Tech Marketing: The ROI Edition I Winter 2009

MARKETINGTECH

www.techmarketing.com.au I

Kick more goals with your marketing spend with a dozen tips for maximising ROI

marketing that measures up

ROI EDITIONWINTER 2009Dell’s Jay

Turner goesBEYOND MARKETING

Kogan PR Stimulus

gets a

Martin WellsMarketing Manager

NEC Australia

MARKETINGTECH


HIn this Issue Winter 2009OP

INIO

NSTech Marketing is published for Australian technology marketing

managers by MediaConnect Australia

EditorPhil Sim ([email protected])

JournalistJo-Anne Hui ([email protected])

ContributorsGrace Chu

Lloyd BorrettJason Davey

DesignerPatricia Istiphan

PublisherTamara Jawad

104/8 Century Cct, Norwest Central,Baulkham Hills, NSW 2153

Subscription information:visit www.techmarketing.com.au or contactMediaConnect Australia on (02) 9894 6277

© 2009 MediaConnect Australia. All Rights Reserved

connectmedia

010MediaThe Cover DVD By Lloyd Borrett

09DigitalBack in 10 minutes? By Jason Davey

aving worked as an IT journalist for many years, I wrote countless stories about how IT departments needed to buck the idea that they were cost centres and start demonstrating to the business that they could, and should, be viewed as key contributors to generating revenues and profits. If you work in B2B tech marketing, you’ve probably tried to pitch that same angle, too.

Exactly the same scenario exists for marketers. Too many CEOs and boards still view marketing as a regrettable expense, its only redeeming feature being that it’s an easy place to trim the fat when times get tough. Unfortunately, the marketing industry must take a lot of the responsibility for that perception, as it never really sought to measure itself and demonstrate its value to business stakeholders.

The irony is this should never have been the case. Marketing can prove its bottom line worth to stakeholders better than most business departments, because it does play a large part in driving the most measurable of all outcomes - sales.

It’s true that marketing has never been more important, particularly in the IT industry. So many technology markets are mature, commoditised sectors - technological advantages are hard to come by and the only real way left to differentiate product A versus product B is via marketing. However, successful marketers will not take this for granted and will ensure they put as much focus on measuring and reporting their success as they do in generating it. Online has given senior executives a taste for accountable marketing and there will be no holding back the tide now. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that in these tough economic times, that desire for proven, positive returns on marketing expenditures has never been greater.

- Phil Sim CEO, MediaConnect Australia

03 Cover StoryMarketing that Measures Up

013 Tech ProfileJay Turner

011 Case StudyKogan gets a PR Stimulus

08SEOSearching for ROI By Grace Chu

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Marketing that measures up

Martin Wells Marketing Manager, Communications & CampaignsNEC Australia

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MARKETINGTECH


Cover story

t’s unlikely that tech marketers have ever had to focus on return on investment (ROI) like they must today. Ever since the Global Financial Crisis started, businesses are watching their pennies like it was their last and marketers have been under intense pressure to show their marketing spends are delivering measurable business returns.

In our Tech Marketing 2009 annual survey, which aims to gauge the spending intentions of Australia’s tech marketing community, respondents overwhelmingly identified ROI as their primary focus, while indicating they would increase spending on those measurable marketing activities traditionally associated with bottom-line benefits, like online and direct marketing. Meanwhile, they were preparing to shave the share of budget held by less tangible activities, like events and brand advertising.

In this special ROI edition of Tech Marketing, we’ve compiled a list of a dozen tips aimed at helping tech marketers to better their marketing results, provided by some of Australia’s top IT marketers and marketing experts.

Martin Wells, Marketing Manager - Communications & Campaigns, NEC Australia said that for him, marketing in these tough times was still a matter of “remembering your ABCs”.

“Always be communicating, activity builds contacts (and clients) and always be closing,” he said.

