Company awareness is quite a straightforward concept and it is achieved through the medium of public relations and correctly executed, not only tells people about the company and its products or services but is designed to build confidence in that brand.

Generating awareness of a brand or company is no more than creating, or in many cases, altering the general perception of a business.

The very first stage of awareness generation is to discover and assess the current perceptions about the business. Once that exercise is carried out, the usual rules of PR apply in that a public relations program should communicate aspects of the business, such as the following:

• Company stability.
• The company’s success, both market success and technical success.
• The company’s professionalism etc.

Communication is the overreaching term which decides how perception can be created…… and remember this is not all about mere ‘awareness’, in the sense that people will just know the name. It is about awareness which makes people perceive that the they are dealing with a GOOD brand.

For instance, Rolls-Royce has a universal name awareness but embedded within that name is a whole raft of perception about quality and reliability. Name awareness on its own is useless from a marketing point of view.

You will often see the classic company mistake of increasing its name awareness negatively after some sort of crisis and instead of mending its tarnished reputation, it compounds its poor image by simply using the wrong words and creating a worse image than it began with.

Until 2015, people knew Thomas Cook as an upmarket package holiday provider. It was revealed this year that three years ago, two young children had died from carbon monoxide poisoning whilst on holiday with their parents in a Greek holiday home. Once the tragedy became publicly known, Thomas Cook made several mistakes.The first being to allow it to be known that they had claimed millions of euros in compensation from the holiday home owner and had not passed any of it on to the bereaved parents. The second mistake was when their German chief executive appeared on television to offer a sincere apology. The general public realised that he had been forced into this move because many prospective holidaymakers had cancelled the Thomas Cook holidays. That went very well and sounded very sincere until the cameras pulled-back revealing that his ‘from the heart’ apology was being read from two teleprompters. The following day,Thomas Cook shares tumbled and holidays are still being cancelled.

The above example clearly illustrates several mistakes as far as name awareness is concerned.

The first is that no matter how strong you think your brand is, a wrong word or a wrong action can ruin it in minutes.
The second mistake made by Thomas Cook was their assumption that they were dealing with a stupid public.

I have come across many companies who have attempted to spread the word about themselves through the medium of direct sales and because their recruitment procedures were not watertight, their reputations were ruined forever. As is often mentioned, a company’s employees, especially those who spend face time with the public or with commerce, ARE the company. That is something often forgotten.

When you are working on company awareness, you need to decide WHO you want to be aware about you and your product. In other words, your campaign has to reflect the demographic to which you wish to appeal

A video of a bungee-jumping clown will appeal to a very different demographic to that attracted to a sequence showing a man wearing a tweed jacket sitting on a golf buggy.

Correct targeting is of paramount importance and very often companies adopt the ‘blunderbuss’ method because they believe that everyone should know about them. That is not creating name awareness….it is a CEO’s vanity.

A proper name awareness campaign needs to appeal not only to the correct demographic but to all the stakeholders – all the people who are key to the company’s success:

They are the investors, the employees, the suppliers as well as the distributors and even the companies and potential customers who are geographically adjacent.

All too often, companies behave like the direct salesmen who is too embarrassed to sell products to his neighbours. They will make the mistake of spreading their name far and wide, trying to create a wonderful perception but they ignore the people closest to them whose perception of them is wholly negative.

….. and companies should always remember that no matter how good they think their name awareness and reputation is, most people will believe the last person they spoke to!

The post Biggest company awareness generation mistakes you can easily avoid appeared first on Carbon Marketing Group Pty Ltd. Australia.

In the last five years, marketing methods have changed more than in the previous fifty years. The reason for this quantum leap is the ubiquitous social media and its MILLIONS of subscribers.

Yes….selling continues to be a NUMBERS game!

A simple Tweet can produce an instant audience which is participating in your marketing campaign within minutes…. and you don’t even have to be a marketing executive to produce that reaction. In fact, what used to be called ‘marketing creativity’ now appears to be something far more random and unexpected.

As a big fan of sales and marketing and an exponent, it still surprises me that even in spite of modern technology, the rules of a successful campaign remain constant.

1. Involve your prospective client.
2. Use emotional buying triggers (EBTs).
3. Use humour if appropriate.
4. Distinguish your brand from the rest.
5. Know your client.
6. Be memorable and unconventional.
7. Expose yourself to the risk of making a sale.

In looking for the five marketing methods which produced the best Return on Investment in 2015, one is immediately drawn to the campaigns which in reality, didn’t cost anything.

For instance, the Old Spice campaign entitled ‘The man you could smell like’ achieved 50 million YouTube hits with 6 million hits on its first day. The ad had absolutely everything going for it. It was memorable, there was humour and most importantly, in common with all old school campaigns, it spread through the modern version of ”word-of-mouth”. In other words, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook!

