Always provide a focus for your adverts

At my first networking meeting for a month (since I had got Bell’s Palsy) I met an interesting lady who taught golf, at home as well as at the golf course.

I asked her how she marketed her business. (It’s wise to do that to see if they know what they are talking about – there’s nothing worse than trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.) She mentioned that she did do advertising in magazines in the past, but had given it up because it was a waste of money.

Probing a little further I found out that the magazines that fared the worst were the national golfing magazines, whereas the adverts that did achieve a result were from the monthlies that are pushed through letterboxes. I asked her what did the ads say, and found that the contents was generally publicising the business and what it offered to customers.

I asked her if her ads had a purpose, an aim or an end goal. I explained that general adverts weren’t going to do as well as ones with a focus, something that led towards an event, a special course or whatever, and that there should also be an incentive, like 10% off when you present this advert or coupon, and a time to achieve this by, for example the actual day of the event or advance bookings to get £5 off the price.

Three simple things to include in your advertising: a purpose, an incentive and a time to achieve it by. General ads don’t grab the customers’ attention, don’t play with their wants or needs, don’t pander to their greed, and don’t command an action to ‘get something for nothing’ by a certain date. Think about these phenomena the next time you write your ads or leaflets…

Magazine awareness to provide marketing value

Guest post by Tamra Booth, Editor of Vive Magazine

Combining design with marketing? Well, this is absolutely essential if you want your marketing to be effective and to deliver value for money.

Magazines and newspapers are notoriously terrible at making sure their clients’ adverts are effective. How many times do you hear people say, ‘I never advertise, it doesn’t work’. Well, I have a fair few times, but that is because they have had an advert designed that might look pretty but it does not grab the reader’s attention, it does not relate to the reader, there is no call to action, so the reader’s eye moves on to the next advert. If we are sent an ineffective advert by a client then we send it back with suggestions. Our designer has a marketing background. Also we offer packages to clients so they reach their customers in different ways, so a mix of designs to drive home a clear and eye-catching marketing message.

Advertising can and does work wonders but it is all down to this Design/Marketing theory that Alice wisely promotes. Whether online or in-print marketing, a clear marketing objective is the way to go. Otherwise you might as well throw your money down the drain.

Tamra Booth | Editor | Vive Magazine
Tel/Fax: 01753 857855 | Mob: 07798 501549 |
25 Hemwood Road, Windsor SL4 4YX | tamra@vivemagazine.co.uk

Alice’s comments: Tamra failed to mention the importance of headlines highlighting the customer’s pain, the subheading announcing your solution to that pain, bullet points listing the benefits behind the purpose of the advert, provide an incentive-laden, time dependent call to action and make sure your contact details are large, clear and accompanied by a demand to ‘do’ something!

How to use your customers to promote your business

Customers are extremely important to your business, where would it be without them? This may sound obvious, but there are some businesses that trundle along taking no notice of this vital element.

When analysing a business promotion, take notice of to whom they are talking to. Who is the main objective in their marketing message? Who is placed at the top of their advertising? Who are they describing when they talk about their services or products? Who is first, the company or the customer?

Humans are naturally self-centred; it’s in our nature to look after ‘number one’. But for business purposes this needs to be turned on its head: you need to think about who you are selling to, rather than banging on about how great you are. Customers don’t give a tinker’s toot about your business, they only care about what’s in it for them. How are they going to benefit from your product or services? Will their lives be improved, and by how much? Will they get value for money?

This concept should be prevalent in all your visual marketing: website, promotional literature, advertising, shop front, merchandise, networking: pitch, presentation and social on-line, sales patter with your customers – in fact any visual outlet of your company. The customer always comes first, as it is they you are promoting to, and it is they who will ultimately buy.

Another factor to take notice of is time. Don’t go mad trying to explain everything, especially if it’s really dull stuff about your company. The 21st century is a fast moving world; customers won’t (or even can’t) spend time reading cluttered and over-long descriptions; they usually make split-second decisions and can be very cruel if it doesn’t match their requirements.

For example, visitors to your website usually spend up to eight seconds to make up their mind whether it the right one, what they can do (go further in, click on something, sign up for a newsletter or download a free report) or just decide to disappear. Your leaflets have even less time to make an impression as to whether they are picked up or discarded: is this relevant to me, does it have the information I want, do I understand all of it, what’s in it for me, who do I contact to find out more?

