The concept behind Morgan Spurlock’s film “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” was to see whether it was possible to fund a documentary about product placement, marketing and advertising using only money made from product placement, marketing and advertising within the documentary – confused?

The result is a metafilm where the subject matter is the film itself, and we see everything from the conception of his idea for the documentary, to his pursuit of sponsorship from major corporations, his boardroom talks with those he manages to hook to the promotional work he does in the lead up to the release of the film.

His aim is to see whether he is able to raise funds through sponsorship deals and stick to his contractual agreements without losing control over the project and his own brand image. This is something that he does by taking a rather satirical approach – he does what he promises to do, and he doesn’t mock the products but he makes it obvious when he’s doing it, and why he’s doing it.

During the movie he also looks into the pervasiveness and effectiveness of advertising in todays world – where American schools are having to sell advertising space in classrooms and on school buses to avoid classroom cutbacks and neuroscientists are able to study the reactions that popular brands have on the brain.

His main sponsors, the juice company Pom, make an important point about brand compatibility – in any brand partnership there must be an alignment of values or both parties will lose power and authenticity. In a partnership you are lending your authenticity to your partner, and if you haven’t vetted this partner, if your brands are not compatible, you will both lose face.

This is an interesting look at the power of major brands and their influence on society and the arts. Well worth a watch for anyone with a particular interest in product placement.

There’s a lot of buzz around  content marketing right now. Content marketing, if managed correctly, should play a big part in your customer retention and acquisition activities but it’s surprising how many companies embark on content marketing without asking why they’re doing it or considering their audience. 

Wikipedia defines content marketing as ‘any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers.’

The important part of that definition is the ‘acquire and retain’ bit. The purpose of your content marketing is to acquire and retain customers.

It’s simply not good enough to rely on a status update, a few retweets and a Facebook post on who killed who on CorrieEnders. 

I suggest you think of content marketing as customer content marketing. The value of the content to your customers and potential customers should always be the first consideration when producing content.

Your customer content should be of real value. The best customer content educates, creates awareness and builds trust. This in turn leads to customer loyalty and referrals. It positions you as an expert and demonstrates that you care about your customers and are there to help.

Develop your content by:

• Addressing common issues or questions about your product, service or sector and be sure to include keywords potential customers will search for to help get you on their radars. 
• Educating your customers with ideas for getting optimum results from your product or service.
• Citing case studies which show how you adapted a product or service to address a common sector issue.

If you manage your customer content correctly, it will help you achieve your retention and acquisition goals.

As always, if you’d like to discuss this subject in greater detail, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

If email marketing isn’t yet part of your marketing mix, you’re bonkers and need to start planning you first email campaign. How bonkers? Well, according to the Direct Marketing Association Client Email Report of 2014, in 2013, each £1 spent on email marketing resulted in an average return of almost £25. You’d have to be nuts to ignore email marketing.

So, here are a few key pointers for your email campaigns.

Campaign objectives

What do you want to communicate to your customers? Deciding clear objectives and how you will evaluate the success of your campaign is absolutely vital. It sounds an obvious one, but you’d be surprised how many companies go into this with a hit and hope approach.

• What’s the purpose of this email? Is it to inform? Promote an event? Launch a service or product?
• What’d the most appropriate audience? Are you sending to your entire customer base or a subset?
• What would you like the recipient to do? What’s the call to action?
• Why should a recipient be compelled to take that action?
• What constitutes success?

Email service provider

It’s absolutely key that you choose the right Email Service Provider (ESP) if your email marketing campaign is to be a success. Don’t, under any circumstances, use Hotmail, Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook, Hotmail or another email platform to send bulk emails.

We use Campaign Monitor to send create and send bulk emails, manage email databases, provide analytics and reporting stats. Other ESPs are also available including like Mail Chimp, Pure360 and Verticle Response – all damned fine platforms.

Build your mailing list

With all ESPs, you can add an email sign up form to your website that will update your database when people sign up for your newsletter.

