- Original Poster
- #1
Hi everyone,
I'm Mark, the MD from Meridian Delta. We're based in Newcastle and employ 50 staff.
What we do
We specialise in direct marketing. What that essentially means is that it's the type of advert where you choose who is going to receive it and the method they get it by. We run postal and email campaigns mainly.
Our history
We were established in 1998 and are members of the Direct Marketing Association and accredited to ISO 9001:2008. We have over 14,000 customers and am delighted to let you know that we get great repeat business from our customers - 44% of our revenues comes from clients ordering more from us with 6 months of their last purchase.
How we hope to help other forum members - our areas of expertise
I hope that what my team and I will be able to offer members is insight into marketing and how it works. There was a recent stat that 64% of SME owners didn't have a marketing plan. TBH, I'm not surprised - what starts most people in business is a passion for what they're great at. No-one comes into business to do accountancy or marketing - they come into it for the love of their particular talent.
The main areas we hope to help on are -
The concepts of the buying cycle and familiarity
Lots of SME owners get frustrated when they do a campaign and it doesn't get the results they want. There are generally two reasons for it.
The buying cycle describes a company or person's readiness to buy. What I mean by that is think about a business with a van. They may have got that van in on a lease and be bound to that lease for 3 years. If that's the case, people you market to in this sector aren't going to respond to you because they've got a van with a long time left to run on the lease. For every 100 companies or people you advertise or market to, only 3-4 may be in the right part of the buying cycle.
That's tied in with familiarity. If you approach an audience unfamiliar with you, your responses will be much lower on the first two approaches. People need to feel comfortable and familiar with companies they buy from - after all, no-one likes to make a mistake. Once your third campaign kicks in, familiarity works in your favour and you generally see a sustained spike in responsiveness.
With marketing dilemmas and questions on the forum, we hope to be able to answer people's views and concerns on these two areas - we consider these to be the joint most important thing in marketing.
This is closely tied to...
What goes on your advert
For completely understandable reasons, most adverts have a company name at the top, a bulletpoint list of what that company does followed by a telephone number or email address.
We think that although these types of ads can be successful, a better way is to use a particular structure - headline, sub-headline, body copy, images (only where necessary), strong call-to-action (tel no for example) and lots of white space. That advert should be able to be read and understood within 8-10 seconds.
People get bombarded with ads every day so we think your advert should speak to the people ready to buy telling them what you can do for them, what makes you special, a reason to get in touch with you now and the method you'd prefer them to get in touch with you by.
Where you'll mainly see us
We'll be mainly in the general forum and the sales & marketing forum.
We're happy to offer any advice we can on the forum or by PM.
We love marketing and we love our customers. We try very hard to get it right and where we get it wrong, we'll hold our hands up and try to make things more than right.
On behalf of the company, we look forward to interacting with you and we hope you get something from those interactions.
Regards
Mark
MD
I'm Mark, the MD from Meridian Delta. We're based in Newcastle and employ 50 staff.
What we do
We specialise in direct marketing. What that essentially means is that it's the type of advert where you choose who is going to receive it and the method they get it by. We run postal and email campaigns mainly.
Our history
We were established in 1998 and are members of the Direct Marketing Association and accredited to ISO 9001:2008. We have over 14,000 customers and am delighted to let you know that we get great repeat business from our customers - 44% of our revenues comes from clients ordering more from us with 6 months of their last purchase.
How we hope to help other forum members - our areas of expertise
I hope that what my team and I will be able to offer members is insight into marketing and how it works. There was a recent stat that 64% of SME owners didn't have a marketing plan. TBH, I'm not surprised - what starts most people in business is a passion for what they're great at. No-one comes into business to do accountancy or marketing - they come into it for the love of their particular talent.
The main areas we hope to help on are -
The concepts of the buying cycle and familiarity
Lots of SME owners get frustrated when they do a campaign and it doesn't get the results they want. There are generally two reasons for it.
The buying cycle describes a company or person's readiness to buy. What I mean by that is think about a business with a van. They may have got that van in on a lease and be bound to that lease for 3 years. If that's the case, people you market to in this sector aren't going to respond to you because they've got a van with a long time left to run on the lease. For every 100 companies or people you advertise or market to, only 3-4 may be in the right part of the buying cycle.
That's tied in with familiarity. If you approach an audience unfamiliar with you, your responses will be much lower on the first two approaches. People need to feel comfortable and familiar with companies they buy from - after all, no-one likes to make a mistake. Once your third campaign kicks in, familiarity works in your favour and you generally see a sustained spike in responsiveness.
With marketing dilemmas and questions on the forum, we hope to be able to answer people's views and concerns on these two areas - we consider these to be the joint most important thing in marketing.
This is closely tied to...
What goes on your advert
For completely understandable reasons, most adverts have a company name at the top, a bulletpoint list of what that company does followed by a telephone number or email address.
We think that although these types of ads can be successful, a better way is to use a particular structure - headline, sub-headline, body copy, images (only where necessary), strong call-to-action (tel no for example) and lots of white space. That advert should be able to be read and understood within 8-10 seconds.
People get bombarded with ads every day so we think your advert should speak to the people ready to buy telling them what you can do for them, what makes you special, a reason to get in touch with you now and the method you'd prefer them to get in touch with you by.
Where you'll mainly see us
We'll be mainly in the general forum and the sales & marketing forum.
We're happy to offer any advice we can on the forum or by PM.
We love marketing and we love our customers. We try very hard to get it right and where we get it wrong, we'll hold our hands up and try to make things more than right.
On behalf of the company, we look forward to interacting with you and we hope you get something from those interactions.
Regards
Mark
MD
