Marketing
Introduction
Silicon Futures has expertise in a wide range of social, web-based marketing techniques and specialises in creating a structured, measurable well-engineered campaign. Whether you are looking to tap into online social networks, build a new website, or create a promotional campaign that links the real and virtual worlds, Silicon Futures can help you by taking a structured approach to solving your problem.
We specialise in identifying market opportunities for emergent technologies. We will provide some case studies of our analysis below shortly!
Case study: XMOS Customer Analysis - Coming Soon.
Case study: Plastic Logic Customer Analysis - Coming Soon.
Case study: Staccato Communications Customer Analysis - Coming Soon.
In the meantime, our founders believe firmly in new, open, innovative technologies. As a result we have established the XFund - a micro-investment fund that invests small amount of capital in sustainable electronics businesses that generate real long-term value. We are particularly interested in open hardware platforms and projects. Please visit the XFund Blog for more of our somewhat controversial viewpoints.
Solutions
We design solutions in three vital phases:
Segmentation
The first stage of any project brief - whether it is designing a new website or producing a social media marketing campaign - is a thorough exploration of the target market. It is impossible to target an audience without knowing who they are and how they can be reached. Many companies have tried and failed to capitalise on new media opportunities despite huge marketing budgets because of mis-targeted or mis-guided promotions. In some cases the promotions can even back-fire.
This is why we carry out a thorough research process as part of our design phase. We explore the client's current customers and promotions to discover whom they reach and target, and we explore the communities of those the client wishes to target in the future. This gives us a clear picture of how the client's target customers interact both with the web and the client - and tells us how we can reach them in a way that is both effective and inoffensive.
Below, we give an example of a simple piece of segmented investigation and demonstrate how simple but rigorous analysis can made a significant difference to online presence.
Brief Example: Internet Discussion Forum and National Association Website
The following data come from a discussion forum for a UK-based national sporting association. The organisation had been approached by a number of potential sponsors. All parties were interested in the breakdown of the web traffic onto the forum and the target audience. This was a simple example of how to use tools that are freely-available to make important web-marketing decisions.
Google Analytics ™ provides a great means of exploring the audience segmentation on many different axes, and also provides hints for how to optimise the web content to increase coverage in certain areas. In this case, it was easy to see that although the forum attracted visitors from over 50 different countries, 79% of the traffic came from within the UK. This was valuable to the sponsors as their target market was entirely within the UK.
The tools also enabled the association to see that whilst the forum itself was attracting many visitors and contributors, the association's own website on which the forum was hosted was receiving virtually no traffic. This information was vital to the organisation - which had originally offered sponsors link and logo coverage on the main website - as it demonstrated the need to reinvigorate the design, content and relevance of the main association website.
It was possible to identify what proportion of the traffic to the website was generated from within University academic networks - in this case a significant proportion - which helped strengthen the case for particular forms of sponsorship that are tied to student demographics. There were also statistically-significant differences between the bounce rates for users visiting the site from within University networks and from outside - indicating that content was perceived as more relevant and better targeted to the student community.
Finally, the investigation also demonstrated that whilst the entire web presence offered value to the regular users, it did little to attract and retain the attention of people who landed on the website through searches. This observation enabled the association to improve the content, navigation and welcome for new users and decrease their non-regular user bounce rate, thereby offering more value to sponsors and improving the association's image with the general public.
Please contact us if you wish to learn more about our segmentation process. Or read on to find out more about our how and why we set project goals.
Goals
Every project needs measurable goals. This is widely recognised in most technological and engineering disciplines. In marketing and promotion, deliverables can become less quantitative and more qualitative, with value being less objective and more subjective. As a result, the appreciation of the value of targets and goals can suffer. This is counter-intuitive.
The harder it is to measure success, the more need there is to define it in advance. This is particularly true in promotional campaigns.
Silicon Futures works with every client to define quantitative goals and measures of success that guarantee a good return on investment. We then work on the campaign or specification with these goals in mind, and constantly assess our efforts against them, reporting back to the client.
Strategy and Planning
In our sections on segmentation and goals, we discussed how Silicon Futures thoroughly explores a brief and identifies metrics for success.
Strategy and planning are about turning this research and these metrics into success.
Silicon Futures works to ambitious but achievable deadlines which are agreed with the client during the goal-setting period. Our plans always include a variety of solid deliverables, such as achievements or progress report documents. Uniquely, we do much of our work using web-based project management tools which enable our clients to track and follow our progress at any point from anywhere in the world. The best results come about through collaborating with our clients and keeping them informed at all times.