Budget marketing

With the week dominated by the Budget in the UK, this week's post is a case study on the marketing activities undertaken by our clients, Creaseys, a 10 partner firm of Accountants based in Tunbridge Wells, to leverage this important financial event.

The temperature always rises in Creaseys as Budget Day approaches! The desire to absorb the detail of the announcements and serve clients consumes the firm. Accountants don't often find themselves in the spotlight and when they do it is important to maximise the opportunity. We agreed the objectives for this year's Budget to be:

1. To consolidate and deepen relationships with existing clients


2. To maintain and grow the respect of peers


3. To start the communication process with identified new prospects


4. To create a platform for positive PR.

A range of activities was designed to deliver the objectives: not all of them original, but each shaped with the objectives in mind.

Budget commentary

With so much commentary available, there is a valid debate over whether it is necessary to produce a technical analysis for clients. We discussed this at length in Creaseys. Creaseys has many professional services contacts that refer complex cases to the firm and with maintaining the respect of peers being an agreed objective, we concluded that the overnight report was justified.

A 6,500 word analysis was sent by email to 1,900 clients, contacts and prospects by 9.00 the following morning and achieved a 30% read rate by close of business. The analysis has been uploaded to the website and produced in print PDF form for use in reception where a rolling PowerPoint loop is also on display.

In the spirit of inter-firm co-operation and to help spread the PR message more widely, the analysis was shared with a fellow IGAF member firm for distribution to its own clients.

We will be conducting a survey next week to get more detailed feedback on the analysis from all recipients.

Tax cards

Tax cards containing details of all the prevailing tax rates are a popular collateral item in many Accountancy firms. This year, Creaseys purchased tax cards from specialist suppliers, Mercia Group. Full artwork (rather than just a logo) was provided to Mercia Group to allow the cards to be made totally bespoke to the firm and the result is very good: a far more cost effective and time saving solution than Creaseys producing cards of its own.

The Tax cards will go to all clients, contacts and prospects over the next few months, piggy-backing other communications to spread the cost.

Budget Breakfast

The Budget Breakfast is the flagship event in the hospitality calendar and has been run by Creaseys for the past few years. The aim this year was to take the event and hence the brand to a new level.

The invitation and registration process started early and was run on-line for the first time. This allowed us to brand the event from the beginning and made the monitoring of responses much easier. The availability of real-time response information also allowed us to target the follow-up approach more accurately.

More than 240 guests attended the event. Local MP and opposition front-bencher, Greg Clark, gave a political perspective and the 3 tax partners covered the most important changes to personal taxation, business taxation, international tax and VAT. The MP's contribution added a worthwhile and entertaining dimension for the audience and will help with PR coverage.

Members of the local press were in attendance and press releases will be sent to all remaining local media next week.

Extensive use was made of branding at the venue. Large display graphics, branded stationery and innovative use of branding on existing installations were used to reinforce the visual brand at every opportunity: we even carefully selected the entrance and background music to create the right ambiance. A clean and contemporary slide template was used for all presentations and the content was closely managed to brand guidelines.

117 people completed a detailed exit questionnaire and we will be analysing the results next week. A prima-facie check shows the feedback to be very positive.

Limited success was achieved in getting new prospects to the event. We overlayed the email invitations with telemarketing to make personal contact with identified names and succeeded in getting 2 new prospects to attend. Nevertheless, the invitation process has established the first contact with many more and is something the firm can build on. There is a law which says that 7 contacts have to be made with a prospect to get to proposal stage and we now have 1 or 2 of these contacts under our belts.

Social Media

Introducing social media into the firm is part of the marketing plan for 2009 and the Budget provided a platform for a first foray. We used Twitter to feed information into the firm on the announcements (e.g. from the Big 4 accountancy firms, the news channels and ICAEW), but decided not to enter into the process of tweeting the announcements ourselves, primarily because Creaseys only had a handful of followers at the time. Followers are starting to accumulate and we will develop an information led 'tweeting' strategy going forward.

The Budget Breakfast was videoed, largely as an experiment, and gives us material to trial on the website and YouTube. We will also use the videos to support press releases. Despite it being experimental, we employed a professional filming service to maintain brand standards.

Results to date

From the Chancellor sitting down at 1.30pm on 22nd April to the last person leaving the Budget Breakfast at 11.30am on 24th April, we helped the firm achieve face-to-face contact with 240 clients and introducers; email engagement with another 570; first contact with 56 brand new prospects and a platform for off-line and on-line PR in the days and weeks ahead. A full debriefing will take place in the firm next week, when we will look at the results of the formal measures. The results and key-findings will be posted in a further update.

