I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve spoken to recently who don’t have a marketing plan.
It’s all up here, they tell me on the phone, and I picture them tapping their head.
I know what I want to do, they say. Why would I take the time to write it down?
Because writing it down makes it real. It forces you to focus. Writing it down exposes the flaws, shows the holes, and makes you look reality in the face.
But here’s the great thing: it also reveals opportunities you never thought existed, and things you hadn’t even thought of. It takes you in unexpected directions and gets you thinking about alternative strategies.
But where do you start? How do you get over BPS (blank-page syndrome, that is)?
With a template, of course. It’ll give the process structure, order and a purpose.
Microsoft has some great ready-made templates for Word (here) and PowerPoint (here). The PPT is in Office 2007 format, so if you have an earlier version, you’ll need the Microsoft Office compatibility pack (here).
Personally, I’d choose PowerPoint. It forces you to keep it brief, concise and bullet-pointed.
Which is what the best marketing plans are.
Words (don’t come easy)
All bulleted out? Plump up the cushions, grab a glass of port and a mince pie, and take 15 minutes out to watch lexicographer Erin McKean on TED.com.
Erin McKean redefines the dictionary is a witty look at words from somebody who spends her every day swimming in a sea of them.
One of the biggest drawbacks of using online dictionaries is, she says, that it eliminates serendipity.
“Serendipity is when you find things you weren’t looking for because finding what you were looking for is so damn difficult,” she says.
If, like me, you love words and can spend hours on end discovering new ones, this talk is for you. And even if you don’t, this talk is for you.
If nothing else, you’ll find out the meaning of double dactyls, as well as polysemy and synecdochically.
Enjoy.
(If you’re reading in email and can’t see the embedded video, click here instead.)
Free lunch? Walk this way…
If all that talk of words leaves you hungry for more, here’s a great way to access some of the leading reference works for free.
Yes, I said free. Not free* or free++ or even free^. Just free.
There is one catch, though.
You have to be in the UK and have a library card. If you are, and you have, you’re in luck, as your library website will provide a gateway.
Researching a company? Try Marketline. Need to find out more about the Big Cheese? Try Who’s Who. Plus the OED, Oxford Reference Online, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopaedia Britannica – and a whole lot more.
Even if you don’t read (you dont?) it’s worth joining your local library just for the freebies.
With all that reference material, there’s more than enough room for a little serendipity. Not to mention synedoche and polysemy.
Merry Christmas (and don’t leave crumbs on the cushion).
The all-singing, all-dancing, everything’s-connected National Health Service IT system is to be ‘dramatically scaled back’ (i.e. quietly scrapped).
Mind you, I could have told you that. For two reasons.
First, I got a bad feeling about three years ago, when I did some copywriting on the subject. The background reading (all 500 pages of PDFs) was grimly compelling.
A bit like watching a road accident that’s about to happen but not being able to do anything about it.
Front-line staff weren’t behind it. It was ambitious, fiendishly complicated and promised the earth.
Mind you, it also cost the earth. Back then, my bedtime reading suggested anything between £6bn (€6.6bn/$9.8bn) and £30bn (€33bn/$48.9bn).
To date, it’s come in at £12bn (€13.2bn/$19.6bn).
My second inkling came when my doctor tried to use the system. She didn’t want to do anything complicated – just to book an appointment.
But it was complicated, as I’ve written about previously (High tech or hype tech?). And in the end, I bypassed the system and used the telephone to make the hospital appointment myself.
Not good.
Easy peasy lemon ketchup
The trouble with big projects is that they’re big. No one person can get their head around all the individual pieces, so they project is compartmentalised. And that means it very quickly becomes fragmented, complicated and disconnected.
A couple of years ago, I boarded a train at London’s King’s Cross station in the rush hour. I took an outside seat in a group of four. In the two seats opposite were a hassled-looking middle manager and her shiny-suited sidekick.
As the train pulled out, she flipped open her folder and peered at a spreadsheet printout.
