How effective is your website?

This week I presented a paper to the 13th Pacific Association of Quantity Surveyors Congress in Kuala Lumpur where I revealed the results of on-going research investigating the brand/marketing management of QS practices in Malaysia, in particular the use of company websites. The paper and presentation will be available in full on the PAQS website shortly. (http://www.paqs.net/)

Why are we interested in QS practice websites?

The quantity surveying sector in Malaysia has become very competitive and fast moving. Quantity surveying businesses are faced with the challenge of professional regulation of their marketing approaches together with a need to communicate clear corporate brands with a range of potential stakeholders from existing and potential clients, to investors and potential recruits.

Website branding strategies are now a part of the marketing and corporate communication of any business. Recent research with QS practices in Malaysia has identified that websites are perceived as being an increasingly important part of the marketing mix (Preece, C N, Roziha, C H, Handzalah, A and Saiful, N M S 2008).

Why we should stop wasting our time

Now is the time to stop chasing clients/customers who are not in a position to place contracts or orders with us. Times are tough and could get even tougher as the global economic downturn continues. Consumers have their wallets tightly shut. What we should be doing is more marketing. Yes you heard that right. Its not a time to cut marketing budgets or downsize marketing departments. Now is the time to invest in more marketing in terms of segmentation and research. Not for now, but in the future when things start to pick up, as they inevitably will. What will our market space look like then? Who will have gone under and who will be the survivors? Will we be in a position to offer what the market will be demanding by then in terms of services or product or both? Will we have the appropriate people with the right training and technology to deliver what clients will be looking for?

And what about now? Some of our clients are still placing orders. They should be the focus of our efforts. Let us make sure we know as much about them as possible. Can we sell more of our services/products to them? We need intensive relationship building, all the corporate hospitality we can muster. A charm offensive the like we have never seen before! After-all, these people and organisations are our best 'marketers'. They will go around talking about us to their "friends" and will help promote us without a cent of our hard-earned profits being spent on so-called traditional advertising.

Now is the right time to bring our business organisations together. People are in fear for their jobs and livelihoods. Now is the time to unite and pull together in one big marketing effort focused on more than just survival, but on building the brand strategy for the future. And this means focusing on our most important clients/customers, not chasing after those elusive big spending clients that don't exist right now.

Why are people talking about me?

Who is talking about me? What are they saying? Who are they talking to? Where are they talking? Perhaps people are saying nice things? But what if they are not? Am I getting paranoid? If people are not talking about me, why not?

As a construction business, whether small, medium or large, domestic or international, consultant, contractor or manufacturer, if people aren't talking about you then you have a problem.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the key marketing tool for construction professionals in the business-to-business marketplace. You can spend your hard earned profits on so-called traditional marketing techniques, but at the end of the day, you are as good as your last job. Reputation building IS brand building in the construction industry. Word-of-mouth marketing is a challenge to manage. But manage it we must.

According to wikipedia, "word-of-mouth is a reference to the passing of information from person to person. Originally the term referred specifically to oral communication,(literally words from the mouth), but now includes any type of human communication, such as face to face, telephone, email, and text messaging".

There are many types of word-of-mouth techniques being applied today including "buzz", "blog", "viral", "grassroots", "cause influencers" and "social media marketing". If you are skeptical about the impact of all this, consider why politicians in particular, have got increasingly concerned about a shift away from traditional broadcasting, towards this form of communication. People are able to get information from a whole range of different traditional and online sources. They no longer rely on "official" or "controlled" media.

The same applies in the business/commercial world. Consumers and other key stakeholders are looking for testimony and reviews of products and companies before they buy or invest.

So what is the "buzz" about your company? Have you stopped to consider how your company is perceived by your clients and other key stakeholders? In times of economic slow down perhaps its time to take a good look at ourselves in readiness for better days ahead. The opportunity and challenge is to start to influence the "buzz".

Some useful references on the impact of word-of-mouth marketing include -

Renée Dye, 'The Buzz on Buzz,' Harvard Business Review, November-December, 2000.
Rajdeep Grewal, Thomas W. Cline, and Antony Davies, 'Early-Entrant Advantage, Word-of-Mouth Communication, Brand Similarity, and the Consumer Decision-Making Process,' Journal of Consumer Psychology, October, 2003.
Frederick F. Reichheld, 'The One Number You Need to Grow,' Harvard Business Review, December, 2003.
Yubo Chen and Jinhong Xie, 'Online Consumer Review: A New Element of Marketing Communications Mix,' http://ssrn.com/abstract=618782, July, 2004.
Florian v Wangenheim and Tomás Bayón, 'The effect of word of mouth on services switching: Measurement and moderating variables,' European Journal of Marketing, September, 2004.
Paul Marsden, Alain Samson, and Neville Upton, 'Advocacy Drives Growth,' Brand Strategy, December, 2005

QSIC 2008 - A great opportunity to network!

The Quantity Surveying International Convention 2008 was a great opportunity for me to meet up with contacts from previous seminars and make new friends with both academics and practitioners from KL and around Malaysia. This was my first major event since taking up my post in Malaysia and the response to my presentation seemed to be positive with a number of people speaking to me about it afterwards. The key messages that I wanted to get across was that marketing for QS practices was more about building and maintaining long-term relationships with clients and potential clients than advertising or promotion. The results of our research with firms so far shows that QS businesses in Malaysia have recognized the importance of marketing, with this being part of the role of partners, directors or senior practice managers. However, our data does not confirm how well developed marketing plans are, or if these are part of the strategic business planning of these practices. The backbone of marketing should be intelligence or market research. Again, we are not sure to what extent firms are investing in good quality research to support their activities. Practices put great emphasis on the use of the traditional company brochure, even though this has little or no influence on clients decision-making. Possibly no more than information on the company website. It would seem that it has never been more important to examine the cost effectiveness of marketing activities. Perhaps practices should be spending more on training their staff in networking and selling skills, appropriate corporate hospitality and events management. Increased competition and diversification of QS services means that practices need to look at how they are communicating their “uniqueness” and being able to differentiate themselves from their competitors.