Assisted Marketing , Marketing Services , Measurement and ROI
The term “direct response marketing” can be interpreted in slightly different ways by different marketing practitioners. So it is probably best if I define what we do. Then you can decide if it is really what you’re looking for.
Assisted Marketing , Direct Mail , Email Marketing , Marketing Services
What springs to mind when you think of direct marketing Inverness?
Did you know that direct marketing, when properly planned and executed, can be one of the most effective ways to get sales into your business?
The current vogue for all things social media is all very well, but you can’t bank a like.
So while social media will have its place in your marketing campaigns, it is worth remembering that it is possible to generate a lot of heat on social media, but not very much light.
In other words, it is easy to get carried away with the technology, the apps and the “buzz”. Achieving actual sales and cash in the bank? That’s not quite so easy.
Perhaps it is time to turn down the volume on social media and start to focus on what really matters to your customers. Then, when you understand more about what customers really want, write to them to tell them you have what they want.
Social media can be such a superficial way to do this. You’re competing for attention with so many other factors.
Why not write a letter? Or send a decent email? Craft a properly built pay per click campaign, pointing towards a web page designed to convert clicks to sales? Maybe place some print adverts?
Most print adverts today are truly awful. You should have no difficult in standing out from the crowd. Direct marketing is all about making you stand out from the rest and commanding the attention of your prospects.
The techniques for doing so are more than one hundred years old and they still work. In the hands of a skilled few, these old methods can be applied to new technologies to achieve strong results for your business.
It is also easy to get carried away with “branding” and “awareness”. Big business managers live on that stuff. I put it to you that small businesses can only fail if they try to copy big business branding and awareness. Most of these campaigns are carried out using vast amounts of money and are usually a sop to a boardroom ego somewhere. Smaller businesses can’t afford to indulge in ego trips. Smaller businesses need cash flow.
Droning on about branding, logos and colour schemes can be an agreeable way to spend a clients time and money. But your customer genuinely doesn’t give a toss about any of that. They want to know key pieces of information from you. They have some unanswered questions in their minds. if you can answer them, you are likely to get the sale.
It is a sad truth that today, most marketers don’t bother answering the questions. Largely because they’re not listening. They’re too busy placing the brand.
Instead, why don’t you make your brand all about what your customer wants? This isn’t a logo – instead it’s a set of information designed to lead to a sale.
This is why you want to promote your business in the first place isn’t it? To get sales?
Direct marketing campaigns from Allstrat involve a number of attributes you might learn to like. If I’m brutally honest, you might not like them at first.
You see, the headlines and the copy will be all about your customers and what they want. Not you.
Many business owners don’t like this. They have a skewed view of what their business is all about. Believe me, what matters is the response from the customer, not the owner. Although the next successful campaign to get knocked on the head by a business owner because they didn’t like it, won’t be the first.
You will get a marketing campaign that has been created with the customer in mind. Use and conversion will always be measured. if we can’t measure it, we don’t do it. This factor alone will save you a few quid.
It helps to know that your campaign has been developed by a member of the Direct Marketing Association (The DMA, the same people who run the Mail and telephone Preference services, amongst other things). the DMA is all about ensuring good, professional practice when it comes to direct marketing . Members are bound by a code of conduct.
This code of conduct means all campaigns are run strictly within the terms of applicable legislation and regulation. Data protection, GDPR, PECR and whatever will come along next. DMA members are obliged to keep up to date and use high standards of data security and privacy.
As a member of the DMA, this means Allstrat Ltd campaigns are run properly. And we get to use this little badge on our website.
What would you like to achieve with your next marketing campaign?
Is it time to focus on measurable results and sales?
Of course it is.
Call 01463 717 115 to get started. Or click the icon below if you’re on your smartphone.
Assisted Marketing , Marketing Services , Online Marketing
Looking at the search engine results earlier today I noticed the Allstrat website lurking on Google page 1, position 7 or so for the term “direct marketing Inverness”.
It is notoriously slow to get a website to rank for search terms nowadays, but can we get the Allstrat name to the top of the listings for the search term, without using PPC?
Might as well practice what we preach – a challenge!
Google page 1 position 1. In half an hour.
Done (see image below). Can we do it for you?
Mind you, it does look as though nobody is actually searching for this term. Just a bit of fun.
A real result
Assisted Marketing , Content & Collateral , Direct Mail
This should be easy. You speak all the time, you hold conversations all the time.
