This report was produced for the purpose of exploring the digital marketing dmcm opportunities available to Spinningfields. Due to the nature of the digital environment it was necessary to explore possible segmentation approaches, and then to focus on a specific audience. This was seen to be particularly important since we would like to make it a success in an interactive consumer to consumer platform.
Bi: Spinningfields is designed to offer Manchester’s professionals a stylish, ‘world class’ socializing and working environment. The area has been named by the Financial Times as the Canary Wharf of North (Financial Times, 2007) due to the many financial businesses and services based businesses in the area.
There are a number of approaches that can be taken when segmenting a market for our offering, however only some of these are appropriate to the digital environment and these will be outlined in this section of this report.
1. Psychographic segmentation based on lifestyle with the benefit of service elements and food interest.
Based on psychometric segmentation it could be assumed that the people who would be interested in the area are more likely to have a professional background and therefore a large amount of disposable income. They are also likely to spend this disposable income on foods or services that enhance their lifestyle. The second dimension that would help to segment this audience is the benefit of the service, as they would be grouped according to their desired or expected utility from consuming a product (Haley, 1968). This group of people would be interested in high quality dining and other high quality services. The benefit of this approach is that consumers can be grouped to large clusters based on their interests (Solomon, 2006). In this case interest in quality dining.
The disadvantage of this method is that it narrows down audience for our offering, as our aim was to create platform where customers can review and discuss wide range of offerings, events happening in the area.
2. Psychographic segmentation along behavioural lines based on a key phrase analysis.
In this approach the target audiences’ interests in shopping and dining can be taken into consideration by using the key phrases they type into Google.
With regards to Spinningfields’ offering they might be interested in food and drink services or events. This approach allows the narrowing down of potential customers by their interests and additionally by their online behaviour. Based on this online advertising can be tailored to their needs. Some practitioners have criticised behavioural targeting as it could be seen as invasive and unethical (Econsultancy, 2010c).
3. Geographical segmentation with behavioural elements.
Geographical segmentation is usually not taken into consideration within the digital environment, though this approach might be appropriate for Spinningfields as a bricks-and-clicks organisation. The overall aim is to promote Spinningfields as an area therefore this approach will be appropriate if the target audience were the people who already live in Greater Manchester and in Spinningfields itself who are searching for things to do in Manchester. In this occasion target key phrases would be location specific e.g. ‘things to do in Manchester’. We are aware that because of the nature of the internet we would attract all visitors looking for attractions in Manchester if we would choose to optimise our blog for more generic key phrases (e.g Things to do in Manchester). However this group wouldn't be our primary target since they would not form a part of the Spinningfields community.
4. Recency, Frequency and Monetary
Another suitable approach is the RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) segmentation of existing customer groups. In the digital environment this segmentation is relevant for site visits, e-mail responses and different service types (Chaffey, 2005). For this segmentation data collected from registration on the yellow discount card community website should be utilised.
The benefit of this segmentation is that the organisation engages with the group of consumers who shown an interest in the services (e.g. They have signed up for the newsletters).
A suitable engagement with existing customers could strengthen the customer’s relationship with the area and energizes their word-of-mouth (Chaffey, 2008). This could also be an appropriate approach as 80% of the revenue of an average business comes from 20% of their loyal customers (Chaffey, 2008). However, only targeting this group of people excludes the chance of acquiring new customers.
The approaches outlined above show that the target audience for our offerings could be divided into two groups:
- People who are already familiar with the area (people who live or work in the area or attend for leisure activities).
- People who are the potential customers based on their interests (people who would potentially move into area, people who would visit the area).These possible segments, and the overlaps between them are presented in the diagram below.
Existing customers, residents and people who work in the area play a key role, as they already are members of the community and could potentially play the role of influencers. They form a vital basis for our communication strategy however, they are not a primary target audience for the acquisition strategies.
This means that the primary audience for our offering are potential customers and potential residents. These two groups can be identified and analysed more by their interests and by key phrases. In order to do so psychometric segmentation based on primary target audience interest was used along with a key phrase analysis.
The number of people searching for generic key phrases such us: ‘Manchester restaurants’ (49,500), ‘shops in Manchester’ (60,500), and ‘shopping in Manchester’ (12,100) is significantly larger than equivalent key phrases for Spinningfields. This shows that the market is bigger and also means that the competition is much higher.
More specific searches that included the keyword ‘Spinningfields’ were analysed. The most frequently searched for key phrases included:
· ‘Spinningfields restaurants’ (390)
· ‘Spinningfields yellow card’ (390)
· ‘pure gym Spinningfields ’ (140)
This shows that consumers look for specific services within the area.
