Lush Services

12/07/2022

Taking Risks: Can a risky decision bring success?

I’m a big F1 fan, and this weekends racing has been absolutely unbelievable!

While I’m a Red Bull fan through and through (not through choice, but by marriage - don’t ask!), I was really impressed with Charles Leclerc’s drive in Austria.

He has never won a race when he hasn’t started on pole.

Sunday, he raced his Ferrari F1 car, that within the final 10 laps of the race, had a major problem with the throttle. He raced a car that effectively had no proper throttle control. He was using his feet to push and pull on the throttle just to make it round the circuit.

This is a guy driving a car at speeds of 200mph around a circuit, hitting multiple G-Force sectors under breaking, and accelerating through corners, and yet he’s doing all this, the fastest out of everyone on the track, with a damaged throttle pedal.

Crazy right?!

How many of us would have just packed it in then and there and said, it’s too dangerous, I can’t do it?

How many of us would have said I’ll see it through to the end but reduce my pace and hope that I make it?

How many of us would do the same as Leclerc, come across a major problem that can effect the outcome of his race, make a temporary patch with what he had available at the time (his foot), without losing his race pace and still finish in 1st place?

Like Charles, when you hit potential roadblocks that can slow down your race, what are you doing to move yourself forward?

Just like Charles had some major choices that if chosen incorrectly, could have finished his race early. You too also have choices when it comes to moving your business forward with the speed and direction it takes.

Do you hit your roadblocks head on, find solutions, so you can continue to move your business forward?

Or do you pull out of the race at the earliest opportunity because your equipment (or strategy, or marketing, or staff), is a little busted up and not working the way you need them to?

Winning doesn’t come by hiding away, it’s come from being proactive and finding solutions when things aren’t working right.

You can swap out what’s not working with what will work better. Just like a car has swappable parts to improve performance, so does your business too.

Marketing, website design, digital activities, new products/services, email marketing, branding, staff. You name it.

All of these things of swapped around in the right way at the right time can help to improve your business performance.

Are you ready to switch up and improve your performance?

08/07/2022

Time Off: Is it important enough to you?

It’s the end of the week.

Some people were ready for the weekend on Monday. Some won’t be ready to finish till silly o’clock.

Which category are you in?

Did you bust out the 5am club membership and smash through your day, or are you a weekend warrior that will be working throughout?

Time off is important to recharge batteries.

Did you realise that after 5 years of service, Facebook employees are given a paid 30 day break away from their job, to be taken in one go.

Do you know why?

Because even Facebook realise the importance of time away from high stress situations, and the value in taking time away to recharge batteries.

What are you doing to recharge your batteries this weekend, ready for a productive start to next week?

07/07/2022

Lead Generation: Mindset and why it matters

Have you ever woke up and felt like you’ve lost your mojo for the day?

You wake the next, and the next, and even the next day after that, in nothing but a slump.

You get to your desk, you’re not overly focused on who you’re speaking with, it’s just another potential tyre kicker right? The same as the last 20 leads you spoken with this month.

Feels awful right?

We’ve all been there. And what’s worse, is a lot of the time, we don’t realise we’re in that slump until it’s too late!

Whether you’re selling pension management offers, asset management, mortgage brokering, willing writing services, whatever it is (yes, even marketing services too!), if you’re not consistently attracting the right kinds of people to work with, your mindset can drop, and you can feel like you’re loosing your passion.

If you’re feeling like this, you subconsciously send across to the people you interact with, a very unstable vibe, like something is a little off, and they don’t quite know what it is.

This can leads to lost sales opportunities.

And if you don’t realise you’re doing it, you can’t figure out how to fix it.

After all, would you trust a car salesman if they seemed a bit brow beaten and down and didn’t really want to talk about the car you desperately want to buy?

The same principals apply when your dealing with financial services.

Tip:

Before you speak the your next sales opportunity, take a couple of moments to yourself. Whatever state of mind you’re in, focus on the person you’re about to speak with:

- Who they are.
- Why their custom matters to your business.
- What it is that your business can do for them right now.
- Why they matter to you and your personal goals.
- Think about how you’re the only person who can solve all of their issues.

Then take a moment to think about how you can connect with this person:

- What do you know about them?
- What can you figure out about them prior to your next meeting, that you can use to compliment, connect with and make them feel at ease in your presence?

Then take that information and go to work! You know how to sell your products and services, and you also know how to care.

Now go care and show interest for your new prospect so they give you that lifetime sale over your competitor that’s snapping at your heels.

