Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tags: advertising, Gillian O’Neil, Marketing, Moviecom.tv, podcast, video, youtube

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tags: hand shakes, Marketing, Networking, rapport, Richard Thomson

Andrew McRae kindly took a few hours out of his busy schedule to give a talk at our breakfast event at Centotre, Edinburgh on the 8 June. The importance of good customer service was the topic of Andrew’s 30 minute talk. Andrew is an architect at Simon Laird Associates and owner of Context Interiors, a homewares boutique in the Morningside district of Edinburgh.

Andrew McRae with his wife Alice at Context Interiors, Morningside, Edinburgh

While working at the city’s branch of John Lewis between 1993 and 2001 he learned that good customer service is a key factor in creating the right perception of the company. Today, quality customer service is more important than ever, especially since the internet and social media tools allow dissatisfied customers to vent their frustration. Such negative customer comments can undo all the years of hard work and expense that businesses spend on establishing themselves.

John Lewis’s approach to customer service and staff benefits made a big impression on Andrew when he started working at the Edinburgh store as a teenager. He has applied a similar ethos to his retail business, Context Interiors, and his work as an architect at Simon Laird Associates. Andrew worked at John Lewis part-time for eight years, starting while at secondary school, then during his studies at Edinburgh College of Art, and finally to help supplement his income while starting out as a junior architect.

During his time at John Lewis, Andrew was impressed by the store’s unique approach on everything from, the staff bonus scheme, regular staff training, the social events at the store’s bar and the hi-fi department. At the time they allowed customers to demo hi-fi separates before purchasing. The store’s vibrant social side was also significant, as it encouraged the strong team spirit.

Andrew is also inspired by other retail outlets, and was recently impressed by Richer Sounds, Edinburgh as the staff were knowledgeable and helpful. He approved of the sign at the counter, which reads:

1. The customer is always right

2. If the customer is wrong, refer to rule #1

While preparing to go on holiday he regularly uses the Trip Advisor website for reading reviews about hotels, restaurants and places of interest. On a recent visit to Dubai, Andrew was impressed by the very high standard of customer service, which made the holiday all the more enjoyable.

With online customer reviews on many websites, it is now very easy for a dissatisfied customer to vent their frustration or anger for all to see. Andrew explained that a few years ago while looking to buy a new car from a well-known outlet he immediately had second thoughts when he discovered bad reviews online.

However, should a business deliver good service consistently then it can breed loyalty and more business via word of mouth. This type of marketing is often overlooked by business owners, and yet there is no significant financial outlay. It only takes time and training to implement a customer service standard into a business.

Recently, John Lewis Partnership was named ‘Company of the Year by Scottish Business in the Community’. Its stores in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen were praised for their sustainable business practice. The business continues to innovate, for example, the Edinburgh branch has a home design adviser, Toby Durant, who can visit your home to help you make the right choices with re-decorating or interior design.

Context Interiors meanwhile, won the category ‘Emerging Retailer of the Year’ at the Scottish Retail Excellence Awards. In August 2010, a second store will open in Cockburn Street, Edinburgh which will sell a selection of home accessories along with quality gifts and souvenirs. Andrew is also working to build the online business and increase the range of products available at www.contextinteriors.co.uk.

Andrew ended his talk by presenting the draw prizes of a Context Interiors gift voucher to Marc Jones form Ice Bomb Design and a Chocolate Library ‘book’ about Edinburgh Castle to Chris Thomas from One Accounting.

Tags: context interiors, customer service, john lewis, Marketing

In this podcast, Andrew Forbes from The Rhetorical Company in Edinburgh (www.rhetoric.co.uk) explains how to communicate your message effectively when speaking in public. Since only memory affects behaviour, Andrews offers advice on how you should use this to your advantage, along with other techniques, such as the regency effect. Andrew’s tips are practical for large audiences, small groups and one-to-one meetings with colleagues, prospects, clients, etc.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tags: behaviour, Marketing, memory, podcast, public speaking

In this podcast, Derek Mair from Action Coach (www.actioncoach.com/derekmair) explains how strategic changes in a business can significantly increase profits. You can also watch a video of this talk on YouTube (www.youtube.com/6degreesnetworking)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tags: action coach, derek mair, Marketing, podcast, profits, strategy

Stephen Ng from Cubic Design (www.cubic-design.co.uk) Motherwell, Scotland, gives practical advice on how to create effective email marketing campaigns. You can view a video version on YouTube (www.youtube.com/6degreesnetworking).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tags: AIDA, design, email marketing, Marketing, podcast, spam filters

Does your marketing sell? by Ian Moore

Introduction
This book is essential reading for anyone who works in the marketing industry or anyone in business who wishes to maximise their company’s marketing efforts. This book is also recommend for any entrepreneur who doesn’t have a marketing background and is looking to work with a marketing or advertising agency for the first time.

