I’ve been very struck of late by the fact that, while my company gets a fair number of calls from clients who tell us that they are doing particularly well, we also get a number from companies that are having a bit of a hard time.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this with my colleagues in the office and my conclusion is that while teachers, administrators and managers in schools are not being affected by the recession (in the sense that school budgets are not touched and neither are their salaries) they do seem to be looking at advertisements in different ways.
When one writes advertising in a way that was perhaps the best way to advertise a few years ago, that advertising, which has worked for a long time, now has a reduced impact. The sales may still be there – but not as much as before.
However, when one writes the advertising in a new style, the response rates can go up.
If I can give one example, I was recently asked by one of our Velocity clients (I’ll explain Velocity in a moment) to take an email advertisement he had done and re-write it. I did so, taking it out of the style of a couple of years back and putting it more in the modern style, and we got the highest ever “click through” rate (the number of people who read the email and then clicked onto the link to the website) that we have ever had. Previously the advert really didn’t work too well. This experience has been replicated many times over.
I’ve written a short paper on this topic called How to Sell to Schools. It is one of a small number of articles in a new How To series we are producing which relate to this area of work - and there will be more in due course. It is available free of charge on the internet at http://www.hamilton-house.com/howto.html
But before you go there – a word about Velocity. This is a service through which our clients get the Hamilton House team very much on board to give them help, guidance and information day by day, solving the problem of how to get adverts to work better and how to make use of the whole array of solo mailing, shared mailing, emailing, and the new low cost research strategies which reveal what teachers think about products (and thus inform us how to write the adverts better). If you would like to know more, please do give my colleagues and me a call on 01536 399 000, or take a look at www.velocity.ac