HeyStrategy

Any chance we could hear from people who actually have something to say?

Phil — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 12:16:00 +0000

This post is aimed at: Anyone with social media accounts, particularly people who use them a lot and people who don't use them at all

TLDR: Let's all encourage people with valuable things to say to share them more by a) reducing our own noise and b) taking the oxygen away from the noisy minority who dominate social by just unfollowing them

A client said something interesting in a marketing session this week, which I couldn’t agree more with:

“The problem with social media is it’s full of idiots with huge audiences spouting shite.”
Someone who shall remain nameless (but has quite a large audience!), 2022

This was in the context of trying to help people with a story or a mission to do some good reach a wider audience, and our conversation was around how to do that when the channels seem saturated. His frustration, which I entirely share, is that we seem as a society to be listening to the people who shout the loudest, which is stopping us hearing from people with something worthwhile to say.

Whilst I don’t think this is either entirely limited to, or entirely attributable to, social media (the breakdown of attention spans is a much bigger, really interesting topic with some huge implications for marketing) in this context it’s social media that’s important, because it’s where most people’s attention is at the moment, rightly or wrongly, so for people who have a message to share that’s where the broadest audience is.

We all know there is too much noise on social

Now, it’s not new to suggest that there is too much noise on social media – people have been saying that for over a decade (incidentally I really identify with a quote from that article: “Marketers suck. Including me.“) But the question that most people seem in response to that noise is “how can I cut through it?” (just google “tips for standing out from the social media noise”), and surely in that case you’re just becoming part of the problem. We are ALL convinced that what we have to say is more important, that it’s the signal rather than the noise, but…is it really? No, come on…really?

I like to use ‘in the pub’ analogies with my clients, and it’s particularly apt here. We’re in a situation where we’re in a pub filled with people loudly proclaiming their own thoughts and opinions, veering from completely fucking inane (“hey, look, I’ve got a dog, look at my dog, my dog is wearing a hat, hey, hey, look at me, now look at my dog again, now me”) through misinformed and misguided (but let’s not disappear down the Brexit sewerhole) to actively offensive, all with a meaty side of dull as dishwater. In this terrible pub, there are lots of people who may want to discuss something important to them – but faced with the deluge of nonsense they stay quiet and eventually leave.

This terrible metaphor is actually a real problem – lots of people are deciding to remove themselves from social platforms, and anecdotally it seems to me that they are often the people you would want to hear from. It seems to me that as more moderate, thoughtful people make a moderate, thoughtful decision to spend their time and attention somewhere less awful, the social platforms become…well, less moderate, less thoughtful, more awful.

But what can we do about it?

To be clear, I’m very much in favour of everyone being able to post (and say) what they want, when they want. I just don’t want to have to read it, and I don’t see why it should have equal weight with the opinions of someone who actually knows what they are talking about.

Obviously it would be lovely if social media platforms figured out some way of doing this. Maybe some sort of test that you have to pass before you can post? (That’s not entirely a joke!) But given that it is far from clear about whether these companies can, or even should, moderate even potentially harmful content, there is no chance whatsoever of them telling some their most active users to, without putting too fine a point on it, shut the fuck up.

6 things I’m going to try

I’m fully aware that my opinions in no way matter to this, but it still felt like it was worth saying, and here are a few things that I’m going to do to see if it helps. If you feel like joining me that would be great.

Before I post, and I mean EVERY TIME, I’m going to ask myself three questions: “who is this for, what will they gain from it, and would it hurt them if I didn’t post it?” If in doubt, I’ll err on the side of keeping quiet.
Start identifying who I’m posting for. This ties in with some things I’m thinking about for my PhD, and it just makes sense really – not everything is for everyone, and we could easily make what we are posting and writing more targeted to audiences who will actually find it useful.
Alongside that, I’m going to join the TLDR gang. You might have seen this on articles, and like me you might have thought it was an irritating affectation. But… I was wrong, and you probably are too. Here’s why it’s useful, and if we tied this in with identifying audiences it could really reduce the noise.
Revisit my overall approach to digital presence. I’ve been working through an Open University Course called ‘the digital scholar‘ which is a bit dated but has some really interesting thoughts on how to be more open and interconnected when sharing ideas. It’s something I need to be better at, and I’m looking at Tom Critchlow as an example of how it’s done really well – interesting, curated, thoughtful, interlinked online content but without an overbearing social presence
Actively look for people who I know have worthwhile opinions on a topic and encourage them to share them, whether that’s on social, through blogging, podcasts, whatever. There are lots of people who don’t contribute because they think they haven’t got anything valuable to say, and I haven’t been proactive encouraging them to speak up.
Cull the noisy minority. Not a literal culling, most of them aren’t that bad… But maybe if every time someone posted something banal, pointless or stupid they lost a chunk of their connections or followers that might make them start to consider their posts more carefully. We can dream, anyway! If nothing else, over time this will mean that I personally have to wade through less mindless drivel, so it’s a win regardless.

