March 13th, 2010
By Carl Da-Costa-Greaves
Whether you’re creating your own email newsletters or writing for someone else, if you’re anything like me, you will always be looking for ways to improve. With growing competition online and new technologies emerging every day, the last thing you want to do is get left behind by your competitors.
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Why reinvent your email newsletters?
You‘ve been writing email newsletters for your business, publishing them and distributing them for years so why change now? A few reasons might be because:
• Your users are reading the same newsletter, making the message monotonous as there’s not much more to read that they don’t already know about you.
• In the age of the digital era there is so much more information that can be collated quite quickly, such as product profiles, feedback reviews, testimonials etc. If this type of information has got you the reputation you have today then you should share this pride with your readers so they know exactly where their suppliers brand stands in market.
• Think big and think different. Why do the same things others are doing?
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How to be different
Now you know why your newsletter may need changing, it’s time to work out how you can make it different.
Writing good email newsletters requires absolute creativity that you need to put in from the start. Some areas to think about are:
• Interest your readers by tapping them into the wider knowledge base of your industry. By doing this you are showing a willingness to educate outside of your own products, adding innovative generic industry information.
• Change the design of your newsletter. Why stick to the same boring way of presenting your newsletter? Play with colours and design styles. Use other interesting newsletters that catch your eye for ideas, design patterns and choice of colours.
• Add some reviews and testimonials about the products and services of your business. This will help your readers gain faith in your brand.
• Keep your readers regularly updated; once a day is too much, once every 6 months and they will forget you.
• Leave your readers in anticipation for the next publication. You can do this by dropping some hints about upcoming offers in your next editions.
If you haven’t changed your email newsletter in the last 2 years then the chances are it’s going to look a bit outdated. Leverage the power of email marketing and try incorporating some of the ideas above the next time you publish.
Tags: creativity, email newsletters, Internet Marketing, spring clean
Posted in Internet Marketing | No Comments »
March 11th, 2010
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Corporate Personality
Personality is at the heart of an organisation, it’s the character, ‘the way things are done around here’ and can be viewed as ‘the culture’ to what companies are trying to achieve.
Personality also consists of various elements such as; competence, ruthlessness, agreeableness and are all dimensions and aspects that make up the corporate persona. How tough, informal or easy a company is to work with are all defined by the personality.
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Corporate Identity
When initially starting out, a company attempts to build their identity. This is done through the following;
• Perceived identity; what the organisation tries to create – ‘continuity, centrality and uniqueness’
• Projected identity; how the organisation tries to position itself
• Applied identity; the actual signals conveyed
• Desired identity; What top management believes the organisation could become
• Essences of identity; Design, Culture, Communication
It’s only after time that a clear picture will emerge about the ‘real identity’ an organisation wants to create. This realisation is obtained by a process of discovery and it’s this stage that leads to a new Constructed Identity.
The Constructed Identity is worked out between everyone involved and then communicated internally (employees will have their view) and externally (outside stakeholders will have their view).The results of this Constructed Identity can be best seen in a lot of the physical outputs of a organisation, ie, the logo, the brand, the products, where it’s made and distributed etc.
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Corporate Brand
We must understand that a brand isn’t just a set of logos trademarks and typefaces; it’s the image and identity of the organisation. The brand stands for what the company stands for and should communicate the essence and core values of the organisation as a whole, which is a lot broader than just talking about how the logo should be printed and what font size the words in a letter should be.
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Tools to help you to further understand your brand
• A brand blue print will help you to analyse exactly what might be contained in your brand.
• Brand positioning statement forces you to think about what it is that your brand stands for.
After you have developed exactly what you want your organisation to stand for you can then begin putting this into your brand positioning statement. This step of the process ensures you are very clear to everyone involved with the organisation exactly what the brand is about. As a result, all activities that take place thereafter come from this understanding and hence reflect the brands true meaning.
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Tips
When developing your brand, use character descriptive words to bring it to life, rather than just explaining what it does; think flamboyancy and creativity which will reflect what people think and feel about you; the things that create the personality and character for the brand, rather than just being a description.
Tags: brands, core values, corporate brands, corporate identity, logos
Posted in Strategic Marketing | No Comments »
March 5th, 2010
By: Carl Da-Costa-Greaves
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What is Corporate Reputation?
There are 3 elements to reputation, known as the reputational radar.
• Brand Reputation – how the public perceives a brand.
• Organisational reputation – what the public think about the ‘organisation’ as oppose to the brand. For example, Unilever PLC has a house of brands and also has individual sub brands. Therefore the public reputation of the company can be different to the reputation of the individual brands.
• Stakeholder reputation – the reputation that stakeholders have of the brand or the company that they are dealing with. (Stakeholder = person group or another organisation that has a direct or indirect stake in a company.)
Therefore when we talk about reputation we also need to be clear about whose reputation, from the list above, that we are talking about.
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Definition of Reputation
There are lots of different definitions of what reputation might consist of but the main point is that corporate reputation has to be earned. The company can create an image, but whether that image will lead to a reputation which is the same as the image, or a positive reputation, will depend on what the organisation does.
