“I was sure it was a photo”

It was not long ago when an  artist impression of a property that you wanted to market, was drawn by hand with pen and colour wash.

Today a  property visualisation is usually an architectural computer generated image ( CGI ) showing a very accurate 3D image of what the final project will look like before it is built. It can be blended with images of people or lifelike plants to appear almost indistinguishable from a real photo.

Once the model is built it can be shown from any angle and can be represented as daylight or at illuminated at night time, for a more luxurious feel. Alterations on a CGI can also be made easily at any stage if the spec changes..

It pays to use a creative company that has experience in property marketing to devise a name that reflects the project, and to design the brand identity to match. Brochures printed on heavy card with high end luxury finishes such as embossing, cut outs , foil finishes or gloss highlights to best present your high resolution visualisations, can do wonders to help your your sales, and can even replace the need for creating a fully furnished show flat.
One of VMAL’s early projects in 2006 was a gated luxury development of houses in Kenya built for very security conscious wealthy foreigners. The CGI of the houses were very accurate, complete with a Porsche in the driveway. VMAL created branding of the project, based on the indigenous maple trees in the area and designed a brochure containing the CGI’s, high end fittings and finishes and an intuitive local map highlighting landmarks of interest. The client sold most of the properties using the marketing material before they were built.

Nowadays with technology advancing and many years of design experience, the creative team at VMAL produce CGI images that can transport the client right into the living room of the project with CGI images that even more realistic. Interior rooms can be produced with soft furnishings and drapes appearing as lifelike as if the client has just opened them to let in the breeze. CGI techniques can be created as a video, to bring the project more to life, enabling prospective clients and investors to appreciate the quality and scope of the project in the comfort of their own armchairs.

VMAL’s goal has always been to create world class quality designs at a price that is not one of the significant project costs, but actually plays a disproportionate role in improving the products sale value.

VMAL have created projects for estate agents including well known ones such as Foxtons who often take on the marketing of a project, but they also deal with the project owners directly to further save on costs.

It’s a new year, you have a new business idea, identified your own business niche, researched your market and are all geared up to get clients.

But where do you begin?

There are many prospective users of your product or service and you have to target as many of them as possible .Of those users, only a percentage will be your eventual clients. That is why a “sales funnel” is shaped as a funnel wider at the top and shorter at the bottom.

If you have the luxury of time you should try and fill the funnel or “pipeline” with as many viable marketing methods as possible and chart carefully which methods work for you and which don’t.

Traditional methods include direct mail, email marketing, television, radio, billboard or newspaper advertising and cold calling, Some methods will work for your industry or your personality and other will not. Newer methods include pay per click advertising and affiliate marketing.

Firstly allow me to paint a bleak picture: Statistics show that 44% of  direct mail is never opened. 91% of users unsubscribe from emails they previously opted in to. Radio, billboard and newspaper advertising generally helps for general awareness to pave the way for other more direct marketing methods but do not create sales.

Cold calling through a list of leads, can a soul destroying exercise  especially as more often than not you will get through to the PA who’s main role is to filter out cold callers!

So what does work?

If you approach most successful business people you will often hear that their clients were via referrals, networking, and word of mouth. That sounds simple so why don’t you have all the clients you need?

The answer is;  you are busy servicing your clients and dealing with the day to day running of the business, there are simply not enough hours in the day to do sales, besides that, most marketing methods are costly. In short the problem is time and money!

Allow me to share some ideas that are more effective use of your time and money.

Instead of cold calling try warm calling. Warm calling is calling someone you have met before or have been introduced to. Spend more effort on getting introductions from existing clients or people you know and you can spend less time more productively targeting fewer but better quality leads.

Is your website working for you? Do not forget that in this day and age your website is one of your most valuable marketing tools and the textual content rather than the imagery is what helps your Search engine rankings.

Anyone can create a website today using free platforms such as Wix, Weebly or Squarespace but for the right impression you might be better off getting a professionally designed website.

Besides search engine ranking which some of these free platforms do not fare well on, just the look and feel of your website can project a professional image or otherwise and effect a sale. It is one of the first thing prospective clients look up if they want to find out about you and your company. A poorly constructed website might even into question the validity of your company. They might be thinking is this company genuine or does it even exist.

A useful method of turning your website into a lead generator is by providing downloadable Whitepapers, informational videos or infographics about your field . Request that the user provides his email and name before he can download. That way you have captured  leads who you can now approach as a semi warm call, with the introduction ” I saw that you downloaded a whitepaper from our website…”

Create a blog on your website. Authoring articles online or on your website that are useful to your users can establish you as a knowledgeable individual in your field and what this does is provide added value and improve client loyalty. Articles published on your website can also improve Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your site.

Other methods of getting introductions is networking using Linkedin. Linkedin used to be a fairly static platform without too much interaction but they have recently changed its modus operandi and are now much more like Facebook. Build up your connections and then post steady updates. If your posts are interesting, you can get much more engagement than in the past and a greater reach amongst professional people who you want to target.

Happy Hanukkah from us VMAL @vmalcreative .

Image taken at temple fortune’s favourite cafe “BREAD”  @breadbakery_official

They happen to be our clients and downstairs to our offices!

Last week a boy in a religious Jewish London school was asked by an Ofsted inspector “What is Xmas?” The inspector who was testing the schools ability to teach pluralism, got an unexpected answer ” it’s the time to get deals!”

The period leading up to the new year is traditionally the shopping season where many British shoppers risk frostbite, to stand in Long lines for that special deal. That has become greatly eroded by an import from the US – “Black Friday”. Why it is black, I am not sure, but it is all about online deals.

This year online fashion website Asos overtook Marks & Spencer in market value terms for the first time despite not having a single store to its name.

M&S has said it will close 30 stores, while a further 45 are being downsized or converted into food-only outlets. Mothercare, for example, plans to halve the size of its 150-store UK chain after more than 40% of its sales shifted online.

If any of us are considering how we should market our product or service, and we look at the decline of the high street, the web route seems a more attractive proposition against opening a physical store.

Many entrepreneurs are discovering that they don’t need to based in city centres to run their business and they can get their recognition and build their customer base via online channels too.

But on the flip side there is an interesting new development taking place,  and that is online companies setting up physical stores.

The real boost to the trend occurred last November, when Amazon the premier online marketplace, opened its first physical location. Amazon’s bookstore in Seattle, USA, may look like a simple store, but it is much more than that: it is a very meaningful first step into the omni-channel for the world’s largest online retailer.

Omni-channel is similar to Multichannel. Multichannel meaning having both physical and online stores and Omnichannel is where you make sure that the brand design and experience is the same in-store and online so that each compliment the other.

Embracing the Omnichannel concept is particularly important in today’s day and age where many shoppers go to the high street to see and feel products and then go online to purchase it.

The big bugbear of owners of stores on the high street is that they are losing ground to the online retailers. Someone might come into your store and leave without purchasing anything only to purchase it on Ebay or Amazon.

However If you can help the client buy into your brand, you are more likely to get them to purchase from you. There are many ways of making the customer shopping in-store aware of the online store. One way is giving them a coupon to an “online only” deal.

Having a Click & Collect service  (buying online and picking up in store) is another prime example of an Omnichannel marketing method.

The luxury American design house “Coach” has more then 1000 directly owned and operated stores worldwide. They adopted the Omnichannel approach quite early on, and the technology allows the online shopper to see which version or colour product is available at which store location and you can either purchase the item or pick it up at the store 2 hours later. After the purchase a personalised email will be sent from the store to the customer highlighting the product that they have just bought and offering a coupon on their next purchase. The buyer would have signed up to the email newsletter so he or she will get periodic offers and the brand will stay in the buyers mind.

