Size matters

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I had an interesting meeting with a new client today. We often try and convince clients to try different approaches to engage their prospects and customers more. This client beat me to it. From the off they said that they wanted to tell a story to enthral the reader.

There was a time when whitepapers were long, technical pieces, often with a large element of blue-sky thinking; and case studies were quite in-depth reviews of a project. Driven by the perception of a time-poor audience, bombarded by thousands of marketing messages, we’ve seen pieces get shorter and shorter. But there are dangers in making everything shorter. Not only is there the risk of ‘dumbing down’ the message, but it can also take the human interest out of the story. Edited down to a curt list of bullet points, the customer and their story become implausible and impossible to empathise with. Simplified to appeal to a broader audience, the whitepaper can become nothing more than a glorified brochure—that’s fine, but not when you are trying to demonstrate competence and thought-leadership to technical decision makers.

At HN we aren’t bound by industry-standard terms. We look at each project and agree with the client what length, tone and level of technical detail is most appropriate to the audience and therefore be best at achieving their objectives. Why not have a look at our article The resurgence of storytelling, or give us a call and put us to the test.

Personalisation: does it still work?

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How many of you still receive emails with your first name in the subject line? Does it make you feel like a valued customer? Or is it just an old trick that’s passed its best?

Personally, if I don’t recognise the sender, I automatically flag these emails as spam. And to be honest, even when I do, the fact that they have my name on file just doesn’t make a difference to me.

In fairness, this used to work. Maybe only a few years ago the use of personalisation in the subject line still increased open rates. But the wow-factor has definitely subsided. These days anyone using a mail merge function can send an email with my name on it. It’s just too easy.

If you really want to build a relationship and engage with your audience, tuning your content for the recipient will see a far greater return on your investment.

I’m not suggesting that you need to stop using your customers’ names altogether. I still really enjoy those emails saying “Happy Birthday, Caroline!”; or the postcard of a beach, with my name written in the sand, to remind me about the holiday insurance I bought this time last year. But the message is still tailored to me – making it personal.

We’’e always encouraging our clients to be sensitive to their recipient’s interests – and that applies to any form of communication. What will they want to hear about? Whether you’re updating them on their account with you, letting them know about an event local to them, or tailoring your content based on the interests they’ve exhibited in previous interactions, make it relevant. Genuinely put yourself in your recipients’ shoes. If you can’t think of at least one very good
scenario in which this content is the answer to a customer’s prayer, don’t send it.

At the end of the day, the best personalisation is relevancy; without it you’re really just a polite spammer.

3 in 1: social networking

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The emergence of the personal brand | Is corporate social networking the equivalent of embarrassing dad dancing?| What’s the future of online privacy?

After a long period of social networking news being dominated by stellar valuations of Facebook, recent days have seen many reports about a flood of funding going to their competitors. So what’s turned the tide? Bebo is shutting down and Twitter’s 3000%+ growth has slowed to double digits. The answer is not external, it’s Facebook’s own hubris and failure to appreciate their members’ privacy concerns.

No doubt Facebook’s management are very well aware of the cautionary tale presented by MySpace. It was the dominant force in social networking and their position seemed unassailable too. Back in 2005 they were bought by Rupert Murdoch for $327m. Last summer it was forced to lay off a third of its staff after failing to meet the audience figures in an advertising deal with Google.

Privacy issues aren’t new to Facebook, they’ve had several past indiscretions. Over the years, Facebook has opened up access to more and more of its users’ information (see this fascinating infographic). The problem is that social networking isn’t just about your friends anymore. We’ve all seen the stories of people being caught out when they’ve claimed to be ill, or saying something derogatory about their company. And who would want their gran to see those photos from that big night out?

