Growing your greens

Strategies to help your green marketing flourish:

When it comes to corporate responsibility and green marketing, an increasing number of companies are recognising the importance of including environmental sustainability amongst their goals….TLC Business are one of them.

Green marketing definitions can be a little confusing, since green marketing can refer to anything from promoting the environmental benefits of a product, advertising a company’s sustainability initiatives, to simply channelling your marketing message in a more eco-friendly method.

When many people think of SMEs going green, methods such as recycling paper and conducting more meetings over the phone spring to mind. However ‘green’ strategies can incorporate even more day-to-day business activities, from using social media more effectively, to the tools you use to market your product or service.
Green marketing can take many forms, below are some of the systems and tools you can adopt in your business:

  • Green digital media
    Green marketing has gone digital with the help of social media and technology. Utilising Facebook or Twitter instead of print advertisements and providing digital versions of press packs are all steps businesses can take to more effective green marketing. Below are examples of how global companies are using social media within their green marketing mix:General Electric has introduced the Ecomagination Challenge, which challenges people all over the world, from businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators to students, to generate ideas how to improve the planet’s energy future. This project is promoted through the company’s website, blog and Twitter.IBM has created a Smarter Planet blog and encourages visitors to participate in conversations about creating a more sustainable planet. IBM also uses Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to keep the conversations alive.
  • Re-design your materials with green in mind.
    One of the most effective ways to go green is to consider the potential environmental impact of your printed material at the design stage. That means taking into account factors like paper weight, item size, and mailing format at the beginning. This may seem extreme but a smaller, lighter piece will not only reduce the amount of paper you ultimately use, but also the emissions of the trucks delivering your pieces.Puma is a great example of a company planning ahead. The major sports brand is reducing its carbon footprint by redesigning the packaging for its shoes. Instead of packaging the shoes in a traditional cardboard box, which then necessitates a plastic carrier bag, Puma has designed a new product, dubbed “The Clever Little Bag”. Puma’s new packaging is made of a reusable shoe bag with a built in handle, thus eliminating the need for both a cardboard box and a carrier bag at the end of a sale. Puma’s green effort alone is projected to reduce the company’s paper consumption by over 65 percent, as well as cutting down on annual carbon emissions by 10,000 tons.
  •  Clean up your database:
    An up-to-date database can also play a key part in your green marketing strategies. Whether you are sending a direct mail campaign using your new eco friendly marketing collateral or you are sending regular e-marketing campaigns. You can save money, reduce paper use and delivery impact, simply by cleaning up and reducing the size of your database. Regularly updating mailing lists and removing undeliverable addresses, duplicates and bounced email addresses, will play a part in saving resources.
  • Adopting a lifecycle approach:
    Selecting green materials and products for marketing materials and adopting a lifecycle approach that looks at the whole campaign, thereby foreseeing areas of potential waste. More and more companies similar to Recycle Match are evolving. Recycle Match operates on the philosophy that one company’s trash is another company’s treasure and matches businesses who have waste products, such as used billboards, textile waste, and salvaged building materials, with businesses who need them.
  • The Green Community:
    Finally, community is another component to successful green marketing. The green revolution has caused the growth of thousands of organisations and causes, each championing their own method of fighting for the environment. Find the businesses that fight for green living in the area, which relates to your product or service and contact them for support.

With the current emphasis on going green, recycling, and saving the planet, it would be foolish not to engage with the green consumer. However, it is important that your actions are credible and sincere. It is all too easy to employ ‘green wash’ when communicating your ‘green’ policies. Organisations that do this run the risk of attracting negative feedback and potentially damaging their reputation. A business doesn’t have to implement all of the suggestions above, simply adopting one or two can be a step in the right direction. Like any marketing or business activity, having a plan is essential.  Your green plan doesn’t need to be complicated or lengthy, but you should outline the steps you need to take to ensure effective execution and alignment with your overall marketing strategy.

