Make your emails work harder

Email is a beneficial and cost effective marketing tool – but what makes an email campaign effective?

Think about the amount of emails you receive per day and each of their content. What makes you read some and discard others?
The two most important components to consider in an email campaign is relevancy and segmenting your list to target your content accordingly.

Compelling Content
Relevant and captivating content is one of the most important ways to make your email campaign effective and keep your customers interested and engaged.No one wants to stay subscribed to boring and irrelevant email blasts! With so many ways to find out information especially on the internet and an average online consumer spending around 51 seconds scanning over your newsletter; engaging and relevant content and the way in which you deliver this, could make all the difference.

Target Effectively
Instead of sending one generic newseltter to your entire target list, break your readers into smaller segments with similar interests and buying behaviours to tailor content to best meet their needs.For Example: You own a local shop and have started selling your goods online. If you segment your email subscriptions into two groups – local customers and online/interstate customers – you can send updates on your local store including sales and events to your local customers and information regarding online discounts and free shipping to the other. This keeps your content relevant and informative.

By Jo Marshall

For more information about Jarvis, our work and team – please visit jarvismarketing.com.au

Or visit our social media platforms:

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Social media tips for 2014

Social Media allows businesses to talk to their target audience in a social setting and is increasingly becoming a key part of the modern marketing mix.

Below are a few social media and digital tips to help your business make 2014 a great year!

1. Be mobile
We’ve been told time and time again, every website needs to be optimized for mobile. But what does this mean? To put it simply, your website needs to be user friendly on a variety of screen sizes. Having a responsive design and thinking about how your consumers will interact with the website on a variety of devices is extremely important. The biggest annoyance I have found in some mobile optimised sites is that they are boring – they might be easy to navigate but sometimes I would rather use the desktop site on my mobile and tablet than use the mobile version. Make sure when you are creating a responsive design that you ask others for their opinions. Also start thinking about other ways you can incorporate the mobile experience such as apps, SMS, responsive emails etc.

2. Niche Sites Will Make An Impact
Even though Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites can allow you to really nail down your audience when advertising, it may pay off to investigate specific niche sites that will often be an affordable and highly targeted alternative.

3. Content is KEY
Creating great content and driving traffic back to your site is going to remain the number #1 way to generate new leads. Publishing content that is interesting, engaging and informative is a great way to stay in the minds of your target audience. The main aim of your social media content is for it to encourage public engagement. We ultimately want your followers to like, comment and share the content, for it to appear in their friends feeds and to generate greater awareness.

4. Spammy Content Will Be Eliminated Everywhere
You may not realise but the public is getting smarter when it comes to advertising. Spam-like content is becoming increasingly frowned upon in the public eye and is not tolerated. This brings us back to content. If any of your content comes across as spammy, irrelevant and unwanted it will be deleted and they will hit the ‘unlike’ button. When thinking about content for your social media accounts have a think about yourself and others.. if a page you are following posted this would you like it? would you find it annoying? spammy? If you wouldn’t like it, then it probably wouldn’t be appropriate.

5. Consistency and Planning is Important
Social media is part reactionary and part planning. Just like advertising and any other business efforts, it is important to have a strategy in place to create goals and objectives, measure your success, plan your time efficiently and maintain consistency. It is also a good idea to research what others in your sector are doing, what are you competitors doing differently to you?

6. Limit Your Platforms
 At Jarvis we like to say, ‘You can’t be all things to all people’ and the same goes with social media. Pick and choose which social media platforms will work for you and concentrate on them. Don’t try and be on all social media platforms just because you think you need to be – it wont work.
For example: If your business is in the financial sector, you might find that Twitter is helpful in reporting up to the second finance trends and news; and a blog may be effective in explaining in a more in-depth way what these changes mean to your clients, where other platforms don’t really offer your customers anything useful. If your an artist, visual platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram will help you showcase your work to the world and other platforms such as Twitter may not fit.
It is important to evaluate each social media platform and really nut out whether they will enhance your messages.