Here in the UK, the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s bought Argos last year for £1.4bn and now replicates the Argos model of click and collect online with and super-fast delivery in its own stores.

Nowadays, the whole retail landscape is changing and the importance of having a physical store rather than just online, is more than just to be able to touch and hold the product, it is also about reinforcing brand recognition so that the buyer will in time become a loyal client.

A client who consulted me about how to revive his once profitable business, revealed to me that he had the following dilemma. He had recently spent money on a new more prestigious advertising campaign that was part digital and part print advertising, in order to pitch to the right type of client. The result was not what he had expected because instead of getting a higher value client, he was still getting the same type of client who did not appreciate what he was offering. It also seemed to him that it is often the same client who negotiates the lowest possible price that also tries to squeeze the most they can from the sale and not give him repeat business. The answer I gave him was that the success of the campaign lies in conveying right message. To create a relevant message one has to appreciate an important marketing concept. There exists two types of clients: A transaction client which means the client is only interested in the transaction at hand. They will always look at the price tag and their biggest fear is paying more then they want to pay, or more than someone else paid. They have the time to shop around for the best price because they are often not in the position to pay more money, and consequently their time is not worth enough. They usually do their own research and do not value your opinion. They want a product not a service, and their main goal is getting the best price. The other type is a relational client. The relational client is interested in building a relationship based on trust. He values time and appreciates the value of a marketing expert who will spend the time to research the best option for them. The marketing pitch that will turn the greater profit is one that is tailored to the relational client. If you can offer a superior service or a time saving device that others cannot offer for less money, then the rational client will appreciate that and purchase your product or service at a premium without quibbling. He knows that it will save him time and his time is more valuable than to be spent looking for the same thing cheaper elsewhere. They consider time spent shopping elsewhere as part of the purchase price.
 

The ideal type of marketing effort therefore is geared towards creating relationships. Reward and loyalty programs are relational type of marketing avenues. The quality of the presentation of your store or online presence is much more important when it comes to attracting the relational buyer as they will be looking for quality and trust. As Albert Einstein purportedly said “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”

Research shows that on average half of the shoppers will be transactional and the other half relational so do not discard the transactional shoppers. There exist ways to gain loyalty from them too. Most business people do not realise that marketing can continue after a sale. If you follow up with a client with things like satisfaction surveys or offers you can gain loyalty from all types of shoppers.

It is surprising how many reward programs that offer very little in monetary value can sway a shopper to buy in one supermarket over another simply because they have the supermarkets loyalty card.

Fundraising is to a charity what sales is to a business, and it relies on the same principle, namely; relationship building.

Harvey McKinnon a fundraising expert said “Donor loyalty is not about the donor being loyal to you, it is you being loyal to the donor”. What this means is that just like a business needs to service its customers and live up to their expectations, so too a charity needs to keep their supporters apprised of the organisations activities and goals.

With Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year;  not far off, many traditional established Jewish charities in the UK will be preparing to send out appeal letters. 

Charities sometimes send periodic ones at other times to keep the cause in their donors mind. A useful idea is to connect an appeal to current topics. For example when terror attacks were happening in France and French people were making Aliya en-mass, we created marketing collateral for some Israel based education charities with messages that evoked those events. 
Another established form of fundraising are charity dinners, and it is an open secret that the dinners are an excuse to create a brochure which is where most of the funds come in from. 
More recently, as people are getting solicited for funds via mail, newspaper advertisements and emails, the organisations need to raise their head above the noise and become more creative. 

A new innovative type of fundraising initiative has emerged that offers prospective donors a luxury or fun challenge experience and proceeds go the charity.  There are bike-a-thons, car rallies or whiskey trials where they treat participants to luxury stays with good food as well as a form of challenge . Some are happy to fundraise if the incentive is a challenge with no pampering such as Marathons and mud filled obstacle courses and the more extreme ice bucket challenge.

