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The Trinity Enterprise Network invited Marketing Consultant Paul Hayes from Beachhut PR to give a talk on building an international brand. And they very nicely agreed to let me come along.

Paul was previously Marketing and Communications Director at Havok and currently works with JoltOnline among others.

Paul had some brilliant advice and war stories from his time in Havok, Pirtomedia, Demonware and Plastinum on how they, as a start up, had go out and sell to the leading companies in games and film. Image it seams is vital but not that difficult… or expensive.

I got a lot of great points to take away from the day and here they are in no particular order.

PR

• Start your PR locally. Use it as your training ground to hone and practice your message before you move international.
• With everything showing up on Google do not underestimate local press. A Wired journalist rang up Paul after a story in the Tipperary Star popped up in his alerts.
• Develop relationships with three key Journalists and publications.
• • THE trade publication of the industry.
  • A national publication
  • One international publication.



• Wired is THE publication for a technology company and it took Havok a year from initial contact to getting covered in the magazine.
• The easiest way to get international PR is to get on a plane and go have a drink with a Journalist and start a relationship.
• Journalists do not write for their readers first. they write for other Journalists and their editor. Remember this when pitching a story.
• It’s easier to get coverage if you ‘promise’ to take out advertising in the future. Most trade magazines are run at a loss to maintain an audience for other business activities, events for example. So do not stress too much if you are unable to take out advertising for a long while.
• Third paragraph PR is better for credibility. The public are very media savvy. They recognise a PR piece about a company for what it is.However if your opinion is mentioned in an overall industry piece it lends more credibility to you being an industry expert.
• You are the best person to tell your story. Do not use a PR firm to be the middle man. It annoys Journalists.

Business

• The first sale was for $1 to get past the ‘First Customer’ credibility problem.It was a marketing deal in return for using the customer in PR, Marketing and Case studies.
• There is value in everything you produce. Watch out for opportunities. Havok had an artwork tool to help users of their main product. 3dStudio Max wanted this for their application and it generated a nice bit of money for Havok over 3 years.
• Paul believes Tradeshow stands are a waste of money. Think smarter or of a ‘Meta Stand’.Instead of a stand Havok would organise wacky transport (with a bar) carrying VIPs from a tradeshow to the afters party and again at the end of the night back to their hotels. A fraction of the cost, and more memorable.

  

• One horror story in the early days of Havok involved 250k on a stand, intending to make a splash. They ended up wedged between Microsoft and Sony who each spent about $10 million to launch their next gen consoles. It almost broke them.
• At a tradeshow in Calais they rented a $20k Yacht and moored it outside the event instead of spending the $200k cost of a stand inside. They also got to save costs by sleeping 8 people and eating on it as well.
• For a tradeshow all you need is you and a laptop walking around. Just as effective.
• In most cases you are not selling your features. What you are selling is reduced risk.Customers assume that your product works. They want to know you will be around in 3 years and will not make them look bad to their piers and boss.
• And last was a question from the audience asking if the Trinity name helped them abroad when making contacts and selling. He said at the time no but after the very successful companies that have emerged over the years including Havok and Jolt Online it can open doors now.

On the day we hit over 10,000 user mark, a big milestone for us, we bring you the results off our recent survey. You have spoken and we have listened. Thank you all for taking the time to take our survey. The information is invaluable to us as we plan on how we can become (and stay) the best darn email marketing service for you.
The survey we used is called Survey.io from the brilliant Sean Ellis and KissMetrics. I really recommend you try it yourself with your own customers. So for the curious and nosey (me usually) among you I have some results below.

Great, relevant content is still the best source of traffic online. Looking at the results above, the Blog and Search Engines results can be combined together, as most search traffic lands on the Blog. I will dig a little deeper into Google analytics and see which source converts better  and get back to you. Thank you all  for reading and commenting. Expect more great tips, advice and research from the team this year and more often.

Of all the questions on the survey this is the most important result to us. According to the research behind this survey a result of 45% and up indicates something special. So thank you for making Toddle something special. It is only from your constant  feedback and input that we are on this path.

Caelen King gave a great talk last year on online business and subscription models. He explained that a churn rate of 20-30% of your customers is to be expected each year. (In his words, “people die” and their focus and circumstances change). A must see talk if you have a few minutes. I remark on this because the number of users above who nolonger use Toddle back up his point. I am just happy to see that we are on the low end of the churn rate.

Survey.io has a great feature where they create a word cloud of the most repeated words across all answers. It gives a great visual snapshot of how your product or business is viewed.
“NONE” in this case is due to the number of people who skipped this question as opposed to them getting no benefits from Toddle :)
“Easy”, “Design” and “Good” are great responses to the key benefits of Toddle. From the beginning we sought to make email marketing easy, simple and fun with great looking professional newsletters that signals you out from the competition. We are more than delighted that you our user agrees with our vision.

Half of you have recommended Toddle. WOW! Sincerely once again, thank you so much. We are honoured and humbeled that so may of you love Toddle so much to refer it to friends and colleagues. We will do our utmost this year to continue to make Toddle a must have business resource that you will be glad to recommend!

Once again your feeedback to this question was music to our ears. We built Toddle to ease the pain point of email marketing for SME’s, Consultansy professionals, small organisations, individual business owners and anyone who wanted to DIY their own marketing material. We are delighted that Toddle has gained such an amazing foothold in this our target market thanks to all of you. The best, most creative response we got to this question  was: “A Breathing one.”

Well this was pretty clear, you want more and it is coming.
Right now we are preparing to move Toddle to new, bigger, faster servers for the next phase of development. Expect a speed boost in about two weeks when the move is complete.
We have more newsletter designs coming out, better integration with your other services, more marketing advice and a few killer features to make your life much much easier.
However,  we are being very careful about what features we are adding to Toddle. As our goal is to make Toddle the simplest, fastest email newsletter application on the planet! The results above show that you guys agree with us. Each additional feature we add to Toddle makes it a little more complicated, so please be patient with us as we test and refine each one to make it the best experience possible for you.

I know I have said it previously, but 2010 is going to be a great year and I am so happy you are taking Toddle on the ride with you.

Kind regards,

Alan and the Toddle team.

You almost become to immune to images of suffering on TV news but when friends from Haiti are tracking family and friends via facebook and twitter, relaying messages and stories, you really start to feel it.
From now until further notice, every purchase you make in Toddle, 100% of your money will go to help the people and relief efforts in Haiti.
Thank your for your support and please share this with others.

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A quick thought.
When people search for reviews of your product and business do you have a an individual review page or blog post to show up in the results with everyone else’s?
If you don’t, then do one now. Shouldn’t take long and you then have some input in what customers see when researching you.

Now excuse me while I go and create the page www.toddle.com/reviews/

Happy new year. I hope you are well rested from the break and that Christmas was good to you. Welcome to 2010. A new year, a new opportunity to try new things and I can feel it in my water, it is going to be a good one.

To jump start your marketing I have put together a wonderfully simple online marketing plan for you for the year. It is put together as a checklist and it has the basics filled in with space for you to add your own twist and cross them off each month. It also includes few tips on what holidays and events you can use each month. It is based on one I have been using last year and I can tell you it helped me focused and on track.

Go ahead and download, print it off and hang it over your desk. This year you are going to be ahead with your marketing!

If you think you could do with some more information on how to get started or improve your email marketing campaigns sign up to our free email marketing course. More useful tips and tricks are found on our monthly newsletter so feel free to sign up below.

Keep us posted and let us know how the plan helped your business and let us know how we can improve it. We will showcase replies right here on the blog.