Communication Annihilation during Demonstration

The G20 protestors in London today have got it wrong. And I don’t mean because of their political biases.

They’ve got it wrong because no-one’s quite sure what it’s really all about. They’re protesting about too much; climate change, capitalism, recession, world debt, third-world debt, war, banks, bonuses, redundancies, low interest rates, food shortages. The list goes on. I saw the early marches around parliament on Saturday myself and it’s just baffling.

Too much to say just becomes noise, the message gets lost, and the danger from the protestors’ point of view is that their demonstration becomes interpreted as just a bunch of angry people.

The thing to take away is that when you say too much it’s too close to saying nothing at all.

When it's Time to Realign Your Marketing

People have no money. They’re feeling the pinch. No-one’s doing any business at the moment. No-one’s making purchasing decisions right now.

Is that so? Here are a few facts for you:

• Michael Jackson announces 10 concerts. They sell out instantly. He announces 10 more…and 10 more. They all sell out. Top ticket prices £1,000+


• Aston Martin launch and start to successfully sell bespoke £1.2m car


• Whitbread can’t physically can’t find enough land and build Premier Inn hotels fast enough to keep up with demand


• Domino’s Pizza & Mc Donald’s report large increases in profits
  Aldi, Morrison’s & Sainsbury’s profits up


• Sales of the Nintendo wii top 50m worldwide


• Gaming sector up


• Adult clothing and toys, erm, up


• Cinema advertising up


• British tourism up
• Business networking group 4Networking recording record membership levels

There are hundreds and thousands of other examples too.

Money is still around and growth is being achieved – you may just need to realign your business to succeed. You can realign by changing your market focus to the sectors that are enjoying growth. Realign by changing the message about your product. Realign by selling something new to your existing customers. Realign by taking your resources and employing them differently to solve a different problem. Realign by changing your position in the market.

Your realignment might at first look crazy – £1.2m car in a recession anybody? But the craziest thing you could do is to fail to realign with where the money’s being spent.

Zero to Hero – It’s All in the Headline

Celebrated by journalists, advertisers, marketers and astute business people for hundreds of years, great headlines are zero-or-hero, loved-or-lonely, make-it-or-break-it important. And it becomes more so every day. We live in a world where the headline is everything – whether we take notice, what we’re going to think about what comes next, how much time and credibility we’re going to allow something. It’s like this because we no longer always have time to try to work out whether stuff is relevant or interesting to us or not. There’s too much choice, too much information, too much to take our attention.

Give me the headline! I can then work out:

• Do I read this email?
• What’s this document trying to tell me?
• Is this magazine worth buying this week?
• Is this brochure worth picking up?
• Does this website help me?
  

It’s the difference between engaging people or being ignored. No one gets to the opening paragraph or looks for the subheadings if the headline hasn’t interested them first.

And headlines don’t just come in text.

• What’s the headline that your suit shouts in a first meeting with a client?
• How do I trust you’re going to solve my problems? Easily? Courteously?
• When you answer the phone like you don’t care what have you told me in BIG CAPS up front

Everything we do communicates something. And people will understand you more easily when you communicate – with everything you do – like a classic newspaper article; winning headline first, then bold opening paragraph giving an overview, followed by paragraphs broken up with subheadings.


How would your communication look in print? What (and where) are your winning headlines?

Owning Your Business' Space

Which space does your business (or product) own? This is a fundamentally important question for all businesses for four reasons:


1, It encourages you to think about your prospects geographically

2, It forces you to define your prospects by type and/or sector

3, It makes you develop your unique propositions

4, Because to ‘own’ that space you have to continually be in people’s hearts and minds


If you can’t define your space, you can’t ever own it and you’ll struggle. Or fail. However, if you can define it (from 1&2) and you can clearly communicate your benefits over and over again (3&4), then you’ll become the choice of the people that you’re aiming at and you’ll stake out your territory.

Overly simplistic?

Why? Show me an easier way than doing this? Sure, it won’t negate competition or suddenly cure all the world’s problems, but it’s a lot, lot easier than wasting time, money and opportunity on soul-destroying hit ‘n’ hope marketing campaigns.

2020 Vision for Your Business

Do you remember all the fuss about how businesses were going to be affected when the smoking ban came in? And of course, businesses were affected – some negatively, some positively. Ultimately though the move was a sensible one for the health of everybody whether you individually liked it or not.

