A common fear I hear expressed by small business owners who are thinking about starting a blog is that the number of comments that will be left on their blog will require an inordinate amount of time to manage and maintain. In my experience, both with my own blog and...
It seems like I have been having a lot of conversations around the subject of how to get more referrals lately. Small business owners love referral marketing because it is cheap and effective. The main cost is time spent seeking and following up with prospects....
Many small business owners fall into the trap of believing that the only way to improve their revenue is to use advertising to drive more traffic to their business. The model looks something like this – Traffic x Conversion Rate x Average Sale = Revenue. The...
Marketing Sherpa has an interesting article on their website (Open Access until June 12th) titled How To Collect Higher Impact Testimonials From Consulting Clients: 7 Practical Tips. My favorite tip on the list is Tip #4 - Ask clients to describe how you helped them...
Lately, I have been reading and hearing a lot of comments about how advertising, particularly print advertising, doesn't work for small businesses. Since advertising is often equated with marketing in small business, I also hear "marketing doesn't work for my...
Did boring presentations exist before PowerPoint? Personal experience tells me that PowerPoint users do not have a monopoly on boring presentations. I also have never attended a presentation given by PowerPoint (or any other piece of software). However, I often hear...
In presentations and on this blog, I talk a lot about selecting your ideal customers and firing existing customers who don't meet that criteria. I try to emphasize the idea that the customers that pay you the most are not necessarily your ideal customers; you also...
Usually when I post about referrals, it is in the context of marketing strategy. While having a referral system is a great marketing strategy, customer referrals are also a good leading indicator that you are delighting customers. Leading indicators are important...
Over on the Duct Tape Marketing blog, John answers the question - "How long should it take for my marketing to work". You probably aren't going to like the answer, but you should read it anyway. As John states - "...marketing is not an event, it's a...
This weekend, I received a nice marketing piece from Deloitte bundled with my copy of CFO magazine. It was a booklet titled Breathing Lessons (How CFOs can thrive under pressure). This book does a very nice job of identifying their ideal customer - Chief Financial...