“You know that consultant, the one with the gold-rimmed glasses, in Peter’s section – you know, whatshisname?” she said hopefully.
“Oh Graham, you mean,” he said. “What about him?”
“Well,” she said, “he’s paid £900 a day and he’s been with us six months. Do we know exactly what he does?”
I did a quick mental calculation, and came up with a figure of close on £100,000 (€110,000/$163,000).
“Hmm, ” said the shiny suit. “Not really. I mean, not exactly. Erm, no.”
“We should find out,” she said, lazily snapping the folder shut, “one of these days.”
Or tomorrow, I thought. Or right now. Because that’s my tax money (yes, they were civil servants – couldn’t you tell?).
Easy does it
Difficult is easy: you do one thing, then another thing, and yet another. Each without reference to what came before. You add a bit here, and there. You spread responsibility among different groups, and patch holes as they appear.
Issues are dealt with as they come in, not according to how important they are. And before you know it, you don’t know where you are. And neither does anybody else. And the result is organised, project-managed chaos. At £900 a day.
So what’s the answer? If difficult is easy, what’s easy – difficult?
Actually no. It’s easy – when you know how.
Here are my top tips for keeping it simple, staying on top of things, and never losing sight of what’s important.
And for leaving the office early (that’s the clincher, isn’t it?):
Keep a log of your day: and see how you really use your time. Important things should take priority, with urgent ones trumping them only if they’re also important.
Review your tasks, and update and re-prioritise each one every day. Or better still, at the beginning and end of every day.
Take stock: check where you are with a project regularly, and make course adjustments if you’re off-track.
Be realistic & honest: if you know you can’t achieve it, don’t say you can. If it’s too big to tackle, break it down into smaller, manageable chunks.
Peel off. Adding another layer to an already-complicated process just makes it more complicated. Instead, strip away the unnecessary layers and get back to basics.
Communicate. Tell people what you’re doing. Ask them what they’re doing. And if you’re the only one doing anything (like me) sit down and have a serious talk with yourself now and then.
De-junk. Recently, I threw out old clothes, LPs, clever-but-useless kitchen gizmos and anything I hadn’t used in a year. It felt so good (better than skinny, to paraphrase Kate Moss). Take the same ruthless approach to your work and you’ll feel supermodel-light in less than no time. Need it? No? Junk it. Move on.
It’s been a while since I let pictures take the place of words, so here we go again with Copycam.
It’s my occasional series on copy that’s caught my eye and addled my brain, captured with my trusty Nokia (still in my Top 40, by the way).
First up is this, which I saw at Marks & Spencer:
Found the mistake? Or should I say mistakes?
First the glaring one: the apostrophe.
It’s such a tiny little thing, but it causes endless confusion. The general rule is that it’s before the s if the word is singular, but after the s if it’s plural. So that gives us:
The boy’s coat.
The boys’ coats.
So far so good. The trouble arises when that boy grows up to become a man and is looking for something to wear in the evening.
Irregular plurals are treated just like the singular. So you get:
The man’s coat.
The men’s coats.
So hats off (evening hats, of course) to M&S for effort. They got the general rule right, but in this specific instance, it’s wrong. And what’s more, wrong in 600 stores up and down the land. Oops.
Still, at least they tried. Unlike Sainsbury’s, who opted for the maxim if in doubt, leave it out. This time, we’re talking 500 stores throughout the UK.
It’s only an apostrophe, you might say. Does it really matter?
Well yes and no.
The meaning is clear, but the mistake still niggles. Small things suggest bigger things: if organisations don’t care about apostrophes, what else flies under their radar?
It may not even be a conscious thought, but it affects people’s perceptions. And somebody somewhere will notice (especially here in Cambridge, where every other person you bump into has a PhD.)
It’s an image thing. It’s a brand thing. It’s an attention-to-detail thing.
And it’s something that’s worth getting right.
