IMC Club Member Heidi Chamberlain-Jones from Eat Sleep Herefordshire shares her thoughts and feedback on how the Inventive Marketing Club has impacted and helped improve their business marketing.
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Who you are and tell me a little about your company
I am Heidi Chamberlain-Jones, the Managing Director of Eat Sleep Live Herefordshire which has the grand title of the destination marketing company for Herefordshire, in other words your tourism board for Herefordshire. That runs alongside my umbrella company called Links Media Ltd which is a business development and training company which helps businesses in all matters of marketing, sales, leadership and management so the two dovetail rather well together…
How do you work with your companies?
…One of the reasons we love doing what we do on both sides of things really is two fold, because we are business to business based as well as B to C with the consumer we have the luxury of being able to put the two together which is really tangible. One of the things that works really well for us is when we produce the annual tourism guide, it’s the only guide book to the area. As well as having an entry on our website among the other amazing benefits of being an member of Eat Sleep Live Herefordshire or ESL as we call it, we charge people extra to go into a printed book. These days they say that print is dead, but it so definitely isn’t, it’s not all about being online. I had the wonderful uplift of receiving a voicemail from a Yorkshire man earlier this week who had specifically called our number… to say he had been in the area, he had picked up one of our guide books and it was the best guidebook he had seen, it was rammed full of information, it had beautiful photography, it was well put together and he just had to let us know!
Now when a consumer tells you that with no other alternative other than just wanting to tell you because they are so pleased with what they had. It’s a free book, they didn’t have to pay for it, there was no other motivation to contact us, that really warms our heart… you know that if the consumer is feeling that you know that the people advertising in it are also getting that feedback, that is all you can possibly want is for those advertisers to be getting the return on their investments so they keep advertising.. it’s just a wonderful round circle, what can be better than that when you are doing business…
What have you done recently that has been fun?
… one of the other things we do… which we don’t charge for, we marry our Links Media with [our] ESL side of things… [and] give free marketing training to not just our members but to the tourism and businesses around the county… [we] help them to do their own marketing a bit better and give them hints and tips… we actually partner with Ben at Rather Inventive… which seems to work so well… Once a month we give free training to people… it’s our way of giving something back and supporting businesses…
What’s your favourite Club episode?
…we love joining Ben’s club, we have had so much return of investiment in terms of knowledge… My personal favourite [is] the one that I seem to repeatedly refer back to which is his one on SEO… helping you to understand how those search terms work… it’s like having my virtual reference book, my idiots guide, Ben makes it so simple… you see exactly where it is suppose to go instead of having to figure it out yourself…
Would you recommend the Inventive Marketing Club?
…I already am recommending the Inventive Marketing Club to so many business friends… even people in my own team… it is such a cost effective way of getting the deep, inside knowledge without all of the dross… Ben is one of those clever people who has a way of speaking to you in a language you understand… Ben is very much here for you… they are not onerous, they don’t go on for ever and ever… I have been very happy with them…