Saying exactly what in the tin

Following on from my visible networking material idea I came across this business card from Jill Wigmore-Welsh. I wanted to share it with you because it stood out from all the other business cards at this networking meeting I went to.

Why? Because the first thing it said is what she does, but in a way that was beneficial to the customer. There isn’t much room, and she even managed a rhyme, but the aim of her business was the most visible element on the card, whereas her details took a back seat.

I like this idea, because the customer should always come first. Why should our networking material bang on about ourselves? The customer cares only about themselves and what they can get out of you and your business, not actually your business. Use the fact that we’re all naturally self-centered, so by turning the tables we can take advantage of this fact and steal a march on our competitors.

What do you think of this idea – your comments are always welcome!

Up-selling pizza blogs

Up-selling is a concept I have been thinking a lot about lately. The book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber explains how the idea of franchises combined with upselling have helped businesses become successful – but how do I transform this into my own business?

I want you to visualise a pizza base, which is an excellent medium for adding things onto. Not just tomato sauce and cheese, which adds value anyway in creating a Margerita, but all the extra toppings which make the pizza individual and appropriate for its consumer. You can add many different toppings to enhance the product, and its the combination of these when added together creates the final effect.

What if your blog was just a Margerita, serviceable on its own, but a bit boring? OK, it tastes nice, and it seems to do well, but do you think extra features would help?

Consider mushrooms as a link to other websites, peppers as a link to your newsletter signup page, chillis in the form of your picture, olives as RSS feed options, anchovies linking to your categories and tags, pepperoni as your social networking links, pineapple for your recent visitors and tuna to show past comments.

As long as all these ingredients are your favourites, it doesn’t matter if you put them all on at once! Although they all have an individual purpose, explore combining these tastes to see what effect they have. Test and measure the responses. Rearrange the positioning to highlight specific items. Work with your widgets!

But don’t forget the tomato and cheese, which should relate to the blog posts, as these are the mainstay of your pizza. Good quality and value should always be on the menu.

How does this relate to upselling? ‘How to beautify your blog’ offers a series of packages that can be added to the main staple, the blog itself. Investigate this concept and give me feedback – does this sort of thing appeal to you? More ingredients cooking away are advice on exiting posts and how to write them effectively, plus all the other marketing elements of blogs I am researching into. Should be the making of the most fantastic pizzas (sorry, blogs) ever!

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).

Don’t just say it one way

If you look at the BBC website newsdesk, you’ll see lots of different links to their news items. It looks like there’s lots of news there, but in fact there isn’t. If you investigated further, you’d find that quite a lot of the links go to the same news article. Why is this?

People view the world in different ways. That’s why we’re all unique. Therefore if you want to reach a wider area of customers, you have to think more outside the box. Most of this can be accomplished with research, hence why there’s websites for finding out the most popular keywords for your website (and your marketing literature). As people think differently, you need to promote your business in a similar vein. Not everybody will respond to the same stimuli, as coaches trained in NLP will confirm.

That’s why there are many newslinks going to one source: to capture more of an audience. Each headline or link has been carefully sculptured to fit in with a certain type of person, in the hope that it will encourage more to respond favourably. They’re designed to work on many levels, in order to increase the success rate of getting their news out there (and this has proven to work).

How can you do this for your own business? If you were able to describe your company in many different ways, how many extra customers could you attract? How could you market your product or services through a variety of avenues to encourage a wider target market? Or even vary the product or service themselves perhaps? Hmmm.

I have said in the past that one way to promote your business is through your ‘perfect customer’. It is much easier to get your prospects to relate themselves to your ‘ideal’ than for you to adapt to their inexhaustible brain patterns. But I’m going to complicate things further by saying you should still promote your ‘ideal customer’, but in more ways. Allow your extremely varied customer base the chance to understand how you help Tom Jones, or whatever you’ve called your ‘ideal’, so that they all get a chance to relate to his predicament, and the solutions you provide for him. Even vary the solutions in which Tom is able to achieve his success; promote from different angles, view points, attitudes, methods, presentations, but all with the same role model.