Speaking of which, what else is wrong with the M&S example? Well first, eveningwear isn’t one word – it’s two. Whoever wrote it was thrown off-track by menswear, which (a) is one word and (b) doesn’t have an apostrophe.
And the last thing that’s wrong isn’t related to grammar, spelling or punctuation. It’s the small print, which reads:
* Applies to products with mens’ eveningwear stickers only. Excludes cufflinks. Savings are applied to total price when items are purchased individually. Items in this promotion cannot be refunded or exchanged individually. All items must be refunded or exchanged together in order for a refund or exchange to be processed although you may be entitled to a refund on individual items in accordance with your legal rights.
Come again? Here’s what I got from this mumbo jumbo:
You have to buy these items individually to qualify.
But if you do, you can’t refund/exchange them.
Even if you don’t qualify for a refund/exchange, you probably do under law.
Oh dear. I feel a little bit grubby after reading that. I think I’ll head for the gents (note: no apostrophe) to freshen up.
Don’t quote me on that
If apostrophes bamboozle us, then quotation marks (also known as inverted commas) are double trouble. And recently, they’ve been proliferating.
Again, the rule is simple. Quotation marks go around something that somebody actually said. It’s a quote (the clue’s in the name).
Here’s an example:
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
And another:
“I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Easy, isn’t it?
And yet quotation marks are everywhere these days, often with entirely unintended consequences.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this in the window of a shop in Cambridge:
Really? Who said that?
The answer, of course, is nobody. The quotation marks are being used for emphasis – which is not what they’re intended for. For emphasis, we have bold, underline, italic or a combination of all three. Plus CAPITALS, colours and fonts.
There’s no shortage of choice. Go ahead – knock yourself out. But save quotation marks for quotes.
It could have been worse.
Quotation marks are often used with sniper-like precision to home in on one particular word or phrase, which immediately makes you think of the opposite.
Now “open”!
So it’s not really open? It’s a joke? The door sticks? It’s not open when you think it is? It’s open but the entrance is elsewhere?
The possibilities are endless, but all undermine the intended meaning. And this insincere, does-it/doesn’t-it quote is everywhere nowadays. Somebody’s even set up a website called The Blog of Unnecessary Quotes.
Or to give it its proper title, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotes. Hilarious examples include:
We value “you” as our special patient
“Deal” of the week
“Wet” paint
“Special” Mongolian beef $5.95
Check it out, and you’ll never, ever use quotation marks again without asking yourself whether you really need them. I “promise”.
The wheel of fortune
To add insult to injury, the bicycle shop was closed.
It was 3pm on a Thursday afternoon, but the lights were off and the door locked. I checked the opening hours, and they were indeed supposed to be open. But instead, they were “open” (i.e. closed).
Outside, several prospective customers peered into the gloom, saw the sign, and looked puzzled.
There was a minor revolution in central London last week.
On 2 November, after a two-year, £5m ($8.35m/€5.6m) makeover, the all-new Oxford Circus opened.
(Note: If you’re thinking big top, clowns and bearded ladies, think again. Oxford Circus is just a junction, much like Piccadilly Circus. Not a performing elephant or dancing bear in sight.)
The new Oxford Circus layout is based on the famous Shibuya crossing in Tokyo. Not only can you cross horizontally (Regent Street) and vertically (Oxford Street), you can now cross diagonally too.
For 30 whole seconds, traffic is stopped in all directions. That’s when you make a dash for it, and hope you reach H&M before you’re taken out by a bendy bus.
With 40,000 people an hour using the crossing at peak time, something had to be done. But it’s a revolutionary concept for Londoners and tourists alike, and it takes some getting used to.
On the first day, most people crossed the old way – vertically and horizontally. It’ll take time for people to learn how it works, and to feel comfortable with the idea.
Why?
Because new is different. New is scary. New is…well, new.
Double-edged
If you’ve come up with an idea for a product or service that’s new, innovative and revolutionary, well done.
The good news is that you’ve got something nobody else has.
That’s also the bad news.
