Digital Marketing Communications Management (DMCM) Assignment - Ben's Version

Cyberthread – Spinningfields

Product/ Service/ Offering

-       A blog that enables customers to review their favourite places in Spinningfields.  It provides valuable feedback to the complex and business’s within it to what is working well and what aspects of the Spinningfields experience could be improved.  - Spinningfield’s official website www.spinningfieldsonline.com does not currently have this facility. 

-       The blog can be viewed at:

http://spinningfieldsdmcm1.blogspot.com/2010/11/digital-marketing-communications.html

-       There will be a link to the Spinningfield’s ‘Yellow Card’ discount card sign up page.  The card boosts customer involvement, compiling a database of purchase behaviour, allowing greater understanding of consumers leading to an increased retention rate.

1)     Target Market Report – Analysis of Segmentation Methods

Online segmentation method	Pros	Cons
Demographic Segmentation	B2C level - some aspects are worthwhile; Social Group and Geographical Location can be found on Facebook groups, or using internet mapping and IP addresses.  Useful if attracting local businesses but, in an online environment, internet is local for everyone, therefore it helps define when online targeting is unnecessary. If customers are local, an outdoor poster etc may be more cost/ time effective.	Not reliable - age, sex and income bracket.  What someone looks at online as an interest, they may not be able to do/ afford, e.g. 16 year old boy on BMW website.  Geographical location also irrelevant, people looking for Spinningfields may be locals or tourists, they may visit website from anywhere.
Lifecycle Stage	Related to value and buying behaviour.  Amazon has a similar strategy - previous sales, product category, frequency of purchase and time elapsed since last purchase are all stored.  Maximises profits by up and cross-selling, identifies time left customer will stay with organisation and any purchasing patterns.	Cyberthread has no access to Yellow Card data, this information can only be established through such a database.
Online Behaviour	Efficient when using online tools such as Google Analytics/ trends, Forrester and  e-market to assess online consumer behaviour through click streams.  Shows which types of advertisements, channels/ online methods get most click through rates - helps identify customer ‘value’. Monitoring websites customers come from to Spinningfields and go to can lead to identifying effective advertisement space. Montgomery (2004), found this method to increase his advertising efficiency by 33%	As mentioned previously, someone’s interest online may not fully reflect what they can, want to do.  Especially if they can’t afford what they are looking at.
Psychographic/ attitudinal segmentation	Good when launching a new product.  Segment on monetarily value, lifestyle.  Are these people early adopters, followers or loyal, or would they purposely find alternative places to go.  Good for finding niche and price-conscious markets.	Difficult to segment online without combining with another method.  Unreliable unless backed by credible data which Cyberthread hasn’t access to, assumptions can be made to profile target customer which may be useful.
Relationship with Company	Targeting existing or new customers is central to a Digital Marketing Campaign. Relationships - profits can be maximised by targeting existing customers, finding out why lapsed customers have stopped visiting the area, and applying knowledge to attracting new customers.	Spinningfields is not a physical product, consumer relationship is not  clear.  Reasons for leaving Spinningfields would have to be asked for.  Current website does not have this facility but new blog should be able to assist through reviews.
Value	Data on historic, current and future value is useful if real-time information.  Could provide in-depth analysis of lapsed customers worth getting back, and who are loss leaders.  Good to maximise Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). One segmentation method are the Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value (RFM) variables (Jonker 2004)	Cyberthread does not have access to this information, however it can make recommendations how best to use data to maximise Spinningfields popularity, customer retention and so profitability.
Adapted from Chaffey (2009)

Tools chosen for Segmentation - Online Behaviour, Psychographic/ Attitudinal, Lifetime Customer Value

Reasons for and against choice - Attitudes and interests influence online behaviour.  By remembering CLV, the target audience’s age becomes relevant as a younger person is more likely to live longer.  They may not currently spend anything in Spinningfields but over time spend more than the older person who may visit now but will pass away in time. If lifetime value is not incorporated into the decision then stable income and consistent customer persona may be overlooked, potentially leading to unsustainable growth. 

Existing customers must also be targeted to keep the current income and encourage a wider customer base.

Ideally a questionnaire to establish what type of customer goes to Spinningfields could have been implemented to a cross section of customers to best represent existing customers and further differentiate potential targets.

Discarded methods - Relationship with the company – Difficult to establish without existing data, leads to basic segmentation on demographics. Demographics – Too simplistic a view online, peoples location, age etc is irrelevant as they may have all the same interests. 

