She’s Ingenious!

Cally Robson

As founder and owner of She’s Ingenious! Cally Robson’s niche is in supporting women inventors and new product developers in getting their products to market.

With a firm foundation of international experience with major companies and brands, and a keen sense of how to turn an idea into reality, Cally set about evolving a concept of how to best support those who are inclined to innovate, invent or create new products. Over 6 years, Cally has refined her idea to address a niche with what is now the unique and special community – She’s Ingenious!

Cally’s approach to the business of commercialising ideas is rooted firmly in the reality of it, warts and all. It’s one thing to have an idea but something else entirely to confront that ‘great unknown’ which is understanding what you have to know and do to get anywhere. And that’s before you figure out how to sell any. Understanding the inventor-ly mindset is crucial. Stepping away from the inventor in you and looking at your idea from 7 different mindsets – including salesperson and customer champion – will enable you to establish commercial viability.

But why ‘go niche’?

Cally has focused on women, who may or may not be entrepreneurially minded to start with, but who are certainly of the inventor or innovator persuasion. Many would argue that the business opportunity of providing a subscription based resource, workshops and coaching is reduced by limiting to one gender. But in reality, making the decision to market to a niche could be the best decision you will make for your business. With it comes an intensity of focus, driving a better product or service, better knowledge of who your customers are and what they need. You can become the best at meeting that very specific need, and the undisputed expert. Naturally it follows that it’s then easier to sell what you are offering. Why would you choose the role of being all things to all people when you can thrive at being something something special? Going niche can give you a sustainable marketing advantage and a real point of difference.

It’s all grown out of experience rather than just theory.

You don’t necessarily happen on a niche. Cally went through the process of appealing to a wider audience, refining her offering, and had even set up a brand, domain and built the goodwill to go with it. But knowing the market you play in is what makes the difference. When you find the opportunity and can see the niche, you then need to break the fear and go for it. Cally has endured the pain of rebranding. But a good idea became an exceptional idea, with a strong brand and an easy simplicity that makes it feel like should have always been there.

Laying claim to your niche is the beginning. Building credibility in a niche is a process – and is ultimately all about the knowledge you gather. Cally set about developing her own innovative crockery line – and then sought a way to make her subsequent coaching business not only a sustainable business, but one that played to her strengths in taking ideas to market. Research and insight are the springboard to position you in a niche.

Building a network of the right kind of contacts and working with like-minded institutions like the British Library, in particular the Business and IP centre, helped to create the right conditions for business growth and the eventual development into the brand She’s Ingenious! this year. Says Cally, I looked at the marketplace – everyone is starting a new business, in particular, women. The web provides the ultimate resource in researching and marketing globally. The combination results in She’s Ingenious! – a content-rich and interactive environment. Like-minded women can find the right practical information to support them in taking their idea to market, and a network of women who are going through varying stages of the same process. She’s Ingenious! is a flourishing source of personal experience rather than just theory. Members are advocates as they are getting real value from their ongoing experience.

She’s Ingenious! members have had a significant success appearing on Dragon’s Den. Sharon Wright with Magnamole, Nathalie Ellis with the Road Refresher – the non-spill pet bowl, Sue Bell with the patented butterfly technology to get the last bit from inside a tube, Jane Rafter with her Slinks Sandals. Watch interviews Cally has captured with experienced inventor-entrepreneurs here. Cally helps shape the commercial proposition for a business idea long before anyone gets in front of the Dragons.

Cally on:

Customers

Members are enterprising women mid-thirties and upward, most likely have  family commitments and want to create an alternative income stream or business asset. She’s Ingenious! aims to provide just what they are looking for – relevant, current and convenient sources of information backed up with actual experience.

There are resources to help enterprising people, but rarely do you find information that provides a clear picture on what you have to do. If you find worthwhile information, it’s rarely detailed enough to be of full use. Many great ideas suffer the fate of stumbling from one expensive professional to the next, while the innovator tries to find the right questions to ask. She’s Ingenious! steps into the gap – the niche – to give the detail, the whole picture, backed up with business savvy.

The brand She’s Ingenious! is summed up: Savvy. Independent. Creative. Practical. Supportive. That truly reflects the women who are members.

Cally advocates creating a people-facing personality for your brand that people can relate to, and attach values and credibility to. This is especially important when your business lives on the web as it helps to cross the potentially impersonal distance between you and your customer.

Marketing

Having a great brand can make the process of marketing your business so much easier. It can work on all levels – simply communicating in an instant what you do.