And to find out these different ways? Don’t forget to use the power of questions, and the qualities of ‘test and measure’…

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!

Up-selling pizza blogs

Up-selling is a concept I have been thinking a lot about lately. The book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber explains how the idea of franchises combined with upselling have helped businesses become successful – but how do I transform this into my own business?

I want you to visualise a pizza base, which is an excellent medium for adding things onto. Not just tomato sauce and cheese, which adds value anyway in creating a Margerita, but all the extra toppings which make the pizza individual and appropriate for its consumer. You can add many different toppings to enhance the product, and its the combination of these when added together creates the final effect.

What if your blog was just a Margerita, serviceable on its own, but a bit boring? OK, it tastes nice, and it seems to do well, but do you think extra features would help?

Consider mushrooms as a link to other websites, peppers as a link to your newsletter signup page, chillis in the form of your picture, olives as RSS feed options, anchovies linking to your categories and tags, pepperoni as your social networking links, pineapple for your recent visitors and tuna to show past comments.

As long as all these ingredients are your favourites, it doesn’t matter if you put them all on at once! Although they all have an individual purpose, explore combining these tastes to see what effect they have. Test and measure the responses. Rearrange the positioning to highlight specific items. Work with your widgets!

But don’t forget the tomato and cheese, which should relate to the blog posts, as these are the mainstay of your pizza. Good quality and value should always be on the menu.

How does this relate to upselling? ‘How to beautify your blog’ offers a series of packages that can be added to the main staple, the blog itself. Investigate this concept and give me feedback – does this sort of thing appeal to you? More ingredients cooking away are advice on exiting posts and how to write them effectively, plus all the other marketing elements of blogs I am researching into. Should be the making of the most fantastic pizzas (sorry, blogs) ever!

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!

How to get your leaflets to start working for you

First, we must consider the purpose of a leaflet: to promote a product or service and bring in sales. Unfortunately that is only half the story, because in today’s world a single ‘blast’ of marketing will not work. We live increasingly rapid lives, bombarded with stimuli and competition, ever filling in-boxes and constant distractions. Unless your leaflet is so ‘whizz-bang’ it cannot fail to draw attention to itself, it will only end up buried. So the answer is to up the anti, and create a series of leaflets that will eventually get your message across to encourage a response.

OK, this may be more expensive, but wouldn’t it be expensive to print a load of leaflets that bring in no or little response? Wouldn’t a well thought out leaflet campaign (or postcards) sent over a series of days or weeks to a small but well targeted audience, designed specifically with them in mind, bring in a better rate of return?

This is because you will be creating a relationship with your leaflet’s readers, which is what marketing is all about. OK, the first one may well go the same route as your competitors’ leaflet: bottom of the pile or more likely the bin. But subsequent literature is more likely to draw in more attention, as long as the message is compelling and the headlines are relevant and follow on from their predecessors.

The idea is to tell a story through your campaign that eventually climaxes in the final instalment with an offer so great, it cannot be missed. Actually plan your campaign through a story-board, then you will be able to work out how many leaflets will be needed and what kind of customer you are aiming at. Develop your message from many angles, or offer interesting ‘nuggets’ of information that come together at the end, like pieces of a jigsaw. If you can get your customers looking forward to their next episode of your campaign, you’ve got them hooked.

Another tip is to really focus on your target market, and actually create your ideal customer. Give them a name (say David or Susan), create a cut-out figure and think up their lifestyle. This is because it is easier to market to one person rather than many, and you’ll find your customers can easily adapt their way of thinking to match up to Dave or Sue, rather than the other way around. Base your story around your characters to give you more inspiration. You could extend your campaign more long-term, like a little soap-opera, bringing in offers and concepts along the way. If your customers have something to latch onto, they are more likely to remember you or your product next time you start another campaign, making it that much easier for you.

Condense and Pinpoint for Focus

Speaking at a networking session today with a would-be catering manager, I helped her visualise how to set up her business for marketing purposes.

