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What business owners want from PR & marketing seminars

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Earlier this week I ran a survey asking the 4,000 business owners on my list what they wanted from PR & marketing seminars.

Several hundred responded – thank you so much – and here are the results:

(click each image to make it larger)

Where would you be happy to travel for a free one day PR & marketing seminar?

We’ve done a lot of seminars in London this year and clearly there is still a demand for more. We’ll be launching some central London events at the end of the year.

What are the biggest marketing challenges in your business right now?

No massive surprises there. Lead generation, website traffic and getting free publicity always seem to be the three biggest problems when I talk to business owners.

Have you previously invested in professional marketing to help you grow your business?

Would you prefer to learn how to significantly improve your marketing, or have it done for you?

This is reassuring. It tells me that business owners want to know what to do in their business, even if someone is doing it for them. This is good. Marketing and sales is the most important thing in your business. If you’re going to learn about one thing, make it marketing.

And your individual comments

Lots of positive feedback on the Tuesday PR & Marketing Tips, so thank you.

One business owner said: “Personally, I prefer workshops without the ice-breaking time-wasting exercises. You have so much useful information to impart, I would rather pay for full-on, in-depth strategy and specific techniques that give real benefit and justify my time, rather than a free day that gives some, but limited, benefit; and therefore less value.”

That’s a really good point, and it’s the reason why I recently launched the two day Intensive Business Focus event.

Posted in General marketing, PR and publicity, Publicity Heaven's news | No Comments »

What’s stopping you updating your website?

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

My Tuesday PR & Marketing Tips yesterday was all about the easy way to create new content for your website.

And I had a really interesting email back from a business owner in Wales.

She said:

“Hi Paul,

Think you may have missed the crucial point with this feature. When a w/site owner can update themselves, updates are usually frequent. Suggest the reason why most business owners don’t update their sites regularly is that there are, as you say, plenty of w/site designers but in many people’s experience they’re hard work to useless.

1. The w/site may not have been designed/built in a way that it can be easily changed anyway.
Sometimes it will require going back & re-designing & re-programming the entire site.

2. Next there can be long backlogs of work – months pass & nothing’s started.

3. When they do start, they are continually jumping between jobs.

4. Some bigger or status job will crop up which will result in other jobs being sidelined for weeks – then creating another queue.

5. The biggest problem is that almost always they are designers who can’t program & so this part has to be out-sourced – so they lose control of the job & forget about it. Frequently it’s disappeared out in India because programming’s cheaper there & then the programmers disappear to another job/company.

Anything w/sites usually means endless delays & a bucket load of stress with waiting, changing the firm, all promises & then the same again. By the time you get it, so long has passed you no longer want it, it’s out of date anyway & then you’ve got to pay some over-priced figure for it.

Currently I’m looking for a local IT teacher or employed programmer wanting extra work to handle precisely the updates you wrote about, but no more “firms”. The days go to weeks, the weeks go to months & the months go to years.

Maybe you could feature this problem & some programmers might jump in to fill this gap. I’ll list what I & most clients probably want :-

1. A start date.
2. A date, even if approximate, when the job will be completed.
3. They come back to you with a report to confirm progress.
4. Being able to do the job fairly quickly – if you’re planning a summer special it’s no use in December & it’ll be out of date for next summer.

Yikes a rant ! but the problem is not as easy as you make out & I suggest that building a good team around you is the real problem & many businesses haven’t managed this yet on the web front. What is needed is a handy person/team who can say like “Yes I can start this next Monday & be done by end Wednesday” – & simply do it.

By the way I’m in Cardiff South Wales, & if you know of anyone who could fill this gap, as they say, “I’d love to hear from you”. “

Of course, she’s completely right. That hadn’t occurred to me, I guess because we keep our private clients’ websites updated for them so don’t see this problem with the people we work closely with.

Website designers – defend yourselves!

Oh, and if you are based near Cardiff and can help this lady, please contact us and we will put you in touch.

Posted in General marketing, Off topic | 1 Comment »

Don’t let your IT people ruin your email marketing

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Sadly my grandmother passed away recently and today was her funeral. So after a long day away from the office and out of email contact, I just ran through a day’s worth of work emails to get them cleared.

If you send a lot of email marketing like I do, it’s always good to approach your email in a different frame of mind now and again. With more than 50+ emails to read in just 30 minutes, I had little time for messages that weren’t totally relevant to me.

Email newsletters that I would normally scour for something useful didn’t get a glance before I hit the delete key. It goes to show why you need to send regular emails to prospects; I might open and read the same email next week.

But I got one email today that really made me chuckle, from a company called MarketingFile.com. I think I bought some data from them a few years ago.

The email told me that I hadn’t logged into my account for 12 months, so as a security measure they had changed my username and password from the familiar login I know, to a bunch of random characters.

Why? What’s the benefit to me, the customer? There isn’t one; in fact they have just made it harder for me to buy from them in the future as my usual account login won’t work.

And since that will probably frustrate me (as I will have forgotten about this change by then), surely that can’t help the company either, as they could lose a sale.

The email suggested I login right now and change my new “random” login to something I’ll remember. Er, no thanks, don’t think I’ll bother.

Is this a case of the IT department ruining the marketing? Security is very important, but really there was no need for them to change my account details without being requested to. Nobody benefits here.

Posted in Email marketing, General marketing, Off topic | No Comments »

That must be a pain to mow

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

If you want your business to be noticed you have to do something to stand out.

In London today I did a double take… when I thought I saw a Smart car covered in grass.

It was a bit too speedy past St Pancras for me to see the name of the business, but a quick Google search found this photo and the company behind it.

Here’s the YouTube video of the Grass Bugs:

Stunning! There are lots of business that would talk about doing something like this, but very few would have the balls to actually do it. Easigrass deserves to do well.

Posted in General marketing, Good PR, Publicity ideas, Publicity stunts | No Comments »

Permission marketing

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Have been reading a lot recently about permission marketing.

This is a concept made popular in a book by Seth Godin a few years back. You can still get a few chapters free here.

The concept is simple. It’s where you only market to someone who has explicitly agreed to be marketed to (by your business).

This is excellent for your business, as you focus your marketing spend on people who have already put their hand up and said they are interested in what you sell. As you can imagine, that has a very positive effect on conversion rates.

The future surely has no place for non-permission marketing. Already this morning I have fielded four calls from people I don’t know trying to sell me something I don’t want (mostly advertising). It’s got to be pretty soul destroying for those poor telesales people who can clearly hear the annoyance in my voice.

It would be much more constructive for these businesses to spend their time finding people who want what they sell, and then phone them to follow up. I bet they could get more profit out of fewer telesales people. They would also discover if people actually want what they sell.

Publicity Heaven’s marketing is built round getting your permission. This is why we offer the free printed report – we are asking you for permission to market to you (and in return we are giving you something free).

(If you haven’t had your report yet and would like the fortnightly PR tips email, sign up here. Don’t worry, you can unsubscribe any time.)

Permission marketing removes the need for trying really hard to sell things. I already know from previous PR product and seminar launches that it is much easier for me to sell good value products and training to people who want to receive information about them.

My gut feel says that people who make a willing purchase after giving their permission for marketing have also got to know you and your business properly. This must surely make them the best customers you can have.

Posted in General marketing | No Comments »

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