The funding is available from Skills South East – you can read here about eligibility criteria and what you need to do to apply.

]]> http://dangerousmkting.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/last-call-for-1000-grant-to-grow-your-business/feed/ 0 Dangerous Marketing Avatar_DM_£1000_2 http://dangerousmkting.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/marketing-news-round-up-for-december-2011/ http://dangerousmkting.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/marketing-news-round-up-for-december-2011/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:13:49 +0000 Dangerous Marketing http://dangerousmkting.wordpress.com/?p=816 Continue reading →]]> Here’s some links to news articles from the world of Marketing that were featured in December 2011.

Click on the link to go to the original article (all copy write remains with the original authors).

Facebook in the news:

• Marketing Week: Facebook now ‘equal’ to traditional ad platforms
• New Media Age: Facebook completes three-month privacy audit
• Marketing: Facebook ordered to boost privacy after critical audit

Compliance and Regulatory news:

• New Media Age:  ICO releases guidance for site owners to step up cookie compliance
• Marketing Week: Ofcom decides not to increase the number of ads allowed on TV

Brands:

• Marketing Week: Success of Sky’s broadband campaign leads to reduction in marketing spend
• Marketing Week: Tesco value perception falls dramatically
• Marketing Week: Channel 4 steps up development of games based on TV shows

Technology:

• New Media Age: Smartphone ownership doubles in a year

Reviews & Miscellaneous:

• Marketing Week: Marketers are the ‘most hard-working and ambitious’ workers
• Marketing: Review of the Year: Top 10 marketing moments of 2011
• Marketing: The Annual 2011: Top 10 celebrity ads

Whilst spell check software if very useful, it does not uncover every error, especially if the word is correctly spelled (spelt?) but used wrongly (incorrectly?). To a lot of people it doesn’t matter – which may be fine, but if your customer is one of those fussy types like me, it can make the the difference between a sale and a miss. And by the looks of the news report, there are more fussy types out there that you might of thought!

But it’s not as easy to spot mistakes as you might think, certainly if your self-editing. Our brains have a clever way of filling in blanks or correcting errors without us even being consciously aware of them. For example, read this sentence: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS. How many F’s were in that sentence? 80% of you reading this will come up with the wrong answer!

Have you checked your promotional material recently and spotted all the mistakes, because you may be giving away sales without even realising!

So, one last question: how many deliberate errors have you spotted in this article? Have a re-read! And if it’s going to drive you to distraction, click here for the answers How closely do you pay attenion_answers!

To find out the details, please go to the Leadership Strategy & Development blog hosted by Pragmatic Performance Management where all the application criteria are listed, along with the means to contact the right people to advise you on what you can do with the grant!

As part of my marketing research for this training, I came across a consumer survey completed in 2006 by the Employers’ Forum on Disability that was used as part of a study commissioned by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills analysing the issues disabled people have to face when they are customers (my full article “How much are we worth to your organisation” is on IP2′s blog site.

The barriers that disabled people have to face when they simply want to buy something is astounding and shocked me as a marketer. The survey produced figures such as 83% of disabled people have ‘walked away’ from making a purchase because they were unable to access a business (either its physical premises or via a badly designed website) or were subjected to such  poor customer service (eg rude and uninterested staff!) that they chose to shop elsewhere.

These figures are even more shocking when you realise that 1 in 5 shoppers is likely to be a person with some form of disability. On the 2006 figures that the survey was based, the market potential of the disabled consumer was estimated to be worth £80 billion per annum!

It would be unthinkable for a business to deliberately ignore 20% of its customer base. But it seems this is precisely what a very large number of UK businesses are doing – simply though a lack of understanding of how to communicate with this consumer group. When analysed from a positive perspective, the survey also stated that 66% of disabled people chose to stay loyal to the business where they have received good customer service related to their disability. Just think of the competitive advantage you could gain by understanding the needs of the disabled consumer – and the good news is that these needs are often very simple!

Case studies show how organisations with better accessibility increase their customer base more rapidly, grow faster and more profitably, as well as being able to maintain a distinct advantage over their competitors. It’s obvious, isn’t it!

So how much of the £80 billion per annum market do you want to tap?

You can find our latest article by Clare McNamara of Move Ahead by clicking here to access our Be My Guest blog site.

