Manas Datta

So 2010 is half way through. The economic climate seems to have “stabilised” for some sectors, though it is set to get quite rough and bumpy dfor certain sectors (like the public sector in the UK for example).

For marketing, I can see a couple of things showing through as prime areas of concern (and things to spend the most energy on), and I have listed these below. Now other marketers may or may not agree with me, but this is what I intend to work towards:

• Cleaning up messages
  At least for B2B marketing, it feels like messages are generally way too complicated, and I’d like to go back to basics and focus on little more than stating what the pain is, what the cure is, and how you can get the cure.
• Understanding customers
  Not really something that is new, but if you have the tools to understand how your customers are interacting with your website and your brand, then that information needs to be exploited ruthlessly, so that’s another thing (analytics) that has crept up the top of my list of priorities.
• Nonline marketing
  I was listening to someone from the new Metro Bank who was saying that customers need to be able to contact you any way that they feel comfortable. Cruel words if you work in online marketing and your focus has been forever to push people online whether they like it or not. For a while it worked because everyone was doing the same thing and customers had no option. But I have a feeling that might be about to change.

So there we go – three simple marketing resolutions that have proven themselves to be important. A very crucial issue to tackle as I see it is to decide what channels are going to work best for you, and then spend time judiciously doing a good job implementing those few channels. I have seen already how over-complicated marketing campaigns don’t necessarily deliver results, and personally, I’m beginning to swing towards an almost Helvetica-like attitude towards my plans and campaigns.

Speaking of plans,  that’s another area where this marketing-zen like state might come in useful in a few months time when it’s time to write plans for 2011. For me, I can see that there will be three key areas of focus:

• Analytics – What is my audience doing?
• Demographics – Who are the people in my audience?
• Action – What do I want my audience to do?

Within the course of the last few months, we have seen the focus shift very dramatically to driving traffic towards paid products. I have long been a proponent of this kind of thinking and have wondered what the point is of having zillions of page views if these people are not doing anything on the site – and if we’re not guiding them towards something that has the potential to either:

1. contribute to the company’s bottomline
2. move the customer one step closer towards taking an action of some sort

Anyway, there are my thoughts for this cloudy south London weekend. Updating this blog is turning out to be a bigger task than I thought – so much to say, such little time to say it!