What’s my FREE marketing session all about?

What’s my FREE marketing session all about?.

A YouTube myth

I often hear people say that it costs a fortune to put together material for YouTube. But this simply isn’t true.

In today’s digital age, you can create professional moving content cheaper than print. And with YouTube being the second largest search engine after Google, it’s important to have a presence for your business.

The statistics are mind-boggling. Three that caught my eye, in this Smartphone era, are the following….

– Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month!

– 25% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices!

– There are one billion views a day on YouTube mobile!

Making videos might have been eye wateringly expensive in the past, but today you can create professional looking low cost content by:

– Creating a whiteboard speed drawing video. Here’s an example I produced to promote my e-book

– Using a slideshow or still photographs combined with the ‘Ken Burns’ effect, to create movement. This is an example promoting a riverside property in Ely

– Presenting to camera with PowerPoint graphics incorporated into a virtual studio image. Fabulous results at competitive prices

It goes without saying that the content has to be interesting – so what topics could you cover? How about:

– Product demonstrations

– Customer testimonials

– Speaking engagements

– Video blog entries

– Corporate culture videos

– Convincers

Create a list personal to your business, then get creative help to work out how to communicate the message in an interesting way!

Have fun promoting what you do on YouTube.

Jonathan Wainwright enables organisations to create commercial success through digital marketing, traditional communications and team development.

Receive a FREE copy of my book, Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

 

Three top tips to give your Social Media content the recipe for success

73% of consumers prefer to read articles, rather than advertisements, to find out more. So it’s vital that your Social Media Content has the right mix of ingredients.

To make sure that your Social Communications are timely, interesting and relevant, follow these three top tips:

1. Keep the latest news trends on your radar. Use the BBC news App., or check your LinkedIn homepage, to check the latest news/comment/trends and where you can, ride on the wave.

For example if you rear the cattle and prepare the meat that goes into the burgers and pies that you make, now would be a very good time to tell the world about it.

2. Make sure your team understand that a responsibility of their role is to identify content.

They don’t need to write it, simply establish the latest topics customers and prospects are talking about. Have a process in place to encourage and reward staff participation.

3. Look at the world from the perspective of keywords. Explore topics where you would like to be associated with the readership. What are the key search words that identify these topics?

Use these words, within your content, to create a bridge to them through the search engines, connecting what you write with this audience?

An application like ‘Wordle’ can be of great help here.

These three ideas will help keep your Social Media content, tasty and fresh.

Something to think about when you are enjoying your pancakes, tomorrow evening, on Shrove Tuesday.

Jonathan Wainwright enables organisations to create commercial success through digital marketing, traditional communications and team development.

Receive a FREE copy of my book, Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

It might look good, but you lose performance when you spin the wheels

A Coaching trend has appeared where it’s OK failing, so long as you partly succeed. Is this strategy in the Client’s or Coach’s best interest?

The majority of people will have come across the mnemonic SMART, when it comes to setting goals. Referring to Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-sensitive.

Great goals, reached through individual centric conversations, meet all these criteria. Studies have concluded, time and time again, that clarity of purpose and single mindedness are key reasons why successful people succeed which is why Coaching mimics this.

The Coach’s challenge, is to help clients set goals that really do stretch them i.e. they are just about attainable, with much effort. What you don’t want are goals so simple everyone will achieve them or so difficult that 99% of people will fail.

Because our society tends to measure success/failure in black and white, this creates a dilemma for Coaches. If goals aren’t 100% achieved, unpicking the reasons why can be very de-motivational. It also questions the Coach’s competency too, so the temptation is to arrive at less challenging goals.

Add to this the, “Get out of jail free card”, that it’s OK to achieve 75% (for example) of your goal and you sow the seed that everything is just fine, which it isn’t.

What this approach fails to do is explore the dynamics of the journey, so a clearer line is needed. I prefer adding ER, (Evaluate and Reevaluate) to create SMARTER, rather than SMART Goals. This way you can acknowledge how circumstances change and how reflection and learning are crucial to effective Coaching.

It also means that with appropriate effort, the Client really gets to grip with the challenge, so they sprint off the line reaching their goal in the fastest possible time!

Jonathan Wainwright enables organisations to create commercial success through digital marketing, traditional communications and team development.

Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Creating your Social Marketing Plan

A conversation with an NLP/Hypnotherapy coach got me thinking. Here was an expert at creating dialogue – it’s what coaches do – yet she was very uncertain about the dialogue of Social Media.

 

 

So, this article is to unravel the irony/marketing speak and explain the top four areas to focus on.

1. Establish who you want to talk to: this might be all or a combination of prospects, customers, media, referrers, influencers or other stakeholder. Define the characteristics of each group and create a fictional character to represent them, so that you can create a lifelike picture of their likes/dislikes, wants/needs/interests etc. This way you can really get to know them as people
2. What it is you want to accomplish? This might be to get customers to come back for more, convince referrers and stakeholders that you are the best in your field, or get people to seek your opinion. Overlay this onto each group of people that you wish to reach. Don’t confuse this with selling and promotional offers; Social Media isn’t about overtly ‘selling’, it’s much more about informative two-way conversation and keeping in touch
3. Where will you find the people that you wish to have a dialogue with? Using the search functions, check out the various Social Media, to see if you can find content around your topic of interest or people you want to have a dialogue with. I would start with LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. For the time being focus on these, expand to other media such as Pinterest as you gain confidence.
4. Establish topics that will interest your audience and activity to stimulate dialogue that can be measured? This might be content to place you as an expert, ‘personality’ or commentator, or hints and tips for self-help, communicated through video segment, podcast, blog or e-book, measured by number of viewers, downloads, comments etc.

As with most things, keep it simple and manageable, don’t be too ambitious. Constantly test what you do. Have a plan. Publish regularly, making it interesting, different and topical and you will soon be enjoying Social Media success.

Jonathan Wainwright enables organisations to create commercial success through digital marketing, traditional communications and team development.

Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

What can we learn from HMV’s and Jessop’s high street failure?

HMV’s antecedents go back to the 1890’s and Jessop’s 1935, but like Woolworth in the past, they have joined a list of Public names that have failed, putting many out of work and yet another nail in the high street coffin. But what went wrong?

I don’t think that’s too much of a secret. Change of market needs, change of customer purchase methods combined with the burden of high overheads. More interesting is why? Why do two successful, well-established and popular brands get in this position?

I think three reasons stand clear, head and shoulders above the rest. The deadly combination is Leadership that lacks vision, poor marketing and business development inertia.

And once the tipping point is reached and marketing advantage lost, as these two giants show, there is no return and no amount of public nostalgia about support helps. The only things that do, are sales and cash in the bank from customer’s buying.

In the UK, most of these death cries go unnoticed because of our 4.8M businesses, 4.6M or 96% of them are micro businesses employing 0-9 people.

So when it hits the fan, there’s hardly a blip on the news radar.

But make no mistake, business failures are regular, painful and common, which is why owners should wake up to the need to keep in touch and make marketing and business development a priority.

Know your customer’s needs and know what they want to buy would be my mantra. And it shouldn’t be an annual research activity but a continuous process embedded into business DNA.

Jonathan Wainwright enables organisations to create commercial success through digital marketing, traditional communications and team development.

Receive a FREE copy of my book, Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

FREE 40 minute Marketing session

Many small businesses and organisations, often as a consequence of day-to-day pressures on their time, have a stop/start approach to marketing.

This FREE 40 Minute marketing session will enable you to prioritise the key areas to work on and where to effectively dedicate your time.

Imagine how much more confident you would feel knowing that you had a marketing plan in place where you can measure the effectiveness of everything you are doing?

Delivered by a either a 40-minute video Skype, or meeting at my office, I will take you through the marketing essentials, to help you get right to the heart of what’s important when it comes to promoting your organisation.

Here is a short video to tell you more

Together we will explore and create a 5-point Action Plan that will help you:

Understand Customers’ Psyche – gaining powerful knowledge to build loyalty

Identify your ideal customer – so that you focus on the best opportunity

Make your business stand out – identify what makes it unique and special

Use the power of Social Media – to create manageable two-way dialogue with prospects, customers and advocates

Measure Marketing value – to find out what works best for you

At the end of the session you will have a personalised 5-point Action Plan to take forward and develop your business.

And if you need further support to achieve this, here are details of my Marketing support programme.

Does this sound interesting?

To book your session, call 07971 006 446 or email me.

Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Jonathan Wainwright enables organisations to create commercial success through digital marketing, traditional communications and team development.