Services provided by The Marketing Eye
Campaign planning
Event management
New prospect identification
Telemarketing (outsourced)
Proof reading
E-mail design and distribution (distribution outsourced)
Design and artwork for all collateral
Press releases
Video production (outsourced)
Social media management

Links
Creaseys
Creaseys' Budget Analysis 2009
Follow Creaseys on Twitter
Mercia Group
The rule of 7

Segmentation - divide and conquer

We will shortly be starting a segmentation project for one our clients.

Locked inside the firm's client records will be a wealth of information about its clients' needs and how to make them more profitable. Tapped strategically, this information should generate enormous value for the firm.

Turning the theory into practice will be a challenge. We agreed the value of the approach with the firm at the end of last year and now need to maintain the momentum through to implementation.

To put the programme into operation, we will need to rank the clients according to existing and potential profitability, group them and then investigate in detail the needs and behaviours of each segment.

Segmenting and analysing the data will be one thing: changing the core skills and behaviours of the staff to make best use of the emerging knowledge about each segment's needs and profitability will be another. Getting the information and the organisation to work together in this way will be the key to the success or failure of this initiative.

We are prepared for a long journey, but hope it will turn into a successful and useful case study. Look out for reports on progress in future posts.

Designed to Care

Our client, Designed to Care, launched this week.

Designed to Care, the brainchild of Keith and Natalie Burrows, designs and retails clothing that is specially fabricated for people with limited mobility or who are in need of assistance with dressing.

Natalie identified the gap in the market when her elderly grandmother was in care. Maintaining dignity while dressing was extremely difficult to do with conventional clothing and while Natalie was able to find some suppliers of adapted clothing in the US, the alternatives in the UK where drab and few.

Designed to Care has been established with a mission to provide a range of attractive, well made clothing that makes dressing easier for the individual, their relatives and their carers.

The Marketing Eye was commissioned to develop the corporate identity for Designed to Care and create the first set of marketing materials. We have also been on hand to advise on launch marketing. Keith and Natalie have used their own IT skills to develop the website, using open source e-commerce software. You can see the results at www.designedtocare.co.uk

The launch campaign involves outbound telemarketing and brochure distribution to nursing homes and care homes around the UK. This is coupled with press releases in collaboration with Age Concern, the charity to which 5% of all sales are being donated.

The world might find itself in an uncertain place at the present time, but no matter what happens, one thing is guaranteed: we are all getting older every day. Sadly, the prevelance of delibitating conditions such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons Disease also seems to be on the increase. To identify an under-served niche market with significant growth potential sounds like smart thinking and we will be watching progress with interest.

Please visit the website and spread the word if you have relatives in need of assistance with their dressing or know of others in a similar position.

Congratulations Ultissimo!

Congratulation to our clients Ultissimo who have just won the 5 star award for 'Best redevelopment Italy 2008' for their property development at Rancale in northern Umbria. The European Property Awards are run by CNBC in conjunction with the Daily Mail and are a prestigious accolade in the industry.

We can testify from first-hand experience that the design and standard of craftsmanship at Rancale is absolutely first rate. The development now goes on to compete in the international awards in Florida. We will all have our fingers crossed for the team!

As the Ultissimo success proves, awards are an excellent component of any marketing strategy. The submission process can sometimes be lengthy, but the rewards are well worth it if you win. Not only do they provide a great platform for PR, but they also offer another reason for customers to choose one business over another. We understand the celebrations went on long into the night, proving that winning awards gives a great boost to morale as well!

Signature Safaris

We are proud of all the work we do here at The Marketing Eye, but every now and again a job comes along that gets everybody even more motivated and engaged than normal. This is certainly the case with Signature Safaris and we are delighted to announce the launch of its new website today.


Simon Lacey, the Managing Director, contacted us at the beginning of the year following a referral by Sussex Enterprise. We were interested and delighted that Simon took the precaution of telephoning some of our clients before getting in touch with us and, fortunately, they all said the right things!

When Simon contacted us, the business was trading as Diplomatic Travel and had been so for 20 years or more. There were two main strings to the business: fully inclusive tours to Southern Africa and a jazz tour to New Orleans. The jazz-tour side of the business was steadily recovering from the disaster of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago, but it was the safari side of the business that Simon recognised he needed to grow.

Our first task was to help Simon with a new name and identity. The business had moved on its offering and yet the brand and the identity still reflected the business of 20 years ago. Brand development is a process that we at The Marketing Eye feel we understand very well and the starting point is always to identify and understand the target market. We identified 4 customers types:

• Trendy traveller (holidays as a status symbol; follows fashion; brand aware)


• Once in a lifetime (outside of target group, invests everything to join once)


• Adventure seeker (seeks the thrill of doing something outside of the norm)


• Intense nature lover (travels extensively to see nature first-hand)

The main targets for our client were agreed as the 'trendy traveller' and the softer 'adventure seeker'. Typically these are brand-conscious, professional couples in their early to mid 40’s, with dual income, with or without children, an executive lifestyle and an appetite for 3 or more holidays a year.