It’s not much of a manifesto, but until I think of something better these might help me feel that I’m doing my bit.

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A New Direction

Phil — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 12:39:00 +0000

I’m really excited to be starting 2022 with a new direction and a new business model. Or to be more accurate, an old business model that I’m going back to! It’s taken a couple of years of slow changes to get here, but I’m back to doing purely consultancy work, with no outsourced marketing work for people, and I couldn’t be happier. Focussing on short-term, high-impact projects with companies is what I’m good at, and what makes me happy, and I’m really looking forward to being able to do more of it.

When I started on my own in 2007 it was as a ‘business services’ provider – basically what I think should actually have been called a VA, with a very practical remit. By 2011 when I set up as a limited company, that was already shifting to be much more of a consultancy model, which suited my knowledge and experience (and temperament) a bit better. By 2015 I decided to move more towards an agency model, combining consultancy with more practical, hands-on services like design, web development and content creation.

Partially this was driven by a desire to build a team to work with, but probably more so because I was so sick of poor quality delivery from so-called marketers that I wanted to try to do things a bit differently, and see if I could build an agency that did things properly. We got some of that really spot on, and some of it not quite so spot on, and learnt a lot doing it. One of the things that I personally discovered was that as well as being borderline unmanageable I’m also a poor manager myself!

Anyway, things change again, and now I’ve moved back to a much more hands-off role – Josh and Julietta are set up as their own independent companies who I still work closely with, but with a clearer separation of ‘what to do and why’ (me) and ‘how to actually do it!’ (other people!)

So, what am I actually doing now?

From October I’m going to be working on a PhD at the University of the West of Scotland, which I’m hugely looking forward to. It will be an opportunity to look more systematically about how small businesses and entrepreneurs are supported and advised, and identify what exactly they need to help them grow.

I’ll still be working with businesses directly, both through business support programmes and directly, in three roles:

Non-executive directorships
Outsourced marketing director / manager support
Short consultancy projects on strategy and planning – either business-wide, or marketing specific

So if you need some additional support with marketing and strategy you should still feel free to get in touch and see if it’s something I can help with.

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Writing Business Proposals

Phil — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 13:41:00 +0000

I’ve had to write up a couple of proposals for new work in the last few weeks. Here’s my quick tips for writing winning proposals.

1. Understand the Brief

Let’s start simple! Make sure you’ve read the RFP (or RFQ, or brief, or whatever they have called it), because you’re going to need to make sure you tick all the boxes. Often these are in pretty standard language and asking for standard things, but make sure you know exactly what is being asked for. If you aren’t sure, don’t be afraid to ask for clarification.

It could well be that there isn’t a written brief, particularly if you’re preparing a proposal for a cold or semi-warm lead. In that case, I’d strongly suggest writing a single page brief for them before you launch into the proposal. Share it with the customer, check that you have understood what they are looking for – it makes you look like you know what you are doing, and as an added bonus you get to write the brief in a way that you can write a great proposal for!

Important! You need to be 100% sure at this stage that the brief is one you can deliver against. The bid / no bid decision is perhaps the most important part of any proposal process – don’t waste everyone’s time by bidding if you aren’t sure you can deliver.

2. Now answer the brief!

This is pretty obvious, but weirdly doesn’t always happen. Make sure your proposal EXACTLY answers the brief. If you’re straying from it, even if that is adding extra value, make sure you flag this clearly and explain why you think it’s right to make that change. I like to turn the questions / aims / objectives / timeframes from the brief or RFP into answers in the proposal, so I know I’m covering everything they asked for.

For example, if a brief states that the objective of the project is to “increase visitors from natural search from 100 to 200 unique users by [date]“, somewhere in your proposal it could say something like “Our proposed approach to this is designed to give the best likelihood of doubling organic traffic (visitors from natural search) to the website by [date]. We have successfully used this approach in [project details] and have prepared the workflow and milestones that we would use to recreate that approach here… ” And so on. It’s not complicated, but if you do it well it’s easy to write a proposal that 100% meets the brief, and which to the customer will sound like you’re reading their mind. Make sure you are changing the phrasing though and including each element where it makes sense in your proposal rather than exactly as they have it in the brief, otherwise they will see what you’ve done!

