As part of the ADMA Expert Group Interview Series, we recently sat down with the Head of Communications for Coca Cola, Leo Roberts on the success of what is arguably their most successful campaign to date.

Each year Coke creates a large summer campaign to attract customers, and this year was no different.  The brief for the Share a Coke Campaign in terms of the objectives was very similar to previous years. It was all about recruiting consumers into the brand and the continuing challenge of taking the existing love for the brand and converting it into purchase intent and ultimately consumption. According to Roberts, the marketing objectives for the campaign were very similar to every other. The slight change was that they simplified the brief to get down to the real essence of what they wanted to achieve. “We got the brief down to no more than 150 words,” said Roberts, which allowed the creative agency more scope. In the brief one of the things that differentiated it this year was the desire to “create an idea that got people talking about coke”. One of the connection planning principles of the company is that social is at the heart,” said Roberts.

Social was at the heart of the campaign right from the start. The idea grew into an invitation to share a coke, and ultimately sharing is a very social behaviour.

“We created a campaign that we thought would generate a lot of buzz. What we didn’t expect was the scale of that buzz and how quickly it grew.” From the moment the packs started to appear on shelves, that was when the buzz started to appear.

The major elements that differentiate this campaign from others are twofold. Firstly the role of the pack is an incredibly important piece of owned media and it played a pivotal role in this campaign. The second element was social. The hub of the campaign was the Facebook community. They had a URL, which drove everybody to shareacoke.com.au and to the Facebook community. “We created a whole heap of content and ways for people to get involved in the campaign and use the functionality of Social Media to amplify the idea to share a coke.”

Like any other advertiser, Coke saw the benefit in measuring the impact of their investment. What differentiated this campaign was the role of digital and social; the amount of investment they put in those channels. “What we did was created new protocols to effectively measure the impact of that investment. It was a fusion of what we traditionally did, and still do, and created new methods to make sure we properly measured the impact of the investment.”

Do they intend to develop the relationship customers on a longer term? According to Roberts: “Growth in traffic was up to 870%. Our Facebook community grew 39% over the campaign period.” The thing with social is that it isn’t always on connection point, and while you can run campaigns and have social at the heart of those campaigns, when you’re not active on a particular campaign, that community is still active, you need to stimulate it, encourage it, feed it.  “That’s our intention. So we have a content plan for our online community that sits outside the campaign. It is about continuing the momentum.”

A lot of companies are coming to grips with social media and the legalities around it. ‘There’s lots of different models you can adopt in this area”, says Roberts. “I think no one model suits any organisation or any brand”. If you think about the way in which their Facebook community is run globally. “The Coke global Facebook group was started by consumers. And rather than shut that down we actually reached out to those consumers and worked with them to build the community. And it’s really our point of view is about fans first, and about making the interaction with them authentic.” Obviously there are some rules around that. A lot of advertisers talk about connection points and a framework of paid, owned, earned and shared. Facebook is an interested one because is it owned media or is it earned media. “We don’t particularly view it as owned media. We don’t own the data, Facebook does. The way we think about it is that it is a piece of owned media, but the fans own it.” … “It’s really about allowing consumers direct access to the brand in an authentic way.”

It’s incredibly important to add value. “As part of the Share a Coke campaign we had 150 names on packs which covered about 40% of our core group of consumers but which meant that 60% of people didn’t have their names on the packs. So we created content that was socially enabled people that allowed people to get their names on cans so that they could then share them via their own social network, hopefully that was a value add and we saw all of those virtual cans created and shared.”

Coke Unleashed
Unleashed is about 18 months since it’s launch and is incredibly complex initiative. Globally Coca Cola have about 15 or more similar programs. “Coke unleashed is a consumer manifestation of our relationship strategy.” It’s a strategy that recognised the power of data. Ultimately it has two objectives. One is about frequency, and one is about retention. “We’re about rewarding incremental purchases but also about retaining loyal consumers and rewarding existing behaviour”. It’s incredibly important. It provides both the short-term digital infrastructure for Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero to run promotions through it. “But long term it’s a way for us to create a one to one relationship with consumers that we value.”

