Brighter Marketing

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. 

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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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Link to the original blog post – Customer Focused Copy

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Link to the original blog post   – 6 Landing Page Tips 

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It can be very difficult to measure your press coverage. Some companies measure column inches, others what the equivalent space in advertising would have cost them. It is difficult to get a solid ROI on PR. However, what you can do is try to get consistent coverage month on month and use a simple system to measure this. One method we have used is a points system: simply assess your press cuttings and internet news on a monthly basis and allocate points based on the content:

• Headline with your company name in it = 1
• Image related to your company, person or product = 1
• Key message communicated = 1
• Quote included = 1
• Whole article about your company = 1

By using this system, you will see patterns begin to emerge. You might have a consistent score of around 20 points per month. If this figures starts to fall, you need to find out why and work out where you need to make improvements.

Link to the original blog post – What is Marketing?

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Link to the original blog post – Thinking Too Much 

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Remember to write “customer focused” marketing and promotional copy or content that appeals to your target audience. It’s important to remember that content will instantly have more appeal if it speaks to your audience in terms of YOU

Example 
we, ours, we’re, we will, we can

USE you can, you might, you will, yours, your and you’re

By using YOU, it puts your target audience in the right mindset and they start thinking of their situation straight away.

For example… we could use the following copy:

“We are a marketing company, that specialise in coaching, we have worked with a range of clients small and large and we ensure that we transfer the skills our clients need to improve their marketing”

However, if we use YOU, then it changes the perspective

At Brighter Marketing we help you to develop your marketing skills so that you can take your marketing to the next level. By working with you on a one to one coaching basis, you gain the knowledge you need to make your marketing a success.

Just by changing the focus, you can make a real difference to the success of your sales and marketing copy.