Postcard Marketing – Simple, Effective and Measurable
Postcards are a low cost way to get your message out. In fact, standard sized postcards around a third cheaper than printing, signing and enveloping regular sized letters.
Postcards can have a high impact. Because a letter is enclosed in an envelope the consumer gets a chance to decide whether to open it or put it to one side. Many people will throw the letter away without even opening it. However, with postcards, there’s no envelope to hide the message. It’s almost impossible to throw a postcard away without seeing its message.
Postcards are simple to create and send. With postcards there are no assembling, collating, stuffing, licking envelopes etc. The hardest part of sending a postcard is putting on the stamp! And we can even do that for you!
3 Tips for a successful postcard marketing campaign
1. Keep Your Message Brief
Only use your postcard for lead generation. Don’t try to explain all the details – just give some teaser information to encourage your reader to take the next step. This might be visiting your website or calling your office.
2. Get Your Postcard Designed
Employ a designer to make sure all the space available on the postcard is used to best effect to give the reader an irresistible urge to take the next step. Make sure you use a compelling headline. That will be the most important part of your entire postcard. If you want to send them to your website show a picture of the site. If you want to make them call a phone number make the phone number as big as possible.
3. Address List Quality
Make sure your Mailing List is verified. Remember, no matter what type of mailing you’re doing, the quality of the mailing list will determine its success. Any in house list will outperform a rented list and if you want to use a rented list make sure you use a list broker to help you. Postcards make sense for almost any business and using these postcard marketing tips you won’t go wrong.
The Business Card – The Essential Networking Companion
The number one rule of business and networking is “Always take your business cards out with you.” Your card plays a major part in your prospect’s first impression of you and your business.
Business cards are disposable yet vital. They now hold more contact information than ever before. Web addresses, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts are just some of the information now included.
A business card’s main purpose was and remains to create an accurate first impression of the individual and their business at a moment’s notice. Hand them to clients, suppliers and prospects when you first meet. We remember names better if we see them in writing, and your business card performs this task perfectly.
In addition, giving out your Business Card provided the perfect opportunity to ask for another’s card in return Anyone who played Top Trumps at school witll be instantly familiar with this method!
Include your card with everything you send out, such as letters, invoices, receipts, brochures, leaflets etc. Take them with you everywhere you go. Put some in your wallet; making sure they are kept clean. Networking is the most effective marketing tool and your business card is your best networking companion
Three Ways to Make Ideas Happen
Everyone has ideas, whether it’s expanding the business, offering new products, learning a new language, increasing income, getting that perfect partner, or brewing at home to get endless beer! However, look around at the boxes piled up in the garage or post-it notes, resolutions in old diaries, and you’ll see that very few ideas actually see the light of day.
In many cases, our own creative tendencies get in the way. If you are an ideas person, being in the habit of generating new ideas often gets in the way of executing projects or seeing them through to completion. Whether you’re developing a new business idea, a side project, or even that novel you’ve always wanted to write – if they are not developed, they become stagnant and inevitably become a source of frustration.
Avoid Living In a State of Rapid Response
Remember some years ago when we were told about the future paperless office, electronic lifestyle, email on the move, desk free working, 21st century stress free living? Without realising it, these modern day developments have meant that most of us have started to live a life of rapid response, like a firefighter running around putting out each new fire that appears. Each day we are bombarded with incoming communications – emails, texts, twitter posts, facebook comments, phone calls, instant messages, etc. As a result, instead of being proactive with our time and energy, we spend it all on being reactive and living our lives at the mercy of the latest incoming alert.
To avoid this Rapid Response behaviour, some of the most productive people schedule quiet time in their day. This is sometimes called red time or green time, depending on the person, and is a time when they are left alone – phone switched off and no interruptions. It’s like hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your life for an hour or more, free of incoming communications. With this time, they focus on a list of long-term items – not necessarily their regular tasks, but long-term projects that require research and deep thought.
Prioritise Your Projects
You probably have a whole head full of ideas. Get them down on paper. No, leave the computer alone! Get a sheet of paper and list them all.
Now prioritise each one by importance. Allocate a “1” for the must-dos and “2” for the should-dos; leaving “3” for the might-do-one-days.
Clearly you can end up with a lot of projects with a “1” or “2” next to them, but don’t worry about that. These are Action Items – important projects which can be actioned in the foreseeable future.
Review your list of Action Items by copying them to a new sheet or put them on the computer in a task manager or simply a Word document, ordering them by priority. From this new list, break down each project into the individual tasks required – or “bite sized pieces”! This is classic task management and is proven to be effective, as it enables you to handle the small tasks that make up the whole project.
Those on the original list allocated a “3” are Back Burner items for review later.
Back burner items have usually come from brainstorming sessions and cannot be actioned now, but may be someday. They should be collected in a folder – either a physical one or one on your computer, and reviewed periodically such as monthly, quarterly, etc. When you review your folder of Back Burner items, be sure to weed out those which are no longer relevant, add new items and check to see if any should be converted to Action items.
