Your Brand on Twitter
October 22, 2009 at 11:41 am | In General, Web marketing | Leave a CommentTags: branding, emotional marketing, marketing, marketing mindset, small business marketing, Web 2.0
With a limited scope of just 140 characters a tweet, you could be forgiven for thinking that Twitter offers equally limited scope for communicating your business or personal brand. If your brand is all about being endlessly verbose, you’re probably right.
But it’s a rare (as hen’s teeth) brand that benefits from waffle so perhaps Twitter provides a useful exercise in finding ways to trim your brand communications to nutshell size.
Think about…
What you tweet about: Do you stay purely business or do you let some personal stuff through? Do you keep close to home or cover industry news too? Do you tweet about news, information, quirky related virals…?
How often you tweet: Too little and you run the risk of making little impact, too much and you need to be useful/informate/entertaining to maintain your relevance to your followers.
Your tone of voice: An important part of conveying your brand in written and spoken channels and, indeed, it’s a challenge to get it right in such small chunks but think about being consistently professional, funny, irreverent, dry, enthusiastic, calming… whatever your brand values intend.
Who you hang out with: It’s tempting to get excited about the quantity of your followers but their quality is important too. I don’t hold back from blocking and reporting anyone who looks like they’re spamming. Anyone relevant, interested and/or interesting is welcome to follow me though so please do.
By the way, has anyone else had to overcome the aversion to the Twitter terms “following” and “follower”? It still makes me think of “gurus”, and that’s not really part of my brand.
Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing Ltd, Nottingham
Francine on Twitter
Marketing Strategy / Marketing Tactics
October 15, 2009 at 10:52 am | In Best practice, General, Marketing effectiveness, Marketing planning, Marketing strategy | Leave a CommentTags: Clarity Marketing, marketing, Marketing effectiveness, marketing for growth, marketing mindset, small business marketing
One of the more frequent difficulties I come up against as a marketing consultant is when dealing with (prospective) clients who want me to tell them the “best way to market themselves”, meaning the (usually) cheapest way to promote their business’ products and services but who have little idea about what their broader marketing strategy is. Indeed, they often think that the promotional tactics they use are marketing strategies.
What’s the difference?
Strategy is the broad route you intend to take (or, more often, according to Professor Tony Watson, the route you do take and explain as strategy afterwards) to achieve your business goals.
Tactics are the means you deploy in order to follow your strategy.
Strategy without tactics is simply daydreaming; tactics without strategy are merely directionless dabbling. You’re welcome to quote me on that.
And, without a strategy in mind, it is very difficult to know what the “best way to market” your business could possibly be.
The diagram above shows the consequences of getting the balance wrong:
An inefficient strategy & inefficient tactics
The route to a slow, drawn-out death. You’ve chosen the wrong strategic path but the fact that you’re dragging your heels along it by using inefficient tactics means it will be a long time before you realise it, if, indeed, you do so before it’s too late.
An inefficient strategy & efficient tactics
The best that can be said of this choice combination is that it will, at least, put you out of your misery sooner rather than later. The wrong choice of direction coupled with a really efficient way of getting to the wrong place. Ouch!
An efficient strategy & inefficient tactics
All too common a situation, this one. You get by, tick over, plod along but you’re held back by poor tactical choices.
An efficient strategy & efficient tactics
Jackpot! This is where we want to be. Travelling efficiently and effectively along a well-chosen strategic route. No wonder that guy’s having so much fun waving his wad of cash around – I’d be smug too.
This is why my heart sinks a little when business owners think I can “fix” their marketing or come up with brilliant tactical ideas to save their business. In the context of a strong strategic approach to the business, this is possible. Without, there’s a danger of taking them to their sudden death. Please don’t ask me to do that? I’m more than happy to help with your strategy.
Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing, Nottingham
Creative Thinking – anyone can do it
October 13, 2009 at 7:01 pm | In Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity, General | Leave a CommentTags: Clarity Marketing, creative thinking, Innovation, marketing, marketing mindset
Creative thinking isn’t only the domain of artists. It’s not the same thing as being able to produce a beautiful/interesting/challenging piece of art/music/literature/etc., although, clearly, it helps to be able to think creatively to do these things.
Creative thinking is also an inherent part of being an entrepreneur, of spotting opportunities and bringing new ideas into the world. Without the ability to generate creative new ideas, there would be no invention or innovation.
To some people, this might come naturally, but you might be interested to know that the process of creative thinking can be taught and that it works!
A recent brief presentation as part of the Ingenuity Programme at the University of Nottingham introduced to a business audience, the process that has been taught for a few years now to entepreneurship students. A ripple went round the room as it was pointed out that today’s students are tomorrows entrepreneurs and they could well soon be snapping at the heels of the people in the room – equipped with some very useful knowledge indeed.
As marketers, we tend to be familiar enough with the second part of the Ingenuity Creative Problem Solving Process – what they term Develop-Design-Deploy. Typically, this is the are where most investment is made.
Creative Problem Solving Process
But by putting time and resources into what should be the prelimary stage – Define-Discover-Determine – it is possible to:
- Identify problems that need solving and so provide a commercial solution;
- Explore the root causes of those problems;
- Using creative problem solving techniques, generate creative ideas for solutions and;
- Determine which the ‘best’ (most attractive, most commercially viable) solution is.
Thus arriving at novel business ideas that can differentiate your business and weeding out inferior ideas that might otherwise have found their way into the market only to fail.
See Lee Martin talking about the creative problem solving process.