At the heart of the Coke Unleashed platform is a database, which they would use to better report marketing decisions. Longer-term is to get a better understanding of our consumers so that we can take that understanding and create more meaningful communications” Social Media fans are profitable to Coca Cola in terms that they’re generating a lot of insights that helps them improve their product offering and brand positioning online.

The key for Coca Cola is integrating behaviours that consumers have online and pull that behaviour into a platform that they can control. Only time will tell how successful the campaign has been for them but it’s certainly been worth watching.

This blog was taken from the full interview with Leo Roberts, Head of Communications for Coca Cola as part of the Expert Group Interview Series. Lucie Austin, Marketing Director for Coca Cola South Pacific will be providing more insights into the Coca Cola campaign at this years ADMA Forum in August.

Last month MIPTV hosted a banded Entertainment Summit for the second time. Doug Scott, President of OgilvyEntertainment, kicked off with a state of the industry, calling 2012 the tipping point for branded content as brands are looking for new ways to engage consumers and the entertainment market projected to be worth $1.8 trillion by 2015. Branded content is not new, but it’s increasingly gaining momentum and turning into big business with substantial results.

The world’s best in web-based branded content is being honoured at the 16^th annual Webby Awards. The winners have been announced and will be fêted at a star-studded ceremony at The Hammerstein Ballroom in New York on Monday, May 21.

The 16th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from over 60 countries worldwide and has four main categories: Websites, interactive advertising & media, online film & video, and mobile & apps. The fact that Online Film & Video is one of the four key pillars of the awards recognises the increasing importance of video content as an integral part of any digital marketing strategy.

Over 20 categories are listed within online film and video and all nominees have premiered their work online.  For the sake of brevity we’ll look at only at branded entertainment. The nominees are…

1. Catvertising

http://www.unignorablework.com/catvertising/

Catvertising is a humorous video made to promote advertising agency John St. located in Toronto. It is a spoof that claims in order to stay on top of the ever-changing advertising landscape John St. has opened the world’s first “cat-video division”. According to their entry information, the video generated 1million views within 12 days, was no.3 on YouTube’s top10, no.1 on the mashable global ads chart and received an offer from NBC to be turned into a reality show. There’s no statistics on how many new clients walked in the door, but a quick look at their YouTube channel suggests the parody had more mileage than just the initial promotion. Cat video commercials exist for three of their clients: WWF, Tetley tea bags and Mitsubishi.

2. Day One Documentaries

http://www.droga5.com/dayone/

With 2/3rds of Americans feeling they’re not financially prepared for retirement, Prudential financial services commissioned a large campaign through Droga5. The result was “Day One”. In 2011 the campaign asked hundreds of people across the US to photograph their first day of retirement. Droga5 then made several short films about people’s retirement on Day One. The videos were placed on a purpose build site for Prudential that also provided resources to help people plan for their own retirement.

3.  K-Swiss, MFCEO Kenny Powers

http://FunnyOrDie.com/m/5uyn

An installment in a series created by agency 72andSunny that shows Kenny Powers (fictional main character from HBO series Eastbound & Down) completing a hostile takeover of K-Swiss shoes.  K-Swiss are taking a gamble with this campaign that is built around the character of Kenny Powers who is an offensive egomaniac, but the humour is generating massive views on sites such as funny or die where the video has 700,000 views. It’s generated over 3million on YouTube and according to gizmodo.com: “Whoever decided to make Kenny Powers the spokesman for K-Swiss doesn’t just deserve a raise. They deserve a medal”.

4. Smartwater – Jennifer Aniston ‘Sex Tape’

http://vimeo.com/20798354

Jennifer Aniston tries her hand at making viral video in this new clip for Smartwater. Parodying and implementing a range viral memes: puppies, dancing babies and a double rainbow. Created by Zambezi advertising in LA, the SmartWater YouTube channel has generated over 10million views. It’s no doubt an expensive campaign, but one that seems to be paying off.

