There is no such thing as failure.

You’ve heard that before, no doubt, but this is particularly true in marketing.

I get asked all the time what marketing methods will work for a business. And my answer is always the same – I have absolutely no idea!

OK, after 22 years I can make a good guess at what might work, but until you actually run a marketing campaign…until you actually put your marketing into action…then neither you nor I will have any idea what will work for you.

Marketing, you see, is a mixture of an art and science. The “art” bit is the nice creative stuff – the designs, the clever copywriting, the texture of the paper, the clever twizzly bits on your website.

However it’s the science behind it that makes it all work for you.

When you start your marketing activities – whether it be advertising, employing the services of a tele-marketer, sending out direct mail letters, running a pay-per-click campaign – whatever it is, you need to put in place ways that you can test and measure the results of each activity.

Then you use that as a bench mark to test other things.

Here’s an example: you run an ad in the Ambridge Review, circulation 6,000.

You put a code in the call to action (e.g. “call 0800 xxxxxx quoting ref AR06 to claim your free farming guide”). You count up how many calls come in quoting that code, and find you have 300 requests for your farming guide. Of those, 100 become new customers for your bright shiny new tractor.

And so we have a response rate of 5% and a conversion rate of 33%. So far so good.

Run another ad in the same publication with a different offer. Now you put a different code in your call to action (“call 0800 xxxxxxx quoting ref AR07 to claim your free tractor ride”). This time you find you have 150 requests. Ooh…so not so good then.

But wait…

…you find that 100 of those people go on to buy the tractor!

So that gives you a response rate of 2.5% but a conversion rate of 66%!

Fabulous!

Now what I might do is take that free tractor ride offer and place the ad in a different publication (different code again) to see if I can get a better response rate.

And herein lies the beauty and poetry of marketing.

Keep doing this and your marketing results will get better and better.

There is no failure in marketing, only results. The results show you what to do next.

Not everything works: not every offer; not every publication; not every message; nor every creative. In marketing, you will get things that fail…but that’s just telling you that particular combination doesn’t work. If you test the individual elements of the combination you will find out what DOES work and then (very simply) you just do more of that!

And that is how you make marketing work for you!

“Failure isn’t about falling down, failure is staying down.”
(Marillion)

Dedicated to your success,
See you next week,
Kim.

PS – Hot tip: only ever test one thing at a time e.g. headline vs. headline, OR offer vs. offer, OR publication vs. publication.

A while back I sat down with the kids to watch a Disney film starring an ancient Egyptian called Kronk, who ran a restaurant (OK, OK, just bear with me….).

Kronk loved running this restaurant, was evidently very good at it, and his customers adored him. He’d wanted to be a cook since he was little and he was now living his dream, turning out a wide variety of delicious meals day in-day out for his regular patrons.

One day though, he received a letter. It was a letter from his father who was coming to visit. Cue panic.

You see, his father didn’t want him to be a cook, he wanted him to be something else entirely. Except our hero didn’t belong in that other world – he only ever wanted to be a cook. But, in fear of his soon-to-arrive father, he and his loyal customers spent the next little while trying to cover up what he was doing so that he could pretend to be something he wasn’t.

Except it didn’t work. He was very miserable trying to be something he wasn’t.

Eventually, via a few funny sketches and everyone bursting into song to sing “Be True To Your Groove” (obviously Ancient Egypt was the place to be!), his father finally came round, and everyone lived happily ever after doing what they loved doing, in a perfect Disney ending.

And so here’s my message to you.

Are you being true to YOUR groove?

Do you offer products or services in your business because you feel you “have” to, or because it’s expected of you? If you do, then get rid of them – fast!

True passion and purpose for your business doesn’t come until you love every aspect of what you’re doing. And if you’re absolutely passionate about what you’re doing for your clients, then your marketing will flow and follow with ease.

And if you ever feel like breaking into song, or seeing the effect that Kronk had over his town, here’s the soundtrack (enjoy!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzKgiRUcU5A

Have a great week,
Dedicated to your success,
Kim.

