#SASCHOOL11 - Digital, Search and Social Media Marketing Event

Our DMCM (Digital Marketing Communications Management) group attended Search and Social School Manchester yesterday at MMU Business School where we learnt lots of interesting information about digital, search and social media marketing.

James Hanson and Simon Alexander from MediaVest spoke about PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - Below are some of the points they mentioned:

Google currently holds 70% US market share and 90% of the UK's market share. With other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN holding less than 10% between them but slowly growing their share is set to rise with the future merge of MSN and Yahoo.

A quote from Eric Schmidt (Google) "Microsoft, not Apple or Facebook, is the biggest rival Google has right now" - even though Google hold the largest search engine market share they still feel threatened by the smaller search engines as they are all constantly bringing out new tools and competing against each other to gain bigger market shares.

They also talked about how mobile is going to be big in 2011 - this was very useful because one of the aims for our Digital Marketing Communications Management project, based on Canal Street Manchester's LGBT community is to create a mobile friendly website.

All in all the event was very useful to help with our current Gay Village Manchester project and it has also given us an insight into how PPC, SEO and Social Media Marketing work within companies which will be useful for us once we have graduated and hopefully start working for a Digital Marketing agency.

Purple Papers

Less dressed up than white papers, but with all the information you need. For those that like to have the full story

View it here on Scribd Canal Street

Merging Convenience and the User Experience

When we first met up with the client he was eager to discuss implementing a mobile strategy for the Canal Steet website, which is justified as 91% of users in the UK have a mobile phone that can access the internet. Furthermore, the LGBT community as a whole tend be early adopters of new technology.

What was troubling for us though, was that there were some critical problems for the usability of the main site that we needed to avoid in the development of a mobile strategy. We wanted to give the client a strategy that would be easy to amend and easy for the user. From that we decided that a modular layout would be a great option. Each module holds a summary of information and can be expanded, collapsed, or moved. This has great implications for the end user and their experience as well as for the client and the future progression of the Canal St website offering.

Market Segmentation

Segmenting by needstates and moodstates isn't exactly a new idea but it's definitely becoming more relevant. Food and beverage brands have been doing it for years.

Instead of being loyal to one single brand in a category consumers now adopt a portfolio of brands based on different moods or needs. This report sums it up best by saying:

"...A young beer drinker might have been loyal to just one brand 20 years ago, now he may consider one brand to be his “cool night club beer”, another brand to be his “watching the game on TV beer” and another his “just cut the grass, refreshing beer”."

I'm exploring how to implement this into a digital marketing communication management strategy and how I can use this to segment the very broad LGBT community.

Blog Post 1

Canal Street Manchester

Canal Street’s website, canal-st.co.uk, is a portal providing information to Manchester’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community with an eye towards the LGBT community at-large. Canal Street’s internet presence has already experienced a sizeable amount of success. The site currently generates a weekly e-newsletter for 4100 subscribers and the Facebook page has already amassed 12,000 followers in just over a year with 90% of them being active users!
The client is now looking to capitalise on the success of the Facebook page to draw more users to utilise the website and its services in the hope of generating more traffic to monetise the website. The client also feels the brand would be served well with a mobile strategy but isn’t sure how to proceed.

From here, we came up with n objectives:
• Increase eNewsletter subscribers by 40% within 1 year
• Develop a mobile-friendly website
• Improve usability of the current site

After meeting with the client and receiving feedback from questionnaires we felt the best digital marketing approaches to Canal Street would be social media, mobile browsing, and creating a blog.

From our feedback we learned that LGBT community are keen to adopt new technology. More than 60% of respondents said they used Android, BlackBerry, or iPhone mobile devices. Despite that fact, the current Canal Street website is not friendly to mobile users.

Social media provides a unique opportunity to generate a dialogue with consumers to improve the portal’s current offering and tailor it to provide content that’s more relevant to the audience. An improved social media integration strategy may also generate more traffic by means of ‘shared’ content.

A blog was considered as a means on enhancing the user experience by providing a personal and more authentic tone. Blogging also create another opportunity for user to generate shared content. It’s ability to be self-archiving was viewed a comparable advantage to the e-newsletter. Despite its advantages, we feel that the client doesn’t currently have the resources to actively monitor and update a blog. The client was also concerned about potential negative comments.

Minaxee Prajapati
07129623

Jamal Mon Desir
09262253

Claire Isbister
07296182

Andrew McLoughlin
0629564

Welcome!

We are The PIMMs Group (or PIMMs for short). We're a group of four final year students in the Marketing & Retail division of Manchester Metropolitan University's Business School

As part of our Digital Marketing Communications Management (DMCM) module we are working on a project to develop the online presence of Manchester's famous Canal Street.

Watch this space as we'll be updating it weekly as we progress. It will be like Big Brother but with out the guilty sentiments after.