Marketing

Positioning

25 October 2021 Stuart Nimmo

What’s this all about? Well in marketing terms, it’s where you exist in the market you operate in. Equally where you pitch your product or service to your clients. We as printers recognise that we are a valuable tool in your marketing communications arsenal. We like to make sure that you use your materials wisely.

Understanding where you and your business is at is highly important to help you to move forward. The last 2 years have seen markets shift monumentally with the advent of how digital tools are used not just in marketing but in the delivery of content and knowledge.

A recent conversation with one of our clients in the personal fitness business was highly enlightening about the issue of market positioning. Why? Personal Trainers have seen the digital tools which they used during the lockdown, now take the lead for convenience with certain sectors of their customer base. The added issue is that it has price point dropped due to lower delivery costs and retention concepts used during the COVID lockdowns.

So, when running your business, you look at your costs both direct and indirect which informs your price point together with your margin. When you are professionally established and have an offering that is delivered at that level there is a significant challenge in the 4 P’s of marketing (Price / Place / Promotion / Product).

So, looking at this PT, if the usual position in the market is swamped with low price offering, then the long-term goal is to deliver in a different place, as the business is geared up for a certain standard of delivery, it probably is easier to apply to a higher market and focus on a higher return for a slightly upgraded serviced product, rather than a downgrade.

How to make this work, we would suggest, that researching the local area, to identify where the potential higher value clients could be. This could be using LinkedIn to find local businesses and individuals within those businesses, supplementing this with other online searches, would also help. Why identify individuals? Being targeted and direct reaps a higher level of response and engagement.

The essential part of the pitch is recognising the potential clients’ challenges and pain points. Addressing them in clear messages. Consideration of the customer journey of what will trigger and support potential actions is essential. Online content will probably be less critical, as it will be a point of confirmation rather than an initial starting point. A possible starting point perhaps should be a bespoke, personalised piece of mail. I almost said direct mail, but this needs to be the level above a piece of DM, it needs to demonstrate a personal approach, attentive pitch. Clever use of some relevant online content, such as a white paper or a planning tool or other want to have exclusive online content, on a hidden URL, which is only accessed from the personal mail. This can then be used as a point of confirmation of a “bite”.

Building a more strategic approach to a higher value client acquisition is all about the customer journey. The tools you use will need to be highly focussed, tailorable and demonstrate true value add, from an intangible point. Materialistic add-ons won’t necessarily create the right bite, but referral and value add proposition from knowledge, empathy and the right service level will create value for both PT and their client.

This example also looks at the marketing strategy moving from being multi-channel, where all guns ablaze at the same time, to a strategic omnichannel, progressive approach.

So why does this matter to a print professional?
• Ensuring your marketing works, matters to us, we want your print to perform, even if it is a limited edition.
• The right triggers can transform your customer journey.
• Skimping on marketing mix tools does not help you.
• We want to see our customers achieve more, even if it is with fewer clients, but clients that have a higher retention rate and value.

Why procrastinate?

3 October 2021 Stuart Nimmo

We all know the facts, customers like being treated as privileged individuals, yet we scatter-gun generic marketing messages hoping they bite.

So why not be savvier?
Communication is best when it is one to one. Communication is best when it is direct and meaningful. So how come so many are just following the flock when being different makes you stand out.

We’ve recently done a select mailing for an event. Being able to have a catchy line which linked to the mailing aided us to get more time with recipients than an online campaign. You’ve heard us before but here’s a refresher on why direct mail is so good…

• A leader in response rates – yes how much physical mail do people get, therefore it attracts more time and attention with the recipient. Can you remember what you saw on whatever social media channel yesterday?

• Highly personalized, with digital print technology, we can add more personalisation than just names and locations, you can make it highly relevant to the individual in many different ways.

• Opened and read, with creative physical mail running alongside so many other channels, it is a refreshing experience for the receiver.

• Creative, lumpy mail creates a buzz, interest which stimulates more of the senses. Doing something which is out of the ordinary size or colour wise, also grabs attention.

• Tangible (physical) – it’s kinaesthetic one of the key learning methods, after all, marketing is teaching your audience about a product or service

• Versatile – seasonal, in shape, in format, in whatever manner you need it to be.

• Familiar everyone loves receiving a piece of creative engaging post.

• Simple to do – HAD-Print are a skilled practitioner with making your requirements fit within Royal Mail’s distribution channels – we take the hassle out of a mailing.

• Trust-building with too many scams being online, the real-world physical item adds kudos to your message about being taken seriously.

• Cost-effective, whether it is using bulk mail rates, specifying to fit within a certain mailing band, a lot can be achieved within the standard letter and up to 100gms

• Highly trackable – whether through delivery or engagement. There are many ways of tracking and monitoring engagement with direct mail. Clever use of short links, QR codes can make this monitorable in a compliant way.

