Latest Reader Poll Results
It’s been a while since I started the last reader poll and it’s time to close this one off. So I asked the question, ‘which of the following direct sales tactics is the most effective?’ with the following options: Face to face, Telesales, Direct mail, Email shots, Other.
It was no surprise to see face to face receive the lion’s share of the votes with 79% of all respondents choosing this option. This was followed in second place by telesales at 14%, which for me has always been a very challenging tactic and I’m sure I’m not alone.
What’s required to make the most from face to face sales then. Well, a good starting point is to ensure you have a set of well designed and branded business cards, much like you can pick up from Moo.com. I run a blogger networking event in London and these cards are an essential ingredient of everyone’s networking tool kit.
For a list of other great sales tips, I recommend heading over to the excellent salesadvicetraining.com blog.
Thanks to all those that took part in the reader poll. The next question is now live in the right hand side bar and asks simply, ‘have you started using any of the following social media tools for marketing your business – blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Other?’
Measuring your Social Media Campaigns
Ever wondered how you can measure the impact of you social media campaigns? Well, all of the answers you could possibly need are here at the home of Measurementcamp.
What’s Measurement Camp?
It’s a London based initiative from PR agency Fishburn Hedges with the aim to “create a set of open source resources which allow interested parties to measure their social media communications online and offline.”
Not only will you find a host of fantastic online tools, but some case studies, ideas for benchmarking and links to other resources on social measurement such as the Facebook group.
If you are interested in learning more about actually getting your messaging into the social mediasphere in the first place and in the right way, then you might like to check out a seminar being run by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Marketing Communications Group called ‘PR 2.0, is your communication online, on-message?’
If you want to attend it’s being held in Central London between 6pm – 9pm on the 26th November and tickets range from £10+ VAT for students, up to £45 plus VAT for non-members of the CIPR. If you would like to attend drop me a line via comments or the contact form and I’ll send your details into the CIPR – or you can contact the CIPR online.
Speakers on the night will include Kevin Murray, Chairman of Bell Pottinger PR, Matthew McKay of BioMed Central and Edward Roussel, Telegraph Media Group Digital Editor.
And I musn’t forget there is the promise of mince pies and mulled wine – yes, Christmas is indeed nearly upon us.
Tag:bloggingHow to get the most from your marketing agencies?
I’ve worked in marketing and communications agencies for a little while now and I have represented clients large and small. Some with millions of dollars of marketing budget and others with pennies, or in some cases nothing at all. If you want to get the most from your agency, whether professional marketer or small business owner, there are a few factors you really should think about.
I am constantly surprised by how few marketers know how to effectively brief and manage an agency. As such, here are a few thoughts from someone who has sat on both sides of the client agency divide:
1. Start with a strong brief
All too often agencies are given a brief that is either too broad for there to be a clear definition of success, or is too defined so as to restrict creativity and allow little room for creativity and strategic consulting. There is no standard agency briefing template, but you should consider the following:
- Background to your business / industry
- Short analysis of trading conditions, including the market, key competitors
- Your companies strengths and weaknesses
- Budget and any preferences you have for its expenditure
- Target audiences – who is the decision maker you want to reach
- Broad objective – create Awareness, Interest, Desire or Action – in most cases for a small business you want to create action as there is little point in engaging in a brand building exercise.
- Timescales – when do you need to have the work completed?
Overall, what are your specific measures of success? For example do you need to see a 15% increase in sales, or 100 new leads for your sales managers to follow-up on.
The key with the brief is to be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound – to use the old SMART acronym.
2. Build a strong relationship
All agencies will want to build a relationship with you and your first port of call will often be an account handler. My best advice to you is to build a strong relationship with this person, ensure they understand what you need and when, ask them to report on progress regularly and importantly reward them for good work. The account handler will be responsible for ensuring all other elements of the agency team pull together to service your account effectively.
I have two examples of recent best and worst practice in this regard.
- The best practice client develop a partnership approach, involving the account handler in decision making, asking and taking advice, setting clear goals and ensuring the agency was well represented within the client company. Once the programme had achieved its objectives, the client properly rewarded the entire agency team with lunch and a mention to the agency bosses how well they had performed
- The worst practice saw the client take on an authoritative approach, overruling every recommendation made, treating agency staff poorly and generally being quite arrogant – the client is always right approach. As you might imagine, the project did not run so smoothly and ultimately the objectives were not met.
One client would dearly benefit from some lessons from the other.
3. Agree suitable budgets
All agencies will take a slightly different approach to fees depending on the client and your objectives. You may find you are quoted based on time, or a set fee for a project, or a monthly retainer for ongoing services. Your particular objectives will be more suited to one than the other and the agency will identify the best fit.