Nobody’s ever heard of it. Nobody knows how it works. Or even if it works at all.
Some people will dive right in: the early adopters. They’re the ones that simply must have it precisely because it’s new. They like to be on the cutting edge, even if they get cut.
But others – the vast majority, in fact – will wait. And if the early adopters aren’t enough to sustain you, you have to work hard to get the rest to buy in to your idea.
How? By explaining it. Then explaining it again. And again.
When the Barclaycard credit card was launched in the UK in the 1960s, the very idea of credit was alien to most people.
It’s hard to believe now, but back then, buying things ‘on tick’ or ‘on the never-never’ – on credit, that is – carried a social stigma that most people wanted to avoid.
So Barclays launched a major advertising campaign to explain to people that credit cards were the way of the future.
And people listened. All too well, as it turned out: the UK now has the highest rate of credit-card debit per household of any country in Europe.
Box clever
New ideas have a lot going for them. But as you prepare your launch, your opening or your marketing campaign, don’t ever underestimate the shock of the new.
Take cardboard furniture. Cardboard what?
Yes, you heard right – cardboard furniture. It’s cheap, easy to assemble, environmentally friendly and funky. And it’s here right now.
How about bacon-and-eggs ice-cream? Snail porridge? Cauliflower with chocolate?
Welcome to the wonderful world of Heston Blumenthal.
You see where I’m going with this.
When you’ve got a great idea, you quickly get used to the concept. Of course you do. You’ve been living with it 24 hours a day since it was an embryonic idea, zinging around in your hyperactive brain.
But they don’t know the first thing about it.
So make it easy for them:
Simplify. Explain your great new idea in small, easily understandable chunks. Don’t over-complicate.
Convince. Find the benefits of your great new idea (lower costs, cleaner environment, less hassle, easier to use, scalability) and hammer them home.
Summarise. Use bullet points, headings, boxes and anything else that reduces the information you need to convey to bite-sized chunks.
Repeat. New is daunting and unfamiliar. So make it undaunting and familiar. Repeat your key messages, say the same thing in several different ways, and hold the reader’s hand throughout the process.
Demonstrate.Draw a diagram – by hand, if you can. It’s more informal and user-friendly. Include photos, illustrations and anything else that demystifies and explains.
Think ahead. If you were a potential customer, what questions would you want answers to? What reasons can you come up with not to use your great new idea? Find them, answer them, neutralise them.
On your marks
Meanwhile, back on London’s bright and shiny new crossing, people were taking their first tentative steps. Boris Johnson, the unstoppable Mayor of London, was convinced it was a great idea:
“We are very confident that this will work well – once people have got the hang of it.”
If they get the hang of it.
A community police officer, who didn’t want to be named, was less sanguine:
“It’s based on the assumption that everyone’s going to act intelligently, which is quite an assumption to make.”
“I don’t care what it takes, as long as it gets me to the top” said the woman with the big hair and the satin blouse, jabbing at me with her glass of sauvignon blanc.
Networking was never so much fun.
I took a precautionary step back to give her room to express herself. And just in time, as her glass described a wide arc, narrowly missing my Sunday-best jacket.
She was in full flight. But she wasn’t talking about career advancement: she’d already reached the top in her profession. Instead, she’d set herself a new mountain to climb.
Search-engine rankings.
She wanted to be number one on Google, she said, with steely-eyed determination.
Who doesn’t?
I let her expatiate a little more.
“Keywords!” she barked, like Archimedes in his bathtub. “Keywords are the key.”
I surreptitiously drained my mineral water into a pot plant. Then, wiggling my empty glass, I quickly made good my escape.
The next day, I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head: ‘I don’t care what it takes’. For that pretty much sums up some people’s approach to SEO. That and keywords, of course.
Bung in those keywords, then add a few more. Then, one for the road. And maybe just another teensy little one for luck.
Then, get your web people to hack away at the back end so you’ve got every chance on your side. And hey presto! It works. People come to your site.
But quickly leave again.
