What is ‘marketing material’?

Many business owners think that marketing material is leaflets, flyers and brochures.  Yes, definitely, but there are many other items that could be included:

Your business card: cards have two sides and the reverse is an opportunity to let people know a bit more about what you offer.

Your website: unlimited space to promote your products and services, BUT remember that, just because the page can be as long as you like, it doesn’t mean you should ramble at length.  Write, then edit, then edit again until you have a concise series of statements that engage your potential customer and make them want to know more.

Social media:  Every post says something about your company and how you operate.  Don’t fall into the trap of thinking ‘it’s only Facebook’.  Just because Facebook is a very social platform does not mean you should say anything you wouldn’t like a client to read.  That means never criticising your competitors.  If you have nothing good to say, say nothing!

Your one-minute pitch: If you go to networking events, you’re often asked to make a short pitch, usually your name and business and a bit about what you do.  Don’t leave this to chance, always have one prepared.  If it’s a group you go to regularly, think of it as a progressive educational process – tell them something different every time, so they gradually learn more and more about your products/services.  If it’s a group you haven’t been to before, or one you only attend occasionally, make sure it gives people some answers to the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question.

Banner stands:  If you attend many events, conferences, business shows or some networking events (always check if it’s OK to display it) you may find a banner stand really useful.  Remember that anything below table height may be hidden so make sure your contact information is around mid-way and the bottom is mainly graphics/images.  A headline that attracts attention at the top is better than just your brand.  Just because you have a big space, doesn’t mean you should fill it up, people want to get the message quickly and easily.

Branded clothing:  Whether this is just a logo on your shirt, a T-shirt, overalls, a fleece or a complete uniform, it makes you recognisable.  If you have staff that wear your uniform you may want to remind them that, even off-duty, if still in uniform people will see them as belonging to your company and judge their behaviour in relation to the company.

Give-away items: pens, coasters, mouse-mats, umbrellas – the list is endless and a good promotional items expert will be able to suggest some unusual and memorable items.  However, pens may be old hat, but are still highly effective.  With a very few letters to play with – this will hone your editing skills to get your message into the minimum space!

5 reasons LinkedIn won’t work for you

I hear people complaining that LinkedIn is ‘stagnant’, ‘out-of-date’, ‘useless’ and other derogatory statements.  While nothing can ever be called perfect, I find LinkedIn is a powerful platform for business – so what makes my experience so different from theirs?

These are some of the things that will ensure LinkedIn doesn’t work for you:

1. The wrong image:  your headshot should be a professional image of your head (and maybe a bit of your shoulders).  People make judgments based on what they see.  Quite apart from the fact that the LinkedIn T&Cs state that it must be a recognisable image of the account holder, people buy people and like to see who they’re communicating with so if your profile image is:

• A full-length shot
• A picture of your product
• Your logo
• Your premises
• A selfie taken while at a party
• A shot taken by a friend in your lounge with all kinds of things in the background
• A bit blurry
• A caricature
• A silhouette
• Showing more than one person
• With you wearing anything you wouldn’t wear to a client meeting (even if you can only see a bit of it)

Change it!

2. Your job title instead of a professional headline.  This is the line of text that sits just under your name on your profile.  If it’s your job title it’s not very interesting, whereas if you have something that lets potential clients recognise themselves, increasing the chances of them scrolling down to read more information.  You have 120 characters to play with, use them well.

3. A boring summary.  Your summary is an opportunity to impress people, not bore the socks off them.  Think of your ideal client and answer these questions:  What are their burning questions?  How can you help them?  What are they interested in?  It will bring your summary to life.  Also write in the first person, it’s not a professional biography to be presented by someone else, it’s your personal profile.

4. Setting up your profile like a CV – unless you’re actively job-hunting.  It should be focused on what your company can offer.  If you’re an employee, you’ll get many more brownie points by connecting with potential clients and be building a strong track record for the future.  If you’re a business owner see it as a marketing tool.

5. Treating it as a numbers game: If you want to build relationships you need to make connections, but quantity is not necessarily quality.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t accept connections, that’s what networking is about, but it does mean that it’s not having lots of connections – it’s about having lots of conversations.