If you execute some of these basic principals into your daily client prep routine, you’ll be better prepared, your mindset will begin to shift to a more positive frame of mind as you rinse and repeat some of these really basic techniques.

If you focus back on the “why” of why you do what you do, you’ll begin to make some clear headway in always being in a positive mindset in front of clients.

06/07/2022

Ads: How one out of place word can get you the ban hammer!

We’ve all been there right, you prep a really great download, your landing page is brilliant, and you’re ads are all ready to go.

You hit the “GO” button aaaand…. Your ad is disallowed.

It goes “against our advertising policies. You’re not authorised to run campaigns around social or political issues”.

Social or political issues?

I’m giving away my 5 best tips on how you can manage your pension fund, not looking to start a riot!

What’s worse, is this is your best all round offering yet!

You feel you’ve nailed it all round, stuck to all the guidelines, done everything by the book.

So you go back and look.

Carefully combing over each word, each sentence in your ad description.

The content looks OK. The images were very carefully selected. The wording isn’t misleading or misrepresenting of anything that’s being advertised.

What could it be?

“Our top 5 tips have saved hundreds of thousands for people living in America so they can retire better off”.

Believe it or not, just simply stating the word “America” can get you ban if it’s seen to be misrepresenting America in any kind of way.

Yes, the ads bots can be THAT sensitive!

Make sure to check the guidelines of what’s appropriate when advertising across a platform with such intense ruling that can literally have your ad stopped for the sake of one simple word!

So let’s retry that again with a change:

“Our top 5 tips have saved hundreds of thousands for people living in your area, so they can retire better off”.

*BOOM* Instant approval!

For the sake of making the ad a bit more vanilla, a little less focused on “America”, but still targeting your audience, you can avoid getting the dreaded ban hammer!

05/07/2022

Lead Magnets: What Is a Good Lead Magnet To Use?

Overall, there are lots of type of lead magnets to choose from. Each lead magnet can have a different way of reaching your audience.

Some of the different lead magnet types include:

Guides/downloads, Webinars, Case Studies, Checklists.

Here’s a list of our top 3 types of lead magnets:

Guides/Downloads
Webinars
Case Studies

Guides/Downloads:

These are most common in the Financial Services Sector.

You’ve no doubt heard of, if not used headlines similar to:

“10 Tips To Better Manage Your Money”

“5 Pit Falls To Avoid When Transferring Your Pension”

“How Much Your idle Assets Can Really Make You”

“How To Move Your Pension With You When You Emigrate”

All very valid titles to guides. And the information inside of them, very informative, very focused, very enlightening.

But what information are you putting in those guides? Have you checked that it conforms to the regulatory bodies guidelines to advertise?

Is your guide 1-2 pages, or is it more of a 20-30 page document that’s filled with more info than that average person is likely to read?

Keep it simple. Keep it brief. Pack it full of the most important info your clients need to hear before they get on the phone with you, so they’re not blinded by jargon, but can easily attribute how they can see their assets being managed by you, I’m a simple, easy to understand way.

Webinars:

Hosting a webinar is a really great way of showing people you know what you’re on about and aren’t afraid to show the world, on camera, that you know your stuff, right?

Webinar’s are not for the feint hearted. It takes a lot of prep work. A lot of editing (if you’re posting it as a non-live webinar) and takes a lot of time to prep.

Most webinars can run from 30-90 minutes (we advise 30-45 mins max) so that it keeps people’s attention. Don’t forget, running live webinars at a sensible time for people to log on and enjoy should be top of mind.

Is starting a webinar at 9pm the right time to keep your audience captivated, or are you just running it that late so you can watch Love Island?

Having punchy, engaging content to to keep people interested from start to finish is key.

Are you taking a live Q&A session too?

Remember, you may need help to catch all the comments if you plan on doing a live webinar.

Case Studies:

Case studies are a great way to socially proof your business by the validation of the fact that you’ve worked with some great people and got some great results.

The best part is, this is one of the easiest lead magnets to create IF you have a good relationship with your clients AND they’re willing to allow you to use their data as a way of saying “hey look what we done for these folks and we can help you get similar results too”.

The easiest lead magnet by far to produce, but only if you have clients that will allow you to share their story/results.

If you’re great at what you do, our top 3 lead magnets shouldn’t be overly scary to deal with.

04/07/2022

Lead Magnets: Why some work and some don’t.

Ever wondered why some people can make a fortune off of what seems like the simplest lead magnet, and yet the more value you seem to stack, the less leads you get?

