How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand.
Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour?
To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the noise. Thousands of messages are directed at us daily but most of them get ignored, overlooked or lost along the way.
What makes you stand out from the crowd is content that a customer actually WANTS to read. Information and substance that excites them and keeps them reading on – and moves them along their customer journey towards buying into your product or service or simply gaining their loyalty.
And not only that, you might have the best product, be it the most efficient, the sleekest, the most forward thinking, but if you aren’t communicating to your customers in their voice on their preferred communication platform, you’ll struggle to get their attention, and ultimately struggle to get sales.
So, before you continue doing the same thing and expecting different results, check out our top 3 tips to creating compelling content and getting it to the hands that matter!
A study in 2016 showed that people are 7.1 times more likely to purchase through an emotive campaign
Why? Because people feel first and think second. Even in relation to B2B purchases. We’re all human. You need to get into the reasons behind customer purchases. So often, competing products are similar and have the same functions but it’s the compelling copy around the product description that can drive an emotive response to buy. Simon Sinek spoke at TedTalks 2009 on the WHY, WHAT and HOW which we feel highlights this topic very well. Listen to examples of how companies have got under the skin of emotive purchasing.
Remember: When you use emotive campaigns, your consumers are now not just purchasing a product but rather an experience.
The catchphrase of 2018? Disruptive marketing.
We’re all familiar with the old adage “out with the old, in with the new”, and now, many companies are turning to unconventional messaging and events – creating disruption to grab attention and get cut through. This style of communication is used to challenge the current market or to be heard by a new one.
A great example of disruptive marketing is Dove’s campaign #RealBeauty – it disrupts the beauty industry by using real woman, rather than models or celebrities, to sell. Existing customers – and even new ones – walked away from this campaign having gained a new perspective. All in all, Dove broke through the thousands of other messages from the beauty industry to disrupt the conventional industry marketing and portray their brand in a new light.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Attributed to Charles Darwin
The pace of change is accelerating, mainly driven by the introduction of technology. The communication platform for instance, is a perfect example of evolution driven from technology.
The flow goes: letter, telegraph, telephone, text, email, WhatsApp, What’sNext?!
This is where businesses need to not only stay abreast of such developments, and adapt to the changing consumer environment, but also listen to their customers – what platforms are they using to access information, how are they searching online, how do they like to absorb information (picture, video, infographic etc) and when? All of these insights will help ensure that your content and delivery remain current and relevant to your customers.
In the UK, WhatsApp is the most popular communication App within all age groups with 84% of the 24 – 35-year olds and 78% of 35 – 44-year olds using it
Fig.1
Source: https://www.whatsbroadcast.com/content/whatsapp-facebook-messenger-wechat-app-global-user-penetration-and-statistic/#GreatBritain
So, if you’re looking for some help or advice in creating compelling content – get in touch with us today.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more
This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more
The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more
April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more
March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more
Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more
‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more
We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more
Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more
It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more
The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more
If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more
After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more
The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more
When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more
In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more
Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more
In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more
It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more
Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video – indestructible – is consistently growing year on year.
In fact, it’s projected that by 2019, video will claim more than 80% of all web traffic. That’s a phenomenal amount of video.
It’s one of the most in-demand forms of marketing out there, but why is it so popular?
Video requires little to no effort. You can be painting your nails, cooking up a storm, partaking in a spot of yoga, all with a video running at the mere touch of a button. It doesn’t require any effort on your part. You just press play and watch.
Video is both visually stimulating and audible. With sight and sound being the two most well-developed of the human senses, video has the upper hand in the name of science and evolution!
It’s engaging, fast and easy for humans to understand because it works in the way that we work. In fact, viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it.
Come on, fess up. How many times have you found yourself watching a movie with tears in your eyes and an expression on your face that mirrors that of the emotional character on screen. In fact, how many of you have welled up while watching retailer Christmas adverts?
Research shows images that elicit emotional responses cause our brains to release oxytocin – a chemical that helps us form empathy – leading to emotional connections that work to build trust in a product or brand. Don’t believe us? Take a look at these links when you’re done reading this:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2caT4q4Nbs
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=litXW91UauE
Wherever we are in the world – video is there too. We can watch it on a train on our way to work, while we sunbathe on the beach or while we’re tucked up at home in our beds.
Millions of people, all in different parts of the world can watch the same video at the same time. And yet it’s a medium that engages us individually by speaking to us on a personal level.
All of us like to be made to feel special – and video allows us to feel that way.
Now, we know what you’re thinking. That’s all well and good, but video is expensive – is it really worth the investment? The answer of course is yes – and here’s why:
1. Video can be re-edited and used multiple times with our shoot once and re-cycle aplenty approach – so you can really get your money’s worth.
