ICDM White Paper

Looking for our white paper as referenced in this month's 53 Degrees? Download available below - drop us a mail or give us a call if you have any questions.

ICDM White Paper.pdf

'Cool Checklist' Campaign Fails Targeting Test

Why is it that the public sector just can't do advertising well? Efforts to promote the Manchester transport plan failed miserably, as we've already noted in this blog. But there are plenty of other examples of shockingly bad ads that fail through poor execution or lack of understanding.

In the 'poor execution' category falls a police advert displayed across London a few years ago telling people to beware of terrorist threats on the tube. Unfortunately, due to the use of a comma in the place of a full stop, it instructed people to do absolutely nothing if they identified a suspicious package.

Now we have this highly flawed campaign. No-one's arguing with the premise behind it, but the execution is hopeless.

Being in our thirties, none of us at the Lever can claim to be 'down with the kids' any longer. But if we were to be asked to come up with a campaign to target this generation, I would hope we could come up with something more in tune with the times than the 'cool checklist'.

Both the choice of media and the content of the message show a lack of understanding of the target audience. That understanding is one of the most vital components in the success of any marketing campaign. Sometimes budgets (and timescales) don't allow for deep research, and that may have been the case with this advert. But this just shows how badly taking a cursory glance at your prospects can fail you.

The success of content driven marketing campaigns is particularly dependent on an understanding of the target market. That's why all our campaigns start with detailed workshops to force our clients to focus on niches and help us to build up a detailed profile of their audience. This doesn't have to be an expensive process, nor hugely time consuming. But it does ensure that the campaign delivers maximum bang for the client's buck. And it helps us to avoid missing the mark as the 'cool checklist' so clearly has.

Creative is not important

Choosing the right digital marketing partner is an important step for your business. The web is the world's largest marketplace. Digital forms of communication are the primary interface for many businesspeople and consumers. You need to be sure that the partner you choose can help you be seen in that marketplace, and more importantly, convert that visibility into sales.

It is this last part that trips up many digital agencies, and the people trying to choose between them. The adage that a picture says a thousand words has never been truer than when applied to the selection process for a marketing agency.

People are swayed by pictures. In this case, designs for how their websites or digital campaigns might look. They have an emotional response to images that is hard to engender with reasoned, logical text. This emotional response often becomes the basis for selecting an agency.

This is wrong. It's like choosing a flight based on the attractiveness of the cabin staff. You have no idea about your destination, or the capability of the plane to get you there. Choose an agency based on the initial creative they present and you risk taking your business in the wrong direction, or nowhere at all.

This isn't sour grapes. We win on design too, and we're not about to turn down the money. But we'd rather be chosen for our brains than our looks. We want to win because we can make a real difference to someone's business. Because we understand the challenges they are facing, and put forward a real solution. Not because we put forward the prettiest pictures.

What is 'Online PR'?

Good question. Some of its practitioners have been around for almost a decade (perhaps more) yet most people still don't know what it is.

It helps to start with clearing up a common confusion between 'public relations' and 'media relations'. PR is a broad set of tools and approaches designed to influence the outcome of a decision. It might include lobbying politicians to get a change in the law; it might mean getting a seat at the table at a standards body to ensure the chosen standard meets your needs; it might mean managing the communications with a community cited near the construction of some unpleasant new industrial building.

Much of the time though, people say 'PR' when they mean 'media relations'. Media relations is a small subset of PR. In the simplest terms, it is about securing the maximum amount of positive editorial coverage for your organisation, company, product or service, usually in an attempt to increase sales. The flipside of this is managing any negative coverage, but this is a challenge rarely faced by most companies, for whom the biggest threat is not a damaging front page splash but total indifference.

In transferring their skills to the online realm, most PR practitioners have focused on the media relations aspect, believing that they can and should try to treat bloggers like journalists. This is a valid option, and - with some tweaks to the approach - can be successful. However it is a very limited assessment of the scope of 'online PR'.

