PM Feb C Weston
- 1. pm | February 2015 23 marketing basics worrying over what beer brand you might buy this week. But you, and more specifi- cally your clients, are more likely to be kept awake thinking about their busi- nesses problems. So it makes sense that your clients are more likely to respond to something they care or are worried about – particularly if it is emotional. Maybe that is why the financial services sector is the largest users of direct marketing – people care about their money. How to get over 240 directors to a paid legal seminar, for free As I’m sure you know one of the most used marketing tactics in professional service firms is good old fashioned semi- nars. So last year my law firm, Flint Bishop, wanted to run a seminar to update HR Directors of Midlands based W hether you’re a marketing professional or a fee earner working in marketing/busi- ness development, I’m fairly sure that you are involved in direct marketing. If you’re surprised by that statement, you’re not alone. Most people I speak with don’t think they use direct marketing in their firms. But I think that is because there is confusion as to exactly what direct marketing is. People tend to associate direct marketing with its most visible manifes- tation: direct mail. It’s a similar story with the phrase marketing, which is usually associated with advertising. And even business development – which is really sales by another name. For me, the best definition of direct marketing is “Any communication through any channel which reaches people directly, or where they respond directly.” If you think about it like that, it covers lots of activities. So besides the obvious direct mail, it includes: • Phone calls • Seminars – where you speak with people directly • Advertising – that asks people for a response • New media – Twitter, LinkedIn, SMS messaging, pay-per-click, banner advertising, webinars • Email The purpose of direct marketing This is simple. It is to build lasting rela- tionships with your clients to their greater benefit and your greater profit. It allows you to understand what your Carl Weston looks at how direct marketing can help win new clients – and build on existing relationships. What’s stopping you? clients want and to deliver it. And it can drive the Holy Grail of any business: increased client loyalty. Advertising that isn’t direct marketing We all see hundreds of advertising messages each day. In fact, research shows around 247 advertisisng messages are put in front us on any given day. These adverts fall into two categories. The first is direct which I’ve already mentioned. The second is ‘mass’ adver- tising. This is designed to keep your brand front of mind for when people need a particular product or service. But mass advertising, by and large, is used for products where very little emotion is involved. For instance, you are hardly likely to lie awake at night This article originally appeared in professional marketing magazine. For further details go to www.pmforumglobal.com
- 2. 24 pm | February 2015 marketing basics £20m + businesses on a raft of new legis- lation. But we faced two challenges. The first was a common problem with free semi- nars: the number of dropouts you get on the day. So we decided to charge people to attend. Nothing too expensive, just £99 per head to cement their commit- ment. Our second challenge was data. We only had around 850 names and email addresses for our target market. Only 26 of these people had attended our previous HR events and just 11 were clients, the rest were prospects that had probably never heard of us. We like to be ambitious so the venue we had booked held 120 people, meaning we had to sell at least 100 places. So the task was simple: we needed to sell to a minimum 12% of our audience. We used this tried and tested method One of the oldest tactics used in marketing communications is making people feel special by offering them something exclusive. In the 1980s American Express built its entire global credit card brand by making people feel exclusive. We decided past attendees were the easiest people to make feel special. Our strategy was to offer them a priority golden ticket carrying the message ‘This is your special past attendee ticket’. On top of making people feel special, using a ticket for the seminar made the email and event feel more tangible, it was some- thing each person could print and own. We emailed the past 26 attendees and 12 booked places on day one. We emailed the same group of people the next day and a further four booked. This left 84 places to fill from our prospect database. We used an almost identical commu- nication for the prospects, just dropping the words ‘past attendee’. We also added the sub header: ‘Hurry just 84 places left” to encourage a sense of urgency. We sent this second email three times the following week, each time changing the amount of places left as people booked and adding the names of big brands that had confirmed their atten- dance. For instance: Waitrose, Age UK, ATS Euromaster, Matalan, Sainsbury’s and Npower. By Friday of that week – and just 10 days into the campaign – we had sold 128 places, too many for the venue to hold. So, throwing caution to the wind, we added a second seminar in the afternoon. contained just four words, • Sentences were short, averaging just 11 words, • We started seven sentences with the word ‘and’. This last point caused much debate. People feel it wrong to start sentences with ‘and’. But grammar lessons aside, this is really important. It is classed as a carrier word in the copy writing world. Meaning it carries people from one sentence to another. It is very effective and if you look at the books or newspaper you read you’ll see it used over and over again. But you probably never noticed as it is designed to make reading easy. Does length matter? Almost as hotly contested as starting sentences with the word ‘and’ is how long your communications should be. For some reason there is a myth that copy must be as short as possible. Maybe because people think prospects or clients are too busy to read? I’ve never really understood this. For instance, if you had the chance to speak with a prospect would you try to talk as fast as possible? Or use as few words as possible? I suspect you wouldn’t. There is also a misconception that people read from the first words/para- graph to the last. Again this is wrong. Research shows that people’s eyes scan the page and can jump in to your copy at any given point. Good marketing writing is salesman- ship in print. It first gets the reader’s attention, then answers every possible objection they have. For this reason copy should be as long as necessary – and no longer. And the longest email we used in our campaign had 1466 words! Here’s what really matters Ultimately running marketing events is a tactic used to make sales. Maybe not instant ones, but sales nonetheless. After all, nothing really happens in business until sales are made. This event allowed us to start conver- sations with 32 prospects. And within six months we had won two brand new clients that have, so far, brought in over £100k in fees. We continued sending the same message to the same target group, minus all those who had already booked. We used several different email subject lines to try and get those people who’d ignored the previous messages to open the new ones. And we created an email to people who had opened our messages but not yet booked. This subject line and headline simply read “What’s stopping you?” Seven days after the second campaign we stopped communications. Because not only had we sold all 240 places, we had a waiting list of 31 people. As a final message – and to show people our success – we emailed everyone who hadn’t booked, announcing that the event was sold out and we had a waiting list. This actually got us an extra six registrations! Never overlook the importance of this As I’m sure you know, every part of a marketing campaign needs to work together to delivery success. So on top of the headlines, subject lines and design layouts we created, lots of work went into copy writing our messages. If you’ve ever tried writing communi- cations for solicitors and other profes- sionals, you know how hard copy writing can be. This is because intelligent profes- sional people can be very protective over their written words. But one of the rules of marketing communications is never write to please the writer: but always write to please the reader. And as were speaking directly with HR Directors – not other lawyers – we ditched any tired business jargon or legalese. In fact we stuck to these simple rules: • Everything was written in a conversa- tional and friendly first person style, • Over 80% of all the words we used Carl Weston is head of marketing at Flint Bishop Solicitors. Never write to please the writer: always write to please the reader.