What separates good communicators from bad communicators? The answer is clarity. Good communicators deliver a message that’s crystal clear, while you never know what a bad communicator is saying. Good communicators use short words, rather than big fancy words you’d need a dictionary to understand. They use plain, everyday English, rather than complicated business jargon. They [...]
Did you know that small businesses have a legal obligation to tell the truth in their marketing? You're not allowed to make false or misleading statements. If you do, you might be in violation of the Australian Consumer Law, and serious penalties could apply. For example, you can’t say you’ve reduced a product’s price if the [...]
Here's a common piece of marketing advice I give to small business owners: do daily marketing videos. They are a really effective way of getting in front of your customers day after day, building trust, credibility and brand recognition. Those, in turn, lead to sales and referrals. Now the big objection I always get from small [...]
When your rivals zig, you should zag. Here are three counter-intuitive marketing messages you can use to stand out and attract attention: If your rivals boast about having lower prices in their marketing, you could boast about having higher prices that reflect the product’s quality If they boast about fast turnaround times, you could boast about [...]
Every weekend, the famous retail chain Bunnings allows charities and community groups to hold sausage sizzles at its outlets across Australia. This event is sheer marketing genius. Why? Because Bunnings gets great PR. It gets extra foot traffic. It builds relationships with its local community – all without doing any extra work. So here's a challenge [...]
Here are three quick tips to make your marketing much more effective. Inject some humour into your marketing – 95% of all marketing is boring and stuffy, so if you can make people laugh you’ll differentiate yourself from your rivals. Aim your marketing at people’s hearts, not their heads, as humans are emotional creatures, not rational [...]
How many different marketing campaigns can you remember from at any point in your life? My guess is that you can only remember a few. That’s not a lot, considering we’ve all seen tens of thousands of campaigns over the course of our lifetimes. So what’s special about those you can remember? They found a way [...]
Trick question: how much money does your small business spend on marketing each year? Why is this a trick question? Because if you're doing marketing properly, it should be making you money, not costing you money. Of course, there’s always an upfront cost to marketing. But if it’s effective marketing, then the amount of money that [...]
Did you know that I work as an unpaid marketing representative for a range of companies? That’s just a fancy way of saying that I provide referrals for those companies to my friends and family. And why do I do it? Because I received such great service and value from those companies, I couldn’t wait to [...]
“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient,” Warren Buffett famously said. A similar principle applies in marketing. Marketing is all about playing the long game. There are no quick wins in marketing. Victory goes to the patient. The reason small businesses do marketing is to build trust, credibility [...]
