About Ant Hodges

Christian Businessman, father of two, husband of one. Expertise in digital marketing, graphic / web design and email marketing

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Jan 06

Are businesses ignoring the recession?

On the way through the snow this morning, which took 20 mins longer than the 10 it normally takes - because of the 20mph speed we had to travel at, I heard on the radio that here in the UK things are really picking up.

John Lewis said "sales surpassed the totemic £100m-a-week" over the Christmas period [Link - Telegraph] and today comes news that it is the "fifth consecutive month of higher staff appointments, and the fastest rate of growth since July 2007" [Link - Telegraph] - even salaries are on the up too.

Does this mean that we can now see some of the big boys starting to spend freely again? If they are investing in staff, there must be work to be done, money to be made and then money to be invested into marketing, design and advertising again... or will we see the rate of increase in spend in our industries grow at a slow rate?

Whatever the markets do, I know and wise Uncle once told me "Position yourself at the foot of growth, that way when growth happens your ready to grow with it" - Digital marketing, websites, email marketing (and video - coming soon with a great new partner), together with being on the decks of these social networking cruise-liners... I'm positioned for the new spend coming. Are you?

Filed under // Business Advice Employment Money Recession

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Nov 28

Words that will make you money in your marketing - three of them anyway

Copywriting for marketing and advertising is a tricky thing to get right. How do you attract the right attention, quickly and how do you get it to generate the best return for the cost of the advertisement that you place, the brochure you are getting printed or the Adwords campaign that you're just about to launch?

Many people will say that advertising doesn't work for their business. "Yes I tried that once and didn't get anything from it" is the standard response I get. When digging down there are many reasons why they have not worked. Improper strategy, unidentified goals, wrong design style, inconsistency with branding, no measuring techniques or just the wrong words.

Here are three words that I would suggest you include in as many marketing tools that you have to engage the people you want to get a response from - I suggest in headings or titles at least.

You

This is the key ingredient to engagement. Talk directly to them. Treat this as the magic word for all your copy. Using this word instantly forces you to have a connection and conversation with the person reading it. Don’t you think that this is a good way to go?

Easy

With everything that is going on at the moment people want to worry less about stuff to make life easy. We want to see easy quick results, have them be easier to achieve and easy to buy. Spelling out how easy something is makes it much more attractive as we want everything... well... easy. If what you are offering makes lives easier, spell it out!

Now

As a business when would you like to make the next sale? Tomorrow, next week, next month? How about now? There always comes a time when you need to tell your customer what to do to lead them onto the next step of the relationship with you and your brand. They need to click through to your contact form or checkout, call your office or walk into your shop. Telling them that 'now' is the time is one way to encourage them not to wait.

There are many other words that will make you money through your website, brochure, advertising or promotions - but these are my top three.

Try them out in your next advertising campaign - let me know how they perform according to how you currently word them.

Filed under // Advertising Marketing Money