OK, yes you’ve guessed it, there’s going to be 12 of these!

There’s some exciting things happening at First Impression and with some of our customers. Join in our 12 days of Christmas puzzle and find out what’s happening on the 23rd December!

In the meantime, enjoy our top 12 tips. Click here to download the 3rd>

Indifference or lack of interest is said to be one of the main reasons a customer will go somewhere else, higher than poor service or cost! And yet we still ignore them.

We all know that it is 8 times more expensive to find a new customer. It is said that only 2% of new sales comes from the first contact with a client and a staggering 80% of new sales comes from the 5th to 12th contact! That proves how much effort is required to win someone round. So let’s not forget our existing clients.

It doesn’t take alot of effort to keep in touch. Here are our top tips to keep your clients feeling loved…

1. Service excellence 100% of the time.

   Sounds a bit obvious doesn’t it. Companies often really pull the stops out with a new client and go that extra mile to impress, but do you keep that level of service up? When that client reorders or wants more from your business, do they honestly get that same level of service that impressed them the first time around? The problem with bending over backwards in the first instance is, you are setting a precedent and you are going to have to maintain that level going forward with that client. If you have reduced lead times or squeezed a customer in last minute to hit their deadlines, or whatever it is that has impressed your client the first time around, make sure they understand your standard terms of operation and that this is unprecedented.

   If you are aiming for service excellence 100% of the time, make sure this applies to your existing clients as well as new ones. They can often fall through the net.

2. Stay interested in their business.

   Even if you haven’t got any work with a client at the moment, stay interested in their business. Set up google alerts or follow them on twitter so that you know what is happening in their business. Keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to pass on to them, tenders, grants, referrals, other suppliers that might be useful, anything that shows you are still thinking about them, and care about their business.

3. A phone call still works.

   If you haven’t heard from a client for a while, or even if they have been ordering from your business but haven’t been dealing with you, pick up the phone. You don’t have to have a reason, just a friendly, ‘Hi, haven’t spoken for a while, and wondered how things are going with you and your business.’ It’s not a sales call (although never be surprised when a customer asks you for something when you’ve made one of these calls). Your customers will be delighted to get such a call. It makes them feel wanted and that you do care.

4. Keep in touch with a newsletter.

   It’s a well known fact that companies who keep in touch with their clients with a regular newsletter retain their customers better than those who don’t. Make sure your newsletters are full of interesting topics, relevant and useful so that customers want to receive it. Never underestimate the power of your newsletter to spread brand awareness and keep in your customer’s mind. If you are not communicating with your clients, be sure your competitors will!

5. Make time for your clients.

   Make time to meet your clients on a regular basis. Listen to what they have got to say and understand what is happening in their business. Don’t always be too quick to suggest your products and services. Clients will trust you a lot more if you are not always trying to sell them something.

6. If it goes wrong, resolve it fast.

   Things will sometimes go wrong, this is life after all. But when it does, be quick to accept blame and a resolve for your client. Clients will rarely move away because of a mistake if it is dealt with efficiently and to their satisfaction. It’s a good test of any company’s customer service of how they deal with complaints, so make sure you have good systems in place to resolve issues quickly.

7. Deliver on time, on budget, every time.

   Doing what you say often doesn’t get you any rewards but if you don’t hit a deadline, you’ll know about it. I’m often amazed at how many companies fail to deliver what they say they are going to do. So there is definitely an opportunity for those of us who do deliver to maximise our opportunities!

8. Use your marketing tool kit to best advantage.

   Think how best to communicate with your clients. In truth a mix of marketing mediums is going to work best. As a marketing company ourselves we use most methods, we blog, we twitter, we use email marketing, we use our website, we network….and we still use those more traditional methods of direct mail and telephone. All work. But as long as you are staying in touch, keeping in front of your customers, they’ll still think of you when the next piece of work comes along.

If you need help keeping in touch with your clients First Impression can help. Give us a call on 01457 857111 to have a chat about your business.

The press will have us believe it’s still doom and gloom out there and I do believe there is another tough year ahead. However signs are that people are fed up of waiting for things to happen and are getting on with it. It’s what we are good at…

See how marketing trends for 2011 might be able to help your business…

Always in touch

With the explosion of mobile communications we are always in touch. iPhones and Blackberry’s mean that we are online, on email, on Facebook, on Twitter etc constantly. And it’s not just the younger generation. Consider your customers and how you can communicate with them on their mobile devices. Does your website view correctly on an iPhone or Blackberry? Or do you have a product or service that would benefit from an App? If you haven’t considered these options you might need to think about them in 2011.

Over half of mobile phone users (52%) are using their mobile devices to update Facebook and 24% use it to update Twitter.
Facebook traffic surpassed Google’s in 2010!
Skype said it had 25 million users.

Are you social?

The figures continue to grow. 2010 was definitely the year of social media and 2011 will be no different. Amazingly there is still a lot of uncertainty about how to channel social media in your business. And there’ll be a lot of wasted time and possibly money in 2011 trying to find out what works. My advice is to treat social media as any other marketing tool. Does it help you to communicate with your clients? Are your clients using social media and which ones? Once you start, make sure you have a strategy and understand what you want to achieve, don’t just fall into the trap of Tweeting… “having a busy day, going to a meeting now” just to have something to say. Make it useful, interesting and share information, that’s what will get you noticed. Do not underestimate the amount of time you can spend on social media. It can be addictive and eats up a lot of time if you are not careful. Like email you should schedule pockets of time set aside to deal with it. If you find you are reacting to Tweets every time they pop in you will find your day will soon disappear! So do your research in 2011, find out if it’s right for your business and control it and be targeted like any other marketing activity.

We want content

Good, relevant content is still highly regarded by Google. But remember your audience too. Those businesses with websites that make it difficult for us to navigate and find the information we are looking for are doomed in 2011. We want content, but we want it now, faster and with less clicks. We want answers to our questions very quickly. We don’t want to have to wade through reams of text to find it either otherwise we will be off to the next website. Take a good hard look at your website content. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What do they want to know and do you make it easy for them? Or do you hide those benefits behind all that waffle about how good you are and how long your business has been running. Get it sorted, you see a dramatic increase in enquiries or potential sales from your website.

Email marketing end of an era

Email marketing has had a lot of bad press in 2010. Everyone seems to be doing it don’t they? And aren’t we all getting fed up of those newsletters that we get all the time? No, everyone isn’t doing it, and many of those who are doing it, are doing it really rather badly, which gives everyone else a bad name. A very targeted, relevant newsletter is still one of the most cost effective, efficient and timely ways of communicating with your audience. It’s not a hard sell, in fact it’s not a sell at all, it’s a drip, drip, drip reminder that you are there. An opportunity to get your brand out in front of your audience, to remind them about your products and services and how you can help their business. Done badly, it is junk mail, seen as trying to catch you out or get you to sign up to something you don’t want. Email marketing should be part of your marketing mix but you need to do it well.

Protect your brand at all costs

Now there are so many different forms of communicating, on and off line, we have to be even more careful about protecting our brand. What I mean here by brand is not just your logo. Your brand is everything to do with your business. How your business is viewed, what you say, your ethos and your actions. It becomes much harder to control your brand on Facebook and Twitter, the rules are suddenly very different. We have less control and we sometimes forget who we are and that we are talking socially. You are still fronting your business and there are many examples of the ‘wrong thing’ said by business owners or employees that can damage a reputation very quickly. Equally, the way your branding is viewed on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Does it reflect the colours, the language, the fonts etc from your website? You can personalise all of these pages to a certain degree and if you are going to use social media, do it properly and make it look professional. Brand your email marketing newsletters, in fact every opportunity you get to communicate with your customers or potential customers is an opportunity to showcase your brand – who you are and what you are all about – don’t waste that opportunity but equally, don’t damage it either.

If you need help about any of these marketing trends for 2011 give First Impression a call on 01457 857111 or email.

What used to work, often doesn’t work any more, or you have to combine a mix of different communication methods – direct mail, email marketing, social media and telephone marketing – which often makes the cost of sale more expensive. It means you have to think harder about who your target market is and what is the best way to reach them. And standing out from the crowd is really important, making sure you don’t just look and say what everyone else is doing. Find out what your differentiator is – what makes you different – and shout about it!

Take a look at our website www.firstimpression.co.uk to see how we help our customers stand out from the crowd and win more business.

We live in a world where technology is advancing day by day, and with that our marketing activity is following the online trend. Social media, email marketing and online activity is becoming more and more dominant across all market sectors, but surprisingly, traditional direct mail campaigns are making a strong comeback.

In a recent survey carried out by Marketing Magazine, they found that direct mail activity grew by 1.5% in the last year, but instead of blanket mailing to their entire database, companies are being much more strategic about who they send their campaigns to.

Businesses are combining their direct mail campaigns with email marketing and social media to boost their results, for example Cadbury sent a direct mail campaign to 300 fans that had interacted most with Cadbury online. They sent a direct mail interactive challenge that required the fans to blog about their activities and post photographs on Facebook. The campaign resulted in the brand making 31,500 new friends on Facebook and increased their site traffic by 442%.

What this shows is that businesses shouldn’t put all of their eggs in to one ‘new media’ basket, instead it is important to mix traditional marketing methods such as direct mail with more modern methods to reach their target market in a variety of ways.

Here at First Impression we have the knowledge and experience to provide your business with a full service marketing solution. Our in house team of creatives; including graphic designers, web developers, copywriters and marketing professionals can help you to pull all of your marketing methods together creating highly effective and measurable campaigns.

By working with First Impression you will save time and money as you only have to deal with one company, meaning you only have to manage one relationship.

If you would like to discuss your marketing ideas with First Impression no matter how large or small, call us today on 01457 857111

Here’s some top tips to help you:

1. Choose wisely, don’t spread yourself too thin
2. Build a complete profile before you start
3. Be consistent across all your networks
4. Stay active, there’s no point setting up an account and never using it
5. Submit useful content

Download the full Top Tips for getting the most from social networking sites

I think, like anything new, you need to find about it, but just like every marketing tool you apply the same rules, do your customers use social media, can you reach them using social media, and are the customers using social media interested in your products and services? Jumping right in without thought can cause alot of wasted effort and in some cases damage. I suggest you find out more about it. Do your research first and if it is appropriate for your business, go for it.

Here’s a good starting point if you simply have no idea what it’s all about  http://www.firstimpression.co.uk/resources/social-networking-unravelled.php

If you want to find out how to make the most of your marketing budget was the focus of our presentation and the slides are now available for download on the following link  http://www.firstimpression.co.uk/downloads/marketing-for-business.ppt

You can view the full presentation here