5. The Most Amazing Beat box Video Ever

http://www.ddbparis-campaignsonline.com/

Trace Urban TV, an international urban music channel needed to launch its French version. In January of 2011, DDB Paris came up with the modestly titled “the most amazing beatbox video ever!” which showcases French beat box phenomenon EKLIPS performing a four-minute history of hip-hop in one single take. After being posted on just a couple of Facebook pages, with no media investment, the YouTube became exponentially popular. It was shared, liked, tweeted and reached 2 million views in less than two weeks. According to Mashable in April 2012 it was one of the 20 most shared ads and currently has over 16 million views on YouTube.

And the winners:

• The Most Amazing Beat box Video Ever DDB Paris
• People’s Voice Winner K-Swiss, MFCEO Kenny Powers

It’s interesting to note how many of the nominees are comedies. Catvertising, Kswiss and Smart Water all use humour, in fact catvertising and Smart Water both mock and exploit funny video memes generating massive online views. Viral videos often go for humour aiming for as wide an audience as possible. However if brands are targeting specific demographics they don’t necessarily need to be funny to engage their primary audience.

“Day one” is a series of beautiful and informative profiles aimed at people seriously contemplating their financial future; they have chosen wisely not to use unnecessary gags. The winning video “beat box” is a clever concept that successfully targeted their audience in a way that appeals directly to their interests.

You can watch the winner be rewarded as the event is streamed live now in HD at www.webbyawards.com or visit the iTunes store and download the Webby Awards app to watch the Red Carpet and Webby Awards Show from your iPhone.

This blog was written by Melinda Wearne from The Content Agency. This will be the first in a monthly blog from Melinda that explores the best in online branded entertainment from around the world.

Does your website reside in Europe or is it likely to collect European’s or United Kingdom’s residents or citizen’s data? Well if it does then you probably already know that new cookie laws are coming into effect on 26 May 2012.

The UK DMA’s Mobile Marketing Council has published a How to Guide Mobile and Cookies Legislation to help affected organisations to comply with the legislation.

If your organisation is subject to the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (PECR) or you are simply curious to see how impactful this regulation will be on industry if it was introduced here in Australia then take a look!

View the full published article on How to Guide Mobile and Cookies Legislation here 

A new study from PulsePoint on the digital marketing capabilities and shortcomings of companies finds that “overwhelming complexity” and a “lack of unified measurement” are the key stumbling blocks in aligning these efforts with consumers’ multichannel behaviors. There’s a growing body of research on this topic, most of which support this thesis that marketing leaders are, in fact, overcome by the difficulty of managing and coordinating marketing efforts across the flood of channels that customers use. They also struggle to measure the results, often because marketing efforts are siloed by channel and aren’t correlated well together (e.g. tracking the impact of an email marketing campaign on web traffic and conversion rates).

This article was written by Tom Hoffman, who is the Executive Business Editor at 1 to 1 Media. Sign up to the 1 to 1 Media blog by clicking here

Imagine a world in which our clients waited eagerly for the next email from us, anxiously glancing at their in-boxes in case they missed it. Well it’s not going to happen anytime soon, and more than likely it’s the opposite. Customers, as we know, scan their in-boxes quickly looking for nuggets in amongst the junk and if we fail to impress that’s what our efforts will be classified as – Junk.

But the problem starts even before that point, because according to Return Path, only 76% of commercial emails actually get delivered to the in-box in the first place. Just to give a sense of the scale of SPAM, Yahoo is blocking 25,000 spam messages per second worldwide and about 95% of emails being sent are SPAM. But it’s not just SPAM that is rejected; even opt-in emails don’t get in.

So of the emails that are sent out, 5% may bounce and not make it to the recipient due to an invalid or expired email address. Of those that do reach the mail server, 12% get filtered or go missing, 3% end up in spam folders and roughly 80% ending up in the recipients inbox.