This book provides a good grounding in what to be aware of in creating effective marketing materials. Whether it’s a brochure, leaflet, mailer, website or Yellow Pages advert. Even if you are not actually producing the materials yourself, it will give guidance to ensure that you don’t buy poorly conceived materials from a so called ‘expert’.

Extracts of this book are available on Google Books, so there is no excuse for not reading at least some of it to see if you like it. The author Ian Moore is a excellent authority of the subject of marketing. Having originally started as salesman in seventies, then working as copywriter for top London marketing agencies, then starting his own successful agency Blue-Chip Marketing in the nineties. Over the decades Mr Moore has worked for household names such as: Kimberly-Clark, Cadbury, Lloyds TSB, Reebok, Scottish and Newcastle, Walkers Crisps and Warburtons.

The author has a strong affinity with advertising legend David Ogilvy (who also worked as a salesman before entering the advertising industry). Both men are copywriters and believe in benefit driven headlines and copy. Ultimately, they believe that salesmanship will create a higher response and sales compared to marketing that is simply showmanship, or showing off.

The book is structured around Mr Moore’s personal take on the famous selling technique AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). This has been developed from his decades of experience. NEWAIDA is Mr Moore’s trademark for courses and workshops that takes the AIDA concept a stage further and more relevant for business today.

While it would be unfair and unethical of me to simply reveal all the concepts in the book on this blog, I will give an overview to whet you appetite. Let’s start with what this book can help you achieve (taken from the back cover).

Get four times as many customers to ready your adverts
Double the response rates to your mailers
Triple the uptake of your promotional offers
Employ the seven most powerful ways to gain attention
Write with the 100 most persuasive selling words

The missing ingredient
So why does one piece of marketing succeed where another fails? What is it that causes almost 20 times as many people to respond to one message than to another? Just how do you make your marketing sell?
It seems there’s a paradox. What well-intentioned marketers think they should do to make their marketing sell often doesn’t work. And that’s because they get salesmanship confused with showmanship.

Salesmanship is the missing ingredient in making your marketing sell. Salesmanship is the quiet skills of empathy and perception. These skills are often abandoned in modern marketing communications.

Very often advertising for big brands is arty or creative and doesn’t engage the majority of the audience. You might find an TV advert funny, but won’t remember the product. Very often the reader will be confused by the advert and not bother to read it, or solve the ‘riddle’. Adverts that capture the readers attention and appeal to them on the desired level, will resonate and be more successful.

I’ve always made it a golden rule never to propose anything – ranging from a rough idea for single advert to a complex multifaceted campaign – unless we could justify why we believed it would sell. If we couldn’t explain how it would engage the customer to achieve the desired outcome, it didn’t get presented. When you apply this discipline to your proposals, you find – magically – that the words of explanation come out in the simple language of salesmanship.

Navigation
Navigation is the first step in NEWAIDA. This chapter sets out principles in helping your customer to know what to think about and to create the desired reaction. If a customer doesn’t know what to do or think about within a few seconds they won’t engage with the marketing material and won’t go any further.

Ease
If the customer perceives your marketing to have too many hurdles they will fail to respond. This is very relevant where success of the campaign is dependant on the number of responses received. Making your marketing easy to use and engage will increase the number of responses. Supermarkets are filled with promotions, discount vouchers or competitions. Their success will depend on how easy it is for the customer to firstly participate, and secondly, if they perceive it as a good deal. If the promotion fails to do this, the response will be poor.

Wording
Since Mr Moore is a copywriter, it’s understandable why he has added this third topic to the AIDA concept. This is perhaps the most important subject of all. The key thing here is to write in your customer’s language.

