When you work in marketing for a wonderfully diverse collection of clients as I do, every day is different – and yesterday was certainly more different than most!

I spent the afternoon at Blackpool Zoo where a client Michael Barr was launching his fabulous new book “How to invest better than the average primate”.

The book has already received some fabulous reviews from some industry experts, but we were keen to see exactly what some average primates would think of it – and as you can see they were pretty interested.

And with such fabulous photographs we are also now finding that the press are very interested – which just goes to show, however good your story is, a good picture always makes it better!

Michael is giving all the profits from his book to UNICEF and MAG International and just a couple of weeks after sales commenced he has already given them £1500. He is now in the second print run so I am sure the charities can expect a lot more over the coming weeks and months.
If you would like to learn more about Michael’s Book or buy a copy and help his charities please visit Michael Barr’s Website.

Last night’s High Street Dreams on BBC2 was a fabulous demonstration of how important a brand can be – even for a small business. It showed candle extraordinaire Jo Malone mentoring two small businesses, pushing them to identify the core values behind their brands, ensuring that these were clearly communicated by their logo and packaging. It wasn’t easy, even with top branding agencies on board, but by identifying and trying to stand true to their core values, two small businesses were able to gain initial distribution with Waitrose and Asda!

Hopefully anyone who has ever been on one of my training courses, or bought a Sharp New Business package would recognise some of the messages delivered by Jo Malone. I spend a lot of time explaining to clients just how important their brand is to business success.

What are the key features of a good logo?

•    It should be memorable – you want potential customers to recognise your brand next time they see it.
•    It should be distinctive – you don’t want people to confuse you with your competitor.
•    It should be descriptive – you want your brand to communicate as much about what you business does and why people should buy from you as it possible can.
•    It should save you money – if your brand says alot about your business – every time it is used it will be advertising on your behalf – and when you are paying for advertising you will need less space as your powerful logo will mean you have to explain less.

What should a small business consider when designing a logo?

•    Try and identify concisely – in a sentence or less what your business is all about (your proposition).
•    Pick a company name which reflects that proposition.
•    Develop a design which adds meaning to the proposition
•    Add a carefully developed strap line which explains more about your proposition.

A good logo will win you business and save you money year after year, so it really is worth spending some time getting it right from day one.

Websites are an extremely important part of the marketing strategy to almost all businesses in this day and age. The first thing we do with most new clients is look at their existing websites and either make recommendations to improve the website or recommend the development of a new site which is structured to provide the information that customers require – moving potential prospects through the buying process towards making a purchase with you.

We do however come across clients who see a good website as the be all and end all of forming a successful business, and 9 times our of 10 this is not going to be the case. If setting up a successful business was as easy as building a good website and sitting back and waiting for the sales to pour in, everybody would be in business and far more people would be successful at running their own businesses.

Having built a good, well structured website you should consider this the foundation of a successful marketing strategy. You now need to work proactively to drive people to your website, to pick up the phone, to visit your shop, to place an order, to recommend you, etc etc etc….

There are very many different ways of achieving this. Building and marketing to a database, optimisation of your website, online advertising, public relations, special offers and promotions, networking, keeping your site up to date and fresh, using social networking, developing and launching new products……. The list is endless and it will be different for every company. 

The important thing is that you don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your new website will be the begin all and end all of your marketing, and recognise that it is only a tool. That is really what Sharp marketing is all about – advising you on how best to grow your business.

If you would like to talk to us about how best to maximise your marketing strategy please give us a call – why not consider booking a Sharp New Business Consultation or Regular Marketing Mentoring to move your business forwards.

Sue Sharp

I recently attended a Master Class Training day for Search Engine Optimisations – SEO. The course was excellent and brought me up today in the extremely fast moving world of SEO. It is essential that professionals regularly invest time in following trends and updating SEO skills as things move so fast in this industry!
It was very gratifying to find that I was already very knowledgeable about a large proportion of the course, although I suppose this was not surprising judging on the excellent results we have been achieving for many of our clients recently, particularly focused on local Google searches.
There were however two areas of the course that I found particularly interesting. The first one was the advice about improving the performance in the search engines (particularly Google) for highly competitive markets where optimisation is problematic, by increasing the number of incoming links. We now have a number of tools available to identify which are the best links available to improve the performance of a specific site. We will be trialling these tools over the coming weeks and hope to be able to offer a new linking service in the near future to help improve the performance of difficult to optimise sites.
The second area of the course was looking at detailed strategies to integrate websites, blogs, Facebook, twitter and You Tube to improve a sites exposure and performance with search engines. Many of our clients are already beginning to benefit from these strategies and I will aim to bring you some results in the coming months. In the mean time if anyone would like advice on any element of SEO, please do not hesitate to give me a call.

As many of my current clients will know, it has taken me some time to develop and launch this new Sharp Marketing Website!

That is because I have found – just as our clients find – that developing and writing a website for your own business is very difficult. It can be hard to detach yourself from the day to day and be objective about what your business actually does, what it needs and how this should be presented to your customers. This I hope is one of the benefits Sharp Marketing brings to our clients when we build and develop a website for them.

We spend time in in-depth discussions about a clients business, to understand how they operate and what problems or obstacles they are encountering. Then we design and develop their websites to overcome these problems and make recommendations about other marketing activities which can work with the website, to increase the all round business generated for the company.

Well, finally I have completed my new site.  In 5 years of trading as Sharp Marketing I am delighted with how far we have come. I am particularly indebted to the wonderful testimonials that have been provided by many of my clients to help put this website together. My hope is that these will provide a valuable insight to potential customers about what it is like to work with Sharp Marketing and why we believe we are different to many other marketing agencies.
If you haven’t done already, please subscribe to this feed and sign up for our occasional marketing advice update on the website, over the coming months I will be aiming to share simple and valuable marketing advice with you, which could make a real difference to your business.