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 [...]
Many small businesses don't realise that the way you respond to customer emails is a form of marketing. Good answers give customers a reason to keep spending money with you, and to refer their family and friends to your business. A bad response has the opposite effect. It’s a generic copy-pasted reply that doesn’t try to [...]
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 [...]
Small business owners can learn a lot from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. That’s one of the conclusions that comes from reading Brad Stone’s fascinating biography, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Amazon began life in 1994 as a small business start-up; today, it’s one of the greatest companies in the history of [...]
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 [...]
A CEO friend of mine stumbled upon a really cool marketing idea. He told his sales staff to stop chasing sales for one month…. and, instead, concentrate on doing one-to-one marketing with existing customers. This CEO wanted to find out if the customers were happy with the level of service they received. He wanted to know [...]