3. Make sure the focus is on the customer

If I was only giving 1 tip, this would be it. If the first ten pages of your proposal are standard templates which explain who you are and how amazing you are, you’re losing the customer from the word go.

Check your pronouns – if it’s more ‘I / we’ than ‘you’, you might not be focused on the customer enough. Likewise count up how many times your company name is mentioned versus their company name – if it’s about the customer (and pretty much every business will say they are “customer-centric”) then just write about the bloody customer!

When you do need to write about yourself (and you will have to in order to talk about your competence to fulfil the brief, and the advantage you have over competitors), make sure you link it back to the customer.

4. Write, Test and Rewrite

Simple one here – don’t submit until at least v.3. There are always improvements. If you think you’ve got it perfect first time, email it to me and I’ll tear it to pieces for you. Ideally get someone else in the team to check it and test your assumptions.

Focus your testing and rewrites in particular on objectives, deliverables, timescales and costs.

5. More Time = Better Proposals

Yeah no shit! But if you don’t know what percentage of proposals you typically win, first work that out. Then allocate a value to your time. Then allocate an appropriate amount of time to the proposal. So let’s say you win 1-in-4, and you value your time at £50 per hour. If the proposal you are working on is worth £5000, and you’re prepared to allocate 10% of the value to the cost of winning it, that gives you a nominal proposal value of £500 (10 hours). Of course, you need to proportion that across the contracts you aren’t winning to, leaving you 2.5 hours to work on this one.

(In this example, you need to prepare 4 proposals in order to be successful with 1 – spending 2.5 hours on each would give 10 hours in total, with a nominal value of £500 at £50 per hour. If the proposal you win is worth £5000, that’s a 10% cost-of-acquisition – ignoring, of course, anything you’ve had to spend to generate the opportunity to bid for the work)

Yes, I know these figures aren’t real, and in many cases there’s no actual £ cost to preparing a proposal. If these nominal calculations don’t work though, your model isn’t scalable and probably isn’t even sustainable. Make these numbers work for you.

Then, spend longer, work harder, work smarter, make sure each proposal is better than the last.

6. Be Different

I can’t stress this enough. Something about your proposal needs to stand out. Whether it’s cost, presentation, delivery, extras, tone…or all of them! It’s unlikely yours will be the only proposal they are considering, so make sure yours stands out.

Send a video instead of a written proposal
If you think everyone else’s proposal is going to be 100 pages, find a way to get yours onto 2 pages.
Make it too good to refuse (“If we don’t deliver as promised, we’ll not only give you your money back, we’ll give you 50% on top“)
Shock them (“All of your competitors are fucking boring and lazy, and there’s a risk you’re going to be the same. Not with us“)
Don’t do any of these – find your own thing.

Now, these are risky, and you need to be comfortable with that risk. Being different increases the likelihood that the reader won’t like it… but it also increases the likelihood that they will like it! It depends on your knowing your audience and finding a way to stand out in a positive way.

You know the saying “nobody got fired for buying IBM“? There is a degree of truth in that, and some customers will always be looking for the safe option. But unless you are IBM, it wouldn’t matter how safe your proposal was, you still wouldn’t win it – so on balance I think it’s always better to take the risk and try to stand out. Lots (and lots, and lots) of other people would disagree with me though. To put it another way, there’s a great bit of dialogue from Red Dwarf:

There’s an old cat saying, “It’s better to live one hour as a tiger than a whole lifetime as a worm.”
Cat

There’s an old human saying, “Who’s ever heard of a worm skin rug?”
Rimmer

Choose which suits you best!

7. Focus on Presentation

Sometimes that point of difference can just be visual, and often that’s a safer way of doing it. There’s some good tips on formatting and presentation over on Hubspot, and all I want to add is to remember to get make sure your proposal gets your brand across properly.

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Youtility – the joy of making your content genuinely useful

Sarah — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 19:02:15 +0000

Sharing ideas for free vs getting customers to pay for them.

Recently I was faced with a dilemma. During my habitual trawl through Twitter, I read an interesting Hootsuite post about writing a social media policy for staff. This happens to be an element of one of the services we provide to our clients – it’s important to have guidelines so that staff are clear about what they can and can’t use the company name for on social media and help to avoid PR slip ups.

