Today, marketing communication finds rush jobs are now par for the course. In fact, we can even consider them as a given.

"If I want it tomorrow, I'll order it tomorrow." This is not a real statement from a client, but  many times, it feels that it may as well be.

As the pressures of making do with less resources hit harder, businesses are doing with less people. Many are wearing several hats and juggling more work at the one time. Multi-tasking is now a given at most workplaces.

So, you need a marketing communication and what do you do? Prepare the job on the last day before, or worse, on deadline.

Sound familiar?
It's no joke.

Last October, I got a call on my mobile from a client who wanted an ad prepared. I asked him when he needed it. "This afternoon," he said. I apologised that I was unable to help, I was out of town. I also did not bring a computer. But, even if I did so, my files are on my desktop computer, an Apple Mac, in one of several external drives.

It's hard to bring all of those files around when travelling. But, I digress.

Careful thought and planning will payback bigtime in making a marketing communication work.

And, I don't mean about getting the photos, background material and so on, but on more basic things. Who do you want to influence? What is the message? What do you want to achieve? This sort of thing.

Sometimes just preparing the message is the objective, when one should really consider, why the message is needed in the first place.

Are you after a simple reminder about your products or services? Do you want to start a sales campaign? Maybe, a corporate ad campaign? A one shot offer?

Whatever you want to achieve, has to be front of mind before doing anything. The message that is developed is based strongly on the purpose of the message.

If you booked an ad, which is due soon, or worse, now due, is not the reason for an ad. A better reason is the one you had when you booked it in the first place.

An old printer friend, many years ago once told me: "Price, quality, speed. Pick two."

I'm not saying that you can't have all three, but usually if you are in a hurry, you should allow for something to give. Quality may suffer, or be prepared to pay more for a rush job. Or, wait a while, but take advantage of a less costly job. You get my drift.

If you brief a marketing communication practitioner to help with a job, plan your brief. Make sure you cover all bases. And, give him time to execute the job.

A good practitioner should be able to fill in the blanks when receiving a brief, no matter how sketchy. But, think of how much better a job you will get if you give him a better brief and enough time to do the job.

And, it won't hurt to step back and consider the why's and wherefore's. In the end, a different communication piece may be called for. Or, maybe not required at all at this time.

Worth considering, isn't it?

A few months ago, I decided that a new image to celebrate our 30th year in business was appropriate. Doesn't seem that long ago when I decided to get into marketing services.

So, the first project was to redo the logo.

Keeping the folded paper symbol was the starting point. We went back to colours we used in the early 80s, green in particular. The pixelisation effect made the folded paper work and become more relevant in a Web 2.0 world.

Then, the next step was to make the website more looking more up-to-date. The use of people in the home page was an important starting point. Why? Simply put, people relate to people.

Plus, since our products are services provided by people, this made sense.

In B2B advertising and other marketing communication, practitioners and their clients focus on product. While a reader or website viewer can relate to a product that is unique, they have more empathy with people. After all people buy from people, not from companies. (Sorry, just a little aside, which I thought was worth mentioning.)

Anyway, back to our new website. The new site is also a good means of exposing our expanded service offering. The flash section centres on websites, which is our main focus in the coming months.

We will be looking into expanding the SEO part of our services, as well as present a DNN shopping cart, which is entirely new to us.

The latter is the product produced by our colleagues at Pulse Solutions of India.

Well, like I mentioned in earlier blog posts, updating a website, in look and content is a given. It should be done regularly to give it a fresh look. Admittedly, we have been a bit remiss. But, in the last five years, this is the third major upgrade.

To view our new site, please click here . I hope that you like the look.

Please feel free to email me with your comments.

Until my next post.

An ad ran by McGraw-Hill Magazines many decades back summarises the need for advertising, especially in the business-to-business field.