2. It’s scalable – video allows you to reach millions of people, all over the world, across every digital platform.
3. Video will boost your SEO and enhance your conversion rates too. 65% of business decision-makers visit a marketer’s website after viewing a branded video and 39% contact a vendor after viewing a branded video.
4. Video content wants to go viral – it’s estimated that 92% of people who consume mobile videos share them with other people.
So if you’re looking for some help or advice in getting your video campaign off the ground or are just interested in how video could work for you – get in touch with us today.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado – we are in the avocado age after all – digital would be the big stone, right in the middle of all that green, mushy stuff.
Why? Well, consider this for a moment.
So we all know digital is pervasive. And therefore – so is digital comms. But when we mix in the immediacy of digital – the ability to change, and adjust on the fly – and then add in the critical ingredient – dialogue and interaction – you can see why you want to put digital at the centre of all you do.
So, how does a digital central approach differ?
Well, rather than thinking of your cross-channel strategy with the mindset – “how can we bring digital into this?” – ask yourself the question:
“how can we use our offline comms to move this prospect or customer to our online channels as soon as possible? And which channels would be the best entry point?”
So first we need to be developing a full digital plan. Which combination of digital channels will be the most effective for moving these audiences through their specific customer journey? Which channels do they use and when in their buying process? You want to get them from where you ‘meet’ them first – on or offline – to where they want to be, when they want to be there, and with messages that work for that stage of the buying process.
Once you have your full digital plan in place, your channels fully optimised and raring to go – then, and only then, do you turn your attention to your offline media. Because the CTA – the call to action – will now focus on taking them to those optimised channels.
Want to know how all that might look?
Well, let’s go for an easy example. Imagine that you’re a phone company – it may be a bit of a stretch but work with us here. We’ll call you Banana Corp. And let’s imagine that this phone company of yours has just brought out it’s all new BPhone XX (or twenty). You’ve created a landing page, and you’re looking to drive as many people to this landing page as possible. In order to raise awareness of your product, you’ve decided to also use billboard ads.
Now, because you planned a digital first approach, your key aim for this offline ad is to drive people to your landing page, as well as generating awareness. Getting those that want to, that are excited by your offer – to take action. So, instead of designing a billboard with a lovely graphic image alone, without messing up the graphic approach, we add your site address, some social media handles, hashtags – and a QR code.
Now, people have the opportunity to go on-line right then and there, read more information and eventually, having engaged with you, migrate through to buying the product.
So, the next time you sit down to create your cross-channel strategy, remember, start with digital – and bring all that green, mushy deliciousness right back to its core.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will GDPR affect me?’ side of things so, if that’s the case, let’s fill you in (and if you know all this already – go and read something else).
First off, why is it important?
Well, let’s ask this: does your organisation possess or process data referring to a specific, identifiable person, and contact that person and/or track their engagement for the purposes of profiling?
If the answer’s yes GDPR will impact you. And just to really scare you (because it scared us too!), the fine for failing to comply can be up to €20 million or 4% of your revenue (not your profit) whichever is the greater.
Yikes, got your attention now, haven’t we?
And if you still don’t think GDPR will affect you, then, well we’d be willing to bet that you’re a customer – and as a customer, this should be of great interest to you too – it’s all about data protection and safeguarding your personal data after all.
So, for the purposes of a short summary, the GDPR implications can be whittled down to three key points:
Now, let’s break each of those three key elements down a little further:
1. Opt-in consentOpt-out (where you have to untick pre-ticked boxes) is a pretty big part of marketing communications these days, and one that you’ve most likely encountered on the regular – whether you’ve noticed it or not (sly devils). But that ‘did I really agree to this?!’ feeling will be no more, because under GDPR, explicit opt-in consent (clear and identifiable) will be required for all marketing communications going forward. That means the default value must be not opted in and those responding have to actively put the tick in the box. So, if a business can’t prove they have this consent as of May 25th, they could be in serious trouble for continuing to use it.
2. IntentThis one’s a real biggy, because under GDPR if a business is using a customer’s data, they need to be able to prove that that customer gave unambiguous, informed consent for them to use it in the specific context for which it’s being used. It needs to be crystal clear that they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into, and it needs to be clear how that business will use their data. So that handy catch all saying you will use their data to make other offers they may be interested in will no longer be allowed.