I thought the article was a good read and was about to retweet when the thought crossed my mind – if I share the “secrets” to some of our consultancy advice, does this undermine the services we charge for?

My hesitation lasted only a few seconds – firstly our company ethos is centred around a desire to be helpful.

Secondly, if a client wanted to google “social media policy” and write one themselves they could find the article in seconds. The point of being a consultant is to make resources accessible to clients and then guide them through how to use them or amend for their purposes. The reason lots of our clients engage with us is to save them the effort of searching themselves.

Thirdly, it’s possible that a prospective client might see my post, think “how helpful, they must know their stuff” and engage with us on something else.

The moral of the story? Let’s take the mystery out of marketing by making it easier for small businesses to do themselves, if they have the time and inclination to do it. If not, they can call HeyStrategy (then I clicked retweet!)

Interested in how useful marketing can replace the hard sell? I highly recommend reading Youtility by Jay Baer.

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The Secret Formula to Creating Incredible Content

Julietta — Mon, 20 May 2019 11:08:56 +0000

For the past year, my daughter has been obsessed with a spongy porous square chap by the name of Sponge Bob. His poor hapless rival, Plankton, spends most episodes searching for the Secret Formula to make the wondrous Krabby Patty (a type of burger for creatures of the sea). It is his unrelenting search for this secret formula that resonates with me every morning as I search about for the secret to creativity. What shall I write about? Where shall I get my next idea from?

I’ve read hundreds of blogs and overloaded on infographics telling me to exercise my creative muscles, read widely, engage more etc. But at the start of a working week, I haven’t got time to read the top 100 most inspirational books or hang out with poets in the local cafe.

Just tell me what the secret ingredient is please

Having pondered this question for a while I have started to notice a recurring period when I am at my most creative. For me, it is usually when I am lying in bed, half awake, half asleep. A semi-doze where my mind wanders in and out of consciousness, putting half-remembered thoughts together. Somehow, somewhere, a new idea forms, a picture emerges out of the ether and a concept is crystallised. Aha!

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep” The Tempest, Shakespeare

Once you shut your eyes, you have shut off the bombardment of information to your brain. The adverts, the noise from the radio, the view of the washing on the floor or the dust on the cabinet. Now you can fully process your day. Your brain is now in a world of its own and is able – to think. This stage is known as ‘hypnagogic’. However, the risk is you fall into a deep sleep and when you wake up, you are too groggy to remember any creative genius you had at the start of sleep.

Salvador Dali used to nap in a chair while holding a key. When the key dropped, sometimes just a second after he had dropped off, he would wake up. Refreshed and full of creativity.

“ The hypnagogic is the ultimate paradigm-busting tool. As your brain slips into an associative, impressionistic state, it is no longer bound by conventional wisdom. Saucy ideas – impossible within a certain rational framework – clamour for attention. Images become metaphors for concepts, and suddenly everyone is a poet.” Jeff Warren, 2009

What if you haven’t got time to take a nap at 9.30 in the morning?

According to neuroscientist, Alice Flaherty, our brains are the most creative when flooded with dopamine. Brilliant! Can I put this in a smoothie?

No, but you can help the body manufacture it. Usually by doing something relaxing like having a shower, driving or some simple sitting and doing nothing. But, you also need some distraction. By focusing on something else, our subconscious mind can roam about, make new connections and overcome problems. So wash the dishes – urgh, or do some gardening. Doing something very mundane may help you come up with something truly amazing.

Back in the days when I used to write for television, I would dread the Monday meetings where we were asked to present our latest specialist factual programme ideas. I would have spent the weekend reading National Geographic, Scientific American, The Economist, Shortlist and The Week desperately looking for inspiration.

Nothing.

I would then sit in my favourite seat on the packed Edinburgh to Glasgow train and stare into the houses that whizzed by. And suddenly, while half imagining myself making-over the person next to me, there it was.

An idea.

Thank [insert swearword] for that.

Now, I know that it was the commute, not the articles that were the key to my creativity. Part slumber, part relaxed distraction were the secret ingredients. Well it all makes sense now. Thank goodness for the clarity of MRI brain scanning neuroscience.

“I’ve created what my friends call my ‘fake commute,’ and I get up an hour early before I’m supposed to go to Spanx and I drive around aimlessly in Atlanta with my commute so that I can have my thoughts come to me.” Sara Blakeley, CEO of Spanx

There you go, Plankton, just have a quick nap or a shower and chill out. The secret formula will come to you. That’s probably ruined series 99 of SpongeBob, but it has definitely made planning my working day easier.

