/U/Marketing

Here’s some tips to help you attract new customers to your venue.

C – Is for customer service. Are you surprised this is the first point? This is the most crucial ingredient in making certain that your customer leave and give your venue wonderful recommendations!

U – Is for utilizing loyalty programmes. These are a great way to create value for customers both old and new.

S – Is for starting small. Don’t throw yourself into any new initiative full steam ahead. Start small and once you begin to see successes, begin to expand on these initiatives.

T – Is for ‘try pay it forward’. It’s okay to take a cut in profits sometimes. It’s nice to give something back once in a while and customers like this. It shows them you’re not all about their money.

O – Is for organising an event. An event is a great way to get traffic through the door and allows people to see your venue pumping and enables you to establish a vibe and atmosphere for the place.

M – Is for measure. Measure everything. How is your turnover looking? Measure your results is you implement anything new, or you change anything related to your service. By doing this you allow yourself to make changes in real time so that there’s no time or resources wasted.

E – Is for execute your advertising initiative effectively. Make sure all your advertising efforts are relative to your industry. Think seriously about your clientele and what they would want to read/hear.

R – Is for referrals and networking. Take advantage of any relationship you have with those around you. Talk about your business with friends and family. Do the same for them – mutual referrals are great for generating foot traffic.

S – Is for strategic alliances. Make connections and deals with industry competitors and benefit from each other’s established resources and clientele.

2014 already saw a sea of changes, with native advertising becoming more important and the trend towards Smartphones and tablets meaning content strategies needed to be rethought for a mobile crowd. It’s a new year, and we’re about to see a whole new range of changes.

In this article, we explore some of the emerging marketing trends for 2015, and look at how your agency can leverage them to gain new clients, offer increased value and establish your shop as a market leader:

1. Personalisation

In 2015, more people than ever are connected across the globe via technology. But with all the brands on the globe shouting into the digital void, what consumers are looking for is localised, personalised brand connections. Personalisation isn’t a trend, it’s the future of marketing – being able to tailor messaging directly to a customer’s interests, demographic, or role.

What this means for your agency? Add personalisation into campaigns by suggesting ways your clients can further segregate lists, or create content to target specific customer groups.

2. Companies will mobilize workers as brand ambassadors

Led by Silicon Valley tech workers, many large global firms are beginning to see the value in having a team of dedicated, enthusiastic employees who promote the brand as cool and hip to their own networks. This is especially true when your staff are made up of motivated millennials with thousands of Twitter followers who are influencers and trendsetters in their own right.

What this means for your agency? Expect to see more projects focusing on internal communications. Work with your clients to find ways they can identify influencers in their own company and incorporate and involve their staff in upcoming campaigns.

3. Platforms will move to a “pay-to-boost” model

According to Jay Bear, President of Convince & Convert, “2015 will be the year of paid amplification.” As companies like Facebook and Twitter are beginning to understand the tremendous value of their user-base, they are focusing on finding ways to monetize their data pool. Post amplification and boosting social media reach is going to become more important, as this focuses on reaching people who are already fans of a brand, as opposed to sourcing new fans.

What this means for your agency? You’ll need to stay on top of changes in the social networks and how they impact how many people see your updates. Include a budget for boosting posts in each campaign, and implement better system to measure which updates work best.

4. Wearable Technology Causes a Paradigm Shift

With Apple Watch and Google Glass hitting the market in 2015, augmented reality and wearable technology has arrived. Its impact on the world of marketing will be massive – but what exactly that impact will be we have yet to discover.

Many brands will want to get in early to pioneer campaigns to integrate with this new technology. There will be new opportunities to create not just integrated, but interactive, marketing that reaches customers in an entirely new way.

What it means for your agency? Keep an eye on this space because by the end of 2015 we will begin to see early marketing applications specifically for wearable devices. Start thinking now about how you can become an early adopter and leader in this space.

5. Marketing becomes more human

Although companies know they have to become an authentic content hub, the content they produce still reeks of sales-speak. Consumers hate feeling as though they’ve been tricked into liking or supporting a brand – they just want interesting stuff to read or watch.

This year, more than ever before, brands have to embrace humour, vulnerability, authenticity, and silliness to win over their audience.

What it means for your agency? Start thinking about campaigns that incorporate humour, kindness, and authentic human experiences at their core. Make this the factor that differentiates your agency’s content from the rest.

