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It should be about generating money and helping your business grow. Watch our latest video to find out the top 5 reasons that marketing doesn’t work and what you can do to turn each reason to your advantage:

Find out more about one of our clients Becky White PR - our first ever client video!

If you like me are hooked on the Undercover Boss series on Channel 4 then you will be familiar with the Best Western episode, which aired a few weeks back (sorry I’m blogging about this now but I actually only saw it last night on the On Demand service. It’s strange how we all see different shows at different times theses days!)

For those of you that are unfamiliar with this documentary series, basically each week a CEO goes back to the floor in his/her own company undercover posing as someone trying to get back into work.

Best Western has been the most interesting episode to date as the company have recently spent over £1 million on a television advertising campaign with their new strapline ‘hotels with personality’ in a bid re-inject life into, what consumers see, as a rapidly dated brand.


Here’s what CEO David Clarke found during his two weeks undercover:

-   In many cases their message of hotels with personality wasn’t the case in reality – many hotels were dated, shabby and badly run.
-   In one case a hotel had failed to achieve a satisfactory quality level to be affiliated with Best Western and had been going to great length to deceive the company and pass hotel inspections by swapping room numbers around!
-   Because Best Western does not own it’s hotels (each hotel is independently run by its owners and affiliated with the Best Western name), almost all customer facing staff knew nothing about Best Western, its affiliation with the hotel or its brand values.
-   Despite spending £1million on a television advertising campaign David Clarke found that neither the staff or customers were aware of the campaign at all

So what can we learn from this and what can you do to make sure you don’t make the same kinds of mistakes when marketing your business? I think it can be boiled down to two major factors:


TV Advertising Doesn’t Work!
Quite a bold statement but trust me it’s true. Unlike in the past, companies can no longer use television advertising as the easy route to get word out about their product or service. Not only has the way we consume television completely changed and diversified making it much harder to reach everyone in one place, but companies can no longer simply command the attention of consumers by advertising on television. The way we as consumers interact with brands has completely changed (for the better I might add) so just launching a TV advertising campaign (regardless of how much you spend) is a complete waste of time. I encourage anyone interested my comments on this to read the work of Seth Godin who pioneered this idea in his book ‘Purple Cow’.

In the case of Best Western, it appeared that they had invested this £1 million in TV advertising because they saw it as a complete solution to the problems of how consumers perceive their brand. Unfortunately for them – no one saw it (as was made clear by customers and staff during the show!)

If you run a business of a smaller scale than Best Western then this is actually good news. They could have carried out a much more creative and effective for their £1 million. In fact they could have achieved better results with a lot less! You can do the same and not being in a position to afford television advertising is no longer a minus, it’s actually a plus – you just need to be creative and use a wider, better mix of marketing tools.

Marketing Messages Should Align With Reality
Treat consumers with respect, which means speak the truth in your marketing messages. If what you are saying in your marketing doesn’t match up with actual customer experiences then you’re not going to fool anyone. In essence I can actually see the reasoning behind the ‘Hotels With Personality’ strapline – many other big hotel brands standardise all their premises to be exactly the same. This means they name have no discerning features or personality of their own and Best Western are not like this – each hotel is unique.

The problem is that, although each hotel is indeed unique, the show proved that this was not always a good thing! Hotels were not of a consistent standard by any means and many appeared to be in a state of disrepair.

In essence their new strapline was actually good from an advertising perspective. The problem being that that’s all it was – a marketing message. It doesn’t really have any grounding in reality. This is an example of a company investing in marketing in isolation in an attempt to counteract ailing sales. They should have coincided this marketing activity with a wholesale rework of how they ensure hotels are all maintained to a consistent standard. The best example of this not being the case and therefore Best Western completely reversing any interest (if there was any) generated from their marketing campaign was when at the end of the show David Clarke goes back to the hotel that he saw witnessed deceiving Best Western to pass their inspections. From a marketing and PR perspective and to show the viewing public that the company had learned anything from this swap, he could only do one thing – inform the hotel owner that Best Western would no longer be affiliated with this hotel.

Instead, he had a meeting in front of the cameras with the hotel owner. After a very staged looking and false conversation where the owner unconvincingly promises to try harder to improve and raise standards, Mr Clarke decides to shake hands and leave it at that. I don’t think it can be under-estimated how much this will damage the Best Western brand. After all the talk of change and modernisation and spending £1 million pounds on an advertising campaign, in less than 2 minutes this wall all shattered and shown to be nothing more than all talk no action. A big mistake in my mind!

