PlusOne – Marketing Musings

If you have excess end of season stock to clear, then SMS is a great way to generate interest, excitement and a sense of urgency about your product or service. Using your customer lists, you can send very timely limited offers for specific products – a great way to make people take action now!!

Offers can be in the form of discounts, multiple buy deals or a free items with purchase.

Today many businesses are using SMS in this way to successfully cater for end of season stock issues and to generate cash turnover. Continue Reading»

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One of the issues facing marketers when they are launching a new product is to come up with a name that people will identify with.  Over time these names can become synonymous with that brand and create a strong mental connection.

We have products like land rover rugged reliability, Toyota  for long lived reliability and Apple computers for innovation.

But what if someone more subtle product name associations?  There are certain products where product names are so subtle in their perception with shoppers that we may not take notice but still can influence us in our buying decisions.  Take for example toilet paper.

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In today’s business environment, tighter margins mean cost cutting across the board for many businesses. One of these areas is marketing and advertising.

As anyone in sales and advertising will tell you, when business gets slow, the last thing that should be reduced is the business’s capacity to maintain and grow its market share.

In fact during economic tough times provides the perfect time to be taking your product to market because everyone else has reduced their marketing and advertising budgets, making the overall effectiveness of your campaigns much better.

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I read this short post on “Finding Common Interests in Clients & Customers”

In it the author quite correctly makes the note of building rapport with customers (and potential customers.)

Rapport goes a long way in developing trust, and for many customers, trusting the person you deal with is often more important than price (which is why one major well know national retailer so often misses out on my business = new staff training needed guys!)

Read the article here

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The children’s school is hardly the place were one would go looking for customer service case studies, so when such a case study presents itself, it is an opportunity too good to pass up.

Some time ago we wrote about how Wayne McMurtrie, Principal of Emu Park State School in Queensland, kept parents informed about a class’s return trip from a camp. This camp was on an island off the Queensland coast and while they had travelled out in a relatively small boat, deteriorating weather conditions saw their return to shore brought forward.

Not only did Wayne use SMS to inform parents of the intention to leave earlier, but he also sent further messages explaining that due to sea conditions a bigger boat was going to be used for the return journey, but also asking if parents wanted to collect their child from the dock or taken back to school.

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While the use of SMS was widely noted in the USA electoral campaign, it will be interesting to see what use is made by political parties and indeed down to the candidate level here in Australia.

I have an expectation that Labor will be more proactive in the use of what is still regarded as fringe media, as well as using social media.

As the election pace picks up, there is the ideal opportunity to deliver targeted messages to the party faithful.

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The swift political dispatch of Kevin Rudd this week is a sobering example of what happens when the message being communicated is either not done correctly or even at all.

And like Kevin Rudd, in the commercial world heads do also roll if this is done very poorly.

Kevin Rudd’s mistake was he stopped communicating. This was especially so in regards to the mining super profits tax. Instead he took on a paternalistic approach and expected the Australian community to accept that what he wanted to do was good for us, but failed to properly explain the how or why.

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Finding the ideal hotel room in Australia or New Zealand has become easier with the launch of a new hotel booking website on the Australian market.

As well as making it easy to find the right place to stay, travelers also benefit as the site is free to use;  accommodationplus.com.au charges no booking fees and often no deposit was required to secure the booking.

AccommodationPlus team leader, Mr Matt Eliason, said the site featured a strongly user oriented design that provided several intuitive ways to find the ideal hotel room.

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SMS, or short message service, is a fast communication channel for businesses of all types that allows great opportunity for innovative marketing and communications.

SMS has become a mainstream means of communication, reaching consumers on their mobile phones.  SMS messaging has become an increasingly integral component of communicating customers who either buy your goods or make use of your services, plus for internal communications.

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Winning business is hard, no matter what industry you are in. But the legal fraternity can experience some unique issues when they deal in some specialised areas.

A legal firm using our SMS Central service has found that SMS provides a quick and cost effective way of maintaining the momentum of turning potential clients into new clients.

They do this by sending reminders about completion and return of forms that are needed to secure them as clients and so save the time and cost of sending a reminder letter and at less cost and staff time than phoning. Continue Reading»

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