• Highly targeted, we stated social can be a little scattergun in its approach. With careful use of datasets, and demographics targeting can be achieved to the relevant audience.

• A complement to digital marketing, it can link up, feed into and even be used as an engagement tool back. Exclusive offers belong in the club as they say, why not make Direct Mail part of the club USP?

• Data-driven – if you run a CRM, make sure you set triggers to fire crafted physical communications, or Direct Mail to trigger subsequent online progressive actions.

If you need case study material for any of these, have a chat with us. We have worked with some great clients over the years and also have brilliant case studies from peer colleagues around the globe!

Race to where?

1 August 2021 Stuart Nimmo

As things get going again, it seems that some of the basics of marketing are getting tossed aside for Arnold Schwarzenegger and his famous “Oozy nine-millimetre” approach. Or being politely put, the scattergun hitting as many as possible with as much low impact marketing collateral.

Everyone likes being treated as an individual, personable, being given time, the basic respect of being treated as a human. So why in the rush to get going again are so many making the mistake of misfiring the marketing gun?

Just some examples being:

• YouTube zoom video links via WhatsApp, so why would I give up my time, when you haven’t got to know me? Conversational basics would identify whether I am prime for your product or not.

• Email invitations, to an event which I haven’t yet justified whether it’s for me. A prime case of jumping the gun.

• Illicit harvesting of data through Linkedin profiles from prolific business networkers and bombarding inboxes with un-requested “I’m wonderful, I’m doing these seminars which you should attend”

In the examples above, understanding the customer journey is key. Hoping to speed up the process by jumping stages, actually sets these individuals back to a negative point on the journey before commencing under normal circumstances. Ultimate end-user perception of these products/services is key. The advent of digital media in the customer journey has increased the number of touchpoints in the conversion process from prospect to customer. The key is looking at the longevity of the touchpoint. Digital media is notoriously renowned for having a short lifespan, such as Facebook or LinkedIn people struggle to remember what they saw the previous day. Email marketing only works once the originator has gained trust from the recipient, especially as it is the original spoof electronic scam platform, we all remember Princes from Nigeria claiming they needed release money. So the perception of email marketing has an interesting positioning in the mix.

So how do you overcome it?

There’s the challenge, originality, creativity and timing are all at play in making an awesome campaign, which smartly tied elements come together, not to act as a barrage of content, but a carefully crafted progression of building trust.

Old school marketing talks about the marketing mix, a toolbox of touchpoints that enable the prospect to build trust through carefully crafted discovery. (Or omnichannel campaign) This relies on you knowing your customers and most significantly their traits and personality, or their customer persona.

In building an omnichannel campaign, progression is key. Understanding how prospects need to relate to your offering is at the heart of building progressively connected touchpoints on your customer journey.

So how does a mixture of touchpoints work?

Marketing is educating your customer about your product or service. Educators work on people learning on Visual Auditory Kinesthetic basis. You need to ensure that the mixture of touchpoints use all of the three learning receptors to ensure you capture every potential opportunity. So a solely digital platform-based campaign will only feed the visual and auditory receptors. Adding physical marketing like print helps you to enable another touchpoint feeding the Kinesthetic engagement with your prospects.

So utilising a printed piece with a sure-fired call for action to engage onto a digital platform can provide progression. This is getting so much smarter with the advent of clever digital back ends. Using managed short links allow you to build a profile of recipients through the use of Personalised URLs underneath QR codes, which is great for 1-1 print mailers. This can allow for the recording of future actions in the journey by utilising a CRM system to record engagements. A good CRM can be set to trigger further physical print engagement, which aids the customer journey towards a successful closure of a sale.

So back to the race, progression is building trust. The underlying principle of “know, like, trust” is at the heart of the customer journey. Somethings you can’t rush, it’s subject to the product or service, yes a low-value product will have a shorter journey, however, one with a higher entry point will need a bespoke approach.

The innovators are the ones doing some disruptive marketing coming out of the pandemic. Disruptive, innovative, different whatever you call it, is challenging the norm. With so much digital communications used during the pandemic, there is a desire to cut through the noise which a saturated digital environment has created. Physical is the key to innovating in this space. Being tactile, challenging and surprising, Royal Mail Marketreach showcases some of the most outstanding pieces and data around the responses, which when used carefully can outperform just digital alone.

In an age where everything evolves so quickly, it is fair to say no one individual is an all-around expert. They don’t exist. The ability to listen and absorb is essential, equally when dovetailing elements together to form a true progressive mixed fulfilling media delivery of your product or service.

Here at HAD-Print, we have acknowledged this from the start. The buzz words of collaboration which seem to be on the rise post-pandemic, were already within our principles well before. So we happily work with strategists, digital providers, fixed media advertising to seamlessly work together.

Print is a valuable tool in the marketing mix, the limits are your imagination.