Archive for the 'Sales & Marketing' Category

The new PR

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Business Link
on 18 July, 2008
in Sales & Marketing
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The PR industry is enjoying a new age of credibility. How long that lasts may depend on the industry’s response to the web and new media. 

Last year an online war of words broke out between two heavyweight PR thinkers from the US; Brian Solis - president of award-winning PR agency FutureWorks, and PRWeek - the industry-leading trade magazine for the PR industry. Rather unintentionally, their debate characterised the opportunities and challenges faced by the new PR.

The story began with Brian blogging that PR had reached “2.0″ status: “It is because of the Web… The evolution of the Web has forced communications professionals to step out from behind the ‘great wall of PR’ to interact with people formerly known as the audience.” PR 2.0 provides opportunities to “engage directly with a new set of accidental influencers”, “talk with customers directly”, and establish a more “conversational dialogue” with audiences. This sea-change is so great that this new age equates to second generation PR, Brian argues.

A few days later PRWeek ran an article which overlooked Brian and PR 2.0 completely, instead claiming “PR 3.0″ is where it’s at. The publication argued that the PR industry has already lived through its second age, during which it has evolved from more traditional media roots towards fulfilling additional functions more closely connected and important to corporate strategy. It was this evolution that brought the industry forward to its third age, in which PR is a mature, confident industry that has become an indispensable part of so many organisations. Their argument was based on evidence of PR’s new found credibility at board-level, and on the industry’s growth in revenue and staffing over the past decade.

After several passionate exchanges both sides in the debate began to agree. They first put aside the ‘dot oh’ number lunacy to concentrate on what influence the digital age has had on PR. PRWeek admitted they had glossed over the importance of the web and new media to the PR industry of today. And Brian admitted that even though the web has had a huge influence on PR, many industry professionals still don’t “get it” when it comes to the web and new media. In the end, they concluded that PR’s old challenges have been largely overcome, but new ones have taken their place.

The lessons learned during this debate hold great resonance to this day. Today, you might agree that the PR industry is a new-and-improved version of itself, with a consistent track record for delivering tangible results. But today, PR faces a whole new set of challenges from the web and new media. These new communications channels are already offering opportunities for some, but many in the industry still don’t “get it”. That fact alone may damage PR’s new found reputation as a key deliverer of objectives, if too many mistakes are made on the road to web and new media enlightenment.

A 2005 study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research found that the PR industry in the UK employs over 48,000 people, with more than 80 per cent working in-house. That’s lots of people who need to adapt all at once. In-house PR professionals must look forward to new media and the web to stay competitive, but they must also maintain focus on the good things they are already doing. Businesses that outsource PR to specialist agencies may stay closer to the pulse of next generation PR, but like their in-house counterparts, they must not let their PR people get too carried away with web and new media mania. The PR of the last ten years - the good work that’s given PR its stellar reputation - must not be forgotten.

PR has evolved, but it has a lot yet to learn. The web and new media provide new opportunities, but only for those who really understand how to rise to the challenge. A future filled with failed web and new media PR initiatives may do more harm than good to an industry still enjoying its new found credibility. That means PR professionals must look past the hype, and begin to really understand where new communications methods sit within the new PR’s toolbox.

More info - PR: the basics

Top ten tips for successful copywriting

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Business Link
on 13 May, 2008
in Sales & Marketing and Top Tips
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Good copywriting grabs attention, gives clarity to your message, and gets you business.

1. Think, then write

Clear thinking is the key to clear writing. Think what you want to say, then write it as simply as possible. Writing, editing and proofing are distractions that muddle your thoughts. Neglect these tasks for a minute and concentrate on what you want to say. Then, simply, say it.

2. Define your key messages

There are two categories of copy: your key messages, and everything else. Everything else is important, but defining key messages first ensures they don’t get forgotten, diluted or buried. Write them down and underline them. Order them by importance. Choose the ones you want to talk about first and last. Do this and you have defined a solid structure to build on.

3. The importance of style

You know what you want to say. How you say it could determine who reads it, engages with it or responds to it. Writing style is a subtle reflection of your own style - as a person, business or brand. How formal do you wish to be? Or put another way: how informal d’ya wanna be? Should you be a spokesman, friend, superior or an equal? Your use of language establishes perceptions - positive or negative - so be conscious of your style and control it. Remember: your company may already have a style guide to adhere to which ensures consistency and clarity of communications. If not (and you have a lot of people writing copy), perhaps it should.

