Online Marketing Strategies for Lockheed-Martin

Online Marketing Strategies for Lockheed-Martin

Significant opportunity exists for Lockheed-Martin to more effectively attract, sell and serve both existing customers and prospects using the Internet. The intent of this memo is to discuss a series of online marketing strategies the company can undertake to both create additional brand value and increase sales over the long-term. The memo concludes with opportunities for improvement to the Lockheed Martin Online Marketing Strategies.

Overview of Online Marketing Strategy Today

Today the online initiatives of Lockheed Martin generate awareness of the brand and also create high levels of credibility with prospects globally with the specific naming of globally recognized customer names. The website strategy is used to connote state-of-the-art engineering in conjunction with world-class credibility, and sets the Lockheed Martin brand apart as one that is first and foremost committed to assisting customers get to their most challenging goals. The vision statement of the company is prominently displayed throughout the site and on the downloadable collateral materials as well, stating that the Lockheed Martin vision Is "Powered by Innovation, Guided by Integrity, We Help Our Customers Achieve Their Most Challenging Goals."

In terms of creating additional brand value, the website as it stands today does a very good job of positioning Lockheed Martin as a leader in the four dominant business areas it competes in including aeronautics, electronic systems, information systems and global services, and space systems. The messaging of Lockheed Martin being powered by innovation and guided by integrity is clearly communicated in all online strategies as well. The company's core markets of defense and intelligence, homeland security, and system information and technology are also well represented on the website and through online marketing strategies including the use of downloadable corporate overview materials. In summary, the current online marketing strategy excels at creating awareness of the Lockheed Martin brand, and needs to be measured using the metrics shown in Table 1, Comparing Metrics by Purchase Funnel Steps. The entire purchase cycle from awareness to purchase and retention is shown in the following table.

Table 1: Comparing Metrics by Purchase Funnel Steps

Purchase Funnel Step

Online Media Metrics

Awareness

Overall Company Aided and Unaided Awareness

Model-specific Aided and Unaided Awareness

Ad effectiveness aided and unaided awareness

Media Strategy Effectiveness Aided and Unaided Awareness

Consideration

Intention by Product

Criteria for product selection

Penetration of Consideration Share

Penetration of Audience Share

Share of Audience

Preference

In short set of the purchase set of the consumer?

Trial

Penetration by Trail Segment

Brand Equity Metrics

Cannibalization of Competitive Brand

Purchase

Trial purchase

Early adopter/early rejecter

Brand Penetration

Penetration Share of Audience

Penetration Share of Market

Retention

Willingness to Recommend

Market Share

Unit Share

Relative Market Share

Heavy Usage Index

Opportunities for Improvement in Lockheed Martins' Online Marketing Strategy

Lockheed Martin sells to a very conservative set of customers globally, many of them elected representatives of foreign nations, and in the case of sales to military departments, high ranking military officers. The use of online marketing strategies needs to take this aspect of Lockheed Martins' customer base into account, and stay consistent yet break into new areas of online marketing strategies. There is an emerging set of new technologies for online marketing collectively called Web 2.0 marketing techniques and are profiled in Appendix a of this memo. These technologies allow for a much more interactive communication with customers, and while the Lockheed Martin customer base is quite conservative, the use of web services that combine multiple areas of interest to them (called Mashups in Web 2.0 vernacular) that bring insights into the company's product lines would be of significant value to both customers and prospects. In addition, the use of Real Simple Syndication (RSS) for publishing news from the company would also be very valuable for supporting online marketing strategies. The online marketing strategy also needs to include extensive use Google AdWords which can significantly increase the company's performance in that search engines' performance. Columbus (2006) specifically defines the strategies necessary for ensuring Google AdWords is a highly effective online strategy. The integration of all these elements to create a cohesive online marketing strategy for Lockheed Martin to attract prospects and keep existing customers continually interested in what the company is pursuing as product, service and support strategies.

Reference:

Columbus (2006) - Trekking AdWords' Last Mile. CRMBuyer.com. Accessed from the Internet on October 11, 2007:

http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/49643.html

Appendix:

Appnedix a. WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS

Application Blogs

Description • Online diary or journal entry on the Internet, which primarily supports text, photo (photoblog), video (vlog), and audio (podcast) formats • Google, AOL, and Yahoo offer free blogging platforms

Mashup

Web service that gathers related content from more than one source • IBM's mashup applications enable project managers to match team resources with a map to identify the geographical locations of the resources

Peer-to-Peer Networking technique for effectively sharing music, audio, and text files • Napster and Gnutella are popular peer-to-peer networks

Real Simple Syndication (RSS)

Feed-based technology that, with the aid of an RSS reader, enables users to subscribe to newly released content such as text, Web pages, sound files, photos, and video • RSS feed may contain the full content, for example a podcast, or simply a link to the content