Category: Seminar

Chris Marr is the founder of The Content Marketing Academy, the UK’s largest membership organisation of its type. He was the speaker at the February 2017 evening meeting of the Club.

Chris is the leading voice of the growing content marketing movement in the UK. His pioneering work has helped countless organisations grow through content marketing.

Like all educators, Chris is also a dedicated student. He’s interviewed and facilitated events with many of content marketing’s most notable thought leaders. The knowledge he’s learned from the likes of Jay Baer, Ann Handley, Marcus Sheridan and Mark Schaefer has been shared freely with the members of his growing community.

Chris told Club members and guests how to use content marketing to make their business stand out.

The key points Chris made were:

• Trust is everything in sales
• People are increasingly buying over the web – cutting out interaction with sales people – because if they’re in ‘buying mode’ they will make that choice themselves. Hyundai Rockar has found just 53% of customers opt to drive a car before buying one
• Trust in online shopping is increasing
• We want things faster and more conveniently
• Product quality is increasing, and prices are reducing. This results in commoditisation of products
• We have more access to information (content)
• Traditional marketing is putting its head in the sand, ignoring these facts
• Given the importance of trust, how do we communicate with digital consumers? Answer the questions they have! Why? Because 70% of buying decisions are made before the consumer contacts the retailer and if they contact you they’re close to buying.
• So investing in marketing, instead of sales teams, makes sense
• Doing this pre-qualifies your customers by ensuring all their questions are answered before they contact you and eliminates the time spent answering the same questions repeatedly. It also builds trust and can position your business as a thought leader in your sector
• Answering questions, solving problems and providing valuable and helpful content about your industry also helps you rank better on Google Search results
• The best organisations in the world: 1) Know more about their customers; 2) Get closer to their customers; 3) Emotionally connect with their customers
• Building trust takes time
• If you’re not creating content, you don’t exist to potential customers
• Content marketing is “The art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyers more intelligent or perhaps entertaining them to build an emotional connection.”
• See yourself as a teacher for your customers – “they ask, you answer” Become the Wikipedia of your industry
• The Big 5 Questions to answer: 1) Prices; 2) Problems; 3) Comparisons of products; 4) Reviews; 5) What’s best?
• Content marketing builds trust by: 1) Providing helpful & valuable information; 2) Giving it away; 3) Accelerates your progress along the Know-Like-Trust journey for the potential customer; 4) Makes you the ‘Go-To’ Resource; 5) Builds your authority
• Don’t rely on traditional media – become a publisher of content
• Your answers need to be long enough to be valuable but short enough to be Google-friendly
• Don’t outsource your content marketing because it’s your source of competitive advantage!

To replay the Facebook Live broadcast of Chris’s talk, click HERE. Members can request a copy of his slides by emailing the Club.

The Content Marketing Academy’s annual conference, TCMA, takes place June 8 and 9. For more information about it, content marketing and The Content Marketing Academy, go to https://www.thecontentmarketingacademy.co.uk/

 

 

 

In the first evening talk of the Club’s new term, The Rt Hon Frank Mulholland QC, Temporary Judge and Privy Councillor, spoke to members, guests and local business people about his career.

After graduating from the University of Aberdeen with an LLB in 1981 and a Diploma in Legal Practice in 1982, Mr Mulholland completed his traineeship before being admitted as a solicitor in 1984 and joining the Procurator Fiscal Service.

He remained there until 1991, when he was transferred to the Crown Office, working as a solicitor in the High Court Unit. Mr Mulholland became a Notary Public in 1992 and joined the Society of Solicitors in the Supreme Courts of Scotland in 1993.

In 1997 he became the first member of the Procurator Fiscal Service to be appointed an Advocate Depute. The same year Mr Mulholland graduated from the University of Edinburgh MBA programme.

In 2003 he returned to the ranks of Crown Counsel as the Senior Advocate Depute. In that role Mr Mulholland prosecuted the HM Advocate v Transco plc case – the first prosecution in Scotland of a public limited company for culpable homicide – and represented the Crown in the 2004 appeals by Thomas Campbell and Joe Steele, convicted over the so-called Glasgow Ice Cream Wars. He was appointed a Queens Counsel in 2005.

In January 2006, Mr Mulholland was appointed as Area Procurator Fiscal for Lothian and Borders and in 2007 became Solicitor General. In that post he formed the Serious and Organised Crime Division within the Crown Office and led the successful prosecution of Peter Tobin for the 1991 murder of Vicky Hamilton. He joined the Faculty of Advocates by invitation from the Dean in October 2008.

