Want to generate some free marketing? Form a referral relationship with a complementary business – one that operates in a similar field but isn't a rival. A good example would be a personal trainer and a health food store. How would the relationship work? Well, you would get a referral fee when you send customers to [...]
Content marketing is a really good way to drive sales over the long-term. But if you want to succeed with content marketing, you need to focus on telling rather than selling. If you provide helpful, relevant, interesting content, you'll develop a reputation as a trusted expert. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. At that [...]
Word-of-mouth marketing is the best form of marketing ever invented. It's free and it oozes credibility. So how do you generate it? You generate word-of-mouth marketing by wowing your customers. That's why great customer service is also a marketing strategy. The moral to the story is to go out of your way to make your customers [...]
Even though we live in a digital age, print marketing has never been more effective, as I explain in this episode of 3MinuteMarketing. The reason is that the letterbox has never been emptier. Before the internet, you would return home from work or school to find your letterbox stuffed full of print marketing – which meant, [...]
Struggling to think of content marketing ideas? In that case, do an online search for "international days" – things like Earth Day and International Women's Day. In those instances, the idea would be to try to find an environmental angle or gender equality angle you could write about in your blogs or social media posts. There [...]
If your small business is doing marketing that appeals to everyone, it's actually doing marketing that appeals to no one. The only way you can create marketing that appeals to everyone is to make it horribly vague. Bad marketing targets every single customer group. Good marketing deliberately excludes many groups. And why would you want to [...]
Would you like a simple way to give your marketing a 1% boost? Well, the next time you meet someone and you hand them a business card – make sure it's a memorable business card. Plain, white, boring business cards that look like all the other business cards are not memorable. What is memorable is business [...]
"People do not buy goods and services. They buy stories, relations and magic." Think about that insightful Seth Godin quote the next time you're doing marketing. If your marketing strategy is to present people with a dry list of facts, it probably won't be effective. But if your strategy is to stir their emotions, there's a [...]
What is your small business doing to stand out with its marketing? No matter what industry you're in, it's a crowded space with lots of competition. So if you don't stand out, customers won't notice you. That's why it's a mistake to play it safe with your marketing. If you do what everyone else is doing, [...]
We all know that sex sells – but so does fear. Why? Because humans are more likely to take action to avoid pain than to achieve pleasure. Fear can be a really effective tactic to use in your marketing, although it always needs to be done ethically. The idea is to remind customers of the bad [...]
