#TotalMarketing

#TotalMarketing is a new twist on Social Marketing which considers every contact with your company as a potential marketing opportunity. You don’t limit yourself to specific channels - you support them all.

#TotalMarketing is inspired by the tactical theory of “total football” which was very effective in the Netherlands, from 1969 and in the 1974 soccer World Cup. Players were not limited to specific roles, but could play freely.

Implementing it is very simple.

1. Look for all points of customer contact. Not just marketing pages, but also:

   • Out of Office Emails
   • Email Signatures
   • “Unknown email address” replies
   • 404 error pages
   • “Thank you” pages for forms
   • Social network profiles
   • Games
   • Domain registration information
   • Manuals and Release Notes
   • Business cards
   • Google Maps and StreetView
   • Business Directories
   • Shipping packages
   • etc.

2. Plan what will happen if a customer makes contact with you, via any of the above channels. For example they click a bad link in a third-party tweet and see a 404 error page from your site, or they are browsing Google Maps and they click the pin that marks your business.

3. #TotalMarketing is about getting them without fuss, from where they arrive, to where their needs can be met.

4. The simplest way of doing this is to create one or more “Contact Center” pages, with details and links to your people and resources such as Wikis. These must include search, and real-world addresses such as phone numbers.
   
   Each new arrival can click through to one of these pages, and see how to meet their needs, using their preferred communication channel. Just because they arrived via Twitter (say), they don’t have to deal with your marketers using Twitter. They could call a phone number, or fire up Skype, or send an email - whatever you want to provide and they want to use.

5. Contact Centers are not just for marketing. They must handle other types of contacts too, e.g. for customer support.

6. Include a link to a contact center everywhere - on business cards, 404 error pages, your Twitter profile, social network home pages, etc.

7. That’s all.

You don’t need to decide which channels to support - you can use all of them. But you have the freedom of deciding what level of support to provide. This will often be the minimum needed to get visitors to a contact center. If you don’t want to provide interactive support on e.g. Facebook, you don’t have to - just direct visitors to other channels that you do support.

#TotalMarketing™ is invented by Pete Austin, following on from ideas by Jordie van Rijn and others. I won’t patent it, and (assuming it’s new) you can use the #TotalMarketing name and concept freely - providing you use the meaning described here and you link back to here. If you like it, feel free to implement it!

If you know different, and #TotalMarketing is not original, add a comment with a link to some evidence and I’ll amend the post xD

Update on 8 July 2011: Goodbye e-commerce, hello ‘customer interaction’

Update on 21 July 2011: Seven Ways to Make Your Shipping Packages Work Harder

Picture © Andrii IURLOV - Fotolia.com