An Our Manly Entrepreneur in Business Interview with Mark Barrett

Best Practice in Contemporary

Local & Online Marketing

Creative Image Marketing gives local business a leg up by designing websites that work better through emerging technologies, business processes integration, branding and targeted communications

Our Manly Business interviews Creative Image Marketing Director Mark Barrett about modern marketing in Sydney.

Mark Barret has been consistently delivering quality marketing solutions during a globally tumultuous economic downturn. Our Manly talked to the marketing man about good business in bad times. What are the smartest businesses doing not only to persevere, but to prosper? What marketing tools consistently enable survivors to weather financial storms?

OM: How should businesses react during a recession?

Mark Barrett: Businesses need to assess their marketing, but first they need to ask themselves, ‘Are we going to fight or just roll over?’ If they choose to fight, they look at their marketing and ask, ‘What are we doing here? Some businesses are going to survive this so we need to be at the top of our game to stand above the clutter.' They examine their marketing, their branding. They look at how they communicate to customers; they look at their level of customer service.

OM: Discuss the viability of e-newsletters.

Mark Barrett: Differentiate between sending e-mail to existing customers and using e-newsletters as a sales tool for prospective clients or customers. People are bombarded with e-mails at the moment. E-newsletters to prospective customers have a pretty short lifespan. It is definitely more important to talk to your existing database of customers or to create a community around genuine industry informative content on a website or a blog that people subscribe to. That is the wave of the future in terms of developing prospects. Create a community around an industry and not a product or a service.

However, e-mail is still a very cost effective way of reaching your current clients, and I think clients prefer it to receiving paper in the mail.

OM: On a personal level, is it fun to help businesses succeed?

Mark Barrett: I think so. It’s why we’re in this game. Everybody loves marketers- we’re seen as the creative, fun people working with images and design. There is so much happening with the web that goes un-utilized by local businesses. It is fun to watch a small local company get better organic search results in Google than bigger companies.

OM: Speaking of which, modern web analytics, like Google Analytics, gives businesses an astute way of judging whether or not an advertising, PR or marketing firm is delivering value for the money. Modern customers can hold you to a very high standard of performance.

Mark Barrett: Google Analytics is the bible for our very switched on clients. If our clients are savvy with e-commerce, we need to show them how to go further. We recently had a client, osteopaths, who had captured the top search results for keywords in their area. There was nothing left to do to increase their organic search results. What’s next? The answer is to find target markets.

In this case, people searching for pain relief. We’re setting up whole directories about pain during pregnancy, which creates a community out of a target market, an interactive forum for the osteopath’s target market with banner advertisements on the sides directed towards their osteopathic clinic.

OM: A lot of businesses get stuck in outdated branding. For a successful business, changing the look can be challenging, but essential for growth. You changed the whole look of your website recently. What precipitated the move? How does a business change its logo to improve the bottom line?

Mark Barrett: It takes a lot of guts. In our case we wanted a website that made people think we were good, but more expensive. A lot of inquiries were coming into the company that were wasting our time. Our old branding was welcoming that. It said, ‘Hey, come in, we can probably do something for you.’ We actually employed another marketing agency to do our marketing. It sounds a bit strange, but we needed that objective view to develop a better suited brand. It took about 6 months to develop our new branding.

OM: For established websites, what’s next?

Mark Barrett: Integrating new technologies like RSS feeds and blogs, using video content, and integrating email and databases and linking financial software like Quickbooks to a website. We’re also helping websites integrate with business processes; aligning  quoting, invoicing, with the job being tracked, and support ticketing.