Brighter Marketing

I have been having a look around the web for some inspiration for some mail shot ideas.  Direct mail that stands out, that commands attention is rare, it’s just normally a sales letter and a brochure, or a postcard outlining some features of a product or service.  Here are some of the best that I found,

Stress Free
This is a direct mail for a blackberry from the main UK telecoms company, BT –  http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/2005/12/bt-blackberry.html. It looks expensive but you could do something similar on a much smaller scale with a stress ball inside a small box, telling your customers you will “Take the stresss out of…”

Interaction
This mailing from a Canadian sound recording firm – http://www.wearehq.com/2010/04/cardboard-record-player-2/ it is great as it gets the person who receives it to interact with it. they can actually play the record and hear a great story from the company that sent it out. This was very popular and people began calling up to get another copy of it for them and their kids to play with. Again this might look expensive, but what could you do that gets your potential clients to interact with something you send them in the post?

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 Link to the original blog post  - Client Loyalty Tips

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The one thing I have seen time and time again in marketing is people trying to get everything perfect. To get the perfect website, the prefect brand, the perfect direct mail campaign. But the one lesson I’ve learned over the years is that there is no such thing as perfect marketing.

The amount of time that is wasted on that last 20% is often far too much. I have seen small businesses agonise over a logo when what they should be doing is getting out there and spreading the word about their business. The logo should have been chosen and then the promotion begin. And having worked for some fairly large companies, the amount of navel gazing that goes on makes me wonder how they managed to undertake any marketing at all.

So when it comes to marketing I operate using the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. If the website is 80% there, then put it up and see what happens, as long as there are no glaring errors the other 20% can be sorted out later.

I think that too many people spend far too much time worrying about that 20%, which in my humble opinion doesn’t really matter that much. The key to marketing success is to take action and see what happens, some things work and sometimes they don’t, but the time spent worrying about that last 20% just isn’t required.

 Link to the original blog post  - Exceptional Customer Service

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In an increasingly digital age, there is less and less emphasis on actually sending “things” out to people. We send PDFs, images, emails, connect on Facebook, text each other and use instant messaging.  However, as a child of the 70s there was none of this, and when I started my marketing career, the internet was just starting. So to get new customers for the company I worked for, I had to rely on adverts, direct mail, seminars and exhibitions.

The thing is, I think we have forgotten how nice it is to actually receive something in the post. My sister lives in New Zealand and whilst we can talk on the phone, she has no internet, so writes to me. I love getting her letters and printed photos of her and the family; they seem so much more tactile and personal than reading an email from her and looking at a digital photo on a screen.  And when a parcel arrives, I can feel the excitement building.

Direct Mail that Gets Remembered
And you can do the same for your customers and potential customers, instead of sending that next email shot, send them something in the post. It doesn’t have to be just a paper based direct mail think differently and think of something that will get their attention, something that intrigues them, which they can touch, open with excitement and more importantly will remember.

Here are just some examples of direct mails that I have been involved with in the past, to help you get your creative juices flowing. [...]

 Link to the original blog post  - What’s Your Marketing IQ?

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When I left university, after doing a degree in marketing, I thought that the world was my oyster. I knew everything there was to know about marketing and I was ready to prove it. There was just one slight problem, that was in the early 1990s and UK was in a period of recession just as it is now. I had to take various temporary office jobs and took me over 18 months to get a Marketing Assistant job, but when I did I was over the moon, my career in marketing had started.

I was 22 years old, and from the very start I struggled, I had a marketing degree, so why did I find marketing so very hard?  The answer was, I had the theory alright, but no real experience of actually implementing it. I had no real idea how to put together a direct mail campaign, brief an agency on a new series of adverts or work with the PR company.  I remember feeling deflated and out of my depth, I wanted to succeed, but felt that I was barely keeping my head above the water.

However, in stepped my guardian angel, my manager, she might not have had a halo and wings, but she definitely helped me learn, she took me under her wing and I began to learn how to actually implement marketing campaigns. I learned from her what worked and what didn’t, how to work with a design agency and get the best out of them. She gave me the marketing coaching I needed and the knowledge that I would never have found in any text book. [...]

 Link to the original blog post  - Marketing State of Mind 

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One of the biggest reasons people fail in marketing is that they don’t focus. 

Image via Wikipedia

By this I mean, they don’t focus on what they need to to get the results they want from their website, direct mail campaign, advert or whatever their marketing activity is.

You need to be totally laser beamed and locked in what you want to achieve from your marketing and your target customer if you want to get results.

As an example in the past two weeks I have received emails and direct mail on the following:

• Management of my fleet of cars – there is no fleet of cars
• Print buying – I am a marketer not a designer and haven’t bought any print in the last 10 years
• Employee uniforms – I don’t have workers in a shop etc and have no need for uniforms
• and finally a postcard inviting me to a tax seminars for accountants – which was just plain strange seeing as it was for accredited accountants

All these campaigns were a complete waste of money, sure I am a small business, but that’s all they seemed to have targeted me for for, and not much else.
The thing is, you need to make sure that whatever you are sending out has a focused message for a focused audience. It’s always better to send out just a handful of emails or direct mails with a headline that really connects to a small focused audience. I have seen much better results from direct mail campaigns that went out to 50 prospective customers than a campaign that went out to 5,000 people who might be interested.

So I might have used the word focus around 10 times in this post, but that’s exactly what you need to do if you want your marketing campaigns to succeed.

Link to the original blog post  - Tips for Choosing a Marketing Agency

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