We use what we would call 'online PR' as part of any digital marketing campaign. The first step is to establish what you want to achieve. For us, it seems a waste to just generate 'noise' in the digital world, when it is so simple to track the success of that noise in creating leads. So we establish goals and ensure our client's website makes it easy for prospects to fulfil them e.g. a maximum of three clicks to close them in some way, whether it is a sale, subscription to a newsletter, blog or feed, registration for an online community, or at worst, the download of more information (usually after leaving their details).

Then we apply 'online PR' tools to create interest. These include:
- Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing (we separate the technical and copy tweaks you can make to your own website (SEO) from the work you do to enhance its profile (SEM) - e.g. link building, PPC)
- Blogging (great for SEM - as you'll know if you found this blog by looking for 'content driven marketing')
- Social network interaction (e.g. we're targeting LinkedIn groups for a new client campaign)
- Audio/Video (professionally produced video shorts can be very cost effective if distributed via YouTube; podcasts and webcasts can deliver great results, even from small audiences)
- Other social media (we're currently trying out Twitter to see how it drives traffic to one of our personal blogs - check out the feed down the left at http://www.bookofthefuture.co.uk)

You could include more tools, but that's all these different media really are. The reality is that the fundamentals of online PR are the same as they are offline: write something interesting and people will want to read it.

Create and post content that rewards, educates or entertains. Do it via a medium that makes it easy to find. And make sure that whatever it links to gives you a measurable result. That for us is a decent definition of online PR. But you could also call it intelligent, content-driven marketing.

The definition of cut-through

Unfortunately the majority of advertising these days is tired and boring. But just occasionally you get the magic combination of creative agency, brave client, and good timing. Check out this Australian advert from hair removal firm Veet.

Genius. Not only does it give everyone a grin but it gets forwarded around the world, so becoming a powerful viral campaign, multiplying the value of the ad spend a thousand-fold. Note the way the scan is artfully angled to look amateurish. Do I see the hand of the ad agency at play, or have I just been in marketing too long?

Either way, just goes to show that the content for a content-driven campaign can come from any part of the marketing mix.

Manchester says 'no': a massive marketing failure

After months of campaigning it wasn't even close. In every single council district across Manchester, people voted to reject the £3bn Transport Innovation Fund investment, and the congestion charge attached to it. This came as little surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the debate. The referendum was lost by the 'Yes' campaign months ago.

The 'Yes' campaign entirely failed to communicate the benefits of the TIF bid to voters. The volume of paper sent out was massive but the presentation was too complex and the detail too great. In marketing terms, it was all about the features not the benefits. Nowhere were people told how the bid would benefit them specifically. The only attempts to simplify the arguments were the insipid adverts, no match for the starkly negative messages of the 'No' campaign.

With the 'Yes' campaign mired in detail and unable to translate the investment plans into real-world benefits, the 'No' campaign was given an easy ride. But it was still conducted well. On a fraction of the 'Yes' campaign's budget, the 'No' campaigners managed to focus the entire debate on the congestion charge rather than the planned transport improvements. The moment that the debate in the media became focused on the charge not the investment, the vote was lost. In the current financial climate the emotive adverts about the potential costs for drivers had an amplified effect. Without them I think it would have still been a 'no'. With them the result was overwhelming.

I'm not saying the 'Yes' campaign was easy. Far from it. But this is one marketing campaign with a very clear, very public metric of success. And the figures speak for themselves. This campaign failed.

Fluid intelligence: Do grads have the right stuff?

I am returning to Lancaster University on Wednesday for the Alumni Careers Fair. It got me thinking about the skills that I will be looking for when we come to recruit our first graduate. My thoughts were further stimulated along this line following a chat with Katrina Delargy, CEO of TIYGA, an interesting start-up based at Daresbury Innovation Centre.

Katrina raised the issue of 'fluid intelligence' versus 'crystalline intelligence'. These are terms created by psychologist Raymond Cattell and developed in partnership with John Horn. Fluid intelligence describes the innate ability to think abstractly and solve problems. Crystalline intelligence is learned through teaching, practice and experience.

