Then, just by chance an email dropped into my inbox entitled ‘7 tips for managing a Virtual Team’  (source information management).  It confirmed my belief that teams do not have to be sitting in the same office to be more productive. Actually, I remember one scenario where team members communicated via email even though they were just cubicles apart, infact a whole ‘disagreement’ was aired out online as opposed to sitting down with a cuppa in a meeting room.

So if you are still wondering about the efficiencies of a virtual team, take it from me it can work, if you foster the right culture and communication infrastructure.

I suppose the only downfall of my virtual team is their inability to dip into the BCS Natural Confectionary Company jelly jar in our Sydney office!  

I reckon BCS will make the best places to work list some day.

The last week of March saw the BCS team in the Gold Coast working their event magic (except marketing consultant Jen Murray who stayed in not so sunny Ireland).

Work on this event started months before with marketing and sponsorship sales being the main focus.   All the hard work paid off and the event itself was an astounding success not only for BCS but also the Australian health sector.  The event is called Health-e-Nation with 3 days of interlinked events fostered networking & collaboration between health, government and health IT industries.

Here are just a few challenges overcome by the BCS team:

• Six weeks out from the event it doubled in size, from a one day conference to a two day conference, showing BCS’s ability to be versatile and flexible in terms of giving the customer what they want and need.
  
  
• In an industry that sometimes has a pessimistic view of events, this particular one earned respect and injected some real positivity into the industry – something BCS is proud to be part of.
  
  
• As usual speakers were tweaking their presentations last minute, which meant that all presentations had to be loaded the morning of the event, cue Luli Adeyemo with her calm exterior and experience in handling such tricky situations. All presentations were loaded and the conference went smoothly
  
  
• New app at a new event: The morning of the conference BCS set up Blink – a mobile solution that allows delegates to access session details, build schedules and interact with other participants.

The BCS team are now in their Sydney office marketing and building other events and taking them to a new level of success! Go Team!

Like many cash strapped marketing departments, perhaps you don’t have a publisher or editor on your marketing team and relying on your good self to come with the goods – as well as tend to all your other ‘due yesterday’ tasks.

Well I always ask myself three questions when putting together event content for clients to keep content engaging:

• Is what I’m writing relevant to my audience
• Am I answering the ‘what’s in it for me question’
• Is this a one-sided product focused piece or is it a piece that has diverse opinions and insights

Sometimes, the hardest challenge can be actually extracting the content from speakers and other event champions who are collectively building the event content.  Yes, marketing can produce content - the high level detail and over arching messaging, key for the initial engagement, but it is the detail around sessions that will get prospects hitting that ‘register now’ button.  

So how can you get this detailed content sooner rather than later?

• Issue speakers with a marketing communications timeline that is linked with the typical thought process of a prospect delegate - that way they can get an understanding of what is required when and why.  The delegate thought process is very similar to your typical buying cycle – awareness, assessment of alternatives, weighing up risks, decision, and register.
  
  
• Make it easy for speakers to submit content and provide them with either a template or clean instructions of what you need (this is just an example below)
  • 12 weeks out from event: Session title, Speaker Bio and Photograph
  • 10 weeks: Session Description – minimum 50 words
  • 8 weeks out: Session Detail – key take homes, why attend?
    at least three bullets for each
  • 6 weeks out: Any updates or diagrams related to session

Having worked on events where I’ve coordinated more than 50 speakers, it can become a quagmire of a task! But with the right processes in place and clear communications to your speakers then you are onto a winner.

I know, I know an expression that most marketers would like to forget about, but just how many of you have had that last minute crisis when it comes to event planning?.  Please take part in my website poll – it will literally take a second, go to my home page scroll down and look to the right.

Here are just a few scenarios that I’ve either experienced or witnessed over the years - I’d love to provide you with a secret formula on how to avoid them, but sometimes it’s just not possible – these are problems that are just beyond our control, the best we can do is crisis management and boy do I have experience in that!

• The gremlin that put the typo in the conference programme cover page – ouch!
• The printer on the blink the night before the event – 300 badges waiting to be printed!
• The orient express train that never left Paddington London station to take bank VIPs to the opera
• The speaker who misses her flight and can’t make it to the event!
• The stage set that falls down
• The sound system that decides to fail
• The HTML link that sneaked into an email to lead delegates to a ladies underwear website

Now if any of these have made you smirk or laugh – please put a smiley face in the comment area below! Or even better add to the list you may feel better just adding one that you’ve witnessed rather than experience!

In my business not having a plan is like planning to fail.  Planning gives you control and whoever you are working with transparency to what is coming next or perhaps what isn’t coming next.

In this business not everything goes to plan – so either go stir crazy or embrace it - preparing for the worst will keep you at your best.

Here are some quick tips for a quick recovery plan:

• Don’t hide, keep that transparency –  be honest, stay in control - issue your plan of action to all parties involved
  
  
• Rework a series of milestones – perhaps your initial milestones were too ambitious
  
  
• Decide who will be involved in the key steps to recovery – make sure each of them knows their responsibilities
  
  
• If you have put your contingency plan in place, then start working on the next contingency plan
  
  
• Keep checking, checking and checking your milestones, tweak them if you have to during the project – just keep everyone involved in the project informed.