In a highly competitive market, in which it is difficult to identify a true USP, the essence of the Diplomatic Travel business lay in the personal service provided by Simon and his small team. They all have high professional standards, true expertise (they wouldn’t offer to organise a trip to a part of the world that they didn’t know intimately) and a true sense of concern for the client.

Our challenge was to create a brand that met the needs of the target audience, portrayed the intimate, caring side of the business and yet positioned it to compete with the much larger travel operators.

After a thorough process (and two or three false starts) we settled on the name Signature Safaris. Signature Safaris was felt to communicate the commitment to use all available knowledge, experience and contacts to construct a holiday that was unique and truly tailor-made to the client’s exact requirements. The holiday would define both the company and the client. The strap-line 'quality beyond imagination' and the remaining elements of the identity followed shortly thereafter.

The primary execution has been the new website: an attractive, easy to navigate and information rich site that has turned into a labour of love for all of us over the past few months. We still have a few steps to go to make it even better, but we can't help share it with everybody now. Take a look, enjoy and dream! Hey, don't stop there...book!

Building the site is, of course, only the beginning of the process and we hope to work with Simon and his team long into the future to help the business grow.

Thank you, Simon, for commissioning the site and pushing all of us here at The Marketing Eye to give of our very best. We hope that it brings you great success.

Tasty! - Effective use of direct marketing

Our latest campaign has just landed on the doorsteps of 10,000 homes in East Sussex. DineAsia is a Thai and Indian fusion restaurant in our local village of Nutley. We don't normally target restaurants, but we made an exception on this occasion, not only because it's our local eatery, but because we can tell that DineAsia is going places. As the first restaurant becomes established, more are being planned and opened in Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire: we predict that Dine Asia will soon be a valuable chain.

The campaign is the first in a series and announces that the restaurant is open. Despite being open for nearly a year, there is still a lack of wide-scale awareness that this is the case. To tempt people to try the restaurant, we have distributed the take-away menu and included an offer of a free bottle of wine on orders over £25. A coupon is incorporated, which allows data to be collected for future marketing.

We recommended a door-drop as the most effective means of communication as we knew it would allow us to put the name and the menu physically through every door in the catchment area. By going for a 'solus' distribution, we have been able to ensure that our material is uncluttered by any other flyers or leaflets. This is a more expensive, but more effective method of distribution than a bundled delivery or inserts into newspapers.

With items coming through the door often being quickly discarded as junk, quality is the key to cut through and retention; it is also particularly important with this client to position the venue correctly and not have it bracketed as 'just another Indian restaurant'. We, therefore, devised an innovative and contemporary looking wallet into which the menu and the offer flyer is inserted. We also arranged for the pack to be poly-wrapped. All in all, it is a high-quality communication that we hope people will read and keep.

Ahmed told us last night that the first coupons are already coming back and we'll report on the full results in later posts.

What next? Now our thoughts are turning to building the momentum. A Christmas campaign in press and on radio is planned and we will also be starting email marketing.

Naturally, we've kept a few of the wine offer flyers in the office - purely for portfolio purposes of course.

Making waves with marketing

Neil has been to the Southampton Boatshow this week where he caught up with old colleagues from Lombard. Here are his thoughts:

Despite the credit crunch, it was good to see a good number of people at the show and to find former colleagues in fine form. The Marine business was always one of my favourite businesses to market.

From a very early stage, we agreed that our goal should be to make Lombard the best recognised and best understood brand in the marine finance market place. This, we believed, was the only way to make sure that Lombard had first choice of every piece of business that was going.

A goal of this nature was no soft target. At the time, the market for Marine Finance was dominated by Bank of Scotland. Bank of Scotland had superior relationships with the boat dealers and heavily outspent Lombard on promotional activity. Barclays was also active.

Lombard didn't have the budget to match Bank of Scotland on spending, so we had to be more strategic in our approach. Over a period of 3 years, we integrated PR with advertising, ensured a commanding presence at the London and Southampton boatshows, developed a leading website and devised some creative sponsorships, including working with round-the-world yachtsman, Sir Robin Knox Johnston.

The marketing effort supported the sales team, which worked hard to nurture the dealer relationships and also to get more introduced business from parent bank, The Royal Bank of Scotland. The product set and the brand were extended to support an entry into the Superyachts market and better products were developed for the Offshore opportunities.