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Top Marketing Tips May 2012

  1. The LinkedIn iPad app has finally arrived. The app is designed to be a personal assistant, with features such as calendar integration and a focus on LinkedIn’s personalised news feed, which showcases popular news articles and updates.
  2. LinkedIn’s Signal is another tool that can be applied to your LinkedIn account. Signal allows you to filter and browse only relevant status updates from your LinkedIn streams. You can target updates from colleagues, competitors, etc. The tool also allows you to narrow or expand your view based on the following filters: network, industry, company, time published and location.
  3. This month we provide you with a book dedicated to LinkedIn. Social networking Guru Neal Schaffer’s Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn, explores the potential for professional and personal networking through LinkedIn. This book goes beyond the “business” genre to expand upon the world of social media marketing, branding, and career management.
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Are your Lead Generation campaigns LinkedIn?

You may be aware that we regularly discuss the importance of social media for a business, providing you with insights into the latest social media trends and top tips about how to engage effectively with your consumers within the variety of social media platforms available.
From our experience of working with SMEs, the same questions pop up time and time again, ‘How can social media fit with my industry’? ‘How is social media going to generate sales for my business?’

Not all social media sites are relevant for every business, for example, product based B2C businesses are more likely to engage with consumers on platforms, such as Facebook and Pinterest, where a business can take advantage of the visual functions available. If you want to communicate to a B2B audience and business professionals, then LinkedIn with its 150 million members is a good place to start.

LinkedIn enables members and businesses to create profiles, connect with like-minded individuals, share blogs and news items. However, more and more businesses are now discovering the hidden powers of LinkedIn, not only as a social networking site, but also as a platform that can be the foundation for marketing campaigns and a vital component in a company’s lead generation efforts.

So how can your business use LinkedIn for lead generation? Think of LinkedIn as a treasure trove with over 150 million contacts that can be used to support your business activities. LinkedIn is rich with information you can use to help qualify prospects, target businesses and research competitors.

Below are some examples of how your business can use LinkedIn effectively:

  • Do you have a list of potential companies that you wish to target? Are there contact names missing or is the list simply out of date? If so, LinkedIn is a great tool for identifying key decision-makers working in the organisations you are keen to engage with.  This helps eliminate the dreaded entry phrase ‘I can’t put you through; we work on a no name basis’.
  • Is your business launching a new product or service and you are keen to research your target audience? We use LinkedIn as a valuable market research tool. It gives you access to a range of groups and contacts, many of which are keen to share their opinion. Post a question on a relevant group and engage with your target audience to get their thoughts and ideas, there’s nothing better than a service or product that really addresses the challenges and problems customers face.
  • Join groups and develop yourself as an expert in your field. LinkedIn enables you to join and set up industry and career specific groups. Groups of like-minded professionals are excellent for gaining knowledge, sharing news and conveying your expertise. LinkedIn groups allow you to see the issues that your target audience are facing, providing you with an opportunity to share your knowledge and build relationships with potential customers.

A great example of a business getting to grips with the power of LinkedIn is Cathay Pacific. Cathay Pacific Airways is an international airline based in Hong Kong, offering scheduled cargo and passenger services to over 140 destinations around the world. Cathay Pacific faced the same challenges that most businesses face, how to crawl through the jungle that is an overcrowded marketplace and reach their target audience with a message that is compelling. In order to achieve this, Cathay Pacific turned to LinkedIn to help target people who would fly business class between the United States and Asia. The aim was to identify members who belong to LinkedIn groups related to business travel in Asia, such as Global Workers, China Networking Group and Hong Kong Connection, in order to engage with time-strapped business travellers in an environment where they were already comfortable, engaged and spending time.

Cathay Pacific established a company page in LinkedIn and started to engage with the groups and individual members, providing regular status updates. As well as increasing the brand awareness, Cathay Pacific’s LinkedIn activity generated a total of 1,324 responses from business travellers, produced 97 LinkedIn page recommendations and increased the clickthrough rate on to their main website.

With the ever increasing array of social networking sites available to businesses, large and small, and the constantly evolving digital world, a business must establish the platforms that offer their business most value. Social media is free but your time is not. You need to use it wisely. We believe that increasingly, if you operate in the B2B sphere, LinkedIn represents an effective investment of your time. It is now so much more than just an online CV; it unlocks the doors to millions of opportunities for your business.