People aren’t really aware that we are living a revolution – there are no longer any hard and fast rules. Don’t think that you are going to get on top of what is happening in marketing by reading books – it’s happening way too fast for that. We are living the change everyday. Beware of sticking to old-school marketing. The internet has changed everything. If you are strategic, you can do your marketing for next to nothing.

With respect to email marketing – newsletters and email marketing are a fantastic way of engaging your customers and prospects on an ongoing basis. But don’t be wasteful of a customer’s attention – treat an email address like the gift that it is and provide a considered marketing message. Is it worth reading?

Find that unique thing to be memorable or stand out.

Web

Measurement for She’s Ingenious! is based on number of subscriptions. Customers who are paying members sign in and engage with content, how long they stay and consume the content is a good measure, as is their movements through the site. A conversion rate of 1% for new customers to the site is acceptable, with about 10% overall taking up the newsletter. Cally: I’d rather have 500 website visitors who are interested than 5000 who bounce. I aim for convertable traffic. She’s Ingenious! has been doubling traffic each month since launch.

Cally inspired thinking to apply to your business:

• Learn from being a mumpreneur: be clear on your priorities, openly acknowledge what you can and can’t do, know what kind of people you want to work with and are best working with.
• Don’t do things that aren’t going to give you benefit – value your own time.
• Develop a solid business model to be your platform.
• Fear is what keeps us from going niche – the little voice that says you have to appeal to everybody. Even once you have taken that first step and said ‘this is my niche’, you will probably find that overnight that little voice has talked you out of it, saying that you should rather play it safe and hedge your bets.
• Knowledge allows you to get focussed.
• Be disciplined about setting your business goals and monitoring your progress towards them.

The full interview with Cally Robson can be read here.

Sign up for the She’s Ingenious email newsletter (averaging monthly) which contains a free tip, technique, or strategy for developing and marketing new product ideas and inventions. And managing yourself through the process.

Contact:

She’s Ingenious

Cally Robson

Cally Robson on Twitter

Contact via the She’s Ingenious! contact email form

Bronwyn Durand writes the Marketing Ideaology blog for JupiterJasper On-demand Marketing.

Is your success hiding in a niche? is from Marketing Ideaology, a blog by Bronwyn Durand for JupiterJasper On-demand Marketing

Cate Trotter, trendspotter and entrepreneur, is the Head of Trends for Insider Trends and Insider London.

Cate Trotter

Cate spoke with Bronwyn Durand about the excitement of building her businesses and the effect her marketing tactics have had on Insider-London (private tours of the best of modern London) and Insider Trends (the fast track to killer business ideas).

Cate and her team of passionate guides revel in showing businesses and travellers what’s most exciting in London:

‘Life. But better’.

Insider Trends is a trendspotting consultancy, delivering trend tours, trendspotting reports and scenario planning workshops to businesses. The bespoke trend tours can focus on themes such as innovative retail concepts, new bars and restaurants, product innovation and point of sale. Most of its trend reports offer insights from around the world. Global brands and renowned designers have used its services to take the lead or remain at the forefront of their industry.

Insider London delivers tours of modern London for visitors and locals alike. Tours are created and led by its coolhunters who know the city like the backs of their hands, taking visitors straight to the best that this world-leading city has to offer. The tours include cutting-edge retail concepts, design and its intriguing and hidden secrets, revealing the most dynamic sides of the capital.

Cate has experienced the frustration and patience testing that comes with development of a business on a shoestring. Growing by investing revenue is a long journey. Cate’s team are an inspiring example of how a small business can develop customer relationships and understanding from 1-2-1 interaction and making the best of the opportunities you create.

Says Cate: ‘In a nutshell, other London tour companies are just not as excited about London as we are’.

What is Cate Trotter’s perspective?

On customers

Our customers have experienced the ordinary, now they are looking for something that shows them more.

• We provide inspiration for businesses. In a way that saves them time and is sometimes unexpectedly relevant.
• We are able to treat each interaction with customers as unique – thereby heightening the personalisation and experience for that individual or company. We respond to individual needs, one customer at a time.
• The devil is in the detail, and experiencing a trend or concept first hand is much more powerful than reading about it, and certainly more inspiring.
• Insider London is a tour by means of conversation, not presentation.
• There is a feeling of liberation when taken on tour by a friend, an insider, rather than a one size fits all guide. That is the experience that Cate and her team seek to create for you – professional friendliness.

