Member Spotlight

Alice Elliott

Design Your Marketing

Name: Alice Elliott
Business: Design Your Marketing
Based in: Reading, Berkshire
Tel: 0118 958 5520
Email: alice@designyourmarketing.co.uk
Web: www.designyourmarketing.co.uk

Where did I begin?

Design Your Marketing was spawned out of my first business, Alice Designs, which concentrated on supplying marketing literature that not only looked good, but was effective in gaining business as well. It's all very well having leaflets that look pretty, but it's a waste of time and money if they don't actually perform as expected.

I noticed that so many leaflets, flyers, campaigns, and in particular adverts had the potential to not actually work. They may look stunning, but they lacked vital marketing ploys based on methods such as AIDA (attraction, interest, desire, action) that are designed to achieve success. This includes:

• Understanding your customers' psychology, how they think and respond to your marketing; this includes marketing research to analyse exactly what your customers want;
• Having a purpose or aim to attract attention, plus an incentive to achieve a response; every marketing campaign should have a focus that plays with your customers' greed;
• Not sacrificing layout for 'tends' or 'fashion', and remembering not to omit simple things like making contact details obvious so customers notice them.

New role = new business

After creating my new role as a Visual Marketer, my business evolved into Design Your Marketing to accommodate these changes: I advise on increasing the visibility of businesses to make them more attractive to their customers; not just in pictures, but through words, branding and presence, networking, marketing concepts, mind-set and long-term strategies, both off and online.

These can take on many forms:

• how to make a business more visible and therefore more attractive to customers
• adapting a leaflet campaign to get long-term customers as well as immediate sales
• advice on how to write a series of adverts to achieve their goal
• providing copywriting for both paper literature and online
• advice on various online activities to increase visibility
• advice on increasing your expertise and effective use of your growing contact list
• dispelling marketing myths through friendly advice for start up businesses

How can I help you?

I work with SMEs and sole traders who want to achieve more business success through thoroughly understanding their customers, and also new businesses that need advice to follow low-cost and best practice routes. Through Design Your Marketing I also provide advisory consultation (locally or via telephone), a newsletter and blog posts to learn from my expertise, a variety of e-courses and online products, and later teleseminars and webinars to assist with the learning processes I provide.

What am I working on?

One of the projects I'm currently working on is business blogging and how effective it can be for your business, such as:

• increasing the visibility of your company in the search engines and social networking to gain more traffic to your website
• increasing the expertise of your company; providing your customers with extra information so they can get to understand your business better
• providing regular updates on good news and future activities; frequently posted new material stimulates search engine spiders and therefore raises your internet presence
• being fully self-editable and therefore eliminating the need of a webmaster or designer to make any changes
• providing an archive of information for reference and online researchers, and potential clients.

Blogs can also be alternatives to websites for start up businesses, providing inexpensive methods of gaining a presence online with the addition of high search engine activity and increasing your followers and potential customers. Effective linking with social networking can increase your business potential while learning the ropes, leaving you in a better situation rather than wasting money embarking on an expensive website.

Future projects will be exploring the benefits of social networking, writing e-newsletters for customer communication, using marketing campaigns effectively to gain long-term business, and branding.

What do others say about me?

"Alice is sharp as a button and has great insight into how design can help your marketing. Speak to her." Rod Sloane, No-Bull Business

"When Alice designed our new Success Network flyer we found her both professional and creative, and she goes the extra mile to help you achieve what you want. She collaborates with you on your project, is able to translate ideas into convincing visuals whilst making sure you use the right messages for your promotional materials. We would not hesitate using her services again." Ute Wieczorek-King, Success Network

"Alice is clearly an expert in her field, but also someone who is always keen to update her knowledge and learn more. She is always willing to help, is a great contributor and is obviously determined to succeed. I have full confidence in her ability to help anyone in the whole arena of visual marketing." Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist

"Alice has given me excellent support, help, advice and expert knowledge on designing and marketing my business to the masses. Her attention to detail, creative flair and friendly manner is second to none. I would highly recommend her to any business." Sarah Goddard, Visage Silhouettes

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