My son, aged eight, seems to have an aversion to anything involving keeping himself clean. I managed to persuade him that showering every day was a good thing by buying him his very own bottle of Lynx.

However….

Might I take this opportunity to mention teeth cleaning?

Asking him to clean his teeth gets the same reaction as asking him to lick the chimney clean. Actually I might have more success with the latter.

I get every excuse under the sun for why he hasn’t cleaned his teeth: “I always clean my teeth after my bath/shower”, “I cleaned my teeth before my bath/shower”, “I don’t like this toothpaste”, “That toothpaste is pink – urgh”, “Look at this Lego spaceship I’ve made”, “Martians have landed in the garden…..” and so it goes on.

Then he tries to pull the wool over my eyes by saying he has cleaned his teeth, when he very obviously haven’t (honestly, do I look as I have “stupid” tattooed on my forehead??). He’ll even say that when he’s stood in the bathroom and knows I will check his toothbrush!

It can take seven or eight requests from me (now exhausted by the whole process, particularly as this happens twice a day) to get him to actually put toothpaste on toothbrush, toothbrush into his mouth and turn the toothbrush on. (Nope – not even the lure of electronic gadgetry can get him cleaning his teeth of his own accord).

I’m hoping that the arrival of G.I.R.L.S in a few years might trigger the teeth cleaning-enthusiasm gene. In the meantime, I think I have a few years of seven or eight requests, twice a day, every day.

It’s an interesting observation though…this seven or eight times to get a message through….and to get him to act on it. In a marketing campaign you need to get your message across at least seven or eight times before your target audience will react and act upon it.

So you therefore need to be sure that you have a very clear message and a direct call to action.

That means that whoever is reading your advert/side of van/website/leaflet etc knows precisely what you want them to do, whether it’s to call a number, click a link, or put their details in the form and press “submit”.

That means you need to be very clear yourself. Just as much as I need to be absolutely clear to the resident eight year old that I want him to clean his teeth (strong call to action) and I have to repeat my message to him eight times before he acts on it (and I get the result that I’m after), you need to follow these principles in the promotion of your business to your potential customers.

One request isn’t going to do it. You need repeated, very clear, messages out there with a strong call to action so that they create the results that you’re after.

And if you every feel like practising, I have an eight year old who needs to clean his teeth twice a day….

Have a great week!
Dedicated to your success,
Kim.

A while back I went to visit two potential venues for one of my VIP Programmes. They were generally OK, other than when the Sales Managers of BOTH venues gave me their business cards.

Both of these business cards were tatty, a bit dirty, and bent at the edges.

Suddenly any ideas I might have had about spending a whole year’s worth of conference fees with them went straight out of the window. If they can’t get the very basics right, like the look of their business cards, then how do I know that they will look after me and my VIP Platinum group for a year?

It’s always the little details that make the difference, both positively and negatively, and I’m afraid that relatively minor lack of detail and care, has made a big difference to the business that I won’t be placing with them.

On the flip side of the coin, the venue where I decided to hold my Platinum Programme definitely cares and look after the little details – even down to the big red mug of tea that they bring me when I arrive to set up! So impressed am I, that my next Platinum Marketing Mastermind Group will be held there as well (starting Spring 2012), as well as any other workshops I run over the course of the coming months.

As another example, I pass a wedding dress shop on my travels. It’s tucked away in the Forest of Dean and could position itself as a unique and premier independent shop and charge premium prices. Except every time I pass, the windows are filthy and there are a couple of dresses put in the window….using the term “window display” is too strong a term! I have no idea how they keep themselves in business, but it’s not somewhere I would recommend anyone go, based on first appearances.

And it’s these first appearances matter. Whether it’s the state of your business cards, your shoes, your voicemail message, your windows if you have any kind of retail premises, or any number of other things like this, how you present yourself is vitally important to how you are perceived and thus how successful your overall marketing will ultimately be.

No amount of marketing will convert into successful sales for that wedding shop. Marketing will drive prospective buyers there…but there’s an immediate let down with the state of the windows, and that’s before you’ve even stepped in the door, and I suspect many people just don’t bother going in, let alone buy.