It’s simple.

KISS

Keep It Simple Silly!

Don’t over complicate your lead magnet.

When you give value, give it in its simplest form. Easy enough to digest, but yet informative enough that it makes an impact on the reader.

Not everyone has the same level of understanding and the world has developed into a much more well connected environment with keyboard and Google warriors ten a penny.

All of a sudden you almost halt in dealing with the likes of Mr Jeffries at No.42 who you could visit face to face for his annual documents sign off and account update.

Or Mrs Jones at no.78 who always had her husband take care of the investments, but now doesn’t have a clue what to do since her beloved husband passed away.

Why?

Because all of a sudden your audience spectrum has increased with your online presence. You begin reaching people with different backgrounds, different a lifestyles, different levels of understanding, the whole game has changed.

Now it’s Mrs Jones trying to work Zoom for the first time, or Mr Jeffries trying to fire up his 10 year old desktop and figure out how to e-sign your latest document.

So what have you done to tailor your lead magnet, to still reach your target audience, while incorporating all those new interested parties, now that your digital presence is developing at a much faster pace?

You still want the Mr Jeffries and Mrs Jones’s of the world, but you’re attracting a much more diverse range of people.

Keep the magnet simple:

Don’t blind your audience with lots of technical jargon that looks great if you were writing a thesis on money management, rather, write simple, clear, easy to digest information that can grab your audiences attention. After all, you want them to realise that your “10 pitfalls to avoid while investing money” is the only guide they should be reading, right?

Have you checked how long it takes to go through and read your guide?

Was it informative, or just a load of waffle?

When was the last time you measured the impact your lead magnet has on the audience it’s trying to reach?

01/07/2022

Case Study: The Yard Stick

The Yard Stick is the UK’s highest rated marketing agency for the financial services sector in the UK.

We’ve recently had the pleasure of a fixed 9 week project with The Yard Stick, looking after 20 or so of their ad account clients, while a new employee was being taken on to fill a vacant position as head of inbound marketing.

Our task was to ensure there was minimal disruption to service while this change was taking place.

Challenges

With a very short handover period, and working in a sector that was completely new to us as a business, we set about ensuring service remained as close to normal as possible.

During our time working inside The Yard Stick, we learned a lot about big, multi-account management.

We deliberately only work with a handful of clients at any one time so that we can pay our full attention to their needs. So managing 20 accounts was a huge task to undertake!

Value

While looking after a variety of accounts, we were able to lend our skills in creating content, images, building and executing new ad campaigns, using different advertising strategies to what were previously being used, as well as monitor and report every inch of account data and feed that back in a meaningful way to their clients.

We advertised with access to their clients across Facebook and Linked In, generating leads for those clients in the Financial Services Sector.

Adverts were also being targeted around the world, so not only a much broader audience locations wise, but also a very specific type of audience to attract too.

Sum Up

It was a fully immersive experience, which shows that we’re now ready to expand as we can now clearly see that our previously thought limits can be expanded upwards, to accommodate more than we thought. A very wise lesson has been learned, and I’m grateful for learning that.

The great part about working on this project, has been utilising different advertising strategies for their clients lead generation efforts, and seeing those results come in under the agreed averages (by a fair amount too) of their expected budget per lead.

30/06/2022

Ad Bans - 3 Common Reasons Your Ads Get Banned Before They Even Start

If you’ve ever gone to advertise on social platform, it can be difficult to know what parameters you have to advertise in, as not all advertising platforms have exactly the same sets of rules.

That being said, we’ve found 3 common reasons that ads fail before they even start, and these are common across all platforms.

1 . Imagery

A common misconception is that you can chuck any kind of image up and it will make it through the approval process.

Wrong.

There’s a lot that advertising platforms now look for when you ad goes through the approval process.

Is the image suitable for the audience?
Is it of a high quality?
Is there too much text?
Can the image been seen to be misleading?

2 . Ad Descriptions

When you’re writing your ad text, what is it you’re trying to convey in that message? If the wrong text goes in, you can get the ban hammer before it gets approved.

Is the language clear and concise?
Is it profanity free?
Is the text misleading in anyway?

3 . Links

One of the big things advertising platforms check via its AI when authorising an ad, is whether the link in your ad actually leads somewhere good, or someone that it shouldn’t.

Are you using full links?
Does you link take the user to somewhere other than your landing/web page?
Can the user easily navigate away from the linked page, back to wherever else they want easily or not?