OK, customers are self-centred, but they are also greedy. You may have got an idea of this from the website reference above. If there is something they can get for nothing, they will have it. Take advantage, and offer an exchange of their details in return for something they want, is of value, is relevant and will benefit them. You now have their details in a secure database for future communication; they are now at your mercy to be promoted at! And customers like being kept in touch, especially if they will have first hand knowledge of any new promotions and can benefit from early-bird discounts!

Use your customers’ opinions, comments and feedback. Write a questionnaire to find out more about their wants and needs. Encourage them to respond to your blog posts, tweets, social networking walls, on-line articles, events and workshops, teleseminars or whatever, and use this incredible source of information to find out how you can make your business even better for them. If customers feel they are appreciated, empathised with, understood and you are willing to adapt for their gain, then they will come back for more, tell their friends, spread the news and even provide testimonials and references (I have a great referral postcard designed specifically for this).

How blogging and article writing help market businesses

One way to get attention is to make a big noise. Any child will tell (or show) you that. And making big noises in business are one of the ways of getting your customers to look your way, and finding a method of getting more traffic to your website will certainly be welcome.

But making a big noise without any content is a waste of time. You have to set yourself up as an expert in your particular field. Analyse all the elements of your business that you know: what makes you successful, what special features do you possess, what little bits of information can you share with your customers that demonstrates your expertise?

Forming relationships in business (ie marketing) is all about giving stuff away, as long as it leads towards the ultimate persuasion of getting customers to buy from you. There are easily things you could tell your customers that would be of benefit to them, but would cost you practically nothing. Think of the baker’s dozen idea, when providing that bit extra results in good will and an increased awareness of the provider.

Of course one way of providing information is through writing a business blog.  This versatile piece of software is virtually free to set up, totally self-editable (you don’t need a web-designer), loved by the search engines (they are visited hourly by the spiders), and can be adapted to reflect your corporate image (including creating more pages that contain further information).  Anybody with permission can add content, and all readers are encouraged to provide feedback, which also helps with search engine optimisation.

Another concept of promotion is through links to your website. Blogs are a superb medium for linking back within every post. In fact, why not comment on other people’s blog posts to increase the linkage back to your own blog or website? This will provide more exposure to a wider audience as well as helping the internet spiders.

Ideally a blog post should be short and concise. Blogs are for quick-fire expertise statements, providing the readership with a concept to grasp, information to process or to provide details of an event with a call to action. Some are over-lengthy, but really a blog isn’t the correct medium for essays. In fact once you get more accomplished at writing about your expertise then you should submit your examples as on-line articles, and there are a number of websites that can host your pieces to aid towards further exposure.

And then there’s the added advantage of linking your blog and on-line articles to the social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendsFeed and the like. All this can be automated through RSS feeds, and again this increases your audience, which in turn is passed on virally through the complexities of their RSS feeds, plus referral and recommendation. The more people who read about how good you are and what you company does, the more likely they are to visit your website and be persuaded to make a sale.

If anybody is interested in setting up a blog but want to know how, including personalising it, then I am creating a series of packages “How to Beautify your Blog”, in which customers can pick and choose certain elements to create the perfect blog for their marketing purposes.  Click on the link for more details, or watch this space for further announcements!

How to use autoresponders within marketing campaigns

When putting together an on-line marketing campaign it is vital to get the process automated. You cannot be sitting there 24/7 waiting for any responses, and then be able to process them immediately. Wouldn’t you rather it be done for you while you are elsewhere doing business, making money, asleep or even relaxing on holiday?

You can automate the gathering of contact details from interested customers into a safe and secure database. You can use that database to send out automated emails that are in response to their enquiries. You can automate the process of sending out on-line goods such as special reports and e-books, and if the customer needs to make a purchase, you can use shopping carts to automate receiving the money and organising the delivery process of these items, whether they are electronic/printed books or other goods.

Then, because you have created a database of your customers’ details, you are able to communicate with them about future promotions and products, made all the more successful because they have already bought from you and are more likely to be interested.  It’s much easier to deal with past customers than to coax the unknown into buying.

There are a variety of autoresponders available, depending on their function. If all you want to do is to communicate with your prospective customers on a regular basis, then an electronic newsletter system is appropriate like ConstantContact.com and iContact.com. These provide databases with a series of templates that can be adapted to suit your corporate image, and their self-editing system is very easy to use.