Historically we as a society may have placed equal value on each form of intelligence, perhaps even the balance on the crystalline. Certainly the theory behind the switch from O-Levels to GCSEs was to increase the emphasis on reason over learned facts. But today there is arguably much less value in learned intelligence, since the sum of human knowledge is available via a search engine. What is valuable is the ability to interpret that knowledge quickly and use it appropriately.

This doesn't devalue experience completely. I can make much more intelligent guesses about the right approach in various situations based on experience; doing something many times over almost invariably means that you do it faster and more efficiently. And there are certain key skills that have to be learned: arithmetic, grammar, and spelling being particularly important for this industry.

But beyond these basic skills, I don't expect a graduate to have much experience and I am unlikely to be swayed by what experience they do have unless it is a fine margin between two candidates. Rather I am most concerned about their level of aptitude, and most of all, their willingness to apply it.

A lesson for the Liberal Democrats: be different to win

As a company we have no political affiliations. But we think the Liberal Democrats make for an interesting case study. Nick Clegg has great potential as a political party leader. The Liberal Democrats are arguably more in tune with the beliefs of much of the country than either Labour or the Conservatives - particularly since their switch to tax cuts rather than tax increases. So why does their share of the vote remain so low? The latest polls place it at just 12%.

Like many market challengers, the Liberal Democrats are making the mistake of basing their marketing strategy on what has been successful for the other parties. Look at the leaflets you get through the door: bar the colours and the logo they could all be from any one of the parties. Look at the website: "The Liberal Democrats are..." blah, blah, blah. Nothing different there.

The lesson from the business world is that even if being different isn't enough to make the sale, it will at least capture people's attention. And that is the primary challenge for any marketer: the first barrier to a sale is if the customer doesn't know a product even exists.

If the Liberal Democrats are to challenge both the other parties, and the general apathy in the country about politics, they need to present themselves as genuinely different. Adding a tag cloud and a bit of video to the website isn't enough. They need to be as marketing-savvy as the younger generation that seems to be their natural audience.

We're not in the habit of giving away freebies, but if anyone from the Lib Dems - local or national - wants to get in touch, we might be willing to do you a deal. We think we could have some fun working with you, and help you to win at the same time.

Get your targets right

We all hate spam. It wastes time, our most valuable commodity.

Spam exists because the marginal cost of each additional email sent tends to zero. For the less scrupulous spammers, the cost of each campaign tends to zero, since they use other people's resources.

But the crudest spam is easy to filter out. It is the accidental spammers that wind me up. Those who wouldn't ever consider their output spam.

For example, I moonlight as a blogger and commentator on the technology industry. I have a separate email address for all my journalistic endeavours. In the last couple of weeks I have received to that address press releases and pitches about such diverse subjects as a tradeshow about baby products and some lost tapes of Agatha Christie. Not very relevant.

By sending me those emails, the PR companies responsible have wasted a small amount of my time. If hundreds of PR companies made the same mistakes, it would waste a lot of my time. That is why most journalists ignore their email until they are looking for something specific.

But the PRs are also wasting a small amount of their own time, every time they send out a release to someone irrelevant. Even if the sending process is automated, they have wasted time inputting an incorrect entry to their list; they have wasted a small amount of resource sending the release to the wrong person; they have eroded the chance that I will ever read anything else they send me; and they will lose a little bit of time reading my response ('why have you sent me this?'). Most of all they are damaging the value of the brand they represent. Given that they send out multiple releases to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of contacts every day, this effect is quickly compounded.

This is true of all forms of marketing, not just press releases. Irrelevant marketing is wasteful. At best it is ignored, at worst, derided. Every campaign must be carefully targeted, your resources and efforts marshalled against appropriate targets for the best possible effect.

Otherwise, it is nothing more than spam.

Mystery shopper

We added a new string to our collective bow this week: mystery shopping. We've been helping Flexistore to test the sales capabilities of its store managers with a series of telephone enquiries.