And the lesson for you: make sure marketing messages are grounded in reality.

Every business regardless of size needs to be involved in marketing. To be as successful as you can be it needs to be a central part of your operation.

But so often it doesn’t work. Or perhaps more accurately, we don’t know if it works.

The truth is, investing in marketing should make and not cost money. So what are the top 5 reasons that it doesn’t deliver the results that it should and what can you do to make your marketing generate real revenue?

Reason No 1 – Targeting
There’s no point in spending your money marketing to people that quite frankly, aren’t interested. Many businesses don’t think carefully enough about who they’re marketing activity is reaching and if these people are the same ones that they want to be talking to. 

Solution No 1 – Target Practice
Know as much as you possibly can about your potential customers. Research and profile them and use this knowledge to base your future marketing decisions on.

Reason No 2 – Marketing in Isolation
Have you ever received a phone call from someone trying to sell advertising? Most of us have and are told that doing this will vastly improve our results. The truth is that in isolation advertising, or any other type of marketing activity, won’t do anything. To be effective it needs to be a part of a much larger, planned process.

Solution No 2 – Work Together
To really make your marketing return its investment you need to make it all work together. Make sure everything you do when communicating with potential customers ties in with each other and is all designed to achieve one set of common objectives.  Then you’ll achieve the best results

Reason No 3 – What Next?
A good marketing plan will drive new opportunities into your business. That’s just the beginning though. It’s actually what happens next that many forget to think about and therefore fail to capitalize on. How do you follow up on new enquiries or purchases and then move on to build that prospect into a loyal customer?

Solution No 3 – Build Your Master Plan
Plan out the whole process from start-to-finish in your marketing plan. Think about what will happen after a customer makes an initial enquiry and have systems in place to keep a track of and build relationships with that customer. Integrating a CRM system into your business or using your current system to its full effect is a great way of doing this and it helps turn marketing opportunities into real revenue.

Reason No 4 – Accountability
Traditionally it’s been extremely difficult to know what’s working and what’s not. If you’re not sure how effective your marketing activity is then it means you can’t continually improve on your plan and areas that aren’t generating a good return

Solution No 4 – The Wonders of Modern Technology
The good news is that today there are cost-effective platforms available for all businesses that allow you track how effective your marketing activity is and give a full overview of your businesses performance. A good marketing plan mixed with such a platform equals better results for your business

Problem No 5 – Where’s the Creative Spark?
Marketing is a creative discipline and the best performing companies are the one’s that are the most creative with marketing. Whether that means an advertising idea or a new, effective process to gain customers. Very often though creativity is lacking in marketing and this leads to lackluster results regardless of how much you invest.

Solution No 5 – Identify Hidden Marketers!
Creative people help deliver better marketing results. That doesn’t always mean you need to involve marketing professionals though. Why not try and identify people in your business that have a creative spark and get them to help with marketing. They’re not always easy to find but it’s worth looking because these people will really help improve results. 

Reception issues aside (which I can’t help but feel is an attack from the media rather than users of the device), the iPhone 4 has been a huge success with over 3 million sold in just 3 weeks!

But what can other mobile phone manufacturers and, more importantly, your business learn from this success?

The most important lesson is:

PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE (OR A SELECT FEW) BASKET/S

What do I mean by this? Well, Apple spend hundreds of millions of pounds developing the iPhone but it is the only mobile device that they produce and, let’s face it, it’s a phenomenal piece of technology.

Apple focuses on user-centric design. The iPhone is so intuitive that once you have used it you won’t want to go back to any other device. Not only that but it is so much more stable than any other platform. With other smart phones such as the BlackBerry Storm - system crashes, bugs and generally unpredictable behavior are the norm but this just isn’t the case with the iPhone.

The mistake that phone manufactures like RIM and Nokia make is that, although they also spend hundreds of millions of pounds on product development, it’s spread across a large number of new products that they are working on at any one time. In general, phone manufacturers seem to be constantly bringing out their latest model. They build many different phones in an attempt to try and cater for different segments of the market – each phone has a different look or set of features to try and attract different groups of consumers. When they release these phones though they have many software bugs and issues because they have not put the same resources and effort into getting it exactly right before its release.

What Apple have done on the other hand is focus on building a phone that is so great and so geared towards the user that they don’t need to constantly release new versions. When they do release new versions they are a development and step forward from the predecessor.