Alternatively you could use an autoresponder like Aweber.com which also provides multiple databases and allows automated email responses, newsletter templates and the delivery of non-paid-for e-goods. It can be used in conjunction with payment systems like Paypal for simple automated delivery of paid goods, but it’s not as functional as a shopping cart.

Shopping carts like 1shoppingcart.com and e-junkie.com tend to be quite complicated to set up, but once achieved make it much easier for the customers to complete the purchasing process, for you to collect what you need from them, such as their contact and payment details, and even organising the necessary information sent to other parties who are part of the processing system, such as distribution houses and manufacturers. They also include an e-newsletter system for regular communications, as well as other automated money-making facilities such as affiliates.

There are a huge number of factors that need to come into play to make any automated system functional, practical and successful. All the marketing ploys need to be applied: attraction, interest, desire, action; focus, minimalism, uncomplicated, persuasion; customer first, market research, validity, affordable; visible, compelling, obvious, proactive. And above all, planning; as Graham Jones the Internet Psychologist said, a lot of on-line marketing systems fail because they just haven’t been thought through properly.

But what is this advert really saying?

I’ve just finished an advert.

The process was that it needed to be made ready for print: the image at 300 dpi, changed from RGB to CMYK, collect the logo from the original and superimpose it onto the new one (using Photoshop to separate it from its original background), work out what font was used for the text and transform it to the right size for the magazine’s dimensions including bleed.

The effect is stunning, because the image used is stunning. But that is all it has going for it. Sure, it will fit in extremely well into the kind of magazine it is going into, as it will look like just the rest of the pages, beautiful. But the problem is, is it really an advert?

Why am I questioning this? Because it misses some vital points. OK, it has a logo, but that isn’t the be-and-end-all of an advert, not unless it is Coca-Cola which needs no explanation. Do you understand exactly what it is promoting? If you do, what makes it different from anything else? Also, the text (if you could read it because it is so small) is too cryptic to understand its message properly; there are no instructions for the reader to take action; and even if they did want to make contact, there’s only a webaddress which is miniscule and totally unnoticeable (can you find it?).

I suppose the owner wanted their promotion to be subtle, like their product, but unless you have managed to secure world-wide fame and a huge following, have made millions of pounds and have several well-placed outlets throughout the world, have all the fashion magazines falling over themselves to do a story on your product and the biggest celebrities showing off their latest version on the red carpet, then this kind of advertising is not going to work – at all!

It’s not always a good idea to do it yourself

I remember when we decided to redecorate our son’s room with a laminate floor. I thought I could try and lay the floor myself to save my husband the bother. How easy could it be? The slats easily locked together and I could get the majority done before collecting the kids from school.

How wrong I was. For four hours I struggled even to begin the first layer. My comments were not repeatable and I achieved absolutely nothing. On his return my husband took one look at my efforts, lined up the pieces against the wall, and in four minutes had completed a couple of layers. What? This was not fair!

I related this episode to a floor specialist I met with the other day as an anecdote. I explained it’s not worth struggling to do something you don’t know anything about, and I know nothing about laying floors, that was his speciality. ‘How does this relate to me?’ the floor specialist asked.

I looked at the advert he had given me to scrutinise. He had been complaining that, although it had cost a lot of money to produce and place, it had brought in no returns. It consisted of sumptuous pictures of beautiful floors above his logo and contact details, even if they were a bit small. It was certainly well designed and was appropriate for the kind of magazine it had been placed into.

‘But what have you asked your customers to do?’ I replied.

‘Err… I don’t know.’

‘Exactly!’ I said. ‘It’s all very well giving them something attractive to look at, they will treat it the same as all the other pages in the magazine, think it’s very nice and then turn over. You need to tell them to take action! Even if it’s just to call you!’

This is a common fault in adverts and leaflet campaigns. Never assume your readers will understand what you want them to do. Just because there’s a telephone number or webaddress it doesn’t mean they will actually take the initiative.

Play on your customers’ natural self centeredness and greed. Offer them something of value, such as a discount, free sample or whatever, if they make contact. Give them a specific time to accomplish this by, or they will forget, get distracted or find a better offer elsewhere. Even by just commanding they phone you: ‘Contact us NOW to find out more!’ will have a better result that saying nothing.