Ideally, and particularly if the economy becomes more challenging, you may want to set some performance based payments, e.g. you will pay 100% of the fees if the agency reaches the agreed targets of PR coverage, or uplift in sales enquiries. An example might be:
Target: 10 pieces of coverage in national newspapers
Fee: £10,000
Scale: £1,000 per piece of coverage achieved, with a minimum fee of £8,000.
This provides you with a little protection against under performance and the agency will have the incentive to perform.
If you consider this route, add a little carrot along with the stick. In other words reward your agency for over performance to the same scale as if they under perform. Not forgetting of course to set this as a line item in your marketing budget.
4. Communicate regularly
No matter what field of marketing or communications your agency specialises in, they will need to talk with you frequently. A successful campaign is rarely run by an agency in isolation.
For example, they will often need speedy approvals of copy or images, or a quick turnaround when a journalist requests more information or a quote, or they may need sign-off on a particular choice of advertising vehicle.
In addition, for ongoing campaigns, they may advise you on how to react to news or crises, or provide input for where they believe strategy could benefit from tweaking. Listen to their advice, particularly in the case of specialised agencies, and agree on next steps together.
The key is to make yourself available to the agency and to listen. After all, you are paying them for their expertise.
5. Evaluate and feedback continually
Along with ongoing communication with regards to the tactical implementation of any campaign, don’t forget too to feedback at a higher level. Agencies, like employees, need the opportunity to react to negative feedback, as well as positive of course.
A quarterly feedback meeting may be appropriate but each campaign will operate on different timescales. The importance is to keep up the two way evaluation, feedback and communication.
6. Pay a visit to their offices
Agency teams are often extremely busy. Of course you are too and, as the client, you should expect a certain level of service. However, consider how often you ask them to travel to your offices and think whether it may be practical to pay them a visit instead.
This small courtesy will provide you with an insight into their agency style, level of creativity and environment. In addition it will give you the opportunity to meet with the broader account team and possibly more senior agency management. All of these factors may benefit both your campaign effectiveness but also your ongoing relationship with the agency.
Agency client relationships are vital to the success of any campaign. Whether it is advertising, PR, web design, DM or other, it is very easy to get this wrong. The emphasis to my mind should always lie in a strong relationship built on clear performance objectives.
Whilst it may be difficult for a small business owner or someone new to the game, there is certainly no excuse for a professional marketer to manage his / her agencies poorly.
If you want some advice about how to choose the right agency, there is a decent enough article on Business Link, or you could do worse than looking up the PRCA (Public Relations Consultants Association) or the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing).
Tag:More recent conversations
It’s been a while since I seriously looked at the questions and comments on my blog with the thought of providing some real answers and value. As such, It’s time to wrap up a few of the more recent and interesting thoughts.
First of all to answer a common question about the price of the Palm smartphone. Well, difficult to put a price tag on it as it will be different in every country. In the UK you could probably get it for free, assuming you sign up to an appropriate tariff – I believe Vodafone has this one. In all other countries, head to your local phone store, or check out the Palm website for guidance. If anyone at Palm reads this, be great to get your thoughts…
On SEO illumination, thanks for gWallet for the advice on writing excerpts in Wordpress. My blogs are all based on WP and I hadn’t heard that tip before. Rest assured I will be jumping on that little gem. Also, a thought would be to ensure your blog posts are properly tagged, something I used to be meticulous at, at least until I had problems with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin and lost a lot of my tags – be warned, do not ever turn this plugin off if you have it installed on your blog. I should point out the illumination is provided by Improbulus and for a full in depth write of, you should definitely check out the superb Consuming Experience blog – and I mean full length..!
It seems a lot of you have the same questions and thoughts around direct marketing campaigns. Mostly around return on investment (ROI) and how to measure it, and getting good data. Both are good questions and could generate lengthy blog posts on each. My advice is to setup your objectives and goals at the planning stage and decide what you think is a reasonable response to your campaign. Anything between 2-5% would probably be appropriate but it will vary per campaign. Getting good data is different and I advise you to try out some data providers and work with them on an ongoing basis to identify which data is the most effective.
Affiliate marketing, you say you worked in telesales for 5 years, do you have any advice for the direct marketers about how and where to get good data? Is it better to go to data owners, or data brokers, what conversion rates are likley in telesales etc.?
I’d love to know the name of the book on social media marketing you are reading Website Marketing. Could you add it to the comments? Sorry tsheets but the video on irritating marketing has been removed by the YouTube user – which just highlights the problems of relying on other peoples content for your blog posts..!
So there you go folks. I’m actually just short of 1000 comments on this blog, so please help me to get over that milestone with a comment or two..
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