Marketing

JNLR 2011-3 National Listenership

National Listenership of any radio stations fell to 82%. Still it’s a bad figure being just shy of three million people listening every day, but it's certainly going in the wrong direction. The rant on this part of the web is normally the spiralling decline of the newsprint business, surely this medium is not going in the same direction. The big talking point, again, is another decline in the listenership of 2FM. This survey see it dropping another 80,000 listners compared to the same period last year and down 153,000 over a two year period. The only reason that the combined RTE figure was in the black was because of the hard work of RTE1. It’s no secret that the problems at 2FM are, in part, due to the untimely demise of Gerry Ryan. This is better illustrated with the quarter hour segments for 2FM throughout the day. Compare it now (the twelve months up to September 2011) to two years ago (the twelve months up to September 2010). There really is little to add to that.   Looking at the figures outside 2FM can be summarised in ‘nothing really happened’ as the status quo was maintained. A marginal decrease in the Today FM numbers and a likewise margional increase in Newstalk. 

JNLR 2011-3 Dublin Listenership

Still dominating the capital is the National broadcaster RTE1 having pulled back 3% points on the same period last year. 2FM dipping into single digits in Dublin has to be worrying (again). Perhaps Montrose would allow the newly appointed Commercial Director, Willie O’Reilly, to look at 2FM for a week or two and come up with a plan. It strikes me that there is none currently and that the station is bouncing around from one bad survey to yet another. Maybe the time Willie spent at a truly commercial station might be a source of some inspiration for the ailing 2FM. They have gone from 13% (123,000) to 8% (81,000) in just two years - a 34% drop in listeners. 98FM and 2FM look as if they had to give way to Nova, who entered this period with 5% listenership in the capital. It’s a fairly spectacular entrance it has to be said and has to be applauded. The downside to this is that the station is prone to fairly gushing prints ads on the back of any of their ‘successes’ – but I suppose they have the bragging rights in this one. Newstalk gained a bit of ground it has otherwise lost in the previous comparable survey. They added 20,000 listeners with the time slot of lunch until five making all the improvements.

JNLR 2011-3 Local Listenership

Briefly the locals. Highland is still the highest listened to local station reaching 65% of its franchise area, but still dropped 4% points year on year. Bolting into second this year, from forth, is Mid-West with an impressive 8% points increase. Equally impressive is the rise of Ocean FM who gained 9%. Galway bay and LM FM see the biggest declines Local  2011

Multi-Channel Marketing

A bit of research fell into the email inbox this morning that’s worth airing. On the back of an earlier article about trying to maximise the impressions of a print ad it was interesting that this research looked at the channels used in the marketing mix and how those channels are tracked.  The research was conducted by SkyIQ , part of BSB Sky. Of the 12 channels used, the most predominantly used channel was online being employed by 76% of the marketers surveyed. In my own opinion that figure struck me as being on the low side. Given that the survey had canvassed One hundred senior marketing professionals working within large organisations in the UK  I thought that online/digital would have been used by the majority, if not certainly the vast majority of all the companies.   Some of the ‘traditional’ media were next in line with print being used by 71% of respondents, email by 66% and, greeted with a broad smile from An Post, direct mail came in at a healthy 61% usage. TV was last only employed as a marketing channel by 36% of the respondents along with mobile also on 36%.     You could get the impression that some channels were not employed for the sake of a “safer option”. Given that we have a 117% penetration of mobile phones in the Republic the figure of 36% usage in the marketing mix strikes me as particula...