New website – who for?

If you’re having a new website created, whether it’s a brand new site or a revamp of your current one, remember what you want it for!

• It’s not for you to show-off your technical wizardry or wealth of knowledge (or at least not primarily)
• It’s not for your web designer to demonstrate their graphic skills
• It’s not for your copywriter to unleash their command of language
• It’s for that mystical creature, your customer.

Of course, you want to display what you’re offering, but it must be in a way the makes life easy for your potential customer.  That means you must make it easy for them to find what they want, easily and without any head-scratching or having to go on a treasure hunt through your menus.

Is your website user-friendly?

If you are confidently nodding and making affirmative noises, did you actually test it on real customers?  If so, then brilliant, you can leave this article and go and read something else.

If you think it’s user-friendly, but haven’t tested it on clients, maybe you should keep reading.
‘Testing’ is not sending people the URL for the new site and asking what they think of it.  Most people will tell you it looks lovely!

Usability testing is not just for big corporations, everyone can do something basic.  Here’s my quick and dirty test process:

1. Identify the actions that you want the customer to take.
2. FIND OUT what potential customers are most likely to want to know from visiting your website (that means ask some people who fall into your potential customer category what they would want to know/do)
3. Create a series of 5 simple tasks and get some potential clients to try to carry them out and mark them on a simple scale e.g.:

• Really easy
• Fairly easy
• Could have been simpler
• Frustrating
• Failed

4. Add a comments box on the test form.

Questions might include:

• Find the company phone number
• Find the mailing address
• From the home page what does this company sell?
• Find out the price of [product]
• Find the nearest retail stockist for [product]
• Find two primary services and (how to) book an appointment to discuss these
• Find a service that is relevant to your business and how it would benefit you to use it
• Connect with the business on LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter
• Find out who runs the company

Some of these questions may sound ‘obvious’, but it’s surprising how many websites don’t make finding that information easy to get to.  Make sure your website is getting high scores in the Really easy box before releasing it into your marketplace.

‘Sign up for our newsletter’ – No thanks!

When the digital world was relatively young, people happily signed up to receive a digital newsletter.  How exciting – new emails to read! 

So how likely are you to fill in that form on someone’s website that asks for your name and email so you can get their email newsletter?  No, I thought not.

Email has been used and abused so much that we are desperate NOT to get any more ‘stuff’ in our inboxes.  And yet we find ourselves on loads of people’s email list receiving newsletters we don’t read, deleting more ‘stuff’ from our inbox and, occasionally, bothering to unsubscribe.

Clever marketers got people onto their list by offering something more compelling than a newsletter – a free download of something that has value.  But then there’s the advent of GDPR here in the UK so we’re all going to have to be extra-diligent about how people end up on our lists and what we send them. 

This means those people on our newsletter list have to have voluntarily signed up for a newsletter.  Signing up to receive a free download of some useful article, tips sheet or checklist, doesn’t mean they’ve agreed to receive ongoing information.

Does this mean a return to those forms begging people to sign up to your newsletter?

No, they’re still not going to be very effective in isolation, especially if your newsletter isn’t particularly interesting for the reader.  However, they have identified what they are interested in by downloading your valuable, free document – that means they would probably be interested in more like that.

Here’s my suggestion:

• Still offer a free download of something that shares your considerable knowledge to help them.
• On the page where they get directed to in order to download their document add an opt-in button (and an opt-out button so they have to do something) that appears before they get to the download, asking them if they would like more material like this.
• Once they opt-in you’d better be sure your newsletter ticks the ‘more material like this’ box.

However, it does mean that – providing you are using a system that has a double opt-in, you now have evidence that they do want more information from you.

Your download page might go something like this:

Thanks for requesting your free download of

27 tips to make marketing magic

As you’re clearly interested in improving your marketing, we’d be happy to send you regular marketing updates with more free material like this download.  Let us know if you want to be on that privileged list:

Then you can follow with the download document. 

This might take a bit of technical ‘fixing’, but should not be too complicated. 

If you’d like some help with this please get in touch.