The first port of call for many marketers to tackle this problem is their Email Service Provider, who is after all responsible for managing their email campaigns effectively. But ESP’s (like Exact Target or Responsys) are only partially responsible for what happens after an email is sent. In many cases where an email is sent to an organisation, that organisation’s own firewall and SPAM filtering policies will reject emails. But more importantly, somewhere between send and receive are the gateway receivers – Google, Yahoo, Bigpond, etc. who employ teams of people whose job it is to filter out “Spam” – which unfortunately means a fair amount of legitimate traffic also gets caught in their nets.

So how can marketers steer more of their emails away from the lost email abyss into the in-boxes of the intended recipients? Research by Return Path shows that 77% of deliverability problems are caused by the reputation of the email sender.

There’s a blacklist and a whitelist of emailers, and you don’t want to be on the blacklist. Your reputation is your key and there are several factors which you can influence easily. The first is keeping your list clean so you don’t continually mail dead accounts or unsubscribes (the latter being against the law in any case). The gateway receivers will monitor that, and your reputation will suffer. Something they will also be able to track to a degree is how often your emails get deleted without being read, or moved to the junk folder by the recipient, or flagged by the recipient as spam, or not opened at all. All this is damaging for your reputation and edges you closer to the blacklist. So the other thing you can do is keep your emails relevant. Relevancy is good for opens and clicks and good for your reputation score.

You can learn more about this and many other aspects of how to improve your email effectiveness when you attend our Advanced email marketing short course running in Sydney on September 21 and Melbourne October 12

Last week our blog discussed customer centricity in a piece How Ready are you to Shift to a Customer-Centric Business?. It discussed that if you’re going become a customer centric marketer, you need to first understand all the potential consequences before you dive into it. One consequence and an area that often gets overlooked is often the most critical; that is the content and language you use as an organisation to connect with your customers.

Content and customer centric thinking for many is not nearly as established as we would like to believe, or as much as organisations think they are doing. Many organisations still think in the product is king/solution-selling way; a belief that should not be the focus for a marketer. It’s an unfortunate fact though that no matter what organisation you look at, customer-centric over product centric thinking is rarely present; even in the social realm many organisations are still focused on themselves.

 “No-one’s interested in your marketing. As soon as you realise that, you understand how hard you have to work to get their attention – especially when they’re in a social situation, such as Facebook, Pinterest and Draw Something. You must engage, be relevant – say something interesting”, according to Creative Director and ADMA Copywriting Education Tutor, Jon Maxim.

Nobody likes people that only talk about themselves. Why would a customer feel any differently about an organisation doing so? In order to be relevant, ask yourself: “What unique offering can I provide to people in the social domain to make them actually want to engage with me?” Or more importantly, “how can I innovate my offering in such a way to influence customers into my organisations’ social circle”. “How can I engage (and listen to) them in a way that creates value, in their own time and in the way that they want to be engaged with”. And that’s what it’s about; it’s about owning a different type of conversation.

“You must engage, be relevant – say something interesting. Simply tweeting your corporate message is to miss the point; your market is a market of one. One busy, cynical, tired, overworked person who doesn’t just not care about you, they’ll actively avoid your sales pitch. For organisations who rise to the challenge, it’s a whole new world of possibilities” Maxim notes.

There is always a world of possibilities to convert company-centric content into customer-centric content. How about the next time you plan promote your next offering with a self-serving piece, try something that creates value to your audience. Rethink the way you market by adding value through leadership, or even problem solving. For example, learn how to better serve your customer by providing a resolution to the problems that they are having. Don’t know where to start finding their problems; Google it.

In the end, your social networks are your brand. If your organisation is truly customer-centric, your content needs to be, too. A customer-centric conversation does not need to be about the customer, but it does need to benefit them. As long as you’re not talking ‘me, me, and me’ and practicing what you preach, i.e. serving the customer. Then you’re on your way to complete customer-centricity.

