Building customer relationships 1-by-1, Cate Trotter, Trendspotter.
Interview with Bronwyn Durand of JupiterJasper for the Marketing Ideaology Blog August 2009
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The Basics
Please give full business name and contact details that will be published with the entry.
Cate Trotter
Insider Trends – www.insider-trends.com +44 (0) 844 504 8080 contact@insider-trends.com
Insider London – www.insider-london.co.uk +44 (0) 844 504 8080 contact@insider-london.co.uk
What is your name and role?
Cate Trotter – I’m Founder & Head of Trends for both businesses.
How long has your business been in existence?
Since June 2008.
What is your industry and main product/ service?
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.
Award-winning 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.
Where the business is going
What is your business vision? (What would you like your business to become?)
Insider Trends:
We are aiming to be heard of within big business – clients and agencies – within our target audience.
Insider London :
We want to own trend tours within London and perhaps everywhere.
Sum up your brand.
Insider Trends and Insider London are about finding and showcasing innovation, the most exciting of what is out there – life, but better. We deliver our brand with professional friendliness. With us you will be sure that we know what are talking about, and that will add to your level of enjoyment. We provide a personalised and approachable exploration of the city.
Customers
Describe your customers in a sentence. What do they want?
Insider London appeals to travellers as opposed to tourists – typically we will attract Austalians, Europeans and Londoners who want to know something else, see something else. They want to experience a different feeling or aspect of London, more modern perhaps. Often we attract travellers who are visiting London for their second or multiple times, and they have done the ordinary.
Insider Trends helps businesses looking for inspiration and insight. Trend Tours provide a highly enjoyable but educational and informative look into London and trends according to a theme. Its bespoke and convenient, saving time by providing immediate contact with the ideas and people that the business wants to connect with. We’ve created tours for architects, inspiring tours for businesses developing concepts, showing technology in action in unexpected ways that are relevant to our customers. We show the state of play in an arena, if thats what you want to know or experience.
Why should they choose you rather than anyone else?
Insider Trends: seeing a trend in action – on the ground – is profoundly more effective than reading about it. The devil or idea is in the detail – and that can make or break an initiative. Insider Trends allows you to experience trends and live them for yourself. Perhaps even connecting with people behind the ideas – get face to face time with the people responsible.
Insider London is a tour by means of conversation, not presentation. You are guided by experts who really care about what they are talking about. It can be liberating to spend time with someone who really cares about the same topics you are interested in. And at the end of the tour, as its never possible to show you everything, you are likely to walk away with extra tips that you can explore further that are specific to your interests. Its personalised. London through a Londoner’s eyes, kind of like being taken around by a friend rather than a tour guide.
Says Cate: ‘In a nutshell, other London tour companies are just not as excited about London as we are’.
Cate also writes for various reputable Trendspotting and green or eco based blogs.
Your Stand on marketing
Do you have a written down marketing plan?
Cate has a written down business building plan. Cate makes the solid point that whenever they do a tour, 12 people are spending 3 hours with their brand. The entire experience is in effect marketing the business.
Part of Cate’s approach is to view the process gaining customers from the sales funnel perspective. There is an introductory end where the potential customer gains value from something like Cate’s hidden gems document. Its a useful way to try to demonstrate Insider London or Insider Trends in action, encouraging a sale. Once the customer is on tour, Cate and her team of expert guides have a 1-to-1 customer approach, enabling them to get to know their customer and base their recommendations for further sales on what will be useful and relevant, the green tour or quirky London tour, for instance.
What is your general opinion of marketing? (what would you say to businesses that don’t pay any mind to marketing?)
Everything you are doing is marketing. If you are doing it right, in almost an unconscious way you can market your business through referrals. We’ve found that in that way, marketing has often come to us. Without having anyone in an official marketing role, we’ve found that sometimes we do passive marketing by simply saying yes to opportunities we are offered.
One thing Cate has invested time in is search optimization – she hails it as incredibly powerful – and enables you to be visable to people who are actively want what you have – Cate has used press releases to good effect, and has had impressive results from even the tiniest bit of press coverage. On the flip side, as a small business owner, Cate says sometimes its a choice between sleeping or marketing.
What is your marketing philosophy? (What governs your marketing choices?)
The 80-20 rule is a big driver of Cate’s philosophy and she is very disciplined in working out what 20% will result in 80 percent of benefit to business – really working it out. Search optimization was top of that.
Their printed material helps them to tell a story about what they do for the customers that come on their tours, bringing what Insider Tours and Insider London to life. They do give out 2 at a time, one to cross or upsell, and one for a friend. Aside from the web, the rest of their marketing at present resides in relationships built in person or using social media.
Cate makes a valid point about marketing and its effect on growth – the earlier stages of employing people to help to manage demand is the hardest – going from 1 to 2 persons is a 100% increase in effort in training and demands on your time. In contrast, going from 20 to 21 people is marginal.
If you could use no more than 15 words to (explain)market your business?
Insider London – private tours of best of modern london
Insider Trends - fast track to killer business ideas.
What has been biggest marketing challenge for your business to date?
Getting it all done on a shoestring. There is only so much you can achieve when you are funding from revenue. Keeping the frustration and impatience in check, not letting the to do list get the better of me and finding the right people to help me.
What was your first big marketing break, and what did you to capitalise on it?
Cate created her first break in university by investing her skills learnt in a web design course to upload a hypothetical animation she created on Green Peace and Walmart merging to the internet. The result of which was that she was offered a job by an ethical marketing business before leaving university. Cate believes that being web literate has given her considerable advantage in developing her business. Even if you use cheap tools to get the job done, you are almost instantaneously in business if you are able to put together a website and take bookings. Cate says its scary how much Google matters.
What is the most successful type of marketing you do and why? How do you determine what is successful?
Search – make instant sales.
PR through exposure given by journalists.
Profile boosting activities through being involved with Changents and Earthkeeper.
Other diversified activities like Trend nights where an event is held around a theme, like green trends.
Word of mouth.
Upcoming ideas
Cate is going to launch a self-funding blog that will be written by invited authors who are experts in their fields and will share in the profits.
Motivate
Where do you get your marketing ideas? (do you have any regular sources of inspiration?)
Cate has been a master of using free resources from marketing gurus. As a rule, Cate now buys any book that takes her fancy – its a false economy by putting limits on knowledge. Even if the book is read only later. Cate gathers ideas from many places, its all about finding the importance for her – citing anything by Anthony Robbins, the 4-hour work week (Timothy Ferriss) Get To The Top on Google (David Viney) and even The E-Myth revisted (Michael E Gerber). If there is any possibility of it making her happier or more confident, then its worth it.
What would you tell a business (entrepreneur) looking for guidance on their marketing efforts?
Do your search marketing, get to the top of Google. Attend free courses. The 80-20 rule applies here too, you can possibly gain 80% head start on the knowledge for 20% of the cost. Monkeydesign house does a day long free course that has an exercise on getting to the top of google that Cate really recommends.
Test. Try new things. Find a way to try something without investing too much time and effort to see if it will work for you. Have little goals and achieve them.
This interview with Bronwyn Durand and Cate Trotter was for Marketing Ideaology.