So if you want to get good results in anything, it’s best to ask somebody who knows what they are doing, and that includes laying laminate floors.

How to convert warm prospects into hot customers

One of the most important parts of a campaign is the call to action. This is, in fact, one element that some leaflet campaigns actually forget to include! Not only does a single leaflet campaign provide just one shot at attempting to persuade customers to buy, but the command to pick up the phone, go to a particular website or send an email is somehow either omitted or presented in such a weak method it is bound to fail.

I used the word ‘command’, because that is what should be done. It’s no good saying “If you would like to know more, please call xxx xxxx”, as this ‘pretty please’ attitude will not induce the customer to pick up the phone. “Call NOW to find out more!” has far more impact, especially if it is combined with an incentive. This statement should also be followed by large, bold contact details on a separate line, not hidden within the closing text.

Unless your offer is so incredibly compelling, it is unlikely that the phone will be ringing off the hook. So the answer is to collect warm leads (people who may not want to buy now, but who may be interested and are sitting undecided on the fence) with a view to conversion at a later date. Marketing is essentially forming a long term relationship with your customers, so you need to be able to gather their details to communicate with them on a gradual basis.

Customers are, by nature, greedy and self-centred, so you should play along with those traits. It’s much easier to work with how your customers think than to try and mould them to match you. Therefore provide an incentive they can’t refuse, something of value that costs relatively little to you, such as a ‘Special Report’, ‘Early Preview’ or ‘Ten Top Tips’ that they can’t fail to resist, in return for their contact details.

Collecting details is made much easier through automation, as you cannot be there 24/7 to receive and send out requests. By setting up an autoresponder on the internet you can collect customer details into a safe and secure database to respond immediately to deliver any ‘free gifts’ you’ve promised, and be ready for later communications. Your marketing can continue with on-line campaigns, such as e-zines or e-newsletters, which are relatively inexpensive and much more versatile.

You may still need to continue with the multiple leaflet or postcard campaigns. This is because it can take anything between seven and 21 times to persuade your customers to buy from you. The on-line campaigns should work alongside the paper version for continuous gentle reminders, particularly with different messages or viewpoints, to avoid repetition and therefore indifference. As I said in Part I, create a storyboard to encourage a following, with cliff-hangers and new incentives, to entice a positive response. Each ‘episode’ should continue to have a call to action, especially if it is time-dependent, either to make direct contact or to receive a special offer in return for their details, as you will want to expand your database of prospects.

And an extra: Alice’s Actions #31 – Create landing pages to host sign up forms

When enticing prospective customers to sign up for their special offer or gift, make it easier for them by creating a special landing page (webpage totally devoted to the cause) to encourage a positive response. It should be devoid of all external stimuli such as links elsewhere, with its main focus solely on the matter at hand, getting them to sign up!  And to facilitate a better reaction, you could always add testimonials and case studies to back up your offer, as long as they don’t detract from the original purpose: obtaining your customers’ contact details.

Comparing incentives with a trifle

One of the most important parts of a campaign is the call to action. This feature can manifest itself in a variety of ways, but one popular version is the ’special offer’ acting as an incentive to get the customer to make contact.

Try to think of and create a really compelling ’special offer’. Is it a free gift or sample, a special report, a video or audio to explain your business and offer advice, or an offer of time or consultancy (like my ‘free half hour health check’ to see how I can transform your literature into something more successful)?

Plan how tasty and full of value your gift will be, as these attributes all contribute to a more successful response. And don’t forget to make your offer time-dependent, as this increases the incentive factor.

Once you’ve decided what your incentive is, then it needs to be professionally produced. What methods will be used to package and deliver it? How easily can the customer view this offer, and what will compel them to sign up for it? The process needs to be made as easy as possible for the customer to rise to the occasion.

Then make sure you prepare yourself and your staff so that once the customers start taking the bait, you are ready and waiting for them. Not only should you have your patter up to speed, but you be ready with an opportunity up your sleeve for a series of upselling motives to add on if applicable.

Think of the call to action incentive on your advert or webpage as the sponge layer of the trifle. The upselling techniques should be represented by the jelly, fruit, custard, cream and, eventually, the chocolate sprinkles. Of course even with just one addition it will taste nice, but think how scrumptuous it will be with all the benefits added together! Plan your response methods to take the best advantage of the situation.