Measure Meetings with Actions
Meetings should be the source of action items and tasks, plus feedback and prioritising of projects. If the meetings you organise or attend are not producing these, you should consider the expense of holding meetings when you consider the cost of time and the effect of interruption. Beware of holding a meeting just because its Monday, for instance. If a meeting ends without any Action Items then perhaps it should have been a voice-mail or an e-mail discussion or five minutes by the water cooler!
Every meeting should end with a short review of the Action Items generated from the meeting. Each attendee should state what they understood as actionable priorities. This should take less than a minute per attendee and. doing so will almost always reveal a few Action Items that were missed, duplicated, or misunderstood. In addition, getting each attendee to state their Action Items out loud also breeds a sense of accountability.
Prioritise Your Daily Work
The principal we’ve just studied – of cutting out the clutter to concentrate on the important tasks, applies equally to your daily routine. As we’ve shown, the availability of electronic data at our fingertips means many of us spend too much time obsessing over real-time data, just because it’s available and easy to access. Whether it is checking your facebook messages, emails or your bank account, these small repetitive actions rarely help you make ideas happen. They just help us feel safe, like touching base for reassurance.
Touching Base describes the things we do that:
have no intended outcome
are not productive in any way, and
are quick enough that we can do them numerous times a day without realising – but doing so puts us at ease.
The first step for reducing Touching Base is self-awareness. Recognise those activities that you do in your daily life that are, in fact, reassurance. The second step is to establish guidelines for yourself that provide more discipline. Perhaps you’ll try restricting all Touching Base to a specified 30 minutes every day? The third step, if applicable, is to delegate the task of checking to a colleague who can review the data periodically and report any urgent items.
Have you a great idea waiting to get out? Has the advice here helped you? Get in touch and let us help you make it a reality!
Five steps to dealing with major problems
As a business owner or key player, you’ll be familiar with tackling major problems. These challenges are the type that stop the workflow and divert the attention of numerous people from completing their everyday tasks. Serious problems on their own can disrupt the organisation and if occurring at a key moment can have repercussions for months afterwards. However, a series of serious problems can cause a cascade effect and act as roadblocks to growth as the business spends too much time firefighting. I am going to share with you five steps for tackling major problems so they don’t escalate to affect the health or running of the business.
Do these five things and you will find a resolution quickly. Skip or alter any of them and you won’t. Simples.
1 – Select Your Team
Anyone can point at a burning building and tell you it’s on fire, but only a few can work out how to put it out effectively. Those are the type of people you want involved in the meeting about the problem. Leave out people who are skilled at communicating problems. In addition, those people or departments affected by the problem are not automatically entitled to a vote or voice in the solution.
Don’t be afraid to hurt some feelings. You need a team of people each of whom who can go forth from the meeting and act without needing further permission or instructions. You need an action team comprising true team players who can focus on the problem and come up with solutions and put them into action both passionately and impartially. Ignore this step and you’ll get bogged down in bickering and ego positioning that will prevent progress.
2 – Define the Problem
Sometimes a problem is evident (like a power cut). Other times, the problem is more complex resembling a tangled web. Let every member of the team define what they see are the problems.
If you have the right people, this will be a constructive step which will highlight the problem areas. If anyone begins to whinge, or pass judgement on a problem or person, or point fingers, stop them immediately. If they continue, dismiss them from the team. See step 1 above – no small minds allowed.
At this stage, do not attempt to offer up solutions! I cannot stress this enough. Many of the problems raised at this stage are actually symptoms of the underlying problems. Differentiate the problem from its effects. Let these symptoms guide you to the root cause. If workers are getting wet – don’t buy them umbrellas – fix the hole in the roof!
3 – Evaluate All Possible Solutions
With the problem(s) defined, get the team to start offering up solutions. Don’t pre-judge any of them, just get them all on the list. Every problem has more than one possible answer. Listen and observe. Suggest variations of the solutions offered up by others. Be creative. Think of every angle. The time is over for pointing out the problem. Think about what you can do to fix this. This will reduce the list of possible solutions to a manageable number, or even leave one obvious solution.
4 – Select The Right Solutions
Not all solutions are created equal, and at this stage, you need to cull the bad ones if there are still too many on the list. Explore the good ones. Pick them apart. But do it objectively – don’t be married to your proposals. Let them sink or swim on their own merits. What is actually achievable? Do you have the manpower and skills to implement it? Is it too expensive? Can it remedy the problem in required timeframe?
If someone appears to have lost focus and is needlessly getting attached to their proposed solution, point it out. If the rest of the team agrees it’s not the appropriate solution and yet the person will not let it go, dismiss them from the team. See step 1 above.
You should emerge from this stage with an agreed, workable solution to the problem.
5 – Make it So
If you have followed Step 1, you will already have the right team in the room and as you have decided on the best course of action, don’t wait to get started. Don’t wait for meeting minutes. Don’t wait for “strategic initiative” plans to be distributed to all and sundry.