So…over the next few days, think about the little things. Because they are actually the most important things.

And, please, do throw away those tatty old business cards buried deep in your handbag or pocket!

Have a great week,
Dedicated to your success,
Kim.

Happy New Year – I hope 2012 brings you much success and everything that you wish for!

An awful thing happened a little while back – I discovered that my website was corrupted and I had two lots of different text on each page, rendering it completely unreadable. Fortunately I know what caused the problem, and I discovered the fault quite quickly, so it was easily remedied. However, there were still 36 hours when my website was definitely not the greatest place to be on the web!

Then, when I was checking out someone’s site for them, I found that their website had something wrong on every page too, also making it completely unreadable.

It’s far too easy to assume that our websites, and any other pieces of our marketing, are OK when in fact that they’re not. I heard recently of a company logo that was about to go to print on some literature…except somehow the company name was spelt wrong within the logo. It took an eagle eyed designer to spot it, so it was corrected before too much mishap.

When I worked at various Ad Agencies, proof reading was an essential part of our job. It didn’t matter how senior you were, proof reading had to be done by at least 3 people and signed off by the most senior.

One of the most useful lessons I was taught was to call the phone number in the ad or on the direct mail piece. Don’t ever assume that the number is correct, just because you “know” it’s the right number. It doesn’t take much for two numbers to be transposed, even though it may “look” right.

And, here’s how I was taught to proof read (and it hasn’t let me down yet) – read your text forward for sense (i.e. does it make sense; is it grammatically correct?) and backwards for spelling. The reason for doing that is that our eyes never read every letter of a word, or every word in a sentence. We see the main letters or the general shape of the word/s, and our brains fill in the rest. So if you’re trying to proof read for spellings, it is all too easy to miss them if you read forward (i.e. in the normal fashion). Read backwards though, and you see each individual letter and word.

Check, double check and triple check dates, times, telephone numbers, addresses, email and website addresses.

It’s always the common things that have the mistakes, e.g. your logo, company name, phone number etc. These are the things that people assume are OK, just because they’ve seen them a thousand times before.

Assuming is dangerous. Check everything.

And in today’s electronic world – double check that what you think you’ve just put online for all the world to see, is actually what IS online.

And as for your website…check on it occasionally to see if it’s OK!

Have a great week!
Dedicated to your success as always,
Kim.

Over the weekend I received a mailing (a real, live one, in the post!) from a well known insurance company that started off with a good catchy headline.

Thereafter…?

It lost me.

I didn’t understand what it was offering me within the first couple of sentences, and there wasn’t any amusing or interesting text either to make me read on.

And so I didn’t.

Back in the prehistoric days when I qualified as a marketer, we had to learn exciting facts such as the “seven second rule”. In this instance, this is the amount of time that you have to get your message across on a billboard roadside poster as a car passes.

Except these days, as consumers we are barraged with information from every direction throughout the day, and so the attention span we have to take in marketing messages gets less and less.

The recognised time you have to get your message across on your website is under 3 seconds. That’s not very long.

And I suspect that is pretty much the time we give most marketing messages, unless something in it piques our interest and we want to read on.

So, whatever it is you’re promoting, in whatever medium, you have a responsibility to yourself and your business to make sure that your target audience knows immediately what it is you’re trying to tell them, otherwise you’ve lost them – and their business.

Have a great week!
Dedicated to your success,
Kim.

As a coach, I love to take people on a journey.  And that journey can end up in places way beyond where that person thought they could actually go. New dreams are formed, and new heights to be climbed appear.

That journey can be exciting and thrilling, but it can also be scary and the end destination can feel out of reach.

Some people make it…some don’t.

The difference?

The ones who make it are the ones that take action.

Sure, they’re scared, and don’t really believe it can all come true, but they’re still excited by the potential of their dream…their ultimate vision of a new reality that they’re created.

The excitement translates into action.

The real difference is, though, that they don’t try and make that jump into their vision in one enormous leap. What I help my clients do is create the baby steps they need to take to get them from now to where they want to be.