Now comes the crunch. Is what I have come up with original?

A Google search quickly solves that problem.

Urrgh.

Someone has done it before.

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely, but they are the same old pieces of coloured glass that have been in use through all the ages.” (Mark Twain)

Oh, thank-you Mark Twain. But that’s not going to help me come up with the next great blog post. Or is it.

Use your kaleidoscope

While your idea might not be new, you can make it new, by reversing it, taking the opposing view, looking at it in microscopic detail or from a macro viewpoint. Use your kaleidoscope to keep turning and making new combinations.

And if this isn’t working, then go back to sleep and relax…perchance to dream.

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Top 5 books to help you start marketing

You’ve started the new year with a fresh optimism for growing your business. You know that you need to get better at promoting your products or services and engaging more with your customers, but you just aren’t sure where to start.

We’ve put together a list of books that can help you understand, refine and implement your marketing goals this year*

*if you don’t have time or inclination to read them all, rest assured that we already have, and you can get us on your team to do your marketing for you!

Youtility: Why smart marketing is about help, not hype

https://www.youtilitybook.com/

Jay Baer’s great little book from 2013 is an ideal place to start thinking about marketing your SME. The basic principle is that the best marketing doesn’t shout about why you should buy a particular product, it provides helpful information to help the consumer make up their mind, and then positions itself so that it’s the obvious choice when it comes to the purchase.

Everybody Writes: Your Go-to guide for creating ridiculously good content

Ann Handley is the content writing guru. By now you’ll have heard how crucial “Content Marketing” is, but you might not know what “content” is or how to generate it. Handley reminds us that everybody writes – all the time (emails, letters, notes, Instagram captions) – and it’s easier than you think to start writing. The book also includes plenty of examples of common grammatical missteps and ways to communicate clearly and effectively.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World

Gary Vaynerchuck (or Gary Vee as he’s known) is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he knows his stuff and has been very successful in building his own businesses. This book (buy the hardback if you can) is a comprehensive visual guide to using marketing and social media to tell your story in the most effective way, providing loads of full colour examples, each annotated and examined to rate its effectiveness. If you can cope with his full on, enthusiastic writing style, his original marketing guide Crushing It is also worth investing in.

New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, Newsjacking, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

Now in its 6th edition, David Meerman Scott’s bestseller covers the fundamentals of marketing and PR in our brave new technological world. The old rules of print advertising and hard selling no longer apply and this book explains why, and what you can do now to reach your audience.

Digital Marketing for Dummies

You’re probably familiar with the Dummies format – yellow cover, thin paper and lots of bullet points – and Ryan Deiss’s Digital Marketing installment doesn’t disappoint. If you’re completely new to the concept to marketing then there are worse places to start. You might skip some of the more technical chapters initially but there are useful explanations of different channels, concepts and ideas which you can quickly turn into practical tools for your business.

At HeyStrategy we’re firm believers in continuous learning, and love sharing our knowledge with our clients, helping them to learn how to tackle their own marketing or choosing the best time to engage with a consultant to take care of some of the most important elements. If you want to get your year off to the best start, or just want to talk about an interesting concept that you’ve read about, drop me a line: sarah@heystrategy.com

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My Year with WordPress

Sarah — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 19:27:18 +0000

August 2017. I’ve spontaneously left my reliable, safe Client Account Management job in a rapidly expanding tech firm. My new job? A marketing and web design consultant at a boutique agency. Having never done any hands-on web design. Working for my brother. What’s the worst that could happen?

Well I’m pleased to report that after the first year, nothing bad happened. In fact loads of good has happened, including a tiny bundle of four-pawed fun. But more of that in a later post…

Let’s go back to 2017 and those first few weeks adapting to a completely new way of working and learning loads of new technical stuff (no mean feat for a 33 year old!).

Part One – the day to day:

Leaving the routine and discipline of a 9-5 job in an office was daunting. I knew I’d miss the interaction with my colleagues, the comfort of a schedule, the clearly defined objectives and goals. But what I actually missed most was the tiny things – having someone to share a problem with and chat ideas through over a coffee. As it turned out, chatting my new HeyStrategy team on Slack came very naturally (I was a teenager during the MSN Messenger craze!) and being away from the constant bustle and chatter of an open plan office made me feel much calmer and a lot more productive.

Getting motivated to start work was tricky too. Not known for my morning energy, I warm up by mid-morning and am most effective in the afternoon. Needing to report for duty in an office by 8.30am in an office was an obvious motivator to get up and doing, but not expressly having to get up and go anywhere other than the next room was a bit of a challenge!