4. Know your readers’ needs

Getting inside the head - and heart - of your audience helps you strike the right chord. People have practical needs (to be healthy) and emotional needs (to look great on the beach). Effectively selling a low-fat cereal might require you to satisfy both needs; the very reason why TV ads often show beautiful people enjoying beautifully healthy lifestyles. There is a saying: “people buy on emotion and justify with logic”, and it illustrates the point that, very often, emotional needs are more influential than practical ones. Even though the practical ones are still important.

5. Let benefits lead

A one per cent fat content is a feature of low-fat cereal. The benefit being that you’ll be healthier and slimmer than if you carry on eating those fry-ups (better still, you’ll look fantastic on the beach!). Features are important, but benefits tend to put features into context for the reader, making their value easier to see.

6. Use headlines

Headlines grab attention and make you want more. Big, bold, underlined, colourful, distinct, quick and easy. Keep them short but meaningful. Usually a sentence or two is enough to make a point. Think need, think benefits, think key messages. Think about intriguing and teasing, but also think about informing: people look at headlines when deciding whether to read on. Remembering that is crucial, because a bad headline can stop your reader before they even start.

7. Get to the point

Every sentence counts, but the first one is crucial. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage describes the paragraph as ‘a unit of thought’. If a paragraph is a unit of thought, the first sentence is what makes your point. Again, be conscious of benefits and needs (as discussed earlier), because the quicker you focus on them the better.

8. All else leads to action

Remember AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action): the four stage sales process. By now your writing should have taken the customer through the first three steps. You have snappy titles and engaging headlines; and succinct, to-the-point paragraphs that highlight benefits and connect with the reader’s emotional and practical needs. The reader is poised and ready for action. Give them an easy, appropriate way to act, and they will do so.

9. Edit

Editing should involve an appraisal of every sentence. What is the sentence trying say? Do you need to say it? Could it be put more shortly or clearly? Are paragraphs properly constructed? Are they clear ‘units of thought’? There are many more questions to ask of your copy. Think back over the previous tips, remember your objectives and the principles of good copywriting, and evaluate everything. As your writing skills begin to improve you’ll find you need to edit less. Remember: if you can, leave a day or two between writing and editing; a fresh mind helps most things.

10. Proof, proof, proof

The odd mistake is sometimes forgivable, but you should aim to make none. At best they undermine the credibility of your voice. At worst they cost you dearly (think mistakes with pricing, event dates, or contact details). Check your copy, word by word, line by line. Again and again. Ask others for help. Take a break and proof with a fresh head. Proof until you stop finding mistakes, then proof again. Everyone usually has their own method for proofing, but however boring or unnecessary you find it, you should do it.

New business worksheets

Published
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Business Link
on 17 March, 2008
in Management & Leadership, News & Opportunities, Sales & Marketing, Strategy & Operations and Top Tips
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Business Link has designed a new range of practical guides and worksheets that can be used to capture your ideas, explore aspects of your business and help you think about the questions you should be asking to take your business to the next stage.

Starting your business - a plan for success

Starting a business is exciting but daunting - you need all the assistance that you can get. This worksheet highlights the key areas that you need to focus on.

Read our guide: Starting your business - a plan for success.

Running your business - a guide to being more efficient and competitive

Well structured food for thought exploring the areas you should be looking at and raising questions you should be asking to capitalise on the full potential of your business.

Read our guide: Running your business - a guide to being more efficient and competitive

Growing your business - a guide to turning ambitions into reality

Businesses cannot stand still - they must constantly find ways to move forward and grow. This worksheet has been designed to help you take your business to the next level.

Read our guide: Growing your business - a guide to turning ambitions into reality

Video interviews - see how we work with businesses

See how our service could work with your business by watching our series of short video clips: http://www.thinkbusinesslink.com/interviews/

Business awards: the best in the business

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Business Link
on 17 March, 2008
in Sales & Marketing and Strategy & Operations
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Ask an award winner how they feel and you might be told that they didn’t think they had a chance of winning. Sometimes it’s hard to fully appreciate the significance of your own achievements - even harder to believe you are the best in the business.

In many ways such modesty represents the biggest challenge to overcome when thinking of applying for a business award. If you don’t think you are going to win, why bother? This attitude prevents many firms from entering business awards in the first place. But of course, the more pertinent questions may be: What have you got to lose? Or more importantly, what have you got to gain?

The only thing you stand to lose - aside from a touch of pride and a bit of time - is the awards competition itself. But even if you don’t win, the steps you take when entering or taking part could help you review your business performance and thus help it develop. Let’s say the application process asks you to evaluate your success based on several different factors, such as customer service, innovation, sales performance or operational efficiency. At best, the act of putting your success into words is a great boost to your confidence. At worst, the process may highlight areas where you need to improve.

