Brighter Marketing

I have just read a really short but interesting article on Seth Godin‘s blog – if you haven’t visited this then take a look at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. He really is a great marketing Guru and has some original and thought provoking ideas. It was one of his latest posts about the importance of headlines that I thought was worth commenting on. [...]

The new website was launched on 17th November and we didn’t want this to go unnoticed, so we developed a promotional email to go out on the following day 18th November. We have been building an email marketing database for over two years now, made up from people we meet to people who have subscribed via our website, however they all have one thing in common, they’ve requested to be on our mailing list and can unsubscribe at any time. We use a couple of very inexpensive and easy to use tools to email our list they are Livewire Campaign (www.livewirecampaign.co.uk) and Aweber (www.aweber.com). [...]

I  was reading the Sunday Times a few weeks ago and came across a great article “Now the buyer must beware” about a chap called Martin Lindstrom a 38 year advertising guru who has given over the last two years of his life to working out why people buy the products they do. Rather than ask customers why they buy, he scanned and wired up hundreds of his volunteers brains so that he could observe which parts of the brain reacted in response to different products and questions. The result… that our subconscious does most of the decision-making. [...]

With the final version of the book at our publishers to have the t’s crossed and i’s dotted, we thought that it was time to put up our new website www.brightermarketing.com. We were going to wait until the book was launched in January 2009, but after our marketing brainstorming session,  we realised that it was important to build-up to the launch rather than just do it all in one hit. In this way we could develop some inertia for the actual launch and keep our book in people’s minds. [...]

We said that we would keep a diary of how we are going to launch our marketing book and give you the lowdown on all the marketing tools we are going to use. So here is the first installment,  which in truth takes into account some work that we did a few weeks ago, but since we didn’t have the blog up and running then, we couldn’t put it on here.

The very first marketing tool we used was our brains, we sat down and thought of all the ways that we could promote the book. Nothing was off limits and after some distillation we came up with a top ten list of what we needed to do to get maximum coverage for our book launch. [...]

This is just a short story that illustrates just how easy brand loyalty can change, almost overnight and how you need to make sure you know and understand what your clients want from you.

Picture the scene, my six year old daughter comes out of the doors of her primary school, smiles and runs over to me, gives me a hug and shows me very proudly the clay head sculpture she has made for me in art. We chat on the way home, stop at a cafe for a cup of tea and cake and she tells me I am the best mum in the world. I feel nice inside and can’t image how things will change….well fast forward five years and it seems that the mummy brand isn’t so popular now. And what’s more it seemed to happen so suddenly, after years of loyalty I was well and truly dropped! [...]

I have decided to stop watching and listening to the news for a few weeks, to be honest every time I switched on Sky News or News 24, or listened to Radio 4 in the car, there just seemed to be a big black cloud emanating from the screen or the speakers. And it seemed to be having a negative effect on me, and everyone around me. When I talked to colleagues and friends the usual question of “How’s business?” had turned into “Has the credit crunch affected you? Did you know XYZ company is having real problems and John of ABC company has been made redundant”. And so it went on, emails that came through were “Survival tactics for the credit crunch”, reminding me daily of all that was going wrong, it was all getting a bit much and I found myself becoming sucked into it all.

So with all this going on,  Siobhan and I  were shown a video by a guy called Dewitt Jones, a photographer with the National Geographic, in a training session we were attending last week. It was called “Celebrate what’s right with the world”. It started with some new age music and photographs of the moon and stars and I thought “oh here we go, another smaltchy American guy telling us to be kind to one another”. But for some reason I started to listen to what he was saying, and the more I listened to what he said, the more I thought “this guy’s actually got something here”. [...]

As our clients and colleagues will know, we decided to write a book earlier this year that contained a good proportion of all the marketing knowledge whizzing around in our brains. We wanted to develop a “how to” marketing book that gave the reader the inside knowledge of how to put together a direct mail campaign or how to buy advertising effectively and more importantly, how on earth search engine optimisation works. Rather than just the theory behind marketing which is great if you want to pass an exam, but not so great if you want to sell products and services. [...]

As this is our ever first blog post, we thought we would discuss how important it is, especially given the challenging times to be motivated to market your company, products and services. It’s one thing to think about the marketing you should be doing to keep your existing clients and attract new ones, but it’s quite another to actually take some action and do it.

This blog is a good example, we talked about doing a blog, discussed the type of content that we were going to put on here, talked to some technical people about setting up a blog, but kind of stopped short of actually developing a blog for quite a few months.  There was always something more important to do and we kept putting it off, saying that we would launch it when our new marketing book – Brighter Marketing Bible for Small Businesses was due out in January 08. But last week we decided that we had procrastinated for too long and decided that we were going to take action and get our blog up and running. [...]