6. Marketing Technologists will Have Their Pick of Jobs

As marketing is becoming increasingly tied to the digital landscape, those marketers who don’t just understand how to create content, but have a working knowledge of development and coding will thrive. Recruiters will be looking for marketers with equal parts creativity and technological acumen to drive their digital strategy in 2015.

What it means for your agency? Alongside your creative team, you’re going to need to invest some money into growing your technical abilities, whether that’s hiring someone new, training up a current staff member, or taking on a contractor.

7. Disparate channels will be merged to create end-to-end marketing

Previously, many brand marketing strategies have been somewhat haphazard. They knew they “must” be on Instagram, so an Instagram account is set up. They knew they should be blogging, so they begin blogging, and this is how the marketing suite is created. But none of these brands have a strategy for how these disparate elements fit together, or what they mean in terms of the customer journey.

2015 is the year brands get serious about bringing together all these different pieces and creating a strategic customer journey.

What it means for your agency? You can be an ally for brands in creating a seamless customer experience. Focus on creating a strategy template incorporating different types of content and marketing collateral, so that you can help brands to streamline and strategize.

8. More Data means Micro-Targeting of Campaigns

With increasing levels of detail in the amount of data available to marketers, brands have the unique opportunity to target different consumer groups at a micro level, targeting campaigns based on a customer’s college major, favourite TV show or most frequented fast-food restaurant.

I was at a blogging workshop recently where I learned about micro-targeting in action. A wedding photographer in the UK talked about how she targeted a Facebook ad to women who’d been engaged in the last 6 months, who lived in her local area and who had also liked the Belle & Sebastian Facebook page. She then included some song lyrics in her ad text. The photographer paid less than $50 for the ad over its entire run and booked 8 weddings as a direct result.

What it means for your agency? Explore micro-targeting as a way to get more oomph out of larger-scale marketing campaigns. Perhaps this is a service you could offer as an add-on to your standard packages.

9. Guest posts are out – paid placements are in

As site owners are inundated by low-quality guest post content, and guest-posting platforms being hit by Google penalties, it seems guest posting as a way of sourcing a legitimate, dedicated audience has gone the way of the dodo.

Instead, brands are turning to native marketing and paid placements to get their content on popular websites. Research has shown native ad campaigns deliver higher brand lift than pre-roll video ads – it seems consumers either don’t notice or don’t care about the difference between native advertising and ordinary content – as long as the content itself is of a high quality.

What it means for your agency? Are you offering to help your client run native advertising campaigns? If not, you should be adding this service as part of your offerings.

10. Creative Content Will Win the Day

In one key way, 2015 is no different to any of the years preceding it. And that is the fact that creative content is the key to marketing success for any brand. If a brand is to succeed in the digital space, then they need to be thinking of marketing not as a series of stats and ads, but as a production house, creating stunning articles, videos, images and infographics we love to read.

What it means for your agency? Look at the types of content you’re producing. What has been the most successful? How are you able to stay at the forefront of the market? Remember, as a content-producing studio, other agencies are not your competitors – the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Huffington Post … these are the platforms with which you have to compete for the eyes and ears of consumers.

To learn more about what to expect for 2015, check out our article 15 Fascinating Stats that will Influence Your 2015 Email Marketing.

What trends do you think we’ll see come to fruition in 2015? How is your agency rising to meet these new challenges?

Imagine you ran a coffee shop with great coffee, a cool vibe, comfortable seating… and no customers. Not an uncommon problem, and the classic solution promoted by social media experts would be something like:

“Create a Twitter handle and offer discounts to customers who follow. Broadcast weekly events and promotions via Twitter and engage with your audience to encourage them to come and bring their friends. More discounts to people who get their friends to follow. Create a mailing list; Tumblr; Facebook page; etc, etc.”

It’s an alluring prospect, that no matter where you are, using online social media tools you can tap into a global audience, create a network of influencers, and drive people to your coffee shop in droves. The only issue? I frankly doubt you’d get even a single customer out of it. It’s all reasonable, common advice. I just don’t believe it would work. My advice?

“Stand outside your coffee shop, up the block a bit. Watch the people who come by. When you see someone who looks like a potential customer, approach them and ask in a friendly, non-confrontational way: Why didn’t you come in?”