As the first month of 2011 comes to a close, I am delighted to say it has been a very busy one for Dangerous Marketing as we get close to celebrating our 10th trading anniversary – and this gave me a chance to reflect on the main approaches we used to getting the business off the ground.

I was fortunate to win a long term contract that gave me the impetus to resign from a full time (well paid!) role to go it alone, which is what brought me down to Plymouth in May 2001. And my good fortune continued when this contract came to an end, as it had enabled me to meet my business partner and a number of associates. All we needed then were contracts to work on! Analysing how we developed our business so quickly, I can put it down to one major factor: networking.

With the business in true start-up mode (ie no clients, contacts or suppliers!), my main role was to get out and meet people! This translated into attending as many networks as possible – and this is what made the vital difference to the rate we won new contracts. However, looking back, it wasn’t simply attending these networks that made the difference: it was the taking of an alternative approach to the intentions of the networks that was the main reason our business grew!

It isn’t rocket science that to develop a meaningful relationship with another human being, you need shared interests and knowledge – you find out what you have in common and build the relationship from there. This is what these networks wanted, but it was HOW they did it that often didn’t achieve the results they wanted. As an example, one of the earliest networks I joined was BNI with its very active sales approach, based on an American networking model (developed by Ivan Misner). It has been so successful, it has spawned countless imitators that adapt the concept to a “more British way” of networking! As a start-up, BNI was the perfect learning arena. However, as we grew, I noted that the value of this type of networking diminished.

In my view, the key weakness of this style of networking is to ‘force’ business people together, based on the ‘common factor’ of having paid to participate. This means you have no control or choice over who you can network with in a closed environment. There has to be similar/shared approaches for the basis of relationships to be sustainable. And as I have continued to network through the years, I notice this element becomes more crucial.

Dangerous Marketing will only provide referrals/recommendations for suppliers or associates that we have seen in action – after all, it is our business reputation that is at stake if the recommendation doesn’t work! Many networks try to short-circuit this referrals mechanism, which often leaves members disillusioned as the ‘promised’ new business they expected doesn’t materialise. Key to successful networking is the freedom to make up your own mind about the contacts you meet.

So now the vast majority of my ‘networking’ now is done on-line through social media, where you have the freedom to choose who to get to know better, based on mutual interests and knowledge sharing (and which has definitely contributed to the business having a very busy January!). However, there are still some very special networks ‘in the real world’ that grab my attention: The Women’s Business Club (TWBC) is one.

Led by founder and MD Kelly Stevens, who is passionate about supporting women in business and encouraging entrepreneurship, the TWBC enables business women to 1) learn from each other; 2) promote their businesses; 3) find inspiration and 4) make important business contacts. Primarily this network is about sharing knowledge and learning amongst its members, which captures the essence of how people (and women in particular!) want to network with each other. The vital component isn’t about forcing individuals to sell/promote their services to people they’ve only just met – each person is in control of the rate at which the mutually beneficial business relationship can develop – which leads to much stronger ties (and greater likelihood of doing business together in the future!).

TWBC is clever in that it gives individuals the choice of networking on line or in person. The Premier Clubs meet monthly over a lunch-time to enable members to pool resources, share experience, contacts and expertise, and look for ways to collaborate to help grow each others’ businesses. Typically the group is a great mix of business types and sizes - from start ups to partners and directors of large organisations.  Although informal in style, the network recognises the value of the time given by the members to attend, so they are conducted as a business meeting, to a timed agenda. Another key factor is that each group size is capped at a number where all the members can gain the most from their participation and collaboration.

I’m delighted to see this approach has been so successful that in the year our Plymouth group has been running, many more groups have been set up around the country, including several in the south west (take a look here at the latest locations).  As the Plymouth group heads to its first anniversary, I also have the honour of hosting the newly set up club in Taunton and I look forward to generating more valuable relationships here.

If you would like to experience this type of truly effective networking for yourself, you are very welcome to come along a guest and help us celebrate the value of knowledge sharing networks!

I know what they mean – like a lot of businesses, 2010 was not the most notable year for me personally or commercially – but this only serves to steel my determination to succeed.  I work best to targets, so my big one for this year is to be able to book my first ever trip to Australia by the end of the year. It’ll be interesting to look back at this when I blog in January 2012 (hopefully from a friend’s computer down under!!). What will be your motivating factor to ‘go for it’ in 2011? Does size matter? Do you need one big goal to aim for or will a series of ever-increasing targets work best for you?