Demographics can assist in creating a persona. An effective way to describe a target segment when based on no fact, there can be several audiences described.  Finding common denominators will enable Cyberthread to target multiple online audiences.  Three Personas are derived:

Persona A – Existing customer- Parent, professional, regularly searches for places to eat.  Moderate level of disposable income, interests include eating out, fine wines and attending community events.  Online behaviour also includes socialising on Facebook and Linkdin, looking at holiday destinations and browsing premium car manufacturer websites – although not buying them.

Persona B – Potential customer - Final year student in Manchester aspiring for places to live, work and play after graduation.  Current low level of disposable income.  Enjoys discounts and actively looks for new places to go out and interesting events to attend.  Socialises on Facebook.  Interests include eating out, ice skating, and being part of their social group, want to be seen in professional light as well as have fun.

Persona C – Seasonal customer- Traveller visiting Manchester.  Interests include seeing new places, attending music events, architecture and aspiring to wear designer brands and live in expensive areas.  Is not on a social network site but does use MSN and regularly sends pictures via e-mail to family members.  Actively seeks to be alternative to the norm.

Justification

Target Persona A - 464,000 Manchester inhabitants.  Assumption – 141,200 of these have disposable income based on stereotypical ‘middle class’ jobs (Manchester City Council 2008). Current disposable income means Spinningfields potentially gains immediate purchase behaviour and involvement. 

Attracting Persona B – 47,000 between the three universities (Office of National Statistics 2001).  Awareness of Spinningfields from an early age means greater likelihood of becoming long-term repeat visitors to the area increasing CLV.  May take advantage of Yellow Card discount scheme, giving more detailed picture of purchasing behaviour over time.  The NUS card is very popular.

Personas A and B - familiar with social networking sites - should be able to review places they go online with little difficulty. 

Persona C - 300,000 pa.  Visitors looking for places to eat and spend time.  The numerous architectural awards, can be taken advantage of.  They may not be interested in the Yellow Card, but tourists provide seasonal revenue for the area.  Benefit of tourist contribution to the website is the likelihood they have been to similar complexes elsewhere, bringing external insight to feedback.

Risks - Not targeting Segments A and B may result in fragmented interest and loss of Spinningfields identity and immediate profit.  Segment C must be remembered if the tourist industry is to benefit the complex.

Specific targeting for much older / younger audiences may be discounted for this purpose because they are less likely to go online and more likely to go on word of mouth recommendation.

Implementation Issues and Solution - The personas above are fragmented.  The objective must include attracting all three personas of people, A, B and C.  By linking Spinningfields to their relevant common interests and targeting channels those interests are on, traffic will be directed to our blog by concentrating on Spinningfields Unique Selling Points. An organic search in Google Insight is shown identifying activity of searches and so popularity:

These need to be prioritised as key search terms/ ad words.  Finding tribes of people most suited to desired psychographics and online behavioural traits will generate the target customer.  The website itself will have to appeal to the three types of people – professionals, students and tourists in terms of appearance, language, style and depth of information, not the online marketing.

Interests Cyberthread is looking for each persona to have are below:

Manchester Spinningfields	Designer Clothes Shops in Manchester
Manchester Ice Rink	Northern Architecture
Discount Card	Restaurants Within Spinningfields

Objectives for Digitally Marketing Spinningfields to identified personas via interests:

1.     Generate 20 blog users by April 2011 of all target customers

2.     Maintain social media usage – make the blog have 1000 Twitter followers by April 2011

3.     Make Spinningfields Facebook group gain 1000 friends by April 2011

These should help raise awareness to all three audiences simultaneously; Potential methods of attracting these consumer types are below:

2)     Potential Methods of Digital Marketing Communications

Method	Description	Reasons why appropriate
Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)  - White Hat	Key words/ phrases repeated within website so they are naturally found by search engines	Free but time consuming.  Selecting key search terms/ phrases for the blog to repeat that are relevant to the search the customer is looking for will help drive traffic to our blog and onto the Spinningfields website which will be full of relevant content.
	There are many ways to do this.  Following three methods are appropriate:
- Location Based Search	Adding location of Spinningfields to our search term optimises people looking for a location-based facility	Easy to include.  People may not know Spinningfields exists – searching ‘Manchester’ then a Spinningfields Unique Selling Point (shop of limited locations outside Spinningfields) Search results will be either the venue’s website or, if the blog emphasises the venues, the blog.
- Metadata (Tagging files)	Tagging a picture to read a key phrase term relevant to both picture and website	Easy and free.  Good for raising awareness, but bounce rate is high if not specifically what customer is looking for.  Due to simple nature, only pictures are needed.
- Social Media Optimisation	Profiles on websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Linkedin can be utilised to update, often automatically, blog news.  Increases amount of links to key phrases to search engines - gets blog higher up the website search list	Free and effective at raising awareness.  Customers can be updated automatically on events in Spinningfields via all social media sites by manually clicking on the feed options on the blog.  No point in using more social medias, these are the most used in the UK. Hindrance of all White Hat SEO –Very time consuming.  Selection of key words is critical.  Too vague/ general and the website can be lost against hundreds of competitors, too specific and the phrases may not ever be searched for in the first place.