Get a FREE copy of my book to review

My book, has just been published by Amazon; here is a very short video to tell you more.

For a limited period, I’m offering a complimentary copy, which you can download HERE.

What I am looking for are opinions and suggestions to develop the sequel; ‘Make your business HOT! 2’.

It’s less than an hour to read and you can easily dip in and dip out of it, so I do hope that you find it interesting and informative.

If you feel inclined, a review HERE, would be much appreciated and a real bonus for me.

Do your Marketing materials use the power of Emotional Intelligence?

It used to be that using FAB’s (features, advantages and benefits) was the way to effectively promote to achieve sales. Today, things have changed. Psychology has upped the game by identifying how Emotional Intelligence also has a role to play too.

It’s all about the emotion that is associated with a customer’s needs.

Take these cakes.

They look pretty and attractive and probably aren’t that nutritious or healthy to eat, yet they sell well because when they are seen, they raise strong emotions in many people.

It’s this emotional reaction that makes them attractive and what makes them sell and in demand; nothing to do with food at all.

So, when it comes to working out why people buy from you, it’s not just about the benefits your product or service provides, it’s also about establishing the key emotional triggers that are most motivational to your customers and prospects.

Get this right and you will create your most powerful marketing ever.

So, remember to take Emotional Intelligence into account when researching why your customers buy.

Make sure that you identify their ‘Wants and Worries’ and then make sure that the benefits that your product or service provides supports these emotional needs.

If they don’t, you could lose out to your competitors, even though you might clearly provide a better service on paper.

Apple is the master of taking this approach, that’s why Apple users are so passionate about the company and its products.

Take a leaf out of Apple’s book. When you do, and use Emotional Intelligence to market your products, you will find out that you really can have your cake and eat it.

Jonathan Wainwright enables organisations to create commercial success through digital marketing, traditional communications and team development.

Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Improving Customer Experience in a recession

When you have lots of little issues joining up together, as accident investigators know, that’s the time you get the major headaches.

But how this principle also applies to Customer Care?

Familiarity is a dangerous place.

As I was waiting in a Post Office the other day, somebody clearly thought that placing items for sale next to the queue was a good idea to increase sales.

And it was.

However as with most things, an idea isn’t enough. You must be able to effectively put it into practice. As you can see from the photograph that’s where they came unstuck. The display is dull, dreary, old fashioned, has no prices and also has a very uninspired product range. So, a good idea looks worse than not doing anything at all. Retail guru Mary Portas would have had a fit.

Combined with this mediocrity was grim and uninspiring décor and the place was filthy dirty.

And to top it all, there were a pile of customer satisfaction cards on the unit, asking the reader to fill in, log-on or whatever, to register their satisfaction (or otherwise).

Whilst I was there, nobody did and neither did I. It was so eye wateringly bad, that there was no incentive to bother. If they didn’t care, then why should we?

No doubt the Manager thought this was all OK, otherwise it wouldn’t have been like that!

It reminded me of a time in my early career working in a car Dealership. The Principal was adamant about the importance of Customer Care and every Service Customer had a pre-paid Customer Satisfaction Card stapled to their invoice.

92% of Customers were 100% satisfied; so he was happy.

He simply wouldn’t accept that this wasn’t the right assumption, as only a small proportion of the customers responded. Changes were needed, because the reality was that most customers were business users, so the invoice went to their accounts department.

Those customers that were unhappy were not completing the cards, but phoning the Service Department directly with their concerns – but this stat wasn’t part of the process and it wasn’t in the Service Managers interest to include it either, as 92% of his customers were 100% satisfied, OK?

But the Principal hung on to this process like grim death and thought that everything was hunky-dory, no changes required, despite the desperate pleas from his other Managers and staff.

The same applies in today’s difficult times. To succeed, the Customer Experience has to be better than ever. And that requires continual attention to detail, an open mind, great listening skills a transparent way of measuring the impact and the confidence to invest in the process.

All this at a time when the temptation and current general business feeling, is to minimise investment, hang tight, cut back staff time and weather the storm.

The danger with this approach is that those little problems can join together without warning, to conspire against you creating a very big headache indeed.

The result being that customers vote with their feet, buy elsewhere and start Social Media activity to publicly promote their poor experience to everybody they can tell their story to, except your organisation!

Jonathan Wainwright enables organisations to create commercial success through digital marketing, traditional communications and team development.

Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn.