Tony Attwood’s Blog

The phrase “viral marketing” - a bit like the phrase “word of mouth” is one of those that is floated around here and there.

The concept that these phrases encapsulate can seem rather like geese and golden eggs - the route to free marketing. But equally they are rather vague.

Unfortunately neither “viral marketing” nor “word of mouth” are ways of advertising for free, but they can be a very powerful approach to marketing which can be very cost effective. Below is a brief outline of the how these approaches can work. As always if you would like to know more, please do get in touch.

These approaches basically relate to having a promotion which customers and potential customers pass on to each other. At its simplest you send out an email, and the person to whom you send it is so impressed that he or she sends it on to others, who send it on to others who….

The variation used by many firms is to put an advert on the internet, and people then tell each other about the site, and so go and look.

Obviously the key here is to have something that people want to look at or see. A very funny You Tube piece can draw in a lot of viewers, not just because they have been told about it by friends or colleagues, but also because others find it through searching for key words on Google.

But most of us don’t have the ability or finance to make a You Tube movie, so we come back to text - and here again it is possible to write pieces that others will refer on. But you do have to get the text right.

Here’s one example. We send out an advert for the Royal Academy to 2068 people, and 422 clicked on the link we gave, which went to their web site.

Now a 20% click through rate is incredibly high - (the average for the sort of list that we were using is about 6.5%) and when we checked what had happed it was clear that many of those clicking through were not the people we had mailed. They had in fact sent the advert on to colleagues.

Articles that appear on blogs and web sites can be forwarded too. The experimental blog set up by Hamilton House two years ago now regularly has its articles cited by other blogs - sometimes with phraseology such as “there’s an excellent piece on this at….” sometimes with phrases such as “this guy might be a bit of a pain when he bangs on and on about finance in football, but he really does know his onions….” Either way the article gets read, and the word gets out. Through our tracking program we pick up about three or four such referrals which give the full web address of the original article, each day.

Another approach is to use other people’s blogs and news services. Here one reads what others are saying (for example where they are discussing a subject close to your product or service) and then one jumps in with one’s own comment, which relates back to your product. Obviously you need to be sophisticated in the way you do this, but as a method of advertising it is ten times more cost effective than Google Ads.

As I mentioned, I am happy to talk about this further - but if you would like to read a bit more background on this final point, there’s an article on http://www.mailing.org.uk/Adwords.html

If you would like to read a sample blog which is not at all about direct marketing or other subjects Hamilton House is associated with, try www.blog.emiratesstadium.info. It is about football, but don’t be put off even if you are not interested in football. Just flip through some of the articles, and note that this gets approaching 200,000 individual readers a month (a figure achieved with an advertising budget of £200). Such success can be found with all sorts of topics.

If you would like to know more please call me on 01536 399 013

Tony Attwood

These three factors are very simple to explain - in fact so simple I can put them down as single words…

a) Text
b) Pictures
c) Content

Indeed it all looks so simple put like that, but in fact these simple facts can and do trip people up very regularly.

Text represents not only the flow of the text, plus the exciting and stimulating use of the language, but also the avoidance of words and phrases that will send the email into filter systems or worse, reduce the chance of your next round of emails actually arriving.

Clearly the words that can’t be used vary from context to context. In its simplest form the word “Free” can cause difficulties, so can mentioning the name of the Schools Secretary (Ed Balls). Discussions on the anniversary of the abolition of slavery often came unstuck with any reference to selling children into “slavery and bondage”.

Moving into other areas we have the case of the dance club that changed its name from Ceroc Central to Ceroc Passion (they speak of themselves as being passionate about dance, just as Odeon cinemas are passionate about film) – which has led to a number of club members not receiving emails announcing dances and venue changes.

Curiously the word “sex” doesn’t seem to set off too many alarms – even in schools – but a lot a pharmaceuticals (and even the word “pharmaceutical” itself) can cause problems. I have no idea if anyone does sell Viagra legitimately on the internet, but if they do, I can’t think how they get the advertising through.