If you can avoid these pitfalls, you’re well on your way to ensuring your ad makes it through the review process successfully!

30/06/2022

What Platform Should I Use To Target My Ideal
Customer?

Did you know there’s more than 1 social channel you can advertise on?

Here’s 3 different social channels and what they’re best at targeting:

Facebook

Consumers - whether it’s consumers of content, shopping online or groups of funny cat videos or even your local dentist, Facebook is one of the most diverse places to advertise!

B2B
B2C

Linked In

Linked In is a great place to meet other businesses, other professionals, business to business types of interactions.

B2B

Pinterest

If you want to attract family types, sell creative items, cookery, home wear, showcase to a wholesome type of customer, Pinterest is the place to be!

With it being a newer site to advertise on, costs are significantly cheaper than other platforms!

B2C

No matter where you choose to advertise, don’t just presume because you’ve always advertised on one platform, that’s always the best.

Different platforms have different types of audiences. By looking at these carefully and nailing your audience, you can better expand your targeting on who your product or service speaks to, as well as converting them into lifetime customers, just by utilising the right platform.

When was the last time you checked whether you’re using the right platform?

28/06/2022

Facebook Ads:

Financial Services Sector.

FCA regulation checks.

Did you even know?

That’s right! Advertising platform Meta (Facebook/Instagram) has decided to check ALL advertising in the UK for the financial services sector, against the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) register.

This means, if you aren’t FCA approved and registered, your advertising account could be restricted from advertising until it is.

Facebook has only released this information in the past week or so via email, with direct emails asking for this information being received this week.

If you advertise in the financial services sector, have you even been made aware of these essential compliance tasks that need to take place in order for you to continue advertising across Facebook?

If not, you really should be asking your marketing partner why not!

All Facebook require is your FCA number, and a way to 2FA (2 Factor Authenticate) the details by asking for a code registered to your FCA membership, to receive a code from Facebook which you then input into the confirmation details.

Given Facebook’s notoriety for being difficult to get hold of support wise, what have you done to prepare yourself for these new level of compliance required by Facebook? Will you pass their requirements?

28/06/2022

3 Mistakes To Avoid With Your Social Media Strategy:

1. Not knowing who your audience is
2. Not creating the right content
3. Using non-relevant images/video

Not Knowing Who Your Audience is:

If you haven’t yet, defining your audience is key to kicking off your ads successfully!

Have you defined:

Age Group?
Gender?
Interests?

If you haven’t had time to work out your ideal client, now’s the time! You can start by generating ideas on their ideal age range.

Are they young? Middle aged, or closer to retirement?

Are they male, female or a non-specific gender?

What things generally interest your ideal customer?

Do they travel a lot? Do they love gardening?
Are they retired?

These simple questions can help you better target your idea client, by closing the gap (and the guesswork) that various social media algorithms go through while advertising and showcasing your content on your behalf.

Not Creating The Right Content

When was the last time you spoke to your client base?

Did you send them one of those forwarded meme’s?

You know, one of those funny ones that only the cool people will laugh at? The ones that “get you” and your sense of humour.

Was it something you’re 100% sold on that your customers will be glad to remember you by?

If you’re not consistently bringing value to your clients front door, will they keep wanting to open up when all you do is bring a slightly funny, likely inappropriate meme to the meeting?

Let’s face it, content has a time and a place, and while sharing the funny stuff can be a great ice breaker, is it really how you want to be remembered by your customers?

Bring value. Or they’ll seek that value elsewhere.

Using non-relevant images/video

“A picture paints a thousand words”.

And a good video can leave you speechless!

Both images and video perform really well when added into an ad campaign.

Video has been proven to perform the best out of all of the standard options (image/video/text).

What view to do you give to others when promoting your brand?

Do you post high quality images and videos?

Or do you post more for click bait/likes on your posts?

Is the visual image you’re creating of your business, the one your most happiest with? Is it consistent? Is it of a good quality?

Or are you just posting to see who will like/share?

But wait…. “What do you mean by high quality” I hear you say?

If you have the power to stop someone in their tracks with the video content you make, or you can open up someone’s mind to 1000 new reasons to like you and your product/service, ensuring what you share is of good quality, on point, and relevant, is extremely important.

If the first way new prospective clients see you, via an image or video in a ad? Is it of the same quality (or better) you see in others in your industry?

How do you stand out against everyone in your sector?

What are YOU doing differently to everyone else?