Her forte was in organising dinner parties, so I suggested she should create five different kinds of hostesses, each with a different kind of dinner party. The reason behind this is if she is able to focus on five scenarios to provide examples for her customers to understand her services, promotion becomes easier.

It is important to create a hostess for each ‘package’ or dinner party. By focusing on a person, your marketing edge becomes keener, and prospective customers will probably rearrange the way they think towards that particular hostess rather than the other way round. Each hostess can display a particular style of party, not just size and contents, and customers should be invited to ask whether a combination of party packages can be catered for – thus getting them across the threshold and into the clutches of your sales pitch!

By simplifying and honing in on what services you provide, and displaying them in easy-to-understand packages, customers are more likely to respond favourably and make contact to find out more. Always appear welcoming and friendly, which means each scenario presented, even though boundaries are deployed, should not be seen to be set in stone, yet always appear organised and professional.

Consistency is the key

Whilst cleaning my bathroom I was struck by the Body Shop bottles on the shelf. That got me thinking on a variety of levels.

One: how the contents of the bottles matched the colours on the labels. Silly really, but I liked that consistency.

Two: the labels themselves were simple and uncluttered, and each bottle matched its partners so that you could tell they were of a set: cleanser, toner, moisteriser, serum, eye cream, etc.

Three: I thought of the consistency of the Body Shop interiors; as a franchise, they are all presented in exactly the same way, so regardless of where you are (Reading, Brighton, Brisbane in Australia) you know exactly where the shampoos are, as well as your favourite brand of face creams.

Four: the consistency of the patter of the sales persons; they all spoke from the same hymn sheet, so no conflictions of information could confuse a potential customer.

Don’t you think that consistency makes your marketing safe? You should make it so that your customers don’t have to think too hard, that it is easy for them without being condescending, that they can find things really easily without losing their interest, that your messages are consistent to avoid confusion, and the simplicity factor highlights your success because everything runs like a well-oiled machine.

That’s something for me to strive for in 2009…

Do you want to buy from me? No thanks, I don’t know you.

A sales rep rang me up today (just as I was about to go out to a networking meeting) and tried to sell me her income protection plan. Apart from not being in a very receptive frame of mind, I was irritated that she tried to pin me down to a time, first before Christmas and then in the New Year, so she could come to my ‘offices’ to continue her sale. When I asked if she had any literature she could send me, the answer was in the negative, but she did have a website.

After I had finally fobbed her off and put down the ‘phone, I wondered why I was so irritated. Of course, she had gone straight into ’sell’ mode and had by-passed the ‘marketing’ part. I suppose a sales person thinks they can win a sale if they can get an ‘interview’ with you, and I was further annoyed because she kept saying ‘well, I will only spend 15 minutes of your time’ – oh, yeah, and was I born yesterday?

If you want to achieve in business, it’s best to go through the correct methods: introduction resulting in attraction of you and your business; marketing to form a relationship and to educate them about your services or product; then the sales patter to influence a positive reaction to purchasing what you have to offer; and finally money exchanging hands with completion of sale.

This method may take a little longer, but the results are more positive and long-lasting, and may influence word-of-mouth referrals to other potential customers. Also marketing can educate your prospectives into other products or services you can offer, and you can learn by marketing research exactly what is needed and wanted, thereby improving your business accordingly.

I feel sorry for sales reps, because sometimes they’re banging their heads against a brick wall. Of course they will have successes, because of the nature of their patter, or the product or service they offer is presented to the right person at the right time, but is this ’sell’ method more profitable? How many ‘no thanks’ do they get against ‘yes please’?  If their company allowed more time for it to be properly marketed, budget depending, the outcome would be less stressful and demoralising, would have longer-term prospects, would allow itself to adapt and reform to become a better business to survive the future, and would result in larger sales from a wider audience with far less hassle.

Get decluttering to clear the way forward

Marketing is all about raising awareness and forming relationships with potential customers. It is also analysing what your customers want and need, and providing a solution within your products and services.

During a credit crunch it is wise to focus on the areas that sell well. Declutter and remove the things that aren’t necessary or are clogging the most important areas of your business, and start to highlight and expand on your most profitable products or services.