Cate does view the journey of customer conversion as a funnel – offering an introduction at one end by means of something irresistibly free – like her hidden gems document (available from the Insider tours website). ‘This enables potential customers to try us out in a risk free way. Once on board, if you are doing your job as a guide, you are taking time to understand your customer and offer them any cross sell options that really will meet their needs (an emerging interest in eco would be a prime opportunity to sell a green tour of London, or a customer excited about the strangest of London may revel in a quirky tour)’.

On marketing

Observe the 80-20 rule. 20% Of what you do will give 80% of the benefit. 20% of your customers will bring 80% of the profit. Take the time to work it out.

Cate has a written down business building plan and believes everything they do is marketing.  Each customer gets to experience the brand for 3 hours at a time – so maximising the experience during that time reaps rewards of word of mouth or customers that become advocates. Cate’s strongest marketing action is in the delivery of her service.

• Do your search marketing – clearly describe what you offer in such a way that customers who want what you have can find you.
• Seek relevant PR coverage – a little in the right place can go a long way to bringing in customers.
• Test – try new things, experiment in small measured ways, achieve mini-goals and then do what works on a bigger scale.

Web

Being web literate is a considerable advantage to a startup entrepreneur or small business owner. It means that you can make best use of the free resources available to you, and best focus the ones you pay for.

Attend free classes – apply the 80-20 rule here too – learn 80% of what you need by paying for 20%.

Become an expert on search – help your customers to find you.

Inspiration

Read obsessively. ‘4-Hour Workweek’ by Timothy Ferriss, anything by Anthony Robbins, ‘The E-Myth Revisited’ by Michael E Gerber, and ‘Get To The Top on Google’ by David Viney are some of Cate’s recommended reads. Cate believes that as long as it helps her to be happier or more focused and confident, then its worth a read. Don’t restrict your access to knowledge.

Become a master of free resources.

What next

Cate is going to set up a self-funding blog with invited authors on a profit-share basis.

Building relationships with customers is always going to be about their perception of how you treat them as an individual, understanding their needs, continuing a conversation.

Cate inspired thinking for your business

• Get to the top of Google. Obvious? Well do it then.
• Really understand where the most benefit to your business lies in deciding what marketing to do.
• Experiment on a limited risk basis so that you can find what works (and have fun while doing it).
• Spend the time with your customers actively understanding their needs and marketing your business to them in a relevant way, whether its face to face, over the telephone or interactively.

Contact

Insider London & Insider Trends

www.insider-trends.com

contact@insider-trends.com

www.insider-london.co.uk

contact@insider-london.co.uk

+44 (0) 844 504 8080

The full Cate Trotter interview and extra information can be found in the full article, here.

Bronwyn Durand writes the Marketing Ideaology blog for JupiterJasper Practical Marketing.

Building customer relationships 1-by-1, Cate Trotter is from Marketing Ideaology, a blog by Bronwyn Durand for JupiterJasper On-demand Marketing

Ling Valentine runs LINGsCARS.com Ltd. This is a car leasing company that has taken marketing differentiation to a new level in an industry where professionalism is rooted in convention.

In an interview with Bronwyn Durand, Ling has given some great insight into how clear brand direction and giving your customers what they most want in a fresh way can be the path to your success.

Ling is a shining example of how breaking the rules may just be better.

www.LINGsCARS.com is on track to achieve 40million in leased car sales in 2009, despite the 25% drop in new car registrations in the UK. LINGsCARS is an online car leasing company, providing new cars by contract hire to private and business customers across the UK.

The website had 612,812 unique visitors to the site last year, and based on last month’s figures, is likely to achieve at least a million unique visitors this year.

Why?

Ling says, ‘Because, clearly, I am the best at providing the correct mix of cars, prices, service and entertainment’.

To fully appreciate the interview, view LINGsCARS here. A written explanation wouldn’t do it justice.

So what is the Ling perspective?

Customers

The goal: To provide the very best personalised service to intelligent creditworthy customers; giving them a great experience while acquiring a new car; by the most transparent, cost-effective and simple method in the UK. Ling’s customers are ABC123 prime and creditworthy people.

Ling’s approach to customers:

• The focus is on people, not cars.
• Every customer will be dealt with in a thoughtful and a correct manner.
• Ling’s website demonstrates the customer response time (and its good).
• In a competitive space filled with faceless dealer groups, houses and brokerages, Ling stands out for quality personalised service and efficiency.
• Every website visitor is treated with equal importance, and their website journey is monitored on a live basis through another Ling ‘first’. Computer Shopper magazine spotted this and said about it: “Welcome to the future.” They called Ling “The leading evangelist of treating website customers with intelligence and collaboration”

The key effect of Ling’s differentiation is memorability. The interactive entertainment and sheer Chinese madness of the website create a powerful experience intended to optimise the chance to be first-to-mind over long buying cycles – Ling isn’t just concerned with the first sale, but the ones to come.

