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Blog posts tagged communications
Ten signs that you could do with strategic marketing advice
February 01, 2012
There are hundreds of potential marketing advisors for a small business owner. From design agencies, PR specialists, telemarketers, SEO experts, social media bods, media planners, and on, and on. It’s difficult to know who to talk, when and why.
Here are ten signs that you could do with some proper strategic marketing input:
- You’re not 100% sure where new business actually comes from – how do they find your site? What prompts them to pick up the phone, etc?
- You’ve done some work with an agency, but you weren’t too chuffed with the output – what was the brief?
- You get lots of leads, but they don’t seem to convert – what is the sales journey, and how well supported is it with powerful marketing content?
- You get enquiries for work that you don’t really like doing – is your business clear about what it does best?
- You’re always screwed down on price – does your brand and messaging set your business apart?
- When asked what your business does, your people all say something different – is your team clear on what you’re about?
- You rarely get repeat business or referrals – is your customer marketing and networking strategy creating advocates for your business?
- If one big customer left you’d be in trouble – is your business over reliant on one customer, or one market?
- You’ve tried telemarketing, PR, advertising or another tactic and it hasn’t delivered – do you have an integrated plan with momentum that all fits together and ties into your sales process?
- You’ve read the books and been to some courses – do you know that you need to give marketing some attention, but never quite get around to it when you’re back at the office?
These are all real scenarios that we’ve heard from small business owners in the last 18 months. Small businesses often make do with a ‘marketing-come-reception’ set-up, working with the marketing suppliers run by friends of friends, or the people down the road. And, there’s nothing wrong with that…if you know exactly what you’re doing on the marketing front. If you have an effective strategy clearly mapped-out, and a good grasp of the interplay of the key marketing tactics, you can indeed put together a top notch freelance team to deliver against your sales and marketing objectives. If, however, you’re feeling your way through the discipline, working it out as you go, then you’ll probably find that each supplier you speak to seems to sound pretty sensible.
You may struggle to find your way through all the ‘good ideas’ that they come up with to configure a watertight marketing operation that supports every step of your sales funnel.
In larger organisations it’s the job of the marketing director to pull all this together. Coming in on salaries upwards of £65k, most small business owners we meet simply can’t afford to have a hard-hitting marketing director on their team. So, what do you do? If you find yourself nodding in recognition at any of the statements above, it would be sensible to find yourself a strategic marketing partner who can be your marketing brain – working out what you need to say, to whom, when and through what channel.
- Article originally appeared on Clear-Thought.co.uk
What does your business stand for?
October 05, 2010
Part of the marketing communications food chain that we don’t hear so much about is the discipline of message definition. But for me, it’s the essential preparation that needs to happen before you really get stuck into communicating with the outside world. I do a lot of work for corporates in helping them define, distil and articulate key messages to their clients and target audiences, and although the process demands a certain amount of rigour, it’s not just for the big boys.
Every business, no matter what the size, needs to be absolutely clear about their messages from the outset. At any moment in time, you need to be able to clearly articulate what your business stands for, what you believe in, what marks you out as different and what kind of value you provide to your customers. This is more than an elevator pitch – this is describing the very soul of your company.
So think about it now. How would you answer the following questions?
- Who are you? Who or what is your brand?
- What is the ‘it’ that you provide, in the simplest of terms (imagine explaining it to a child, or a non-native English speaker)?
- What value do your customers derive from ‘it’ and the service you provide?
- How do you make clients’ lives easier / better / more efficient or profitable?
- What do you believe in? What are your guiding principles of doing business?
- What is your viewpoint on the industry you’re in? Where is it going? How will you move with it over time?
Set aside time and space to think about these questions and really refine your answers. Write it down. Talk about it with colleagues, clients, and – best of all – those who are completely unrelated to your business. Do they understand what you have to say?
I advise clients to undertake this exercise every six months at least. Because as the world changes around us, it’s important to revisit who you are, how you do what you do and what is critical to you and those you serve.
Once you’ve established your messages, you’ll not only look at your business differently, but you’ll find that your communications will flow so much more fluently, through all the channels you choose to employ.