Here’s how this applies to your business:

Have a strong conviction and confidence about your products and services, know exactly what your about and focus on providing it to the absolute highest standard that you can. Don’t create new products or service offerings in an attempt to try and make what you’re selling fit to every different demographic group on earth. Focus on making what you’re selling great, develop it with your customers in mind, make it the best it possibly can be and have confidence in knowing that what you have to offer is great.

For instance, so often I look on businesses websites and find a company that is trying to be all things to all people. They offer so many different services in an attempt to try and attract as many people as possible. The problem is that they are saying so many different things that they effectively end up saying nothing at all.

Build a select number of great products or services, focus your efforts on them and have a strong confidence and conviction in what you’re selling.

You might not build the next iPhone but you will see improved results!

We were completing some Keyword Analysis for one of our clients last week. Looking at what key terms they should be optimising their site for to gain the highest amount of relevant traffic that will convert into solid business.

Today, SEO can be a minefield – so many companies are doing it that, to actually get the results you’re looking for, you need to find highly specific search terms that are truly relevant to the product or service that you’re offering. Search Engine spiders (not actual spiders annoyingly – it’s the method that search engines use to trawl sites and syndicate them appropriately) are becoming better and better at spotting tricks that many use to try and bump themselves up in the rankings.

At the same time, a new but very beneficial piece of jargon you will be hearing about in the coming months is the ‘long tail keyword’. Clever companies are beginning to realise that, although short search terms such as ‘marketing services’ have many people searching for them, they are also highly competitive. At the same time ‘long tail key words’ i.e. multi-worded search terms such as ‘UK based marketing services company’ actually account for more traffic overall and each search term has much less competition. Therefore a company has more chance of reaching the top of the search engines for these terms.



Anyway (I kind of went off on a tangent there) - our client is a software company that creates web based CRM software. Armed with the long tail key word knowledge I was telling you about a second ago we began analysing thousands of different keywords and combinations of keywords that would be the most effective.

Probably the best indicator of an effective search term is one that has a high KEI score. Put simply a KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) score is just a number calculated by looking at the amount of people searching for a certain term against how many competitors are optimising their site for it. The number should always be above 1 to call it effective but the higher the number the better.

We were looking into terms such as

‘website based CRM ecommerce software’
‘customer relationship management CRM software’

What we began to see was that by actually making small grammatical and spelling errors in the keywords they became hugely more effective terms to go for. So for instance spelling website as 2 separate words (web site), misspelling the word e-commerce and using many other common misspellings in words actually still had a lot of people searching for them but with a huge amount less competition.

Ok now there are 2 major arguments against doing this:

1.   Everyone I tell about this points out that it looks unprofessional to misspell on your website. True - although if people find you by misspelling your key term then they will be none the wiser! I suppose it depends on how much SEO makes up of your website traffic
2.   Most people who search for these results will see the corrected spelling suggestion by Google and click on that instead of actually looking at the initial results. This is potentially true and, as far as I know, there are no statistics available to show how many people click to search under the corrected spelling. All I do know is, that in the increasingly competitive world of SEO, you might just find that misspelling your search terms could actually generate more traffic to your site than spelling correctly.

On that note we are currently looking to recruit a dyslexic SEO specialist so please send your CV to recrootment@brinnmarketing.com

That was a joke so please don’t swamp me with CV’s – dyslexic or otherwise!

All good marketing is creative – it engages our attention, it stands out from the crowd, it hits us in the right places at the right times, it evokes emotion and, ultimately, it makes us consume that particular product or service.

At the same time, coming up with something truly creative is no easy task. Big multinational companies spend millions of pounds each year paying top creatives in the world’s best advertising agencies to come up with new ideas – and even they don’t always get it right. So how can you?

By it’s very nature, creativity isn’t something you can teach but there are a few little tricks and pointers you can use to make it that little bit easier.

Here goes:

Find your creative space – Sounds like the words of a pretentious artist or experimental dancer right? Probably, but we’re not talking about working in a room filled only with cushions and sandalwood incense! We’re talking about finding a space, whether you’re working on your own or with others, that’s away from your desk. Go into the meeting room or other area where you can just purely focus on coming up with ideas and get away from the ringing phones and cluttered desks. It makes a real difference.

Know the goal – Good creative marketers constantly revert back to the end goal, checking if their creative solution actually solves the problem. When you think you have an idea that is truly brilliant think back and make sure that your marketing idea will achieve what you want it to.

