The 21 tricks of marketing
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Online advertising is flying. According to research by global media services agency ZenithOptimedia, internet advertising will outstrip radio advertising next year.
In the UK, it already has. The last set of figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau show online advertising in this country has grown 41.6 per cent year-on-year and is now worth £2 billion. By comparison, the rest of the sector struggled to post a collective gain of just 1.1 per cent.
Though this is quite a testament to the power of the web, it should be remembered that the lion’s share of ad expenditure still goes to traditional media. Around two-thirds globally, according to Zenith.
If you want to leave the opposition behind, online alone won’t cut it. The tried and trusted forms of direct marketing, fine-tuned with precision targeting, will make all the difference. Given the various media and myriad ways to experience a product or services, it’s the company with an integrated marketing strategy that will hit the jackpot.
1. Out-think competitors
Imagine conducting an MBO and then hiring a group sales and marketing director who spearheads a campaign that sees turnover rise by more than 300 per cent to over £120 million in under three years.
That’s what Robert Macmillan did when he hired Tony Massey in 2004 for HH Print Management (HHPM). Massey was given a blank canvas and a budget of £100,000.
Operating in a competitive B2B space, Massey realised that none of HHPM’s competitors had considered promoting themselves as a brand. ‘Our immediate competitors were borrowing from the market leaders in this area, and they were using heavy business jargon that was often out of context and inappropriate,’ he says.
Rather than regurgitate clichés about thought leadership and being the best, Massey says it was important to ‘develop a voice and adopt a language of our own’.
In 2005, an agency was hired to rebrand the entire business. ‘We’ve devised a completely new corporate identity. It was apparent that we needed to do this if we were going to stand out from our competitors and realise the opportunities that we thought were out there,’ he says.
2. Avoid fads
If your business model is bringing in money, then you can bet that within a year there’ll be people trying to replicate your success.
‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ says Eric Baker, founder and CEO of the online ticket exchange service Viagogo. ‘The thing is that followers always copy what you were doing six to 12 months ago.’
Baker should know, he saw it with his other online ticketing outfit StubHub.com, which he sold to eBay for US$307 million (£150 million) earlier this year. He says that imitators often go for the easy option, especially in online exercises, making the fundamental mistake of forgetting â“ or not knowing â“ a company’s core marketing message.
Baker says that Viagogo has a simple way to describe what it does. He explains: ‘When someone imitates, they tend to muddle the message. That makes it harder to understand what the commercial proposition is. It’s not only imitators that do this, a lot of people who are starting businesses make these mistakes. It’s obvious that it’s gimmicky and is being used to try and make a quick buck.’
3. Clean mailing lists
‘If I get a flyer or letter through the post and something is misspelt, it feels like real junk,’ says Michael Howard, the CEO of office design specialist Maris Interiors.
As a result, Howard says that
he has an in-house team who spend a lot of time cleaning lists before a direct mailing (DM) campaign to make the information ‘as close to perfect as possible’.
Moreover, it’s vital to connect with the right people. Throughout its marketing drive, HHPM felt that rivals weren’t reaching key decision makers in organisations and this was an area to capitalise on.
‘We used business intelligence tools to map the market, and the organisations within different markets, and then identified who the decision makers were within the organisations,’ says Massey, noting that outfits like Dun & Bradstreet and OneSource proved particularly useful because of the information they can provide.
‘If you want to know what is happening [in your market] or you want to slice and dice the data, there are tools out there that enable you to do that, although they’re not cheap,’ he adds.
4. Follow your nose
If marketing is going through a bad time at the moment, it comes as no surprise to BRAND sense’s executive director, Simon Harrop.
‘Eighty-three per cent of all marketing expenditure is to the eyes alone,’ he says. ‘That’s against a background of falling spend in advertising, television and the press. Marketing agencies are realising they’re not delivering, so they’re panicking and changing the mix. They’re moving to outdoors or online, but they’re not really getting to the heart of the problem. If you want to emotionally engage with consumers then you can’t rely on your eyes alone.’
Harrop worked with Lloyds TSB on its branding campaign, where the emphasis was on newness and being personable. He comments: ‘We created a fragrance that was driven by the attributes of fresh and new, subtly applying it to the branches and the literature inside.’
One of the results of this, he says, was that queuing times were perceived to be shorter by customers. ‘There was an improved perception of the retail environment and brand,’ he says, suggesting that we need to ‘unlearn the sensory bias towards the visual’.
Biology, it seems, is the reason why a sensual approach may be more effective. Harrop states: ‘Sight and sound enter the cortex part of the brain that evolved at a later stage; it’s the mammalian section that controls rational thought. It’s here that you have the screening senses on things you hear and see.