“Tech marketing is all about the interaction between people, process and technologies where everything communicates,” he said. “Keep it simple and deliver on that simplicity by ensuring every piece of communication and media has a contact return path - whether it be by phone, email or web - with all these paths ideally tracked and managed to determine effectiveness and ROI.”

This is key, agreed Jay Turner, marketing director at Dell Australia. “Make as many parts of your campaign as independently measurable as possible,” he said.

Public RelationsEven if no media outlet picks up your news, you can still ensure you get it out to interested parties via Google News. MediaConnect, the publisher of this magazine, offers a free announcement distribution service called PRWire (http://www.prwire.com.au) which not only pushes releases into Google News, but also onto Twitter and RSS feeds.

Tech publishers, IDG and iTWire also offer free vehicles to publish your releases in Google News and there are a number of other inexpensive services, like Newsmaker and PRWeb that can be used to enhance the distribution of your releases.

Measure the Pipeline“Don’t limit your ROI calculations to sales alone,” said Simon Steel, strategic director of Campaign[x]. “Recognise instead that a customer will move towards making a sale over a period of time. Then break that journey up into pipeline stages and assign a value to each. You’ll never look at your lead generation campaigns the same way again.”

Steele suggests giving each campaign response a weighting. A weighting is a percentage of total sales value, which reflects the likelihood of that response leading to a sale.

Technology marketers are under more pressure than ever to deliver results. So we asked the IT marketing community and tech marketing experts for their top tips to improve ROI. By Phil Sim.

“Customers make decisions through information gathering in multiple areas. You need to know which areas work best for you and your customers to make re-investment decisions.”

One common theme amongst those who provided tips to Tech Marketing is the importance of segmenting your audience and providing highly targetted marketing.

“Relevance to audience is paramount,” said Wells. “Go one to one, put the shotgun away!”

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MARKETINGTECH

I www.techmarketing.com.au

Cover story

5

Geoff McQueen Managing Director

Internetrix

Testimonials & MarginsCustomer testimonials are one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to market B2B solutions. To get the best bang for your buck, Sebastian Rice managing director of marketing agency Silverspan, says that material should be created that can easily be re-used. “At a minimum, you should aim for press material, material for sales brochures and text for your website,” he said.

Rice also stressed that marketers have to be aware of business fundamentals, like profit margins and how likely it is that a business will generate incremental revenue from a new customer.

“In the B2B space, most campaigns that we work on today integrate multiple elements of public relations, online advertising, events, direct marketing, and telemarketing. Deciding the appropriate mix of each of those elements is generally where most organisations need serious advice,” said Rice. “The balance usually depends on the size of the target audience, the practicalities and cost of reaching that particular group of prospects, and the likely margin from each new client.”

Build Media RelationshipsWhatever you spend on public relations, you will dramatically increase your ROI if you have established relationships with media prior to sending out any media materials. Journalists are far more likely to open materials

related to companies and people they know. Peter Spiteri, marketing director at Emerson Network Power stresses that these relationships must work not just for the vendor, but for the journalist as well.

“Building trust and acting as an advisor without hidden agendas - even on technology topics that don’t relate directly back to the vendor’s business - is key to these relationships,” he said. “Simply regurgitating corporate messages won’t win you any friends with the media, nor give you any credibility, even when you do have something of value to offer.”

The annual Kickstart Forum (organised by MediaConnect, the publisher of this magazine) is arguably the most time-effective and cost-effective way to kick-off, or grow media relationships and position your spokespeople as quotable authorities. See inside front cover for more details.

Speak Up“Get out there and speak at industry events and conferences,” says Catriona Pollard of CP Communications. “Participating in presentations and speaking opportunities provides a cost effective way of reaching a captive, and quite often a large and influential audience. Speaking opportunities can increase the brand awareness of your company and provide a platform to be industry experts with the target audience.”

Pollard also recommended marketers start a how-to blog. It costs almosts nothing and demonstrates your companies expertise and authority.