Now the Scottish parliament is looking at drastic ways to cut alcohol abuse. There’s already uproar amongst retailers about how it will affect business but if it becomes law then I’d imagine that the laws will eventually become statute all across the UK and may well influence the tightening of alcohol laws internationally because western society has an increasing issue with alcohol.

Then there’s the car industry, an industry that’s been churning out massively under-efficient products for years. It’s been fighting change rather than embracing it (for its short-term good rather than everybody’s long term good), and is now faced with the ‘perfect storm’ of unacceptance and recession. Given that the ‘green issue’ has been on the world’s radar for at least the best part of a quarter of a century it’s entirely feasible that the industry could have avoided this whilst making the world a better place.

We also live in a world where lending, health, drugs, family, stress, pollution, education, welfare state, pensions and so many other issues need serious political and social intervention because our current systems are outdated, irrelevant, expensive or socially unacceptable. And we need to address this in a world which is going to spend years in debt. Over the next ten years our political leaders are going to have to make some very radical decisions and changes. Decisions that can no longer be avoided or introduced softly.

But this tune isn’t about politics.

The point to take away is that the world is about to go through a decade of change like we’ve never seen before. You might think you’re used to fast-paced change, but the handle’s about to get cranked. Big time. The world’s going be a very, very different place by 2020 and it’s not just our political leaders that will need to make tough and sometimes thankless decisions. As business leaders we need to be looking at how we can position our businesses – in terms of revenue and recruitment – to take advantage of changes that will be sweeping and all but instant.

Resistance will be futile. You'll just go up in smoke.

The Recessionary Marketing Myth

“If you do some marketing now you’ll be in a better place when the recession ends.”

I’ve heard this a lot recently – I’m sure you will have done too – and it’s troubling me. Please be very wary of this phrase, particularly if it comes from someone who’s trying to sell you advertising, sales or marketing advice, or anything else ‘results’-related.

Why does the phrase trouble me? For two reasons:


1, It sets the expectation in your mind that whatever you do now you won’t see any benefit from for months (if not years). It pats on the back the bit of you that wants self praise for actually doing something, but ignores the bit of you that’s thinking ‘I need a result’. And if you accept it as a truth you’re diminishing your ability to make fundamentally sound judgements on your business’ marketing – and that’s going to cost you.


2, Anyone who’s trying to sell you something by using this is not a good marketer and/or they’re assuming you’re not. They’re assuming you’re daft enough to spend money now and not want a return for months (or years). Using this line conveniently hides poor results which is likely what you’re about to get.


Of course if you’re working on properly organised marketing now then you will be in a better place when the recession ends, but only because you’re ensuring you get the returns now whilst it’s in town.

Happy Marketing.

A Different Perspective on Your Clients' Attention

Imagine that the people you wanted to present to; the buyers, decision makers or budget holders that you want to be in front of to make sales, sold you their time. So rather than making appointments in the ways that you currently do – through whichever sales & marketing approaches you’re currently using – you just had to book and pay for their undivided attention whenever you wanted it. Kind of like an ‘Attention Credit’.

You’d have to think about whose time you wanted to buy the most and at which price points, so you’d pick your target audience very accurately to suit your proposition and your likely lifetime profitability. You certainly wouldn’t go and make dozens of poorly researched appointments or pay over the top to sit in front of people who wouldn’t be interested in what you do.

These Attention Credits would not be cheap to buy either, so you’d be forced to think about how well you’re going to communicate when you get there. Why would you pay for an hour and a half’s worth of blabber when you could communicate everything so much better in 45 minutes?

If buyers sold you Attention Credits it would pay you to properly target your marketing, to research your clients properly before you met them, to communicate in the most effective manner possible, and to continually test and measure what you’re doing. You’d create an outstanding process to ensure you were getting the very best return on your investment.

Not so different to what’s happening in the real world then. Shame that we just don’t feel the pain of the marketing cost & the poor communication in the same immediate way that we do the pain of a ticking meter.

It's Snow Excuse Not to be Selling

Is it deep and crisp and even where you are?

Snow has covered much of the UK overnight and more is forecast. Of course this causes major disruption to all our normal activities but it does provide big sales and marketing opportunities (not least, of course, if you’re stocking shovels). If it hasn’t affected you where you are it may well be that it’s affected some of your customers.

Many people who are usually in a busy office may be at home today and will have only their inbox and their mobile to keep them company (apart from perhaps overly-excitable, off-school children). No colleagues by the water machine or office politics issues to take their attention. Even in full offices today, normal business won’t happen in quite the same way. Customers will be away, deliveries and meetings won’t take place, and there will be a very different atmosphere.