Transferring all that knowledge and experience into a sales letter should be simple enough.
It seems not.
A client called me in November last year,
“I’ll be writing all our sales letters from now on.” He proclaimed.
“You’re too expensive. It’s only a letter after all!”
I let him get on with it. And asked him to let me know how he got on.
One of his managers emailed me last week, to tell me that responses to her last two mailshots were down. Well, very down. In fact zero. What a shame…
She was kind enough to send me a copy of the new sales letter written by her boss.
It was beautifully formatted, factually correct and sent out on lovely, heavy, laid paper with a nice, big logo at the head: VAT number, registered office address and so on. Oh yes, all the corporate bumf was there.
Unfortunately, the rest of the letter was also “corporate bumf”. It read like an old fashioned insurance policy and was written entirely in the 3rd party.
It was certainly a letter, but it wasn’t a sales letter. It was dull in the extreme – and it was going in the bin every time. There was so much wrong with it I can’t list it all here. But it struck me as I read down the lines, that those of us of a certain age were taught to write letters in what they call “business English”. Few of us actually talk like that. And I bet you don’t read like that. Write these letters as though you were there in the room with the reader. A sales letter is an intimate conversation between you and a customer. Don’t banjo the whole thing by using expressions like, “we await your advices…”. You’ll be awaiting for a long time!
If your day is interrupted by a sales letter, what would it need to do in order to attract and hold your attention?
Assisted Marketing , Content & Collateral , Online Marketing , Websites
George Orwell, a 20th Century author, noted that a lot of printed English was ugly.
Ugly text is useless. It’s hard to read and doesn’t cause the reader to respond. He used the phrase “Avoidable Ugliness” to describe the problem and gave five rules for the rest of us to follow. So we could avoid writing ugly copy.
When you promote your business using the written word, your choice of structure and the words themselves can speak volumes about you.
Many websites are written in a way that makes the business responsible for them look stupid.
This isn’t the result those businesses were aiming for when they started work on their website. However it is the result they get.
Question: Is it happening to you?
Assisted Marketing , Marketing Services
So can you help me?
I could guess – but that’s not very professional.
I could ask you – but we haven’t met yet.
So here’s an opportunity for you to help by telling me…
Assisted Marketing , Content & Collateral
You have a very short time to GRAB a readers’ attention.
Then you have the length of your article to lose that attention. It can go at any time.
Your reader can be sitting there hanging on your every word when the phone rings, the kettle boils or the kids start arguing again.
Losing their attention is easy and not always your fault.
Then it IS your fault!
The wrong words are anything that isn’t simple. That means,
They might all look great when you’re writing your sales letter, but they don’t belong there. Words from any of these categories will fail to hold attention. They won’t earn their keep.
Words only work when readers understand what they mean.
In sales writing, words only work when people feel ready to read the next line.
Simple words work best. Your readers understand simple words quickly and easily. You don’t have to work hard to understand simple words.
Selling is easier if you use simple words.
Assisted Marketing , Content & Collateral , Search Engine Optimisation , Social Media , Websites
Take a look through your website, your emails and your letters.
Does your writing style say more about you than you think?
Are you using Readable Text?
You would be amazed how many websites are almost unreadable. And if your sales message is unreadable it’s not getting read. Is it?
The good news is, there are tools you can use to check how readable your text is. They are quite easy to use – all you need to do is cut and paste your text into a web page and the “readability” score for your text will be displayed.
There are some examples on this website. Here’s how we use one of these methods to test the readability of our writing…
Assisted Marketing , Content & Collateral , Marketing Services , Online Marketing
You need practical marketing services in Inverness to help you attract more customers and grow your business.
This is about much more than pretty logo and your brand image. These are nice, but they’re all about you, which is focusing on the wrong thing. When it comes to buying, customers aren’t really interested in you, they’re interested in what you can do for them. Marketing is really about getting your sales message and your special offers in front of the right people and encouraging them to buy.
Assisted Marketing , Blogging , Content & Collateral , Marketing Services , Online Marketing , Social Media
An infographic is a presentation of data or information in visual form. Making a picture out of numbers or words.
We’ve been doing it for years with “death by powerpoint” presentations. However infographics differ in that the whole story is on one page, designed to be consumed quickly and easily.
Do people really look at the messages in infographics or are they really just attracted to the pretty pictures and bright colours?