Focus on ConversionsWhile most marketers would be using website analytics to count visit and page views, surprisingly few have configured their analytics software - such as Google Analytics - to measure conversions. “A successful conversion could be anything from viewing your online store locator, to browsing a catalogue, getting them to make contact with you, or making a purchase,” said Geoff McQueen, managing director of Internetrix. “Conversions are vital for retail businesses because they generate leads which can often result in sales. They are therefore vital to your bottom line.”

Analytics packages should be configured to give actionable insights into the conversion funnel, showing you where you’re losing your customers and helping you take action that will increase your conversion rate.

Market IntelligenceNothing beats having an in-depth understanding of your customer to improve your marketing results, said Dell’s Turner. You can use databases, surveys, case studies and firmagraphics, but nothing is as cheap or insightful as actually getting out of the office to visit some customers. “A visit to the customer will likely change your approach and demonstrate where you have wastage,” he said.

Read more about Jay Turner on page 13

Opportunities LostHannah Watterson managing director of Watterson Marketing Communications says the first thing companies must ensure is they have the right resources and processes in place to handle customer inquiries generated by their marketing activities.

“Too often companies do not have the number of people they need to take calls or respond to emails and so the opportunity is lost,” she said. This is particularly the

case when exhibiting or participating at events. Have a plan in place to follow up the people you meet there. “What’s the point of collecting visitor information at an exhibition if you don’t qualify and follow up on those leads?”

MARKETINGTECH


Cover story

We live and breathe IT02 9959 1991 www.silverspan.com

IT Marketing Strategy

IT Event Management

IT Lead Generation

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Tie in with Big EventsWhen you plot your marketing, one handy tactic is to dovetail your offer or campaign with an event that is drawing much attention and commentary in the industry, said Martin Mason, managing director of B2B communications specialist Bang Australia.

“For example, a recent virtualisation and storage campaign for an IBM technology partner generated record response rates, mainly because it landed on peoples’ desks the week after the VMWare Virtualisation Forum,” he said.

Clean DatabasesA great database can make a massive difference to ROI, but having a clean, accurate database is not always easy or cheap. Adam Benson, managing director of Outsource, recommends that you only buy a database if you’re going to use it regularly and keep it clean. Otherwise, consider renting.

“It’s cheaper and you still get to keep records that respond to your campaigns,” he said.

Other tips marketers might consider in order to keep their data clean are to dump old, failed records. They cost more to maintain than they’re worth. He also suggests not filing away return-to-sender mail, with the idea of one day, doing a big major clean-up. “Send it to a telemarketing agency to clean. Incremental cleaning is easier to budget for than a major clean,” Benson said.

Segment your CIOs Technology marketers who speak to all CIOs with a single message are getting it all wrong, said Lloyd Borrett, marketing manager for anti-virus vendor AVG. “CIOs are individuals, and they typically represent a composite of different roles, depending on their personal and professional backgrounds, the size and context of their companies, and the strategic importance of IT to their companies. Technology marketers need to segment their CIO audience and speak to each in the voice they need to hear. Understanding each segment’s buying needs enables you to push the CIO’s hot buttons and maximise ROI.”

Read more from Lloyd Borrett on page 10

Think MobileResearch from the The Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) has found that mobile website usage is increasing by 55 per cent year-on-year. To ensure your customers are aware you’re on the web, beat the drum, said Adam Ward, director of Asia Pacific for 2ERGO and promote your mobile website in offline marketing, using a .mobi address or something equally identifiable as mobile. Ward also notes that SMS campaigns, when done well, have very high response rates due to the fact that 95 per cent of all SMS messages are opened immediately. So let your customers opt-in to SMS communication, and also allow them to contact you via SMS as well. Ensure your customer databases include fields for mobile phone numbers and define their preferred methods of communication. Then bring it all together by using SMS to drive users to mobile websites.

