Whether you believe we are coming out of the recession or not, one thing is certain,marketing to your existing customers is still the easiest way to get more business.

Too often businesses plough large sums of money into trying to attract new customers at the expense of their current customers. They forget, or worse don’t realise, that they already have a ready supply of customers who would happily buy again, if only they were asked.

And it’s not hard to do… read the rest of the article on our website

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You will be working through the stages of identifying your:

• target market,
• strengths,
• fear factors,
• unique selling points,

and turning this into a core statement that your present and potential customers will resonate perfectly with.

Workshop Aim:

The aim is that you leave the workshop with a clear picture of who your target market is, based on:

• profiling your best customers,
• what it is that drives that customer to seek a solution (their fears),
• how your company can solve the customers’ problem better than your competitors (your strengths)
• and how best to communicate this to them.

Knowing this will enable your business to better brief creative, marketing and sales staff, providing them with the information they need to better represent your business.

We’ve all attended seminars where we’ve left enthused, only to loose momentum once we get back to work and caught up in everyday business. For this reason we’ve designed this workshop so your active participation ensures you develop new insights into your business, and you leave with something practical and relevant to take back and use immediately.

Bonus Offer

Register before the end of August and you will receive one hour free consultation after the seminar from one of the presenters of your choice worth $120.00 +GST
Register Online

The Presenters:

The Workshop will be lead by Dave Sewell, a business development specialist and retail trainer with a genuine empathy for small business owners.

Using a combination of principals learnt and experience gained in retail and small business ownership over the last twenty years, Dave has designed this unique workshop in response to two of the biggest challenges that businesses face; identifying and understanding their core business strengths and target market.

Dave will be supported by Wendy Riley-Biddle, owner and principal designer at Hot Pyjama Productions, a marketing communications company.

Wendy has twenty years experience in advertising and marketing, culminating in 10 running her own business. She will be taking you through the process of identifying the right channels for communicating your core strengths to ensure it effectively reaches your target market

When, Where and How Much?

When: 21st September 2010, 8:30 – 12.00 noon
Where: The Running Bull Bar, Cnr Riccarton Road and Deans Ave, Christchurch.
Availability: There are only 15 spaces, get in quick!
Parking: Available behind the building, off Deans Ave.
Cost: $149.00 + GST

How to Register?

Register online to secure your spot or call Wendy at Hot Pyjama Productions on (03) 374 9929.

Note: Due to the limited spaces available in the workshop there will be no refunds for those cancelling within 14 days of the workshop.

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Then it is time to re-think your strategy!

Hot Pyjama Productions is offering you a FREE no obligation 45 minute ‘Think Tank’ to help get your marketing out of the doldrums.

Come and join us at Hot PJ HQ for a free flowing of ideas on how to best reach your target audience and tap into the many years of marketing, sales and design knowledge we have at Hot PJ.

How to identify the best communication methods for your goals

Because we don’t favour any one particular channel (we are not commission agents for anyone), we take an objective and pragmatic approach. Our interest lies in ensuring the solution we assist you with meets your goals, and is measurable.

Perhaps you have an idea in mind but aren’t sure if it has legs?

Talking it over with someone outside your business who has extensive marketing and design knowledge can help to focus your thinking.

You don’t get much for free these days. If you have a marketing dilemma or hurdle you don’t know how to get over, take advantage of our free 45 minute ‘think tank’, after all, two heads is better than one!

To make a time contact Abbie on (03) 374 9929 or book online

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Briefly, this is how an online sale works when buying product. Purchasing a service wouldn’t usually have the delivery component, but can roughly follow the same process:

1. Shopper selects product for purchase and it goes into a virtual shopping cart.
2. When they’ve finished, shopper proceeds to ‘check out’ where they enter their address details or log-in if they have an account with the seller (which automates this process).
3. ‘Check out’ recalculates purchase costs adding in shipping and any relevant taxes.
4. Shopper is taken to a secure ‘gateway’ to enter in their credit card details. Most often this is a third party provider who charges a fee per transaction (based on a percentage). They will also usually charge a fee to set up this facility for the site, and an ongoing fee for providing this service (secure hosting, certificate, etc).
5. The shopper is sent confirmation that their payment has gone through and a copy of the order via email. The seller receives the payment into their bank account and delivers the product to the shopper.

Scenario One:

The above process, because it interfaces with a bank and a gateway payment system, will require the seller to become a credit card merchant with their bank. There will be fees paid to both the bank and the gateway provider for their services; usually a one-off set up fee, a percentage per transaction, and any ongoing service fees. This means the ticket is clipped twice before the seller gets their money.