It’s a powerful process and makes everything – suddenly – within reach and achievable. Because all you actually have to do is take the next step…and the next…and the next. In order, and in turn.

The trick is to start with the end in mind. Once you’ve worked out what your business looks like in 3 years or 5 years time, write the key elements of that on the top right corner of a piece of A4 paper.

Now draw a diagonal line coming back to the bottom left of your piece of paper.

Divide that line up into the number of years between “now” (bottom left) and “your future” (top right) so that you create a time line.

On a separate piece of paper, work backwards from your ultimate business vision, and start stepping the activities back…ask yourself “to have achieved that, what would I need to have achieved just before then to make that happen?” “And what’s the step before then?”

And keep going until you’ve got back to the here and now.

Put those steps onto your time line, and then all you have to do is follow that plan.

It makes the journey exciting and achievable, because all you’re doing is going for next (achievable) step.

And before you know it, you’ll have achieved your vision and will be asking “What’s next?”!

Enjoy!
Have a great week,
Kim.

Having been a fan of Barry Manilow for nigh on 30 years (now, there’s an admission!), I pretty much know the words to all of his songs, and it never fails to amaze me that every time he sings, he sings with 100% emotion and a feeling that reaches out and touches every single one of his fans individually. That’s quite a talent.

In his live shows (worth going to – he’s a great showman), you get the feeling that he’s just singing to you personally.

So, what’s he got that others haven’t?

I once read an interview with him about how he does that, and I quote the master himself:

“I used to take acting classes and I was taught how to break down every line of every song as if it were a script. Where am I? Who am I singing to? Why am I singing it? During ‘Please Don’t Be Scared’ from one of my early albums, for example, I was singing to my mother, who was dying in a hospital at the time. That’s a pretty heavy scenario, really hot emotionally… very hard to do, and with that scene in my head, the song exploded night after night. That’s what I do with every song. I’ve broken down every song as if it were a scene.

‘You try doing ‘Can’t Smile Without You’ for 30 years. Believe me, you’d get bored. But I don’t get bored, because every time I sing that line, which comes up 15 times, I have to figure a way of making it sound sincere each time. If I didn’t do it like that, I couldn’t do 30 years of this. I’d just be throwing the songs away night after night, and audiences wouldn’t come back. I just call it finding the truth within a song.”

(For Manilow fans, the full article is here)

And herein lies a brilliant message in marketing.

It’s something I already teach my mentoring clients – and that is to direct all your marketing communications at one person.

Whether you’re writing an ad, an ezine article, a blog, recording a podcast or video – the trick is to talk to just one person. And communicate the core truth of what it is about you and your products or services, that will truly make a difference to that one person.

That person needs to be someone that typifies your target market, AND someone who inspires you to get your message across to them.

That way, however many times you communicate the same message, however many times you communicate something new, you will always be able to reach out and touch the mind and heart of your target audience. They will feel special…as if you were talking to them personally.

And if you can talk to them personally, and have an effect on them at a personal level, then they will listen to you and what you have to say.

And THAT is powerful marketing.

Have a great week,
Dedicated to your success,
Kim.

Two and a half years ago I woke up one morning to discover I couldn’t move. Not only that, I was in severe and crippling pain. When I did manage to coax my body out of bed (and I was only 40 then, not 105!) I couldn’t stand up straight and could hardly put one foot in front of the other.

My best friend arrived like a beacon of light and looked after my kids, fed them and my husband, and drove me the 50 mile round trip to go see my osteopath…the only one I would trust to lay a hand on me in this amount of excruciating pain. Not only could I not stand up straight, but I couldn’t sit either, nor walk…all in all I was in a complete mess.

My osteopath diagnosed a muscle spasm in my lower back and hip, and packed me off to the GP to get some muscle relaxants (they didn’t work) and some heavy duty pain killers (no effect either).

A muscle spasm sounds nothing, but I can tell you that the pain was somewhere equalling childbirth. And it lasted at that intensity for about three weeks. In the end I had to take four months out of my business to recover properly and I still get the odd twinge down my leg now just to remind me of that time.