Good salespeople are taught to speak the language of their customers. This is known as matching is used to build pace and rapport, by mirroring and complementing aspects of the other person. When you match, you show that you are willing to enter the other person’s model of the world – intuitively, they feel more at easy with you.

Seven deadly sins of marketing communications:
1. Hyperbole (exaggerated and bold claims that over promise and usually under deliver).
2. Cliches (example “The sky’s the limit!” any business can make these claims and they are usually meaningless).
3. Platitudes (meaningless headlines posing a something significant. Also, a competitor could also claim eg, ‘We’re the fastest)
4. Word play
5. Riddles
6. Writer’s fog (a formula to ensure the copy is not too dense with jargon, impersonal and verbose).
7. Designeritis (the design of the marketing taking priority of message and content. Gratuitous use of graphics).

Trade press advertising is viewed as rather unglamorous, and I assume that it was assigned to the agency’s most junior and inexperienced copywriters. Maybe these guys had never done a sales call in a corner shop, or been to a presentation at the likes of Asda head office. Whatever their excuse, it showed in their soapbox style presumptuously aimed at some great unseen yet miraculously enthralled crowd.

More practical copywriting advice
Write to a person and not to a crowd. Try to find the right tone. Make it businesslike yet friendly in tone. Keep it to the point. Make it fit consumption at any level, managing director to office junior.

When writing copy use two ‘you’s for every ‘we’

The reading age of the average supermarket shopper is 11.

Use the language of the people, avoid words with Latin or Old French origins. Avoid jargon also.

The brain is designed to hear language. We train our brains to convert it back into sounds when we read. Writing should be treated not as the written word, but as the spoken word. And surely this means a simple, conversational style.

Don’t use full points on headlines, magazines and newspapers don’t.

Imagery
The author does offer some advice on any images used in marketing by explaining that the visuals should do something useful: to enhance and dramatize recognition for your customer – of their need, or the category, or your product. Use it to dramatize the proposition.

Avoid what the author calls the ‘irrelevant simile’ – they prove nothing. For example, a blue-chip company wants to communicate ‘flexibility’ and uses an image a gymnast. Avoid this, people think it’s the analogous item that is being advertised.

From here on in the author gives insights and advice on approaching the classic AIDA selling concept. Below I have quoted key points from these chapters.

Attention
Adverts with benefits in their headlines are read by four times as many people as ads with no benefits in their headlines. For profitable attention, you need a benefit.

Make your advert newsworthy eg. ‘new improved’, ‘new advanced formula’. Use sensory language to engage the mind, such as the ‘The Inch War’ for Ryvita.

Interest
Key tips:
1. Write for the interested customer.
2. Seek out first-time buyers.
3. Key question: “Am I treating my customer as if they’re already interested?”

Content always beats form. A company newsletter can sometimes appear boastful and selfish. An internal staff one packed with stories and pics about them will be a success – because it’s about its customers (the staff).

Desire
You can’t make your customers need your product, but you find out whether they want it. The communication task, then, is to help them realize that they do.

Use layered delivery. In sales letter you should be able to just read the sub heads to understand the content of the letter.

There’s no such thing as long or short copy only enough copy. Give the customer a stream of relevant, interesting facts and benefits and they’ll stay with you.

The book ‘Positioning’ by Ries and Trout supports the theory that if you can’t get into your customer’s mind first, your best bet is to do it by reference to something they already understand and believe.

Action
1. Help your customer to say ‘yes’
2. Offer ‘carrots’ and incentives to encourage customers to respond to your marketing
3. Set a two dates for an offer deadline, date one big prize, date two smaller prize
4. Use the ‘mop-up’ technique to prompt lasped subscribers or customers who have failed to respond

Finally
I should add that this book is a pleasure to read, as it’s well-written and packed with real life examples and anecdotes to back up the author’s points. The review above is just some of the highlights, there is obviously more content in the book. I would recommend reading it once through, then dipping into chapters every now an then to refresh your memory and inspire you to create or ‘buy’ more effective marketing materials for your company. Read reviews on Amazon.

