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Choose brand consistency for 2010
February 01, 2010
The best way to increase profitability through your investment in design and marketing is for you to be consistent. There’s nothing worse for your bottom line than your image chopping and changing. The trouble is the damage from inconsistency is so subtle that many business owners are blissfully unaware of the negative effects on their target audiences. Brand irregularity includes conscious and subconscious confusion, distrust and irritation and can result in customers going elsewhere.
Here are our top five tips for achieving brand consistency:
- Firstly, invest in a quality well designed logo (and if your budget can accommodate it, some simple brand guidelines). This should then form the basis for every piece of marketing material that follows.
- Following on from here ensure your marketing material looks like it belongs to the same family! If there is no clear link between your business card, website and brochure for example, then your customers’ journey is disjointed and your message becomes unclear.
- The biggest and most obvious blunder is to randomly change colours from one piece of marketing communication to the next. Don’t do this! Decide on your brand colours which should be specifically chosen to communicate key messages and then stick to them.
- Select every aspect of your brand carefully. Understand that these brand characteristics all mean something and effect the people that experience your brand. These characteristics should include (but are not limited to) things like fonts, colours, logos, design elements and language style.
- The best way to achieve the above is to establish a long term working relationship with the right designer who can help build that unswerving, dependable and loved brand that will actually have a positive affect on your businesses profitability.
This blog post by Sara Brown originally appeared at sarabrown.co.uk
Customers, who wants them?
October 23, 2009
The customer may always be right, but are they the right customers?
One of the customer’s of my company (Actinic) was incredibly picky about how their business wanted to use our software. We are a mass market, low price supplier and we’ve sold tens of thousands of products and services, so we normally can’t make changes for individual companies who typically pay a few hundred pounds each. However, this particular customer was very persistent. So one of our product managers contacted them, spent ages discussing their requirements and subsequently we agreed to make some changes. Responding in this way was exceptional and it cost us much more than we could ever make in sales from the particular guy.
But this customer isn’t at all grateful. In fact, recently they have become even more critical, and have continued to cost us more in support than almost anyone else. Would it have been better if we had said “no” in the first place?
Without sounding too critical, the customer in question doesn’t appear to be particularly successful, and I’m sure it’s not a coincidence. If someone can’t understand the business needs of their suppliers, they probably don’t know how their own customers tick either.
Some clients are very demanding, and whatever you do they are never satisfied. I’m not talking about customers upset with poor service, who need helping. Nor am I talking about customers that need a lot of handholding. Nor about customers who buy the wrong product, who should have their money returned. I’m talking about customers who fundamentally don’t understand the trade-off involved in human and business interactions.
Although the circumstances I’ve described are rare, they aren’t unique. My guess is that this applies to maybe one in two hundred customers. The cost in time and demoralising impact on staff makes it more difficult to give good service to everyone else. As a result, I am coming to the conclusion that for this small minority, we would do better to suggest that they do business with our competitors.
It’s critical not to provide our customer service team with any excuse for bad service, so there are some dangers in adopting such measures. However, applied incredibly carefully to a very small minority, surely it’s time to review the relationship with these sorts of customers?
The blog is mightier than the sword
September 18, 2009
In the old days a quibble over a product or service not being up to scratch would be resolved through an exchange of letters with a customer service department. A swift resolution ensuing, the customer would be happy and the business might have gone beyond just saving face and reinforced its brand values, too. Today, this model is not quite so strong.
According to Webuser.co.uk, a holidaymaker has secured £600 in compensation for a disastrous holiday as a result of the prominent Google search ranking he achieved for the angry blog he fired off when a complaint letter to the holiday firm yielded no result.
The holidaymaker had originally penned a letter of complaint (ten pages of letter, in fact) detailing a depressing series of problems he encountered during a less than satisfactory Tunisian holiday. After six weeks, having only received an acknowledgment for his rant, the increasingly angry traveller went public and recorded his troubles on his personal blog.
In no time, he was getting lots of traffic – much of it from people who had simply typed search terms relating to holidays in Tunisia. In fact, the critical blog entry’s Google ranking was creeping ever closer to the summit on all the key search terms the travel company would rather see taking you to the holiday package they were trying to flog.