The ad showed a very stern looking man sitting on a chair, looking straight at the reader. The text was quite short and stated:

I don’t know who you are.
I don’t know your company.
I don’t know your company’s product.
I don’t know what your company stands for.
I don’t know your company’s customers.
I don’t know your company’s record.
I don’t know your company’s reputation.
Now—what is is you wanted to sell me?

Moral: Sales start before your salesman calls—with business publication advertising.

When a sales person calls on a prospect, if the latter has never heard of the company, or its products, the former is automatically at a disadvantage.

Having been a sales representative in a previous life, I know that feeling. It’s not really a good one, comparable I suppose to being behind the eight ball from the start.

Now let’s add to the mix a fallacy that I’ve come across with some marketers: Everybody knows us! Yes, I have had a client of two tell me this.

Unbelievable, isn’t it? Many people, maybe. Most, again, maybe. All, I don’t think so.

One doesn’t market in a vacuum. Products come and go. Marketers come and go. As well as do customers. And, the newcomers who maybe newbies to your industry or just fresh out of university. Can, you really say that they know about your company and its products.

I must admit that most of the advertising material I prepare for clients is brand awareness stuff. Flying the flag, putting the company name and brands out there. Reminding the market place that “Yes, we’re here and we want to help.”

So, even if most people know about  you and your products, remind them of who you are and what you stand for. Oh, and that you are after their business.

Ignore at your own peril.

Like everyone today who goes to work and comes home at the end of the day, I am bombarded by marketing/selling messages throughout each working day. And, add to that what I work with during the day going through PR articles, ads, brochures and so on, this comes to quite a lot.

How does one get noticed with all the messages bombarding you each day?

Going through the trade media as most of my clients are B2B marketers, I read or go through a lot of ads everyday. Many of which, i find disappointing.

Now these ads are probably produced sloppily in-house and quite a good number are professionally-prepared by  professional communication practitioners and advertising agencies. And, I put myself as guilty of these same transgressions in marketing communication.

I personally make no excuses as I usually just follow client instructions, especially when clients supply the copy. And, my only input is by way of layout. In these instances, I do make suggestions as to the copy, if appropriate. (But, I must admit that sometimes it is easier to take the path of least resistance, and just give in quietly).

I refer to the ad message and what is set out in the ad. This is what will set a marketing communication apart from the surrounding messges.

Many ads feature the client logo on top, with ad copy being either a company mission statement or an enumeration of products and services offered—the classic tombstone ad, or ”name, rank and serial number ad” as this is also known. Really a larger version of a business card, with maybe an addition or photo/s or other visuals. And, when you are faced by an array of business cards, who really bothers about the message.

These  ads are of value only as subliminal reminders of an organisation’s presence in the marketplace, at best. Unfortunately, at worse, these are not only ignored, but could be a way of proving to the market that the staff of the company concerned is just too busy to take time to prepare the right message or really is not interested in getting more customers.

Well, maybe. But consider this: when putting out a marketing communication, the point of view is not “I” or “we”, but should really be “you”. Yes, you the customer or prospective customer.

And, to really make an impact on the reader, the aspect certainly should be what’s in it for the reader. Yes, think about it, when you read a communication piece, one of your first questions is normally, what's in it for me, right?.

Every piece should have some sort of promise.

Dr. Samuel Johnson (18th century English author and lexicographer) noted that " promise, much promise, is the soul of an advertisement."

A close friend of the Thrales and executor of their estate, he expounded when selling off Mrs Thrale's brewery: " we are not here to sell off vats and boilers but wealth beyond dreams of avarice." (Now, that is a promise.)

A more up-to-date example which comes to mind after so many years is Volvo.

The slant of the Volvo ads some 15 years ago was on safety. The focus was not on the car itself, but on the safety shell, built into each vehicle. Volvo now has another slant, but the “Staying Alive” message is still at the back of my mind because it was memorable. And more importantly, the promise was safety, not just the driver, but the driver’s family who are in the vehicle with him (her).

Yes, drive a Volvo and you and your family will be safe. Again, a great promise.