Social networking has created the personal brand. A great example of the dangers is the parliamentary candidate the Labour party ditched during the election due to some crude tweets sent as a student. I’m glad it didn’t exist when I was a student! But there are good examples too. Columnists such as David Mitchell (@RealDMitchell) and Victoria Coren (@VictoriaCoren) have become publicists, promoting their own work and by extension the publications in which they appear – the Guardian and Observer newspapers in this case. And it’s not just those in the media, tweeters and bloggers like Allen Kelly (@AllenKelly) of VeriSign mixes news on the security products offered by the company that he works for and personal opinions and updates.

And that’s good! Too many companies have felt obliged to have a social networking presence, but instead of learning the new media just mechanically churn out dull updates linking to their staid press releases. If you want to make a success of social networking, you have to have a genuine commitment to engaging with your audience. This has to have executive support as social networking needs to be timely, it can’t be subject to a laborious approval process. You can just tweet/facebook links to your website, but that’s no more than an RSS feed. Give your presence a personality, have an opinion, and you’ll see much better results.

We get mail

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The other day an email landed in one of our inboxes and we passed it around in wonder; we couldn’t believe how long-winded and awkward it was. Here’s the opening:

In the midst of this dynamic, hyper-competitive global economy, understanding and addressing the ever-evolving needs and requirements of every customer is increasingly more complex yet essential. In response, a complete shift is happening in the way marketers are pursuing buyers and consumers, as well as addressing the needs of the sales channels. These realities provide immense challenges and opportunities for marketers.

Did you make it all the way to the end? If you were the recipient, would you continue reading?

To be fair, it wasn’t long ago that the trend was predominantly for a style of copy only slightly toned down from this example. We weren’t allowed to address ‘the business audience’ as if they were normal people who might appreciate plain speaking. There was a whole other language to use, ‘business language’; and it was unengaging, passive and wordy. Why say ‘in’ when you can say ‘in the midst of’? Why be satisfied with addressing customer needs if you can address both their needs and their requirements? Oh wait, not just address, but understand also. And we’re still in the first sentence!

The tendency to produce over-complex and verbose copy came, we think, from the belief that wordiness conveys seriousness and authority; and that adding adjectives makes copy more powerful. Neither of these beliefs has ever been true.

But things have changed. While each brand is doing it slightly differently, our clients are asking us for a much more relaxed style. They want copy that talks directly to their audience without fuss or embellishment. Have we writers finally managed to convince everyone that its possible to be both authoritative and concise? And that all those adjectives dilute the message?

Possibly; but I think the change really stems from accepting that people don’t expect, or want, to be addressed in a radically different way when they walk into work. It may never be appropriate to address the CIO or IT manager of a target company as if they’re your mate; but (in the UK and US at least) it’s become acceptable to address them as real human beings. That’s a trend we can only encourage.

Finding the ideal match

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Finding the right agency is a lot like online dating. First off, expressing who you are and what you are looking for in a couple of hundred words isn’t easy. 5’8” and slightly chubby is simple enough, but are you adventurous? I’m more adventurous than Auntie Margaret, but not nearly as daring as Wild Sarah, so what do I put? Likewise, do you want an agency that pushes your creative or technological boundaries? And just like dating you might have to make compromises; the agency that produces the best visuals might not be very good at the logistics – of course two agencies are more likely to agree to a three-way relationship. But no matter how good a relationship looks on paper, how many boxes a potential partner ticks, there’s always that elusive “chemistry”. You can work at building rapport, but it will never be as good as those rare occasions when you meet somebody who is on the same wavelength.

So how do you wade through all the profiles out there and find the right agency for you? It’s fairly traditional to get a handful of agencies to pitch for a specific project. But is that really the best way? That approach is akin to speed dating, gambling everything on just a few minutes. And preparing for a pitch is a challenging and expensive process – for both the client and the suitors. Which is why I was interested to read about how Santander is approaching finding a new agency:

http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/1008409/Santander-overhaul-UK-brand-positioning/

What do you think of this approach? Do you have any advice or horror stories about finding an agency that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

Or if you’d simply like to find out more about us, check out our profile.