Are you practising what you preach?
September 02, 2010
We all have a mission, in life and in business. You’re in business to help people do certain things, right? Whether it’s providing people with a great meal, building them a cutting-edge website, training them to be brilliant at something or providing certain types of information, you’re in business because you are good at something.
But are you practising what you preach? Are you immersed in your company’s service and values, and do you treat yourself as a client?
What I mean is this: Wisdom London is in the business of helping our clients to communicate their messages brilliantly, creatively and clearly, to specific audiences. But we can’t hope to be seen as authentically good at that (especially as a relatively new business... we’re less than a year old, after all) unless we practice what we preach. Which is why we are just as obsessed with our own communications as we are with those of our clients.
I can’t advise on social media without using it. I can’t argue the value of thought leadership without producing it. I can’t justifiably critique a client’s web copy, without regularly doing the same to our own. I’m not saying we always get it right, but we are never knowingly hypocritical. We’re trying hard every day to practice what we preach.
So think about what you do for your clients. Do you do the same for yourself and your own company? Is your website as amazing as the ones you aim to create for your clients? Is your own business tangibly benefiting from the software you develop, or the services you sell? Do you regularly eat the food you serve, wear the clothes you sell, or use the products you source?
Credibility and authenticity are all – doing your own business a service by benefiting it the same way you aim to benefit your clients not only builds these positive values, but demonstrates a true belief in your own products and services. And that is worth more than you might imagine.
Make it a priority.
Kate Spiers is founder of Wisdom London.
Seven top tips to integrate email with social media
July 22, 2010
Social media is the latest buzzword in the marketing industry. But social media does not work well in isolation. By integrating your social media activity with your email marketing, you can improve the effectiveness and results from both disciplines, bringing outstanding bottom-line results.
Unfortunately many marketers just aren’t taking this on board. In fact, our recent Hitting the Mark study found that only 17 per cent of email marketers from the UK’s top retailers included social media sharing links in their emails.
Here are my seven top tips to better integrate email and social media marketing:
1. Include ‘share on social network’ links in your email messages – chances are your email recipients will have many like-minded friends on social networks that could also be potential customers. Encourage them to share your email content with their friends by including ‘sharing’ links in your email newsletters.
2. Encourage social media ‘followers’ and ‘fans’ to sign-up to your email newsletters – the reverse is also true: you probably have lots of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook that would be interested in receiving your email newsletters. Have you asked them? If not, why not!
3. Use blog posts as content for email newsletters – by using your blog posts in your email newsletters, you not only have a great source of wonderful content, you also raise the profile of your blog and encourage your recipients to check it out!
4. Add social network ‘subscribe’ buttons to your email messages – if recipients like the content in your newsletter, then they are likely to be potentially interested in following you on social networks too, so make it easy for them.
5. Ask for social media details during sign-up – you ask for a range of contact information when recipients sign-up to receive information from you. So why not ask for their social network details as well? And if they give them to you, make sure you follow them and add them to your CRM database.
6. Use metrics from email campaigns to identify most popular social networks – your email platform should be able to give you a range of metrics, allowing you to see which of your recipients added your content to which social networks. This will give you very valuable information relating to the social networks that are the most popular, helping you to focus future activity.
7. Ask for feedback – stuck for content for your next newsletter or just keen to get some reaction to your latest email? Why not ask your community on social media? Get them more involved and make them feel part of the process.
Have you tried any of these? Are there other tactics you find work well? Let us know in the comments.
This article originally appeared at the dotDigital Blog
Automation, repetition and laziness make for a healthy blog
July 01, 2010
Here are three steps to making sure your content is seen by an interested audience.
Automation is good
It performs a small but significant task for your carefully crafted text. Sign up to the dlvr.it service and add the RSS feed of your blog to the system. dlvr.it will detect when you have published a new blog post and then seed it into your status updates across a range of social networks. This leaves you more time to get on with all the other jobs you need to do and draws in your interested audience wherever they choose to have a presence.
