Marketing Lingo- Demystified

Have you ever had a conversation with a marketing professional and just nodded politely as they waffle on, talking at you?

More than likely they used words like “ROI” “Experiential” “Below The Line” “Above The Line” or Ideation” and I bet they lost your interest within about 5 seconds.

I’m a huge fan of plain English and not confusing people with awful jargon that’s just going to alienate the very people you want to do business with. By using simple to understand terms and phrases, there’s really no need to pull out the jargon. Unless of course you’re talking to fellow marketing professionals that want to outdo each other with pointless words!

I’ve collated a list of words that you’ll hear all too often and wonder what on earth they’re talking about.

 

Below The Line- A traditional marketing term, a little outdated. When advertising encourages the interaction of its audience. For example when an e-newsletter directs the reader to ‘click here’ or ‘call us’

Above The Line- Again, a traditional term. When the advertising message is one sided and doesn’t require any interaction with the audience. For example a billboard and a lot of printed ads. These are simply to get a message across with little to no action required.

Brand- The emotions and thoughts your customers (and prospective customers) have about your product or company.

Branding- Not just the logo! It’s how your business is presented to your audience.

Touch Points- The journey a customer takes through all of the interactive stages with your brand.

On Message- Ensuring everyone in the business knows the official brand ethos and message to give a consistent look and feel to the organisation.

Marketeer- A marketing professional that will more than likely confuse you with the jargon above! The word conjures up less than favourable feelings and creates an image of someone that sells stuff in a reckless, haphazard and somewhat careless way. Whereas Marketer is just associated with someone who markets products or services in an industry. That’s my personal opinion anyway.

Marketeer v Marketer? What are your thoughts?

 

Next time you’re faced with someone spouting all sorts of nonsense at you, just stop them and ask to be spoken to in plain English so there’s no confusion, boredom or thoughts of slapping that person with a wet fish.

Long live plain English!

Buy cheap, you buy twice

When starting a new business, knowing what to spend your money on first is always a contentious issue. Do you plough everything into equipment? Premises? Branding? Or Products?

A scattergun approach to purchases is usually the way most new businesses do it however, it’s all too common that at a time when they can least afford it, the temptation to scrimp on their brand is all too evident.

Going for the cheapest option with generic, awfully printed business cards, websites that look like they’re from the 90’s and a logo that looks like a child has scrawled it on the kitchen wall is just a lost leader. Why damage a brand that hasn’t had the chance to be great?!

Businesses end up paying twice as they go for the cheaper option and realise that it’s not the best way to communicate their offering. By no means is paying through the nose the right decision either, but putting aside a decent budget for your brand will ultimately give you the return on your investment sooner rather than later.

There are handy ways of building a brand on a budget and just putting effort into it, makes a huge amount of difference!

• Be Emotive- Creating an emotional connection with your customer sounds all airy fairy but if you can connect on a level that resonates with your ideal buyers, you’re onto a winner. Whether it’s your strapline, brand colours or even the language you use, they all contribute to the emotional sale everyone is after.
• Have Values- No matter how fancy your logo is or how shiny your office may appear, beyond the looks of your brand it’s the values that you offer your clients that are the most important. Think about what your clients say about you, what will they tell their friends and most importantly, do your clients actually like the service you’re offering?
• Find your Difference- Unless you’ve got a business that is totally unique, my guess is that you’ll have competition from others in your industry. It’s not a bad thing; in fact if you play to your differences you’ll stand out in the field as a quirky independent and attract customers with your unique style. Just don’t be different for different sake, you need to discover your own brand personality and make sure everyone in the business has the same view point. Do not confuse your customers with mixed messages!

I’m a huge believer in value and I wonder why so many people are driven by price. Yes, you have a budget but if you look at it to be a realistic pot of cash to get what you want, then the value in what you’re buying will become more evident.

Next time you look at your own brand think about what it conveys about your business. Does it excite you? Does it say what you do? How do you feel about it?

If you’re not happy with it, how do you expect your customers to buy into it too?

Customer Service? What service?!

Everyone has suffered at the hands of an angry or disinterested customer service person and maybe even a few of us have had the delight of excellent service. But why can’t we get consistently good service every time?

I’m a stickler for service, whether it’s in a restaurant, supermarket, on the phone to a utility provider or online to a retail store. Every industry, no matter what you sell should always put service ahead of everything else.

Figures show that almost 79% of people would switch providers due to unfriendly/impolite staff and yet every day we come across the person that got out of bed the wrong side or merely can’t be chewed.

Surely if consumers are willing to switch for that reason, why aren’t businesses doing more to make sure their staff are as helpful, friendly and considerate as possible?