Mr Mulholland was appointed Lord Advocate following the 2011 Scottish elections and in July 2011 was appointed to the Privy Council.

He stood down as Lord Advocate on June 1 this year and was appointed a Temporary Judge in the High Court and Court of Session on August 28, pending his formal admission as a Senator of the College of Justice on the retirement of an existing senator at the end of October 2016.

His talk was listened to with great interest by a gripped and appreciative audience.

 

 

 

 

St Andrews Business Club seminar hears experts on Post-Budget opportunities for local businesses

Date: 24 March 2016
Time: 5.30pm for 6.00pm start
Venue: The New Club, St Andrews

 

Local business people received expert insight into the post-Budget opportunities for businesses and advice on the latest developments in personal and business financial planning in the penultimate St Andrews Business Club free seminar.

The event, titled ‘Post Budget Outcomes: New Rules & Opportunities’, was held at the New St Andrews Golf Club and heard from three speakers from Thorntons Investments.

Barry Davidson, Head of Wealth Planning, gave an introduction to Thorntons Investments and its approach to managing clients’ investments before handing over to financial planner Stewart Taylor. He reflected on the outcomes of the Budget and the planning opportunities this and the new pension freedom legislation have created.

Finally Chief Investment Officer, Matt Strachan, provided an overview of the current state of the economy and investment markets.

The seminar series is supported by Business Gateway Fife and is part of the new drive by the club to increase its membership. The final seminar will take place in April.

Seminar – The Fundamentals of Financial Management – Stephen Westwood

Date: Wednesday 17th February 2016
Time: 5.30pm for 6pm start
Venue: The New Golf Club, St Andrews

Our speaker at the meeting on 17th February will be Stephen Westwood, who many of us know as a past President of the Business Club.

He will speak on the topic of “The Fundamentals of Financial Management“, which is the title of his first ebook in the series on Business Success and which he successfully launched during 2015.

Stephen is an accomplished businessman with an extensive track record of enabling businesses to deliver successes in building and realising value, restructuring and fund-raising. His extensive career has included high-level interim assignments for British Gas as Director of Customer Services and Manager of Debt Recovery Services, Chief Executive of lOMaS pic, Chief Executive of Reactivlab, Finance Director of GW Thornton Holdings pic, Finance Director of The Medical House PLC and Chief Executive of the Prolog Group. He has also served as a non-executive Chairman for venture capital bodies as well as providing consulting services to arrange of smaller businesses and start-ups.

The businesses have included public and private companies, both in the UK and internationally, across a spectrum of industries including manufacturing and engineering, medical devices and informatics, retail energy, systems and IT solutions, renewable energy and clean technology.

Accomplished serial science and technology entrepreneur Aubrey Thompson was the latest successful business person to share ‘My Story’ with members of St Andrews Business Club at its January breakfast meeting.

The dominant theme running through his varied career has been the ability to see the many potential markets for a new technology and the ability to market them effectively in the global marketplace.

But his story started in Dublin, where he gained degrees in Applied Physics and Applied Chemistry from Trinity College and the Dublin Institute of Technology. Aubrey also organised a gig for a young man called Paul, better known to us now as Bono, while a student union Entertainments Officer. A brush with one of the stars of The Commitments also taught Aubrey a valuable lesson about cash control!

Aubrey’s connection with and love for France and French food began with work there in the early 1980s using solar collection mirror systems and the latent heat in salts. It continued with work alongside his first mentor applying new knowledge about ultrasonography to create the first ultrasound machines.

They’re now most commonly used for prenatal scans of babies and livestock, but in 1983 Aubrey spotted the potential for sorting beef by its tenderness in order to identify which cuts best suited sale as premium products. By 1989 he’d spotted the trend for increasing consumption of high-quality beef, but lack of venture capital in Ireland and other factors led him to sell the ‘Tenderometer’ technology to a Danish firm and move into a very different area.

Back when the joke was that you bought a (case-size) battery and you got a free ‘mobile’ phone, Aubrey became Director of Marketing for Motorola in France and Belgium and one of the team who led the creation of the marketing and distribution networks for mobile communications – the precursor to today’s retail shops.