Daily Deals and Coupons, some interesting research

There have been some very interesting studies conducted recently into the world of the ‘Daily Deal’ and coupon redemption. Perhaps one of the more interesting of these was conducted by Rice University in September of last year and again in June of this year. But.... if you've been tempted, have a look at something we cooked up, a daily deal calcutator  Their research findings are a fantastic guide to any business tempted by the lure of a daily deal. Whilst many of the business running these deals are very satisfied with the outcome, many are not. There are some parts of this fairly intricate equation that businesses can influence and some are completely out of their control. There are so many elements involved in these Daily Deal promotions that it’s really very difficult to isolate and pinpoint one or two key factors. In their September research, Rice University maintained that the two key drivers to success or failure of a Daily Deal were Employee Satisfaction and the coupons effectiveness in attracting new customers. Employee Satisfaction is a massively important element. These promotions will (should) increase the workload of your staff or they may face extra hours. If there little in the way of recompense for the extra work, then it’s going to be an uphill struggle to succeed. Another element that makes these promotions work is the number of new customers that return to an establishment and spend at full rates and your staff have a vital role in...

Daily Deal and Coupon Calculator

In an effort to try and bring some reality as opposed to hype Daily Deals, we've put together an interactive spreadsheet sheet to try and help you get to the bottom of the numbers. There are so many variables it can really be a bit of a nightmare. But hopefully below will at least give you an indication of how a potential promotion might do. There are a few items that you can fill in with certain levels of confidence and others that are very much picked out of the ether. One those, it’s best to try and err on the side of caution. Face value is as it says; the normal price of the goods or services you are going to offer. Voucher value is the promotional price. Discount is worked out automatically. What percent will be new customers What would, on average, be the spend of a regular customer What are the costs of the goods sold (specifically the voucher good) Number of vouchers sold and the percent redeemed Number redeemed – we’ll default that at 15% not redeemed “Sales above voucher” is trying to estimate the number of people that will buy more that simply what’s on offer. Change the % there The percent of new customers that will come back again The Daily Deal site cut The cost proportion of the deal. From the face value, what’s the cost portion as a percent Fill in these and see what you get at first pass. Then you can move some of the subjective elements...

Car Rental and SEO

In a resent look at the car hire market, in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), some very interesting points were brought to light. Anything in the motor business, whether it’s dealing with the new sales, second hand sales or rental is hugely competitive. The foreign car rental business is massively competitive and it’s on this we are going to concentrate. Just as a small aside, and one that as a country we have to be able to capitalise on: Hitwise recently released their Travel Quarterly Review – an overview from a search perspective of the travel and related markets. This quarter they analysed the UK searches for ‘flight destinations’. By Flight destinations searches it means search phrases that have a fight slant to them and a specific city destination. So, this could be expressions like “cheap flights Dublin” or “Dublin Flights” etc. “Flights/Dublin” ranked 4th (up for 11th in the same period last year) of all the city destinations searches from the UK. It’s not a bad showing for the Capital being forth on that list of potential destinations. Anyway, once all the bookings have been made there is always the issue of Car Hire. Sticking, for the moment, with the Hitwise research their fastest moving expression in the first quarter of 2011 was “car hire Spain”. “Hire” being the appropriate term here in this neck of the woods. If you are optimising for the visitors from the USA then that has...

Taco Bell Facebook coupons

Taco Bell, the Mexican/American fast food chain, recently got itself into a spot of PR bother. A customer took offence to the amount of beef contained in her beloved Taco and so offended was she that she took a class action suit against Taco Bell - as you do. The law hired firm came out blazing and claimed that the mixture was only a paltry 35% beef, the rest was "other ingredients". The people at Taco Bell (I’m at pains not to use the initials of “TB” as I think they have suffered enough in the publicity department) were not impressed and responded that it was in fact 85% beef. Jumping to the end of that particular story, the Law Firm are cowering under a bed somewhere as they as much admitted the 85% was incorrect and they got it wrong. Taco is considering counter suing. Taco defended their patch rigorously and took out full page ads asking (aka veiled threats) the law firm to publicly apologise. But during the height of “beefgate” they decided to turn to social media and, more specifically, their loyal Facebook customers. They assumed ‘Loyal’ because 5.5m of these would be worriers had ‘liked’ Taco Bell on their individual pages. It was only natural to assume that these people would now lay down their lives and come to their aid in Taco's hour of distress. In order to curry favour with these folk, Taco offered them coupons for a free ‘Crunchy Taco’. As the retail price of each offer was $0.99 there was some $6m potential downside for Taco, if it all went to plan. Amazingly, only 3% of the 5.5m fans liked the company (or offer)...