To retain customers in these challenging times is simple, just be nice to your customers and deliver your brand promise every time. It’s not to reduce your prices or give the customer less choice or even to reduce quality, service is key.

If you don’t know what your brand promise is, ask why your customers come back to you. Feedback is super important and unless you know WHY your customers like you, you’ll either end up losing them or not catering to their needs so they’ll flirt with the competition.

Here are three tips to delivering exceptional service:

• Live and breathe the brand- If your staff love your brand and are really enthusiastic about the product or service you offer, they’ll convey their passion to the customer.
• Include your Staff- Including your employees in decisions will make them feel part of the business and more valued as an employee. In turn giving them more responsibly to retain the customer and provide good service.
• Client feedback- Ask customers what they think, then you’ll find out where you need to improve and if you need to implement changes to retain them. Ask anonymously as they’re more likely to be truthful!

In short, if your staff have a face like it’s been slapped with a wet kipper, ask them why. It could be that they’re just having a bad day and in that case, explain they can’t bring a bad mood to work or it could be that they have some personal issues to address. Either way, engage with your staff and as a manager or boss, taking control and providing your staff with good service will make all the difference.

Just remember, if your staff aren’t interested and don’t care whether the customer leaves then there are no doubt plenty of better people to replace them, that do care!

Long live good customer service!!

Sales vs Marketing. A fight to the death

Do you call yourself a sales AND marketing professional? A sales consultant or a marketing consultant?

Anyone worth their salt knows exactly what they are and a big bugbear of mine is (mainly with recruitment agencies calling roles sales AND Marketing) people that think sales and marketing is one job!

Without me going off into a rant, I’ll explore the differences…

SALES- the function to enable a customer to buy their product or service

MARKETING- the concept of the product or service that generates leads for the customer to buy

On a whole, sales and marketing do look very similar from a passers-by attitude, yet highlight the individual skills of each role and they’re very different.

Marketing is seen as a superfluous function once a business is actually getting sales because they fail to maintain the flow of marketing activities. The sales will eventually drop off and then the cycle begins again, they start marketing to generate sales and, voila, they stop marketing again once people start buying.

So without marketing, a customer would never find out about a business’s offering and without a sales team, the customer can’t buy. Chicken and egg?

If your sales team is a little baggy and out of the loop with what marketing is going on around them, they’ll never know what the customer is being offered. This is point in case for many large firms that don’t know their current campaigns. Many a time I’ve called a large call centre to enquire about an offer I’d seen advertised and they were none the wiser. This is where sales and marketing meet.

I’ve been on both sides of the fence, the sales person hating the marketing department because they don’t involve the sales staff in their decision to pull an offer or to advertise something that would never sell. As well as the marketing department, wondering why the campaigns aren’t going down well and why certain things aren’t selling.

Without a strong relationship between both parties, neither will work very well.

If you run a small business these two entities are generally one person’s job however, it’s crucial to make the person responsible for both sides of the coin. If no customers come knocking your door down to buy or the customer fails to close the deal, they can’t blame someone else! Yet that person will generally lay blame with the marketing as they claim it didn’t work.

So whether you call yourself a Business Development consultant (SALES PERSON) or marketing executive, just make sure you’re working with each other and finding out what works for both sides. There isn’t a winner in this battle I’m afraid, it’s like having a favourite child and putting all of your effort into the good looking one, at some point it’s going to backfire!

Silent Big Brands

After the ‘scandal’ of Tesco being revealed as being behind what seemed to be an independent coffee shop, Harris and Hoole, my question is, is it wrong that large multinational businesses are muscling into the independent store?

Supermarkets are taking over the world and soon enough everything we buy and use will eventually be linked to one of the giants. It’s not great for the high street and it’s also not too great for the independent shop owner.

I like to think I’m buying local or from relatively small organisations with good values and superior products. I don’t like being duped or being taken for a ride, thinking I’m putting my money into small businesses when in fact the fat cats of huge businesses are sitting being the till taking my money, again.

My eyes were opened after a trip to a ‘fairly’ well known crisp and snack factory and I was informed about the products they make and distribute. They WALKED me through the selection of products they sell and I even got to see the factory floor where they make these well-known salty snacks. I happened to notice the wrapping of a packet and asked why their logo or name weren’t mentioned on the snack packet. The factory worker didn’t know so I thought I’d keep my question for when I get back to speak to their MD.

I know factories make and distribute products that are sold for other companies and I thought this was the case, I was wrong. The crisps in question were a more superior product and sold in places like Costa coffee and other such establishments. I was told that these are indeed their brand however they like to omit their logo to appeal to a ‘higher class’ of snack eater and to be able to be stocked in ‘nicer more expensive’ stores.