Growing Social Media sites (Xposure Creative Brand Marketing 2009) are important as they attract the following cross sections of societies and so need to be fully utilised:

	Coverage (%)		Population (%)		Age (%)					Income (%)
	UK	World	Male	Female	18-24	25-34	35-44	45-54	55-64	£25000- £29999	£30000+
Facebook	50.7	28.8	46	54	11	31	23	14	7	9	58
Twitter	8.4	5.2	55	45	16	31	21	15	8	6	47
Linked in	3.9	2.4	58	42	9	34	25	18	9	6	57

Limitation of social media sites is not everyone uses them, to add to this, there are further restraints of getting peoples attention and co-operation as there are an increasingly large number of groups and sites for people to join or choose not to look at.  When done well, they can act as viral marketing in a more controllable environment than naked e-mail.

3)     Non-viable methods to Target Online Customers

Method	Description	Reasons why inappropriate
Banner Adverts	Paid for eye catching advert on a site relevant to Spinningfields or target audience	The banners have fairly high click through rates however there is no money to pay for them.  A version could be adapted for use on ‘satellite’ websites which drive traffic to the main blog however this may be interpreted as ‘Black Hat’ SEO.
Direct e-mail (permission based)	Asking people if they would like to receive an email updating them about Spinningfields to their personal e-mail	Cannot be used to target new customers.  The existing Yellow Card database and Spinningfields website have this facility.  The blog could drive traffic to this feature but not implement its own newsletter to acquire or maintain relationships as it would be too time consuming.  Social media updates will have to be optimised for best effect.
Pay per Click	Paying to be a sponsored listing on front page of a search engine.  5c - $2 per click (Sitewizard 2010)	This costs money.  Pay-per-click means website pays for each time someone clicks on the link even if by accident or don’t read the content.  If Cyberthread was selling something of monetarily value to consumers this may be appropriate if potential profit would significantly outweigh acquisition cost, however here there is no budget.
Pop up adverts	Originally popular in early 00s when pop ups appear with flashing messages	Method is seen as nuisance marketing and could damage brand image.  Can be costly and time consuming to generate the adds, which have low click through rate and most anti-viruses block them.
Search Engine Optimisation Black Hat Marketing inc spam email–	Send spam or having a page of hidden key phrases on website to make the search engine think there is more content / hyperlinks than there actually is.	Good for raising initial ranking on search listings, websites that use this method are often banned if they breach regulations - BMW in 2006 (BBC 2006). Spam bounce rates are high – content isn’t always specifically what consumer is looking for so they leave. This method is likely to damage brand image.
Viral email	When something (video, coupon, rhyme, offer)  is popular enough to be passed around independently of Cyberthread generating free publicity	Creates publicity around product with little / no input from lead organisation, Youtube could be a good host. Hindrance- If message is poorly generated or in wrong format, its meaning can be lost / manipulated and can damage the brand image with little or no control. Not to be used yet – possibly in future

The risk of using either of these methods vary.  Methods that may damage the brand image and so alienate the personas we are trying to attract must be avoided (pop-up, black hat marketing/ spam). 

Viral Email will not be used yet as inappropriate use may damage the brand, but it is a future communications channel worth researching further should Spinningfields wish to, and the media does not have to be funny video, it could be interesting, innovative or promotional based, for now it carries too much risk for the developing brand.

Banner adverts and pay per click would both be viable should the blog start selling things and be able to justify the customer acquisition costs however, for now, this is not possible.  One method the banner adverts could be used is if they are incorporated on the social media websites where each profile could act as a satellite.  This will have to be managed closely to ensure terms and conditions are not breached and Google does not ban the blog.

Permission based email is a strong possibility however it is not currently possible on the blog.  The blog will need to be enabled to create basic profiles then this will be utilised, for now direction to the official Spinningfield’s newsletter will be more effective.