By GRACE CHU Managing Director

FirstClick Consulting

DDefine Success Metrics:This sounds simple, but it’s critical that the right definition of success is used when measuring ROI.

Measure The Right Things:A survey last year revealed that a high percentage of marketers still aren’t measuring or analysing their online activity. With so many choices available, there’s no excuse for not measuring everything.

Apply Different Values:All conversion events aren’t created equal, so make sure you’re applying different values to different types of events.

Test & Measure Offline Actions Driven by Online:Don’t just calculate ROI based on online activity – consider other measurements like, running customer surveys in-store to measure the ratio of offline to online leads.

Integrate Online & Offline:Online and offline marketing are largely interdependent and interrelated. In many ways traditional media raises the question, and digital media helps consumers find the answer.

Searching

Optimise Everything!Anyone can set up an AdWords campaign and spend money, but maximising the performance and generating positive ROI within a competitive environment is a highly complex science.

Leverage SEO and SEM Synergies:Search marketing is a tale in two parts, and a common challenge is that often these parts are managed by different departments within a business and marketers who are able to understand and manage both disciplines are in the best position to maximise uptake of the search opportunity in the most cost-effective way.

These are just a few of the issues to keep in mind when it comes to online ROI - there are plenty of others not covered such as lifetime value of the customer, conversion latency, brand impact etc. While this might seem like a lot to take on board, many of the above points are interdependent and can have a compounding effect on ROI.

But here’s the good news: if you can run through these seven check-points and tick them all off you’ll be building a significant competitive advantage into your digital marketing campaign, and will be well on the path to maximising your online ROI.

Grace Chu is the founder and managing director of FirstClick Consulting, a strategic search marketing agency that provides SEM and SEO services to large and mid-sized corporates. (www.firstclickconsulting.com)

By GRACE CHU Managing Director

FirstClick Consulting

for ROI

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between.

So how do we make sure we’re measuring online ROI effectively? Here are a few tips to keep in mind when implementing a digital marketing strategy:

ifferent theories abound in marketing circles when it comes to the effectiveness of online versus offline. Search Marketing in particular attracts more than its fair share of theorists – at one end of the spectrum are those who believe that Search ROI is often overstated due to ‘last click attribution’. Whereas at the other end of the spectrum, many argue that Search ROI is often understated, because marketers only measure return based on transactional conversion events and not engagement events or offline actions driven by search.

Opinion: SEO

www.techmarketing.com.au I 8

ould you allow a shopper to browse your retail store for 20 minutes without asking them if they need assistance? Wouldn’t you ask them what they were looking for, provide helpful advice, promote your latest offers and ensure they left your store content?

Effective websites translate this experience to the online space by harnessing the increasingly valuable alignment between technical capabilities and marketing goals, particularly in relation to Content Management Systems (CMS). When this is done effectively, the customer’s online experience with your business or brand can actually be as, if not more, satisfying than an offline one.

Your website should be the hub of your online marketing strategy. More than just an exercise in brand awareness, your website should be sticky – capturing information as the consumer interacts; providing relevant and engaging content and offers based on their online behaviour. This allows you to measure the appeal of your product or service offering to the specific requirements of your ‘shopper’.

What Should you be doing?Integrating your online and offline campaigns with your website is imperative. You should use the technology your website provides to track the traffic that has been driven to your site through the campaigns you have run, and measure the online behaviour of users to properly engage them. You should tie together a campaign response with a follow-up website visit, by presenting a follow-up offer, or re-target this group based on their behaviours and actions. But remember, not all visitors will be inspired by the same

call to action.

Targeted communication, and the resulting increase in engagement, is where you will see results. Your engagement strategy should ensure the data you capture is relevant and used effectively throughout the customer lifecycle.

Look at ways to analyse the visitor experience. CMS providers like Sitecore (www.sitecore.com) are offering solutions that make visitor segmentation and profiling possible on-the-fly. This gives you the ability to create a highly relevant and intuitive experience by adjusting content as a profiled visitor progresses through your site.

