Lucy Kamall is PR Director at Character Communications
We all know these are tough times and everyone needs to work smarter to get their message across. Last year, the Wood Awards, the UK’s premier showcase for excellence in timber and wood products in architecture and furniture, enjoyed one of its best years ever, but the entries didn’t simply flood in by themselves.
Strategic print and online advertising created a broad level of awareness, press coverage and articles highlighted the versatility and beauty of wood and Twitter generated conversations about design and aesthetics, but it took three solid weeks of telemarketing and personal networking to ensure completed entry forms were submitted by the deadline. In a year when it was feared that the full effects of the recession and simple lack of construction projects would finally be felt in force, we secured almost as many entries as we did in 2005.
The power of personal contact
We discovered that companies were busier than ever but with a smaller staff, therefore less time for anything not considered an immediate company priority. In a time where digital and online communication seems ever more important, don’t underestimate the power of personal contact. Relationship building and networking through events like the TTJ Awards, the Wood Awards ceremony, the London Plywood or Hardwood clubs, or any events where your customers will be should be regularly on your agenda.
For the Wood Awards 2013 we decided to use social media further. All the entries will be featured on Wood Awards Twitter, Facebook page and Pinterest sites (a social media site with content driven by images) as they come in, giving potential entrants incentive to enter early and see their work showcased. Whilst some companies get social media right, all too often it is consigned to a box-ticking exercise; the pages are set-up, but there is no content or discussion. Make sure you have a content strategy before you engage with social media, and don’t forget the key word is ‘social’. This is two-way communication, so be sure to read and respond to what people have to say to and about you. Don’t do it if you’re not in it to connect with people.
You need to strike a balance if you’re using social media to promote an event or product. In addition to providing content and debate, you need to use the tried and tested method of connecting to people – ring them up, or visit them. You might be surprised how successful you’ll be.
Catherine Towns is PR Director at CIB Communications
Taking an integrated approach to any marketing campaign will ensure you extract as much value as possible from your budget.
Using a mix of marketing tools is an effective means of increasing the OTS [opportunities to see] of any message and the digital revolution has extended traditional media channels at a pace, giving marketers greater creative scope than ever before. However, this is at a time when few marketing budgets are being increased. Instead, marketers are expected to do more for less.
The risk of any campaign that looks across multiple platforms is a duplication of costs. Using a full-service agency to develop and deliver a whole campaign is one way to avoid paying extra for a central idea to be re-packaged by a creative, a PR and a digital agency, for example. Conversely, when a number of agencies are involved budgets can still be kept in check if they work as one team, each adding value to the process rather than just adding cost. Content generation is a prime example – the incremental cost of your PR agency writing your blog piece and some tweets at the same time as the press release will be lower than two agencies essentially working on the same content. Instead, your digital agency concentrates on developing your channels, extending reach and engagement.
Avoid the pitfalls
A full service agency also avoids the pitfalls of different parties working in silos. It’s still surprising how often opportunities for agencies to share output are missed because they aren’t aware of each other’s remit. Clients shouldn’t be afraid to ask us to work closely together – aligning plans to ensure that any activity meets the different requirements. If an agency genuinely wants to be part of a successful campaign it won’t be precious. Photography shoots and video production are particular areas worthy of collaboration. A photography brief that takes into account the needs of both the design agency and the PR agency will achieve much better value (and results) for a client. A day’s shoot that results in versions of a video that work at a corporate level, on social media channels and that can be ‘sold’ into online publications are also a better use of a client’s budget.
The marketing landscape has evolved beyond all recognition in the last two decades and whether you work with a full-service agency or a number of specialists, both have their advantages. However, whichever route you choose, integration should be at the heart.
Craig Curtis is a Director at Duo Marketing Services
Marketing used to be pretty simple in the timber industry, generally you had some advertising and PR in TTJ, a bit of direct mail and if you were lucky an exhibition thrown in. Now we are looking at social media, search engine optimisation, pay per click, email, text, online, offline, above the line, below the line, direct mail, advertising – to mention just a few.
The digital age has changed everything, the routes, formats and channels of marketing are limitless, and if used properly, can be a huge benefit to how you market your business.
The trick is to write a marketing plan. Start with these headings: ‘Why?’, ‘Who?’, ‘What?’, ‘How?’, ‘Where?’ and ‘When?’, and don’t forgot ‘How much?’ Follow these simple steps and you have a basic plan.
Unfortunately many people get very excited and start with the How? – "OK we need a Facebook and Twitter campaign" – but forget that the most important "Why are we doing this campaign?", "Who is our target audience?", "What is our message?"
