Internship

Yes, I can help you get an internship

Creative Agency Secrets helps students get their first jobs in marketing.  It’s incredibly hard to get a job as a junior marketer and so this is part of our social marketing – supporting the next generation.  And as a result, we’ve got a strong track record of delivering valuable learnings to interns and we also have hired many ourselves – the pick of the crop!

I got this email today and so am sharing my answer as a guide to help students get internships for themselves.

Hello.

I am Business Management Student from XXXXXX and looking for internship.

Can you help me to get internship.

Regards

 

Hello YYYYY

Yes, I can help you to get an internship.
I will speak very frankly so these comments are not harsh, but you will only be successful if you apply my advice.
  1. Learn how to write a formal business letter.  Use proper sentences, punctuation and grammar.  Capital letters for your name are important if you want to be taken seriously.
  2. Do some research first on the business you are approaching.  In your letter explain what you would hope to learn from the company and what you think you could contribute to them.  Remember an internship is not one-way.  So can you teach me about how to market to female students from India who are living in Auckland?  Your letter needs to be a sales pitch for YOU.  Read these articles on how to write a cold email
  3. Read these articles from our blog archive about Interns they will help you understand what Creative Agency Secrets teaches its interns.
I look forward to receiving your letter.

Will the student reply?

In parallel with the new business development tuition I give to clients, this email is designed to do two things.  Yes, it gives advice.  But its secondary function is to discourage applicants.
I want the recipient to understand that it will not be easy to get an internship with Creative Agency Secrets – we have high standards and so only the best succeed. Yet if they take our advice, they may be successful.
I do this with new business opportunity spotting – if you want to meet me, I set small hurdles up (like having you fix the meeting, not me) so that only the diligent and persistent will succeed.
Local Marketing event in Auckland

8 Marketing Strategies To Grow And Scale A Local Business

Most of New Zealand’s businesses are local. Knowing how to get known locally is an important skill. Today we’re showing you our latest tips for local marketing success.  Better still, they’re all things you can do yourself – today.

Ready for your local marketing quick-fix?

Local marketing is absolutely essential nowadays whether its a neighbourhood, a city or a country. Few of your customers are in social media looking for your locally supplied services.  Having robust local marketing tactics is essential. The key is to get value from both online and offline marketing spend and the cross-overs are increasingly beneficial when focused on local marketing.

Rebecca Caroe shows you 8 tactics for local marketing success. Take a look at the list, and for more details, check out Rebecca’s full presentation below.

8 Tactics For Local Marketing Success

1. Google My Business 

You can control how Google represents you by looking at 4 aspects of your site: words, pictures, videos, and maps. Go to business.google.com to edit the information. This is great for verifying addresses, changing and maintaining information when you move and much more. Today, since a vast majority the local searches are happening on mobile, it’s important to keep the information up to date. In fact, we did an experiment of where our ads were viewed and found that an overwhelming majority of our advertising was viewed on mobile devices (see video below – timestamp 21:06).

2. Key Words

Use efficient local keywords. Google is well known but supports its own objectives. Select an independent keyword tool. Also ensure that the city, town, or suburb are all included in the meta data.

3. Directory Listings

Online directories are underappreciated and do matter. Get yourself listed in both general and niche directories. Write a standard one sentence or paragraph and send it in to all of them. Don’t know where to start? We have you covered with our comprehensive list of directories.

4. Google Alerts

Google can give you alerts for key search phrases. Sign up to get them. Good phrases to sign up for are your business name, key staff members, competitors,  and new business opportunities. This is a great way to contact prospects, build a mailing list and much more.

5. Business Associations

Business associations are an invaluable way of meting local businesses. Through this, you will be able to network, give talks, send out promotions, and even get a mailing list.

6. Networking Events

The reason for this is similar to the previous point; you can grow your local network giving you greater and more diverse business opportunities. Consider both general and niche events. The video below has many websites to find these events locally such as Eventbrite and Meetup.com. A good idea is to have a post-event process for picking up contacts. The handy “Card-In-The-Pocket Trick” works every time. Simply put the business cards of contacts you do want to follow up with in your right pocket and in your left pocket, put the others.