‘The sense of taste and smell and, to a certain extent, touch, have a direct connection to the limbic system. That’s the reptilian part of our brain that developed first and controls emotions and memory.’
In short, traditional marketing doesn’t stand a chance. ‘Over-reliance on visual stimulus is not only a bad move because of the fragmentation of the media, it’s not even going to the parts of the brain that will create any deep emotional attachment,’ he says.
5. Get on TV & radio
Although television and radio are heavily maligned as an advertising tool, they remain an effective means to reach a large audience in an instant.
Julian Healey, head of marketing at Key Retirement Solutions (KRS), which specialises in equity releases, says TV serves the company well: ‘We treat it as a direct response mechanism. We don’t measure any particular impact on branding, viewing it purely on its own merits, ie generating calls into our call centre and leads onto our website.’
Using satellite channels and Channel Five, Healey says that KRS works hard to buy airtime in the mornings and during programmes they know its audience will be watching. ‘We wouldn’t go on peak viewing in the evening as it’s expensive and our target market is less likely to be watching,’ he says.
Baker expects to use TV and radio advertising for Viagogo in the future, but is wary after getting very little feedback when taking that route in the early days of StubHub.com.
Healey observes that while the response from TV is good, ‘it’s not as effective as the national press’.
Click here to view Global advertising expenditure by medium table
6. Establish your objectives
‘People get excited about advertising as they think it’s glamorous,’ says Helen Westgate, MD of Westgate Communications. ‘But how do you know if an ad is going to be seen by the right people?’
It’s a point made by Mark Roy, chief executive of The REaD Group, which cleans DM data: ‘With TV, businesses often don’t have a clue what’s happening. It may placate the chairman’s wife as she tells her friends that her husband’s company is on the television, but no-one really has any idea what impact it has on sales.’
In reality, sales might not be the primary objective. Westgate says: ‘There is a difference between raising brand awareness and generating prospects. If it’s the latter, that’s a completely different exercise so you might be better off choosing to advertise in a niche title with 2,000 subscribers who will be in your space.
‘Unfortunately, a lot of the time people think that if they place an ad then business is going to walk through the door when that isn’t the case.
‘A successful marketing programme has got to be a building process and it can’t be about one article or advert after which you expect an immediate phonecall.’
7. Go direct
According to Roy, about five billion DM items are sent out every year at a cost of around £9 billion. ‘It’s not a cottage industry,’ he observes, pointing to the success of the financial services industry in mailing new offers for loans, credit cards and saving accounts.
The reason for DM’s popularity during the past 20 years is that it’s measurable.
A good response rate is generally thought to be 0.5 per cent to four per cent.
Maris Interiors’ Howard finds DM extremely effective: ‘We have a mailing list with around 50,000 names on it and we’ll probably spend around £25,000 for a mailshot. We sell a high-value service so the cost is irrelevant as all we need is one deal and that’ll pay for the whole year.’
For Howard, if a DM campaign is to work there needs to be a call to action, such as asking a prospect to ring you through an offer.
‘Putting an advert in the paper and hoping someone is going to call is pretty poor,’ he says. ‘A lot of flyers are sent out and they’re not making anything happen.’
This is a view based on personal experience. He says: ‘We’ve done advertising in the past that basically says: “Aren’t we good.” That pretty much earns you zero results.’
8. Consider events
Opinion is split on the usefulness of events. Dawn McEwen, head of marketing for law firm Davenport Lyons, states that holding a seminar or briefing on a specific topic is a good way to bring people together and generate business.
That may be specific to the professional services sector, as both HHPM’s Massey and Viagogo’s Baker speak of disappointments in this area.
Massey says: ‘We got involved in events and seminars where huge claims were made about the people attending, but I’ve found that a lot of the delegates tend not to have a purchase in mind. You can end up wasting £10,000 on these things.’
Baker comments: ‘When we first started out, we tried mass marketing, such as TV and big glitzy events and launch parties and that didn’t really make a difference.’
After burning cash, it was time to do some bootstrapping and that’s when Baker understood how to get ‘your marketing message down to its basic proposition’.
Click here to view advertising expenditure by region table
9. Keep hold of your clients
In the race to win new business, you can forget about the customers already on your database. ‘Client retention is vital,’ says McEwen.
She tells partners at Davenport Lyons that, as a general rule of thumb, it’s five times more expensive to win new clients than to retain existing ones. ‘Before you even get onto someone’s radar, you need to establish nine points of contact before you get anywhere, never mind about the selling process,’ she says.
