Networking, or ‘face-to-face marketing’, is one of the most powerful forms of marketing ever invented. When you’re face to face with someone, it helps you build trust, and trust is one of the main reasons we do marketing, because trust leads to sales. So where is the best place to network? Well, the best place to [...]
What is the first thing you do before you spend money with a company? You go to their website to do your research. If you like what you see, you might spend your money. If you don’t, you’ll move on to a rival provider. Potential customers are doing the same with your website. So if you’ve [...]
Here’s a brilliant marketing campaign you might want to use in your own small business. Every quarter, a business owned by a friend of mine sends a 32-page print booklet to everyone in its database – 24 pages contain jokes, while the other eight pages are ads. Customers eagerly await the arrival of the next joke [...]
Would you ask a complete stranger to marry you? Probably not. Yet many small businesses do something similar when they meet a customer for the first time. “Hello! Nice to meet you! Buy my stuff!” That’s coming on too strong, too fast, Casanova. What you need to do instead is woo the other person. How? With [...]
There’s a quote from legendary ad man Howard Gossage that really gets to the heart of marketing. “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes, that’s an ad.” The moral to the story: if you want people to consume your marketing, make it interesting. If your marketing is boring, people will avoid it. But if [...]
Have you ever seen the James Bond movie Dr No? Well, years ago, Richard Branson’s staff gave him the nickname Dr Yes. Why? Because every time they came to him with a new idea, instead of saying “No, here’s why the idea won’t work,” he would say “Yes, I can see how that might work.” He [...]
It’s hard to build a successful small business if you don’t do good marketing. But good marketing alone doesn’t guarantee the success of a small business. Good marketing attracts the attention of potential buyers. But then what? You also need a system to convert that attention into sales. But a good sales system doesn’t guarantee success [...]
Is it a mistake to meet a potential client and then direct them to your website? After all, we’re relying on them to take action; we’re relying on them to go out of their way to consume our marketing. So might it be better to hand that marketing directly to them in the form of a [...]
When you do marketing, the best approach is not to sell the product but to market the solution. For example, if you’re in the mattress business, don’t sell mattresses; instead, market the benefits of a good night’s sleep. When you do marketing this way, you focus not on the features of your products but on their [...]
Here’s a really clever content marketing idea for your small business. Make a list of the five most common questions you get asked by your customers, and then write five ebooks that answer those five questions. That way, whenever you get asked one of those five FAQs, you can send the ebook in reply. Imagine you [...]
