Get the database right and the staff onside – or marketing campaigns are a waste of time, says an information technology marketing specialist.
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Entrepreneur: Scott McCorkell, Managing Director
Company: McCorkell & Associates
Business type: Information technology and telecommunications marketing and advertising
Founded: 1990
Employees: 53
Turnover: $2M - $10M
Head office: Sydney, New South Wales
Contact details: +61 2 9957 3666
The McCorkell & Associates Story
Scott McCorkell says that his marketing/advertising business is based on several key premises. First, speak the technical language of your clients. For McCorkell & Associates (M&a) that means speaking the language of the information technology and telecommunications (IT&T) industry. McCorkell has no difficulty with that.
In the past, he has run six other companies that were either software or hardware vending operations, distributing products throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
McCorkell says: "There is a need for people who speak the language of the sector. It is a complex industry with its own way of doing business. Clients can see the benefit of not having to spend the first three months engaging an agency, then training them up on the jargon, the market, the competition, and so on."
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Key learning points:
- Differentiate - Be unique in a market and offer unique services. Find points of differentiation from competitors and focus on them.
- Databases - Create a database that matches your market. Measure the results of marketing campaigns. Call centres are invaluable for producing leads and following up marketing initiatives.
- Internal marketing - Before launching a marketing or advertising campaign on the world, make sure staff are aware of it, understand it, and believe in it. Then they will support it.
- Risk management - Do not depend on one client. If one client is 90% of your business and you lose that client, the business is finished.
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If McCorkell's first business premise is about talking the client’s talk, his second is all about walking the walk. It basically comes down to getting results. He says: "A big frustration that I felt as a customer of marketing and advertising is that there was nobody out there that was responsible. You would have up to 25 different companies: the event management company, the advertising agency, the marketing company, the printer, and the promotions goods under the one banner. None of them will take responsibility because they blame the other person for being at fault. So we offer all those services to the IT&T industry under one roof and take responsibility for the results."
McCorkell's advice to clients and other CEOs: build your database, build your market. Effectively, the database is king. He says: "If you've got a population of 22 million and a product that fits into a category or a selection of people, why advertise? If you can get it down to 100 companies in the country that can afford your product and would be interested in that product, why put full page ads in newspapers?"
M&a helps clients to create databases that match their market niche. If the client already has a database, McCorkell tries to maximise its effectiveness. Databases are used in combination with M&a’s telemarketing call centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore, which generate sales leads and measure the results of marketing campaigns.
"We follow up and/or offer inbound call services for each of the campaigns that we run," McCorkell says. "If we send you a direct mail piece without following up, all we've done is killed a lot of trees. We need to find out if the intended recipient received that mail, whether there was anything of interest in it and how we can service that requirement."
Before marketing campaigns are made public, M&a sells them to the client’s staff first. It is not uncommon for M&a to spend up to two months with the staff of some client companies to bring them up to speed with the advertising and marketing changes. McCorkell says: "Too many times, I've seen people sit in their ivory tower and say, 'That's what we'll do’. But the message downstairs is, 'We don't like it and we don't believe in it’. If that is the case, the campaign is never going to work for anybody."
McCorkell has a final warning, which will resonate in other industry sectors as well: don't rely on one client for much of a company's turnover. It is critical to spread risk. Companies have failed because they were dependent on a single client.