Here’s how I got started working from home:

Step one: get out the paintbrushes and smarten up our box room to create a lovely office that I wanted to spend time in and create a quiet, organised space to get things done.

Step two: steal my boyfriend’s routine and get up while he gets ready for work. Behave exactly as if preparing to leave the house – get dressed, brush hair, get snacks and drinks ready. Then when he leaves, make a coffee to take for the commute (up the stairs) and shut the office door behind you.

Step three: embrace the opportunity to take a break to go out for a walk at 10.30am (or any time) if you want to. Because we’re clocking our billable hours with Harvest, I can manage my schedule to fit around when I work best. If my mind drifts mid-morning and I’m not achieving anything, it’s in everyone’s best interest (particularly the clients!) if I stop the clock and start again later when I’m super-focussed and productive. This means I can often be found at my desk in the evenings but that’s when I do some of my best thinking.

Step four: draw the line between “home” and “work”. It’s hard to switch off when you’re on a roll with a project or your head is full of ideas. Create a clear boundary between work stopping and play starting. Decide what time you want to finish working and then schedule something like a call with a friend or heading out to pick up some food, pack up your desk and close the door of the office behind you. Try to turn off phone notifications if you can and remember that almost everything can wait until the morning.

With the ideal work environment set up, I was now ready to get stuck into the slightly more daunting aspect – learning how to design and update websites (spoiler: it’s loads easier than I thought and really fulfilling!)

Find out more next month in the next instalment!

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Marketing New Year Resolutions

Sarah — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 12:38:30 +0000

Have you made a new year’s resolution to focus on key areas of your business? Do you struggle to find time to market your business because the day to day work takes over?

Here are our quick tips for SMEs to kick-start your marketing this year:

1) Update your business plan

Before you even think about spending time on marketing and PR, you need to decide what direction you want your business to take this year. You need to know what your business goals are and how effective marketing can help you get there. If you try to start building a website or posting on social media without clear goals in mind, you’re wasting your precious time.

2) Create your marketing strategy

Now you know what outcomes you need for your business and what products/services you want to promote, you need to figure out what marketing tools can help to achieve it. Plan out milestones, major events and targets on a calendar for the year. If you have the budget, working with a Marketing Consultant will help to clarify what’s possible and work out an effective marketing strategy.

3) Establish your brand, tone and message

A really strong brand identity which carries across your website, logo, print and social media accounts will help your audience to quickly recognise who you are and anything associated with your brand.

4) Decide on your tone and key messages

To establish credibility and drive engagement, your audience need to know who you are, what you do and why you do it (your message). The way you talk about yourself (tone) is key to helping your audience decide if what you do is right for them.

5) Start marketing

The key to effective marketing is planning, and by now you’re fully prepared to start putting your plans into action. Decide how much time you can afford to spend (or afford to pay someone to do it for you), and ensure that your activities are focussed, high quality and consistent.

6) Review, tweak, repeat (or bin)

With a couple of weeks’ marketing activity under your belt, you will start to see what’s working and what’s not. Repeat the activities that are helping to achieve your goals and either bin or refine the ones that aren’t. Tools like analytics and customer feedback will help you to identify this.

Our team of marketing consultants can help at any stage of this process (although sooner is usually better!), putting together a strategic plan or carrying out the day to day implementation of actions.

With a range of packages to suit any budget, there’s no reason that your business can’t have a marketing manager this year, without having to recruit a full-time member of staff. Drop me a line sarah@heystrategy.com or 07715 493843 for a no obligation chat.

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Marketing your business – learn from other people’s mistakes!

Phil — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 15:58:32 +0000

The number one mistake lots of people make when trying to market their business is starting by talking about yourself and your product rather than talking about your customer, but that’s an article in itself!

So these are seven common mistakes that we see companies making (in no particular order of severity). These mistakes are more strategic than tactical, because the number of practical mistakes in marketing would be a much longer article, but the conceptual flaws here often underlie a lot of the obvious mis-steps that we see businesses making.

1. Don’t mistake ‘Promotion’ for ‘Marketing’

A lot of the time when businesses talk about “marketing themselves”, they actually mean “promoting themselves” – i.e. trying to tell potential customers about their products or services. Marketing is about more than who can shout the loudest, it’s about making sure that what you’re shouting about is actually what people are interested in (and therefore possibly willing to part with their cash for!) Promotion is just one part of the “4 P’s” marketing theory, along with Product, Place and Price (and many marketers add a fifth, overarching “P” for People). http://www.shell-livewire.org/home/business-library/marketing-and-promotion/marketing-planning/marketing-mix-4ps/

Before a company can successfully market a product or service, they have to make sure that all of the other elements are right for their potential customers. If they can do that, promoting themselves is much easier, but if they get any of the other elements wrong then money spent on promotion can easily be wasted.