The seller will also need to pay for the system to be integrated, the costs of which will vary depending on which solutions are being used. Certain banks prefer certain gateway systems, and its best to find a developer with experience in the relevant system to minimise cost and hassle. Also some systems are easier to deal with than others -for instance I’ve found the BNZ BuyLine solution particularly user-unfriendly. They don’t supply a developers manual which means it is very unclear throughout the process what needs to be done. It also makes it impossible for developers who aren’t familiar with the system to price for integrating it.

Links:
Here is a website page which lists the main NZ Banks and their payment gateway solutions:

Scenario Two:

There is a variation on Scenario One where the services of the gateway and bank are combined into one. This means the seller doesn’t have to become a credit card merchant. These are services like Paypal, Worldpay, Paymate, flo2cash, etc.

They handle the entire transaction, from a credit card or debit card, and deposit the money into the account the seller has with them. Some have requirements about how much money must be in your account before withdrawals can be made, and when it can be withdrawn, etc. So the downside is that sellers don’t always get access to their money as quickly as the bank, and it has to be transferred out to use it outside this payment system.

However these solutions can be a lot easier to integrate, and are ideally suited to lower volumes of transactions, or small sites wanting to ‘test the water’ without shelling out large set-up and ongoing costs. Many of them also offer multiple ways of taking payment, including sending invoices, direct debit, etc.

Summary:

There are a number of factors to consider when deciding if, and who you will use when it comes to payment systems. Some may be dictated by who you bank with, some come down to personal preferences, i.e preferring a NZ based solution, preferring not to pay high initial fees, or wanting your money straight away, etc,

The best way to decide which solution is best for you is to short list the options and review each. Some solution providers will supply you with a free shopping cart, payment buttons to use on your website, and various other widgets you can use on your site to assist the purchase process. Check out if they supply a demo of how it works from the shoppers point of view, as well as the sellers, and make sure they provide a developers manual explaining how the system is to be integrated.

Which ever method you choose, make sure you also have a robust website to start with. No point building on unstable foundations.

Additional links:

• ANZ eGate
• ASB Payment Express
• National Bank BuyPoint
• BNZ Buyline Direct
• Westpac Hosted Plus

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You couldn’t get more central than this!

The Old Weekly Press Building is a refurbished historic building which overlooks the City Mall, on Cashel Street, opposite the Guthrey Centre (Bridge of Remembrance end). The building is a hub for emerging and established technology businesses.

Space is available in the office of Hot Pyjama Productions, a design and market communications company. The office overlooks the City Mall on one side, and a private out door courtyard on the other.

It really is a hidden treasure in the centre of the city.

Your space is approximately 22 square metres, with room for two work spaces, or one and a meeting space. Open plan but with about 8 foot high dividing walls giving you privacy in your own space. Rental term available for 2 years in a sub lease arrangement. Rent negotiable at around $9,000 per year.

Large shared entrance/meeting/chill out space plus storage room, kitchen, bathroom and toilet facilities. Plus fabulous sunny shared courtyard, a perfect place for lunch or after work drinks.

Your space comes furnished with desk, chair, storage shelving, whiteboard, small meeting table and chairs.

Would suit a small business, sole trader or partnership in the IT, business consulting, online business, professional service, or related industries.

Enquire Hot Pyjama Productions Ltd

Level 1, Old Weekly Press Building
107-109 Cashel St, City Mall
Christchurch, New Zealand

Phone: (03) 375 9929

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In an earlier post I talked about how to set up your profile in Google Maps. But what happens if someone has beaten you to it?

We’ve had a few clients who have discovered there are already listings in Google Maps for their business and they don’t know how they got there, who added them and, most importantly, how they can access and change them.

You may still be able to claim and edit the listing

Click on the ‘more info’ link next to the listing as it appears in Google Maps.  Log in using your Google account info (or set one up first), edit the listing from the ‘edit this place’ link and Google will review the changes before deciding to make them public.

You can also click on the ‘Business owner?’ link and follow the prompts to add, edit or suspend the listing.

This will require validation* to ensure you are the rightful owner of the listing, but will help to protect your listing from being changed by someone unauthorised. This is all part of ‘claiming your listing’, and the most important step you can take.

Google sends a letter containing a PIN and activation instructions to the business address associated with the listing. After you validate the listing, you may edit your Google Maps listing at any time.