Then there is the question of what you have to gain. First comes recognition, both with respect to your own achievements among peers in your industry - but also amongst customers, who will associate your business with success and prestige. This should increase their respect and loyalty towards your brand, and also give them a reason to feel good about themselves. Everybody likes to back a winner.

Winning business awards is also priceless from a promotional point of view. You will very quickly see the value in adding ‘award-winning’ to your ‘about us’ blurb, your flyers, product packaging, sales presentations, advertisements, and anywhere else you care to shout about your success. It makes consumers and competitors take note - it makes you seem unique and better - opening the door to new business. The PR and word-of-mouth opportunities are equally compelling. Local media may enjoy publishing stories of regional success, and if that happens word travels fast.

Of course, despite all the benefits, you may still be left wondering whether business awards are really just a game for the elite - the businesses at the cutting edge of technology or working in the most fashionable of industries. This may sometimes be the case, but often, business awards are less concerned by glamour and more by drive, performance and measurable results, whether that comes from a business working in new media, manufacturing, textiles, healthcare, or any number of other industries. And often, it’s not a case of what you do but how you do it. To name a few examples, business awards look for measures such as how you out-performed on your business plan, how you made your business a satisfying place to work, how you provided excellent customer service, or your versatility and imagination at solving your biggest problems.

You may need to buy a ticket to win the lottery, but to win a business award, it’s less about crossing your fingers and more about showcasing your hard work, determination and excellence. Someone has to win, and it really could be you.

Click here to view a list of current and future regional business awards

Customer care: the personal touch

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Business Link
on 18 February, 2008
in Sales & Marketing
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A small business can be a better business by fostering excellent customer care. Indeed, it could be a key quality that differentiates a business from its bigger rivals. So much so that many large and growing firms go to great lengths to maintain the personal touch. It’s part of what keeps customers coming back for more.

In its simplest form, customer care is way of thinking. Many small businesses are hungry for new customers and passionate about keeping them. As a result, they may naturally invest more time into building one-to-one relationships with customers, or choose to ‘go the extra mile’. This could mean offering discounted prices to loyal customers, doing a bit extra without charging for it, or possibly just talking closely with customers about how they could be better served. There are many approaches, but often, it’s a business’s attitude, passion and commitment to the customer experience that counts.

Of course, customer care is often more complicated than that. Especially for large or growing businesses, where a more systematic approach may be required. For example, a business with thousands of customers may employ database technologies to segment customers into groups, in order to understand and serve them more effectively, or to identify lapsed customers so that efforts can be made to attract them back. Similarly, businesses with lots of employees - whose people perhaps don’t care so intrinsically for customer care - may struggle to maintain the personal touch, and as a result might have to encourage employees to care through training or incentives. Such issues might be especially important for growing businesses, where the transition away from close customer relationships may affect customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Big corporations often spend millions investing in customer care, and still fail to get it right. Conversely, a small business may spend nothing and deliver a truly unrivalled customer experience. This indicates that both tangible and intangible influences are vital to great customer care. In short, customer care is both a science and an art.

For businesses of any size, customer care offers a very real opportunity for competitive advantage. And crucially, it cannot be easily bought. It’s a unique opportunity to be different and better than the rest, and it should be treated as such.

More info - Manage your customer care

Assessing customer value

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Business Link
on 28 January, 2008
in Sales & Marketing
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Your customers are your most valuable asset. Ultimately, any business is weak without them. But each customer is different, offering a unique level of value to your business. By identifying and nurturing your most valuable customers, you can sell more, increase your profitability and grow your business.

Customer value can be viewed from three distinct perspectives:

• Current value is a measurement of current customer profitability, based on the products and services that customers have previously consumed.
• Lifetime value is an extrapolation of current value, which aims to predict a customer’s future spending based on previous consumption habits.
• Potential value seeks to estimate a customer’s propensity to become significantly more profitable in the future.

It’s important to remember that profitability by definition takes into account the costs you incurred when delivering products and services to customers. You may spend more time or money acquiring and servicing some customers than others, or you might charge higher prices to different customers in exchange for different levels of effort. In other words, customer value is more than just the sum of a customer’s spending. It’s a balance of that sum against the time, effort and money you spent on that customer.

Of course, when measuring the lifetime or potential value of customers, nothing is certain. High value customers may buck the trend, deciding to purchase elsewhere or curb their spending. Conversely, low value customers may become exponentially more profitable. Nevertheless, making sense of customer value - both current and potential - helps focus resources and crucially helps minimise the chance of high value customers going elsewhere.