Keep it simple
When you are finally are ready for the "How are we going to do it?", keep it simple. Make sure you are highly targeted, don’t just go for the cheap option, or even the trendiest option, go for the option that will give you the best results against your objective. Remember to use oldfashioned traditional marketing techniques and don’t just listen to the techies. Many people still prefer to receive a quality targeted, personal mailing piece, rather than a poorly produced, impersonal email or text.
One of the most useful tools we use is a simple 12 month marketing calendar, with your Y axis being your channels – advertising; web; PR; direct mail and so on – and your X axis being months of the year, with a final row being the total cost for each month. It’s simple, but really helps you do something!
Marketing needn’t be difficult, but it is worth putting in the hard work and thinking time to make it a success.
Angela Casey is Managing Director of Porter Novelli
Social media is the Marmite of the online age. Some people swear by it and believe it brings new ways to engage with customers. Others say it is pointless and unnecessary. What cannot be denied is that it is changing the way people and businesses will communicate forever.
When a business undertakes a PR, marketing and advertising campaign, it goes through a number of processes. It starts with examining the business plan to align a communications strategy with the sales drive, goes through an analysis of the audience and then concludes with a plan of what to say to them.
The modern business now has to be mindful of a wide range of tools to reach customers. The range still includes traditional print media, direct mail, presence at exhibitions and advertising, but we can no longer ignore the importance of social and online media.
Don’t get left behind
If you ignore social media and hope it goes away, or tell yourself you will look at it when you are next on holiday, you will get left behind. You have to be in it to understand it and to keep pace with changes, or risk ignoring a vast business marketing tool that is making traditional communications obsolete. If you want to learn about it, follow businesses that are getting it right, like Starbucks, Toms and Google. While these are global brands with global budgets, they are a good example of companies that have created a persona and a voice and are sticking to it with great success.
We have discovered, through our work with the UKTFA, that many people in the industry are keen to learn more about social media as a means of communication, and there is a definite demand from businesses to find out information via social media channels.
Linking to people who are part of your business through sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ supports your existing networking and marketing effort. Think of LinkedIn as the equivalent of the plastic business card box on your desk – but with LinkedIn you can take it with you and access it all the time. Furthermore, you can talk to everyone in your card index at the same time and contact them instantly. Even more importantly, they can contact you too – and maybe become a customer.
Since October 2012, Google+ alone has gone from 400 million users to over 500 million users, and it’s growing faster all the time. Are you one of them? If not, then maybe it’s time to reconsider – the day is dawning when that’s where your new customers will be coming from.
Anna Hern is a Director at Ridgemount PR
When sales are depressed it is all too easy to hunker down, cut costs, delay investment decisions and wait for the market to pick up. But when the market is not growing, the only way to keep making money is to be positive, be aggressive, innovate, tell the market what you are doing and take market share from your competitors.
A really close scrutiny of what matters to your customers is always the starting point. You can often wins sales by reducing the cost of what you sell, but if cost is your only unique attribute then you are hideously at risk. A new competitor enters the market with a product slightly cheaper than yours and you have no response.
Keeping customers is about giving them value – understanding their business needs and providing new solutions tailored exactly to their requirements.
And it’s worth remembering that your customers are facing many of the same issues as you: pressure on everyone’s costs means that personnel have been cut to a minimum, time is at a premium and waste is unacceptable.
My advice to my staff is always that before you give any proposal to a client you need to consider what response you are asking for. Only send it if the easiest answer for the client to give is "yes". What that means is that we need to have done all the thinking – we are presenting a rational, thought-through suggestion that is practical and can be implemented immediately. If we are instead asking questions, requiring more input, asking the client to spend his time then it’s all too easy to say "no", or, "not now" (which is usually longhand for "no").
Being in a position to do this requires our investment – in time or in the development of a new service proposition that meets a customer need. The companies that are making this investment now will be the ones that survive.
One good recent example is Metsa Wood’s new shrink-wrapping offer for merchant customers. It’s a neat value proposition, solving a problem for both the merchant and the merchant’s customer and supporting the overall service promise of the brand.
And of course, once you have invested in an innovation, then you need to shout about it: new communication channels offer new ways of contacting your audience, but don’t necessarily invalidate traditional routes. A judicious mix of techniques should provide a targeted approach to your potential customers.
Alison Relf is Director at Taylor Alden PR & Marketing
Successful marketing is about using the appropriate media and using it intelligently. The more choice there is, the more discerning you need to be and today the marketing wheel has more spokes than Bradley Wiggins’ bike!
Ask yourself what media/sales channels you use and respond to in your business? Then ask yourself what your customers use. Ask them. Every day they will be sending and receiving emails and may be browsing the internet and checking out LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Increasingly, they’ll be doing this from a smartphone or tablet. They may use other social media or online reputation channels too.