7. Testimonials

We all need to know who’s worthy of our trust and testimonials are a great way to do it. Make sure you have a testimonial page on your website. Set up a process to get testimonials regularly and make sure the most recent ones are on the top. And be sure to link it back to a client’s website. Keep a long and a short version. The short version can go on the website page for easy readability, and put the long version in a blog post that you can link to on the site.

8. Local Advertising

The traditional methods still work and are great for brand building and product/service promotion. Google Adwords, Google AdSense, Yellow Pages, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all great places to do this.

Want more?  How much more?

If you want to learn the secrets to compound growth for your business, get private coaching advice. Bespoke for your unique situation and with a 100% refund guarantee if you’re not satisfied.  No risk!

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Customer Feedback

Don’t Be Boring Is The Best Way To Gather Customer Feedback

Customer feedback. These simple words are in every businessman’s mouth (and 2-hour long Powerpoint presentations) and can give you priceless insights if done right. This data is essential to measure customers’ satisfaction and make your products/services meet their needs. But let’s be honest, the ways people use to collect it are not thought through like they should. From annoying guys with clipboards knocking on your door to spammy messages in your inbox, research is carelessly planned by most companies. Fear not, though: we have a few suggestions for you on how to seize your customers’ opinion.

Yeah, you know where I’m going: the infamous surveys. Right now, as I mention the words “fill a form”, I can almost hear your eyes rolling. It’s something loathed by most of us, and some planners consider just a necessary evil. Doesn’t matter if you are the poor soul who’s spreadsheeting the results for that damn thing or, God forbid, the one answering to an endless questionnaire.

Understanding the importance of this kind of research, many companies offer rewards to customers in a hopeless attempt of getting useful information to work with. Burger King, for example, used to encourage customer feedback offering FREE FOOD if you completed their online survey. However, even a free burger was not incentive enough to make me bother to finish those.

Ok, so where are those brands failing miserably?

The process itself is outdated. If the activity is too laborious, doesn’t matter what “prize” you are offering. People tend to quit or, even worse, answer rubbish by mindlessly marking “x” on random fields just to be done with it, giving you worthless data.

Now you are probably asking yourself the million dollar question: is there a way to avoid wasting your resources while collecting useful data?

Make it fun

Surveys must be dynamic, well designed and lighthearted. No one can stand boring lists of questions and tiny “tick boxes” in this day and age. You can use a tool like Typeform, a Spanish startup that is mastering user experience for all kinds of forms, from a simple suggestion box to a more intricate survey. You can check an example at the end of this article. Their innovative service promises to keep “focused and engaged respondents” with a beautiful interface, responsible for a 59% completion rate on the platform. That’s a MASSIVE result.

Make it meaningful

Your customer has to understand the objective of giving you feedback and see that you are actually listening. You can start showing your appreciation by making him part of the creative development of new products, like McDonald’s did with the “Create Your Taste” campaign. There was no money involved, just a warm feeling of belonging and the thrill of signing your own McDonald’s sandwich. Crowdsourcing at its finest, bringing excellent results (and funny memes, because internet).

Here at Creative Agency Secrets, we made a testimonials campaign for ourselves by partnering with a charity called StarJam. Offering donations in exchange for a few words from our clients, we turned their feedback into social proof for our own brand on the internet. You can check more details reading our case study.

 

Customer feedback formpowered by Typeform

Marketing for a web design business

I’d like to chat about marketing for my small web design business.  I’ve got to this point without needing to do much marketing, however, to grow, I need to be doing something!  What’s your advice?

Having looked at many, many web design agency websites, there is one clear point of difference which you creative-web-designshave that others do not have.  You BOTH do web design and you’re a Shopify expert.

But the website doesn’t separate the customer journey (pathway through the site) for these two groups.  It’s important to shortcut the number of clicks a visitor makes on their discovery through your site.

Recommend: Separate links to detail pages for these two services

I asked you about the split in clients between web and Shopify – and you told me it was about 50:50.  Then you told me some of your clients were first timers – getting a website or ecommerce store for the first time.  This group needs to be treated differently from clients who know how to buy web services.  This group can lose you money as they are inexperienced.

Recommend: Set up a page for FirstTimers to guide them through how to brief an agency.