(Funny though, that the safety cell was not invented by Volvo, though the company would certainly be remembered for relating this with its cars. It was developed by Mercedes Benz, who did not patent the technology as the management of the company wanted to share this with the rest of the world.)

Excuse my digression, but let us remember that the principal consideration is not that you as a marketer are there put a message across because you love your organisation or your job, it’s because you as a marketer exist because of your customers. No customers, no you.

And, your customer doesn’t care about your company, your mission statement, your product (or service) offering, but on what your company can do for him or her. Yes, what’s in it for me (the customer).

So, the point of view and the message is a promise of something that must just be too good to pass up.

And, put simply the more enticing the message the greater the interest the reader will have to go beyond the headline, read through the body copy and then contact you for more details.

One of the better definitions I’ve come across on selling is: "Saying the right thing, to the right person person at the right time”. After that happens a sale transpires.
 
We raise the buying temperature of prospective buyer, by saying the right thing, building up on earlier statements. As we sense the buyer’s temperature rising, we feel for the right time to make a close.
 
Yes, we have to make a close. We ask for the order. This can be done in several ways, from the straight, “Can I have your signature on this order?” to a choice like, “Which colour do you prefer, red or white?” and so on.
 
But, we have to ask for the order. There is no point in making statements which gets the buyer going and then just leaving it at that.
 
This post follows on my previous one, where I mentioned that it is a worthless exercise, if we don’t ask for the order.
 
In print advertising, we do this by a call to action, asking for a phone, asking the reader to email or go to a website and so on.
 
By the way, I had one client, remove the line “Why not give us a call NOW?”. He wanted to keep the copy short. As I was on deadline, I didn’t argue and left it that.
 
What a waste, after all one the better definitions I’ve come across for advertising is “selling in print”. Mind you the last word can now read any of the electronic media, including the web, TV, radio and so on.
 
The point I want to make is that the AIDA formula mentioned in my last post has the last point as ACTION. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. That’s how it works and dropping the last point, is like what I have propounded before, we need to ask for the order.
 
BTW, in the web, we may ask someone to click here. The presence of a hyperlink to an order page, contact page or other is usually enough.
 
Selling and advertising are similar and have pretty much the same objective. It's good to remember, when sometimes we just want to put up our selling points and forget to ask for the order.

Just a thought.

Last week, I redid an ad for an old client, whom I hadn’t done work for in over ten years. This was the first ad done for him in 12 years. (How I reconnected with the client, is a story by itself.) The gist of the thing is that the client wanted the text changed from running copy to point form.

I did the alterations as he wanted and when I saw him a few days later, I explained why I use prose, or running copy in the body of all my ads.

Well, let’s face it, when you read a newspaper, a book, a blog, or other stuff, you will find that the text is usually in prose, as running copy. That’s how you learned to read and that’s how things have been set out from eons back.

So, we are used to reading things in that way.

Now, I must admit a few things:
-    we are bombarded by hundreds of messages everyday
-    we are all busy, so reading copy, especially long copy may be hard to undertake because of lack of time
-    most of my clients are engineers and they like stuff set out in point form
-    some people tend to think in that way and want to see text set out similarly.

However, let me posit a rationale for running prose.

Other than the fact we are used to reading stuff set this way, running prose allows the writer to do a few things:
-    present his story, as just that a story, a narrative
-    a narrative allows the writer to build up a case with one point building up on another
-    corollary to that is that this method of writing allows the author a means of following the AIDA principal: get Attention, build up Interest, create Desire and call to Action.

In contrast, a shopping list of points doesn’t build up interest, nor does it create desire. When you explain selling points, that build on one another, you bring up the reader’s interest, one point at a time, so that he/she gets not only more interested to know more, but then has the desire to do something (go on the internet to get more information, call the advertiser to get this information, or even better, order from the advertiser.)

Finally, a call to action is like asking for the order. You may have experienced this, as I have: a sales person give his spiel, gets your interest, builds up your buying temperature and leaves without asking for the order.

