Experience

Peter De Legge brings more than a decade of marketing and advertising experience and over five years of online marketing and strategy experience to each project. Peter has worked with a wide range of industries, from technology-related start-ups to traditional B2B manufacturing and service firms. His approach brings solid business and marketing thinking and a strong understanding of technical IT issues to problems. For years his Marketing Today newsletter has been subscribed to marketers who come everywhere from the Fortune 1000 to the top five consulting firms to start-ups and entrepreneurs, from America to Viet Nam.

For some clients this means total responsibility for their Internet development projects, often working closely with their marketing and IT departments, for others it means assisting in the development of an Internet strategy and marketing plan while an Internet development firm handles the graphic design. Strategic partners include Internet consulting firm Wired Matrix and award winning marketing communications firm, Urbas Creative Group.

With a background that includes marketing management experience at both manufacturing and service corporations, as well as experience working directly in the advertising and commercial graphic design fields, Peter De Legge has provided marketing consulting and development for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies as well as working on traditional marketing communications. From start-ups to established global leaders, his strategic and customer-centric style combines both business marketing savvy and a strong command of IT processes.  

Peter's writing, mostly on business-to-business marketing and Internet marketing has been referred to as a resource by major publications, University marketing departments and leading e-marketing experts. Seth Godin, former VP Direct Marketing and author of Permission Marketing praised Peter's Marketing Today Web site: "I love the (Marketing Today) site!"

Peter De Legge's background working directly in the print advertising and direct-mail field includes working on projects for some of the world's largest direct-mail advertisers campaigns, such as Columbia House, Hearst Magazines, Chrysler and Billboard Publications and serving as an account representative for Chicago Tribune Community Publications. In addition, Mr. De Legge has consulted for a number of non-profit organizations, given numerous presentations and spoke  at seminars on marketing on the Internet. 

Peter De Legge is a member of the American Marketing Association and Association of Internet Professionals. His professional educational background includes a BA in Marketing from Saint Xavier University in Chicago. In addition, Mr. De Legge has received training or attended training through the Northern Illinois University, Business Marketing Association, IBM, Catapult, Microsoft and other organizations. Mr. De Legge is also the publisher of Marketing Today, a Web site on marketing, that has received professional acclaim worldwide from top marketers. Marketing Today's e-newsletter subscribers include marketers from some of today's hot Internet start-ups to established giants like IBM.

Perspective

"Too many companies suffer from poor Internet and IT strategies because traditional, non-IT managers lack a good understanding of technology and are intimidated by it. So these managers end up not treating this areas like serious business and delegate it out to technical people. That's the problem as I see it. 

Traditional managers need to learn a bit about technology -- enough to get involved -- but most of all, they need to be concerned with the business processes behind the technology. Things like, is my Web site really designed in a manner that is useful to my customers and prospects? Does my site really have value to its targeted audiences? And what actions do I want my targeted audiences to take? Do I really want these people going to my Web site as opposed to going through other channels? If so, why?"

Peter has identified the most common errors made with corporate Web sites:

• A lack of a formal Internet plan - according to ActivMedia, three out of four companies online have no formal promotional plan and are unsuccessful.
• A lack of experienced business managers - the same ActivMedia study found that company Web site marketing failures were often tied to inexperienced managers making poor decisions.
• A lack of understand who the customer is and what they want on the part of Internet team   
• Designing the site around the company's infrastructure, products or services - sites built around company silos and an internal perspective instead of around a customer or prospect's needs.
• Poor or confusing navigation and design - navigation that is just not simple or needs explanation. If you have to explain it or if your traffic patterns show that most visitors to your home page click directly to your site map, you have a problem. Most of this problems could easily have been avoided by bringing in a usability expert and having them do a small amount of user testing. 
• Long down load times - research shows that Web site users leave pages that don't download in less than ten seconds. Still, how many companies through Flash on their home pages because they are amused by rich media? 
• Content that is not strategically driven - content that does not reinforce your company's brand identity or drive users to a specific desired action.
• Not soliciting customers and prospects -- not listening to the targets of your Internet efforts. Users will tell you a great deal through their clicks and time spent at your site, and many of them will tell you even more directly if you ask, because it is so simple to do.   
• Not taking advantage of data to improve the user experience - a second visit to a Web site should be different from the first; your site and management team should be learning from user data to consistently make the user's experience more relevant.  
• An online experience that is inconsistent with the company's offline brand
• Not providing enough value to motivate the visitor to return or having a strategy to stay in touch with a visitor - research shows that between 80 to 98 percent of first-time visitors to a Web site never return
• Not leveraging offline efforts to drive visitors to the site -
• Global ignorance - site's that completely ignore or do not understand how to deal with non-US visitors. 

The Internet truly shifts the power from marketers to consumers or buyers. It empowers them by giving them greater choice and a direct line to the companies they buy from or consider buying from. 

The days of ivory tower marketing gurus spouting unsubstantiated dogma are over. Technology, through data and a closer relationship with customers and prospects is greatly driving this evolution in marketing. 

The Internet, CRM, personalization and other technologies have allowed (or at least,  hold the promise of allowing) companies the ability to better understand the needs of customers and prospects, resulting in improved customer service and improved products and services. Mass customization or personalization is clearly going to become the new corporate standard.

Channels are becoming more transparent. Customers' service expectations increase and this includes the pressure for marketing channels to become more transparent -- customers want to choose the channel that is most convenient to them, but expect to be recognized, regardless of the channel they select. There is a trend towards the customer choosing the channel, not the marketer.    

Winning marketers not only need to continuously listen and quickly adapt and anticipate the needs of customers, they need to constantly be thinking about new ways they can add value for the customer -- they must become obsessed with providing greater value to the people and companies they sell to. In return, the marketers that serve their customers needs best will win. It sounds like the fundamental principles of marketing they have taught in college, it is. The difference now is that successful firms must make good on those ideals in order not only to succeed, but to survive.