Grow Your Business - David Reid Group Perth - Strategy, Marketing, Sales, People, Technology, Consulting and Coaching

Jeremy Cookson

Jeremy has worked in advertising and marketing for over twenty years. He has been involved firsthand in developing marketing strategies for national and international clients and has consulted to both the State (WA) Government and Federal Government. His clients have included Coles Myer, Blockbuster Video, Optus, Citibank, Westpac and Australia Post.

In this DRG snapshot Jeremy outlines the need businesses have to re-evaluate their marketing in the light of our changing marketing landscape.

What challenges do people face in today’s marketing environment?

Today’s media landscape and marketing communications is far more complicated than it was five years ago. If you think about the media options today – backs of toilet doors, tops of tables in food courts, smart cars dragging mobile billboards down the main street, airport signage – and that’s without even starting to talk about the entire online or mobile marketing environment which utilize dynamic data and even proximity programs. Many of these new media have only come about in the last five years, and some more recently. And things will keep changing with the development of technology so I think marketers or business owners working their way through all of that - coming up with a balanced media mix and coordinated sales and marketing program can be very difficult.

The other complexity to these choices is managing a brand across all these different activities and making sure you don’t have a very disjointed approach to your marketing. I think these are some of the new challenges that marketers face today. Businesses are now turning to marketing consultants with expertise outside of traditional models to manage this new and far more complicated communications mix.

Advertising agencies recognize that they are not able to effectively manage all these activities and that for some campaigns and clients there is a need for specialist external resources. I think it is often very useful to get an external consultant’s point of view, who may juxtapose some new strategies and thinking around some of the new options that are available.

In summary, there are real challenges in developing an understanding of, and working with this more complicated media landscape to get the best return on your marketing dollar.

How do you get the best from your marketing dollar?

It starts and finishes with understanding the customer – who is it that you are trying to sell to? How do they think and process things? What is their buying cycle? Where do they live? Once you’ve formed a view about all of these things you can start to come up with a marketing communications strategy and media plan of how to reach those people. You can also flow some of the buying decision information back into the creative concepts.

It’s really about what I refer to as the sales stepping stones. What are the sales stepping stones that move a potential buyer from where they are today, to where you want them to be – buying your product. Some of these stepping stones may be that customers look at your website, they might request a brochure or other form of information. Analysis of these stepping stones means getting a meaningful marketing plan, making some decisions about which steps to take and in which order, and working out how to spend their marketing budget most effectively.

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