Extra help

I have to admit to finding the whole process less than straightforward so if you experience the same frustration when trying to remove or edit a wrong listing, you aren’t alone.  I couldn’t find any clear path to reclaim a listing once someone else has already done so.

Google does provide a forum and here is a particularly good post that will answer many common concerns about hijacked, merged or duplicate listings.

Other common issues:

I don’t know my password:

With most it is just a case of requesting a password change. If you can identify the email address that was used to log in (and for many businesses they will have one that is used for most generic communications) then just go to:

• • Google.co.nz and click the ‘sign in’ link at top right
  • Click the ‘Can’t access your account?’ link at the bottom of the sign in pane
  • Click, ‘I forgot my password’ and follow the steps from there.

You’ll be sent an email and you’ll have 1 hour from the time it was sent to reset your password. If you miss that hour you will have to do the process again. This is a Google security measure.

I forgot my username:

Do the same process as above, but click the ‘I forgot my username’ button and follow Google’s prompts.

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This month Google announced a new index system which they’ve called ‘Caffeine’. This promises faster delivery of ‘relevant’ content than it did in the past, particularly when it comes to new content.

Search engines have always loved new content

If you write a blog, you may have noticed how quickly the content of a new post is indexed by search engines when compared to static website content.

This new indexing system turbo-charges the speed at which new website content appears in Google search engine result pages (or SERPs). It is now even more important to ensure your website content (the words) is kept fresh.

Spending large sums of money on a pretty site, with content that doesn’t change, is not a winning strategy if you want to attract visitors to your site on an ongoing basis.

Sure, some content remains relevant long term, and making changes for change’s sake is not something I’d be wasting my time on. But adding relevant new content to your site is time well spent.

If you have a content management system and you aren’t using it, you are wasting a valuable tool

If you already produce a printed or emailed newsletter, make sure you are regularly adding the content from those to your site.

Here’s some more ideas for adding new content and attracting new site visitors: Attracting visitors to your site

And if you don’t have a CMS…

If you don’t have the facility to easily update content, even if it is through our site developer, then its time to review your website and your solution provider.

Think of your site as ageing in dog (or cat) years. A site that you launched 3 years ago is actually like a 21 year old in technology years! Are you still working on a computer bought 21 years ago?

Talk to us now about how you can improve the performance of your site. Phone Abbie or Wendy on (03) 374 9929.

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• businesses
• schools
• clubs
• not-for-profits

If you haven’t yet discovered ‘Google Places’ then read on to find out how easy it is to profile your business or organisation in Google even when you haven’t got a website.

What is Google Places?

According to Google, more people (about 87%) use online search to find local information than any other media.

One in every five Google searches is related in some way to location. To ensure their search results are relevant, Google has put a lot of effort into developing tools like Google Maps to help searchers find what they are looking for.

To set up your listing in Google Maps you use Google Places. Once you’ve verified your listing, Google will rank your listing based on its relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance and other factors. You may have noted Google map listings appear near the top of the search results.

There is no way to buy a better ranking as you can do with Google Adwords, however I did notice that after I updated Hot PJ’s listing in Google Places with more images, the next day we had jumped up four places in rankings for a specific keyword phrase.

Here’s how you claim your ‘Place’ on Google Maps

1. Visit Google.com/Places and Sign up for a Google Account
   This will give you access to heaps of other useful Google tools – more on those in coming newsletters.Google recommends using an email address that you don’t mind sharing with others or passing along, in case you want to transfer your listing to someone else.
2. Log in and click “add a new business”
3. Start your listing by profiling your business, school, organisation or club
   Enter into the preset fields your contact information, a 200 character description of what it is you do, and choose a category to describe the sector you are in. You will be prompted to select a category which may not fit your business or organisation as well as you hoped. While you must choose one of the categories, you can also add an extra four others of your own making.

   Google takes the location details you input and plots your location on the map. You can change the marker location if it isn’t accurate. The link to do this is under the map.

4. Enter more specific information:
   • are you location based or serve others at their locations?
   • hours of operation
   • payment options (if applicable)
   • Add up to 10 photos
   • Add up to 5 YouTube videos

Plus any other additional info in a series of fields. For instance I used this space to list Hot PJ’s Twitter address, blog, plus info on where to park for free when visiting us, and the offer of our free 45 minute marketing ‘Think Tank’.

In the photo gallery I uploaded a selection of work we have completed for clients. They display as thumbnails which, when clicked, enlarge. This is a great place to show your products, key personnel, photos of your location, your logo, etc.