The strategy has clearly paid off. At this weeks show, Bank of Scotland had reduced its presence to a shared space on one of its remaining dealer's stands and Barclays looked very corporate with what appeared to be an adapted general purpose show set-up. Of course, Bank of Scotland has its own particular problems at this time, but Lombard had it on the run in the marine market long before the current difficulties set in.

So, what do we learn out of this?

Be number one in your chosen market: If you are going to be successful in a B2C business, be number one in your chosen market. This doesn't mean you have to have a massive above-the-line budget, the trick is to define your market as tightly as possible. The Marine market, as opposed to the finance market in general, is a clearly identifiable niche. The customers cluster around the two main boat shows and a small number of publications making reaching them relatively easy and cost effective.

Cover all routes to market: We recognised that the market not only had a direct component, but a valuable and influential intermediary network in the dealerships. Equal attention was paid to both segments and distinct strategies were devised for each. We also covered the off-line and on-line channels to provide customers with a choice of how they dealt with us.

Segment the customer base & talk to the customer appropriately: We established through research that there were a number of customer types - from the passionate sailor who spent his life and every last penny afloat, to the successful entrepreneur who saw the boat as a symbol of achievement. We started to talk to each segment differently, acknowledging their different needs and motivations.

Ensure a strong and differentiated brand identity: We developed a brand identity that stood out from the crowd using visuals and copy that empathised with the target audience. We didn't allow the brand to stand still and kept challenging ourselves to evolve it.

Be a specialist: The Marine market likes to deal with people that it sees as 'one of them'. We showed that we were specialist in the market and had real expertise by employing people with a passion for boats. We produced publications on buying and owning a boat and provided expert commentary through PR.

Align marketing and sales: Too often, Marketing and Sales retreat into silos, neither acknowledging or understanding the other. At Lombard we were able to solve this. The sales team was buoyed by a marketing effort that it saw to be working: marketing thrived on the support of a sales team that turned its campaigns into results. The strategy was jointly owned and jointly delivered.

All in all this is a marketing success story that proves that theory combined with creativity and commercial acumen gives rise to competitive advantage and tangible results.

Good luck guys, may you go from strength to strength: it was a pleasure working with you.

Neil

La Dolce Vita

We are just back from Italy, where we have been visiting our clients Ultissimo and viewing 2 of their property developments in Umbria.

Ultissimo is the brain child of Paul Belcher and Steven and Karen White. Typically they find and renovate rural buildings that have fallen into disrepair. The buildings are lovingly transformed into 6-8 extremely stylish second homes or holiday villas, which are then sold, predominantly to the UK market.

The renovations are all meticulously carried out and it is very clear that Steve and Karen, the principles behind the renovation activity, leave a lot of themselves in each project. They take their responsibilities to the community and the local environment very seriously and treat each development as a legacy to the country that they love so much.

Most of the original features of a property are retained, sometimes with surprisingly rewarding results. At San Vittorino, near Gubbio, they uncovered a 14th Century fresco on the wall of an abandoned chapel. This now forms the stunningly original centre-piece of the bedroom in one of the properties.

We have been fortunate to work with Ultissimo since its formation in 2007 and have watched it quickly grow into a successful business. Regular reviews appear in the property pages of the national press and the development at Rancale, nr Umbertide, was a 2008 Award Winner in the CNBC European Property Awards.

Jo, our creative director, is currently out with the clients visiting 2 new projects in the Lake Como area. We'll post her report as soon as she gets back.

We'll put some fun into the numbers

We'll start this adventure into blogging with some good news and a little bit of trumpet blowing by us at The Marketing Eye.

Tunbridge Wells chartered accountants, Creaseys - one of the top 100 firms in the UK - have appointed us to provide strategic marketing support on an ongoing basis.

The move is another step in Creaseys' strategy to position itself as the leading accountancy practice for businesses and high net-worth individuals in the South East. We are naturally delighted to be appointed and look forward to getting stuck into the task.

One of the things we are going to do is introduce Creaseys to the delights of blogging and other social media to make people more aware of the astonishing depth of resources that exist at the practice. Several of the partners have publications to their name - ideal material for blogs and Squidoo.

The greater focus on marketing at a successful business like Creaseys underlines how every business needs to think about how it is going to compete in the long term and have a proper marketing strategy and plan.

We are pleased to say that we are seeing a rise in the number of enquiries here at The Marketing Eye despite the slow-down in the economy - indeed, we have now decided we need to recruit. The attitude this time seems to be one of not waiting to be hit by a recession, but to improve efficiency and go out and compete for every piece of business that is going - thank goodness for that.