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Are you tweeting?

Twitter now has 10 million active users in the UK – Is your business one of them?
The once personally focused micro-blogging tool, Twitter, has developed in popularity with individuals but equally amongst businesses in the UK. Twitter may have been a source for celebrity status updates in the past, however, the times are changing and more and organisations are realising the potential behind the social networking site. According to research published this week, over one-in-six businesses now use Twitter to scout and engage with new customers.

So how are small businesses achieving success through Twitter?

  • The London Studio

Theo Paphitis of Dragons’ Den launched a Twitter competition called Small Business Sunday. Once a week, Theo started asking entrepreneurs to tweet him about their business, choosing his six favourite, which he then flagged up to his 240,000 followers and on his website.

One of the companies that tried to attract the attention of the successful dragon was a multidisciplinary design studio called The London Studio.

“I tweeted Theo hoping to tempt him to look at The London Studio website and see the products I’d designed,” says the MD.

“He did — and his single tweet saw my website’s traffic more than double on its weekly average. I thought the server might break. Sales jumped too — gift shops and other independent retailers got in touch and asked me to be a stockist, and existing ones put in larger orders. I sold an extra 13,000 cards in the month after Theo’s tweet. Twitter has been great for business.”

  • Big Green Bookshop

The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green tweeted on the 24th of February 2011 that without help they would have to close the doors to the book shop in nine months due to an unpaid bank loan. Shortly after the tweet was sent, the topic started to trend on the social media platform, growing in popularity, spreading throughout the social media realm. Due to Twitter the shop sold enough books to cover its bank repayments for two months and is now trading healthy.
Is your business one of the 10 million active UK users on Twitter? If so, has you ‘tweeted’ or ‘followed’ in the last two weeks?  Take a look at the top tips below to get your business on the path to social media success.


Tips to get your Twitter activity up and running:

  • Follow other relevant small businesses – Quality rather than quantity
  • Share tips related to your industry
  • Post links to original thought pieces
  • Give referrals via Twitter
  • Communicate with potential customers, strategic alliances and suppliers
  • Engage with industry magazines, editors and journalists – you never know who might read your latest news or blog feature.
  • Ask your audience questions

Twitter is more than just a status update, the opportunities are endless….Get tweeting today!

For more social media tools and tips, click here.

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New Cookie Regulations

By now, you should be aware that new regulations on a website’s use of cookies came into force at the weekend. Websites available to European visitors and owned by European companies must now follow the EU E-Privacy Directive passed in 2011. The laws require websites to provide information about the use of tracking technology on the site and the purpose of that technology. Websites also must allow visitors to choose whether or not to be tracked.
Is your website compliant with the new regulations? Click here for all you need to know.

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Blog your way to the top

Image: Social Ninja

In today’s digital society, blogging is not confined to personal use alone. The medium is a powerful communication channel for many different sized organisations and to some, it represents an integral component of their marketing and social media strategy.
Why is this the case and more importantly, why should my business blog? Well the answer is simple. Every business, from finance to catering, has a voice and more and more consumers are interested in hearing what your organisation has to say. A business blog helps add a personality to your brand, enabling you to engage with your market on a more human and ultimately, more meaningful level.

Topic is key. Think about how your blog could help your customer. What questions do you get asked? We regularly tell our clients to write a blog, with many stating ‘Who would want to read something I have written’…Well you would be surprised.  Regular blogs are an excellent way to communicate with your potential customers, introducing them to your organisation, whilst sharing your thoughts on the latest industry trends and news; all helping towards strengthening your position as an expert within the industry.

A well-established blog can help influence an audience. When clients start conversations, the chances are these days many are doing it online, using social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or their own blog. Social media serves as an important mode of interaction and provides you with an ideal channel to your target audience.  Consumer habits are dramatically changing, with many using social media to source companies, recommend services and start conversations with like-minded individuals and businesses.  Posting blogs on social media sites can help inform and spark debate with your target audience and more importantly, drive traffic back to your website.