Additionally, if you delay getting started, people will over-think the solutions and try to reinvent the wheel. The problems of vested interests and small minds will lead to criticism of the plan and they will come up with their own evaluation and solutions. Fear and resistance will creep in. Progress will stop and you’ll have a new set of problems.
Step 1 required that you select people who have the power to create change without additional permission. If you did that then congratulations – you should all be able to walk out of that room and make things happen. If not, you have just wasted everyone’s time, including your own. Go back to the start and begin again.
The Anatomy of a Business Card
Wall Street in the 1980s. A group of stockbrokers sit round a conference table. Slowly, one lays a small, off-white card on the highly polished wood. His colleagues nod in admiration.
“Good colouring,” says one.
“That’s bone. And the lettering is Silian Grail.”
Someone else takes out a card.
“Eggshell, with Roman.” The first man smiles bitterly. “Nice.”
A third broker produces a card.
“Raised lettering, pale nimbus.”
“Impressive”
“Let’s see Paul’s card.” The room falls silentas the third broker draws out the card of an absent colleague. The first broker’s face creases in horror. “Oh my God. It even has a watermark.”
The trumping of Patrick Bateman’s business card by his colleagues in the movie American Psycho is an indicator of how important the small rectangular (or oblong) card can be in the world of business. Most of us, when defining ourselves in a space just 90 x 60 mm, plump for the conventional white card option. However, that could be your first professional mistake.
According to visual communications experts, business cards are “silent ambassaadors” and “the handshake you leave behind”, so you’d better make it a firm one.
Business cards are the descendents of the calling cards that genteel ladies in France started carrying in the 1800s. The fashion quickly spread across Europe and then crossed the Atlantic to the USA.
In those days it actually mattered if it had been dog-eared. If the top right corner was folded, it meant congratulations. A folded lower right expressed symapthy. These examples alone bear out the “silent ambassador” quality.
Cards were even made of glass, leather and even china, and are preserved in museums.
After dabbling with new technology in the last fifteen years with mini CD-ROM cards and vCards, the business card has had something of a renaissance and can be found everywhere. Technological developments have meant there are countless variations in colour, materials, folding, die cuts, holograms, reflective UV sensitive and so on, However, the ubiquitous business card remains the chief method of presenting oneself in business and seems likely to coexist happily with new technologies.
We provide graphic design and web design solutions for clients in Warrington, Manchester, Liverpool, Wirral and throughout Cheshire, Lancashire, Merseyside and beyond.
Contact us for information and advice on improving your business card appeal!
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Getting the Most From Your Website
A website is a bit like an exotic plant – to grow it and keep it flourishing, you need to spend some time planning for it and spend time maintaining it once it’s established.
1 – Welcome your Visitors
The first and sometimes most difficult step is to realise that your website is not actually for you – it’s for your visitors, so ask yourself these questions about them:
- Why are they visiting your site?
- What do they want to find or see?
Take a critical look at your site and check:
- Is it simple to navigate?
- Is information easy to find?
- Is the layout clean and clear?
- Are there obstacles and distractions?
Background music, numerous click-throughs, inessential pop-ups and poor navigation layout are all annoyances. Remember, it is as easy for a visitor to close the browser window as it would be for a reader to turn a page. If you make the visit annoying or difficult, they will simply look elsewhere.
Most visitors to your site come with a specific requirement. Make it easy for them to find what they want.
Don’t underestimate how easy it is to lose your way in a website. Make it easy for visitors to a) see where they are, and b) get back to the previous page or to your homepage.
2 – Content is King
Your website shouldn’t be an on-screen copy of your leaflets. While the work and research put into producing your leaflet can be used to provide content, the flexibility of a website means it can be much more. However, this doesn’t mean decorating it like a Christmas tree with flashing graphics and lurid colours (see item 1 above)!
It is essential to keep in mind that your website has a clear purpose – as an advertising and marketing tool, showcase, information source, product catalogue etc.
3 – The Power of Analysis
Google Analytics is a free service which helps you analyse the traffic to your site, including broad geographical information, pages viewed, time of day time on the site and new visitors versus returning visitors. Google analytics also enable you to set a benchmark for your website. From this, you can see which pages are most viewed and those which are rarely or never viewed. In addition, if you launch a promotion with a specific web address, such as www.yourdomain.co.uk/competition, you can use Google Analytics to see how many visitors typed in that specific URL.
4 – Rising Through the Ranks with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Let’s go back to the plant growing analogy; like other marketing tools your website isn’t ever completed, it’s like a living growing thing. It needs updating, refining, adding to and unused pages deleted.
The more it’s updated the higher the ranking it attracts from Google et al. (see SEO andThe Dark Arts of SEO)
If you use the power of the internet and exploit the possibilities of your website, the opportunities for your business are endless.
We provide website design and optimisation solutions for clients in Warrington, Manchester, Liverpool, Wirral and throughout Cheshire, Lancashire, Merseyside and beyond.
Does your website get the response you want? Do you need help? We can assist you with honest advice and practical help in formulating a web strategy to address your business challenges.
Contact us today to find out how we can help your business.