McEwen tells the partners to focus on what she calls the four Ks: know the issues that your clients face; know their business; know the sector they operate in; and know your own product and how to sell it.
With this in mind, she believes that partners can pick up other business from a client. ‘For every explicit legal need they may have, underneath there may be some hidden, additional issue,’ she says.
10. Target your audience
It’s the mantra of marketing experts: work out who you’re targeting, know your market and identify your audience.
HHPM’s Massey says the company’s strong growth is partly attributable to its overseas expansion. ‘We’ve been reaching specifically for organisations in the Fortune 1000,’ he says.
These businesses often have a ‘buyer’ who is responsible for making decisions on a regional or pan-regional basis. ‘It’s this person who may not necessarily have been approached directly by vendors who can support their needs. In our space, they might be conducting business with 200 or more people across Europe,’ says Massey.
This strategy has seen big organisations signing contracts with HHPM. In three years, the company has expanded its presence to over 13 countries, including France, Germany, Poland, India and the US. ‘Our overseas operations now account for 40 per cent of the group’s turnover,’ he says.
For McEwen, engagement with the partners at the firm is crucial when deciding what strategy should be adopted: ‘You shouldn’t be imposing business and marketing plans on those who are going to sell your products and services. It has to be a process where you have the whole team involved to get buy-in and engagement.’
11. Don’t rush into digital
The ability to track online marketing campaigns makes the digital arena an attractive proposition. If the hype is to be believed, pay enough attention to detail and understand your customers and you can guarantee your return on investment.
Scepticism lingers in some quarters. Westgate says: ‘Digital marketing is the next big thing, but there is a fear of a dotcom situation: of entering digital marketing before it’s really happened.
‘From a communications point of view, everybody knows they ought to be doing it, but many businesses are still unsure about how it should be done.’
12. Exploit email
‘People are taking an offline view to marketing on the web,’ says Mark Grey, MD of e-marketing services agency Abachi. ‘They think that the techniques that work for DM work on email and they don’t.’
For Grey, businesses have a tendency to go for an email campaign because it’s cheaper. ‘The money that you save in expediting the campaign should be put into developing the creative,’ he says.
‘This is a rarefied skill as there are copywriters who can go from writing brochureware to writing web copy, which is essentially brochureware, but it’s unusual to find people who can then go on and write a compelling email that will be opened and read.’
Andrew Robinson, managing director of email marketing specialist Lyris, claims that search engine optimisation techniques, or pay-per-click advertising, will drive about 12 per cent of traffic to your site, but emails will produce 20 to 30 per cent of traffic. ‘It really is a serious player,’ he says.
That means a lot of businesses will be sending emails and, as a result, standard, non-personalised messages will no longer suffice. ‘In two to three years, generic information will be perceived as spam,’ adds Robinson.
13. Move with the times
Back in 1999, when Ginna Clark was trying to get the online catalogue site Catalink.com up and running, she used to fax screenshots of the site to potential clients to show it worked. ‘Back then, most of them didn’t have a web presence,’ she says.
How quickly things have changed. Healey observes that newspapers and TV generate the bulk of KRS’s leads, but online is growing fast. ‘It’s 15 to 20 per cent of our total business and this is from an older demographic who are perceived to be not especially web savvy,’ he comments.
McEwen says that alerts and updates are proving popular. ‘You don’t want to abandon hard copy projects, but you need to move with the times,’ she comments. ‘A lot of our clients are saying: “Give me a paragraph in a particular area of the law.” So we’ll send them the information that is important for their business, then link that email back to our site.’
14. Try online sampling
‘Using email is direct marketing on speed,’ says Robinson, referring to how you assess your target market online.
He uses the classic example of splitting potential customers into category A and B: ‘When you’re testing one message against another in a sample, before you send it to a whole group you can get your results back in an hour with email. If you use direct marketing, it’ll take weeks.’
15. Beware cynicism
The use of text messages to advertise a product or service, such as a house that has come on the market or a two-week cruise in the Caribbean that can be booked, has become more widespread, offering a personalised message to its intended recipient.
Text message marketing may suffer the same fate as email, as, for the latter, no matter how personalised the message is, people tend to skim read them. Howard definitely thinks so: ‘I had 84 emails when I got into work and spent most of the morning going delete, delete, delete.
‘I think a lot of people are doing that now as email’s so overcooked. I’m not saying it doesn’t work per se, but we’ve tried it by hiring an agency and had almost zero results.’