I have some great planning tools that I’ve used over and over again – I know that the tools won’t prevent a plan going off track, but they at least give you some control and damage limitation. Give me a shout if you want insight into these tools.

So have Australian organisations followed the trend and built mobile websites?  well to be honest from my experience the answer is no – there is certainly disparity when it comes to the number of consumer-focused mobile websites that actually load properly on phones. Research from Google supports this - 80% of Australian businesses do not have mobile-optimised websites, and many businesses confused having an app as sufficient to having a mobile strategy. 

So with a massive audience out there surfing the internet via their smart phones – here are some statistics to justify budget spend on a mobile site:

• Two in five Australian smartphone owners use their device for search daily, which exceeds the equivalent usage in the UK and Germany.
• For small businesses, 49% of smartphone owners have used their device to research and then call stores, with 45% using their devices to find a shopfront location.
• Top actions people are doing as a result of a smart phone search - people are calling businesses, visiting their websites. One in three have made a web-based purchase from a business as a result of doing a local search. (Source: Ryan Hayward, APAC mobile product marketing manager for Google)

So ask yourself – how can people buy from you if they can’t navigate your website on their smartphone?

I know what I’m going to do - Best Case Scenario’s website is going to go mobile!

Contact me if you are interested in building a mobile website, our consultants have been researching this for some time and have the information to get you started on your way.  

Well the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) published their research report ‘Senior Marketing Monitor 2011’ early December. Usually I open reports with an air of dread, expecting to see results such as ‘marketing professionals are not valued in the organisation’, ‘marketing budgets are experiencing constant cuts’ etc…  

However, the 365 senior marketers who completed this survey are a pretty positive bunch and hopefully represent most marketing professionals in Australia.  They are certainly more positive about the role and influence of marketing: Most senior marketers (80%) feel positive about the role and influence of marketing in Australia

The good news is that smaller organisations and not for profit will grow marketing budgets the most, with social networking and online advertising as the top communication channels.  It’s obvious they need to remain competitive and are taking positive steps to protect themselves.

Here is a summary of the results taken directly from the research report – to see the entire report visit the AMI web site - http://www.ami.org.au/index.asp

Marketing Budgets

At a total level, we forecast that senior marketers will oversee marketing budget increases of about 3.5% in 2012 (similar to forecasts about 2011 and about half of what was forecast for 2010).

Of the organisations who are expecting an increase (about 38% of all organisations), an average budget increase of nearly 20% is expected. Organisations with smaller turnovers, Retailing, Not for Profit and Professional Services will grow marketing budgets the most. Financial Services and Manufacturing are both budgeting for small marketing budget declines.

Marketing Priorities and Challenges

Measures to increase sales and customer acquisition have been the top marketing priorities for 2011, both being much more of a focus than last year.

Shifts in Communications Channels

The use of social networking, online adverting and direct marketing as communication channels continues to grow, with most marketers having increased usage of these media channels and very few having decreased usage. Traditional media channels such as TV, radio and print advertising are still being supported by a steady proportion of marketers.

Marketing is rated way down the scale, with only 3% saying Marketing is influential and Sales and Product development, engineering in the lead.

What’s happening Marketing Executives?  Are we still thinking tactically and not putting enough strategy into our roles? Is it because we still feel like Marketing is going it alone with the marketing function? (other research findings from Gartner a few years back).  

Well, I appeal to all marketing executives worldwide to change perspective and think about ways to be more influential in your organisation – here are some links to my previous blogs that may help you along the way… I have been going on about this topic for some time now, so it’s dear to my heart, marketing empowerment is key to drive success.

Marketing and Professional Development

Sales First, Marketing Later

Marketing Strategy, Too Busy for it?

I like this concept and have seen it work with some of our clients, however, it does take patience and understanding that this type of marketing may not result in immediate sales – it’s more of a relationship marketing approach and can be used in conjuction with other marketing activities (perhaps ones focused on immediate sales/results).  Over time drip feed marketing will pay off, and ensure your sales pipeline is full.

Here is a very simple of example of how it may be structured:

• Decide on your triggers – it could be simply that as soon as someone opts-in, they go through a series of email touches.
• Decide on your campaigns to match triggers – for example all new opt-ins will get useful free product tips and recommendations.
• Take this a step forward and monitor your prospects behaviour, have specific micro-sites relevant to different products or industry sectors - then track visitor ratings to each micro-site.
• You may then decide to drip feed more relevant content based on content popularity

This is a very simple example, but gives you an idea of how something so simple could prove to be very valuable in terms of creating campaigns that will have an impact!  Happy Drip Feeding!

On behalf of one particular client I study their event data very carefully for common trends regularly – so marketing tactics can be tweaked pretty much immediately depending on the findings.  From a strategic marketing perspective it’s also extremely useful.

My love for Excel Pivots – has shall I say ‘excelled’ (pardon the pun!) – Window 7 has certainly come a long way in terms of Pivots, it’s so much more user friendly and intuitive than ever.

Using event data is just one way of understanding your clients and prospects – it really doesn’t have to be rocket science analysis, keep it simple, use the data you collect on registration such as job title, location etc… and use this to its full potential.

I’m happy to demonstrate to anyone how to do a quick analysis on a Pivot – it will only take 5 minutes!