When asking for sign ups, make it clear what you’ll give them in return for the gold dust that is their name and email address… such as:

• Early notice of exclusive offers.
• New product announcements
• A quid pro quo – e.g. a white paper or industry information in return for their details

It’s also a good idea to make it clear how often you will be sending them emails. BIG TIP: Send emails too frequently and you’ll find the content quality will suffer and your unsubscribe rate will go up.

You should only add people to your database who have given permission for you to email them. It’s worth considering including an email sign up as part of your registration process, or ecommerce flow, to build your database.

Stay legal

There are laws that cover sending promotional email messages. You need to be aware of them. They differ from country to county but are usually very straightforward and unambiguous. If you’re in the UK, you can check out the rules at https://www.gov.uk/marketing-advertising-law/direct-marketing

Create your email

Most ESPs have a selection of perfectly serviceable email templates you can use. Here are a few key considerations when putting your email together:

Engaging subject line

Your subject line should give your recipients a good reason to open your email – there should be some kind of benefit – something in it for them . Make sure your subject line is compelling and clear.

Pope kidnaps monkey headline

Grab attention with a powerful/curious/compelling headline that will make them read further.

Communicate benefits

Detail the benefits of your products or service rather than just the features. For example:

• Feature Driven: ‘Buy these elasticated waistline trousers’
• Benefit driven: ‘Buy these elasticated trousers and stay as fat as you like! No need for pesky, boring diets!’

Keep your sentences succinct and don’t be too clever or technical. It has to be easily understood on first swift read. Use bullet points to break up text, and embolden important phrases. Keep it short. Believe it or not, your audience hasn’t been gagging to read your email so make it swift, punchy and worth reading.

Text to image ratio

An email made from a single image may look the dog’s doo-dahs but it will be useless if images are disabled. Your recipients won’t have a clue of what your email is about until they have enabled images. When using images include alt tag descriptions so if images don’t render the recipient will know what’s supposed to be there.

Call to action

Make sure the call to action is obvious so it stands out on the page. It should be a clear direction, e.g. ‘Register for our webinar today’

Logo

Be proud, people! Always the logo.

Personalisation

Personalise your email by using the recipient’s name in the title and body of the email. Your ESP will have a simple method of merging names into your email. Using names in the subject line improve open rates by around 5%.

Your address

You must include your business address in the footer of your email.

Unsubscribe opportunity

You must allow your recipients to leave your mailing list. It’s not only a legal requirement but it’s also polite. ESP generated emails will include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email.

Post it!

You’re now ready to send your email. As you become more comfortable with email marketing, you may want to consider split-testing your campaign to see what works best e.g.:

• Best day to send
• Best time to send
• Types of email – text only or html
• The nature of the offer – discount in £s or %
• Trying different subject lines
• Trying different copy

Analyse it

Once sent it’s important that you measure how effective your email has been.

You will have different metrics for different types of campaign e.g.:

• Order volume
• Registration volume
• Email open rates and click through rates
• Number of report downloads

Learn from each email distribution, revise and test.

Good luck with your email campaigns and please get in touch if you’d like any help or further advice.

Orange Crush Digital has partnered with Lead Forensics, who optimise sales leads by identifying the visitors to your website and turning them into leads.

In our opinion, Lead Forensics is the market leader in providing B2B lead generation, using its experience of the challenges faced by sales and marketing teams.

Many organisations are investing heavily in website development and strategies to generate traffic, but research shows that just 2% of website visitors actually convert to enquiries.

By identifying anonymous visitors you can create qualified sales leads for your business.
The Lead Forensics solution provides key information on anonymous site visitors, including business names, industries, addresses, phone numbers, turnovers, employee numbers, pages visited and the number of people who have viewed your site from each company.

You can optimise the ROI of your online marketing and lead generation initiatives by using this information and target prospect leads more effectively, based on your knowledge of their behaviour on your website.

The Lead Forensics software is easily installed by adding a simple tracking code to your website. The data is accessed in real-time through the online portal or integration with your CRM platform. Compatible platforms include Salesforce, Oracle, Sage and Microsoft Dynamics.

You can arrange a two week trial of Lead Forensics without any obligation. To do so, please drop us a line and we will arrange for a Lead Forensics consultant to give you a call.