What should you say and how to say it within your leaflet campaign

Quick reference:
How to get your leaflets to start working for you
How to get your successful leaflets to look good

It’s not what you say, but how you say it, that contributes towards a successful campaign. Be aware that your customers come first; after all, your business would not exist without them, so therefore they need to be the main focus for your campaign. This means you need to turn your mindset around to accommodate the fact that your business comes way down the pecking order of importance.

Each element of your message needs to be carefully planned, placed and executed. The first thing at the top should not be your logo and company name. Even though most leaflets and adverts blare theirs out from this position, this only works for worldwide recognised businesses; otherwise the reader’s reaction is ‘who?’ or ‘so what?’.

The main key element is the headline, which should be designed to attract attention. Begin your campaign with a statement or question that stimulates a positive response to your customers’ pain or problem. You should have done adequate market research to find this out, so position yourself inside your customers’ head and start to think like them. Work with something that will result in the reader saying ‘yes’.

The subhead should provide the resolve or solution to the headline, and there you can subtly drop in the name of your company.  I mean subtly, as the solution should always come first. The result should be to increase the readers’ empathy towards what you are offering.

Next highlight your benefits in bullet points. Here most businesses happily list their features, but remember since you are focusing on your customers, turn these features around to their point of view, so that they become customer benefits. Take out all the ‘we’ and ‘our’ and substitute them with ‘you’ and ‘yours’ to achieve this.

Why use bullet points? Readers find it easier to scan or quick read through a list than to trawl through a dense paragraph. In this fast moving 21st century, bombarded with stimuli from every direction, people don’t have the time or inclination to read everything. A list containing concise, focused and relevant points is more likely to be absorbed.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get. How many campaigns forget to include a call to action? The remainder of your leaflet could contain all the right ingredients, but if you don’t ask your readers to do something, even to tell them to call you for more information, then what is the point? And by making this time-dependent you are more likely to stimulate a response, otherwise, even if they have the best intentions towards your campaign, there is no stimulus to demand a quick reaction and your leaflet could get forgotten.

And last but not least, make sure your contact details are large, clear and easily accessible. If your telephone number doesn’t jump out to hit them between the eyes, your landing page web-address is not clearly visible, or your email is hidden amongst other text, you will not encourage your customers to make contact. And no customer contact means no sales.

How to get your successful leaflets to look good

The misfortune of the single leaflet (or postcard) campaign is that there is limited space for what you have to say. By choosing only one shot at your potential customer market, you will have to cram in a lot of information into a relatively small space to get the full message across.

The initial reaction, after scanning the grey mass in front of them, is that readers will look for a way out: get rid. Even if all the marketing criteria are met: headline, sub-headline, bullet points, call to action, special offer, contact details, the fact that they are virtually sitting on top of each other defeats their objective.

When laying out your leaflet, the first thing to consider is your margins; wide borders navigate the eye towards a focal point: the message inside. Adequate white space provides sufficient elbow room to allow the leaflet to breathe, so each marketing element has a chance to succeed.

Next, consider which kind of picture you are going to have. Background images can backfire: one particular advert had a relevant picture behind all its text, but it was so complex you couldn’t make out what it was trying to say. Presented by itself it would have been easier to understand its message, therefore providing a more effective contribution.

Another problem with a complex background is that it detracts from the words in front of it. Messages are not easily understood if they have to compete with their surroundings. Clean, clear backgrounds, preferably white or pale in colour, combined with a darker colour for the words, will have far more impact for quick recognition and readability than the reverse.

Pictures should be relevant, and not just a smiling tele-operator who looks good. It’s easy to get a picture off the net that will do, but then it may be so popular that everybody uses it, thus reducing your impact. A good quality, well produced photograph is vital, with excellent focus and presentation within its own frame; a home produced job with camera shake or low resolution taken from a mobile phone will not cut to the chase.

And finally how the leaflet is prepared for the printer will make or break a good campaign. Customers respond to quality, and an obvious product of the office ink-jet will certainly not provide the impression you are looking for. Neither will a leaflet whose pictures are not converted to the printers’ resolution, as failure to do so will result in flat, 2D, uninteresting images that also suggest low quality.

Also the kind of paper or card used will make a difference: good quality with a clean finish will easily sway the customer to read, absorb, understand and therefore take action – ultimately resulting in a sale.