Here is a short list of the types of things you can monitor, measure and utilise on your website:

Dynamic multivariate testing (in real time): offer testing • and optimisationReal-time website content personalisation based on • behaviour (using click-streams and visitor history)CRM system integration directly from your website • to identify a site visitor (displaying positive buying behaviours) as a leadSession profiling that reports on customer ‘segments’, • as defined by their user behaviour, to allow you to learn and identify customer groups

By using these techniques you will not only increase the sales effectiveness of your website, you will learn more about your customers by their online behaviour at the same time.

W

By JASON DAVEYManaging Director

Digital MarketingBullseye

THE COVER DVD

Jason Davey is managing director of digital marketing for digital services agency Bullseye (www.bullseye.com.au)


Opinion: Digital

9

Back in 10

Why measuring online behaviour is essential to a positive user experience

minutes?

I t’s common for software vendors to make special offer packages of their products available on magazine cover DVDs. Savvy advertising and marketing types see this as predominately a branding exercise. If they’re lucky they’ll see some of their branding on the cover of the magazine, plus on a page inside the magazine featuring details of the cover DVD content. Who knows, maybe someone will install the package, and maybe a select few will buy it.

Thankfully, most publications in this region realise that this is the way it is and don’t charge us to be on cover DVDs. But last year a few publications started to think differently. One approached AVG (AU/NZ) asking for us to pay about the same as for a full-page magazine advert for including our product on their cover DVD.

I decided to make them a counter offer. We track everything to do with such magazine offers, so we know their value to us. I suggested to the publication that instead of paying to be on the cover DVD, we’d give them a significant commission on every sale made via the cover DVD special offer package.

The AVG brand is extremely well known in the magazine’s marketplace, so they were expecting a huge uptake on the cover DVD special offer. Plus, the better the cover DVD promotion worked, the more money the magazine would get. Thus the magazine had every incentive to fully highlight the AVG cover DVD offer in the magazine, on the cover

By LLOYD BORRETTMarketing Manager AVG (AU/NZ) Pty Ltd

DVD, and via their online sites. A true win, win situation.

The magazine loved the idea. We supplied them with a special offer installation file, plus set up a landing page on our web site with the appropriate tracking mechanisms.

A few weeks after the magazine hit the streets their sales representative called asking how much commission they’d made so far. We explained we hadn’t even bothered to run the report as yet because it takes a while for any sales to happen from a 90-day free trial.

Four months later the sales rep rang again, keen to find out how much commission they’d made. Indeed he mentioned they were hoping to have a huge end-of-year party with the proceeds. So we ran the report to get the numbers.

There had been three click-throughs from the cover DVD special offer package to our landing page. Two of these were from our own people testing that the setup was working properly. One was from a magazine reader. No-one had purchased!

So we paid what we expected to pay for being on the cover DVD. The magazine got a reality check as to what being on a cover DVD is truly worth. That said, we would have gladly paid 100 times the cost of a magazine advert had the DVD special offer generated the corresponding volume of sales.

THE COVER DVD

Lloyd Borrett is marketing manager for Australia and New Zealand for anti-virus and security vendor AVG (www.avg.com.au)


Opinion: Media

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What results can you expect from software appearing on cover discs?

I www.techmarketing.com.au11

Kogan PR Stimulus

E-commerce start-up Kogan Technologies pulled off a massive marketing coup on a tiny budget with their Kevin37 promotion. By Phil Sim.

W

gets a

hen Kevin Rudd announced his stimulus package, business minds all over Australia took to dreaming up ways they could grab their slice of the $900 bonus most Australians would soon have in their pocket. Marketers all over the country jumped onto the stimulus bandwagon and it soon became a case of over-stimuli.

However, amongst all those thousands of stimulus offers, it’s unlikely that there was any that generated more attention than Kogan’s Kevin37 promotion.