The same was to say for one of their juice drinks and a few other products. I was told this was so the consumer feels like they’re buying from a small company and they’re being more responsible towards the smaller supplier. These juice drinks are sold to festivals as the customer likes to boycott the large brand and buy small.

Is it just me, but is this completely wrong? By not telling the customer who the real producer is and making the branding of the product seem more superior and small scale, it’s giving the customer the wrong impression of their product.

If they surveyed the customers that bought these and asked how they would feel if they knew it was manufactured, on mass, by a huge multinational company, I’m sure it would be different to what their marketing department think.

Why can’t brands be open and honest and tell their loyal customers what they’re buying into? There’s a reason why people are turning to local producers and small manufactures, just take the current horse situation!

In short, be honest about what you sell, where it’s come from and who you are. Your customers will appreciate it.

Hello 2013

Happy New Year

So the New Year is here and everyone is making resolutions to be better, fitter and generally to outdo last year. Great! But how long will it last?!

New Year for me is a time to reflect on the year that past and see what changes I can make to improve. Making all these daft resolutions like, “I’ll go to the gym everyday” or “I won’t eat chocolate ever again” are all silly.

My thought is to just keep doing what makes you happy but improve upon the parts that aren’t doing as well as you’d like.

January is a great time to reflect upon your business too, to see where you want it to go and to finally have an excuse to pull your finger out and do something. Marketing is something businesses are first to get rid of when tightening budgets, yet the first thing businesses think about in the New Year.

So you’ve ditched the budget yet you want to do lots of marketing. Hmm…what’s the solution?

For many businesses there is a great funding pot available in the North East that funds Business Improvement so at last, businesses can start doing some of the improvements that have been on the back burner for a while. This fund is fantastic at helping businesses to kick off a new website or design new marketing literature, even to implement strategic changes, both financially and from a marketing prospective.  Find out more by getting in touch.

If funding isn’t for you or you’d like to do some nice FREE things to improve your business, here are three tips to get you going…

Pick up the phone. Ring your clients and say hi, see how things are going and most of all DO NOT SELL to them. By catching up and not actually flogging anything to them, your clients will appreciate it and be more likely to think about you next time they need your product or service.

 

Google your business. You never know what might be lurking in the depths of the internet about your business. You may come across some less than favourable articles or maybe you aren’t listed in some obvious places. Get it sorted and your prospective customers will be able to see what you want them to see!

 

Change the date. We are now in 2013 so everything with a date on, copyright tags on newsletters, websites etc will no doubt still say 2012. Keep up to date and on top of things. There’s nothing worse than something that is out of date and it’ll show your customers you are on the ball and have an eye for detail.

Have a super successful 2013 and just remember, be nice, smile and enjoy it!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Tis the season of goodwill (and all that) so we’d like to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a super successful 2013.

We’ll be reopening Pink Label HQ on January 3rd 2013 and we’d love to work with some lovely new businesses in the New Year to get their marketing up to speed and really making a difference. So get in touch to get the Pink Label Treatment

Pitch over, now onto the festivities…!

A year of change, for some!

I’ve neglected my blog for a little while as I’ve been super busy at work and a little trip I took to Amsterdam took a few days to recover from!

Usually my blogs are ranty and sometimes full of tips or suggestions. This time I thought it would be good to reflect on the year and share my thoughts on how things are at the moment.

So what’s new? Well Pink Label is going really well and as I’ve just past my first year as a self-employed person, I have to say things haven’t gone too badly.

All the doom and gloom and about businesses going under, struggling and scrapping around for business has really intrigued me. In the North East I see a lot of proactive people that are actively looking for business, getting out there and seeing what changes they can make in their businesses to attract new customers.

Then on the other hand I see a lot of businesses standing still, waiting for the tide to pass and times to change. They’re festering in their own misery and gloom, making themselves look desperate every time a new business wafts past.

These are the businesses I’ve tried to work with to help and encourage them to get out there, change their ways and most of all, look positive. There’s nothing worse than a lack lustre business that really shows no confidence in themselves. It’ll be evident who reigns supreme when we see who is still in a year’s time. Not that I want to see any business fail, however if they don’t recognise they have to get off their backsides and actually market their business, there won’t be anything left for them to do.

I feel lucky that I’ve even survived my first year in business as I know a lot don’t and I put it down to having a great circle of friends and a fantastic group of businesses around me that I can reply upon. The help and support I’ve had this year has been amazing, without it I doubt I would have done so well or I’d have sank into the oblivion of bad businesses.

