Now I have always been a great believer in harnessing new platforms like mobile marketing and social media sites to promote your brand or company. Hence setting Alchemis up on Twitter.

In my view it’s more than a wise step to get out there, even if a Twitter account doesn’t result in immediate new business, your brand and company name is out there in the “Twittersphere” for all to see, which can only be a good thing.

The common perception with social media sites is that people go there to socialise and not to buy. True, but brand visibility is the key, and with Twitter having over 18 million users, and Facebook a staggering 400 million active users, it’s hard to see why some companies still stick to their guns and use more traditional methods of marketing.

On the same note, with the introduction of more and more mobile devices, surely the place to be is in the mobile web? Well you would be shocked at the lack of brands I speak to on a daily basis that are yet to fully appreciate the benefit of mobile marketing.

That’s why when one of my clients that I call on invited me to a seminar based on their predictions for paid search in 2010, it was refreshing to listen to someone promoting the idea of harnessing the mammoth power of social media, and the importance of the growing number of consumers available to be targeted through mobile devices today.

Now I am not about to give away my client’s top tips for mobile or social media search (sorry), but what I will say is that the seminar really drove home the constant developments in social media and mobile technologies that companies just aren’t making full use of.

I read an obvious but probably not widely registered fact in an article some time ago that text messages are usually read by a user within 20 seconds, which means brands can start seeing results almost instantaneously, versus hours or days for a similar email marketing campaign. Now if brands can harness this to generate new business and get results that fast, then they should be getting onto it before these spaces are flooded, and their brand becomes a needle in a haystack.

The moral of the story is if you’re not using the power of social media, do it. And if you’re not mobile marketing, do it.

I can’t recall the last time I had a clever, well-targeted marketing text message sent to me, in fact I’m not even sure I’ve even had one! Aside from my mate John texting “Dan, get down to the Royal George, they are giving out free Tequilas!” Now that was well targeted.

One of the key concerns raised by prospective clients is that of representation by their New Business Manager, the individual we select to work on their campaign. They are worried that business development callers will push or persuade marketing prospects to meet their clients when they don’t actually want to or don’t have a genuine need.

Our response to this is that a consultative approach to prospects is far more effective in the long term and that pushing a prospect into a meeting will almost certainly result in either a cancelled meeting or, even worse, a poor quality meeting. Thus, our offer is based on the quality of meetings that we set for our clients – this does mean however, that we don’t set that many, but in our experience marketing agencies prefer quality to quantity!

Selling is all about making it easy for people to buy; therefore you have to find out what they want to buy rather than try and shove something down their throat that they don’t want and never have any intention of buying.

At this stage in the sales cycle this need may only be implied (i.e. ‘I’m slightly concerned that my current agency isn’t always giving me value for money’) but this doubt is nearly always sufficient reason to set an appointment. We then work with our clients to help them turn this implied need into an explicit need during the meeting itself (i.e. ‘I’d like you to come back in and show me how you would improve my customer retention rates’)

So… the hard sell (aka the transactional sell) does not and never will work in any service based market. The hard sell can work in a product based call or when there is a single transaction involved but a consultative or relationship based sell is the only way in our market.