7. Influencers and Word-of-Mouth Hold Power
Like I said before, the public is getting smarter when it comes to advertising. The younger market doesn’t want to be sold to. They don’t want you to tell them what to do and what to have. It has become more and more important to have your products endorsed by someone credible, be recommended by word-of-mouth or appeal on a personal level. By empowering your best customers to spread the word for you, you can gain trust in a new audience and hopefully turn them into new customers.

8. Everyone Likes a Picture
Image based platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest are great ways to showcase visually what you are about. While text is not dead, it would be a great idea for you to think of ways you can incorporate images into your other social media platforms that will compliment your written content.

9. Video Consumption Will Increase
Whether it’s meant to inform or advertise, consumers like to watch short videos to learn more about businesses. People are lazy – they like to watch things to gather information rather than read copious amounts of text. It may be relevant to your sector or it may not (see point 5 & 6) but you should investigate as to whether video content will add value to your website or even allow you to relay information to your target audience in a personal fashion.

10. Evaluate Your Messages
The way the public engages with Facebook is completely different to Twitter, Pinterest is completely different to Instagram so why should the messages be the same on each platform? If you are using social media tools like Hoote Suite to publish content on ALL social media platforms with one click.. think again. Evaluate the medium, how are others using it? Keep in mind the different ways of communication and tailor you messages and their language to the appropriate channels.

2014 is going to be an exciting year. Be sure to stay on top of your businesses social media efforts.
If you think you need a professional social media/digital strategy or just to ask a few questions, contact us! We are the pros! 🙂

For more information about Jarvis, our work and team – please visit jarvismarketing.com.au

Or visit our social media platforms:

FACEBOOK | TWITTER | PINTEREST | YOUTUBE  | LINKEDIN

What should your advertising say?

Make your offer interesting

Translate the interesting elements into meaningful benefits

State your benefits as believable

Get the prospects attention

Motivate your prospect to take action

Communicate clearly

Measure against you plan

 

Once you have worked all this out hire someone who knows how to write and produce ads to make yours. Not a PR firm. Not a designer. Not a printer. Not a media business. Not the publication. Not the radio or TV station. A marketing and advertising agency that knows what they are doing and have a track record.

 

For more information about Jarvis, our work and team – please visit jarvismarketing.com.au

Be consistent with your advertising effort

 Whatever your approach, be consistent!

Don’t expect advertising to work instantly. One exposure to a potential customer in a purchasing cycle has little or no effect unless they are absolutely in the market for your product or service.

Build trust with your potential customers by being consistent and continuing to communicate with them through good and tough times. Just like any relationship. The optimum level of exposures to your target market in a purchasing cycle is three.

This is the area where businesses fail the most. They will try something then when it doesn’t work after a short time they will stop. Then months later try something different. This inconsistent approach is confusing to the market so they ignore you.

 

For more information about Jarvis, our work and team – please visit jarvismarketing.com.au

Selling is not just SELLING!

(Image: Graphic Design Junction)

“People love to buy things, but almost no one wants to be sold.”

Thousands of people are eager to buy what you sell. They want the benefits, the convenience, the comfort or prestige that you can provide. Human beings are an acquisitive bunch! We want stuff!

The “desire to acquire” goes deep, and it’s a good thing.

So, if you aren’t making the sales you would like, let me suggest that the problem is not with your customers, but with you. The problem is likely one of the following:

1.  Not enough potential customers know about you or that your product could enrich their lives. This is a marketing problem, and as a business leader it is your job to solve it. Let people know! Get out there and get in the game!

2.  Or, the other possibility is that you’re trying too hard to “sell.”

Personally, I have a deep-seated aversion to being “sold” anything. I see websites that seem manipulative or dishonest. I see sales techniques that fail to build trust or credibility, and they do not attract me.

But people are eager to buy benefits! They buy solutions to their problems. They buy things that make their lives better, easier, simpler, healthier or more comfortable. They buy stuff that makes them happy. And they buy from people they know and like and trust.