Set up a survey or questionnaire with your past, existing and prospective customers to get feedback on your business or premises. Hold a competition, send a Christmas card, or throw a party for your best customers and friends to give that New Year positive feeling and get a sure-fire response.

Capitalise on the areas that show your business off to its best advantage. Really stop and think how you can describe your business in as simplest terms as possible, and then market that profitable area as much as you can. Really think about your customers’ wants and needs, and create a solution within your products or services.

Keep up to date with the latest trends, and move your business along with them. You don’t need to be ultra-techie, just adjust what you are offering to match the current state of affairs. Be aware of what other people are thinking.

Don’t forget how busy people are nowadays – can you think of a way to make them stop and look for longer? All you need to do is to get them to cross your threshold…

Display your knowledge, and offer something for nothing that won’t undermine your business. It gives a good impression, sets you up as an expert, and gets your customers on your side. And keep promoting a positive, successful attitude with good benefits, quality and value for money.

Get your adverts to sing!

A client of mind proudly showed me one of her advertisements which had been placed in a magazine. This was relevant to me because I had designed that advert for her. Her comments were that the quality of her ad seemed to be much better than the other ads, why did her colours ’sing out’ more, and what caused the 3D effect?

Very simple, I had converted the images in the artwork into CMYK before I created the pdf and sent it to the magazine editors. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and these are the colours printers use for their inks. By combining these colours together in a myriad of ways, they can create every colour under the sun.

The other ads looked flat and uninteresting because they were still in RGB, which stands for red, green and blue, the ‘light’ colours used on television screens and, of course, computers. If a publisher has to print a piece of artwork still in RGB, it appears flat is because the printer’s machines have to convert RGB into something more usable, and the colours aren’t compatible with CMYK. You don’t get a sense of ‘depth’, vibrancy and trueness of colour if the pdf is not properly prepared for printing.

Another factor was that the ad was exactly the right size for the space so there was no distortion, and suitable margins were allocated to navigate the eye into the ad, not away from it. I have written before about allowing sufficient white space in artwork, and my client also noticed that as her ad had a white background the content was therefore much easier to read. The ad was not cluttered by trying to fit everything in at once, and as she had booked a series of ads over a number of months, she had maintained the interest of her readers (and hopefully potential customers) with something different in every issue.

Another technique I had used for the copy or words of the ad was AIDA, the marketing method which means ‘attention, interest, desire and action’. Her advert began with a question which marked out her customer’s pain, and the sub-headline stated the solution which her company provided. Bullet points highlighted the benefits she could offer, and a call to action combined with clear, obvious contact details finished everything off nicely.

If you are thinking of placing an advertisement in a magazine or journal, and want it to stand out above the rest, then all you need to do is go ask Alice!

What goes into a newsletter?

When you write about a specific subject in your newsletter, the best way is to break it down into its basic components, and explain it simply using everyday language. This exercise is more difficult than it sounds, because the idea is to make it not only interesting, but to appeal to as many readers as possible to gain their trust and form relationships with them. By breaking down a subject, it will then lend itself to a number of other subjects which will become fodder for future articles.

Do a postcard campaign to gain interest and increase your readership. This is cheaper than creating a large quantity of the first edition of your newsletter and potentially losing most of them to an uninterested audience. The postcard campaign would have to be run over a series, as in today’s society not everyone responds immediately to information, they may need to be coerced into your way of thinking, seduced into the benefits of your profession, and stimulated by fascinating facts that they may not have thought of before. Sometimes it can take several goes to gain a follower.

Please don’t bore your readers too much about your business (this may sound unkind, but people are notoriously self-centered, and only think in terms of what is in it for them). You could easily explain the various features of your company through the benefits it offers, by writing about successful case studies, funny stories with good endings, witty and entertaining information articles about certain subjects you want to get across, special offers that cannot be resisted, competitions to raise awareness, ‘try before you buy’ offers to get them across your threshold…

Selecting certain pages for particular subjects is a good idea, because if you are going to make your newsletter a regular feature, people will like to look at a particular page first (like as for the local newspaper the sports section, the horoscopes, the letters page, the classified ads, for example) before reading the remainder of the newsletter. Keeping a consistency will help your readers in gaining confidence, and they will then look forward to the next issue. It’s like a supermarket that always has its basics like milk and bread, but the way there will offer all sorts of more provocative products to entice their interest.