That would have a been a wasted exercise. When I write ads, I usually ask the reader to ask for more information. This way a reader, who has been piqued with interest, will call up and talk to someone in the advertiser’s office and allow the latter to follow-up with a personal call, other phone call, quotation or whatever.

And, to finish my story on the ad I was working on. In the end, he conceded that he should follow my suggestion, as an expert in my field. (This is that quip used by advertising agency creatives, “Why buy the dog and do the barking”, right?)

I rewrote the text as a narrative, but also included some bullet points in the body copy. It was a most satisfying exercise in the end, especially since the client acceded to following my suggestion because of my experience in the field.

Hopefully, the client is happy with the result.

In a previous post, I noted "Don’t assume you know what your customers’ needs are."

So you’ve been in business a while and in the same industry for many years. you call on the same people everytime and you know the industry inside out. So, you know what your customers’ needs are, right?

Can you truthfully answer yes?

Calling on the same people doesn’t mean you know them well enough to know what they need. I don’t think that one can equate familiarity with individuals to familiarity with their needs.

Let’s throw the current economic uncertainty into the equation.

An article in Marketing Week recently held in Adelaide expounded on one of the speakers, Dr Peter Steidl of Mindshare, (Sourced from an article “Delivering resutls through the downturn”, in Direct September/October issue, pp 14-15) He said that economic recession is not driven by inability to spend, but by the uncertainty about the future. “In fact, during a recession, consumers have more discretionary spend, due to lower interest rates and lower petrol prices. But they are motivated to re-examine habitual purchases (which account for 85 percent of purchases) both in a consumer and a B2B environment.”

The article went further to say that the downturn is a “time of opportunity for marketers looking to expand their market share, because consumers are more receptive to messaging about innovation and difference.”

Steidl also noted that marketing was not innovating. He maintained that marketing practice was not changing.

He further noted that recessions were historically times when more number one brands went down to number three. He added that “This is the time for smaller, more agile brands to make their move.

“Speed and flexibility can beat scale”, he said.

Perhaps to highlight some of these points, Tim Cooper of Coopers Brewery who said that “In recessionary times when discretionary spending is being hit, people are happy to do it themselves and take up the hobby of home-brewing.”

Which makes you think, you can still your product, but it may be a different model, a different configuration or a variation on your normal offering. And, if that is what your customers want, why not give it to them.

Applied to the original theme of this post, do we really know what our customers’ need are, let’s consider what the current economic downturn does to his/her thinking. We can then tailor our communication to our customers, in light of how they would look at spending, when everyone is making his/her discretionary spend go further.

Rummaging trough some old magazines, I came across an old copy of The Bulletin and flicked through until I came to an article on guerrilla and viral marketing. It’s a pet topic and something I haven’t given much thought in a while.

The Web 2.0 world, with the mushrooming of social media, makes it imperative that marketers think outside the box of traditional or more conventional media. Communication is not only done through print advertising, PR, the electronic media and so on.

First and foremost of the use of the web as a marketing communication medium is the website. Once up and running, this has to be freshened up with new content, a new look and so on. And, this should be done regularly.

BTW, I too fall on this aspect, so marketing communication consultants are not immune. Mind you this year has seen the most number of changes to my website, but I digress.

My favourite Web 2.0 medium still is blogging. This marcom method is now main stream. It’s not the realm of “nerd” types, but something more and more corporates are adopting.

If you’re still thinking about it, maybe it’s time to be more serious and jump in. Blogging allows you to reach your target market easily, in ways not available previously. As publsiher, you control content and can make yourself whatever you want your image to be.

It allows you to talk informally in super friendly terms. And, very importantly it allows you to get feedback in ways not previously possible.

Just think, it’s so easy to respond to a blog, in the surrounds of posts and other comments. It’s a lot harder to pick up the phone and complain. And, besides, let’s face it most people will not complain. They tend to just drop you altogether.

And, without feedback, you’d only notice when a customer’s leaving shows its effect on the bottom line. By then, it may be too late.