I wager in the first hour you’ll get at least one real customer, dozens of potential customers who are much more likely to stop by in the future, and a hundred tangible ideas on what you can do right now to attract more business:

• Did they not like the vibe? Redecorate!
• Did they doubt the quality of your coffee? Emphasize the roaster’s brand to demonstrate quality!
• Did they just not notice you? Put an A-board out front with an arrow pointing at your store!
• Did they not want to go to an empty place? Promote free coffee whenever you’re empty to anyone who comes in and sits for an hour!

The problem with “social media” is that you actually don’t care about a global audience: whatever you are, you want a very, very localized audience. The most important audience of all are the people who stopped by, checked you out, and walked away. Just ask them why, and let that guide you. Granted, I’ve chosen a physical example of a coffee shop to illustrate this idea, but as I imagine is obvious: the principle is exactly the same for your website. The fact that “the internet” has billions of people is irrelevant to your service — the handful of people who actually visit your site are the ones that matter the most. Again, everybody would agree with this, but what would the classic social media advice be? Probably to use the same sort of bland strategy the fictional coffee shop owner would follow — and probably with the same (lack of) results. Instead, my advice to you would be:

“Do everything you can to talk with your visitors. Put a giant sign up button on the homepage requiring nothing but an email address. If that doesn’t work, just have it open directly to a chat window with you logged in ready to talk. Ask them why they came, what they’re looking for. You’ll be amazed what you hear.”

It sounds so obvious. It’s so easy to do. Yet, nearly nobody does this. Luckily, we did, and I count as one of the most important techniques we ever used to get real world customer feedback. I literally believe that had we not done this, Expensify simply wouldn’t be here today. Our initial assumptions about what people cared about were so far off, in so many directions, that had we not a tool like this we simply wouldn’t have survived the first year and never become the leading brand we are today. Despite this being such a hilariously obvious technique, I’m almost embarrassed to say we only stumbled into the technique by accident:

1. Our first homepage had a big sign up button on it that required only an email address. (This is common now, but at the time it was really controversial: What, I don’t need to create a password? *mindblown*)
2. Immediately after sign up, you’d get a fancy stylized HTML email with a bunch of information nobody would ever read, and a validation link that most people would never click.
3. However, we had a system that every hour, would email everybody who signed up in the past hour.
4. This system ran on whatever increment in the hour that we started it, so if we started it at 1:17, it would run at 2:17, 3:17, etc.
5. Furthermore, this system only sent plain-text emails, and only using my actual email account (“David Barrett ”)
6. And the message, contrary to all marketing best practices, was extremely open-ended with no actionable link to click: 

---

From: David Barrett
Subject: Welcome to Expensify!
——————————————————-
Hi there! I see you just signed up for Expensify, welcome! Can you tell me about yourself? Namely, what sort of work do you do, how big is your company, how do you currently do expense reports, how did you learn about Expensify, how do you hope to use it — that sort of thing. Thanks!

David
Founder and CEO of Expensify 
Follow us here: http://twitter.com/expensify

---

A good response rate to an email like this is 2-3%. A great response rate is 5%. But this email got a 12% response rate. And not just any responses — pages and pages of thoughtful, priceless feedback, from people who genuinely wanted us to succeed. We were floored. Not only was the feedback inspirational and motivational, but it created long-term relationships with our champions that have stayed with us for the many years since. As for why it performed so well, I have a few theories:

• It came a random duration after you signed up, on a random minute in the hour, so it wasn’t obviously an automated message.
• This was reinforced by the fact that it was a simple text email. Let’s be honest: nobody “real” writes well stylized emails with a formal greeting and logo — all it does is mentally flag you as spam.
• It was written by me, and sent from my actual email address. Hitting reply went straight to me, not some obvious mailbox. (Many responses would start with “You can’t have actually just emailed me for real, so I doubt you’ll actually read this and I’d be shocked if you actually replied, but since you asked here are my thoughts…”) 

And most important of all:

• It came on average 30 minutes after signing up. This meant that you received it right after your first interaction with the product, while it was still on your mind and your initial impressions were on the tip of your tongue, just waiting for someone to ask. 

I can’t overstate how helpful this was in shaping the company, and building us into the responsive, user-focused company we are today. Clearly, this gets harder and harder to maintain as you scale — when I send out our newsletter to my millions of closest friends, I get a lot of responses. It takes a long time to go through them all, but I do because “social media strategy” isn’t about the media, and it’s only loosely about strategy. It’s really just about being social, talking with the people who like you (and those who don’t), and being responsive to those who matter the most to your business: customers, users, and those who might be some day.