(Image: Viralblender)

If enough people “know and like and trust” you, they will listen when you offer a product or service that makes their lives better. If they “know and like and trust” you, they will flock to your door and you’ll make all the sales you need.

For more information about Jarvis, our work and team – please visit jarvismarketing.com.au

Independent advice

There are so called advertising experts everywhere. It is one of the only professions where you don’t need some sort of accreditation or licence to operate.

One simple rule applies. Are they independent?

Whatever you do avoid listening to a rep peddling a particular medium. They are being paid to sell that advertising medium so will never offer independent advice.

No amount of razzle-dazzle, flash presentations, graphs, research and spin should convince you of anything.

OBTAIN INDEPENDENT ADVICE – should I repeat that?

 

For more information about Jarvis, our work and team – please visit jarvismarketing.com.au

 

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Working on your Marketing Budget

Take stock!

This means work out exactly how much you are spending on marketing and advertising.

Review everything that is remotely about marketing and communications in your business.

It is going to be a scary exercise but be brave. Include people, yellow pages, messages on hold, the corporate box, sponsorships, donations, and all the trade press advertising you have been sold over the years under the name of branding. Also review promotional products. Do you really need to give suppliers a stubby holder, mouse pad or pen that last a day or two. Even events where everyone gets to drink and eat at your expense.Do you really need to go into every feature that is produced for your industry?

You get the idea. Now do this first!!!!

 

For more information about Jarvis, our work and team – please visit jarvismarketing.com.au

Should We or Shouldn’t We!

Times are tough, or so we are told. I prefer to think of the current business climate as the greatest opportunity you have as a business to gain market share on your competition.

Most managers weren’t around for the last re re re recession. That word is hard to say for most of us that survived it, maybe even prospered through it.

In good times loyalty is only questioned in business relationships if you do something wrong. In tough times everyone is looking for an edge and many business relationships come under the closest scrutiny.

So opportunity exists right now, and when there is opportunity you have to be out there communicating with your target market not hiding away and bunkering down.

But, I hear you say “we have to cut the advertising budget by 10%, 20% or maybe even 30%”.

Work out exactly how much you are prepared to invest on advertising and building your reputation and the return you are expecting from it. The return you get from advertising is in direct proportion to the thought and planning you put into it.

 

For more information about Jarvis Marketing, our staff, our services and past work please visit our website

 

Brand Value

Business Directors realise that brands like never before are the single most valuable asset a company has. Whether local or national, in today’s world there are more products and much less product differentiation.

Competition is coming from all sides, fuelled in part by the ease with which brands can cross borders. On top of that, there is less room to manoeuvre because the media is extremely cluttered.

The brand is the totality of what the consumer experiences. When the consumer walks into your office, calls you on the phone, sends an email, looks at you online, opens a piece of print communication, sees a sign, reads or sees an advertisement.

Good advertising can build brands but in the world we live in, the world where every point of contact builds the brand we must have a consistent brand image.

A strong brand image is critical to growing market share.

A consistent brand identity whether a product, project or at a corporate level is an investment that is critical to your growth as a business.

Tips for producing successful advertising

 

(Image: emercedesbenz)

 1. Make your offer interesting

• What are the reasons people want your product?
• For Mercedes its style status and luxury

 2. Translate the interesting elements into a meaningful benefit

• People buy benefits not features.
• People don’t but cars. They buy speed status, style and performance

 3. State your benefits as believable

• State the benefits in such a way that they will be accepted beyond doubt
• Mercedes might say – you will receive one of the most luxurious ride of your life.

 4. Get the prospects attention

• Be sure to interest them in your product
• Mercedes might show its vehicle riding over a bumpy road with passengers asleep

 5. Motivate your prospect to take action

• Include a call to action – phone, web, dealer, demonstration etc.

 6. Communicate clearly

• Use headlines, sub heads and visuals to get your point across.

 7. Measure your finished ad against your strategy

• Use your strategy to guide you. If it doesn’t work scrap it and start again

 

For more information about Jarvis Marketing, our staff, our services and past work please visit our website