Ireland Facebook Statistics

Some very interesting Facebook statistics are available at Social Bakers. So we put a few of these together here, just to give you an idea of what’s happening on Facebook as we write. Firstly we will look at Facebook penetration worldwide. There’s really two ways to look at this; absolute numbers or penetration as a % of the population. In numbers, the United States is, naturally, way ahead of the rest of the field with over 150 million Facebook users or the equivalent to half of its population. Ireland’s figure is always going to be low in comparison and we have 1.9m Facebook users, or just shy of half the population. When looking at the numbers, it’s worth remembering that Facebook was originally only in the English language. It wasn’t until early 2008 that it began to translate in to French, Spanish and German. So some countries may only be beginning to adopt the Facebook format as it becomes localised in their language.

Affiliate Links

I looked at this before when I thought some publications were being a little disingenuous about their affiliate policies. But, I am glad to see, that our friends at News International are being completely up front about selling their traffic. In an article on High street fashion the say Want to know where your favourite stars' frock is from? Fear not, every week we bring you the hottest celebrity looks from Britain's High Street - and you can click through to buy them online straightaway. You can click on any of the images which will, via what looks like affiliate links, whisk you off to the different retailers. I’m actually all for print recycling their information on line and garnering as much loose change as they can for their work – even it the links are done retrospectively. We’re about to have a change in television programming there sensitive and venerable viewers will have to be informed if a product(s) have been commercially placed. Should the same apply here? Probably not, as...

Coupons and Loyalty Schemes

I read with interest that yet more of the print industry is moving into to coupon/loyalty/butter-voucher arena. There has been huge interest in the web side of this business and recently highlighted when Groupon turned down a €6bln takeover bid from Google. Google, spurned, but not completely defeated, has now decided that it will go it alone based on its current advertising technology. Outside the ‘web discount’ systems Associated Newspapers are launching a loyalty discount scheme for the Mail On Sunday. It’s based on readers purchasing loyalty. In the UK if readers subscribe to the Saturday Mail and Sunday Mail on Sunday together they get redeemable vouchers for a variety of companies like Tesco and Pizza Express . It, like the Poll Tax, is being “tested” in Scotland first and will roll out to the rest of the dominion at a later stage – once William Wallace has given it his imprimatur presumably. The paper already has culture and (more importantly) a system in place for subscriptions in England and Scotland so it’s probably easy to dove-tail the loyalty scheme into the current subscription process. There is no mention of Ireland in the reward scheme, but that’s possibly because they don’t have a subscription scheme in place here. On the web coupon home front we have Groupon here, but branded under City Deal. Again offering discounts on a variety of events/services – but they only kick in when a certain number of people have committed to the deal (“Group” “Coupon” = Groupon). Not to be left behind IN+M are planning “GrabOne.ie” which...

€1 Irish Independent

For the last two Mondays, the Irish Independent has dropped its price from the normal €1.90 to €1, practically half price. It’s a fairly drastic move and one that it would have been loath to do in the past leaving to price weapon to the Tabloids. Financial Times €2.30 Irish Times