The building industry is sometimes regarded as technologically tardy, but don’t be complacent. It has embraced smartphone technology to stay online on the move.
Embrace this technology too, but use it intelligently. Everybody has a website, a blog, a Twitter account. Think how you are going to make your voice heard above the babble.
Use tools such as YouTube. Your own YouTube channel gets you noticed and informs the audience of your USPs. It’s a great step-by-step instruction manual and can display your product in practice.
Your website is your information hub and should be the focus of any marketing strategy. Put everything on it, including your YouTube channel, e-newsletters, press releases, news, customer testimonials, gallery and technical data. Encourage a dialogue with site visitors and stay current. Out of date, stale news suggests you’re not in control.
Also use search engine optimisation. It’s not difficult, but it’s worth getting a website developer to fine-tune your site and make sure search engines can find it. And invest in GoogleAds to steer searches to your site.
But you need to continue using traditional marketing methods as these can start the information journey. Think press releases, news, testimonial case studies and informative, striking advertisements. People read trade magazines – printed and on-line – they still attend exhibitions and they open their mail. But be choosy. Don’t book space at every exhibition going, for instance. Find out which attracts most visitors in your markets.
In addition, if you’re involved in transport, especially of large components like panels – use the space! Splash your logo where you can.
Whatever mix of marketing techniques you choose, always ask yourself the same question: is this working for us? Measure the results – how many hits did your last YouTube video get? When does the number of website hits rise? How many people visited your exhibition stand?
Making lots of noise is easy these days – but if nobody’s listening, you’re wasting your time!
Tim Roberts is a director of Tim Roberts PR & Marketing
Clients have always asked consultancies to help marketing departments justify their public relations expenditure and the answer is simple – PR adds value to a business.
PR can engage with audiences at multiple levels, delivering an impressive return on investment. It can inform them about new products or services, educate them, help to change perceptions and ultimately behaviour, enabling a business to win brand advocates along the way.
During uncertain times, reputation is all-important and PR is an excellent tool for influencing key stakeholder groups – existing and prospective customers, your employees and not forgetting suppliers, trade bodies, government and even your competitors.
Understanding business and in particular the businesses that they are representing is also critical for a good PR consultant. As consultants, it’s our role to become trusted advisers who can look at the story a business wants to tell and find ways to make it relevant and interesting to a particular audience.
Having a good grasp, not just of your client’s marketing and communications strategy but also its commercial and business development strategy will enable you to develop and tailor the right message for the right audience, ensuring that their communications objectives fit with their wider business objectives.
An external consultant can inject creativity, bringing a fresh perspective to the business and give them the confidence to know a story has potential. It allows them to tap into specialised skills, enabling it to extend its core competencies and focus on developing its business.
The smartest marketeers understand that a recession is a great time to pick up market share. By maintaining, or even increasing their budgets, they may not come out ahead during the down times, but developing brand confidence and maintaining awareness will pay off in the long run.
Paul Richardson is Managing Director at Vividink PR
Combining public relations and social media can provide amplification to your marketing message. PR can sound daunting and expensive, but if you have someone who can write clear, concise and factual copy, then you have a start.
Making the most of news happening within your company is one of the best ways to increase your businesses profile. What’s newsworthy depends upon your business but there are straightforward news stories such as winning contracts, launching products, new premises and new people. And, once you begin to look, more news opportunities will appear. Presenting these to magazines and news portals in the right way works for both parties; the media are always looking for interesting news and you can become a reliable source, commenting on industry trends and developments.
Harness social media
Once you have a news stream, you can amplify the effect by harnessing it to social media to open up a dialogue with customers and prospects, identify issues and trends. Plan and organise how you will use it and go for the big three – Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
LinkedIn is a very powerful business-to-business networking platform with groups and discussions on subjects that will be relevant to your business. Facebook is effective at reaching the general public with very cost effective advertising opportunities and nice targeting features. Finally, Twitter is a great broadcast tool to get newsbytes out in just 140 characters. Setting up accounts is easy, but remember you are presenting your business so it would be advisable to do so to the same level of professionalism that you would use anywhere else. Set up rules and guidelines on who can use them, what they can say and if there are any approval processes required for content.
Once you have these in place then you can begin to harness the power, tweeting links to online coverage; pulling through website content into Facebook and LinkedIn; getting involved in industry discussions on LinkedIn; creating company pages in Facebook and LinkedIn; and setting up groups and discussions of your own. The opportunities and the benefits are there to be had, just make sure you plan and execute in a consistent manner.