Don’t forget. This Friday, Jon Maxim will be delivering a FREE Lunch n’ Learn to ADMA Members on “Maximum Copy” where he will showcase how to maximise your copy with 45 copy writing tips in 45 mins. Email your interest to membership@adma.com.au

Marketers spend a lot of time and energy preparing content to entice their customers to do business with them, and emails are a major mode of delivery to reach these individuals. But these efforts are useless if the messages aren’t opened by the intended target, or, worse still, if they don’t even make it to a customer’s inbox.

According to Return Path’s latest Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, only 76.5 percent of emails reach the inbox, meaning that almost a quarter of them end up as wasted opportunities. Daniel Deneweth associate director of deliverability strategy at Responsys, said by taking control of their email strategy, companies can achieve higher deliverability. Speaking during Responsys Interact 2012, Deneweth shared the following five tactics that marketers should follow to increase their chances of getting to their customers’ inboxes, as well as what they shouldn’t do.

1. Target active subscribers: Deneweth said this is a key tactic and can help organisations avoid having their messages filtered into the spam folder. “Keep engagement in mind,” he said.

What to do: Send emails only to the most engaged and focus on engagement metrics. What not to do: Mail to inactive customers and ignore open and click data.

2. Make the cadence connection: The one-size-fits-all approach rarely works, and it certainly doesn’t in email marketing. It’s therefore imperative to understand how many messages individual customers find appropriate and then respect their wishes.

What to do: Customise the frequency of messages according to the engagement levels of each individual.

What not to do: Ignore engagement data and keep sending the same frequency of messages to customers who aren’t engaging with your content.

3.Avoid spam traps:Deneweth warned that some customers might provide an email address that they no longer use. He pointed out that if a particular company has a high rate of emails that aren’t opened, the ISP can block all emails.

What to do: Reduce mailings to inactive customers and quarantine new signups until you make sure the email address provided is still active.

What not to do: Keep mailing to old addresses that have shown lack of engagement and dump all signups into the general pool.

4. Make unsubscribe easy: Although no company enjoys seeing its customers unsubscribe from its content, customers will still find a way out by hitting the spam button. “List quality is more important than list size,” Deneweth stresses.

What to do: Move your unsubscribe link to the top of the email and raise awareness about your preference center.

What not to do: Hide your unsubscribe email at the bottom of the page in small, light font.

5. Establish a deliverability review process: Organisations should examine their metrics and make sure they’re reaching their targets.

What to do: Carry out regular monitoring of key deliverability metrics and compare them to industry benchmarks and make sure that there’s a person responsible for managing deliverability.

What not to do: Remain on autopilot and ignore warning signs.

Finally, getting to the inbox isn’t enough. It’s important that the messages organisations send to their customers are relevant or they might find themselves relegated to the spam folder.

This article was written by Cynthia Clark, Senior Writer, 1to1 Media. You can sign up for the 1 to 1 Media e-newsletter by clicking here.

Some people argue that the first and only purpose of a company is to create and retain customers to sell their product or service? And furthermore, that this objective should be the ultimate entity that a company should consider when developing a marketing and sales strategy.

However, some might also bring the argument that a customer obsessive focus has a destructive impact on competition; when each competitor focuses on customer service and discounts rather than what can lead them to the sale and profit.

There is a balance to achieving the best of both worlds, and to focus your efforts on being a customer centric organisation in everything you do, whilst maximising profit.

We asked Regan Yan, Managing Director of database marketing services provider Digital Alchemy: How are customer centric organisations different? He said simply “because they make different decisions and choices. Many organisations I see aspire to become customer centric, but don’t want to change the way they make decisions. Customer centricity to them is making their communications more customer friendly.”

It is a case that too many companies are customer friendly, but not customer centric. Organisations manage each customer equally, missing an opportunity to discover who their valuable customers are. Without that data and knowledge, they cannot make their most valuable customers even more profitable ones.

Another mistake people often make is that they think being customer centric means doing everything your customers want, and that’s simply not the case. Customer centricity means that you’re going to reach out to customers in the right channel, time and communication that suits them, it means to provide good service and develop new products and services for the pivotal customers, not the one timers. Some customers deserve the special treatment, others simply don’t.