What could possibly be more mundane than selling cheap razors? Michael Dubin also went the YouTube route with a video and a simple message, which was “ Our blades are F****** Great!” Humour, quirky, memorable with a direct appeal and a CTA (Call to Action….or what we in Direct Sales call “Closing the Sale”!). At the last count, his new clients were being counted in hundreds of thousands. He spent £4500 on a rather poorly executed video…but then again he knew his audience. (See No 5 above).

20 million video hits cannot be wrong and if you’re interested, the campaign is the Dollar Shave Club. The most striking aspect of this campaign was the fact that Dubin knew exactly which demographic he was aiming for and he went for it HARD. Incidentally, there is no sign of any razor in the advert!

Unsurprisingly, and knowing the YouTube audience, a USA campaign made memorable by its toilet humour had the strap line “Ship my Pants”. That brand of K-MART humour has so far generated about 25 million YouTube hits. In the States K-MART’s image is ‘respectable-domestic’ so with a line like “Ship my Pants”, they took a big risk (No 7 above) and the number of hits suggests that they were right to take that risk.

If you’ve ever come across an app called Crowd Mics, you already know a marketing campaign which only cost the price of app development followed by one or two quite innocent looking demonstrations, once again, giving a fantastic RoI but this time almost certainly through the strength of the product itself and the idea.

The Crowd Mic concept is as follows: it turns a smart phone into a wireless microphone, meaning that the user can tap into a sound system using Wi-Fi.

Thousands of people attend conferences, many of them can only be described as “techies”. Not just techies but techies who know what it’s like to try and ask a question at a conference and not be heard. This particular product needed one very short video plus a couple of TV audiences watching someone speak into his smart phone. Rest was word-of-mouth.

This product, more than any other in 2015 showed that in order to market the product successfully, we no longer have to try as hard as we used to.

2015 Sales and Marketing is (officially) FUN! But then again, to some of us….it ALWAYS has been….and the fifth most successful 2015 Marketing Campaign?

That’s probably being designed by a teenager in his bedroom right NOW!

The post Top 5 ROI Marketing Methods for 2015 appeared first on Carbon Marketing Group Pty Ltd. Australia.

Direct Sales was invented in the United States in the 1940s and 50s. It then spread gradually, with varying success, depending on the culture of the country into which it was implanted.

Some of us still remember the old vacuum cleaner salesman of the 1950s. The vacuum cleaners were then followed by all sorts of other products both tangible and intangible, culminating in the huge financial services sales forces of the 1980s. In those days, selling was what is known as a secondary career and the sales industry was populated by far too many people whose only ambition was a quick buck.

The old direct sales methods were very crude. Who can forget the ‘foot in the door’ method or even the more advanced ‘head in the door’ which meant that the salesman could keep talking when the door was slammed!

Let’s be honest, direct sales soon gained a pretty poor reputation. This was not the fault of the sales medium but more of the types of character who fell into selling.

There was a time when it was thought that direct selling had died out but surprisingly, and especially in this technological age when everyone appears to have access to all the world’s knowledge and information, the personal aspect of direct selling and perhaps the realisation that the strongest sale is a personal sale, direct sales, is now making a strong comeback.

There is a saying that ‘people buy people’ and that is indeed true but the type of person engaged in direct sales today is very different to his Neanderthal cousin of the 1950s.

The modern direct salesman is a highly trained and educated professional, who sells according to a client’s real and not imagined or invented needs.

The modern salesmen is a communicator, whose presentation can ‘weld’ the client to his product or service, making it the strongest form of selling which exists.

Buying something via a laptop or telephone does not create a client for life. Only direct sales can do that and it is achieved through the personal relationship and bond created between salesman and client.

Of course the modern direct salesmen combines the best of both worlds: the personal relationship as well as all the modern technology available to him.

We say that a good salesman ‘paints word pictures’ and that is probably why the old school salesman was a bit of a talker. The pictures he would paint were occasionally not only too big but contained too much colour!

Nowadays, you’d be hard pushed to distinguish between a lawyer, accountant and professional salesman. There is no sales ‘technique’ because most selling is now knowledge-based, rather than through the medium of a bad script!

As far as painting word pictures is concerned, today’s salesman has his laptop and other technology and his presentation is made in the full knowledge that the information he passes to the client has to be accurate because he also knows that whatever he says can be checked immediately.

One of the most important aspects of direct sales is that the whole culture and character of the company for which that salesman is working is projected through him at point of sale. His customer contact time is when the client makes a value-judgement about the company and the product he represents.

That is why a properly trained and prepared salesman will generate the most powerful business, because his client visualises the salesman’s entire company through him……and that is why modern direct sales is by far the most powerful and more importantly, permanent method of distributing your product.

The post How effective is Direct Sales? appeared first on Carbon Marketing Group Pty Ltd. Australia.