Risk & Business Magazine Cooke Insurance Group Fall 2016 | Page 19

tell the customer what to do. • • People tend to read the following: • Headlines • Subtitles and subheadings • Photo captions • Short bolded or highlighted text • Small insert-boxes • Handwritten notes Of course, this does not mean you can overwhelm your audience with too many “things that get read first” or none of them will get read. And each of these has different uses in different contexts. For example, a handwritten note in an ad on the internet does nothing, whereas a handwritten post-it note on a mailing gets attention. So we have to ask ourselves, “What sorts of things grab attention?” Here are some answers: • - Headlines - Subtitles and Subheadings - Photo Captions - Short Bolded or Highlighted Text - Small Insert-Boxes - Handwritten Notes Deliver quickly once you get the order: This is an instant world. People expect it immediately. The service standards you compete with are expected to be high. Perfect service is now the expected norm. ARE THERE SPECIFIC STRATEGIES THAT YOU HAVE USED IN THE PAST AND KNOW WORK THAT HELP TO GRAB CONSUMER ATTENTION? People have limited time and even smaller attention spans. The key in marketing is to capture some of this limited attention span and to get people to read more. So it pays to understand what things people read first, because this is where you need to grab attention. • PEOPLE TEND TO READ THE FOLLOWING Keep it simple and intuitive: Customers will not stay long enough to figure out how to do things or where to find things. Avoid redundancy. Redundancy is the main cause of excess verbiage. Curiosity—If you can arouse curiosity, people will read more. How many people reading this interview have looked up the Danby Appliances “Flip Your Fridge” video? Your curiosity was piqued! Humour—If people feel they will be entertained, they will read more. • Emotions—Shock and awe can grab attention. People buy first with their emotions, which is why most large agency ads play to emotions. Without attention, you do not get read. So it is worth spending time on what people first pay attention to—emotions. MARKETING HAS SEEN A DRAMATIC SHIFT IN RECENT YEARS FROM PRINT TO DIGITAL. HOW DOES SOCIAL MEDIA IMPACT HOW YOU REACH CUSTOMERS? Media has changed drastically over the last several years. It was formerly a shout box from brands to consumers. Television, radio, and print: that was about it. Then technology and the internet came along with a major curveball. The world went online and sources of information increased dramatically. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media became easily accessible. Social media is one of the best ways to use curiosity, humour, and emotions. Using social media to promote a business or product is easy; however, using it properly is sometimes difficult. It is important to make sure you post interesting content and post often. But you also don’t want to post too often and bombard your customers. I decided to start sending out daily quotations from famous people. I know that email is an “interrupting medium,” so I chose to send them only by Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, a post to a Tumblr page, and to a section on my blog. That way, people only see them if they choose to look. At the same time, I’m keeping my network engaged, because when people see these quotes, they think of me, and when they think of me, they think of Danby Appliances. Running a business can be a great thing, and you can have a lot of fun while learning and implementing guerilla marketing tactics and using social media to market yourself and your company. Business and marketing practices are constantly changing, and although it can be daunting, it is important to adapt and change with them. Following some of these tactics can help you grow your good business into a great business. As I said earlier, I started my business in the 1970’s from the trunk of my car and grew it into a $2 billion corporation just by following good marketing principles. If I can achieve that kind of business success, so can you. It just takes a lot of hard work and a lot of imagination. + Jim Estill started a computer distribution company (EMJ Data Systems Ltd.) from the trunk of his car in 1979. With a great team, he built the company up to $350,000,000 in sales and sold it to SYNNEX in September, 2004. He then became CEO of SYNNEX Canada until May 2009, growing sales from $800,000,000 to $2 billion. Jim has been the CEO at Danby Appliances since June, 2015. Jim has always had an interest in early-stage technology businesses and was on the Board of BlackBerry (previously Research in Motion) for 13 years, including before it went public. He has also written two management books, Time Leadership–Lessons from a CEO and Zero to $2 Billion: The Marketing and Branding Story behind the Growth. FALL 2016 | 19