It may seem like an odd question to ask, but just occasionally brand owners seem to forget how long and hard it was to acquire equity their brands. Whether complacency or naivety is to blame, it does not matter: the consequences can be disastrous. Just ask Tiger Woods or BP.

Recently I was the object of such complacency or naivety (I haven’t worked out which yet). Although the matter has been resolved, I feel compelled to relay the essence of the story in the hope that other brand owners can avoid being as equally complacent or naïve.

About 18 months ago I bought a piece of home office equipment for domestic use. A couple of months ago it broke down. I took it to the local service agent who informed me that the reason it was broken was because I had replaced proprietary consumables (aka manufacturer-branded parts) with non-proprietary consumables (aka parts made by someone else) and these had damaged the equipment. Furthermore, my actions had voided the manufacturer’s warranty so they couldn’t fix the problem for free.

My choices were either pay for the problem to be fixed, or buy a whole new piece of equipment. Naturally I was somewhat aggrieved to learn this – particularly as the consumables vendor expressly assures consumers their products are fit for purpose. I therefore raised the issue with the vendor and, as is my right, sought a remedy under the Consumer Guarantees Act.

Long story short, I ended up being the meat in a proverbial brand sandwich. Neither the service agent, acting on behalf of the equipment manufacturer, nor the consumables vendor could agree where the fault for my machine dying lay.

More significantly, and on topic, they didn’t seem to care about me as their customer.

Unsurprisingly, the reputation of both brands went down in my estimation. Their respective reputations had attracted me to use their products and services for nearly a decade, but now, thanks to a seriously short-sighted approach to fixing a problem, they were about to self-inflict some significant damage.

Thankfully one of the brand owners – the vendor – ‘woke up and smelt the coffee’ and adopted a more positive approach to solving the problem (which is now solved). In doing so, the vendor restored something of its reputation in my eyes, but by no means all. I will definitely think twice in future about using the vendor’s products or services. As for the other party in this debacle, the service agent, well they have some serious pulling-up-of-socks to do if they expect me to be a customer of theirs again.

The moral of the story, then, is this: be careful with your brand. Don’t be complacent about it, don’t take it for granted. Look after it, and it will surely look after you.

This article first appeared in the Waikato Business News and was written by Ben Cain, Associate, James & Wells. Based in our Hamilton office Ben is part of the litigation team. His speciality areas include litigation and dispute resolution concerning trade mark rights and domain names. For more information and for expert IP advice contact Ben on Email: benc@jaws.co.nz or Phone: +64 7 957 5660 or 0800 INNOV8. 

Video highlights:

• Plan for challenges your product or service could face
• Capture and exploit your intellectual property
• Turn business cost into business opportunity
• Combine customer value with innovation and product stewardship. 

Meet the facilitators

Jane Lancaster, Director, Catalyst Ltd

Jane is a founding partner of Catalyst® Ltd. She has worked with many New Zealand companies and sectors in setting commercial goals in food, natural products and biotechnology and designing innovation programmes to deliver on them.


Jon Lucas, Senior Attorney, James & Wells

As a Registered Patent Attorney in both NZ and Australia, Jonathan crafts intellectual property strategies and commercialisation structures for technology companies.

Before launching a new business, going into production on a new product, or starting a service business … before throwing thousands of dollars into getting your idea to market … before signing that lease and ordering the stationary … you need to figure out if there’s actually anyone out there who will buy your product.

“But, Steff, I’m an architect. People everywhere need architects. I’m opening a graphic design agency. There are businesses in my area, and they all need business cards and posters and website designs. I’m a lawyer … everyone needs a lawyer at some point in their life, right?”

Wrong.

Why Don’t Businesses Conduct Market Research?

It seems like such a simple step. Before you invest a ton of time and money into starting a new business, you figure out if there’s a market for that business in the first place. And yet, far too many business owners neglect market research. This contributes to the shocking statistic that 1 in 5 small businesses fail within the first year.

Why wouldn’t you take the time to research? It could be that:

You’ve had a great idea and you don’t want to hear any negative feedback on it. You believe market research costs a significant amount of money, and you can’t afford it. You’ve cased that area. You’ve snooped on other competing businesses. You’ve done your market research, right? Right? You have a timeframe for getting your product to market – perhaps to coincide with an important event – and you don’t want anything to hold up the process. Whatever the reason, you will usually find that a little research in the beginning, even if you need to invest some money, will save you many dollars and significant heartache in the future.