In a world where content is king, ensuring all of your content is engaging, memorable, thought provoking, effectively, “on point”, is absolutely essential. Whether you post daily, weekly, monthly (or heaven forbid), yearly, it’s important that at every point, your customers can see a high value, high quality output from you.

Not just in your text, but your imagery, videos, emails, products/services.

If you can be proactive in all of these 3 areas, and look to improve on these basics, your overall customer offering will improve. Your content towards your customers will improve. Your visual offerings will improve and you’ll begin to shine over and above what your competitors are.

And let’s face it, you don’t want to give away your customers to your competitors, all because you’ve not nailed the basics, do you?

When was the last time you gave your social media outreach strategy a quick MOT to make sure it’s firing on all cylinders?

27/06/2022

We’ve had the pleasure of working with some great businesses recently.

It’s allowed us to see what others are doing, what’s working, what’s not and help us align more carefully, how we can help you!

We’re huge believers in ensuring that as a client, we listen to YOU and YOUR NEEDS.

It’s important for us to ensure we understand you, your business, your goals, what you’ve done that worked previously, and even help in areas you may not have thought of yet!

We know the value a social presence can bring to a business, it’s reputation and how’s it perceived within its local community.

That’s why we feel it’s important to share our collective knowledge across our business, straight into yours!

Ready to start to your social growth yet?

20/06/2022

It’s been a while since we last posted!

A lot has happened!

So, recently we have had the absolute pleasure of working alongside some wonderful businesses, in a variety of sectors!

Recent projects include:

Canon - Leads generation project for some brainstorming sessions held with a variety of people throughout the world, with their developing regions program.

Key challenges included: Finding the right demographic of people, video calling each one, with a full follow through process, and ensuring those people turned up for the relevant session.

The Yard Stick - Short term cover for the management of 20 advertising accounts in the Financial Services Sector, including building out new ads, changing creatives and overall management of those accounts and clients.

Key challenges included: Learning The Yard Stick's way of doing things, new systems, new processes, and being able to hit the ground running after a very short handover period as well as being able to handover all the processes to a new starter.

It's About Music - A new dance music event that took the company from 0 sales to 50% pre-event sold tickets to a cold audience, for an in-person event in a very niche market, in a newly renovated club.

Key challenges include: Creating content from scratch, that didn't clash with other people in the industry, promoting across DJ's/platforms so that the brand could be visible, as well as navigating being one of the very first run of events straight after COVID restrictions had been uplifted in the UK.

These are just SOME of the highlights this year so far, with many more opportunities on the horizon that are working away in the background.

If you have a business that needs some help with moving your digital presence forward, why not see how we can help by dropping us a message.

10/01/2022

05/10/2021

So last night Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp went offline for an extended period of time.

For us, it’s was an unpleasant pain as both advertising and contact with not just some of our customers reduced, but a lot of our customers customers felt the pain too.

While it may have been a pleasant and welcome relief for some users, for businesses, it can be painful experience having key ways of communication and advertising removed without knowing when it’ll be switched back on.

As a way to help diversify, we’re offering all new clients that come on board throughout the rest of October a one time, all in one package.

We’ll get you set up and running on all the key social channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest) and run those platforms for you (both content and ads) for a reduced price of £2000+VAT instead of £3000+VAT. Saving you a whopping £1000+VAT off of our standard price for this service.

We know the importance of social media within a lot of businesses. We also realise that having all your eggs in one basket is also a bad idea too.

If you want to talk about a strategy to safeguard your social media options, we’re here to talk. Just drop us a message or pop a comment below and we’ll reach out for a conversation.

03/08/2021

We’re always striving to be the best we can be for our clients.

Today, we’d like to welcome on board our newest client, The Mildmay Community Centre!

Based in London, this local community centre puts their local community at the heart of everything they do, and it really shows.

We’re really pleased to be working alongside them in their journey to help improve their local community!

You can check them out at:

https://www.facebook.com/mildmaycommunitycentre/

https://www.mildmaycommunitycentre.org

19/07/2021

With lockdown now being in the lifted mode, we’ve decided to do something special!

If you’re a small business owner and need help getting your brand back in the limelight, we’re offering a one time special offer for all new small business clients.

Think this might be for you?

Why not drop us a message and see how we can help!

15/07/2021

It’s been a minute since we last posted.

How have you all been?

How are your businesses surging the pandemic?

Is everything going really well, or is it still a daily struggle for you?

While we’ve been quiet due to lockdown, we’ve been working on some side passion projects that we hope to bring to full bloom in the coming months.

What’s new that we can help you with?