Know the audience – Sometimes otherwise great creative ideas just don’t fit with the audience that they are trying to engage. We’ve all had those ideas for truly hilarious new strap lines for our products (or more often someone else’s!) but if the people that you are trying to reach don’t quite share the same sense of humour then it’s time for a rethink!

Know the audience you’re engaging with and create solutions that compel them to take action.

Don’t play it safe – Despite the point above, you should never play it too safe when it comes to marketing ideas. In today’s crowded market place it’s difficult to stand out from the competition; so doing the same as everyone else won’t get you anywhere. If you’re looking at the competition then look for what they’re not doing and then try and outplay them.

A good trick for coming up with ideas that beat the competition is to take inspiration from companies you admire that operate in completely different industries to you. Then you can apply new ideas to your business that your competitors haven’t thought of yet.

Keep it simple – If the idea confuses you even slightly it’s going to be much worse for the potential customer who has no prior knowledge of your business. Define your message and convey it in the simplest, most creative way possible.

Sleep on it – If possible, sleep on it. If not, get a fresh pair of eyes to go over your ideas and give you an honest opinion. We’re all guilty of having had those ‘revolutionary’ new ideas that don’t seem quite as revolutionary with the benefit of a good nights sleep!

An unbiased view – When soliciting opinions on your ideas from others, try to ask those that have no prior involvement with what you’re doing and what you’re trying to achieve. If possible ask someone that doesn’t even work for your company. This way you will get two things:

1. An honest opinion because the person is less likely to worry about hurting your feelings or angering their superior.
2. An unbiased first reaction because the person has no prior involvement in the project - they are coming to it completely fresh. They also have less knowledge of your company in general so you are essentially gauging what the opinions of consumers may be when they see your advert (It’s not quite cutting edge market research but it does help!).

Try these next time your working on a new idea and let us know how you get on.

Good Luck!

After the last blog post I thought this would follow on nicely and show you an example of what I was harping on about!

Here goes:

We have been working closely with i-level retail, part of Merson Group, to create their new website and everyone involved in the project at Brinn and i-level are really happy with the end result.

If you read our last post (If you build it they will come… or will they?!) then you’ll be aware that we believe having a website in itself is pointless and brings no benefits.

However, this newly designed site is part of a much larger project to deliver a marketing plan for i-level retail that will increase new, relevant enquiries coming into their business.

The launch of the new site coincides with 12-month print advertising campaign, Search Engine Optimisation using highly targeted key terms, e-marketing campaigns and attendance at this years Marketing Week Live show, which we worked with i-level to pull-together. All of this online and offline marketing activity is designed to pull traffic towards the website, and therefore increase enquiries coming through the site and into the business.

As well as this, i-level can now take control of their own marketing using Framework. With Framework i-level can:

Easily login anywhere from a link on their website

Use Frameworks powerful content management system to easily edit and add to their site when they want - without any requirement for a web designer

Be more effective with enquiries and build customer relationships using Frameworks CRM system.  This is fully integrated with the site so whenever a new enquiry comes in through a web form it is automatically loaded into the CRM system for i-level staff to start working with.

Keep in-touch with customers or market to new prospects with Frameworks intuitive email marketing system.

Track the progress and effectiveness of all marketing activity in real-time with Frameworks analytics and reporting feature.

So hopefully now you see what I was talking about the other day:

i-level retail now have a website; the right kind of people visit it because of targeted online and offline marketing activity; once there, more visitors will take action and submit an enquiry because it is designed in a way to engage their attention and compel them to take action; once action is taken this information is uploaded into Frameworks CRM system for staff to begin communicating with that prospect; they can set-up email marketing campaigns to target specific groups within the CRM system and i-level now have an analytics system that shows them whether or not our marketing campaigns are actually working!

I’d like to call it joined up thinking but I hate that term!

A new website -

It’s the first thing a business thinks they need to do to improve their marketing and sales performance; it’s seen as the silver bullet to turn around a company’s fortunes and, worst of all, it’s sometimes only done out of a feeling of obligation or fear of getting left behind without a single thought of how it is going to generate more revenue for the business.

Then when it comes to actually going live with the website, so often the attitude is:

‘If you build it, they will come’

(Little reference from Field of Dreams there for any of you who are into cheesy 80’s films!)

The truth is:

If you just build it, they definitely won’t come!

The concept of building a new website – if it’s required – is absolutely fine.  People are often surprised when we tell them we’re not particularly interested in building them a new site. For us, building websites for clients and then leaving them to fail (as they inevitably would) isn’t what we’re about.

