Diarmaid Mac Mathuna

Head of Client Services

+353 1 7088154

Marketing the old fashioned way doesn’t work anymore!

FEBRUARY 21, 2013, Digital Marketing

I’ve been at a couple of events related to digital marketing recently that have changed how I work, and I thought I’d share some of the key “takeaways” from them here.

In this first blog post, I’ll cover “demand generation” which is a key part of what anyone involved in sales or marketing needs to be doing. That’s according to Michael McGowan from Sales6ix, who ran the workshop I was at for Enterprise Ireland recently.

Demand generation is all about building awareness about the products and services you offer – while at the same time making sure that marketing is integrated with your sales process. It can be particularly effective for companies selling new, innovative products or services that help other businesses solve problems. Michael also focussed on the pipeline needed to convert those leads into happy customers. “It’s all about the ratios” is a bit of truism in sales, but Michael’s workshop proved it really is the case. Because so few leads are ever actually converted into customers, it’s important to have that funnel brimming over through effective marketing.

As Michael pointed out, people don’t like cold calls anymore and they actively try to put off for as long as possible any phone interaction with sales people. So as a marketer you have to encourage them to interact, and generate demand using inbound marketing. This creates a great area of opportunity, says Michael, because you can create useful content for your website that helps people when researching the services and products available on the market. This will encourage them to get in touch and help differentiate you from the competition.

According to research Michael presented, the best ways to do this are (in order of effectiveness):

(1) on demand webinars
(2) online videos
(3) blogs

I was delighted to have video mentioned so far up the list and Michael shared some pretty compelling stats that made us and the other digital marketing agency at the workshop very happy. Watch this space for our first ever webinar sometime soon (coming up after the sold out online video workshop we’re running with the PRII), and our new website will have even more video on it too. We’ve also written recently about using video analytics for making sure marketing campaigns are measurable.

So they’re the main things I took away from that event. I’ll be covering the mobile marketing conference organised by the Digital Marketing Institute in my next blog post. Were you at these events? Or do you have any extra comments to add from your own experience? Feel free to contact me directly on diarmaid.m@agtel.ie or use the comment form on this blog to share your thoughts.

Shameless plug: I’ll be talking about Social TV and some of our IFTA-nominated TV programmes that have big social media angles at a talk in Engineers Ireland on 7 March at 7.30pm. It’ll be in Irish, but all are welcome!