Once the holiday company became aware of the growing popularity of the blog post, blogs about the blog post and probably even blogs blogging about the impact of blog posts about the original blog post - such is the way the Internet feeds off itself - it became apparent that an “elevated” level of response was required. Compensation was paid to the blogger and an apology posted on his blog, to boot.
However, it may be too late for damage limitation - the rant, of course, has been widely seen and still exists in the public domain. The digital footprint of a blog post that would never have seen the light of day had the travel company responded sooner is now leaving the most indelible - and embarrassing - of stains on its reputation.
Marketing your knowledge
August 24, 2009
Working for Actinic, we have a pretty diverse set of customers selling some truly weird and wonderful products. However, regardless of the product or service being sold I always come up against the question of online marketing and best practice.
Looking back at the last few conversations I have had on the subject, most merchants I speak to use online marketing for one thing: sales. While this may be fairly obvious and there is certainly nothing wrong with it, I believe a lot of people are missing a great opportunity -- why not try communicating something other than cold hard sell? Let me explain a little further.
Most retailers sell things they have some type of connection with. I have a relative, Andy who has a very successful sportswear business; he’s a former tennis coach. In his bricks and mortar store people often come in just to chat about the latest advances in running shoes or tips to beat the boss at next week’s golf tournament. While this may sound like a waste of time, Andy values building a relationship with customers as the most essential thing to his business. Customers come in for his advice and may end up walking away with a new pair of Nikes, and how to get the most out of them.
But often this product knowledge fails to come across online.
With your next marketing campaign why not use your product and industry knowledge to help inform and educate your customers? If you want to keep it product-focused detail the interesting features and benefits instead of focusing just on that sale. Or why not try emails with some useful tips or a follow up to check to see how recent customers are getting on with their purchase?
No matter how diverse your products are I bet you’re the expert on them, helping to educate and inform is the best type of marketing there is.
The Art of Sales
August 05, 2009
The art of selling can be looked at in two ways. Either it’s persuading someone to buy something that they neither need nor want – “selling coal to Newcastle” – or it’s about discovering customer needs and finding the most appropriate way to meet them. Newcastle no longer mines any coal and frankly, the ram-it-down-your-throat sales approach is about as up-to-date as the expression. That said Newcastle in Australia, named after the UK one, is actually the biggest coal exporter in the world.
In contrast to the US, the UK doesn’t see sales as a profession, and popular culture places all sales people into the cowboy pen. This can be seen from the euphemisms used for sales roles here in the UK. Sales people are called account managers, business development executives, consultants, customer service representatives - anything except sales.
In fact, if a prospect ever tells someone they are good at sales, it probably means they’re not. People need to feel that they have a choice in order to buy. If they feel pressured, they react badly.
Selling the right thing means fewer returns. It also means happy customers who buy again, and tell their friends. Alternatively, selling the wrong thing gums up your phone lines with complaints, increases your cost of doing business, and leads to you being denounced on social networks right across the internet.
I don’t know how many people have consciences, and how much they apply them to business. Whatever the answer, it’s good to know that honest sales lead to better profits, even while letting you sleep at night.
Outdoor Advertising: A Dying Medium? Definitely not.
July 31, 2009
Recent articles in the media and marketing trade press, are hotly debating the question of whether outdoor advertising has had its day.
For the record, we say the answer's 'no'; but I wanted to explain why we know this is the case. A quiet revolution is going on in out-of-home advertising. Small businesses are really starting to tune in to the medium's benefits, and we are seeing ever-increasing numbers – around 250 per week, in fact - signing up to Signposter.com to run out-of-home campaigns in their local area.
I believe that if small businesses are prepared to invest hard-won capital into an outdoor campaign on an ongoing basis like this, it’s because of hard evidence - such as sales increases or increased footfall to their business - of the medium's effectiveness. When every pound counts, they won't do any promotion without the confidence it will work.
This says to me that 'on the streets', where it counts, outdoor is working; it’s picking up more converts to its impact and effectiveness. And if it works like this for small businesses and local campaigns, I'm confident it'll continue to deliver for the big players as well.
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