Moving on, pictures are also a real problem. People stopped putting pictures into emails (known generally as embedding) when it became clear that interception software was stopping a lot of emails with pictures being delivered. There is also the problem of speed of transmission - a small picture (such as a logo) might increase the size of an email from 50kb to 1500kb - nothing to notice.

But that does mean you are using up 50 times the amount of space in sending the emails - and if you are sending out a lot that can well mean you will be running a lot more slowly - and will get a lot more rejections.

The alternative approach to pictures embedded in text is the approach which has the picture resident on a hard drive. The client needs to click on a bar to activate the picture.

The problem here is that (depending on the setting of the software) all the reader will see is a blank screen (possibly with a little red x in one corner). Not a very good way to start the advert, when the customer typically will only give on one second before deleting.

The simple answer is to avoid pictures, and instead put all your effort into writing brilliant text, which forces the reader to click on the link to the web page.

And that fact tells you why most firms go for pictures - they don’t have the skill to write exciting text.

Which brings me on to content.

How you write an email is as important as how you write direct mail. Sadly, many firms just sit down and write a sales piece without any proper thought. And so they get poor results.

Just read the first three lines of any email advert that arrives in your in box, and I suspect you will see exactly what I mean.

Some firms specialise in getting emails out to the recipient - and of course that is important. But it is equally important to ensure that the email is received, and read.

If you would like to talk more about sending out emails and getting sales from them, give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

To me, successful direct marketing is always about combining two areas of work.

On the one had there is the exciting creative stuff (the clever turn of phrase, the twist that takes the reader to one place when he/she thought you were going somewhere else, and so on…)

On the other hand there is the technical stuff that relates to the way the system works and the way the psychology of perception means that our brains process the piece.

Let me take just one example of this latter point

When I write a sales letter I occasionally use bold to highlight the first few words of a paragraph - but I never use bold for individual words or phrases within a paragraph.

The reason why the bold words and phrases within a letter or email don’t work - and in fact are counter productive is complex but has to do with the way the brain skims through text looking from the left while subliminally taking in what is on the right. Putting bold in the middle of the text ruins this flow, and reduces readership.

These technical bits of information are boring and dull, but they make a huge difference, and I have found over the years that time and again really exciting sales pieces have been destroyed in this way.

Why the positioning of bold is so important is not intuitive - which is why so many people do get it wrong. Indeed I have some clients who take my copy and change it to incorporate bold within the text, even though I plead with them not to, on the basis that they have seen other firms do it so it must be right.

So, my gentle word of warning is:

a) If you want to make a sale you have to write stunning, exciting and exhilarating copy, which grabs the reader by the throat, and

b) You have to abide by the findings of studies in the psychology of perception.

If you would like me to look at any email or direct mail that you have sent out or are thinking of sending out, please do send it through to Tony@hamilton-house.com and I’ll give you a call back to tell you what I think. No obligation, no charge.

Tony Attwood
01536 399 000

The Advertising Association (AA) has suggested that more non-broadcast adverts should meet the Advertising Standards Authority requirements.

According to reports “The recommendations, if accepted, will bring companies’ marketing communications on their own websites, and other non-paid for space online, such as brand activity on social networking sites, within scope of the CAP Code.”

All other marketing communications activity in paid-for space online, such as search marketing and display advertising, is already within the ASA’s remit and subject to the CAP Code.

The idea is to bring this into play before the end of the year, and then effectively stop government control of advertising to children by claiming it is all “self-regulated”.
Rae Burdon, chief operating officer at the AA, says: “Contrary to general understanding, much advertising online is already in remit and there’s a very high level of compliance with the existing rules. There are some complex issues in the remaining space which require careful analysis.”

“The industry has delivered to CAP a clear mandate that first and foremost will protect consumers and children, that will also – crucially – protect editorial content, and that will, if accepted, maintain CAP/ASA’s reputation as a world-class operation. The whole industry has pulled together to make this happen. What’s important now is effective implementation and raising consumer and stakeholder awareness.”

Tony Attwood
01536 399 000
Sales@hamilton-house.com