Google loves content.  Getting to the first page of the search engines is always a priority for website owners. Providing good quality, unique content, such as blog articles, is a good starting point to achieving this. Blogging provides you with the opportunity to be present, be found, and get your business noticed by your target market. Search engines favour sites that are both active and also adding new content on a regular basis. A blog accomplishes both of these features. By having a blog you are demonstrating that your site is not static and that the information on the site is not only current and up-to-date but also increasing. Simple steps such as utilising keywords and internal and external linking to relevant and complimentary sites are all factors which can not only develop your blog, but also improve your SEO.

Blogging not only shares your expertise and improves website visibility; it also opens doors to many opportunities. Successful bloggers are often asked to expand their blog for industry magazine articles and columns, or attend the latest product launches and conferences, as their voice is seen as influential in their industry. A prime example of a simple blog working its way to the top is Mashable. Mashable was once a one man blog that soon turned into a popular news site, tackling social media and the digital culture. Bored by schoolwork, Scotsman Peter Cashmore skipped college and began writing about how people were using technology and the new world of social networking. From March 2012 Mashable was worth a staggering £127 million with over 2,775,000 Twitter followers and over 838,400 fans on Facebook.

Producing a blog that attracts a following like Mashable’s doesn’t happen every day, but a well maintained and regularly updated blog is an effective marketing tool. The only thing it will cost you is your time.

Start your blog today!

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Free ‘Top 10 Marketing Tools for SMEs’ Seminar

TLC Business Seminar
TLC Business is once again hosting its free annual marketing seminar in Winchester on the 12th July from 10am – 12:30pm.

This seminar will give you an overview of what marketing tools are out there for SMEs, why they might be useful, which offer the best value and what are the ones we would recommend to enhance your marketing’s effectiveness.

We will explore a range of topics including:

  • CRMs – Do you get what you pay for?
  • Social media management – How you can use your social media time more efficiently
  • E-marketing – What software to use and why?
  • Google analytics – What it all means and why you should be measuring
  • Video – ” I’ve heard it is important but I don’t know where to start”
  • Information sharing – Reduce costs and increase efficiency
  • Marketing measurement – “50% of my marketing works and 50% doesn’t, the problem is, I don’t know which 50% is which”

Places are limited, so reserve yours today to avoid disappointment.

To book your place and for more details, click here.

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Facing Tough Competition

Is your business on track for marketing gold?One of the key factors for business success lies in knowing who your competitors are and what they are doing. Facing up to strong competition can be a challenge; however, we believe that with the right research and analysis, you business can be armed with the tools necessary to achieve market dominance.

You may think you already know your competitors and what they are up to, but how often do you check their social media platforms, promotional material, website or customer service? Time and time again we speak to SMEs who believe they already know their competitors and that research is not a priority. We would have to disagree. Understanding how your competitors engage with your target audience and identifying what their strengths and weaknesses are, gives you a valuable insight into how you can improve your business. Competition can be fierce and in order to form sound business strategies, you need to have as much information as possible.

Ensuring your offering is different (in a good way!) is vital. If you don’t have up-to-date information about competitor activity how can you be sure you are?


So where to start? How about asking yourself these questions.

  • Who are your direct competitors? Have you actively searched for new companies that may have entered your market place?
  • Where are they located? Do you all operate in the same region?
  • What services do they provide? Have they introduced a new product offering recently?
  • Do they have an experienced team?
  • What about indirect competitors? Who are they? The watch market didn’t see mobile phones as a threat, now their market place is shrinking as people use their mobile to tell them the time.


What else might be useful to know?

  • Do they have an effective website? What content do they upload and is it updated on a regular basis?
  • Are they actively participating in social media? What content are they sharing and what platforms are they utilising? Are they effective users of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?
  • Do they have a USP? Are they providing a service or product that you are not?
  • Have you mystery shopped them?
  • Are your competitors publishing regular press releases?
  • Is there a news or blog function on their website? What are they talking about?
  • Do your competitors advertise, if so, where?
  • Do you know what terms they are optimising their website for?

All this may seem overwhelming, but preparation and research are vital within a crowded market place. Your findings will help shape winning marketing strategies that help drive future business success.