Website

The only car leasing company to have an entirely online business model, everything is done from the website: sales, marketing and customer communications.

Ling says: ‘My website is 100% up to date and alive. I monitor it constantly; I seem to live inside LINGsCARS. I have a database with over 10,000 car trims and over 250 tables. I have some pages, which if they were printed out would exceed 400 pages of A4 paper in length. I break all the conventional rules. My whole website is more advanced than any other in the UK car industry.’

This ‘live’ availability of great deals is very advantageous in an industry where speed of securing a deal is of paramount importance, and where competitors are displaying an outdated list of car deals.

Ling: ‘I used my energy to build the biggest and best website in the whole industry. There are no limits to websites’.

Marketing

Ling: ‘I consider everything I do to be marketing – its my number 1 concern’.

Marketing is planned each year, but in such a way to facilitate adaptation as marketing opportunities present themselves – like Dragon’s Den. A spend limit is defined and allocated to what will best take the business forward – often brainstorms producing the most remarkable or crazy ideas will get the budget.

Given that there is a mature customer management model in place, once Ling has sourced the best deals, everything is geared towards relentless marketing. Ling says: ‘You never know what will appeal to different people’.

While competitors are spending a fortune on paid adverts, including adwords, Ling has focused on developing natural search to be top for every strong search term in the sector, as well as a long tail of content-related searches.

Marketing is driven by the entertainment factor – Ling explains the approach: ‘Much in the same way that Top Gear does not “road test” cars on TV, but entertains the viewers in many different and quite crazy ways’.

Ling’s memorable marketing includes (there are many many examples on her website)

• “Rescuing” Northern Rock when it was collapsing: Ling invested £10,000 when everyone else was withdrawing cash and gained some big TV appearances on the news and GMTV.
• “Pitch and run” on Dragon’s Den: entirely intended to promote the business. Ling managed to be entertaining and secure offers from two Dragons before turning them down. Ling says: ‘That took a lot of planning to pull off. I practiced for weeks and it nearly killed me in effort. However, it was well worth it. Subsequently I was so successful I was featured in a BBC book and given a whole chapter “A lesson in sales and marketing”.’
• LINGsCARS is listed on EdExcel as an A-Level exam question alongside McDonalds, EasyJet, Boots and Sainsbury’s, for students taking business qualifications – demonstrating the belief that every activity is marketing, even when there is not necessarily an initial direct benefit.
• “Chop Gear” series of car road tests with Ling’s crazy sister Shan appearing as a Chinese Red Guard.
• Ling’s marketing assets include a Nuclear missile truck, a London bus, and Beijing jeep

Inspiration

Ling admires Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, and constantly watches for opportunities in the media. Ling says: ‘If it is difficult, we do it, because what makes things special is that no one else ever has the confidence to make the extra effort’.

Ling’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs is to have confidence in yourself and not to be afraid to make a fool of yourself. Take every opportunity presented to you and give it 200% effort. Always broadcast any results you get as you never know what can be gained from the extra publicity.

What next?

Ling is already bringing her unique approach to new ventures.

Check out www.lingsmobiles.com – an entirely automated site that runs without human intervention; used car advertising will never be the same again when LingTrader launches; and LINGsWINGS promises to find all those £1 flights you know exist but can never find.

Try this

If you type your first name into Google, what do you get? Try typing ‘Ling’.

Marketing differentiation is not about aligning yourself with your competitors and doing one or two things better or differently.

Ling inspired thoughts for your business:

• Don’t take yourself too seriously
• Make Google spider food
• Make it as easy as possible to do business with you
• Try something different, and commit to it

Contact LINGsCARS:

LINGsCARS.com Ltd
LING World Headquarters
Vance Business Park
Gateshead, NE11 9NE
Tel 0191 460 9444
Fax 0870 486 1130

sales@LINGsCARS.com

www.LINGsCARS.com

The full Ling Valentine interview and extra information can be found in the full article, here.

Bronwyn Durand writes the Marketing Ideaology blog for JupiterJasper Practical Marketing.

Marketing differentiation, Ling Valentine style is from Marketing Ideaology, a blog by Bronwyn Durand for JupiterJasper On-demand Marketing