I asked Christine how she would describe tactical marketing, and here’s what she said:

“My interpretation of tactical marketing is the planned marketing activity that companies execute.

An example was Hoover setting up the Training and merchandising team and choosing to outsource it.

Companies attending exhibitions demonstrates tactical marketing along with the provision of promotional staff in place to support achieving objectives.

Leaflet drops, advertising, merchandising, direct mail, and other marketing activities are included in tactical marketing.”

James Bell makes a nice comparison between Strategic versus tactical marketing here, and makes an important point:

“Just putting a marketing message in an appropriate medium for John Smith to hear or read is not good enough. The strategy must derive from an understanding of what’s important to John Smith. Otherwise, this tactical part of the marketing process will be much less effective, resulting in ads that under-perform.”

The Times 100 has an article that compares the two, and comes to a slightly different conclusion - that strategic marketing is the overall long term plan of where an organisation wants to be, and tactical marketing involves using the elements of the Marketing Mix to get there.

They also have a great summary of marketing techniques that should give you a better understanding of how you should plan your marketing activity to include research, strategy & tactics.

You can read more about what Christine did with the Hoover team to improve their tactical marketing activities here.

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Sue’s put together some tips on getting more information out of people when you’re marketing products in store.

Here’s the video:

And as ever, here are the notes in case you can’t view the video:

Hi, I’m Sue Abbiss from Beyond The Box, I’m a Field Marketing Manager. I’ve spoken about top tips for sales, and we mentioned open questions, so I’m going to talk a little bit about that.

Open questions require an answer, not just yes or no, so who, what, where, why, when.

If you were to ask a closed question for example “did you go to the pictures last night?” you would get a short yes/no answer. If you were to say “where did you go last night?”, they might give you more information.

So just remember, a good sales tip - use open questions - who, what, where, why, when - to gain information.

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Sue’s got some tips to help selling in retail stores:

Here are the notes, in case you can’t view the video:

Hi I’m Sue Abbiss from Beyond The Box, I’m the field marketing manager.

Today I’d just like to go through top tips on selling.

1. Make sure you that you approach every customer in store, say good morning, etc.
2. Build rapport, it’s important to ask friendly questions, be open with them.
3. Identify a customers’ needs by asking who, what, where, why, when.
4. You can then match those needs to a product that you think is right for them.
5. Once you’ve done that, overcome any objections and answer any questions that they have.
6. Then ask for the sale. don’t be afraid to ask for the sale.
7. Once you’ve asked for the sale, close the sale.

It’s as simple as that!

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We’ve done a couple of articles on marketing at exhibitions, and they’ve been very popular, so Christine’s made a video about marketing and getting more people to your exhibition stand.

In case you can’t see the video, the notes are here:

Hi I’m Christine from Beyond the box, and I’m going to talk to you today about how you can get people onto your exhibition stand.

Once you’ve invested the money into booking a stand at an exhibition, you really want to make sure you get a return on investment, and talking to people is the key.

Don’t stand in the actual shell scheme or inside your area; really do something to get people to come in and talk to you.

You could have something on the stand to attract customers, for example a cartoonist, a magician, or someone handing out prizes, sweets, gifts, anything to attract people.

And once people come to your stand area, go and talk to them. I’m amazed how many people book space at an exhibition, and then wait for people t come and talk to them. That’s not likely to happen.

You might have to venture off your stand, into the exhibition area and actually talk to people, and invite them to come in.

Don’t be afraid of doing it, they expect it to happen. They want you to come and approach them and talk to them.

You need to see as many people as you can, and start to sort through who are the good leads and who are the bad leads.

My top tips are :

1. First of all, make sure your stand looks inviting, friendly and open.
2. Secondly, have something that’s going to be of interest to them to perhaps get them on [your stand] if you don’t feel overly confident about making that initial approach. So the cartoonist, the magician, anything at all that could attract people to your stand.
3. Once they are in the vicinity of your stand, invite them into your stand.
4. Talk to them, show them samples, explain fully what you do.
5. And the important thing, don’t forget to get the details; make sure you record their telephone number, website so you can get further information and the nature of what they are enquiring about, so you’ve got plenty of information there to call them back.

Good luck!

And here are the other features on the topic of exhibitions that should help you prepare:

• Being Effective At An Exhibition Part 1 - How to Get People To Your Stand
• Being Effective At An Exhibition Part 2 - How to Engage
• Being Effective At An Exhibition Part 3 - How To Follow Up
• What do we need for an Exhibition Stand?

