The Potential For Strategic Alliances

Yesterday during a workshop the opportunity that strategic alliances present to businesses was again raised during discussion within the group. Put simply a well thought out Strategic Alliance (SA) is the most underutilised business strategy and this is especially true for SME's that somehow have this unspoken belief that every business needs to go it alone to be successful. Of course nothing can be further from the truth and all we need to do is to look at how the larger companies do it to see what amazing benefits a strong SA provides for all parties involved.

Just the other day I was involved in a discussion on this very issue and discussed with a colleague the wonderful example of the global strategic alliance that has been formed between: McDonald's, Village Cinemas and Pixar Movies Animation Studios.

What wonderful simplicity when you think of who the target audience is for all three of these businesses that you realise that they are for a large part, the same group.

I really don't suppose for a minute that we should be surprised that when business heavy weights like these organisations mentioned the result will be good, given their resources and marketing talent.

But the simple truth is that and businesses or organisations can do it with a little thought.

The first question that needs to be asked is what other quality organisations out there, already  target my target market and may already have well established good will, market expertise and professional networks already set up.

The second question you need to ask is which of these organisations from question 1, can I approach that are complimentary but not competitive with what my business or organisation does?

Finally what am I willing to offer and what would I like those other businesses to offer the same market in any co-marketing campaigns between us. Here you literally have a blank canvas and are only limited by your own imagination and creativity.

In the case of the example above the specifics are well known with movie merchandising available at the restaurants and access to McDonald's vouchers when you buy movie tickets, and so on.

 In marketing I believe that this tool works so well because the businesses leverage and support each other’s efforts.  It is a classic win-win scenario and one that should be very appealing to SME's everywhere.

So go to it and start thinking about who you could approach to form such an alliance with.

And until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Regards,

Daniele.

Putting Together An Effective Dashboard For Your Busines

 Increasing Complexity

As the scope of social media continues to expand and the type of marketing platforms seem to have no limits, it becomes increasingly important to focus on your stated social media and overall marketing objectives to determine how well (or otherwise) our key performance indicators (KPI's) are being met over time for each platform. To be able to answer this with confidence you need to do a couple of key things. 

Firstly you need to be clear about what it is we want to be able to measure from its existing point (i.e. baseline reading) moving forward and why these measures are the key ones for you.  If you focus on the wrong measures, then even if they are properly assessed, the result will provide little useful data for the business.

Secondly and almost as almost as important is the way the metrics will be displayed. Too often, managers are inundated and overwhelmed by copious amounts of raw data making it difficult to focus clearly on the key data points and trends that really matter and provide the basis for true insight and future decision making.

For this reason it is wise to set up a simple, efficient and practical dashboard that will provide management with facts and figures designed to update and provide this added understanding into what has transpired.

There are I'm pleased to say various existing providers of Dashboard templates and resources available. Some are free and some will cost you some money.

Possible Providers

 iGoogle (www.google.com/ig) and MyYahoo (http://my.yahoo.com) both for example provide free tools for the respective Google and Yahoo home pages.

For Twitter, Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) provides a dashboard specifically for the brief Twitter messages.

Specifically for social media you have free dashboard services such as: paid versions from suppliers such as: UberVU (www.ubervu.com)

Regardless of whether you opt for the free service or pay a little more for the one of the paid options, the point is simply that you need to be starting to get your structure set up so that all valuable information is routinely gathered, analysed, seen and understood by the business.

Additional Training Resources

Naturally to learn more about any aspect of Social or Digital Media marketing click on to this link:
http://www.victorianchamber.com.au/business-solutions/training/course

And so until next time, good marketing and good luck. 

Regards,

Daniele.