The REaD Group’s Roy is also sceptical: ‘The online guys are saying the world is fantastic. Give it five years and it won’t be. There is still a lot of cynicism and an increasing amount of suspicion, especially over security, about online.’
16. Do your research
Organising a piece of research or a report can do wonders for your brand and profile.
Davenport Lyons’ McEwen comments: ‘We’re known as a firm that specialises in IP [intellectual property] so last year we commissioned an annual report called Counterfeiting Luxury: Exposing the Myths, which looked at consumer attitudes to luxury goods.’
It gained coverage in the national press and, claims McEwen, generated leads for the firm.
Howard struck on the idea of writing guidebooks for when people move offices: ‘We sent out a mailshot to people in our target market and asked them if they would like a free copy.
‘We received loads of responses and that gave us lots of leads about people who potentially wanted their offices fitted out.’
A whole series has been written. Howard says that it’s generated around £18 million worth of business in three years.
17. Spin it right
An interview in the trade press or national media may stir interest in what you’re doing. The benefits are only to be had, however, when your public relations are done properly.
‘You need to make sure that your message is newsworthy,’ says Viagogo’s Baker, who has been on Channel Four and Sky news after forming high-profile partnerships with football clubs Chelsea, Manchester United and Everton.
Using the media doesn’t have to be the only way to give your company a stellar reputation. Taking a caring approach can also generate effective publicity. Be it going carbon neutral, recycling, using biofuel or helping the community, an environmentally friendly or social initiative can make your service or product that bit more attractive.
‘Green credentials help your business,’ says Westgate. ‘It makes people have warm feelings about what you do.’
18. Give a guarantee
Kathryn Lennon, the MD of marketing consultancy Tangerine Trees, observes that explicit guarantees can be a useful means to ensure a sale.
If a customer is at that buying point, the one final assurance can, she says, ensure the deal is closed. ‘By making the guarantee a powerful condition of sale, you can state specifically how the customer will come out protected, advantaged and ahead of the game,’ she says.
In this internet age where purchases are made without ever seeing a face, consumers are increasingly wary about who they can trust. For online transactions, a guarantee can be the difference between success or failure. Baker observes: ‘If you’re not delivering on your marketing message then the game’s going to be over for you as you can only fool people for so long.’
19. Find your demographic
What’s the profile of your customer? Where is your service or product most likely to be appreciated? How can you match the two together?
The REaD Group’s Roy observes that there is a wealth of complex tools out there to identify who you’re selling to and what makes customers tick.
It’s moving at a pace and he notes that modelling systems exist, which claim to predict when certain kinds of people are likely to move into buying cycles. ‘Most of the time it’s complete rubbish,’ states Roy. ‘It’s a lot better than doing nothing, but you’re still grasping at straws.’
For Roy, it makes sense to stick to what’s known to work and that’s basic geographic information suggestions (GIS). ‘If you’re living in Deptford, your profile is clearly quite different from someone who is living in Mayfair,’ he says.
20. Don’t lose touch
Keeping close to your customers is essential, but if you’re a CEO then you should also be in regular contact with your marketing department to make sure things are being done according to plan.
Westgate says: ‘If you’re not talking to people regularly, then you don’t know what’s going on. Things change quickly and you need to be fleet of foot.’
She believes in weekly updates from marketing departments and if a channel simply isn’t working, her response is simple: ‘Change it.’
Davenport Lyons’ McEwen highlights the necessity for constant monitoring of campaigns. ‘After six months, if you’re going after one market and it’s really not happened, you need to adjust it,’ she says.
21. Arrange your approach
If a marketing campaign is to be effective, then it needs to form part of an overall, layered strategy. When HHPM’s Massey started at the company, he soon brought in people he’d worked with at previous organisations, building up expertise in telemarketing, consultative sales and digital communications. Over time, this meant that marketing and sales were neatly integrated.
He explains: ‘The amount of science you can apply to campaigns now is unbelievable, in terms of how you can track email campaigns and align this to highly targeted telemarketing.
‘We have brought the latter function in-house as we think it’s such an important part of what we do. We don’t use external call centres or anything like that.’
It means that the company has ‘control of every touchpoint, right from that first bit of dialogue’.
Westgate dryly observes that, in reality, there ‘is nothing magic or tricky about marketing’. It involves combining many elements, such as: targeting; market research; experience of clients; and knowledge of the market. This information then has to be synthesised, processed and measured.
Fundamentally, regardless of tricks and buzzwords and technology, you need to be sure what you are selling is actually serving a purpose.
Baker puts it nicely: ‘A marketing strategy can only dress up a pig so much.’