My business coach always used to say to me, “Do you want to be good or look good?”
Let me explain: most businesses like to look good, to have a big fancy office in the right location and have lots of staff to add to the veneer of success. You get the picture! But when it comes to marketing and design, they then want to get it done on the cheap. The prevailing sentiment is all too often, “yeah let’s find someone in Outer Mongolia or badger a local agency to do it on the cheap”. Not a good look!
This seems like madness when companies spend so much on rents but choose to squander money on cheap marketing rather than investing in creative ways to stand out. Giving quality and substance beyond the veneer is essential. Like hiring a decent industry photographer, for example, to bring your company image to life and improve overall brand image. This then converts into more sales and more money coming in. What is it that they say about first impressions?
Businesses need to keep customers loyal
We love brands out here: we love spending money on them too, but it’s truly baffling why we don’t seem so invested in spending on our own brands to stand out. It baffles me further that a lot of business don’t even want to do any marketing, find fun ways to engage with their customers and keep them loyal to their brand. A lot of businesses we come across don’t even keep good data on their customers! Instead, the constant need to find new ones as they probably don’t even remember the name of the last few customers, or only a phone number if that.
Over this past year, Plug has invested in photoshoots, with a renowned industry photographer, as part of our storytelling. This might seem nuts to some, but for 15 years we’ve been a very successful agency going strong and growing nicely year by year – a result of getting the marketing right.
Nothing catches the eye of a viewer more effectively than a photograph. People are trained to look for photographs in their day-to-day lives. So sharing an attention-grabbing photograph with your customer is the smartest thing you could do to market your business. Putting out an image can perform some major tasks that include catching a prospective customer’s eye, enhancing the details of your product or service, appealing to the customer to buy or just putting out in public the whole idea of your company.
While photography plays a major role in marketing, we also send out thank you cards to clients, calling cards to the ones we want to attract, calendars to sit on their desk, regular eblasts and keep a dream list of potential people to work with. All little tactics to stand out from the competitors.
In the workshops where I teach, ‘How to grow your business’, I remind people it’s not hard out here to stand out. I demonstrate easy, affordable and practical ways to grow your business by being memorable. The problem in being good is the effort and hard work. The fact is, growing a business is hard work – and not many business owners can do it.
The reward for our hard work, is that Plug is recognised for its retro military vibe – and the title ‘Brand Commander’ is well-remembered. I always say to clients, “it’s not just about looking good, it’s about being good, putting your money on real muscle – on real marketing.”
Having been in the region for nearly 20 years – 15 years as Brand Commander, there is still a ‘keeping up with jones’ mentality, silently judging where people live, how they live, how they ‘look’, where they go out at the weekends, etc. We even had a client who couldn’t believe I took the metro to work each morning and enjoy doing so. In his mind, it didn’t ‘look’ good. Can’t help wondering if he noticed – I am good!
Lucy Bradley, Brand Commander at Plug Operation Design.
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