In the B2B arena, where partnerships are of paramount importance, the efficient management of marketing is central to your business’s longevity. One way to effectively manage this is to execute an intranet/extranet strategy. These portals enable internal marketing systems to operate to the best of their ability, but also enables businesses to reach out to their partners and vendors.
Too often for B2B, intranet development takes the form of throwing some human resources information onto a quickly developed system, says Margaret Manning, CEO at digital agency Reading Room. The reason for developing an intranet was simply that ‘everyone else has got one’. The disappointment when staff members fail to log on in droves leaves many businesses dismissing intranets as a waste of time and resources. It is a myth to think that building an intranet is cheap and easy. Initially, it can appear a simple task: all you need is a spare PC and someone in the IT department who knows a little bit about coding websites, and away you go. However, this is to treat what should be a valuable business tool as tantamount to a training exercise for the lucky IT guy.
As the latest ‘must-have’ technology, intranets and extranets gained bad press because of a lack of understanding regarding what these technologies could deliver to a business. Often derided as little more than glorified telephone directories, intranets in particular have got a second wind and are now established in the marketing landscape, as businesses in the B2B sector realise that they must manage their digital assets much more efficiently. With partners demanding increased integration with the businesses they trade with, developing an intranet/extranet portal is now high on the agenda.
B2B enterprises more than any other group of businesses must have efficient internal marketing systems that enable them to service their strategic partners. John Nicklin, sales and marketing director at intranet, extranet and portals specialist Sorce, says, An intranet is much more than an internal website. An effective intranet/extranet solution dramatically improves information sharing, collaboration and business process management throughout an organisation.
Nicklin identifies five key areas where organisations need to focus. These are:
governance: defining the project sponsor, determining the strategy
branding: ensuring the intranet reinforces core brand values and identity
technology: building the solution to integrate with existing infrastructure
people: engaging users as administrators and content contributors
content: striking a balance between business and social information.
However, to ensure that your intranet/extranet is successful, it must be planned carefully. A successful intranet, extranet or portal results from good planning and a strategic approach to implementing a solution that delivers real business benefits, says Clare Millar, head of marketing at Company Net.
Taking a people-centric view is enormously important: defining the target audiences and identifying efficiency improvements, cost and time-savings and ways to enhance productivity that help the user perform day-to-day tasks will all contribute to the success of the system and will ensure user adoption. Whilst the solution itself might hold a wealth of business information from a simple contacts database, to campaign planning tools, sales materials or financial information only the information useful to an individual’s role is displayed. This permission-based, people-centric, advanced personalisation that delivers content to the user based on their role is now widely available in most major vendors’ solutions including: MySite (Microsoft SharePoint Server), iViews (SAP), MyTeamSite (BEA) and MyNewsPage (Metadot).
Chris Sykes, creative director & founder of agency Volume outlined how it constructed a recent intranet portal for Sage. We’ve recently developed Sage’s new brand portal. This has basically been built to deliver sales and to also help Sage get its new branding to its internal audience and its business partners. The cost of this portal all-in was about £40,000. If we then look at the other end of the spectrum we recently developed the Dell Atlas system its staff training and assessment system in which it’s effectively invested about £750,000. But this cost wasn’t in one hit. The costs have been cumulative. The system is a managed intranet that we host but is also effectively nine different releases of the system; each building on the previous version. Dell are pragmatic enough to understand that rolling out each separate component to cover a specific function was more cost-effective over the long-term. What they have then done is add functionality to the system over time.
How your business uses its intranet/ extranet capability will be determined by your core focus. Clearly using an intranet/ extranet combination is a powerful tool to enable your business to operate more efficiently, especially in the area of partner management. Moving your marketing assets to an intranet and then giving your partners access to these via an extranet can make good commercial sense. Cost still remains an issue for smaller organisations, but even if you’re running a micro-business, a portal can help you punch well above your weight when it comes to marketing your goods or services.
According to Andrew Yates, MD at Aprimo, One of the key issues that organisations need to consider is how the digital assets are actually going to be used. It’s great having a static repository of images and collateral, but users often need more functionality. At Aprimo we’re finding that most organisations want to give users the ability to manipulate the assets. So, for example, regional dealers want to be able to localise DM pieces with their location details or maps. We’ve created a system for Honda that enables more than 200 UK car and power equipment dealers to generate and place press ads from approved templates without the usual time and cost constraint associated with artwork adaptation, resizing, fulfilment and delivery. Implementing an intranet/ extranet portal can offer your business a huge advantage in that servicing your customers and partners becomes much more streamlined.
Sykes at Volume says, We build a broader range of functionalities. For example, if you’re working for a client that basically sells through resellers, then normally the resellers are tiered. You’re a bronze, silver, gold or premier reseller. Again, if you’re logging-on and it identifies you as a silver reseller, the information you are presented with is just relevant to you. This may be sensitive because as a silver reseller you don’t get as good a discount as a gold reseller.
The importance of managing customer information is echoed by Kerry Marriot, UK marketing communications manager at Mediasurface. The intranet/extranet is really the product of an overall information management strategy. Information comes in many forms; structured such as images, movies, and documents, PDFs, etc. and unstructured, such as emails. The storage, management and control of this information is what sits behind truly successful intranets and extranets as they both form just two of the ways that a business chooses to make information accessible to different audiences.
She continues, At Mediasurface we always recommend that businesses think about how they want to use information, how to store it, update and share it. Once that strategy is in place, the delivery mechanisms, i.e. intranet and extranet, in addition to other websites, fall into place.
Designing and implementing an intranet/ extranet in your business can have many advantages if approached with care, but watch out for the pitfalls. One of the key pitfalls is not having a strategy in place, says Sykes at Volume. Normally intranets are built, launched and then they die very, very quickly. Businesses ultimately need to establish ownership and also ensure that the site is sustainable and scaleable. So, again, we’ve had clients to come to us and say, ‘We built this six months ago and now we need to do this’, and ultimately it means that we’ve had to throw away six months of their investment and start again. Whereas a little bit more forethought up-front would actually save that time.
Manning at Reading Room comments, Intranets and extranets are a very new way for organisations to communicate with customers and also a very new way for customers to communicate with their suppliers. It is sometimes very difficult to predict exactly what customers want, and even when you ask them they often say ‘functionality’, which (when delivered) is not really useful to them.
She continues, The trick here is to research, but then to deliver prototype functionality to a limited group of customers and get real-life feedback prior to rolling out a major investment. Appoint one or two project champions who have a keen interest and enthusiasm in online tools; don’t force responsibility for this on someone with little interest. Again, you should not allow the online processes to be defined entirely from existing offline processes: use this as an opportunity for change.
Using an intranet/extranet portal to support your marketing activities now makes commercial sense, but only if you approach the construction and development of your portal with care. If you clearly define how your intranet will operate, who will have access and who will maintain its systems, it will become a superb asset. Rolling out an extranet can help you manage your customers by giving them more access to your business. This closer relationship will result in long-term loyalty that your business can build upon.
