Welcome to our blog! A place where we chat about stuff. Stuff that interests us, stuff that we hope you’ll also find interesting. We won’t write about what we had for breakfast or the fact that we’re tired – that market is well and truly covered. We will share useful advice and industry insight and make you smile from time to time – promise.

1.02.12

Seduced by a business card

It started with a hint of something special, a teaser of more to come. Sophisticated, seriously good quality and dare I say, a hint of sexy. I’ll bet your mind is boggling with all manner of ideas, so would you be surprised to discover I’m talking about the latest business card offering from that clever stationery company called Moo?

Those of you familiar with the Moo brand will know that their marketing is pretty darn impressive. I’ll doubt they’ve ever heard of standing still. They’re always thinking of new ways to entice you and it works! But boy, to tempt me to sit and watch a video all about the new Luxe business card is going some. And I did. So can you, enjoy…

27.10.10

Why Brand Management is everyone’s business

I once delivered a seminar on branding during which I asked the question – “What does your company brand stand for” – and the one answer that stood out for me, “Oh, I know this, really I do. We’ve recently had a re-brand and we were all told what the brand represented.”

Oh how I winced.

Like PR, brand management is the responsibility of everyone involved in and with a company. That means all staff, management, suppliers and I’d even go as far as to include customers. But to act responsibly, each individual must first fully understand what the brand represents and how their actions, both good and bad, can influence a brand. It is not enough to ‘tell’ people what a brand represents. Telling does not engender any feeling of ownership, involvement, let alone responsibility for.

So how does one do that? By involving all interested parties in brand development and management. Sounds simple, and yet so many companies get it wrong.

Be honest now, how well do you manage your brand?

Tracey Jefferies
Partner, Adapt Communications

18.10.10

Target Practice – know who you’re aiming at and why

Done well, digital marketing can be an extremely cost effective and successful way of interacting with your target market. Many of us know what we should be doing, in which case these tips will serve only as a reminder. For those businesses considering digital marketing we urge you to get it right first time, why waste time, money and energy on activities that don’t yield meaningful results.

1. Segmentation

Traditional ways of email marketing relied on sending campaigns in one blast – 1000’s of emails on a huge variety of subject matter, to a wide target market. But times move on. By replacing these large batch mailings with smaller, more targeted lists based on peoples interests and demographics – segmenting your database – you are more likely to yield much better results both for the customer, by delivering highly targeted content and for the client by driving more sales.

2. Are you capturing the right information about your subscribers?

By asking a few simple questions before someone subscribes to your newsletter, downloads a datasheet or purchases a product, you can more easily split your mailing lists into different categories. Store this information within your mailing lists and ‘hey presto’ you can now deliver appropriately targeted content to your customers and see open rates soar.

3. Are you capturing data when and where you can?

It can be an important decision to allow someone on your website to view or download content without some level of interaction. Suggestions to encourage interaction include inviting the user to:

• Rate the content
• Share the content
• Bookmark the page
• Subscribe to the content

However, just knowing that something was downloaded or looked at is not enough. Ask yourself:

• Who were they?
• Did they find the information useful?
• Can you help them further?

If you offer something of value to your visitors it’s more than acceptable to ask for extra information (data capture).

4. Taking data capture to the next level

With the right tools you can segment your data based on age, gender, location, income, mobile device or in fact anything as long as you capture the data appropriately. Consider advanced segmentation based on your customers behaviour such as previous engagement, loyalty or responsiveness to previous marketing communications.

5. Check the quality of your data

Do you always check the quality of your data at the point of user input? Asking your visitors to type their email address into a textbox sounds simple, right? Wrong. Ever since I first started managing client mailing lists, I have seen thousands of mistyped and badly formatted email addresses. Some can be fixed, but others are lost forever all because at the point of data-capture users weren’t forced to be careful.

Appropriate error checking and getting your visitors to confirm their email address will lower the number of bounced emails and improve your open rate.

6. Don’t treat everyone the same

Plan your data capture strategy and start segmenting your mailing lists based on your customers demographics, personal interests and behaviour. Soon you will have the power to deliver more personalised communications that will turn subscribers into customers.

David Green
Partner – Adapt Communications

5.10.10

Broadcast v Engagement – Terms & Conditions Apply

Television broadcasts were first explored using electromechanical methods to scan and transmit images. Broadcasting was intended as a one-way form of communication and enabled the world access to news, information and entertainment.

A quick online search defines broadcasting as a means to:

• Transmit (a radio or television program) for public or general use
• To send out or communicate, especially by radio or television
• To sow (seed) over a wide area, especially by hand

Viewers were not intended to respond in any way, unlike nowadays when interaction is encouraged, to an extent, through phone-in’s, competitions etc. At the point of invention though, broadcasting was purely intended as one-way form of communication. There were no rules of engagement, you either chose to watch or not and these ‘terms and conditions’ still largely apply today.

Social media when used appropriately is a hugely powerful communication tool of the 21^st Century. One of my favourite wikipedia definitions explains that:

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.

This in my view, is the perfect does it what it says on the tin explanation. If that’s the case though, how come so many individuals and companies get it so wrong? The key words above define the rules; ‘social interaction’, something that so many companies, of all sizes, from various industries, simply don’t get or choose to ignore.

True engagement (communication) with your existing customers will encourage loyalty. These customers will continue to use your services/products and enjoy spreading the word on your behalf. These people will be excited about your new products/services and eager to purchase.

True engagement with potential customers will set the tone for how you intend to interact with them.

Using social media only to broadcast demonstrates a lack of empathy; it shows that you don’t really care about your customers, that your main priority is only to broadcast your news; that you’re not really interested in what anyone else has to share. It shows either that you don’t understand the rules or that you have no intention of signing up to the terms and conditions.

Broadcasters take note – Ignorance of the rules is no defense. Ignore the social media rules of engagement at your peril and watch the impact on your bottom line.

Tracey Jefferies

Partner – Adapt Communications

24.08.10

Welcome to the blog

Welcome to our blog! A place where we chat about stuff. Stuff that interests us, stuff that we hope you’ll also find interesting. We won’t write about what we had for breakfast or the fact that we’re tired – that market is well and truly covered. We will share useful advice and industry insight and make you smile from time to time – promise.