Blog posts tagged marketing websites

Learning from the competition

Whether you run a business yourself or are involved in business support, it doesn’t take a genius to recognise that businesses are interested in marketing. (Marketing, business planning and grants have consistently topped the charts since BHP started producing business advice in the early ‘90s.

But the Marketing Donut only makes sense if there’s a gap to be filled. Looking through hundreds of websites offering marketing resources convinced us that there is – and gave us a few key lessons on what we should be aiming for.

Not surprisingly, a lot of sites are driven by advertising. Fair enough, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell where the advertising ends and the content begins. Webpages that look like The Million Dollar Homepage and advertorial whose sole purpose is to get you to hand over your money are absolute no-nos.

Some sites do a great job covering a specific topic, but are far from comprehensive. Fine as far as it goes, but if you’re going to have to look for the right site each time you want a piece of marketing information you might as well stick with Google.

Then there’s a whole range of sites catering to marketing professionals in big corporates (and marketing students who hope one day to be marketing professionals in big corporates). Nice theory, shame about the reality.

SMEs need to understand the issues that matter and how marketing principles apply in practice. Overviews need to be backed up with detail while detailed explanations need to sit comfortably in the bigger picture. Tools that actually help you do the job are even better.

And however good a website’s content may be, if you can’t find the information you want it might as well not be there.

These key principles have informed the development of the Marketing Donut. Have we delivered? – we’ll soon know.