This train of thought triggered me to recall a very interesting conversation I had recently with a marketing colleague about whether size matters in marketing! We were discussing what difference does it make working as a marketer for a small business or as part of a large corporation. My career in marketing consultancy has been focused on the SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprise) sector, typically working with businesses between 5 and 25 people, although my previous working environment was within multi-nationals (both as employers and clients) when I was based in the south east. My colleague had worked their way up to being a marketing manager in a number of large corporations and was in the process of making the change into being a consultant in the south west, so we compared notes.

She gave me the impression that the largest aspect of a marketing manager’s role in large corporations these days is more to do with protectionism than creativity - the amount of time spent overseeing the brand to maintain the battle against the competition seemed to take up most of her diary. Of course, this was supported by multi-million £ budgets and – in theory anyway! – the need for accurate metrics to predict and confirm return on investment. Everything that can be measured is, but she mused that this does not mean that the right results were being obtained. As we have seen in social media in particular, the qualitative outcomes are the most difficult to measure but often the most telling when it comes to looking at a success story.

On the other hand, my experience of working with small businesses focuses mainly on getting as much impact as possible from the smallest available resource – and this is why I love my job so much! My clients and I get to be truly creative and resourceful because when there is a tiny budget to spend, you get very picky about where you spend your money (as you can only spend it once!). And it can be done – I’ve known that great feeling many a time when my client has received great media coverage or hit on a new market really quickly simply because we played clever with the little money that we had!

So for me and my clients, size DOES matter! The smaller the budget, the smaller the expected opportunities but this pushes us to be the most creative we can be – and it’s amazing the size of results you can get even when starting with a very small pot of gold!

What are your experiences of working with small enterprises or large corporations? Do my comments reflect your experience – let me know your thoughts below! And if you’d like to know my secret of how I can help your business grow into a mighty oak from a little acorn, just contact me and we’ll have a discussion!

Once you’ve viewed the video, we’d love to know what you thought of it, so leave a comment here or on our YouTube channel! If you want to know more about how we can help your business specifically, contact us and we will be happy to provide an initial consultation free of charge!

The concept was the brainchild of Karen Clarke, Head of Business Development and Fundraising at St Loye’s Foundation, who wanted to give the charities a chance to increase their own followers on Twitter and raise awareness whilst “… having a lot of fun”, as well as to demonstrating the value of local charities working together in partnership.

I found out about it simply through a request put out from St Loyes on Twitter

There were three featured charities St Loye’s Foundation, Headway Devon and Hospiscare, although tweeters were encouraged to mention other good causes too. What made it so simple to support was that a rota of hosts from the local active ‘Twitter Community’ were given information about these charities to tweet out as part of our general tweet ‘chit-chat’ during the tweetathon, which ran between 8 am on Friday 29th October and 8 am on the following Saturday (I was a co-host of the final shift!).

But the truly vital part was taking account of Twitter search by using the hashtag and phrase #24hrtweet. This enabled the subject to be picked up easily by other tweeters (followers of the hosts) who then spread the word. And the advantage of it being done for 24 hours was that our efforts caused the hashtag to trend on twitter during the quieter hours – more importantly to be the top trend, which will boost the coverage potential of the featured charities. And it also demonstrated that even small groups of people can get noticed in the wider world!

In a personal respect, it was a great way to find out more about how Twitter can work to help – and sometimes to hinder. The only negative in this exercise was the medium of Twitter itself, which has such clever software that if it thinks your actions resemble spamming (ie sending out too many tweets in too short a time), it temporarily disconnects your account, which it did to a couple of the hosts (me included!). Luckily it is only temporary but could have been very inconvenient.

A big thank you goes to Karen at St Loye’s for the opportunity to participate and to my co-hosts who did a splendid job in keeping the #24hrtweet going – not only was it a great way to get personal satisfaction from playing a small part in helping some local charities, but also the opportunity to converse and engage with some great people through the channel of social media.

I urge you to try it! You never know what it will do for you AND your business!

I’d love you to comment with your examples of linking with charities – either as a volunteer or being the charity that was helped. If you want to know more about how to help local charities and communities through your business or any aspect of Corporate Social Governance, contact me via my Twitter account (@DangerousMkting) or our Enquiry Page.