It’s very common for a business to put an advert out, in the local press, for example, spending a significant part or all of their marketing budget, and seeing little or nothing in the way of return. This means one of two things: either they chose the wrong promotional channel (“the paper is rubbish, I never get anything from it”), which they wouldn’t have done if they’d properly understood their target audience, or they didn’t properly work through the 4 P’s before they placed the advert. A company could place a brilliantly conceived and designed advert in a widely read magazine, designed by a talented artist and with wonderful copy from a professional writer, but if their price is way more than anyone is prepared to pay, the advert is wasted. Whatever the promotional channel, this concept applies – get your message right before you start telling people about it! Which leads us to:

2. Don’t underestimate the amount of noise out there

Even if you get your message exactly spot on, your potential customers are being so bombarded with promotional material that the likelihood of them playing attention to you is pretty low. Just think about the number of companies who are trying to promote themselves to you every day – adverts on TV, in the press, in your magazines, on the radio, on facebook and google and on loads of other websites you visit, companies trying to reach you through twitter, snapchat, Instagram, billboards on the side of the road, shops displaying offers in their windows, emails in your inbox! It’s a hurricane of noise over which it’s very difficult for a small business to be heard. This article in the Guardian talks about how it was15 years ago, and arguably it’s only got worse since. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/19/advertising.marketingandpr

For a business to have any hope at all of getting a customer’s attention, they have to work extremely hard, and they have to keep working. But more than that, they have to be different. And if you have to choose between being the best and being different, arguably being different is better, because if you can’t get people to pay attention to you, you can’t get them to buy from you, so they’ll never know how good you are! It’s not enough to put a few tweets out and write a story for your website, you have to be more interesting, more challenging, more active than your competition. For some inspiration, check out http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/50-guerrilla-marketing-tactics-you-should-be-using/. I can’t stress enough how much energy you have to put in to marketing.

3. Your marketing is never “done”

As we’ve already seen, marketing is about more than telling people about your products and services, it’s about understanding your customers and making sure that you give them what they need, so until you run out of potential customers you’re going to need to think about marketing! However, there can sometimes be a tendency with promotional activity to do a bit, then stop, then wonder why there’s a drop in sales. There are two facets to this. The first is plain laziness & complacency. There are a number of businesses that I’ve worked to produce a marketing plan and who see an upturn in business because of the promotional activity we support. They decide not to use us regularly (which is fine!) but then I’ll get a call 12 months later for some more support (which is great!). When we meet again, they will tell me how enquiries have dried up, how the recession is killing their business and the marketplace is dead, how people just aren’t buying, and when I ask what they’ve been doing to promote themselves the answer is always the same: nothing. Often they are literally sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring (and in one memorable occasion they were waiting for the phone to ring despite their number being out of date on their website and all their marketing materials). We do some work to re-energise them, or they pay us to do the work directly, and unsurprisingly the enquiries start to roll in again. The basic message to these types of businesses is get off your arse, get out there and start telling people what you do. Any time you spend sitting in the office waiting for people to call is wasted, and it’s basically down to laziness.

Luckily, that laziness is relatively uncommon, but the second, related facet is more common, and it’s the somewhat natural tendency to lose focus on marketing and promotion as you get busier. It can be time consuming for a small business to sort a website, send some emails, maybe do some flyers, sales letters, or cold calling, start doing a little bit on social media or pay someone to run some ads for your business, and often all of this will be done by the owner or office staff who might not have any real understanding of marketing. If their promotional efforts generate some enquires, then, it’s understandable that they might start focussing on their “real” job – actually delivering their product or service. Time and time again I see businesses get really busy and immediately start to neglect their marketing, and time and time again those businesses eventually run out of new enquiries. If they are smart or lucky, they will have enough momentum to start promoting themselves again and bring in another new set of enquiries, but I’ve seen businesses fail because of this “feast or famine” cycle. It’s a truism, but the best time for marketing activity is when you’re already busy – that means building time for marketing into your business, rather than trying to do it on top of everything else.