3. Transparency and invisibilityFinally – and this is where as a customer your ears should really prick up – under GDPR, customers will be able to ask for the data companies are keeping on them (to be turned around in 30 days tops!), and should they wish, have that data removed entirely. So, as a business, there’s going to be a real need for highly structured storage systems, processes and methods. Don’t let your customer data get in a mess, and definitely invest in a high-quality CRM system.
But GDPR is far from all doom and gloom, in fact we truly believe that GDPR can only really be viewed as a good thing. Not only do we have a moral duty to safeguard those individuals using the services or products we provide, but we’ll have happier customers too.
A study by Macro 4 recently found that 42% of those asked would be more likely to use a company that made it easier for them to understand what personal information it was holding about them, and how it will be used.
And this just reinforces our long-held view supporting Seth Godin’s principle from the early days of digital – that of Permission Marketing. Once you have permission from your customers and prospects to market to them because they see the value in the relationship – they should be even more responsive to your communications.
So be GDPR compliant, don’t get fined and be even more successful. There really isn’t a downside.
This week we also have a poll on data protection on Facebook. Vote here, and see what the consensus is around Facebook implementing a private, subscription based option.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Perhaps the most obvious benefit, but important none the less, is that outsourcing some or all of your marketing requirements gives you access to skills and experience that may be missing (or simply under-represented) within your own team. Less obvious – but a real time-saver – are all the other guys behind the scenes.
What people often fail to realise is that you’ll also gain access to the outsourcing company’s trusted suppliers – printers, creative designers, web gurus, you name it – removing all the dreaded time and uncertainty that comes with finding your own.
Outsourcing gives you a resource that you can scale to suit your needs, no matter how demanding those might be! Here at Coussins Associates, we work with clients with a variety of outsourcing requirements. From growing organisations that want regular marketing help but are not ready to commit to a full-time marketing overhead, to larger organisations that are looking to control their marketing resources, and organisations that require marketing support in specialist areas on an ad hoc basis (I know, we get around!).
This flexibility means you only pay for the marketing resources you need, when you need them – whether that’s a video production facility for a week or an ongoing implementation team.
Often companies can get stuck in a marketing rut – following the “we’ve always done it like this” mentality. Outsourced marketing helps to eliminate this, giving you access to a different perspective from an experienced outsider, who’s not bogged down in internal politics (“Brenda would never make me tea again if I did it this way”) or past strategies (“In 1990, John did something similar, and it ended terribly”).
Working with an outsourced marketing company usually involves working with them over an extended period of time (you almost start to look like part of the furniture), enabling lots of knowledge transfer back and forth between the two companies. This cumulative gathering of knowledge means that to your delight, they’ll become very familiar with your products or services and your industry – eliminating the need for you to brief them about these prior to each project (and we all know how long that can take!).
What’s more, they’ll become an integrated part of your team – understanding how you work and your company’s preferred methods and strategies – a seamless extension to your work family.
For much less than the cost of a full-time marketing executive, you gain access to a team of experts. You don’t need to worry about the overheads – or time – involved with recruiting, training and retaining your own members of staff. Outsourced marketers will hit the ground running (reducing development costs), and are used to working to fixed deadlines and budgets – giving you tight control over your marketing spend.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not be getting is the quality of marketing communications you deserve long term. The more time you spend at the beginning of a project, the less time you’ll spend at the end juggling the piece backwards and forwards, aggravating not only yourself but your design team to boot (and if experience tells us anything, it’s don’t upset your designers!).
You see, persuasive, golden creative requires a treasure map of Xs; information, directions, clear instructions – the lot.
The last thing you want is your creative team digging in the wrong spot, only to have to send them on a wild goose chase once more. Those cost time and money – and we generally find that businesses don’t like to waste either of those!
So, enough of the analogies, what goes into a good brief?
Well, first off, start with the simple stuff. You, of course, have a completely clear idea of the product or service you’re promoting – your creative team on the other hand, don’t. Make sure you provide a full, detailed product description including all the features and explain any acronyms along the way. Nobody wants to waste time trying to work out their WYSIWYG from being USCWAP!
Highlight what you want the piece of work to achieve and set some fully SMART objectives.
Next, positioning and propositions. Get right into the nitty gritty here and be ruthlessly clear about who the product is aimed at. We’re talking a pen portrait description of your target market complete with stereotypes and imaginary personas (are you hoping to sell to Ben, Tarquin or Jose?) – it’s far easier to be creative when you have a clear image of who it is you’re speaking to.
