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If you want to improve leads and boost sales opportunities then business to business (B2B) marketing can do this by looking through existing data.

A simple example of this is if you were selling insurance is to look and see when your clients were up for renewal and prospect them.

Companies would be able to arrange appointment to promote their products and new ones and offer special rates for their existing clients to keep them on board.

A report that was carried out by Return Path called Creating Subscriber Experiences showed that 85% of businesses did not uses any information that their marketing departments found out that could improve their campaigns and in turn increase revenue.

The French advertising company Publics has bought Razorfish from Microsoft which is said to be worth over $350 milion but as part of the sale Microsoft still have to make future spending with its old advertising arm.

When Microsoft bought aQuantive it also took over Razorfish.

The chief executive of the Publicis Groupe said

“The acquisition of Razorfish is another step forward in realizing our strategic vision of building a world leader in digital communications, a critically important space for our clients,”

After the deal is completed digital communication will account for a quarter of the revenue for Publicis, and some of the clients that Razorfish include are McDonalds and Ford.

Microsoft has bought a share of Facebook which is sure to upset Google.

The deal is worth £120 million which has allowed Microsoft to buy 1.6% of its stock and also when you consider the business has not made any money yet and is less than 4 years old that’s not a bad result for Facebook.

Kevin Johnson of Microsoft said

“this is a strong statement of confidence in this partnership and in facebook”.

Facebook in the meantime hopes to use advertising to increase the number of traffic to its site allowing friends to connect to each other through messaging, facebook is still behind MySpace but due to it growing faster it hopes to overtake soon.

Dubai municipality has decided that it wishes to carry out a marketing survey to see if the public knows what services it provides.

The aim of the study is to find out what is possibly the most effective media tool they have to deliver the messages to the public.

The director of marketing Farhan Al Marzouqi said “Dubai Municipality offers almost 500 services through its various departments and we would like to know whether people are aware of all our services. Besides, measuring the overall image of the Municipality and how its presence in the eyes of people”

They have divided the study into three parts, to discuss the general institutional identity, the second part is on the public gardens and lastly to pay attention to markets that are related to Dubai municipality.

Marketing jobs are set to rise mainly due to when the economy starts to slow down marketing jobs are usually the first to be cut. So now with companies recruiting for people to start in their marketing departments is a good sign that confidence is increasing in the economy.

Over the past month recruitment companies have noticed that there has been a sharp increase in the demand for marketing positions.

During the first part of the year many companies were not spending valuable money on marketing projects and also taking on staff.

Over the last month there has been a massive increase in the demand for jobs in the marketing sector which was a really positive step forward. 20 or so jobs were called for while six months ago were would only have been half that meaning that recruitment agencies had to proactively go out and find the right candidates.

Another encouraging fact is that redundancies have started to slow down also hinting at the economy starting to recover.

Oxo have decided to launch an X shaped cube in a distinctive beef flavour in a £2 million campaign which is said to be the biggest marketing campaign the company has done.

Oxo has had sales grow by 3% to over £38 million in the last year.

The idea behind the X shaped cube is to appeal to the younger market following recent make overs of Mr Kipling and Hovis who are part of the premier foods brand.

In 1910 the Oxo brand was launched after a German Chemist found a way to extract large amounts of beef extracts from carcasses.

The Oxo cube was sent out to british troops in the first world war and between 1914-1918 over 100 million of them were consumed.

Lets just hope this is a continued success with its bold new look

Marketers need to sell products and consumers are expecting the products to get better and better. Often this is  done with  flashy but useless additions which are fluff but offer no real benefit. As a case in point, we have a new kettle in the office which  illuminates the water with a fancy blur light when you switch it on. What is the purpose of this other than a marketing gimmick? Think about it. Why? It is not to tell you the kettle is on because it still makes a noise as the water is boiling and steam comes out the top?

Some people might say it is the design. What drives the development of these things? The answer is technology. Have you noticed how most electronic devices now have blue LEDs? Before that they were green and years before that they were red only. The reason is that it was difficult to make LEDs in any other  colour. LEDs are not the same as light bulbs. Their colour is determined by the properties of the semiconductor materials used to make them. New materials such as GaN have allowed blue LEDs to manufactured. In the past blue LEDs were not available and so subliminally  blue lights are  distinctive and make the product stand out as modern over the boring, green and old fashioned red LEDs.  That is why there is trend for  blue lights; advertising marketing gone mad.

It has just been announced that Microsoft and Yahoo will be joining forces. The agreement means that the Microsoft search engine will power Yahoo and Yahoo will sell advertisements on its advertising network for both companies.  Together they may have the power to take on Google. Combined, this will give them 30% of the search market. In any case the partnership is expected to bring in an extra $500 million. The contract is for 10-years.

With Google having a whooping 60% of the market can this merger have a significant effect?

By sheer coincidence, my annoying Google capture came up with:

Talks between Microsoft and Yahoo have begun again. Yahoo and Microsoft are likely to pool their reasources to gain market share of the advertising revenue. The partnership would see Microsoft displaying adverts for both parties on its search engine Bing while Yahoo would take over display advertising sales. Nothing has been settled so far and the partnership may not materialise.

Individually, their market share is such that they lack the reach required to achieve a good revenue  for their advertising services. Yahoo’s U.S. search market share is 19.8 percent while Microsoft’s is 8.4 percent (according to comScore) compared with Google’s 65 percent.

It is often said that in an economic depression marketers will still spend money on advertising products.  However does this agree with the facts? With the continued growth of the internet digital marketing and spending on SEO seem set to increase but this is because it is a growing market, more people will find themselves connected to the internet and the convenience it offer will undoubtedly lead to greater online sales.

However, this must be tempered by the fact that people have lower disposable incomes meaning they will be less willing to spend. Marketing budgets suffer from a time lag and so while the rest of the economy is in the grips of a depression, marketers have escaped relatively unscathed so far.

In times of  economic gloom, marketing is one of the first areas to be cut. It is a way of making quick short term savings. In the long term however, this can severely hurt future sales.

The expected outcome is a decreasing in the spending on traditional marketing but a small increase in digital marketing budget as companies try and achieve greater targeting for their products.