Why?
Because spiders aren’t people. Search-engine spiders, that is. While we’re all sleeping soundly in our beds, those virtual arachnids are running all over our sites, seeing how they square up to the Google algorithm of interestingness.
Bingo, they say. Lots of keywords. Let’s move this up to number one.
Damn, they say (the readers). Lots of keywords. Let’s close this site and go somewhere that doesn’t insult our intelligence.
You see the problem. And it’s just the first of many when it comes to search-engine optimisation.
Think of a number – any number
Search-engine optimisation isn’t a science – it’s an art. And as such, it’s priceless.
A while back, a client of mine shopped around for some quotes on SEO. £300 a month, he was confidently told by the first company. That’ll see you right.
Not bad, he thought, when he worked out that he could lop it off his substantial advertising budget.
He continued his round of calls.
£3,000 a month, said the next. £950 said the one after that. Then £1,650.
And finally, £175.
All for the same service: putting him on page 1 of Google. He decided to take a break and consider his options.
So which one did he go for in the end? The most expensive? The cheapest? The one in the middle (the classic choice)?
None of them.
Instead, he climbed online, found a free course, and optimised his site on his own. Saving himself almost three grand. Or 175 quid. Whatever.
The point is, it wasn’t that difficult.
Years ago, I heard the boss of an airline answering an interviewer who’d asked him what he attributed his ‘Best airline to the Far East’ award to (the latest in a string of six straight awards). What was it that set him apart from the rest?
“It’s not one thing we get right,” he said slowly and deliberately.
“It’s all the little things.”
From little acorns
And that’s the story of SEO too. Cramming your copy full of keywords will keep our multi-footed insects happy, but put off your potential clients. So make it just part of your search-engine strategy – and use it sparingly.
Get all the other little things right, and you’ll be flying high in the rankings too.
And here’s the scoop: you can do a lot of those little things yourself.
There’s no definitive, must-follow, sure-fire, one-size-fits-all recipe for SEO success. But here are some of my top recommendations:
Content: add more copy regularly. Search engines love sites that change and develop. Sites that are static will never bring readers back, so make sure your site grows, expands and adds value (through blogs, forums, articles, news stories).
Inbound links. These show how popular you are out there in cyberspace. Ask people in your network to link to you. You’ll be surprised how many will say yes, especially if you do the same for them.
The nuts and bolts. Freaked out by the prospect of looking ‘under the hood’ of your site? Don’t be. Technical doesn’t have to mean scary. Get in touch with your inner geek – you might just enjoy it. And once you’ve learned about Alt tags, filenames, titles, descriptions and keywords, you’ll be able to fine-tune your site like a pro.
Divide and conquer: don’t try to cram everything into one page. Subdivide your site. Create pages that are optimised for a specific search term rather than trying to use one page to cover all products, services and client types.
Be patient: if you want to be top of the pops by next week, you might as well not start. If you’re thinking longer term (3-6 months) then you’re far less likely to give up. Going up the listings takes time.
Never stand still. Congratulations! You’ve got to page one of Google. Now get back to work. Yes, really. SEO is not a destination – it’s a journey. If you stop when you’ve reached your goal, and everybody else keeps moving on, you’ll be left behind before you know it.
Think like a reader. What do you like to find at the top of the Google list when you search for a specific term? And why should a potential reader be any different? Give your reader relevant copy, with enough – but not too many – keywords. Write for them first, and our furry six-legged friends second. People buy, spiders don’t. Never forget it.
Happy optimising.
(And next time you’re at a networking event, if you see a woman with big hair, a satin blouse and a love of keywords, make sure you stand next to a pot plant.)
Find out more:
Class act: don’t miss this free SEO course run by Mississippi-based J. Walker (aka ‘Cricket’). An absolute must if you’re serious about doing your own SEO. Sign up here.
Seek and you shall find: before you start SEO’ing, make sure you know what keywords people are searching on. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Good Keywords v3 will tell you everything you need to know.