A move into manufacturing mobile antennas in China led to Aubrey becoming Managing Director of Infocell, the company which developed one of the first wireless real-time passenger information systems and rolled it out to buses and stops around London. And created what may be the first mobile app – a system to tell mobile users when their bus is arriving.

After a spell taking that technology worldwide and to the Chinese market, Aubrey came back to his first love – physics, via the application and interpretation of sound waves. But the scanning subjects for St Andrews-based ADUS Ltd (Advanced Underwater Surveys Limited) were shipwrecks and similar subsea objects for which high-resolution 3D interactive subsea surveys were invaluable. ADUS was acquired by DeepOcean in 2013.

One of their subjects was the stricken cruise liner, the Costa Concordia. It was also scanned visually from the air by a drone made by one of his latest ventures, Cyberhawk Innovations Ltd. It’s the world leader in aerial inspection and surveying using Remotely Operated Aerial Vehicles (ROAVs) and is exploring the vast potential for the latest iteration of this technology. The market is growing very quickly with an estimated 1m drones sold worldwide in December last alone!

3D Holographic Radar™ surveillance and its many applications is the focus of Aveillant Ltd, a spinout from Cambridge Consultants, which Aubrey has been Chairman of since April 2014. He also had a St Andrews link through his roles as Partner in The St Andrews Entrepreneurial Partnership.

Members showed their appreciation in the usual manner for what was both an entertaining and enlightening story.

The websites for Cyberhawk, ADUS DeepOcean and Aveillant can be found at www.thecyberhawk.com, www.adusdeepocean.com and www.aveillant.com
Aubrey’s LinkedIn profile is at https://uk.linkedin.com/in/aubreythompson

St Andrews business people hear how university collaboration can boost profits

Members and guests of St Andrews Business Club heard how Interface can help businesses increase their profits by matching them up with Scottish academic institutions with the niche knowledge they require.

Laura Goodfellow, Head of Business Engagement at Interface, the Scottish body which promotes innovative business-academic collaborations, told the audience at the club’s latest free early evening business issues seminar how companies can approach it to work with academia in order to develop new products, processes and services which lead to increased turnover, profits and productivity.

Once they specify what they’re after, Interface communicates that to universities and collates the resulting offers of assistance before passing them on and monitoring progress.

To date Interface has supported more than 1,200 collaborative projects by matching businesses from all sectors to universities and research institutions across the country to find the right expertise, technologies and facilities. 79% of businesses surveyed have or predict that they will increase their turnover as a result. Its website can be found at www.interface-online.org.uk

The seminar was the third in the series supported by Business Gateway Fife and is part of the drive by the club to increase its membership through allowing business owners, entrepreneurs and managers working in St Andrews to sample the benefits of membership before joining.

On 4th November 2015 Wynn Jones ECSA LPT CEH CHFI CCSA CVE CCA, of Praetorian IT Security ran a IT Security Seminar seminar at The New Golf Club, St Andrews. He spoke about some of the social engineering techniques and attack vectors used by the cyber-criminal fraternity and hackers of the world, to gain access to your computers, networks and websites.

He also talked about the many and varied reasons behind their reasons for hacking, why over 30,000 websites per day are hacked and 200,000 new viruses are discovered every day.

Wynn blew away the common misconceptions that the only thing hackers are interested in are credit card details, and top secret industry secrets.

He advised on some of the best practices and tips for helping to protect the data you store and pass across the internet.

• Some of the most common and not so well-known attack vectors used by hackers.
• Hackivism! The multitude of reasons why people hack.
• Quick demonstrations of how easy it can be to setup a cyber-attack.
• Firewalls and Anti-Virus programs; The first things a hacker is taught to evade.
• Tips, tricks and solutions to help keep out generic attacks by cyber-criminals.

Wynn Jones is a seasoned IT security professional with over 21 years’ experience in the IT industry. He has worked for and with a wide range of companies, everything from sole traders up to multi-national corporations like Experian and Lockheed Martin. Wynn now runs his own Fife based consultancy providing affordable IT security solutions for the SME.

On 24th September 2015 Pauline Randall, of Florizel Media Ltd ran a seminar about using LinkedIn. Pauline took us through some of the most important factors to consider with Linkedln.

She looked at:

o Completing your profile. What to include (not forgetting your photo!) and what to leave out.

o Connections. Who to join up with, who to avoid and watching out for fakes.

o Recommendations and endorsements. Getting them and giving them.

o Groups. Creating and utilising more controlled environments on Linkedln.