Kogan is an e-commerce upstart, selling LCD televisions as well as various gadgets and consumer electronics including netbooks, blue-ray players, digital radios and GPS units. Its founder is Ruslan Kogan - a 26 year old entrepreneur who is on a mission to re-model the consumer electronics supply chain by cutting out the middle men between it and the Chinese factories where the products are made, enabling it to sell at a substantially lower cost than its brand name competitors.

At the time the stimulus package was announced, Kogan had for the first time negotiated a price that would allow it to sell a 37 inch LCD HD television for less than $1000. In fact, it had gotten the price down to $900, the exact amount of the stimulus bonus.

Kogan admits the idea for the Kevin37 promotion wasn’t

his. But it didn’t have anything to do with his marketing department, either, because Kogan doesn’t have one. “I’m part-time CEO, part-time marketing manager and part-time cleaner,” Kogan explains. Rather, Kogan credits one of his “mates” for identifying the catch-line.

“As soon as he said it, I was like ‘Oh my god, that’s genius’. So we branded the promotion ‘Kevin37’, on the one hand to be quirky and funny and on the other, to show the marketplace how much we were smashing the marketplace on price.”

Kogan’s PR agency PPR then went to work on the press release to announce the initiative and the response from the media was instantly overwhelming. On the day of issue, Kogan had received airplay on every commercial free-to-air channel, as well as multiple radio interviews, and a swag of print and online articles.

The coverage came on the back of the young entrepreneur’s burgeoning media profile, who is almost proud to admit he’s had no formal media or speaking training, bar for “debating at high school”.

“I enjoy speaking to the media and explaining our business and everyone who has ever sent through an interview request has gotten an interview. All media is important to us,” he said.

Ruslan KoganDirector

KOGAN TECHNOLOGIES

MARKETINGTECH


Case Study: Kogan Technologies

“But I haven’t had any official media training, because all I’m really doing is saying it how it is. I know this stuff, I have a passion for it.”

There was no advertising to back up the Kevin37 campaign, with Kogan boasting that there was so much editorial coverage there really wasn’t a need for any additional pull. In fact, Kogan is pretty sceptical on the merits of any advertising, bar Google AdWords.

“I’m a big believer that people are becoming immune to advertising these days,” Kogan said. “When I read the newspaper and I think two hours later about the ads I might have seen, Ican’t think of any. I don’t look at 99 per cent of the advertising, because it’s irrelevant to me.”

“Google AdWords is the only advertising we do on an ongoing basis, because you know someone is searching for something related to your advertisement and that they are most likely to buy, so you’re not wasting your advertising budget on people who are not interested in a product.”

On any metric, the Kevin37 promotion was a success. It shifted units, it bolstered the brand and it drove massive traffic to the Kogan website - all without a cent of advertising being spent. However, the media is a fickle mistress and while the Kevin37 promotion brought about nothing but positive attention, the next month Kogan felt the other end of the stick when the ACCC gave it a slap on the wrist for contravening a section of the trade practices act. In its advertising and promotions, Kogan has boasted that consumers could save a certain amount of dollars without specifically referring to any particular competitive product. It’s the kind of mistake, a green, young company might easily make and Kogan said he was happy to accept the ACCC’s ruling and agree to adhere to the act with its future marketing initiatives.

It was the type of ruling that in most circumstance would quickly have come and gone, maybe with a brief mention in a trade outlet here or there. However, given the high profile Kogan had recently earned, the story was giving major prominence in many publications and the company was even dubbed as “dodgy” and “a bad boy”.

“With the increased publicity we’ve received, I’ve definitely noticed a bit of tall poppy syndrome, but to me it’s not really that upsetting. In fact, in some ways I see it as a compliment. All I can do is tell the truth and some media blew that story out of perspective, but you’ve just got to trust that people can make up their own minds about which outlets they choose to read and believe”.