• “Reputation is the sum values that stakeholders attribute to a company, based on their perception and interpretation of the image that the company communicates over time” John Dalton, Managing Corporate Reputation.
• “Reputation is the principal means through which a market economy deals with consumer ignorance” Professor John Kay.
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Corporate Reputation Framework
Corporate Reputation is the endpoint in a chain, see image above. A chain that comes from the corporate image, with the corporate image coming from the corporate identity or brand; which will in turn come from the personality that the organisation is trying to create. All of these elements are wrapped up in the corporate communications that the company is producing.
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Benefits of Corporate Reputation
Corporate Reputation acts as a lynchpin for all of these concepts in the reputation framework, with lots of things feeding into it such as the image and reputation and what the organisation does to enhance the reputation. The benefits of having a solid reputation are things like trustworthiness and credibility.
Corporate Reputation determines the levels of credibility, trustworthiness, responsibility and reliability that a stakeholder has with the organisation.
It’s also worth noting that an organisation may own a brand and may also try to create their image around that brand, but it is the stakeholder that owns and creates the reputation.
In summary, it doesn’t really matter what a company does, because what determines the organisation’s reputation is what the stakeholder’s think of it; managing Corporate Reputation is therefore all about managing the stakeholder’s perceptions.
Tags: brand reputation, corporate image, corporate reputation
Posted in Strategic Marketing | No Comments »
March 2nd, 2010
In previous posts we’ve discussed how to write winning email newsletters.
However, If you’ve just started out in business or only recently started capturing email addresses through sign up forms etc then you probably don’t have a big list to send your email marketing campaigns or email newsletters to. So what do you do?
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Here are some inspirational ideas to grow your opt-in email marketing list:
• Place your email newsletter signup form on your home page. Or if this doesn’t fit with the look and feel of your design then have a visual cue, or noticeable link to take users directly to the signup form page.
• Link to your signup form from every page of your website (you might even add a link to your footer or side navigation).
• Place a link to your email signup form in your email signature (ask everyone in your company to do the same).
• Offer free giveaways to one lucky subscriber (it can be an exclusive promotional discount or a limited edition offer of some sort).
• Post free whitepapers or helpful articles on your site. They’ll get downloaded and hopefully spread around the web if you offer them for free and with no registration. Inside your whitepaper you could place your add or promotion of your newsletter and the benefits of signing up (see above).
• Send out personal, one-to-one emails to all your clients who haven’t already opted-in and ask them to please sign up to your newsletter.
• In your “Contact Us” form on your website, add a checkbox to “signup to our newsletter”
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Already Have a List of Customers?
What if you already have a customer list with email contact details of people that you’ve been doing business with for years? Just because they’re your customers it doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to start receiving your email newsletters.
For example, if you run a small consultancy business with a about 25 clients who are very close to you. If you just assume they’d want your newsletter and you automatically subscribe them to your list without their permission, you’re just going to irritate a lot of them (or worse, get yourself reported as a spammer).
If you’ve got an online store you’re probably sitting on a huge email list of customers who have purchased something from you in the past. But if they didn’t check a box for email marketing, or if you haven’t emailed them anything in years, you shouldn’t start sending them emails out of the blue.
So what can you do? If you have a list of customer email addresses and you want to start sending them email marketing, but you don’t have their permission yet, ask them for permission by sending a “Re-Introduction Email.” It can be extremely effective in re-energising dormant contacts and will certainly help you on your way to increasing your opt-in subscribers.
Tags: email marketing, email marketing campaigns, email newsletters
Posted in Internet Marketing | No Comments »
February 28th, 2010
Keyword optimisation on your website has become standard procedure for most marketers. But are you optimising your press releases with your chosen keywords?
Here are a few reasons why you should:
• If you’re posting your press releases to your website (and you should be), it’s going to be the freshest content and Google likes fresh content.
• Generally, press releases and news articles rank very highly on Google. The more keyword rich your press releases are, the better you/they will rank in Google.
• Press releases aren’t just for the press. Make it easy for prospects, bloggers, customers and the media to find you wherever they’re searching.
Don’t know where to start to find the right keywords?
• Find out what keywords successful competitors are using.
• Read articles written by target journalists.
• Survey your PR and Marketing department personnel.
• Survey your Web site development team.
• Survey product development personnel and executive management.
Many press release distribution services have built in SEO features. Use them for a trial period and track results in order to get an idea of which of your keywords are the most popular. Also, be sure to avoid over used industry words like “flexible,” “scalable” and “market-leading”.
After you’ve written your press release and think you’ve optimised for all the necessary keywords, put it to the test. HubSpot have a free online Press Release Grader tool to rate your press release. “Press Release Grader rates a press release based on a checklist of criteria – from content and structure, to search optimisation and link analysis. The free tool is designed to optimise a press release so it can be found more easily.
Going through the above process will train you in a style where you will not only be considering how to get the news out there, but will make you think openly about what people will be searching for so that they can actually find your content. Building these search terms and keywords into your story will then leverage this valuable source of content.
Tags: press releases, web site development
Posted in Internet Marketing, knowledge | No Comments »
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