It can be assumed that people who search for Spinningfields are familiar with the area and they are more likely to commit. They might be people who already live or work in Manchester or who have experienced Spinningfields in some other way, but they haven’t attended the area and purposely search for it.
Because our blog is new it is important to prioritise and focus on a group that is specifically interested in Spinningfields. Based on the most popular results this group can be broken down further by their interests in food, shopping and city centre accommodation.
The aim is to make this target audience a part of the community, so that once they’re in the community they can also contribute to our blog by posting reviews which might influence the secondary target audience: people who search for a generic key phrases.
Bii: The following section presents a number of digital marketing approaches that are appropriate to communicate with our target audience.
Online partnership (online advertising, third party newsletters) is a possible way to communicate with our target audience when they are not on our site. Our services could be promoted through well-established third party websites such as ‘Manchester Confidential’ or ‘Pride of Manchester’. Using this approach would potentially help us to increase awareness of our offering.
Online PR (social media platforms/tools, blogs, newswires) would also be a suitable approach for our target audience. This could be done through maximising the number of positive mentions of our offering on a range of third party and social network sites. This approach would be appropriate as a low-cost tool to raise awareness of our services. According to the recent announcements by Google (Econsoultancy, 2010a) we are aware that reputation sentiment could influence company rankings on the search engine. If that does play an influential role, our blog platform could work as a mediator of reputation management for Spiningfields.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is another suitable approach to communicate with our target audience. This can be implemented through either pay-per-click (PPC) or SEO. Either of these approaches would be appropriate since our target audience is looking for specific key phrases related to Spinningfields. SEO should be favoured, since consumers more frequently use the organic search results over the paid for results which appear alongside them (Chaffey, 2009) Providing links on other websites would also help us to increase backlinks to our sites (reciprocal linking strategy), which would form a part of our SEO strategy.
Due to the nature of our offering and limited resources we will primarily utilise social networking sites. This strategy is support by evidence that 54% of respondents interact with social media to learn about products (ForeSee Results, 2010 in Econsultnacy, 2010).
We will first consider Twitter campaign to promote our offering and encourage people to post their reviews. Twitter is appropriate as it is the fastest growing social network (Mintel, 2009), it is free and allows great interactivity between those that present information and those that consume it. It will be appropriate for our target audience as consumer research shows that over 50% of Twitter followers say they are more likely to buy or recommend a product after they followed it on Twitter. (Chadwick Martin Bailey, 2010 in Econsultancy, 2010). It’s worth saying that people choose to follow someone on Twitter, because they’re interested in what they have to say (TechCrunch, 2009).
Secondary we use Flickr, which is an appropriate site as we are marketing a location and this platform allows the area to be visually represented. Tagging photos using descriptive keywords would allow them to easily be found and our page to be easily identified by our target audience.
A Facebook group should be considered as the site accounts for 9.58% of all upstream to other websites in the UK, which makes it second largest source of traffic after Google (Econsultancy, 2010b). In addition to this a Facebook group would be able to directly tap into a captive audience, and would do so using one of the methods that is currently popular. A Facebook group would be appropriate due to its wide appeal and flexibility.
We will use SEO to boost our position in organic search listings. This approach is appropriate as our blog is new and we need to increase traffic in order to achieve increased readership and number of reviews.
Biii: This section of reports explores range of digital approaches, which are not suitable on this occasion.
Not all social media tools are appropriate for our offering. We will use Facebook but haven’t yet specified which features of this networking site would be appropriate and which won’t be.
A Facebook fan page won’t be used to promote our offering, this decision has been made as research shows that successful fan pages are mostly appropriate for big, well-known brands (TechCrunch, 2009). Choosing this approach would be inappropriate, as it would mean wasting our resource- time, which we could allocate to meaningful interaction on Twitter.
We are also not going to use Mobile advertising (or smartphone applications) due to our lack of resources. This could be a disadvantage for our business, because the number of mobile Internet users looks set to exceed the number of desktop Internet users within the next 5 years (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2010 in Google Statistics). Additionally one in four users in the UK use handsets to access social networking sites and blogs (ComScore MobiLens, 2010), which might affect the accessibility of our offering.
Because of the nature of our offering we feel that it would be inappropriate to use online advertising and PCC. Our aim isn’t to push sales but to build a platform for existing and potential Spinningfields’ customers to interact with each other.
Additionally online advertising and PPC are not appropriate, as they don’t allow two-way communications, which is a core of our offering. By using this approaches we could risk being perceived as biased, which would then make it more difficult to create a sense of community around the blog. There are some implications of this choice as we will have to put significantly more effort into the SEO to achieve the same results as would be achieved by paying for the top spot in searches.
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