“This is a giving competition, and we intend to win.” If you’re looking for a quote to guide your marketing strategy, you’ll struggle to find a better one. Why? Because when you’re doing marketing, your focus should be on giving, on trying to deliver as much value as possible to your existing customers and your potential [...]
You probably use hashtags to attract more interest in your social media posts – if so, well done. But a lot of small businesses don’t realise that there’s a second benefit to using hashtags – which is to ensure you remain on-message with your marketing. For example, these daily videos always feature the #smallbusiness and #marketing [...]
Humans are more likely to take action to avoid pain than they are to achieve pleasure, as I explain in this episode of 3MinuteMarketing. That’s why marketing aimed at helping your customers avoid something bad can be more effective than marketing aimed at helping them achieve something good. So you don’t always need to tell your [...]
One of the main principles of marketing is to focus on your customers rather than your business. Make it about them, in other words, not you. But surely we should ignore that rule when writing the ‘About us’ section of our website, right? Wrong. It’s counter-intuitive but it’s true: the ‘About us’ section should be about [...]
I recently sent an introductory email to a potential client … and learned a valuable marketing lesson in the process. This person’s email system sent me an auto-reply that was stuffed full of marketing about his business, including links to: A report A podcast A video An ebook By setting up the auto-reply, this person had [...]
Take it away, David Beebe. “Content marketing is really like a first date. If all you do is talk about yourself, there won’t be a second date.” This is a valuable reminder for small businesses: when you do marketing, you need to focus on your customers, not yourself. Don’t talk about how amazing you are. Instead, [...]
Ever heard of the ‘Rule of Seven’? The Rule of Seven is a marketing idea that says a customer needs to consume a company’s marketing at least seven times before they make a purchase. Some people dispute whether the number is actually seven. Some people think it might be two or three times as high. Whatever [...]
How do you know whether or not a particular piece of communications has been successful? Well, the aim of communications is to convey information. So if you managed to convey the information you were trying to convey – your communications was successful. If you didn’t – it wasn’t. So what’s the best way to successfully convey [...]
What are your customers’ pain points? Whatever they are, you should mention them in your marketing, for two reasons: If your customers know you understand their pain, they will feel you care about them If your customers know you can solve their problems, they will want to pay you to do so But wait – shouldn’t [...]
“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time,” Henry Ford famously said. Ford, who was one of the 20th century’s greatest entrepreneurs, knew what he was talking about, as I explain in this episode of 3MinuteMarketing. If you’re doing good marketing, it should be making you money, rather than costing you [...]