But it is all very well giving them all this wonderful information if you don’t get anything in return. The idea is to get more people to try what your organisation has to offer. Therefore you must provide special offers that have a time dependent call to action. These must be worth the reader’s while, maybe even a lost leader to get them to sample what you have to offer them. Usually if you do a really good job, it will sell itself and you will get more customers. I say time dependent because if you leave it open ended, the lack of urgency will disappear from their busy minds and the opportunity will be lost or forgotten.

Why not create a blog as an archive medium for all the really important or successful features and articles of your newsletter. Because it is a blog, it would be frequently visited by the ‘internet spiders’ compared to that of a website, which can wait weeks for a visitation. The more frequent the postings, the more often the spiders visit. These postings could have links to your website or any other internet based information, which again would raise awareness and click value of your website, because it is not only spiders who roam the web and click on links but people too.

Create a sign-up form on the homepage of your website to increase your newsletter membership. You could have past copies in pdf form on the newsletter page, which readers could download if they’ve lost their original copy, or interested future subscribers to see what it is like. Again the spiders trawl the pdfs, so more info is passed onto the internet, encouraging more visits to your website, blog and sign up forms, especially if you include web links in the newsletter.

How clearly do you describe your business?

One of the most difficult things in networking is adequately describing your business so that your listener’s eyes don’t glaze over. With some networking groups you only get 60 seconds to give your pitch, which is actually a blessing in disguise. It makes you concentrate your mind on the most important parts, enabling you to condense your ideas into a few concise and well-chosen words.

But be aware of speaking value to your audience. Waffling on about unimportant details will cloud your description and waste your opportunity. Pin-point the areas that concern your customers the most, analyze exactly what they need in this present economic climate, and once you’ve understood their pain, offer a solution that cannot be ignored and highlighted as your USP to stand above your competitors.

For example, I wish to bring to your attention the importance of good design in promotional literature. There are various elements which are ignored because they are either considered as ‘old fashioned’ or are not properly taught, as they require what is termed as ‘having an eye’ for placement and positioning of text and images.

Today’s world is forever getting faster, and our brains haven’t time to stop and analyze subjects at length like they did 20 years ago. Concepts need to be understood in a nano-second, and this recognition will either result in taking action or being rejected. Multiple promotions are required to drive a message home, usually in various methods to avoid repetition, as on-the-spot decisions or reactions are rare.

The main element is the importance of margins. The eye needs to be navigated towards its passage across the page, guiding it to the relevant areas to aid comprehension. This cannot be achieved if the margins are too narrow or non-existant (as with bleeds and images set outside of grids) as is the wont with many ‘modern’ designs. Misunderstanding the use of ‘white space’ and therefore cramming in as much information as possible into the space will not enable the reader to fully understand the message and another opportunity will be lost.

In marketing terms, this concept could also be stressed by not having too many words in your promotional literature. The old adage ‘less is more’ results in summarising your message into a concise select number of words or phrases, especially if they have a ‘benefits’ bent rather than ‘features’, and will enable skimmers and scanners to ‘get’ your point quickly in this fast moving world of ours. They maybe will be able to retain the information somewhere, and remember the concept when it is presented to them again soon afterwards. Don’t expect instant recognition or action, people need to be coerced or seduced into your way of thinking, all aided by expert design and pin-pointed copywriting.

Renaming your Business with a Focus

At BNI this morning I spoke to one member who was undergoing the process of renaming his business. The quick advice I was able to give him in the five minutes we had was to brainstorm all the keywords he and his partners could think of that referred to his business, write them down in a huge list, compare them at a meeting and thrash out some ideas.

Gather ideas from on-line such as Wordtracker and off-line such as friends, family and colleagues, also when you’re driving around or thinking about a case/situation/meeting/email response – even if they sound stupid, unlikely or unsuitable – anything could finally trigger that fantastic answer you’ve been looking for.