The amateur dramatics were great fun, and the results were really informative. All of the managers we spoke to rated well for their patter, but the variation in styles and even the content of the conversation was significant.

It reminded us of an old internal communications adage: everyone in your organisation is in sales. Every one of your staff will at some point come in to contact with a potential customer. So it's important to make sure that all of them tell a consistent story.

However this has to be done in such a way that doesn't eliminate all trace of personality. Although we were looking for each of the managers to sound professional and present a consistent image for the company, we found that it was the individual quirks and personalities that were most likely to turn an enquiry in to a sale.

The responsibility for marketing doesn't stop with the marketing department. Everyone in a company has a responsibility to present the right image and messages to the world. But to do this employees need both support from the company, and to have a sense of belonging. Both of these things can be achieved with an effective internal communications programme.

It is hard to objectively measure the value of an internal communications programme. But they can be completed so cost-effectively that it's hard to argue that the results are not worthwhile.

Give us a call if you're interested in finding out how.

(PS - Without wanting to suck up, we were actually very impressed with Flexistore's proposition. Instead of you lugging everything to one if its locations, the secure storage vault is delivered to your door. You load it up and someone comes and picks it up when you're done. Cool, eh?)

Laughter is the best exercise

How do you make a newsletter interesting? Really, how many of your customers want to hear about your latest products? The answer, sadly, is probably not many.

Too many newsletters fall in to this trap. The aim is noble: to maintain regular contact with your customers and prospects. But all too often the content ends up reading like one of those much-pilloried Christmas round-robins.

"Jack got straight As in his A-levels and Jill is off to finishing school."

"Our new LR7 PR9 is the fastest widget in the business."

Who cares?

We have been helping Penrillian to create interesting newsletters for nearly two years now. Instead of talking about the company, we talk about the industry. We summarise one of the key issues facing Penrillian's customers, then just mention that Penrillian can help solve it. We discuss an issue that is of interest to the market and then point readers to some additional research, news stories, or downloads.

But the highlight of the Penrillian newsletters is the cartoon. We searched through the portfolios of hundreds of artists to find someone who could interpret technology stories in a pithy, punchy way. Eventually we found Noel Ford.

I've included one of Noel's cartoons here. You can see the rest if you check out the Penrillian newsletter.

The visual impact of Noel's cartoons immediately differentiate the Penrillian newsletter from other vendor communications that the targets receive. Sure, they add significantly to the cost of each issue. But their value is immeasurable.

Don't knock the value of marketing agencies

Yesterday I went to a networking event. The lead presentation was by an accountant promoting a series of business growth seminars.

In his presentation the accountant referred disparagingly to marketing agencies, suggesting that they cost a lot for little return. His seminars offered to teach people to do their own marketing. He talked about getting 'free publicity' as if PR was some sort of innovative marvel.

PR isn't new. it is an established profession. It has decades of history. It is studied as both an academic subject and for professional qualifications. It has its own industry bodies. So do many other forms of marketing. A morning learning how to write a press release does not a PR-expert make. I wouldn't expect to be able to manage my annual accounts after spending a morning learning how to use Quickbooks.

To diminish the value of marketing agencies in such a cavalier fashion showed both a lack of understanding and a disrespect for the other professionals in the room. There were 101 people in attendance: the law of averages says at least a few were from marketing agencies.

I can't guarantee that all of them provide good value. If all marketing agencies were equal we wouldn't be accumulating clients so quickly. But to dismiss the value that the right marketing agency can bring was not only rude, it was bad advice: something an accountant should never want to give.

I am a marketing professional. I don't have to qualify with the ACCA or the ICAEW as accountants do. But I do have over ten years experience, as do my colleagues. Over that time we have all brought immense value to our clients. We have helped people to sell products and even whole companies. We have been responsible for securing the investment that made companies viable in the first place.

We measure the value of our services in purely financial terms. A metric an accountant should surely understand and appreciate.