Blogging also allows other things I’ll cover in another post.

Going back to that issue of the Bulletin, on page 49 (February 20, 2007) there was list reprinted from “Marketing Work: Unlocking Big Company Strategies for Small Business” by Chris Lee and Danele Lima, Morgan James Publishing included. The list is reprinted in toto:

Ten Marketing No-Nos:

1. Don’t assume you know what your customers’ needs are.
2. Don’t underestimate the shortcomings of your business.
3. Don’t try to market your product to everyone.
4. Don’t take your customer’s for granted.
5. Don’t hire slick salespeople with poor listening skills.
6. Don’t design your marketing plan in a vacuum.
7. Don’t leave weaker areas of the business alone.
8. Don’t launch into expensive research every time.
9. Don’t dwell on poor performance.
10. Don’t stress out completely and lose your work-life balance.

Great ideas, worth considering. In fact, I plan to dedicate my next post/s to these points.

Last week, a client’s email set-up was only partially receiving emails. Originally, I thought that this was because of the client’s inability to use Outlook. Allow me to explain what happened.

When the client’s website was finally uploaded live, it was setup at another hosting company. Some of the email address owners had difficulty setting up, which I attributed to the same reason.

I spent some time in front of one the client’s computers and set up his outlook. It worked and received a test email via outlook and via his yahoo email account. Problem solved. Or was it?

Late last week, the CEO sent me an email which read in part that the IP address (confirmed to be the ISP’s) was blacklisted. Referred this to the ISP, and kept on their backs to get a resolution.

The problem was that Spam and Open Relay Blocking System (SORBS) was blacklisting the IP address, which was blocking emails. The ISP terminated the account of the spammer concerned and informed SORBS, so hopefully that problem is solved.

Lesson learned. Actually two were learned. First of all, the customer is always right. This old adage is something that a marketer must not forget. I must admit that I did get to learn more about Outlook in the process. But, the customer is right.

If there is a complaint, one cannot just dismiss this off-hand. Not that I did. But, I should have given this more importance. In my defence, I did speak with web design colleagues and they agreed with me, with DNS transfer completed, email should work.

SORBS and IP blocking did not even come into the picture.

Second and more important lesson learned is listen to your customers. We cannot assume that we  know what our customer’s needs are, what they’re thinking of at a point in time or why they need our help. Let’s face it, as a marketer, our raison d'être is to serve our customers. Full stop.

No customer, no us.

Listening is both an art and a science. Communication is two-way street. It starts with listening. If we communicate as part of our marketing effort, we should be prepared to listen, to get feedback.

While the points I’ve given here appear to be pretty basic. They should be noted and reconsidered. Sometimes we miss the forest for the trees, when we’re caught in the fast-paced world of today.

These lessons are applicable to anyone in business. And, they’re very valuable that we should not just brush them aside. After all, if we cannot communicate and listen to our customers and we don’t believe that they are always right, we will probably be out-of-business pretty quickly.

Worth a thought.

I've been pushing blogging as a good method of marketing communication to help improve the search engine rankings for my clients' websites. Not only does blogging do that, but it is by itself a good tool to communicate with customers and potential customers, get feedback from sectors of the marketplace you would not normally hear from and so on. I've covered this in a number of previous posts on another blog.

Now, with my tie-up with Pulse Solutions, JG Marketing Services now offers SEO services in a more structured way. Pulse offers a lot of expertise and many years of experience in many aspects of the web.

They've shown me their successes and I was quite impressed.

A lot the skills they've picked up with all the work done, can be leveraged to offer Australian companies similar successes. After all, we don't want to waste all that acquired knowledge.

We have a number of off-the-shelf plans on offer. And we can offer tailored solutions for those with specialised requirements.

For more information, you can download a flyer explaining what's involved: click here to download the flyer
We are offering special deals to our first customers, so if you're interested let me know. I'll offer an extra discount to interested parties who mention this post.