“Customer centric organisations make decisions fundamentally differently” says Regan. To be truly customer centric requires the ability to look at your customer in a different light and delve into a more granular level; where you can make decisions based on the individual or customer segments who are valuable from the ones who aren’t. Regan’s right, organisations need to shift their current mindset, not only in customer service, but in the channels and mediums they reach out and respond in.

In order to see if you’re as customer centric as you think, Regan presents you with a couple of questions to see which choices your organisation would make:

1.  Customer has a product that costs twice as much as the one they need based on their usage.  Does your organisation write to the customer and recommend they downgrade to a product with half the revenue?

2.  You have the opportunity to sell a product to a customer, product A is appropriate for the customer and has revenue of $100, product B, is not so relevant for the customer but has a revenue of $300.  Which one do you decide to offer the customer?

3.  You have a very aggressive product offer that offers the first 3 months of usage free but it’s only available to brand new customers.  If an existing customer, who has been with you for many years tries to purchase the promoted product, do you give them the 3 months free if they ask for it?

4.  Product manager creates a product offer that converts to a high monthly usage fee above the market after 2 months free.  They want to send it to your high value customers.  What do you do?

Now think about the level of change that your organisation would need to make in its decisioning to consistently choose the best customer outcome at every interaction…

This does bring some clarity to the subject and raises some questions. Overall it’s clear that if you’re going to look at becoming a customer centric marketer, you need to understand what all the potential consequences are going to be before you get into it. Make sure you understand why you are going down the customer centric pathway, and where you want to get to if you choose to go there.

Is your organisation ready to become a customer-centric business? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

This article was inspired by Regan Yan, Managing Director, Digital Alchemy. Regan will be presenting at Data Day in two weeks in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

In mid-April, ADMA chaired a meeting of twenty worldwide DMA’s in London to discuss critical issues affecting the future of marketing and advertising. At the top of the agenda for almost every country was the issue of privacy and the concern about how it will affect the future of marketing and advertising. (Click here to hear international viewpoints).

Data increasingly sits at the heart of marketing and advertising. Decisions on how to reach customers, engage interest and provide better service are all reliant on using data. This has long been the mantra of marketers but is now extending to all forms of advertising… and in fact business in general.

However, as corporations get ever-smarter in using data to deliver on customer needs and expectations, the progress is being countered by the threat of ever increasing restrictions imposed by ill-considered privacy proposals.

The problem in many countries is that the government recommendations are focused solely on consumer protection without recognising the critical role that data plays in our future growth, innovation and commerce.  Europe in particular, has made short sighted recommendations to try to address immediate narrow issues without considering the enormous knock-on impact. For example, in an attempt to address the issue of social media sharing, Europe has proposed to require businesses to ‘delete’ personal information on request. This certainly works if you are trying to erase your Facebook history …but just consider the ramifications for fraud prevention, company records and suppressions.

This is even more concerning when considering that the European definition of ‘personal information’ could be extended to non-personal or de-identified data. This would mean IP addresses, cookie information and aggregate data would be subject to privacy laws – i.e. consent would need to be gained to use the information and it would need to be deleted on request.

Similar trends are reported in the US, which is embarking on the path of implementing a much more reasonable and well balanced privacy regime.

Just because this is happening on the other side of the world doesn’t mean it won’t impact Australian marketers and advertisers. It will. The new proposed European law specifically states that if data is collected in Europe or relates to a citizen then it is covered by the legislation. This has far reaching ramification when considering the global nature of Internet and the move towards a global economy.

ADMA strongly believes in consumer protection but also believes that much greater consideration needs to be given to benefits that arise from organisations being able to made data-driven business decisions thereby developing and tailoring products and experiences based on our wants and expectations.

Australia is imminently poised to see how our government will approach privacy laws. The new draft Australian Privacy legislation is due to be released in a matter of weeks and this will reveal the extent to which the government has considered the advantages of a balanced approach that protects the consumer whilst encouraging progress and innovation.