You also told me that some of your work is advice, particularly for Shopify clients.  You charge an hourly rate for this work.  This is a good rate, but it’s non-repeating business.

Recommend: You offer two services for advice.  One is straight advice; the other is training.  Double your charges for training because you are teaching clients how to be self-sufficient and to run their own Shopify stores.

Symbol for creating new business opportunitiesSymbol for new business analysis[Click the icons to see other articles on these topics]

If this advice is useful for your business, consider hiring us to help tutor you through effective business marketing.  Can’t pay?  Join our newsletter and you’ll get a free 8 article series of practical business marketing tips to implement yourself.

Only the digitally confused need attend!

No, I don’t want you to come to our event unless you qualify

On 27th September I’m speaking at a breakfast event. [ticket reservations below]

It’s about de-coding digital marketing for folks who are confused about how to do digital communications successfully.

Why am I doing the gig?

Despite digital being commonplace to me, it’s not that clear to everyone.

You may already be using some digital channels and be having some successes in bringing new revenues to your firm.  This event isn’t for you. 

This event is for the “digitally confused”. 

You know if this is you or not.  YOU qualify as being digitally confused if you’re unsure how to get good results from digital or online marketing.

My acquaintance, David Baker wrote to me this week and I want to quote him verbatim.

“An outside advisor like me comes into your firm and we bring several valuable things:

  • Perspective. It’s hard to see your own label when you’re in the jar.
  • Insight. There’s no need to reinvent the flat tyre over and over again.
  • Courage. Sometimes you just need a push. You need permission from just one more person.

I’d say that most of you should never hire an advisor and you’ll be just fine, thank you very much. You’d do a lot better if sometimes you thought less about the consequences and did what you know I’m going to tell you anyway!”

For the rest, let’s see you sign up to the breakfast on 27th September in the box below.

‘Nuff said.

P.S. And if you’re wondering why I wrote this – it’s to deliberately exclude people who would not benefit from the event.

Marketing and Cash Flow

How to Cash Flow your Marketing

Finance people see marketing activities differently.  They may be blocking spend that you perceive essential.  To understand the Chief Finance Officer’s perspective on marketing, we decided to interview expert CFO Trish Love about how she makes decisions to spend money on Marketing.

Marketing Activities versus Cash Flow

Trish has an 8 step process she uses to appraise marketing budgets and to prioritise spend. She explains “these steps are not sequential but there is a loose logic I follow.”