Indeed, Kogan claims to welcome criticism. The company allows users to comment and review the products they buy and it also has a very active blog, which was also used to trumpet the Kevin37 promotion. That blog post gained more than 80 comments, a significant proportion of which was not positive, with some taking exception to the fact that the federal government’s stimulus money might be spent on Chinese-made goods.

“That’s not something I’m concerned about at all. We have a value proposition with all our products, we know we offer the best value for money and I’m happy to be a hundred percent honest. I want to hear those bad comments, because anything that is constructive we take on board and it helps us improve our brand and our business.”

Kogan said the reality is that even if you try and muffle the dissenters, they will just go onto other forums. “It’s not something you can hide from,” he said. And Kogan aims to have a presence on many of those forums as well, being active on both Twitter and Facebook, which the company tends to use to trumpet specials and limited time offers.

Social media fits with Kogan’s marketing strategy on two fronts. One because it’s cheap. And two because it allows the company to involve and engage its potential customers. Perhaps the best example of that was when Kogan used its blog earlier this year to ask its customers to help design its first foray into the notebook market. The specifications for that product were predominantly based on the 300-odd comments that responded to that blog request and the subsequent release of the product sold out in a day.

In your marketing text books, that level of engineering alignment with marketing intelligence and customer engagement would be trumpeted as world’s best practice and an achievement few organisations are ever able to attain. For Kogan, it was just about getting back to his mantra of giving the customer something they’re asking for and doing it in a way that’s a little bit unusual and which delivers value.

So right now, no, Kogan can’t imagine that he’ll need to bring on a marketing manager any time soon. It’s not something he’s yet even contemplated. After all, he notes, there’s another mate doing a marketing degree at Monash, who he can ask for a bit of advice along the way.

12


t is a long-held dream of tech marketer Jay Turner, to fly a blow-up animal over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Prior to his current role as marketing director at Dell, Turner worked at Gateway - a PC company that was well known for their use of a Holstein dairy cow as their mascot. In order to drum up awareness for the company, Turner came up with the idea of creating a giant inflatable cow and floating it over the top of Sydney’s most iconic landmark. A hot air balloon company was on board and Turner had even approached local radio stations to run cow-spotting competitions.

“However, we didn’t quite get that one off the ground - excuse the pun,” Turner said regretfully. “There were a few senior people in the organisation who thought I was a lunatic but I still say that one day, I will fly some animal over the Harbour Bridge - even if it’s for my benefit only.”

It’s probably fair to say that it is highly unlikely that Turner will get the chance to fulfill that dream at Dell. Firstly, Dell doesn’t have a mascot - bovine or otherwise. And secondly, giant inflatable creatures aren’t the kind of marketing that the highly analytical, and results-focused Dell is renowned for.

“Because of the past direct nature of our business, we measure everything. We measure to the cent, the media, the cost-per-lead, the return on investment, the revenue per spend right down to the P&L,” Turner said.

The customer intelligence that Dell derives from that process means it has an unparalleled understanding of its various customer bases, allowing it to segment very narrowly and then approach each of those segments with a unique strategy, Turner said.

“Some want to be communicated with in other ways, some don’t want to be communicated with as often, some want to hear about solutions most close to them,” he explained. “The only way you can successfully do that on any scale is to start with the customer and invest in knowing them as best you can.”

Jay TurnerMarketing DirectorDell Australia

Jay Turner started selling toothbrushes, moved into IT distribution and had shared a moment with a cow before landing at measurement master Dell. And somehow it all seems to make sense, reports Jo-Anne Hui.

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BEYONDMarketing

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MARKETINGTECH


Tech Marketer: Jay Turner You’d be hard-pressed to find any organisation that understands or knows it customers in the fashion that Dell does, Turner argued.

“To that point, it’s gone beyond marketing,” he said. “Every function you can think of in marketing, we’ve aligned to customer segments - the public/government sector, large enterprise, SMB and consumer. The whole organisation from the top to the bottom is aligned that way now, and that certainly wasn’t the case in the past.”