Repetition is good
Not only is it perfectly acceptable to repeat your status updates, it is encouraged. Your audience will not be on the web all the time. You may have an international audience where time zones come into play. If you publish a blog in the morning it is good practice to update your Twitter status and any others later in the day with a link to your blog post.
Laziness is good
Do not panic if you get ‘Blogger’s Block’. If you do not have any inspiration for writing content do not force yourself to write. Your audience will thank you for the quality control. Regular updates keep a blog alive but writing content for the sake of it will do you no favours.
Do you “own” your niche in the market?
June 07, 2010
There’s an important, and often overlooked, correlation between the strength of your brand strategy and the effectiveness of your marketing activity. In other words, people who have defined their niche in the market and communicate that consistently find it much more cost effective to market their businesses than those that don’t.
Have you defined your niche yet? It’s pretty simple. You look at what you’re good at, what you want to be known for and what your clients love about you. Then you look at what your competitors are doing, and what they’re known for or good at. Ideally, there will be a nice slot for you somewhere that you can occupy: your niche.
Let me give you an example. A client of ours makes widgets. Those widgets are beautifully designed and expertly made in the UK. She’s utterly detail focused and so that’s the niche she’s chosen to occupy: high quality and great design. Over the past couple of years she’s found that a lot of competitors have sprung up around her, many of which are outright copying her designs. A fair few have copied her marketing design, too – her website, brochures, etc. And because she’s been on maternity leave, she’s understandably let the communication slide. She’s slipped into a nasty situation where they’re all jostling in the same marketplace for the same clients. It’s easy to get cross and upset about this, but ultimately she’s got to “own” her space and that should fend them off. They’re not all offering the same product, hers are higher quality and she leads the field in design, so by making sure she communicates where her niche is, she can quickly and cost effectively get things back on track.
So how do you go about owning your niche in the market?
Once you’re happy that you are really occupying a “niche” (because there’s no point in directly competing with your competitors) then you need to keep that niche at the centre of everything you do. By that I mean sitting down, and actually mapping out what you’re going to do to communicate your brand position. That could be that you create “engaging brand identities and powerful marketing campaigns that help people grow their businesses”; it might be that you’re the “UK’s leading colour consultancy” or that you’re a “gardener with knowledge”.
Once you’ve defined this, map out what marketing activity you’re going to undertake to communicate this. This is such a powerful thing to do because not only will you save money (ie, you won’t be tempted by that last minute “deal” in the local newspaper to take a full page advert), you’ll also find that your marketing is a whole lot more effective because your target market will be attracted to what you do; and they’ll “get” it much faster because throughout the year you’ve been talking to them consistently. So how do you do this?
Well you find activities that will support this, and you also make sure that at every opportunity you’re reinforcing and re-communicating your brand strategy. In other words, you stay focused. Many small businesses make life difficult for themselves because they fail to carve themselves out a niche, and once they’ve got that, they rarely communicate that niche via their marketing activity.
I’m going to visit a potential client this afternoon who owns a children’s shop. This is an enormously competitive marketplace to be in: you’re competing with the multi-million pound marketing budgets of the likes of JoJo Maman Bebe, Gap and Monsoon. You can compete on a smaller scale, but you’ve got to be focused.
Once we’ve worked out what her niche is, we need to communicate that in everything she does. She already has a plan to run a competition (fantastic idea!) but she’s got to be clear on what the style of the shop is and who her target market are. She needs to make sure that when the winners’ photo shoot happens it’s done in a location that supports her brand strategy and that will appeal to her ideal client. And all the design of the entry forms and adverts needs to look instantly engaging and attractive to her audience. Once she has these photos, she needs to use them in a way that backs up her niche and makes the most of them – and that’s just one piece of marketing that she needs to think about!
“Owning” your niche is hard work. It takes focus, determination and, frankly, some investment of your time, if not your money and someone else’s time, up front. But it WILL pay off. You’ll find that you spend less time and money in the long term on marketing that doesn’t work; and you’ll also find that your marketing is much, much more effective for it.
Fiona Humberstone of Flourish
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