  1. Budget the Activities In – both the time and money.  As a CFO you must have a budget before you commit spend.  If you mentally allow for some cash to grow the business – later you can refine the spend detail.
  2. Budget for contingencies – there WILL be some.  If it’s in your budget it’s easier to make a decision – if it is not in a budget it needs a higher benchmark of certainty in order to justify the spend commitment. We have 90 day planning and strategy cycle.  And so the next step is whatever you think the budget is going to be, double it.  Do this for money and also often for time budgets.  For contingencies – there will be some. Things to remember: contingencies happen.  If you are wrong about the $10k budget and right about $5k spend then you’ve got $5k more profit but your budget was conservative.
  3. Take a “can’t afford to get it wrong” approach – have measurable results. You can’t afford frivolous spend – your CFO will ask for measurable results as often as possible.  Not all these will be very refined e.g. it can be difficult for some campaigns to map directly to winning a customer.  As a CFO, I take this approach as often as I can without being overly focused on it.
  4. Consider alternatives – choose wisely via expert advice.  This is part of your decision making process.  Review your options – what are the best high level strategy? the best tactics? who should deliver? when? should this be internal or external?  All these give a flow chart or mind map to demonstrate your decision making pathway.  In my experience, while drawing these together a natural path illuminates.  You can see which route is best.  An example I had recently was a review where I could see we may not be able to afford $20k but we can get 80% of it done for $8k.  This told me that this path is be the better one for our business.
  5. Plan – time in your calendars, money in your budgets. This is self-explanatory – book marketing meetings and time to do the work as a regular diary event.
  6. Prioritise – time, money, outcomes.  To illustrate this, let me ask you a question. “If you took advice from a marketing expert one day and each day you took their advice you got $5k revenues in return. Then how many days of the week would you meet your marketing expert?  If the results from marketing is cash flow positive why wouldn’t you do more of it?”  I find business decision makers choose not to do marketing because of a lack of trust, a lack of competency, a lack of time or a lack of know-how.  If you to spend the first $500 to make $1,000 or to spend $1k to make $2k… the “scaffold-up” method of spend and results is one approach for a small business.  This enables you to afford marketing as you grow.   My advice to marketing people who are pitching for more budget is this:  you have to bake the marketing cake with all the ingredients – if you miss out the baking powder and eggs, you’re blown. the cake won’t work without key parts – your marketing expert should help explain this to you.  This conversation tends to get people stuck.  You are in a situation is when it’s so obvious to the expert but they forget to frame the outcomes in a way that resonates with the business owner.  It’s the advisor’s role to have that conversation.  CEOs in NZ are money- and time-conscious so know what the deliverables are – scaffold up.  Systems, general operations, finance, marketing – are the 4 area of a business.  Then remember to give each of the 4 turn about for budget and attention.
  7. Sequence – also in parallel and cross pollenating effects.  Once we’ve got the plan now put in the ongoing sequence….I look for the easiest way to do things.  Do a marketing activity once and use it 3 separate times.  The sequence has to be carefully thought through so you can do work in parallel with cross pollenating effects.  Do a newsletter – look for different vantage points for the reader depending on which part of your business is writing the article.  How will it resonate?
  8. Some activities are not negotiable – decide what these are and hold the boundaries – too easy to let them slip otherwise.   You need to know what these are.  Make a conscious decision if you have an inverted pyramid you must know how far way down you can go before you run out of money… each strata reflects a different activity and cash.  Know which you can do before you run out of money and time.  Decide to hold the boundaries of the things which are critical; don’t let them slip.  If something is insidious you may not notice.  If it’s intentional it still may slip but you know it’s happening.  Agree up front what is in this bucket.

 Getting along and working effectively for the good of the business is the outcome we all seek.  So there you go.  I hope this summary helps marketing folks to understand finance folks and vice versa.

How to become an Effective Business Leader

How to become an Effective Business Leader

If you are responsible for the running of a business, then you are a leader. Being a leader means having the specific skills required to get the best out of people, such as employees, suppliers, and the people you meet in the running of your business. With an effective leader steering the ship, a business has the potential to grow and thrive.

If you are looking for the advice of being an effective business leader, this guide gives you some tips.

  1. Be Likeable – One of the most overlooked aspects of being a good leader is to simply be likable. How is your demeanor when you walk into the office? A leader who is friendly, smiles and makes the effort to acknowledge employees is going to be more liked than someone who walks in with negativity. Make sure your presence around others is always a positive one and you will be liked as a leader.
  1. Communication Skills – Good communication is about much more than making yourself understood. It is a two-way process that involves just as much listening as it does speaking. Making sure that everyone has a chance to be heard will make them feel valued and strengthen your team. There will be times when you need to give instruction that may not be agreed with, and it that case good communication means being open when you are making a particular decision, and being clear in your instructions and the desired outcomes.
  1. Build Relationships – When you have good professional relationships, it helps in every area of running a business. Take the time to get to know your employees, as having a rapport will help stop the ‘them and us’ barrier that so often occurs between lower-level workers and senior management. For more ways to build successful business relationships, you could also hire a coach such as Toni Vans.
  1. Set a Good Example – You can’t expect others to do a good job if you don’t set a good example yourself. Be the leader who you would want to work for, and you are on the right track.
  1. Able to Act – Being a good leader means being able and willing to make decisions, and sometimes tough ones. Taking calculated risks and being decisive is something that makes your team have confidence in your abilities, and having a supportive team also furthers your development as a leader.
  1. Support Team Development – As a leader, you should be able to motivate and inspire your team. One way to do this is to take an interest in helping them develop and grow their career. This could take shape in investing in training programs, or helping them to strengthen specific skills in areas that were either lacking or that are of interest to them. People who feel rewarded for the efforts they put into their work are more likely to have job satisfaction and be key team players.

An effective leader is someone who understands people, as well as the specifics of a business niche. When you develop your skills as a leader, you will have a happy team that helps your business grow.