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Motivate - understand ‘what make your staff tick’, get to know the person, what drives/motivates them, understand what de-motivates staff (working conditions, unfair treatment, poor policies) so you can avoid these. 

Opportunity - give your staff opportunities for advancement and the chance to develop themselves, as well as develop their role. Set goals and challenging targets to help staff advance 

Team building - arrange regular team meetings, communicate with all staff, keep them informed of any changes, or update 

Involvement - get staff involved; seek their opinions on the ongoing development and progress of their company 

Valued - believe in your people, make sure you let staff know that they are valued; focus on recognising excellent performance, send a letter or email thanking them for a job well done. Remember to send staff a birthday card.  

Empathy - show staff that you care about them and not just the job; take their feeling into consideration, understand that some times out side influence can affect their work.

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As mentioned in our previous post about text and email communication skills, here is the list of resources to help with communicating by Email or Text.

Grammar Book

The GrammarBook Blog includes regular posts to help with common grammar and punctuation conundrums. The purpose of the blog is to promote the book, but the content is so good that you don’t mind the odd plug here and there. Here is one example of the videos they produce:

Visit GrammarBook.com for the full list of videos

The Grammar Blog

This site is devoted to real life Examples of Bad Grammar to help you avoid making the same mistakes.

Grammar Girl

The Grammar Girl Podcast is available via RSS, so you can improve your skills while you’re out and about; and the Blog has the transcripts with links to any references mentioned in each show.

Mind Tools

Mind Tools have a number of articles on the topic, including An Introduction to Communication Skills.

Cheese

This video has some important messages… It can be very easy to send an email without thinking of the implications. If you have some patience and can get over the cheese factor, have a look:

This one is from Telephone Doctor.

Eats Shoots & Leaves

This is a classic, and highly popular book by Lynne Truss.  They also have a punctuation game online.

More…

We’d be happy to update this list, so if you know of books, videos or websites that you’ve found useful or that you publish, please let us know.

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Christine wrote an article about Communication Skills for Business Zone.

Here are the notes:

Email and text messages

Email and text messages have taken communication into a whole new dimension. They are fast, economical and in some instances enable friends to keep in touch far more frequently than the ‘pen pal process’ ever did. Could such marvellous inventions possibly have any downsides? Well, yes they do.

Punctuation

Punctuation was invented so the sender could visually demonstrate emphasis, tone, inflection etc, in the written word. Commas, exclamation marks, brackets, full stops and all those other small but highly effective symbols help us to fill in the blanks left when we are trying to interpret a written message and body language and verbal emotions are not available to assist us.

Thank goodness for punctuation! Great! Except that when people text or email, grammar and punctuation seem to have gone out of the window which totally changes the meaning of a message.

Examples Of Ambiguous Messages Without Punctuation

Here is a well known example of how that can happen. An English professor wrote these words on the chalkboard:

A woman without her man is nothing

and asked his students to punctuate it correctly.

All of the males in the class wrote: A woman, without her man, is nothing.

All the females in the class wrote: A woman: without her, man is nothing.
Punctuation is everything.

Business Implications

How many quickly and carelessly sent texts or emails have left the reader scratching their head in a ball of frustration as they try to second guess what the sender was trying to say?

No wonder that ‘poor communication’ continues to be blamed in the workplace for reducing the standard customer service, low morale, misunderstandings and mistakes some of which are very expensive.

One cannot dismiss the benefits email and text messages have brought to communication, but equally they have brought confusion, frustration and costly mistakes which could drastically be improved by taking time to compose the message carefully, and with thought.

Misinterpretation

When writing a business letter most people will take time with punctuation, spelling mistakes and its composition. Despite all of this it can still be misinterpreted. It seems though that when we write a text or email we consider it acceptable to forget all the attributes that help make the written word easily understood. We seem to have accepted that fast methods of communication can be discharged with fast input and limited attention to simple tools that would make the content sensible and legible.

It is the sender’s responsibility to ensure that the content of their message has been fully understood. Sadly, many of us seem to think that with the simple press of a button the responsibility of understanding the message now falls solely upon the recipient.

For years we have poured scorn on legal documents because they are written in ways we don’t understand and now we have invented our own version. It just doesn’t take as long to compose!

Resources

To help improve your written communication skills, you could take a communication skills course or swat up using some of the resources we’ve found on the Internet and in libraries.

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