Book into the New Business Ideas one-day workshop from the Ingenuity Programme.
Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing, Nottingham
Creative Marketing Ideas
October 5, 2009 at 1:22 pm | In Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity, General, Marketing effectiveness | Leave a CommentTags: brand advocate, branding, buzz marketing, Clarity Marketing, creative thinking, marketing, Marketing effectiveness, marketing mindset, services marketing
So who’s having the best creative marketing ideas these days?
In terms of things that have made a connection with me – and made me take some action – I’m pretty impressed with the charity sector.
I’ve blogged before about the creative approach taken by Pants to Poverty, ranging from eye-catching marches in central London (particularly catching the eye of a TV news crew), their videoing of stunts at festivals and events, and their great competition campaign against ‘bad pants’ harnessing people’s passion through social media techniques.
I was alerted to the latest charity campaign to catch my attention via Twitter and loved the concept so much I just had to join in.
Adopt A Word is a fantasically synergistic link up between small charity, I CAN, which supports the development of speech, language and communication skills in all children with a special focus on those who find this hard and Collins the dictionary people. What a match.
For a mere £20 you can adopt a word for a year, with a promise to care for it and give it plenty of exercise. Give a Word a Happy Home.
Naturally I was pleased to have cottoned on to this idea quickly enough to adopt “marketing”. as my very own.
As an example of great brand values coupled with a distinctive emotional appeal, the campaign must be a winner.
So what can a small business learn from these examples? What they undoubtedly do is to:
- Stand out with original ideas that would be impossible for anyone else to copy without being distinctly “me too” about it;
- Get an emotional reaction, one that makes you want to “get involved” whilst allowing you to express yourself and your own values;
- Create something to show and talk about, enabling their fans to spread the word for them.
Notable are the imaginitive ideas that go beyond the obvious, something that the typical small business could harness to great, and cost-effective effect, in their own marketing.
Do these examples give you any ideas to go beyond the usual brochures and advertising?
Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing, Nottingham
Strategic Thinking vs Strategic Planning
September 25, 2009 at 4:12 pm | In Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity, General, Marketing strategy | 1 CommentTags: Ingenuity Programme, Marketing effectiveness, marketing mindset, strategy
I attended an interesting breakfast seminar this week as part of the University of Nottingham’s Ingenuity Programme where I heard Professor Tony Watson talking on Strategic Thinking.
His research in businesses shows that strategic thinking is much more significant than simply having a ’strategic plan’.
Most strategy is developed ‘after the fact’ to explain actions taken rather than actually determined and guided by a plan. Any ’strategic plan’ tends to be solely the property of the board/senior management.
Strategic thinking, on the other hand, can be adopted by anyone and everyone within a business – and deployed effectively as long as the business has a broad strategic direction. Strategy is developed by both thinking and action – acting thinkingly and thinking actingl,y as Karl Weick put it.
You can see and hear some of Tony’s presentation as it was livestreamed.
The presentation made good sense to me in relation to the idea of the marketing mindset – that the ability to understand your business situation as it changes and evolves, and to spot and harness the marketing opportunity it presents is about understanding your broad business strategy and being able to take informed marketing actions to achieve it whilst remaining flexible to the changing marketing environment.
Tony will be running a one-day workshop “Strategic Thinking – What’s It Got To Do With Me?” (the “Me” being anyone and everyone in your business) on 19th January 2010. It’s some way away, I know, but places are limited and, if Tony’s ideas have been as thought-provoking for youas they were for the audience this week, you might like to consider booking a place soon.
Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing
Customer Service – some questions for the ‘Big Boys’
September 24, 2009 at 12:19 pm | In Customer service, General | Leave a CommentTags: Clarity Marketing, marketing, Marketing effectiveness
I’ve not had much time to blog over the past week or two because of the amount of time it’s been taking to try and get my new phone mended (it conked out after the 28-day period in which I could automatically have asked for a replacement and, despite there being something in consumer law about items needing to be of satisfactory quality, fit for its purpose and as described, it took a week and half to even get to the point where the phone company would consider taking it back to be mended.
I don’t want this to turn into yet another rant about bad customer service (I must have got that out of my system by now) but the experience has raised a couple of questions about how large companies regard customer service.
1. Do they believe that having someone at a call centre help-line go through their computer-based list of “things to do in this situation” is actually the same thing as helping?
Even if going through the list results in absolutely no improvement in the fault? Even if the only result is several hours of the customer’s time wasted (I value my time even if they don’t) which, in my book, makes the situation worse?
The people I dealt with (of course, I was passed around several of them) were all perfectly polite and pleasant – but they were absolutely no help at all. And yet, they did the job that they’re paid to do and probably believed they did it well. Ultimately the customer foots the bill for the company to pay people to be utterly useless. Why do they think that this is good business?
2. Do they believe that keeping within boundaries of consumer law is the same thing as providing good customer service?
I’m all for customers knowing their rights (see Consumer Direct for the UK) and for businesses abiding by the law but the Trading Standards people are here to ensure customers get a fair deal not to set standards for exemplary customer service.
How could any customer feel valued knowing that all the company that they were buying from thought they were worth was the bare minimum that they could get away with?
A couple for the Big Boys to ponder but I won’t be holding my breath for an answer.
PS I got my phone back yesterday after being deprived of it for a further week. So far it’s working. You can see some of the stuff I can do with this wonderful item at http://qik.com/francinepickering.
Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing Ltd., Nottingham
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