In June, ADMA will be launching a monthly webinar series bringing you the latest news about privacy from countries around the world along with providing a summary of how it will affect Australian based marketers. Watch this space for more information.

It’s just SO tempting for B2B marketers to want to target large juicy market segments and market an ever increasing portfolio of products to that audience.

The cold hard truth is that there is nothing less likely to succeed. When I broach this topic with the delegates at ADMAs B2B Marketing Strategy course, I often get quizzical looks. Surely the larger the market the better? There are more potential customers that just have to be a better place for us to fish! Doesn’t it?

In B2B marketing, being a small fish in a big pond isn’t fun. You get pushed around by the big fish, bullied, picked on; it’s tough to win in a fight. Think about the last time you were in a sales call and positioned your company’s value proposition with a client. Did you have to say “Ahhh yes, we are like {insert name of your sector’s dominant player} but cheaper/more flexible service/we bundle heaps of extra stuff for free”…sound familiar?

Every time you are compelled to do this you are giving your competitor a “free kick”, you are acknowledging they are the number one team in town. In many cases non-dominant players are forced to compete on price, putting pressure on margins.

So what’s the solution? Pick a pond that you can dominate. Don’t ask how big my market is; ask instead how small is the market I need to play in, if I am to dominate, if I am to become the big fish.

So lets take a simple example; you make mobile computers…that’s a pretty tough market to dominate and there are lots of powerful big fish. Instead, use focus as your strategy and market to the Mining sector, or the Agricultural sector emphasising your mobile products ruggedised design features (assuming your product does possess such features!).

So how do you figure out how small your market needs to be for you to be dominant? You need to work out a couple of things. Firstly, what’s my share in the market I am playing in at the moment?

• How big is my current target market?
• How many customers do I currently have? 
• What’s my current market share?

…and then figure out:

• In my focus sector, what would a dominant market share look like given the market characteristics? 

Is it 20%, 30% or 50%? It’s unlikely to be less than 30%. In Australia most markets are dominated by 2 or 3 big players. We all know the market power of the banks and supermarkets in Australia (to name but two examples). I expect you can think of several more in your area of business.

• How many customers can I realistically service given my sales, support and delivery capabilities in the next 12-24 months?

Am I constrained by my manufacturing or service capability? Is my distribution channel capacity limited? There are almost always constraints on the supply side of your business that mean you couldn’t support more than a certain volume of business, regardless of your sales success.

• Multiply the dominant share required by your capability to service customers and you have the size of the market that will allow you to dominate.

Almost inevitably these calculations will yield a much smaller market size than you started with. Focusing on this smaller market and focusing your sales and marketing efforts to dominate this smaller sector will mean the benefits of being the big fish will accumulate to you, over time.

A couple of words of warning. The market has to recognise itself as a real market you can’t simply invent a market segment and decide to dominate it. Vertical markets are great focus markets as buyers often have similar challenges you will be great at solving.

Similarly, this approach of “Focus as a Strategy” works best in markets that are still relatively immature and growing, it works less well in very mature markets.

Lastly and most importantly of all, your actions must follow your strategy. The biggest benefit of focusing on a market to dominate is the amount of single-minded, devoted marketing effort that follows in your tactics and planning. Now the problems you solve for prospects, their needs and the benefits of your solution become clearer. Your new, more tightly focused messaging is heard loud and clear by prospects. Your tactics acquire a new found relevance and your plan of attack is simplified and tightly directed.

If you find yourself struggling to compete with the big fish in your market, change your approach, focus your energies on a smaller market and direct your sales and marketing energies. Dominate that sector and move on to your next chosen target.

If you would like to find out more about taking your B2B Marketing from strategy to action, why not check out ADMAs B2B Marketing Strategy Course.

This blog was provided by Chris Fell, Managing Director of G2M Solutions. Chris also has his own weekly blog from G2M Solutions.