Tired of DIY marketing? Well, you should be. It’s hard enough to manage running a business without throwing in how to market it. That is, unless you’re a marketer. The fact is, running an effective marketing program takes not only an in-depth understanding of your core business and culture, but also a strategic perspective on…
For those who have been in business for a while now, you have at least a high-level understanding of how marketing impacts your sales. You’ve noticed trends that stimulate an increase and missteps that trigger a decline. But one thing is certain; a failure to connect your marketing with your sales objectives won’t deliver good…
Depending on your industry, year-end signals a period of celebration and rest. You look forward to taking a little time off around the holidays to enjoy family and friends. You reward employees and colleagues for a job well done. But business owners looking to grow their businesses next year may slow down, but they don’t…
Social media is sexy and direct mail is dead. If you take the advice of some, you’ll completely abandon all offline marketing efforts for digital campaigns that may look good but fail to deliver sales. The reality is, direct mail isn’t pushing up daisies just yet. In fact, depending on your industry, it’s alive and…
Tales of ghosts and goblins may give you a fright this Halloween, but very few things are scarier to a content marketer than to hear the words, “content marketing is easy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. And this month, we’ll be covering marketing myths, like this one, that jeopardizes your business’ ability to…
People hate being sold to. This explains why salespeople understandably find selling to new customers so daunting. It doesn’t have to be if you follow a few guidelines: Be interesting: conversation Cold calling is (mostly) dead. The best way to find new customers is to meet them out in the real world. Just understand that…
Turnover is expensive. For Human Resources Managers, this is common knowledge. It’s cheaper and less disruptive to keep a good employee than to find a new one. But retention efforts aren’t confined to employee directories. Business owners, too, must consider retention efforts – client retention. And as with anything long-term, it starts with fortifying your…
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” John Wanamaker nailed it back in the late 1800s when he summed up just about every small business owners’ feeling toward marketing their businesses at some point. Despite following all the rules – the recommended social media posting…
Building a profitable and successful business hinges on your ability to spend time and resources on the right things. That’s where systems play a huge role. While adding efficiencies and effectiveness, systems eliminate wasted time, duplicative efforts, and unnecessary costs in your day-to-day activities. Every part of a business could benefit from a system or…
Creating systems for your business is perhaps one of the most important steps you can take to nudge your business toward profitability. As complicated as it sounds, developing systems is just another way of organizing your business operations. By defining the key functions you need to run your business, then developing processes and determining the…
For smaller organizations, trying to keep up with the pace of marketing is a challenge. Every day it seems like there’s something new to learn – a new social media platform or a new best practice for sending emails. But the breakdown of most small business marketing isn’t so much a failure to understand new…
Remember a time where you had no internet, no cell phone, no Google, no laptop, and an Atari was an advanced gaming system? Remember when you had to actually go outside and play? Read a book to entertain yourself because there was no such thing as an iPad? And binge-watching Netflix wasn’t even an option….