When I look back though, this was oddly a good period of my life. Before then my business was going in a direction that I didn’t want, and I was working with people who didn’t want my skills. I was, if I was honest, uninspired and didn’t feel at all like I was moving in the direction of my dreams in life, and the goals for my business.

Taking four months out of this business, therefore, didn’t have that much of an impact in the long run. But what did happen, through this enforced stoppage, is that I had time to think. Really think about what I wanted to do, what I wanted to offer to the world, what difference I wanted to make and to whom I wanted to make that difference. I was stuck on the sofa for a lot of that time, so all I could do successfully was think.

Somehow my body had ensured that I stopped travelling down a path I didn’t want and was making me unhappy, and put me on a new path. Fairly dramatically, it has to be said, but a new path nonetheless.

And that new path became Merrie Marketing as it is today. OK, I’m not “there” yet, but I’m now doing what I love doing, working with people and clients who inspire me and who I’m passionate about working with, and I’m generally having a ball!

How often have you spent quality time reflecting on your business? Is it going where you want it to go, or is it making you unhappy and not fulfilling you? Are you working with the kind of clients who inspire you, and pay what you’re worth – or are they draining you emotionally as well as through your pocket?

Marketing becomes a breeze when you’re passionate and clear about what you do and who you do it for. But sometimes, we have to work through the chaos and the pain to get to where we need and want to be. And I can promise you it’s worth it in the end.

Have a great week!
Dedicated to your success,
Kim.

This morning, I spent 24 minutes doing my entire social media for the week. I know because I timed myself.

That’s updating a new blog post, and sending out 4 new status updates a day across Linked In, Twitter (@merriemarketing) and my Facebook business page (www.facebook.com/merriemarketing).

And this is the amount of time I spend every week – first thing every Tuesday morning.

And I know from my figures, that I generate about 24% of my revenue from my social media activity. In just 24 minutes a week.

After I’ve done my social media, I then write my e-zine, which takes me about 45 minutes to write a new article, update it and get it uploaded so it gets mailed out on Thursday at 10am (UK time) to drop into your inbox.

And then I get on with my week.

You see, the one things that makes all this work for is that I use automated online systems to…well…systemise my business. I also make sure I have a strategy and a system for very part of my marketing.

One of my mentors said that System means “Save Your Self Time, Effort and Money”. And that couldn’t be true-er for marketing.

I often get asked how much marketing budget a business should set, and what they should use it for. Setting marketing budgets is a bit like asking how long a piece of string is, but my suggestion is always to start with spending your budget on automated systems and tools that make your marketing easier, and run like clockwork. More importantly, they run to give you a presence and promote your business out there whilst you’re doing other stuff, like working with clients, attending networking events etc. (I haven’t quite worked out how to automate myself at networking events yet ;o) )

And the thing is, it’s not expensive.

I use WordPress for this blog…cost – well, nothing.

My secret social media tool is www.socialoomph.com – I recommend the professional version, and it costs around £17 a month ($29). From this I handle ALL my social media – my status updates, making sure I have the right kind of followers and so on.

My e-zine gets sent out via www.aweber.com – it collects names and email addresses on my behalf, deals with anti-spam regulations and tells me who opens my newsletter or not. Useful if you want to send out sales messages. All for around £12 a month to start with.

My online “live” relationships are managed using www.TweetDeck.com – cost – err – nada. From here I can watch all the conversations going on across all my social media networks, my clients and my friends, and take part in those conversations from one single point.

So, total cost?

£29 a month to manage a large percentage of my marketing.

Like all things, it takes a little time and effort to set it all up, but once you’ve done that, then your marketing becomes a whole lot easier, and you don’t have to spend hours and hours doing all this stuff.

You should have about 7 or 8 different media working for you to bring prospects into your marketing funnel: if you don’t systemise and have strategies for how these are going to work for you, then you can be spending an awful lot of time “doing your marketing” rather than working with your customers or clients.

And as much as marketing is important, it’s your customers and clients that are paying your bills, so you need to automate as much as your marketing as possible so that it’s as effective as possible, in as short a time as is possible!

Dedicated to your success,
Have a great week,
Kim.