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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Field merchandising can take on many forms, but predominantly merchandisers make sure stock is available and well placed on the shop floor for the consumer to see. Merchandisers can check stock levels by checking the store systems, make sure all products are placed out on the shop floor, or by going into the warehouse and unboxing products if necessary. Once the product is on the shop floor, a merchandiser will make sure that the product is placed in the best possible vantage point, make sure all POS is correctly placed and that the product is clean and tidy. So it will be the first product the customer will see when entering the store, and if the product looks good, customers are more likely to buy that product.

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Point of sale can have enormous benefits when designed correctly. If the design is poor and the thought process for designing it minimal it becomes confusing for the customer and can in fact, have the opposite effect.

Here are two examples of how it can differ. Both are designed to advise the customer on an electrical appliance but one is far superior and will inform the customer of the product more effectively.

First of all I want to raise the guidance given to staff by companies, quite rightly they ask them to talk to the customer about how a product will benefit. The benefit tells them what the feature will do for them; a feature may be limited in its ability to educate the customer by revealing its use. Despite this, some retail outlets persist in creating customer information in the form of point of sale which refers only to the feature, totally contradicting the sales training they give to staff.

Consider the picture below, POS for a camera. Unless they have previously completed their own research about the product or have a technical background, would the customer know why they should select a camera with 72 mega pixels as opposed to one with more or less?

Is ‘compatible with PRO Duo’ an important feature? Only the customers that know what ‘PRO Duo’ is would know the answer to that. What about 3x optifocal zoom and 6x digital zoom, will every prospective customer know if they need it? It leads me to ask the question ‘What’s the point’ of point of sale that doesn’t tell the customer anything. Perhaps the thought process is to encourage the customer to ask a member or staff. Easy for the confident customer to do if they can find a member of staff, but what about the unconfident customer who may feel foolish if they admit to having little knowledge about the product.

In my mind the presence of the feature indicates that the author is concluding that the reader should already know the benefit. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news – some don’t and any store displaying such POS could potentially alienate customers and lose sales.

If we compare the POS on the picture below a key feature with its benefits is displayed clearly and boldly. Straight away the customer is informed how the large 1.8” screen and easy to use interface on the MP3 video player will benefit them.
Following on key features are displayed as icons with a simple clear associated benefit.

Reading this information has given me a much greater knowledge of the product. As a customer I can make a more informed decision to buy or decide if the product is suitable or insufficient for my needs without the help of a sales person.

This is a great example of simple and effective point of sale with ‘a point’.

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Be specific Make sure your feedback is clear and focused on the performance and don’t personalise it. Explain what the problem is, why it important that the employee achieves the performance expected. If you have raised your concerns before about the same problem, remind the employee when you have pointed out the offence in the past. Simply telling them what was wrong won’t help them change their behaviour, discuss how the employee can improve or avoid the mistake in the future, get their input. Make sure you add a time frame when you want to see the improvement by.  

Give timely feedback. Make the individual aware of what they did as soon as you can after the event, so they can recall what as happened. However be aware of their emotional state, before you give the feedback, perhaps you may need to wait until the employee has calmed down and can think clearly about what has happened. But don’t wait days or weeks, to provide feedback, when the problem has become a distant memory and don’t save telling the person until you have your next meeting, this could turn your meetings into a negative event.  

Check understanding. When summarising back to the employee, avoid asking ‘Do you understand’ they may merely say ‘yes.’ Ask them to summarise back to you, what you want them to do to improve, and when you want to see the improvement by, this way you know that they have understood what was said.

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