So if you can’t answer many of the questions above….start researching you competitors today.

 

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TLC Business Host Top 10 Marketing Tools Seminar

Website

TLC Business was delighted to host its annual marketing seminar yesterday, at Winchester Business School, tackling the topic ‘10 Top Tools for Effective SME Marketing’. The unseasonal weather didn’t put off attendees, as a packed house was treated to a morning of our top marketing tool tips. Topics covered included: effective CRM and email marketing systems, Google Analytics, Dropbox, YouTube, URL builders and QR Codes.

TLC Business Director Joshua Spencer said “We were delighted with the turn out and would like to thank everyone that took the time to attend. It was our intention to give attendees ideas and tips that they can take back to their business and use straight away to make their marketing more effective.”

We were very pleased to receive excellent feedback, below are just a few examples and 100% of people stated they would recommend attending future TLC Business events.

  • ‘Excellent insight into the most up to date and effective marketing tools’
  • ‘Excellent morning’
  • ‘Useful tips – food for thought’
  • ‘Very informative – thank you’

For those that were unable to attend the seminar, but are interested in the content and would like to receive a copy of the presentation, please email anna@tlc-business.co.uk.

We are already starting to think about next year’s topics, so if you have any ideas or preferences, please let us know.

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Google Analytics – Where To Start?

Last week, TLC Business hosted a marketing seminar on the ‘Top Ten Tools to Effective SME Marketing’, with topics including, CRM systems, video and email marketing.  Over the next few months, we will be exploring these topics further, providing you with top tips to help you get more out of your marketing.

First stop…Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools out there for marketers. It is invaluable for monitoring and analysing traffic on your website, allowing you to evaluate both on and offline marketing campaigns. It gives you an enormous amount of information about who is visiting your site, how they got there, and what they are looking for.

We are always surprised by the number of businesses who do not actively review their Google Analytics reports. Yes, the volume of results available can be daunting; however, the importance of the information stored is critical for any business.

So what information should my business be measuring?
Let’s start with the basics:

  • No. visitors – How many people visit your website in a day, month and year? Are there any trends that appear…quieter in August but a peak in September?
  • Bounce rate -The lower the better. Are people looking around your website or simply jumping off after the homepage? Has a particular page got a higher bounce rate than others?
  • Length of time on site – How long is a visitor spending on your website before leaving? 10 seconds or 2 minutes? Does a particular page retain visitors for longer?
  • How many pages visited – Are the majority of people visiting one page on the website, or exploring multiple, for example, ‘news’, ‘services’ and ‘contact us’?
  • Traffic – Are visitors coming from a direct source or referral links?
  • Keywords – Which keywords are pulling in traffic to your website?

Google Analytics doesn’t just stop there; explore your site in more detail:

  • Visitor flow -This graphically represents the pathway visitors take through your site, from the source, the various pages viewed and where along their paths they exited your site.
  • Form Field Tracking – Filling out forms online is well known, not only for tracking conversions but also for losing visitors. You can use the Google Analytics tracking feature to improve your conversion rate by analysing and optimising the form to make the process easier and more efficient.
  • Page load speed – The report provides an at-a-glance view of essential information. Which landing pages are slowest? Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
  • In-Page Analytics – This enables you to visually analyse your website pages in order to assess how users interact with your website and understand the following questions, are my users seeing the content I want them to see? Which links are users clicking?
  • Social Visitors Flow – A visual presentation of how visitors from social platforms  are navigating your website. Assuming the goal of your social media campaign is to get more traffic to your website, this report provides you with insight into which social sites are sending the most traffic to your website and what your social visitors are doing once they get there.

The information above may be overwhelming; however, using Google Analytics to measure the performance of your website can reveal useful insights into the effectiveness of the content and layout of your site. Advanced areas within Google Analytics provide you with a vital tool to help you understand and breakdown those larger numbers and daunting information into smaller, more meaningful numbers.

To provide you with even more insights into using website analytics more effectively, our next blog will look at the latest social media developments within Google Analytics and how this can help you successfully drive traffic to your website.

Stay tuned!

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