebook updates: fed from a blog: http://blog.exa.com.au/

·       New educational business seminars: are being introduced by Exa. Free to attend and discuss how to properly use social media, mobile marketing and organic online marketing. These will soon be done in Perth!

·       Change in FB competition rules: you must keep in touch with what you can and can’t do in Facebook. You used to be able to create competitions to get likes but now you must ask a question.

·       Woobox: is a great tool to assist with this: https://woobox.com/. *It is important to capture users data when running competitions or it is pointless

·       Timing: Consider the timing of posts and the best day/time to send out your message for maximum effect

·       Keeping up to date internally: Marketing managers often run into the challenge of trying to keep up to date with all departments. Meetings are good but it would be even better if people utilised internal organisational social networking such as Yammer

·       Meet Up: http://australia.meetup.com/ A great way to meet people interested in similar things from business to personal groups. E.g. women in business, marketing, book clubs, fitness groups etc.


Join Perth Marketing Brekky Club: Would love it if you all join the Marketing Brekky Group on Meet Up: http://www.meetup.com/Perth-Marketing-Brekky-Club/

·       A marketing/PR person is a paradigm shifter. Often there are those in an organisation that are afraid of technology, the unknown or change. You are a key person to facilitate and manage change for the betterment of the organisation.

·       NLP: Discussion of utilising NLP to assist with managing difficult personalities and ensuring you can do your job more effectively.

·       What is NLP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

·       NLP assist with learning how to reduce emotions and make yourself more effective, how to deal with different personalities, how to best communicate with others on their level etc.

·       Platinum Rule by Tony Alessandra (PHD) and Michael J.O’Connor (PHD) discusses how to treat people as they would like to be treated NOT how you would like to be treated. This is essential in business! Only $14.19 at the Book Depository: http://www.bookdepository.com/Platinum-Rule-Anthony-Alessandra/9780446673433

·       John Demartini ran a Break Through Weekend; all about identifying your highest value; your purpose to make you more efficient in life. Similar techniques to NLP. https://drdemartini.com/breakthrough_experience

Well, that's it for this month and I'm looking forward to the next Marketing Breakfast Club.