Better winning through chemistry

Continuing our abuse of great album titles, with apologies to Fatboy Slim. This phrase just seemed to be a neat summation of the benefits of Permission Marketing.

Permission Marketing has been around a long time as a concept, but was rejuvenated for the internet age by online marketing guru Seth Godin back in 1999. I use the term 'guru' advisedly. Many marketing theorists are just that. Godin has turned his ideas in to a large pot of cash.

Permission Marketing is about a return to the one-to-one relationship between vendor and customer. Relationships that these days we imagine exist only in sepia-tinted photographs of housewives making the weekly trip to their local butcher and greengrocer.

Today these relationships are enabled not by the grocer's good memory but by vast databases that examine our buying behaviour and aim to treat us all as individuals based on that information. Amazon offers one of the best known and most effective examples with its recommendations of things you might like. But Permission Marketing is not restricted to massive global enterprises like Amazon (an enterprise whose viability was still being questioned when Seth wrote his book).

The practical barriers to entry for Permission Marketing are relatively low: the technology is cheap and widely available. The reasons that it isn't a de facto part of every modern marketing campaign are human: it requires patience, commitment, and a change of mindset.

People have unrealistic expectations of marketing. They want every ad or direct mail piece to deliver immediate sales. Sales is the ultimate metric for marketing, but in almost every case there are intermediate steps where you build the relationship with the customer - especially for high-value items. Godin compares this process to dating.

In the dating analogy, we are your style consultants, your dating expert, your PA, and your florist. We will make sure you look good for every date, say the right things, and go to the right places to meet people. As the relationship progresses we'll remember the days when you ought to send something nice, and come up with creative ideas for what that something might be.

Taking the time to build up - and maintain - a degree of chemistry with your customers is hugely rewarding. Over time each sale becomes that bit easier. You will sell more. And, if you treat them right, your customers will bring other customers to you.

Speaker's Corner

Want to get the most from a trade show or conference? Get yourself on the podium. Competition for speaker places at some of the more popular events is fierce. Getting your application noticed requires ingenuity - especially when the application process is restricted to text-based online forms. This is where content skills come to the fore.

Yes, we're boasting. Because we have just secured a speaker slot for our client Penrillian at the forthcoming Smartphone Show in London this October. This isn't the first speaker slot we have ever secured, not by a long way. But it's a really good example of how to get a small company on a big podium against tough competition. Here's our three top tips.

1. The customer is king.
You can stand up all day and say how great you are. But you will never be as convincing as when a customer says it for you. Get a customer up on the podium - alongside you or in your place - and you are getting an extremely powerful endorsement, while giving your customer exposure that they value. In almost every case, the audience will be more interested in what the customer has to say than what you do.

2. Drop the spin
However well they disguise it, almost every company is going to want to get up on the podium and sell. Sell their products, their services, or their expertise. Boring. Boring for the event organisers, boring for the audiences. Even if it makes it past the selection process, turnout will be low, unless it is Steve Jobs announcing the new iPhone. So do something different. Offer to educate and enlighten; challenge accepted ideas, or even challenge your rivals to a debate. Openness and honesty will shine through in your application, and in your final presentation.

3. Entertain
Even at the trade shows that delve down into the technical weeds of a subject, the audience needs to be kept awake. Proposing one man (though women can be equally boring) and a slide deck isn't going to grab their attention. Think of an interesting analogy and stretch it to breaking point. Connect seemingly unconnected subjects in an engaging way. Do it in fancy dress. Whatever you do, make sure that your topic looks like it will be entertaining.

What is a sale?

In our marketing literature we talk a lot about the relationship between marketing and sales. That the latter is the only true way to measure the success of the former. But what is a sale?

For many of our clients a sale does not equate to a transaction with money going in one direction and a product going in the other. ADS for example, the drugs and alcohol charity. For ADS a sale means ensuring that people who need help find that help at the appropriate time.

For some of our other clients, the only people they need to sell to are their own investors. A sale for them means getting through the next round of investment meetings successfully, either to unlock promised capital or to secure additional funding.

