News

Brand attributes help sales

October 20^th, 2020 in News

What Are Brand Attributes? Brand attributes are the characteristics people associate with your brand. In a business to business environment, positive brand attributes could be “expert”, “good value” or “understands our industry”. Negative brand attributes could be “overpriced”, “incompetent” or “slow”. Do brand attributes help sales? Brand attributes have a strong effect on your commercial performance and competitiveness. Let’s demonstrate that with a very…

Using a psychographic profile in marketing

September 7^th, 2020 in News

A psychographic profile is a definition of a person (a purchaser in our case) based on psychological characteristics such as values, fears, goals, interests or opinions. It defines people by their personality traits as opposed to demographic facts like age, gender, income or location. It’s also different to the occupational characteristics we often use as marketers: job title, seniority, et cetera. Take a look at this chart that compares psychographic, demographic and occupational attributes:…

Buyer personas – understanding purchasing behaviours

August 24^th, 2020 in News

You can make your marcoms more effective by using buyer personas to describe the behaviour of people as they go through their purchasing process. People act differently as they move from being vaguely interested in a product to actively considering buying it. Contents Our cast of four buyer personas Browser Bill Interested Iris Purchasing Paula Loyal Luke Buyer personas aren’t linear Buyer personas aren’t singular These are not normal buyer personas Buyer personas and psychographic profiles…

The AIDA Model – is the purchase process linear?

August 20^th, 2020 in News

What is the AIDA model? The AIDA model describes a linear purchasing process. The four stages it proposes are Awareness (originally Attention), Interest, Desire and finally Action. The model originated in the American advertising industry in the early 20th century so it’s got a lot of history behind it. Contents Awareness Interest Desire Action What’s wrong with the AIDA model? Where does AIDA fit in your marketing strategy? How to develop the AIDA Model. Awareness At this stage in the AIDA…

Identifying “purchasing intent” or “ high intent”

July 27^th, 2020 in News

It’s one of the staples of digital marketing that we need to establish the purchasing intent of visitors to our websites. We need to understand what they’re trying to do. The reasoning is simple. If we understand what they’re trying to do we can help them do it. If we can separate a student doing academic research from an operator looking for technical support from a purchaser looking to buy, we can make our website more productive for us and the visitor. Does a pricing page show…

You didn’t know Windows Calculator did this

July 24^th, 2020 in News

We all know Windows Calculator can add, subtract, multiply and divide. A few of us probably know it works as a scientific calculator too (although I personally have no idea what a cosine is nor how I would use one). Programmers might even know about the functions that manipulate decimal, hexadecimal and binary numbers in a funky way. But it also has a bunch of features that are genuinely useful to normal businessfolk like you and I. And I bet you didn’t knew they were there. Here’s what it…

Proximity to Profit – prioritise tasks logically

July 15^th, 2020 in News

The Proximity to Profit model provides businesses with an objective way of prioritising competing tasks. No organisation ever has enough time to do everything it wants to do. When deciding which task takes priority, it too often falls to “he who shouts loudest” or “whatever the boss wants, goes”. Contents The 4 Hows Measuring Proximity to Profit Proximity to Profit In Action With Proximity to Profit, you can prioritise tasks according to which are going to help the business most. But,…

When a “strategic opportunity” is not

July 10^th, 2020 in News

OK, so I don’t particularly want to pick on marketing in property, but the comments I’ve had from people when I mentioned my last post made me remember this image of a strategic opportunity that cropped up near me. I took this photo in August 2017. The wording struck me as rather over-blown even then. Isn’t it time for our language to get a bit more grounded? But maybe we’re more influenced by fancy words than I think. By the way, I don’t have anything against…

The Kano Model – sell the sizzle, scientifically

July 7^th, 2020 in News

The Kano Model is a scientific way to expand on an expression we all know: “sell the sizzle”. It means that we should try to sell the exciting things about our product/service rather than the mundane features that can be found elsewhere. It’s a way to differentiate ourselves from the competition and, thanks to research by Professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s, there’s scientific backing to show that it works. Contents Threshold Attributes Performance Attributes Excitement Attributes Using…

Donated by cows…

July 2^nd, 2020 in News

Does this sum up why marketing has such a poor reputation? How can you give housing estates names like these? They flattened the oaks, parks and gardens to build houses. What next? Will we describe beef as “donated by cows”? Will we call leg amputations the cure for athlete’s foot? Marketing has to be about more than fancy words that gloss over the ugly truth.