And take your time to make your decision – it may come easily to you, or after weeks of sole-searching you may even go for the original one you first thought of! Never rush into a renaming job too quickly – it’s too much hassle and time-consuming to change it later.

Get noticed above your competitors

Today I met a office furniture company while out networking. They were an established foreign firm who were looking to expand into Europe and the UK, and had formed a Reading branch. The sales rep was out networking around various groups to tout her wares, which included a well designed brochure sporting the clean, simple lines her furniture was valued for.

Now there are plenty of other office furniture businesses in Reading, so how could she get her company’s reputation levitated above the rest? I suggested she should first collect some testimonials of satisfied clients, and also statements of successful return on investments, such as how the lives of their workforce had been improved through a better environment, increased their sales because of the ambience and quality of their premises had impressed prospective clients, and the efficiency of layout of furniture had made the processing and resourcefulness of their business that much easier.

How to get all this information out to the public? Well, take this newly resourced material and use it in  articles, press releases, blogs, newsletters, speaking events, direct mail… just to get your concept out there. Keep the same clean, simple style as the company’s branding, in both presentation and writing style, to promote your branch effectively. All this can be accommodated in both a paper format and the web, as combining the two can produce very powerful results. Using all the technology resources to best effect can have quite an impact on your business’s success and sales…

Want to know more? Then go ask Alice!

Portrait power showing your personality

Pictures of Rachel

Sometime last year I met up with a friend who showed me her husband’s latest toy – a whizz-bang digital camera. It could do everything except make a cup of tea.

At the same time my friend was moaning on about her pictures of herself and how terrible they looked. I said she really needed to get some professional ones done – but apparently her old ones were! Ooops. So I decided to do an experiment. We had an hour, so I decided to have a go with this fantastic camera.

The first half hour we messed about because she needed to relax and calm down, change her clothing into something she was more comfortable in, play with the tools of her trade and discuss exactly what she really wanted. The next half hour I took pictures. Most of them were unacceptable, but the beauty of a digital camera is that it doesn’t matter, you can easily delete them. But some of them were really good, capturing her when she wasn’t expecting it (no cheesy grins in posed positions here) and showing my friend in her true light as a warm, funny and exciting person.

I thought nothing of it, until she told me the other day that she has used them on her website and as photos in social networking sites and PR portraits. As a result her workload has increased dramatically, her expertise has soared and her publicity presence has improved immensely.  All because she had used some pictures that truly reflected her as a person and not some stiff board with a stuck on smile.

My next problem is how to create this for me, as I can’t point the camera at myself and press the shutter…

Using images to support description

Selecting the right kind of imagery for your promotional literature is just as important as choosing the right words. This was brought home to me when I visited a client recently who was very keen not to have the same kinds of pictures as her competitors, so that her publicity stuck out from the crowd. Her choice searched more into describing how her company would help her customers, not blagging on about her profession and the features they had on offer. These pictures’ poignancy sparked off a series of unconscience thought that stimulated her customers’ reaction and encouraged them to realise they needed her services. Very clever, especially as this concept had already proven its success!

Presentation Presents

During BNI meetings each member has the opportunity to give a 10 minute presentation to enable them to further explain their business to their fellow members and therefore generate more referrals and leads. Today we had an excellent presentation from Emily Wallace of Interlink Express, which included a very quick brainstorming session to help her extend her company’s services and provide a series of straplines for future networking.

One of the things she gave out to us to thank us for listening and to draw attention to herself and her company were little chocolate bars. They in fact were only Milky-Ways, but I thought wouldn’t it have been more effective if she had had her company’s logo, details and strapline or message on the wrapper (see my last post), as after the chocolate had been consumed, the wrapper would be kept and noted for future use or referrals.

Don’t miss a trick when it comes to promoting yourself for future retention through gimmicks.  Little presents like chocolate are nearly always appreciated (unless you’re losing weight or suffer from migrane) but you can always give it to someone else if you like (and keep the wrapper).