Prepaid Marketing for Online Success

You must have surely heard the adage that “You Plan to Fail, if you Fail to Plan“.

Whilst this is undoubtedly true for all businesses and all ventures in life, it would be fair to say that this is especially true within the Prepaid Debit Card Industry as budgets tend to be slimmer than most but planning is just the first step because if your measuring and monitoring aren’t up to scratch, you may find your programme struggling sooner rather than later.

In fact, if you are the Prepaid Card Programme Manager or part of the Marketing Analytics Team that has been tasked with monitoring and measuring the success (…erm or otherwise) of your Prepaid Card Programme, then there are a few things you definitely need to be measuring to avoid making that trip to the Job Centre…

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For the last 14 months, I have been gushing about my iPhone to pretty much anyone who would bother to listen. Not sure about the exact stats but it would be fair to say that the iPhone is no longer an exclusive phone as everyone knows the virtues of this wonderful product from Apple Inc. and hence, it has proved popular with the punters.

So much so, that I have been quite happy using my iPhone for all my consultancy work as well and have been pretty happy with it. So it was a bit of a shock to the system when my iPhone suddenly lost WiFi connectivity and typical battery life dropped down to 30-40 minutes  at best. Given that this happened just after I had upgraded to the latest iPhone software, I was very upset indeed with the guys at Apple. The warranty on my machine had expired less than 2 months back which upset me even more that the iPhone had fallen apart just after the warranty had expired and I was certainly not going to let Apple get away with it.

I called my network provider, O2, who I love to bits and they were helpful but also tried to get me to sign onto a new 18 month contract with the promise of a free replacement. No thanks.

I booked my appointment to see an “Apple Genius” (as they are called) at the Apple store and made my way to the store. On the way, whilst talking to a client, my fully charged phone died after 7 minutes and now, I was seething and literally walked into the Apple store – spitting fire and venom.

The time was 12.55pm on Friday afternoon – Friday the 13th, so horror was very much on the cards. However, I also walked out of the Apple store less than 30 minutes later at 13.20pm, with a song in my heart and the firm belief that the guys at Apple should be running the world.

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Attended a wedding reception a couple of weekends back  in a truly wonderful banquet hall in London.

It was a Sikh wedding reception and a truly memorable one. The family in question had come over from Afghanistan and had a fairly significant “Pushto/Afghani” influence which made it even more interesting as you do not typically expect listen to Afghan music at a Sikh wedding reception. In fact, prior to the wedding reception invite, I was ignorant of the fact that there were any Sikhs with such Afghan influences in the first place.

Anyway, I was enchanted enough to ask the couple sitting across where I could listen to this sort of melody and lo and behold, I was introduced to Virtual Afghans – the web and its resources never fail to amaze!!.

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Well, just when you thought it was safe to say that you were starting to understand Google and the rules around optimising your website for Google’s search engine results – Google have done a Britney with an “Oops, we did it again” single of their own.

I am Gonna be your #1

It all happened on a quite Monday night as I sat running up some Google search results for sites I had spent time optimising recently. Typed in “prepaid marketing” in to Google and was quite chuffed to see my site as the #1 result – rightly so too as I was competing with 1/2 a million other pages for the right to be up there.

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More than 5 recommendations in a week on Linkedin means someone is changing their job…or in the current climate – maybe someones job is changing them.

I have been thinking about this hypothesis of mine for quite some time and I thought I’d run a little experiment – so I did. Have spent the last 30 days observing colleagues, friends, acquaintances and all and have seen at least 3 instances where the above is true. Now given that the number of times I have seen more than 5 recommendations come through in a week is also 3 – that’s a 100% hit rate!!!

Doubt if LinkedIn power users are going to go down to 4 recommendations per week based on this post :0) but it would be nice if we kept recommending colleagues and partners that we have worked with on our own simply because we enjoyed working with them or because we actually thought they did a good job as opposed to “tit for tat” recommendations when one of you needs them or the flood of “John Doe is so wonderful…..” when John needs to make a career move from A to B :0)

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Drove over 500 miles over the last 2 days between Nottingham, Brighton and London and wished I was able to just teleport myself instead of having to do the BIG drive. Just thankful I didn’t get stuck on the M25 like I did last week – spent 4 hours to move 4 miles and my ordeal had only just begun :0)

It does get you thinking though how does one get from point A to point B as traffic levels rise and congestion increases. Well, its probably a case of travelling the road less travelled which is sometimes risky or being local and knowing the back roads like the back of your hand. Local knowledge surely helps, as it does when it comes to local industry knowledge!!

The Web is becoming a part of our lives to a degree where it is now a part of our fabric – our very making. Remember hearing something about “Internet addiction Clinics” on the radio but that is a different story altogether. The Web defines so much of what we do and don’t do these days and marketers are aware of this and it is no wonder we are bombarded with a zillion messages everyday.

Spam and solicited emails, pop-ups and pop-unders, cookies serving contextual ads, displays ads across the web space, tailored content and websites serving up content that is human and search engine friendly – the fact is that the information super highway is incredibly congested.

So, how does a marketer get their message across online?

Well, its similar to getting from point A to point B in more ways than you think.

You could travel the road less travelled and do something innovative and different and your message may be noticed or go with the tried and trusted method and use the back roads. Work with experts who have local industry knowledge and have “been there and done that” and you are more likely to succeed than not!!

Make sure you don’t get bogged down by congestion on the Information Super Highway.

There are over a 100 prepaid credit cards being offered to consumers in the UK with moneyshare, travel and general spend being popular categories where prepaid card usage has flourished. Innovation is being delivered by the prepaid card companies who are now looking at offering prepaid credit cards linked to basic bank accounts with credit repair and budgeting tools to help with paying bills online as well as staying overdraft and credit free.

The banks, though, with direct access to significant consumer volumes still seem to be kicking their heels with regards to prepaid cards: Prepaid365 explore why banks are not tweeting about prepaid cards.

The Prepaid Marketing Team has set out to prove the above bringing its unique blend of online marketing and prepaid experience to the table.

Onwards and upwards!!