Ditch the business mumbo-jumbo in your marketing, because it’s a turn-off for customers, as I explain in this episode of 3MinuteMarketing. Instead of using complicated words and sentences, speak to your customers in plain, simple, everyday English. You can’t expect customers to connect with your marketing if they can’t understand it. Some businesses have a mistaken [...]
I'm a big fan of the concept 'always be marketing'. The more times you get in front of existing and potential customers and referral partners, the more sales your small business is going to make. But the phrase can make some people nervous, understandably, as they focus on the cost of all that marketing. But when [...]
How much would you pay to get five rooms of your home cleaned? If you’ve received a quote, it’s easy to go online to compare prices and find out whether it’s a good deal or not. But how much would you pay to have more leisure and family time and less stress in your life? Even [...]
Repeat after me: "Marketing does not need to be perfect to be effective." Marketing, like most things in life, just needs to be good enough. Some small businesses put off their marketing until ‘all their ducks are in a row’ and everything’s perfect. But guess what? There will never be a time when everything’s perfect. Nor [...]
I love marketing ... but the point of marketing is not to do marketing. The point of marketing is to make sales. So you also need a sales strategy. Oh, and you need to keep customers happy after making sales. So you don't just need a marketing strategy and a sales strategy – you also need [...]
If you're wondering how to do good marketing, you might want to follow the EED rule. Educate. Entertain. Differentiate. Educate – use your marketing to provide your customers with helpful, relevant information. Leave them better off than when you found them. Entertain – make it fun and interesting for them to consume that information. Differentiate – [...]
Networking can be a really effective form of marketing – provided you go about it the right way. The wrong way is to meet someone and then SELL, SELL, SELL! It’s tacky and can make the other person feel cheap. So don’t try to flog your product or service when you meet someone at an event. [...]
Here’s a great quote from Donald Miller: "Everything you sell is medicine. If it's not medicine, it ain't selling." What that means is that your small business exists to solve problems. And If it isn't solving problems, why would anyone want to do business with you? So when you are doing your marketing, you need to [...]
What does your small business sell? Whatever it is, you need to be able to explain it in clear, precise English. You need to do it on your website. And you need to do it when you meet potential customers and referral partners. This has actually been a challenge for me with my content marketing agency, [...]
When I talk to small businesses about doing content marketing with my agency, Hunter & Scribe, they generally raise one big issue. It's cost (Surprise!). The way I try to get them to think, though, is to see marketing not as a cost, but as an investment in their future profits. Because if you do marketing [...]
