London Meeting 25th July 2009
This meeting, although following the long established OMMG/Meetup format, saw the inaugual meeting of Smart Marketing Warriors membership organisation.
Blending the OMMG/Meetup format of a free flowing exchange of members problems, experiences and solutions with the Warriors structured delivery of useful internet marketing training was something of a problem in the time available and we continue to give a lot of thought to how we will structure the day in future.
For the moment we stayed on the well proven path and worked to the OMMG/Meetup format in the morning before delivering two valuable presentations in the afternoon.
Members problems assembled in real time onto a mindmap appeared to present a very varied range of issues. However, a few minutes thought boiled them down to some broad groups as shown here and enabled us to identify common problems as well as obstacles being encountered by individuals.
As expected, a number of them (6 to be exact) were clustered around the use of Wordpress which has become such a universal tool for building web presence and credibility.
Four more fell into the field of basic marketing processes. These will be dealt with in future through the methodical delivery of training via the Smart Marketing Warriors online course.
Of the remainder, Social Marketing was already lined up to be the subject of one of the afternoon presentations, and the others were either dealt with immediately or have gone into the lesson planning process as priority items for us to respond to as soon as possible.
Smart Marketing Warriors offers the combined experience of 4 established online marketers and in the afternoon Roger Bourdon, one of the founding partners, presented his experience of launching his first product.
Of particular note was the optimisation process of starting with the basic structure and then progressively improving the offer and the consequential improvement in the profitability.
Laurence Borel, an independent consultant in the field of Social Marketing strategies, then gave a presentation on Social Media and an insight into this hot topic which is clearly becoming a very powerful marketing tool – when used correctly.
Finally, we wrapped up with some members feedback which, together with the collection of problems identified in the morning session. has given us a clear steer on what members are looking for.
As our objective is to deliver what our audience wants (good marketing strategy, that one ) members can look forward to some good stuff in the near future.
The next meeting scheduled for 22 August will follow a similar format with a nominal charge of £7 (increased from £5 due to change of venue) for the morning session and an opportunity to take part in the more formal Smart Warriors presentation session in the afternoon.