Tracking spending habits and measuring customer profitability can be difficult tasks, so much so that large organisations with thousands or millions of customers invest heavily in gathering and analysing data in order to group customers by value. But businesses of any size can make use of such approaches. A small company selling products or services to a handful of clients could quite easily find the information they need to analyse customer behaviours. And though perhaps less systematically, could seek to predict a customer’s future spending and profitability. Even companies with more than a few customers can make sense of customer value by employing straightforward data collection and analysis methods to capture and interpret data. 

For any business of any size, the focus when assessing customer value should be on collecting the right information and subsequently evaluating it in the right ways. The task may be crude or complex, but either way the process should provide some level of insight into which customers offer most value to your business.

Learn more about assessing customer value - Identify and sell more to your most valuable customers

Get involved in Business Networking

Published
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Business Link
on 28 January, 2008
in News & Opportunities and Sales & Marketing
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Networking is a simple concept with the basic aim of bringing people and businesses together. It’s a chance for businesses to showcase or share their experience and knowledge, seek help and guidance, collaborate, find sales leads and customers, or maybe just swap contacts details. In short, the focus is on linking up like-minded people so that something positive can happen.

Traditional real life networks can sometimes be formal groups, with rules about who can participate. For example, there may be set joining criteria in order to attract members with common attitudes or characteristics (such as company size or background). This is not intended to foster a ‘clique’ - it’s really about maintaining relevance so that attendees can get equal value from the networking experience. Such groups encourage highly engaged participants, who recognise their role in contributing to the overall networking dynamic.

Of course, not all business networking is so involved. One recent trend to hit the business world is the emergence of ‘speed networking’, which are casual events based on the speed dating concept where participants spend just a few minutes talking to each other. There are usually less restrictions about who can take part, the assumption being that although there is a higher probability that participants will bump into undesirable contacts, they will not have to spend too much time with them and can move on to meet others as quickly as possible.

Online networking is another growing marketplace where business people can link up without leaving their desks. ‘LinkedIn’ is an online business community based on the concept of building a network of ‘trusted contacts’. ‘BT Tradespace’ aims to link small businesses, individual sellers and customers, through its online community and business listings. Focus is again on building trust - this time through user comments, reviews and ratings. Such sites aim to build trust through clever technology, rather than through personal judgement resulting from face to face contact.

The involved membership only approach, and the high volume approaches like speed networking and online communities represent two extremes when it comes to business networking. There is in fact much more in between, such as networking breakfasts where business people simply sit down to eat with like minded peers, and formal or informal networking events held by local Chambers of Commerce or other business support organisations. The trick is to do a bit of research to find out what’s going on in your local area. Once you have found a networking approach you are comfortable with, all that is left to do is get involved!

Find out more - Learning through networking with others

What makes your business, products or services unique?

Published
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Business Link
on 21 November, 2007
in Sales & Marketing
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A unique selling point is a differentiator which distinguishes your business, products or services from others. It helps you communicate key benefits, get new customers, and establish a competitive advantage.

First you need to outline the features of your business, products or services. That is, the distinctive attributes - as you see them. Second, you should seek to understand why your customers come to you, and why and how they use your products or services. Third, you need to understand your competitors, specifically why and how their business, products or services differentiate from yours.

Missing a step in this process can be problematic. The way you see your business, products or services may be different from how your customers perceive them. You may also believe you are unique, when in fact competitors offer similar offerings. If you begin to define your unique selling point based on incomplete or misguided perceptions, you may end up sending the wrong message entirely.

But that’s just the beginning. Once you have completed these 3 initial steps, you can begin defining what your unique selling point is.

Your new found intelligence helps you identify the key benefits you offer. These might be benefits that satisfy key customer needs, or fill gaps that exist in the current marketplace. For example, if you identify that customers value you because you offer exceptional customer service, you may begin to more explicitly position this benefit via your marketing messages. Or, if competitors focus on exceptionally high quality, you might consider positioning yourself at the budget end of the market, especially if your intelligence highlights an untapped audience.

But remember - whilst various customer, market and competitive insights may influence many areas of your marketing activity, your unique selling point is intended to be just that - unique. Ideally, you should be able to summarise it in one or two sentences. Of course, you may have one unique selling point for your business and another for each of your products or services. And indeed, these unique selling points may change over time as your business, products or services evolve.

The more relevant, defined and succinct your unique selling point is, the easier you can permeate the message throughout your business and beyond, from your core marketing messages to the way employees talk to customers. And crucially - the way customers remember your unique selling point and how much they believe it. As a result, your unique selling point goes beyond a vague definition, becoming a key quality of your brand, products or services.

Read the guide Know your customers’ needs which includes information on defining a Unique Selling Point, and outlines 10 things you need to know about your customers.