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Vacancy Description

Start Date: October / November 2012
Duration: 6 months

The Host Company

The host company has been successfully helping businesses who are marketing their products and services across Europe for some 11 years now. We believe in an integrated approach to marketing utilising the techniques that best fit the business requirement. This includes web and all related media options as well as more traditional media such as direct mail, e-mail and lead generation and other telemarketing activity, both internal and external.

We keep ourselves up to date and abreast of all the developments in the best use of technology to deliver successful marketing, but always underpinned by good data analytics and knowledge of your target audience.

We are always challenging and pushing the boundaries of current marketing, so that we operate at the leading edge of direct marketing, delivering effective strategies for our clients. The key focus though is always on return on investment.

We work with businesses from large multi-national businesses to SME's who are looking to improve the success of their current activity or are looking to launch into Europe for the first time.  We also work with companies who are based in continental Europe and are looking to expand their marketing activity into the UK. Our main focus is on the B2B market.

We see our work with clients as being a partnership and have a number of clients who have been working with us over a number of years.

Scope of Project

Providing marketing data in terms of mail, phone and e-mail lists is one of the services that we provide. We specialise in data for Europe, but also source data for all countries on an international scale. We have built up a network of quality partners and suppliers of marketing data across the globe.

There are literally 10's of thousands of different lists available targeting different sectors and there are many different selection criteria available for each list. Currently, we have this information available to us in different media formats, offline print, online, and partly in a form of a database.  Also data is either Business to Business or Business to Consumer, and can be postal, e-mail or telephone or a mix of all three media in different combinations.

Our business issue at the moment is that we rely heavily on knowledge in people's heads and on list data sheets. We need to be able to access the information and find the right lists that target the correct audience we are looking for to make the process quicker and more effective.

Requirements

Online database tool which can be used to create records of databases. These databases have a number of fields obtained from scanned PDF images (with OCR text embedded). The database fields will be stored in a database, along with a reference to the original stored image located in a file store.

Searching can then be performed using key words from any of the fields in the database, to produce a list of possible matching databases. Multiple databases can be selected and this used to generate multiple quotes for the various databases. The quotes will consist of standard text along with fields from the database for the relevant search matches.

System Components

1. User input
   Users of the system would view a scanned PDF file and from this extract information from a number of fields into an input screen.
2. Searching
   This would provide search parameters (along with advanced features for users who know specific fields which they want to narrow a search) which would generate a list of possible matches.
3. Output quotes
   From the list of matches it would be then possible to enter additional parameters to narrow the search criteria. Once complete, each of the required matches could be selected and a RTF/PDF generator tool would provide a set of quotes for the results from a number of predefined templates. The templates would consist of standard text along with insertion markers. These markers would then bring specific data through from the system database to populate the quotes.

Project Outcome

We are looking to have at the end of the project an efficient and effective database system that will provide us with the following:

1. Hold all the information on our suppliers, list data sheets, description, source, costs and all selection criteria available.
2. The ability to search on keywords that are held in the data sheets in order to be able to identify lists that would reach target audience being searched for.
3. Ability to pull information from datasheets into a quote document and to edit the quote document.

Skills Required

• Good level of English verbal and written communication.
• Knowledge and understanding about direct marketing would be helpful.
• Technical IT Knowledge in understanding how to build searchable databases, but also the ability to translate business processes into workable IT solutions.
• Ability to work as a team, but also be able to work on initiative and unsupervised at times.
• Knowledge of business processes.
• Fluent German and/or Russian.
• Good communication skills.
• Good telephone skills.
• Good knowledge of Microsoft office tools.
• Project Management skills.