A new game

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A friend was recounting tales from a recent team-building course—you know the kind of thing where there’s construction of some mode of transport, usually to cross water, and biscuits available with every round of coffee. One of the early exercises was to pass a ball around the team such that every hand touched it. That was the only rule. The team, as you might too, arranged themselves in a circle and around the ball went. I forget the time, but let’s say it took a minute to do a loop. “Do it faster and faster,” encouraged the facilitator. And so they did, and with practice achieved a much shorter time. At some point they were at the limit—and they knew it. This is when the facilitator told them to cut at least another 5 seconds. “Not possible,” they all said. “It is,” he said.

So used were they by now to their circle that it took a long time for them to accept that this configuration wasn’t a rule. By breaking the circle, forming a column of hands and literally dropping the ball through all the hands, the best result was achieved. But these fantastic results needed a new perspective before they could be envisaged.

Apart from giving you the ‘hack’ for your next team-building event, the purpose of sharing this thought for the day was to reinforce the sentiments of Seth Godin’s blog A car is not merely a faster horse; that the new tools available to us as marketers are not just digital versions of the old. EDM is not DM; a webinar is not a seminar. The new media opens up new opportunities for how we communicate and build relationships with our audience. We all need to recognise that the old rules don’t have to apply and, to get great results we need to get with the new game plan.

A little bit different

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We had a lot of late nights last week helping a client respond to a multi-million pound tender. Burning the midnight oil to get it done on time is pretty normal when putting together a bid, so that’s not what made this job different.

Tender responses are usually hefty, detailed, written in legalese and, well, a bit bland. There are good reasons for all of this but it does handicap the ‘selling’ purpose of the document; and what is a bid if not the ultimate opportunity to sell your product or service?

With this particular bid, our client had no choice over the format of their formal response; the tender was issued as a series of questions that had to be answered online and delivered as printouts in a certain way. But the rules did allow for respondents to attach supporting material.

So the client turned to us: could we help them create a good-quality standalone brochure that would really sell their proposed solution to an executive audience?

They recognised that, while their online responses would be pored over by those charged with assessing the proposal in detail, this was not the best way to reach or convince many of the relevant decision-makers. They wanted to explain the proposed solution in clear and compelling language to a non-technical, time-poor audience.

The result is an executive overview that illustrates the solution’s benefits over alternatives, answers likely questions and combats likely objections; without making the audience wade through extraneous detail or ‘hygiene’ factors.

We were really impressed with the way our client recognised, and grabbed, the opportunity to do something different. Bid responses are important and there’s a natural tendency to ‘play it safe’, but there’s still room to innovate. We expect that this approach will help them to stand out against their competitors and improve their chances of winning this prestigious and sizeable deal.

Is it a brave new world?

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When you are in our line of work, you tend to do a lot of reading—and from quite diverse sources sometimes. A piece from the newsletter of a specialist media mergers and acquisitions organisation caught my eye this week. And not because it told me anything new; but because it gave a snapshot of the industry that showed how times have changed… a bit like that glance in the mirror first thing in the morning.

The article was about how to value a digital agency, as opposed to a traditional marketing agency, and that just asking the question made no sense in today’s market. Back in the Noughties, digital was the ‘shiny new bolt on’ and big network agencies were scrambling to acquire the skills, probably feeling like they’d been caught on the hop. By the middle of the decade, the article reports, there were more than 200 digital agencies acquired per quarter. A staggering number really. Today, no one acquires digital for the sake of digital.

What’s important, as much for client satisfaction as company valuation, is the agency’s ability to communicate in a digital society using whatever media—email, online, social or good old print—will be most effective at getting the message across to key audiences. At HN digital has become such an instinctive part of our repertoire it’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t. Along the way we’ve learnt quite a lot: if you’re looking to improve your use of email, have a look at our new best-practice guide; or if you’ve got a digital project, give us a call.