Two types of Market Research

There are two different types of market research you can undertake. We recommend a mix of both.

Primary Research

Primary research comes from your customers – the people who will actually be buying your products and services. Usually, you can gather primary research through:

• Surveys: If you already have a database of potential clients, push out a survey asking them what they are looking for from your industry. Be sure to include open-ended sections for comments. These can be particularly illuminating. 
• Focus groups: Ideal for testing a product with a specific group. 
• Website polls: Often not as reliable as closed surveys, as you can’t control who is answering, but a great way to get continued feedback on improving products / services. 
• Reading what they read: Magazines, blogs and other forms of media geared toward a specific market can help you figure out what your customers are looking for. 
• Hanging out online: Check out social media pages, #hashtags, discussion groups and other online locations to see what your audience is talking about. 
• Your website: Collecting important data through a analytics software like Google Analytics can reveal important data about your core demographic. Find out where people are visiting your site from, and which devices they are using, so you can adjust accordingly. 

Secondary Research

Secondary research comes from outside sources – often, studies done by other organisations on demographics, tastes, decisions and values of certain groups can prove a valuable source of data for you when making decisions about your business. 

Here are some places you can conduct secondary research:

• Universities and Libraries: These contain reports, journals and archived papers of thousands of studies across the world. 
• Museums: Not all museums contain only “old stuff” and their archives can be a valuable source of information about certain groups. 
• Government Departments: All government departments will be conducting research on a regular basis, and most of this is available freely for public use. 
• Industry Associations: Of all your sources, these trade associations will have some of the most important insights into competitors in your area. 
• LinkedIn: Visit popular groups within your niche and ask questions about pain points for certain products / services. 
• Discussion forums: Pose interesting questions and ask users who are fans of similar products / services what they need and want. 

Saving $$$ on Market Research

Paying a company to perform your market research can be a costly endeavour. As a startup company, it’s probably best to perform your own research. It might not be as scientific or as accurate, but it will give you a fair idea of whether your business will float or sink in your current market.

Here are some free and cheap solutions for conducting primary and secondary market research:

• Use free survey tools like SurveyMonkey to create a survey you can send out via social media and on your website. 
• Talk to social media, communications and marketing graduates about conducting a market research project for your company. Graduates are always looking to pad their resumes and you should be able to get an enthusiastic worker at a great price. 
• Head to your local library. It’s not all copies of Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. You might be surprised at what’s available in your public library. Many academic journals and other papers can be accessed free online there, and the subject librarians can be extremely helpful. 
• Conduct your own product testing by giving out free samples at events or outside stores. This can be a great way to test a new product. 
• Browsing the internet takes nothing but time. Take a few hours to research some websites and social media pages associated with your target market, and identify some of the key pain points. 
• You are probably already a member of your local industry organisations and associations. Talk to other business owners or your association staff about the research you need to conduct. They will probably be able to point you in the right direction, and the association might even have something useful on file. 
• Investigate the government agency under which your industry sits. Government agencies are always conducting research, and most of it is free for the public to access and use. 
• Community organisations can also be a valuable source of knowledge for certain demographics and areas. You might even be able to partner with a community group to provide something beneficial in return for some research assistance – such as exchanging some free legal advice seminars for the ability to survey members about your services. 

You’ve Finished Gathering Data … Now What?

As Sherlock Holmes says, data (clay) is needed to make your bricks. Your bricks are the products and services that build a successful business.

Once you’ve collected data from various sources, it’s time to put it all together.

• create charts and graphs to present data in different ways. 
• share your findings with other stakeholders and business partners. 
• collect comments and survey answers from potential customers, rate them and group them in order to understand them better contextually. 
• pull out the relevant data from your studies and journals, and discard the rest. 

Then, you need to mull. What is the data showing? What improvements can you make to your offerings to help them stand up better in the market? What are people saying about the current climate for your company? How many people will actually swap over to your new business, or is there a strong brand loyalty for your competitors in the area? It can be helpful to write down a list of questions you have and find the answers in the data.

What you do with your market research is up to you, but it’s important to have all the clay you need first first, before you start making your bricks. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with a very crooked house.