Alice Elliott's blog

How much added value do you give?

Friday, July 30th, 2010

It’s fascinating noting the different styles of American waitresses and how they treat you. Of course they are always excessively nice because they depend on your tips to boost their meagre wages, but they still have varied methods of attentiveness, depending on the kind of restaurant they are serving in, the response of customers seated there [...]

How to make your advert stand out

Friday, June 4th, 2010

In this particular local magazine I regularly receive through my letterbox I get a chance to purvey various attempts at designing advertising. I do feel sorry for multiple trades who have to compete with each other, all trying to attract the same customers from the same page:
Look! Four plumbers jostling with each other to capture [...]

Perhaps perfection is important after all

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Six months since giving up my business, things have become rosier. My post Perfection doesn’t work in business was a result of my feelings of rejection, failure and disillusionment. But now I can look at business in a new light, having had plenty of time to analyse my present situation and learn from my mistakes.
In [...]

Don’t wait for your customers, go find them

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Gone are the days when customers came to you. The internet may be compared to a massive shopping-mall, but it is, of course, so huge, there is no way anybody could possibly walk pass your shop (website) unless they knew it was already there.

There are some websites that capitalise on this phenomenon, due to [...]

Are you bending over backwards for your customers?

Friday, November 20th, 2009

How easy are you making it for your customers to use your services? Do you go out of your way to help them?
I like the way Clark’s the shoe shops now offer a personal service to their customers: I saw a pair of purple (well, that is my colour) shoes that I liked, and asked [...]

How not to choose the wrong client

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Don’t get seduced by a potential customer with a fat, bulging wallet. Remember the old saying: “all that glitters is not gold”.
My husband is working on a tender for a job in the Far East. Of course the businessmen concerned are rich, and want large, expensive work to be done, which adds to the attraction [...]

Enhance how customers feel, not your product

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Watching the ads on telly, the Dulux paint one caught my attention.  It was very short, and it consisted of a sad girl with a green background, and then her emotions were reversed as the green changed to a cheery yellow.
Dulux were playing with how the girl felt towards her newly decorated walls. It didn’t [...]

How are blogging and teeth similar?

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Blogging as like flossing your teeth, you need do it fairly regularly to maintain your oral hygiene (or marketing awareness). It doesn’t need to be done everyday like brushing your teeth (or working on your marketing strategy), but you need to keep it up if you want a nice smile (or well marketed business).
Nobody likes [...]

Combine price and quality to attract customers

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

While visiting Nottingham we decided to go for a Chinese meal. Just down from our hotel was an restaurant called ‘Big Wok’, which looked enticing at £10 for all you could eat.
Now normally these ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ establishments skimp on quality for the sake of price, but we were pleasantly surprised. [...]

Customers' copy outweigh your business profile

Monday, July 13th, 2009

All copywriting, whether for web or paper, should be biased towards one thing: the customer.
Blabbing on about the company is a total waste of time, customers don’t give a tinker’s toot about the business, they only care about “what’s in it for them”, how will they benefit from the product or services offered, will it [...]