Several years ago I started recommending that businesses add an e-newsletter to their marketing arsenal. If you haven’t yet done this, I encourage you to start one this week. If you did implement a newsletter and included a way for people to sign-up for the newsletter on your website, in addition to collecting emails at events and when people utilize
Congratulations, you have been asked to speak at a local civic organization about your business. Perhaps you have been invited by a company to come and give a presentation about the services you offer to their employees. Or maybe you are just going to give a small sales presentation to a decision maker about why they should utilize your company
When someone asks you the question, “What do you do at (Insert Business Name)?” your answer is essentially the start of your brand in their mind. How your brand continues to evolve in their mind happens through their first visit to your business, any follow-up correspondence, and your involvement within your local community. So what might you be doing wrong
A few weeks ago I ran an article about tracking customer satisfaction using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) System. It is one of the systems we use at our business to both monitor our customer satisfaction levels and to also respond to complaints. After learning about it, one of our readers wrote in and asked: “Seems if the real goal
Have you ever had a really good marketing idea, implemented it, and it went off super successfully? Then you tried to emulate it the following year – or perhaps in another market – and you didn’t have the same results? Congratulations! You haven’t failed at marketing, you’ve learned one of the cardinal sins of marketing. Strategies and tactics vary by
When you spend time looking over your marketing materials you should continually ask yourself, “How does this marketing piece distinguish us from our competitors?” The easiest way to answer this question is by answering another question. “If I were to take someone else’s logo and replace it with the logo on this current piece of marketing collateral, would it make
Below are five questions you should be asking yourself now as you prepare or review your company’s marketing plan. 1. How do your customers want to get information? While the Yellow Pages, newspaper and television might have been great advertising venues for you five years ago, are they still the best use of your marketing dollars today? In order to
When done successfully, working a booth at a local event, business expo, or other type of trade show can be a great way to grow awareness of the services your business provides to your community. But many marketers flop when it comes to successfully working their booth and maximizing the number of touch points available to reach potential customers both
As anyone who’s ever started a business can confirm, there are plenty of unknowns when it comes to being an entrepreneur. “Who’s my target customer?” “Should I have employees?” “What kind of website do we need?” “How much should I charge?” And many, many other questions besides. But before you go too far down any of those paths, pause a
If your community is anything like the communities where we have businesses, you are not limited on the number of publication sales reps frequenting your business, leaving you voicemails, or filling up your inbox, all in hopes of getting you to spend your advertising dollars with them. With so many options, how do you know which publication to pick? Step