So take advantage. What can you do to keep in touch with your customers today? What can you do to help them? Could today be the day when you just call the people you need to keep in touch with but never seem to get round to doing? Could you review your marketing plan or your sales pipeline? Could you send a relevant, personal email to people? Could you write that direct mail letter you’ve not got round to? Could you do a sales plan that helps you with your major objections? These are the days when you can gain a real advantage over lazier competitors.

The other big advantage you have is that people remember the conversations they had and the things they did on days like this. So if your customers have snow – even if you don’t – they are far more likely to remember whatever you do today.

Take advantage.

Then go tobogganing in your lunch hour.

Sometimes You Get More than You Bargained For

I recently worked with a plumbing company – a very straight forward husband & wife team. (Marketing to many plumbers is an ad in the Yellow Pages and a name on the side of their van, so they had approached me with some trepidation). We worked on a localised mail campaign which addressed the real concerns of people looking for plumbers and I advised them to spend a little time and boot leather delivering the letters around their local area.

Yesterday was wet. Very wet. Yet undeterred, and armed with a couple of hundred envelopes, Mrs Smith (not a changed name, she really is Mrs Smith!) posted letters on four roads in the pouring rain before deciding that enough was enough and going home. When she got back she was astonished. She had four calls from customers waiting for her and through her letterbox she found a handwritten note which read:


'Many thanks for your circular. As a retired commercial director I must congratulate you on your efficient presentation of this excellent letter. I have put your sticker on the inside of my kitchen units and will most definitely be using you when the need arises.'


What do we learn here? That;

1, Getting marketing done professionally pays
2, The fundamental principles of profitable marketing are universal and recognisable
3, Adding something that engages the ‘might use you in the future’ group is a sure-fire winner
4, Don’t put things off because it’s raining (use that as a metaphor for recession if you will too)
5, Hand written notes have the power to touch people even more than four new customers

They Don't Believe You

When people don’t believe they don’t act. You don’t get many Sikhs going to church on a Sunday morning, and you won’t find many environmentalists queuing up to buy a 4x4. Strangely though a Sikh may be welcomed into a church very warmly and many 4x4s are actually quite green with good mpg/CO2 figures, clean engines, and long life cycles. But it won’t happen if people don’t believe.

When people do believe they’ll act in utterly incredible and even unjustifiable ways. They’ll camp outside your shop of a cold night waiting for it to open, they’ll fly to the States to buy the latest Apple i-whatever so they can have it three months early, they’ll rave about you. In extreme they’ll do frightening things that are totally justifiable only in their own minds – like deliberately blowing themselves up and killing innocent women and children in the process. Belief is sometimes frighteningly powerful.

People make their decisions around what they believe and what they don’t. What they believe about you, your claims and your industry. The time share business suffers here. Time share holiday homes – what a great idea – but we all believe we’re going to get ripped off so we avoid them. If their claims get bolder – however true they might actually be – we only believe them less.

If people aren’t buying from you in the numbers you’d like it’s probably because at some level they don’t believe you. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s just you haven’t convinced them otherwise yet. It’s (probably) not that they think you’re lying either. You just haven’t got them to really ‘get it’ yet.

When they do believe, they’ll buy. And they’ll rave about you. That’s what people do.

So if your product really is that good, it really is twice as powerful as your competitors’, how are you going to communicate that credibly? Because unless they’re believing it, you’re wasting your time and probably your marketing spend with it. It’s more than likely something really simple that’s blocking your path. Be honest with yourself and identify it.


Happy selling.

The Big Marketing Budget Mistake

Imagine your bank did this deal for you. For every £1 you give them, they give you £1.10. They then give you thirty days to pay your bit, too.

Now here’s the question. How much are you going to budget to spend with them?

Of course you’d be mad not to spend as much as you possibly could with them and to continually reinvest what you take out. Why would you put a budget on it?!

This is the madness of marketing budgets. If your marketing works – ie: it’s giving you a measured positive result – why would you do anything other than spend as much as possible on it? High growth companies of all sizes tend to get this and they become obsessed with working out customer lifetime values, how much they are happy to spend to acquire each new customer and then continually spending in the areas where they can be sure to get a positive return that they can measure.

Much of my work centres on getting business owners and directors to stop dreaming up and wasting budgets, and to start learning to find and actively maximise these calculated money makers. (When you consider I guarantee my fee for this work you realise how sure I am of the difference there is for you here). Good marketing is like your bank giving you £1.10 for every £1, not about sticking to budgets.