For best results upload square images no bigger than 1mb and 1024 x 1024 pixels. Unfortunately you can’t seem to specify the order your images will appear.Adding video is easy, just cut and paste the link from www.youtube.com

5. Verify your listing
   Every listing must have a mailing address. This is the physical address where mail can be sent to your business or organisation. To verify this Google will send a text message to a cellphone or a postcard to your mailing address. The text message will be something like this: “Use the following pin to verify your Google Places listing for yourusername: 12345″

   Only after your listing is verified, will it will appear in Google. This can take up to 12 hours.You can then log in the dashboard to see statistics on how many times your listing has been displayed during a search in Google. You can also add coupons to your listing too, as a way to attract interest and customers.

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But you may find differently when you decide to move design studios and the incumbent designer says they ‘own’ the copyright.

Perhaps you think this sounds like a tall story? If only… but it continues to happen when some designers refuse to hand over design files, claiming copyright ownership, and placing restrictions on what their client can do with their own logo or trade mark.

Only last year a new client of ours faced exactly this, forcing them to rebrand at additional time and cost.

At Hot PJ we don’t believe in this approach – if you pay for it, your logo is your logo. We’ll help you to protect it, but we won’t use copyright as a tool to punish you if you decided to leave.

Protecting Your Rights

One of the ways to protect your exclusive rights to your logo or trade mark is to register it with the Intellectual Property Office in the countries where you operate.

Up until recently the costs and perceived complexities of registration often precluded companies from doing so. Recently Intellectual Property law firm James & Wells launched IPOL, an online tool for registering trade marks and design applications in New Zealand.

The site provides online ‘wizards’ to help you draft and file your own application in NZ for a fee of $250 ($150 to IPOL plus Government fees of $100 for a design and $100 per class for a trade mark).

Selecting the right ‘Class’ for your Trade mark or Logo

Selection of the right class for your list of goods and services can be the complex part. But the IPOL ‘help’ wizard does guide you through this process. If you get really stuck you can pay for additional help with your application from an IPOZ advisor. There are very reasonable set fees for:

• help with checking the registration for trade marks that might block your application ($600),
• an opinion on whether your trade mark qualifies as a trade mark under NZ law ($100),
• help from an IPOL Advisor to check the acceptability of your list of goods/services ($100).

Easy to use, lots of ‘help’ options

Having tried IPOL as a first time user to register a logo as a trade mark, I found it quite easy to use – a bit of form filling at the start that seemed repetitive, but once underway with my application I found plenty of onsite ‘help’ that answered any questions I had.

So first check with your designer that you do own the copyright to your logo, then use IPOL to register an application to protect your exclusive rights to it. If you don’t you risk others claiming or using something similar to promote their own business, service or goods. If their offering is inferior to yours this could hurt your business reputation.

Also see:

• Protecting Your Brand – IP solicitor Dan Winfield of A J Park explains
• Do you own your own logo?

You might also be interested in:

• Got a marketing hurdle you can’t get over? Book a free ‘Think Tank’ session
• A Rebrand is not just a change of Logo
• Getting to Know Your Logo – a guide

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Not long ago I received a very long self promotion email from someone I had meet at a networking event. Somehow they are more annoying than the usual spam because I had actually meet the sender.

After making my way to the 6th sentence of this 732 word e-monstrosity, a pattern was emerging; every sentence began or featured the word ‘I’ at least once.
“I operate…”
“I work…”
“I studied…”
“I ask you…”
“I am very good at what I do…”

At the very bottom in the last two paragraphs, was the offer  – but I’d given up reading the email 642 words before!

So before hitting the keyboard to drum up business, here’s a few ‘do nots’ when it comes to writing marketing emails, most of which can also be applied to all promotional copy.

Do not:

• Iinclude everyone’s email address in the ‘To’ field for all to see.
• write in big bold letters, with random use of capitals which SCREAMS at the reader.
• write overly long emails. People are busy so respect their time and get to the point clearly and quickly.
• write long paragraphs and sentences  – they are off putting to read, especially when the information is boring.
• overtly self promote without considering the needs or interests of the recipient.

Do try to keep your email to one page scroll. Break your text into sections, separating each with short headings that introduces the following text and helps readers to scan read for information they are interested in.

You don’t want to be accused of spamming so pay attention to the spam laws. See our blog posts:

• Anti Spam Law: 3 Steps to Comply
• Protect your clients email addresses

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