Why digital companies need to refocus on marketing their unique value
By Greg Orme
Times are tough. You can’t turn on the TV without Robert Peston assaulting your senses with dire warnings about the economy. And for a lot of the creative digital businesses Kikrbright supports – interactive and online marketing and design, digital education, entertainment and games production – the change in business environment has been a bit of a shock.
Management have never needed to try so hard to get revenue through the door. Whether the buyer is a marketing director, commissioning editor, agency creative director, or a consumer clicking on a website, these bytes of creative value are generally discretionary purchases in a time when discretion often means ‘doing less, or doing nothing for now’.
The Golden Years
Between the dotcom bust of late 2001 and the onset of this recession in autumn 2008 demand was high for digital services and content pushed along by mega-trends such as channel fragmentation, social acceptance of all things online and household broadband penetration. This was the proverbial rising tide that floats all boats. A time when orders for all sorts of things – websites, banner ads, interactive online productions, mobile content, TV, games, design, and animation – just “arrived” out of the ether. For the founders of some lucky companies a sales and marketing strategy just meant having a warm body in the office to answer the phone when it inevitably rang. The challenge was not how to get work, but how to get it all done – and retain a consistent level of quality and creativity.
New Challenge, New Approach
Times have changed. And the difference between those who emerge from this downturn stronger, and those who come out weaker (or, sadly, not at all), will be management teams that realise they need to adapt their style and change their focus to survive. So, if you are reading this and you manage a digital agency or multi-platform production company you might want to sit somewhere quietly and ponder this question: "do we have sufficient focus on our market position, business development and sales to match these tough economic times?"
To help you dig into that big issue here is a handy list of sub-questions to sanity check if your marketing strategy is suited to our times or just, erm, a bit of a non-starter:
- Is our USP (Unique Selling Proposition) genuinely unique? Or is actually all but identical to the other players in my creative industry segment? (This one is a bit of a can of worms because the answer has direct implications for your overall company strategy – but it is the question to start with!)
- Have we asked our customers recently why they find us valuable to work with - and crucially what our relative advantage is over the competition?
- Are we ever so excited about acquiring new customers - and completely forget to call our old ones?
- Does the messaging on our marketing collateral mostly talk about what we do, and how creative and brilliant we are – rather than the value we offer to our customers?
- Are the marketing channels we use (website, social networking, speaking at conferences, emails, client visits etc) the most effective mix for our market and what we do?
- Do we have productive internal processes and systems to estimate the size of our forward-looking order book - and to make sure one key ‘marketing’ person is not acting as a bottleneck?
If the answers to the above are less than reassuring you are doubtless missing out on business that could help you through these bleak times. What’s ironic is we find a lot of creative businesses – even those who work in marketing fields – have not applied the same discipline to branding for their own business that they offer to clients or their own creative products!
Why bother?
There is no doubt this recession will start to recede in the next 12 months or so and digital industries supplying creative content and creative services will again start to grow - and grow faster than the UK economy. So, if the good times will inevitably roll again, why worry about sales, marketing and business development?
For two good reasons: firstly, what a sad waste it would be if great management teams, and otherwise sustainable business models, fail because of a short-term cash flow issue bought on by falling sales. Secondly, this is a perfect time to get this right and get a jump on the competition. While times are a bit slack operationally it’s a great opportunity to put your house in order to be ready to grab as much business as we can when the economy picks up.
© Copyright Kirkbright 2009