Finally there are those clients who only engage us to sell an idea. Influencer marketing campaigns, as outlined by Nick Hayes and Duncan Brown in their excellent book, can be hugely important in the creation of a market, the propagation of a theory, or the creation of credibility for an individual or organisation. That credibility, or those markets and theories, become enablers to future sales. But for this campaign alone, the 'sale' is something completely separate.

In summary, a 'sale' is just a clear, measurable objective for a campaign that can be used to benchmark that campaign's success in terms that matter to the business. Whatever a 'sale' may be for your organisation, we believe we can help to increase their number.

Attract. Sustain. Convert. Release.

In content-driven marketing, the content shouldn't always be designed to win business instantly. Think of the relationship with the prospect as a conversation in a shop, with you as the shop assistant. You wouldn't try to tell the customer what to buy before finding out a bit more about them. In fact you may not even put the effort in to speaking to them at all if you didn't think that there was a good prospect of making a sale (although that does open you up to Pretty Woman-style moments).

To give another analogy from my tennis-playing colleague, think of content-driven marketing like a game of tennis. Every shot can't be a smash. You need to serve to start the game, and play a few shots to line up the winner. Aces may happen but they are few and far between.

The content you use to communicate with your audience has to vary. It needs to educate the prospect, question their needs, and if necessary, create a perceived need, before you try and close the sale. Content can also be used to filter your database, dismissing those who you wouldn't want to work with, or those prospects who will never become a customer.

There are four basic categories of content designed for these different tasks. Apologies to Simian Mobile Disco for misappropriating their album title.

Attract: This is content that has a viral element that will make people want to pass it on, or that will be sent out as an invitation to join your community to a new group of prospects. For example, you might send out a one-off cartoon strip to a database that you have a acquired for a single use. If it's funny people are likely to forward it to their friends and colleagues, and they might want to see more. So you ask people to go to your web presence to subscribe to the series, and they become part of your community. (We've found that 2D comic strips are still very popular even in this multimedia age).

Sustain: If prospects are going to remain a part of your community, you need to sustain their interest. At the same time, you need to define their perception of you, and create awareness of how you can help them. Sustaining content is typically helpful and/or educational. For example, you might offer a summary and analysis of a recent major news story in the relevant industry, along with selected background reading. Written well this can be engaging, challenging, enlightening, and save your prospect time getting up to speed on an important issue. All of which makes it valuable to them, while portraying you as an expert in the given industry.

Convert: This is where the call to action comes. Content designed to convert leads will often contain some form of incentive or encouragement, though what form that takes will depend on the industry, the scale of the deal, and the type of customer. Incentives can be financial - e.g. BOGOF; buy now, pay later; free sunroof and alloys etc - but they can also be entirely social. For example, pre-ordering has become very popular with books, CDs and computer games so that fans can 'be the first' to hear, read or play them. The chance to gain competitive advantage can be very compelling in business-to-business sales.

Release: The least well-known form of content, and the least understood, is that designed to repel rather than attract prospects. In the retail world you may not care who you sell to (unless you are selling arms or alcohol), but in the services world you want to be a little more picky about your customers. We want to work with clients who are on our wavelength, so we design our mailshots appropriately. By setting a very particular tone, we can get clients who aren't right for us to self-deselect, cleaning our database for us.


Attract. Sustain. Convert. Release. It's a simplified model, but understanding each and using them appropriately is key to good content-driven marketing.

Content-driven marketing and the media

Most people see the press as content creators, but in reality they are also great content consumers, transforming the output of companies and marketing agencies in to their own format. They can add huge value to your content, both in terms of reach and independence - especially when they are an organisation as respected as the BBC.

Thanks to our links with the local BBC, we were asked to put forward candidates to comment on a story about the 60th anniversary of Baby, the first programmable computer, constructed here in Manchester. Naturally we suggested one of our clients, Tim Panton from PhoneFromHere.com. Tim was particularly appropriate as his company had recently won (with our help) a special innovation award at the Big Chips that was created in honour of this milestone.