With many charities scratching their heads for new fundraising initiatives, let us explore some ingredients for fundraising that could help sow some ideas:
We have discussed forms of challenges but it is not a simple as adding a-thon at the end of a new idea. As with as business marketing; all of the creative ideas that we have discussed have to be relevant and tailored to the type of clientele the tzedakah is pitching to. The type of fundraising that is relevant to one demographic with not work for another. 
One thing most of the above ideas they have in common is the use of people power. Their is no better way to fundraise than to recruit people to your cause who will fundraise for you.
Another important factor in fundraising is setting goals. Kef Bikathon, that I was happily part of, for the past 3 years, have upped their goal year by year and that has become part of the challenge that the participants have taken upon as part of the challenge with the competitiveness fuelling a positive will to generate more money for the cause.

Goals in fundraising mean more than just the final figure than the charity is aiming for, it is something that each fundraiser needs to be set day by day and week by week. That rule applies equally in business, In order to achieve results you need to define goals. 

There was a famous Scottish / American industrialist called Andrew Carnegie who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. He was also one of the most important philanthropists of his era.

He hired a consultant to help him improve his workforce and the consultant suggested measurable goals to work towards, Andrew told him to work at it for a month and if he achieves results he will pay him twenty five thousand dollars. In those days that was no small fortune and the end of the month Andrew paid up after seeing the power of goal setting drastically improving his results.

As a final note, realise the value of long term relationships by cultivate long term relationships with the donors and the fundraisers. Educate them about the cause, to give them an emotional attachment to it. A nice touch is to send branded gifts before or after events as a token of appreciations and to nurture them to become ambassadors for the charity.

If you want to refer to someone misrepresenting or putting down their own product, there is a phrase used in the jewellery trade and beyond; it is ” doing a Ratner “The story of Gerald Ratner’s fall from grace is a famous one. He jokingly denigrated two of the company’s products and told his audience that his stores’ earrings were “cheaper than an M&S sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long”. This faux-pas was enough to disturb consumer confidence and bring down his jewellery company, wiping five hundred million pounds off the value of the once global leading jeweller. Gerald ratner learnt his lesson and aside from building a smaller but thriving online jewellery business called “Gerald Online” from the ashes of Ratners , he also gives motivational talks on what he has learnt

After the scale of that fiasco that took place in 1991, one would have thought that others would learn from this. Well, here are some examples of similar stories that took place after this one.

Asked in an interview in 2001 to clarify the target market for the Topman clothing chain, the firm’s brand director, David Shepherd, replied: “Hooligans or whatever.” He went on: “Very few of our customers have to wear suits for work. They’ll be for his first interview or first court case.”

The company later suggested that the word “hooligan” would not be seen as an insult among its customers!

David Sheppard probably did not appreciate that disparaging your customers is as bad for your products as putting down your product.

Another more recent example of a company owner who thought using humour would help their popularity was an owner of a coffee shop in North Carolina. They put a sign outside the store that said “Small coffee” – $5, “Small coffee, please” – $3, “Hello, one small coffee please” – $1.75. It was deemed quite clever and attracted quite a bit of media attention. One news outlet wrote “You’ll always be rewarded for good behavior, and now in some places, you might even save a little bit of cash.” Ultimately however it reflected badly on the coffee shop’s owner and insulted the patrons. No one wants to be told how to behave by their peers never mind by the coffee shop they frequent. If you think about it you will realise that it is quite small business thinking. No large chain such as Starbucks would consider this type of message.

The effect of saying what you don’t want your customers to hear is something that can be learned from recent politics. Theresa May’s recent drastic drop in the polls was caused by her revealing a policy to reduce social care. This was attempt to be honest, but was uncalled for, especially so close to the election that she herself called. She did backtrack but ever since that statement her popularity has continued to slide.

In the meanwhile Labour carried on doing what most politicians do and just continued making many empty promises that were lapped up by the masses.