That focus on the customer is not just a corporate mantra, it is very much aligned with Turner’s own philosophies on marketing and something he puts down to his background in sales.

Prior to making the move into marketing, Turner was a sales rep for Johnson & Johnson, driving around selling toothbrushes and baby powder to pharmacists and shop owners.

“I’ll probably be attacked as I walk out the building when I say this, but the best marketers are sales people. Marketing’s about the customer, and the more you understand the customer, the easier it is to get your strategy right and spend your money in the right place,” Turner said.

Turner’s marketing career now spans 14 years, all of which have been in the IT industry. He worked for a couple of prominent distribution companies, including Australia’s biggest - Tech Pacific (now Ingram Micro) - then Gateway and then made the move to Dell eight years ago.

“It’s been good fun,” he said. “It’s been like going to university only getting paid for it, really.”

One of the major attractions at Dell has been the opportunity to be involved in so many different parts of the business and in a variety of positions. Turner said he has had five roles in his time at the company spanning consumer marketing, third-party marketing and corporate marketing to Dell’s top 5,000 accounts. He’s also moved between local and regional positions and crossed between pure marketing positions and more strategic roles that have involved setting three-year growth plans and building customer segmentation models.

“Ultimately, I think what makes you a successful marketer is your breadth of functions, skills and experience. Really, I’ve had the opportunity to do the ‘supply chain of marketing’ through the trades, to the reseller/local shop front all the way to the end-user. Then if you look at it from any other way, I’ve done marketing aimed at the biggest corporates in the world, government, small business all the way down to consumers.”

Looking at the challenges he and other marketers are facing today, Turner identifies media fragmentation asperhaps the biggest moving target. Once upon a time, you could reach 80 per cent of the population by advertising on three television channels and doing some PR on the side.

“Now I’d say you need to be on 35 channels, Youtube and Facebook to have any chance. And you have to upset Media Watch to cover that last five million. With the change in technology and the digital age and digital radio, you’re going to have to be on 40 radio stations. It has really changed the industry,” he said, adding that while it may seem like a challenge from the outset, it’s actually a real benefit for a marketer.

“If you only need to impress 20% of a particular market, you don’t have to spend all the money on the other 80% you don’t really need. That’s really why digital media and the advent of lots of TV channels has happened and why it hasn’t fallen in a heap. You can target your customers a lot better.”

While the current economic environment is a factor affecting all marketers, Turner again comes back to marketing ROI and being able to demonstrate the link between a marketer’s work and their company’s profits.

“If you can show the financial return on a P&L level, then you’ll find that the pragmatic accounts and finance people will in fact invest more in you at this time. Everyone may be saying, ‘Hey I don’t know what sort of budgets I’m going to get in the future’, but if you can measure marketing like I can at Dell, you’ll be seen as an investment, not a cost.”

ON JAY TURNER Steven NormanManaging Director, Asia Pacific, Targus.We are all challenged to do more with less and Jay has the creativity to make it happen. He really thinks about the broader picture and how marketing can positively impact the P&L. Through his consistent delivery over time he has tremendous support from the senior management to get things done.

Suzan StanleyAccount Executive, Large Corporate Accounts, DellJay is the real deal. His volume of work output is tremendous and his intellectual horsepower is way above average. Jay’s compassion and ethics are the stuff of a real leader and his sense of humour will keep you rolling in the aisle.

Andrew MartinGeneral Manager, Enfatico ANZJay has always struck me as a consciousness marketer who clearly understands the challenges that SMBs face in the IT area. He has time for people, which make him good to partner with from an Enfatico point of view.

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At MediaConnect we judge our success by the success of our clients.Our job is to provide all of the tools and information that PR professionals need so that they can get on with the job of getting the right messages out to the right people.

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Dimension Data Australia

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Documents

Tech Marketing: The ROI Edition I Winter 2009