Basics of Marketing

Enness’ marketing draws lots of compliments from lots of different places and people, and there’s no doubt that it has been a central and significant contributor to our success and growth.

I have personally managed, developed and created the Enness brand and marketing strategy from scratch over the last 15 years. It’s something I’m hugely proud of, especially given I’ve done it without any marketing training or education.

With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of the marketing principles I’ve developed in Enness and which we have stuck to year after year, even as we’ve grown.

Consistency and regularity

For me, this is the most important part of marketing: you have to “do” marketing every day, week, and month, year after year, for it to work and produce results.

I see lots of new companies launch and send a few emails and put out social posts over the first weeks or months, and maybe do an event or record a podcast for good measure. But then as the business gets going, the marketing effort slips away and it’s something that’s done when someone has a bit of time, or marketing is only a priority for the business when leads dry up.

All of us are constantly flooded with messages, emails, social posts and advertisements from millions of companies seeking our attention. Only the most magic campaigns or the ones that are time relevant to us personally, work in a one-off way.

For marketing to work, you have to carry out campaigns and tactics repeatedly at the same standard over time, so that your prospective customer recognises you, learns about what you offer or what your brand principles are, or what you are about.

We have sent our marketing emails to our database weekly for over a decade – we have changed the format a bit and experimented over the years, but now it’s an expected and hopefully appreciated addition to many people’s inboxes. We have also committed time and effort to LinkedIn for years and years, and as a result we have an authentic and real following.

You have to invest in marketing, do it regularly and consistently so that your prospects get used to it, recognise you, trust you and their understanding of your company and what you do builds over time.

Content

We make lots and lots of content – web pages, blogs, case studies, guides, videos. These are either general market level information, brand level information, audience-specific content or hyper-focused content that is targeted to a tiny niche.

Our content is informative, easy to follow, created for a specific audience and on the whole, doesn’t sell Enness or our service. This is called “inbound marketing” – the principle is that you make great content, then put it in the right places for your clients or customers to see. And then you wait. You wait for your potential customers to see it, engage with it, learn about you and understand your business. Then, when they are ready, you hope that they will contact you.

The outcome should be opportunities to engage with people who 1) are looking for something that you offer, 2) have a current need and 3) have chosen you from the multitude of other avenues open to them to seek advice or help.

The content you make needs to be open, transparent, accurate, informative, relatable and relevant. It needs to build trust, show that you know what you are talking about and connect with the person reading or engaging with it.

Content doesn’t need to be super involved; you don’t need to be an expert writer or hire a team of videographers to follow you around. Some of the most successful things we do are short posts on LinkedIn or updates on our blog: this is what we think, what we are working on, what we have noticed, what we have learned or what we have done. Do that regularly and consistently and people will start to notice and respond.

Use of imagery and design

I’m not sure I read anything anymore unless it is directly linked to something I am currently interested in or need to understand, and it is put in front of me at exactly the right time.

So, even though we write (probably) hundreds of thousands of words a year, we spend just as much time and attention on our brand, imagery, fonts and colour schemes.?

This is again a relatively simple thing. If your prospects see your name, logo, colours and designs regularly, they are received at predictable times and are the same standard, and you do that month after month, at some point they will recognise you. At some point after that they will hopefully contact you, then with any luck they will ask you for help or buy something in the future.

If you bridge this with constant reminders that you are here, dependable, trustworthy, accurate and so on, it all goes some way to helping your prospects contact you when the time is right.

We use individually drawn images in the same style, each with our “E” logo for much of our marketing – and we have done the same for years. We then overlay that with the exact same colours, fonts and style to drive our memorability and recognisability over time. ?

Data and records

So, you do all the above: create useful, informative content. Present it in the same way with high standards and imagery and you put it in the right places for your prospects to see it. If you do that regularly, people will call, email, fill in forms and connect with you. These go on to become conversations with potential customers and they represent the most valuable thing for any business: a chance to talk or sell.

In our part of the market, (and in many businesses), it’s really rare for someone to call us and start a mortgage application (or buy something) immediately. Usually, the first call is to ask what we do, see how we work, get help on a potential plan or to discuss an idea.

So, we take this first call as the start of the process, we give our time, our thoughts, listen and give ideas – we then generally leave it up to the prospect to call us back when they are ready to do some work or if they have more questions.

In-between we continue marketing to them, but now we have two very valuable and privileged things: the email address of a potential customer and a broad understanding of what they are planning to do. Collecting, respecting and utilising this data in an organised way is vitally important.

Our database contains about 70,000 records, all neatly categorised, segmented and maintained. We remove anything that isn’t relevant and invest lots of time in maintaining contacts and data. We send about a million emails a year through our database, and each contact in our system receives content that we think is useful and interesting to them. We also have a structured process to speak to and engage personally with as many of these contacts as possible each year.

Many of our clients have existed in our database for years and years before we do our first piece of business: people don’t apply for mortgages every week and for some people it can be a once in a decade event. We know that we have to stay relevant, be memorable, add value and build trust over a long period of time to even be lucky enough to be one of the companies these individuals speak to when they arrange their next mortgage.

So – for us, for marketing to be successful, we do the following:

• Create great, authentic content
• Put it in the right places so our prospective customers see it
• Commit to being consistent and regular
• Use the same imagery, colours and designs so we’re memorable
• Collect and manage data
• Do all of the above over a long period of time…

…AND repeat.