Irish Newspaper Circulation April 2010

A marginal decrease in the mornings this month. Taking into account the ‘disruption’ in the buying cycle for Easter and School holidays – its not a bad result.  However the year on year picture is very bleak. The tabloids account for 24,000 of the 29,000 drop in the market year on year. Just how much more blood letting can that tabloids take is anyone's guess.    The Sunday market is beginning to get a little interesting. In last months figures, it looked as if the much publicised defection of Paul Williams to the News of the World didn’t materialise into sales with the paper only adding 998 copies in Pauls first month at his new desk.   But the continuing heavy advertising campaign and, it has the be said, the input that Paul has made into the paper story wise, would seem to have paid off with the paper gaining  9,400 month on month – pretty respectable in these ‘straitened times’. The only obvious looser in the figures below would seem to be the Sunday Daily Star who dropped 1,800 month on month. However the picture is incomplete. As the ‘established’ Irish Papers don’t produce monthly circulation figures, we don’t know how the Sunday World has faired in the past two months. One would suggest that the Sunday Market has not expanded of late and therefore the copies that were picked up by the News of the World have to be coming from another paper. But in this fast paced environment we will have to wait until August (when the Sunday Worlds figures are published) to get an answer to that question. There was really no point...

Media Revenues from 2009 to 2013

You have been handed the Media Revenue 'crystal ball', courtesy of the people over at PricewaterhouseCoopers Ireland- so which horse will you back? A recent survey on the Irish Entertainment and Media Landscape makes for some particularly interesting reading as it predicts (as much a one can) the revenues streams for the various media sectors between 2009 and 2013. Naturally some sectors fair much better than others in their predictions. They estimate that the industry as a whole will be worth $4.98 billion in 2009 rising to $5.9 billion in 2013 a growth of 2.7% per annum. This sector is delivers just under 2% of our GDP, but in terms of numbers employed in the sector as a whole its possibly disproportionate. The real growth sector in Ireland will be access to the internet which is said to grow by 12% per annum until 2013. The stark truth about that figure is that our Broadband penetration is, according to ComReg, at 28.8% in Q1 2008 and this is both fixed line and mobile access. This rapid growth is only comes on the back of poor penetration rates over the past few years, so it really only catch-up.

SME’s and their Marketing Budget

The results of a survey conducted by Truvo for a recently held conference are particularly interesting for SME's. The survey was conducted in three countries - Belgium, Ireland and Portugal. In total they canvassed 1850 small businesses and, as the survey was conducted in May 2009, it's particularly topical. They posed the question: How do you allocate your marketing & advertising budget: Truvo have a vested interest in the SME sector. It's where they get most of their revenue. This company, and others like it, have seen a decline in print adverting, advertiser numbers and average advertiser spend in recent years. In Ireland their print revenues fell 9%, their online gained 65% (coming from a low base) and their overall revenues were down by close to 5% in 2008. So, in order to get an insight into the minds of their customers, they conducted this survey. From the results its looks as if the largest chunk of the SME's current marketing spend goes on the traditional print Directory Advertising. This spend is then followed by small businesses developing their own websites and the combined they take 38% of the total budget. "Online" now consumes 40% of the SME's marketing and advertising budget leaving 60% to the more traditional mediums. Some leaps of faith have to be made here to try and interpret what is actually meant in by the broader categories. Other Print could be direct mail, leaflets/flyers perhaps. Other media is really too broad, but you would suggest that it...

Marketing Mobile Coupons and Mobile Tickets

Dominos (www.dominos.com), in the USA anyway,  have taken a real leap forward in my opinion with their new mobile coupon offering. For some time now, Dominos have encouraged customers to 'opt-in' to their mobile medium i.e. give details of nearest store, mobile number and permission to be contacted via text. They have partnered with www.air2web.com/ who look after the mobile coupon marketing for them. Opt in customers then receive 'mobile coupons' which they can use when they are buying online or online via dominos mobile site. As dominos know the geographic location of customers (because of the store location) they can offer local specific offers through their coupons. Last year Dominos signed up one million people to opt in to receive mobile coupons, three times as many signups as the previous year showing their customers acceptance to that type of mobile couponing. Franchise operators will be encouraged to use the new mobile couponing, but it's up to the local businesses to decide on the specific offers as tastes and products will vary geographically. Their wap site - mobile.dominos.com looks as if it's only set up to accepts orders from the States and I wonder if they will be adding this to their arsenal here locally. It's really a step in the right direction for mobiles, mobile coupons and mobile marketing. So many people have tried to crack the mobile coupons with different levels of success. There ...