Now I’m not blowing my own trumpet or being cocky about having a good year, I’m just saying with the right attitude, good people around me and an enthusiasm to be something other than just an employee, has really motivated me to stay self-employed.

I hope everyone that reads this changes one thing about how they market themselves and sees a difference; whether it’s thanking businesses for their custom (not always done!), reviewing their sales processes or simply attending events to be seen. It’s all a step in the right direction.

There may be a blog before Christmas, we’ll see! If not, I wish you all a fabulous Christmas and 2013 is definitely the year of luck!

Appearance isn’t everything, or is it?

Outraged by the news that HMV are introducing an ‘appearance policy’ I’m going all out and proclaiming,

Does appearance really matter?

HMV are a record store, well they used to be until they started everything from computer games to books. I remember saving my pocket money when I was small to go to HMV to buy the latest album from my favourite artists. I loved the whole environment of wandering through aisle upon aisle of music I’d never heard of, discovering new and exciting bands and talking to the staff about future releases.

I somehow related to the staff in HMV, even though I was only young, I looked up at these ‘cool’ people because they were all individual and expressed themselves so well. Maybe having pink hair now was spurred on by them, who knows!

In a retail environment where everyone that enters has a clear individuality whether it’s to buy their favourite classical CD or World Cinema DVD, even just a pop single, all of these customers are individual. So why shouldn’t the staff be too?

From reading the article in the Telegraph, one point really stood out for me,

“We’d like to think our colleagues are presentable anyway, so this is just about adopting a more consistent approach, which we believe our customers will appreciate,” he said.

Did the bigwigs at HMV care to ask their loyal customers or is it just an assumption? My advice would be to ask your customers before introducing ludicrous ‘appearance policies’ and actually take the time out to see what your customers want to see.

From working in a corporate background and having to fight my corner about my pink hair, I fully understand that not everyone perceives self expression as a positive. However, it’s 2012 and the world isn’t controlled by uniforms and a restriction on how to dress (although sometimes it seems like it). No matter how a person looks, surely it’s how well that person does their job?

There was a case like this with Police officers being told they have to cover their forearm tattoos up. Up until someone in an office somewhere declared the new ruling, no one made a fuss about them being on show before. So why speak out now? I actually believe it’s all down to corporate stereotypes and pandering to the conformists to ‘fit in’ and be standard.

In life and in business especially, everyone should wear what they feel is appropriate to them. A personal trainer wouldn’t exactly go to work in a suit. I’ve always said it, stand out and be you. Express your personality and show your customers who you really are, stop hiding behind the starched white shirt collar and strangling tie, let go and relax!

Photograph courtesy of Keith Newman, Highlights PR

Pick me, not them!

Standing out in a busy marketplace doesn’t always mean reinventing the wheel, it sometimes helps but here’s something…

Just be better than your competitor!

There are a huge amount of businesses out there all doing the same thing but what makes a customer choose whether to use you or the next company in the google listings?

From a marketing perspective, I could spout a load of hoo harr about what businesses should and shouldn’t do. I’m not going to do that, mainly because you’ll get bored, switch off and think about something far more enjoyable. Although I will give these three tips from the point of view of a consumer. Yes, I buy stuff, I’m a consumer, I don’t just tout my business all day every day!

Shock horror, customers don’t buy purely on price. Customers are savvy shoppers and are always looking for a bargain, but a bargain doesn’t mean the cheapest. Quality is number one. When I go to buy something, I compare quality and that doesn’t mean just the product or service. It’s the quality of service, after care and knowledge that I’ve been sold something that fits my needs

Know your stuff. It could be the difference between a customer buying from you or not. If you don’t know your product or service inside out, get learning! A customer wants to deal with knowledgeable and experienced people so they understand what they’re buying and are reassured that they’ve made the right decision. On the other hand, you need to find out what the customer needs first and if your product or service suits what they’re looking for.

Branding. I’ve always said that looks don’t matter, but they help! So true in this instance as the customer looking to buy from you will judge you. They’ll judge how useable your website is, how easy it is for them to contact you and if you have a retail store, how clean, well laid out your store is. If you give the impression of shoddiness in your own branding and your logo or website is tired, it doesn’t exactly give off a great impression to a customer that wants to give you their money.

Of course when the customer has decided to use you, ask them why! I always find businesses ask why they got turned down for a job or why something fell through but never why they got chosen. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know how your competitors are doing.

Once you have the customer the next job is retaining them and the aftersales is the most important. Don’t leave your customers to settle and look around at your competitors, they chose you in the first place, make sure they stick with you. Now that’s another blog for those tips!