4. Don’t forget that time has a cost

A real reason for small businesses struggling to spend enough time on marketing as they grow is that they forget that time has a cost. Often in smaller companies the responsibility for marketing falls on the owner or director – often the same person who’s responsible for everything else as well, including actually doing the work! When the level of work is low, that’s okay, because any time spent on marketing is valuable, but the mistake comes when that time is not accounted for in pricing. If the business owner has to spend three hours networking to get a sale, then the profit in that sale has to cover the cost of those three hours. If it doesn’t then when the company gets busy, the owner has to do the three hours on top of everything else, they can’t afford to pay somebody else to do it for them. This is unbelievably common, and it’s probably the main reason that entrepreneurs start to get that crazy, over-busy, slightly wild look in their eyes. Luckily, it’s an easy one to solve. Work out how much per hour the time of the person doing your marketing is worth, and keep track of it. Add it to your physical marketing spend (on websites, design, printing, adverts, consultancy) and you’ll know how much it costs you to generate each sale, on average. If you then know how much an average sale generates, you’ve got the key data available that allows businesses to grow – it’s probably the most effective single thing you can do as a result of reading this article.

5. Don’t forget to improve conversion rates

The second most effective is to start paying just as much attention to the number of sales you make as the number of enquiries you generate. We see a lot of clients who have an overwhelming desire to get more leads, and their mantra is “more google ads, more website visits, more social media posts, more networking and exhibitions” – in short, they are always looking to out more in to the top of their sales funnel, in the expectation that they will get more sales at the end. This is on the whole true, but if your conversion rate isn’t good, then you can expend a huge amount more effort to see a small increase in sales. We can see this with a simple example:

Company A sells 10 gadgets each week. To sell those 10, they need to attract 1000 visitors to their website – 5% of visitors make an enquiry (so 50 enquiries), and 20% of enquiries turn in to sales, so 10 sales. To double their sales, the company needs to double their website visitors, so we somehow have to find another 1000 people each week. However, if the company can improve their two conversion rates, they can hit that target without any new visitors! A 50% improvement in the number of visitors who make an enquiry would give 75 enquiries per week, and if they combine that a 50% improvement in how many of those enquiries turn in to sales (so 30% of enquires buy, instead of 20%), they would sell 22.5 gadgets per week – more than doubling their previous sales!

This is a simplistic example, and it makes light of the hard work that would need to go in to improving those conversion rates. But often that work on improving the sales funnel (through better marketing processes) is way, way cheaper than trying to reach more and more potential customers.

6. Don’t choose a promotional channel “because everyone is doing it” and 7. Make sure that you are marketing today (and tomorrow) – not for yesterday

The final two mistakes are very different but share the same root causes. It’s increasingly hard to know where marketing budget is best spent, and everyone has an opinion. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard “you’ve got to be on Twitter because it’s the best way to promote your business!” Well here’s the truth – it isn’t and you don’t. For some businesses it’s great, for some it’s terrible, and the only business you should care about is yours. Replace ‘Twitter’ with ‘Facebook / Linkedin / Myspace / Snapchat / Adwords / the Wirral Globe website / beer mats down the pub’ and you’ve got a substantial portion of all the well-meaning but pretty hapless marketing advice from the last four or five years (well, maybe not the last two so much!). Choosing a marketing channel because everyone else seems to be doing it is the worst way to set your marketing strategy. Were you choose to promote yourself should be based on your customers, your products, and your budget. Everyone else’s opinion is irrelevant, and the only reason people listen to it and then spend time and money chasing down marketing dead-ends is a fear of missing out on opportunities.

That’s not to say that some of these opportunities aren’t right for you though – there are more options available than ever before, and it’s an exciting time in marketing for those business who ‘get it’. However, the other side of the same fear coin is sticking with old, ineffective marketing activities because they’ve always worked in the past. Local paper ads are the prime example of this, and I see companies spending tens of thousands on largely ineffective ads because they’ve done it that way for twenty years. Again, that’s not to say that local papers can’t be a valuable tool, for the right product and at a reasonable cost, but it is pretty clear that it’s not as effective as it once was, and wishing for the ‘glory days’ of the Yellow Pages, and business name starting with AAA, and some nice classified ads isn’t going to bring them back! The worst example of this I’ve seen is a retail business who primarily sold via newspaper ads, who had shrunk from a turnover of £10m+ in the late 1990’s to under £1m today. They didn’t have a website, because the owner thought it was a waste of money. He couldn’t understand why his business had shrunk!

If you think you might be making some (or all!) of these mistakes, we’d love to help you! Contact us to start getting your marketing right.

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