Communiqué SME October 2009

We were sitting at home last weekend musing on how to decorate our downstairs loo. I know, we’re sad, and need to get a life, but there is a point to this, I promise!

We had a whacky idea to paper the walls with old maps so that visitors to the little room could embark on imaginary journeys.

I wondered if they would get bored after a while and the novelty wear off. It got me thinking –so much of what we do regularly becomes routine and what we see often becomes wallpaper, including, if we’re not careful, our marketing.

Any viewer of commercial TV can tell you that by the end of an average evening the fourth or fifth showing of an ad just sends you to sleep or drives you into the kitchen to make a cuppa.

Are your marketing materials a bit like that? The same old, same old, sent unerringly to a semi-comatosed audience?

Don’t despair – we all end up there at times. It’s a good idea to do a regular face check in the mirror and give your communications a bit of a makeover.

Here are my tips for getting noticed more often.

Happy marketing!

Carolyn Page

How to get noticed

1. Speak their language

Recognise how your customers and prospects like to communicate and use their preferred channels of communication. If they like to Twitter, then you have to tweet. If they like to chat, then pick up the phone. If their world is e-everything then get busy with those e-newsletters and e-campaigns. It’s not your preferences that count!

2. Ring the changes

Try to communicate in different ways to your prospects and customers. Mix up the e-mails, newsletters, phone calls and try some old fashion pen on paper. I’ve found the occasional handwritten postcard to a client works wonders because it’s different, unexpected and personal.

3. Check your face in the mirror

Do a reality check on what you’re sending out – pile up all the marketing materials you have sent to your prospects or customers in the past few months (including copies of e-marketing pieces) and envisage being on the receiving end of all that. Does it make sense? Is it all just the same thing fired out on a random or even regular basis? Would you just put it in the bin?

4. Be creative

Think outside the box. Sit down with friends or colleagues and brainstorm some really whacky ideas. In amongst the impossibly silly ones there is probably a perfectly doable gem of an idea. Take inspiration from other great campaigns. Raising awareness of your business is a necessary evil – you have to do it from Day 1 and have to keep doing it so that you don’t fall off the radar. Getting noticed amidst the noise of today’s relentless streams of communication requires a huge effort and bags of lateral thinking.

Some creative cost-effective marketing communications I’ve seen lately:

· SomeoneI know looking to raise awareness for her fairtrade clothing range wore angel’s wings as she rode to work on her bike each day, generating lots of interest and enquiries for her business.

· A backpacker’s hostel in Amsterdam on a low budget made little flags saying ‘You won’t get any of this in our hostel’ and stuck them in dog pooh around the city! Oooo! But it got the message across in a novel way to a mobile audience of young, foot-sore explorers with plenty of horror stories to tell about the state of hostels round the world.

· A lady I met at a networking event recently got up and spoke really well about her weight loss business, wearing the baggy old clothes she had when she was 3 stone heavier, and made a huge impact. The impact was huge but she wasn’t!

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Events

The events calendar for the winter is a bit bare as most people are thinking about Christmas, but things will pick up again in the New Year.

Look out for our new interactive marketing workshops for SMEs in next month’s edition of Communiqué.

The first event for those of you who need a marketing plan to boost your business in 2010 will be on Wednesday 6 January.

Pencil it into your diary now!

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