Tags: AIDA, David Ogilvy, effective, Ian Moore, Marketing, NEWAIDA, salesmanship, selling

Stephen Ng from Cubic Design kindly shared his expertise in email marketing at our breakfast event at the Corinthian Glasgow 4 November 2009.

Part 1. How to use Attention Interest Desire and Action (AIDA) in your email marketing

Part 2. How to avoid spam filters and general email marketing advice

Part 3. Design advice for email marketing

Part 4. Question & answer session

Tags: cubic, design, email, Marketing, recession, spam

On the 3 September 09 the 6 Degrees team were guests at the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) seminar at The Royal Scots Club, Edinburgh, Scotland. The seminar was presented by Mark Hunter from Tartan Media Productions and the subject was Web 2.0 websites and podcasting. Below is some of the main points from the seminar along with 6DN’s design agency’s experiences of using these channels.

For those who don’t know, Web 2.0 is the name for a relatively new website technology. Chances are you are probably using these websites: YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, MySpace, Twitter, Wikipedia, to name a few. Such websites basically allow you to interact with the content or add your own content such as photos, videos, music and text. This is also known as social media.

Podcasting is also another means of delivering video and speech online. Apple’s iTunes is one of the most popular channels for downloading podcasts. 6 Degrees Networking’s podcasts can now be obtained from the iTunes store and this blog (see podcasts category). More podcasts will be available soon.

Blogs
Blogs are a great way to attract traffic to your website, especially if its updated with new posts every week. Google loves blogs and many viewers often find your website by visiting your blog first. Marketeers are savvy to this and a good example of maximising this is the blog written by Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott Hotels. Mr Marriott writes succinct posts about issues he cares about and his travels. As a result the blog has proved popular and had generated business for the hotel chain. Many readers will no doubt have the blog in their RSS reader to keep up-to-date.

YouTube
Having a YouTube channel is a great way to drive traffic to your site and create awareness about your company. Most of you will have noticed while using Google to search for something YouTube videos appear in the results. Google owns YouTube so it naturally wants the videos to appear highly in the results. YouTube generates advertising revenue for Google so it wants as much traffic as possible.

Simply posting videos is not always enough. Very often the views will be less than a 1,000. The videos need to be compelling in some way and inspire the viewer to share it on Facebook, Twitter or simply email the link to someone else. This viral effect is something marketers should try to achieve with their content.

I know from experience that YouTube channels take time to establish (3-4 months at least) and the content must have a decent production values or work well on an emotional level. 6DN are establishing their channel at present.

Below, is one of the most popular YouTube videos of all time. It resonates because the parents have unwittingly filmed their sons just being natural, yet it is very funny and endearing. It was only posted on YouTube for fun but to date it has been watched over 100 million times. Any business would love this level popularity but it is very difficult to create on demand.

However, some brands have been created a buzz on YouTube. Cadbury (confectionery brand) was able to reverse it’s fortunes after a health scare in some of it’s chocolate brands. The series of adverts show on UK television were quickly posted on YouTube by the public and watched around the world. There is no dialogue in them so their appeal is far ranging.

YouTube can also be used by the public to vent their anger after receiving poor service from well known brands. Some might argue that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Perhaps Comcast have improved their customer service due this incident being posted on YouTube by an angry customer.

The desire to be successful with YouTube has lead to some companies and organisations to create videos that are essentially deceptive propaganda, this is known as astroturfing. Obviously, if a company is guilty of this the damage to their brand would be enormous.

Twitter
Twitter has received enormous publicity in 2009. While some are sceptical about its merits, companies can use it as an effective marketing tool. The website Twitter 101 gives various case studies. Dell computers use Twitter to publicise sales and discounts on their products, thereby increasing business as a result. 1 in 30 web hits comes from Twitter. The UK high street furniture chain Habitat got into trouble recently for exploiting Twitter in an unethical way. Read more here.

Finally
Thanks to Carl Gardiner from CIM for inviting us to the seminar and Mark Hunter for the excellent presentation. If you are concerned about the use of social sites affecting your employees productivity in the workplace the implementation of a system by Productivity Software would help restrict access to these websites during working hours.

Links, resources and books
Slideshare – PowerPoint slide sharing resource
Book: New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott
Book: Naked Conversation by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Book: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Tags: facebook, Marketing, podcast, social media, web 2.0, youtube