The truth is, web design is a commodity. Go onto to any freelance site like peopleperhour.com and you’ll find an infinite number of web designers offering their services for next to nothing. You can even find people offering to build you websites for free! If you took them up on that offer I wouldn’t be surprised if you ended up with a great looking new website.

There is of course a catch to this. Today, just having a website is not good enough. It won’t make you money, it won’t generate enquiries and the vast majority of people that are interested in your product or service won’t even see it.

The web has moved on and, as a result, marketing has moved on.  The term online marketing is now obsolete. It’s not ‘online marketing’ it’s marketing. If online is not at the centre of your marketing strategy then your company isn’t performing as it should (my blog/rant about the term ‘online marketing’ is one for another day!)

So why isn’t your website working? The answer is almost always because building the website and getting it live is seen as the end goal - even though this is actually just the beginning. The idea that you can build a website and leave it there to make you money is completely wrong. To have a successful marketing function today you need to have a strong, creative and dynamic web presence at the centre of everything you do. More than that though it needs to be planned out and process-driven.

Big nationals and multi-nationals have now completely sussed out how to successfully engage with their customers online and use it as a driver for growth.  They have a website - that’s a given, but it’s what they do with it that actually makes it work and deliver results.

I was recently told about Tesco’s latest venture tescodiets.com. It sounded interesting so, with the additional knowledge I could do with losing a few pounds, I tried it out their 4-week free trial! It is a spellbinding way for Tesco to engage with their customers in a way that just wouldn’t have been possible even 5 years ago.

Tescodiets.com is a web application that builds a personal profile and diet plan based upon each user’s individual requirements. But it doesn’t stop there – it then creates a customised shopping list and you can click right through to the main Tesco website, purchase the items on your list online and have them sitting at your front door the very same day. After recording your progress on the plan each week, you are offered support from your personal mentor, sent emails with targeted special offers relating to your diet plan and provided with constantly updated tips and reports on your profile.

But what can the owner of a much smaller operation learn from this? Quite a lot actually - here goes:

1. Make it useful – Whatever you are doing online, you need to make it useful and interesting for your customers. This can involve big things like building apps for your customers to use that relate to your line of work or just something as something as simple as keeping a blog that provides useful tips and information for visitors.
2. Keep it up-to-date – Building a website without having the ability to keep it up-to-date and current is a big mistake – Google even take into consideration how often you update your site when indexing it so the more you update, the higher you go in the rankings.
3. Give something away for free – Again, it can be anything from free trials of your products or services right through information about upcoming product releases. Remember if you want to build a relationship with a customer and encourage them to come back to your site again then giving away insider info on your website is a great way of doing this.
4. Like a needle in a rather large haystack – We all know how vast the Internet is and that’s why just building a website is such a waste of time.  There are so many cost-effective tools available to businesses to drive traffic to their website including Search Engine Optimisation, link building, social networking and much more. You can bet your last penny that Tesco Diets will be utilising all of these tools but they also have a simple refer-a-friend scheme where the referrer gets an additional 4-weeks free – how cost-effective is that! But don’t think this is all about online; even if you are advertising in traditional media, the desired action should still be for that person to visit your website. Your website contains the additional information a prospect needs to build enough trust and credibility to purchase what you’re selling.
5. Process, process, process – What do all these big nationals and multi-nationals websites have in common? They’re all process driven. On tescodiets.com you can be sure they will have a CRM system that will capture all customer info on their website and depending on the action each customer has taken they will automatically assign certain actions to happen. This will include adding them to specific email campaign lists targeted to their needs and offering specially targeted promotions based on products they like. Tesco will also constantly review the performance of their site – making sure users are taking the desired action at each stage.  

To create a successful marketing function your business needs to do the same. Here's how it's done:

Think about what your website is actually designed to do

Create a process that drives traffic to your site

Engage your audience to take action

Constantly review and improve performance

This all sounds complicated and expensive. The truth is, it’s really not. As a business owner without the resources and money of a company like Tesco, you still have all the tools available to you to be able to do all of this and more. Technology is at the point now where your business really can afford to implement this kind of functionality without costing even as much as you’re already spending on marketing.

To conclude, you need to understand that just building a website is pointless. It takes much more than that to build up an effective marketing function using the web as your centre point. The good news though is that this will be highly effective in increasing sales and it is now an affordable and very feasible way for small to medium sized businesses to compete with the big players.