Devise a clearly expressed, single, compelling proposition that you want to communicate and include a positioning statement for the product (if you don’t have these, call us, we can help!). Set out any other benefits you want your audience to look at underneath, with at least one related benefit per feature. Note them down and order them in a hierarchy of appeal. (A fun Coussins secret, but something which helps us here is the ‘so what?’ test – is it really a benefit or simply a feature? Or at least we find it fun…)
Customer attitudes are important in getting across the current feeling in the market and the reaction you want your product to generate. This should be in the first person, from the point of view of the customer, and also explore possible resistance (yes, temper tantrums are a possibility!), objections and competitors. Be completely clear about issues potential customers may have, allowing your creative team to deal with them effectively – painting over imperfections, so to speak.
It’s worth taking some time here and brainstorming a few ways of getting your customers to act. Set out any potential incentives you can, including special promotions, deals and offers which might encourage a customer to act quicker than usual (chocolate and biscuits tend to work with us).
Lay down a clear call to action and stick to it, what’s the next step in the buying process you’re trying to achieve?
Finally, read through what you’ve written, note down any style points or guidelines you’ve missed and add in any personal preferences where appropriate – if the colour yellow reminds you of that time you accidentally dropped your mother-in-law’s trifle. On your mother-in-law. Then now is the time to speak up! Only once you’re confident you’ve missed nothing off are you finally ready to hit send.
It’s important to remember, a creative’s job is not to create content, but to shape and embellish existing content for a specific purpose.
The bigger and better the treasure map, the more golden the treasure – happy briefing folks!
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Seven years on and you still see the same creatures of habit sneaking their way onto the screen – it’s something we see often here at Coussins Associates (not in any of our own presentations of course!), and since we believe the world will be a better place without bad presentations, we’re sharing our light-hearted top 5 tips on how not to construct your presentation* – so you can know exactly what not to do with your PowerPoint presentations.
*DISCLAIMER: The following 5 steps are to be taken with a pinch of salt – unless, of course, “Death by PowerPoint” is the look you’re going for.
The key is to choose the most outrageous animation, pick clashing colours and fill your slides with as many pictures as possible, and maybe make the text really small too. After all, appearances do matter, and if your slides look this err ‘good’ then who cares what they say, they’ll sell anyway – won’t they?
Use as many different styles, fonts, headings and colours as you like, so no two slides look the same. Keeping the audience guessing what to expect next is a great way to keep them confused, overwhelmed alert and awake, if not at least really curious.
Some presenters like to have a structured approach, leading up to some conclusion the audience can get behind or respond to. These odd balls will know exactly what to expect when they click advance slide and how it seamlessly links to the next. But we find that, like the recently discontinued iPod Shuffle, most presenters love a game of Russian Roulette with their slides.
The structure is not only a secret never to be shared with the audience, it’s a secret from the presenter too.
From line graphs to tables, to pie and bar charts, there are plenty of options to choose from here and it’s important to show that your business case, research or message is supported by credible data. So, remember to use lots of them on each slide. It doesn’t even matter if the graph isn’t relevant to the presentation, or doesn’t make any sense, since it’s unlikely to be legible anyway.
If you’ve managed to cover all the above steps, then you’re well on your way to leaving some form of lasting impression – assuming some of your audience are still alive. It won’t be what you said, or the call to action that stays with them, it will probably be the smell of the poop you’ve just thrown on the screen in front of them – but as the saying goes – any press is good press, right?
If you’ve been making frantic notes on the above and haven’t yet realised that these tips are more than a little tongue-in-cheek, then you probably don’t need to read any further! Don’t get us wrong – we love PowerPoint, we really do. It’s just that in the hands of the wrong people it can be a tool for bad rather than good! And whilst none of the above-mentioned PowerPoint features are bad in and of themselves, when used by those who don’t understand that a visual aid (not a visual crutch) is supposed to support what you say and not replace it, then it really can mean death by PowerPoint. Or, more accurately, death by presenter.
You want your PowerPoint to look good; and effective use of master slides, legible and clear fonts, appropriate use of graphs and a set of coherent slides, will definitely put you on the yellow brick road to mastering PowerPoint.
If you’re not sure though, Coussins Associates can help – you can either click here to check out our PowerPoint wizardry, or if you’re already convinced, why not send us an email and we’ll give you a call, or even better, call us directly on our office number which you can find here.
You see, we know that PowerPoint is just an aid, not the presentation itself. Whether, it’s a “well done on that project” to your staff, or a “let’s talk about signing that contract” with a potential client, think about how your use of PowerPoint is going to reach that end goal. We have the tools to help you do just that, so you can focus more on what you need to say, rather than how to say it – and sell more stuff.
(And if you haven’t seen “Life After Death by PowerPoint”, you can find it here for some more entertaining tips on how to achieve the not-so-elusive ‘Death by PowerPoint’.)
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.