What started as a live piece for the local radio breakfast show became a TV piece and an online story too. Click through to check out the TV footage and the online story, and click here to check out Tim's own blog about the experience.

Now we just have to help Tim and his team maximise the value of this exposure.

The L Team

Our latest email campaign has just gone out. Click on the image below to see the full piece and find out more about our team, but I think you get the idea...

Content for Communities

The StartupsLive tour came to Manchester last night, with guest speakers including local chef and entrepreneur Paul Heathcote. Paul is a great example of why instinct and experience are more important than qualifications when it comes to successful marketing.

Back in the early days of his Longridge Restaurant, Paul used to type up newsletters - on a typewriter - and snailmail them out to his list of loyal customers. This is content-driven marketing at its simplest: keeping your customer-base informed and enthused about what you are offering.

It worked for Paul. Combined with some good PR, some equally good luck, and huge amount of hard work, it has seen Paul grow his empire to fourteen restaurants and a huge outside catering business.

Today you can achieve the same effect as Paul's newsletter with a great deal less effort and more sophistication. We can't guarantee you a multimillion-pound empire, but modern content-driven marketing tools do make it very simple to produce and distribute information to your customers and prospects. They also add a degree of intelligence that Paul could never have imagined. The ability to know who is reading the information you send out, who is forwarding it, and who is clicking through to your website.

Even with offline marketing, we can add measurement to campaigns, offering prospects and customers incentives to respond to direct mail, PR and advertising.

The challenge today is in creating content that drives people to respond. Content that cuts through the noise and engages people.

For that there is no magical new technology. Just plain old human inspiration.

Launching the first ICDM

Starting a new company is always a challenge. However great your experience in previous roles, you are going out to the world with no reputation and an unfamiliar name. In our case we've made it even harder by trying to push an unfamiliar concept.

We're working on a more detailed explanation of Intelligent Content-Driven Marketing (ICDM) that we will offer as a free download some time soon. But we thought our first blog post might be a good opportunity to give a quick explanation, and talk about how we came to this point.

First up, it's important to say that understanding ICDM isn't rocket science (unlike an ICBM, the construction of which does indeed require rocket science). It is simply an evolution and combination of a few more familiar concepts, into what we believe is a more effective and efficient whole.

ICDM was borne from two central beliefs:

• Firstly that buyers - both business and consumer - are increasingly savvy and cynical about marketing. Not only do they subconsciously filter out most advertising, but they are increasingly adept at spotting more subtle approaches such as PR. To engage with buyers today requires a more honest and up front approach, offering them something of value in return for their time and consideration.

• Secondly, we know that marketing - and particularly communications - is increasingly being challenged to justify itself. To offer more accountability. With the credit crunch starting to bite, we need to do better at measuring the value of marketing campaigns.

The answer to these challenges came from our experiences in various companies and agencies. We're all relatively young, but between the four founding members that experience still stacks up to almost 60 years.

Like all the best ideas, ICDM was created in the pub over a few pints. The webbies amongst us were raving about their ability to track a prospect's interaction with online marketing materials. The content guys were boasting about the successes of campaigns that focused on content - either educational or entertaining - that drew in communities of interested parties both on and offline. It didn't take too long to put the two together and come up with the concept of ICDM.

ICDM means:

• Giving people content that engages them, and tracking how they respond to it
• Maximising the value of marketing by creating content once and using it across multiple channels
• Measuring the value of each channel and focusing on those that work for your audience
• Tweaking your output over time until you are confident you have convinced individual prospects of your proposition
• Then making it as easy as possible for them to buy
• And doing it all in the most efficient, automated manner possible

To accomplish this we have assembled a small team of skilled content creators, designers and web engineers. We are building the tools to deliver on this vision, and we're looking for bold clients who want to make their marketing more efficient and effective.

If you think that might be you, or if you want a better explanation, then give us a call on 0161 236 8668, and we can have a chat. I look forward to speaking to you.

Have a great weekend.

Tom