It is easy to be coerced into spending a lot of money on advertising – because we liked the sound of the deal or because the telephone sales person made it sound compelling.

Before you spend a penny on advertising or PR, write a marketing plan – and there are plenty of books out there on [...]

Many businesses make the simple mistake of promoting Features when they would profit far more from promoting the Benefits of their product or service.

One of the hardest tasks is writing words that encourage people to buy from you. It isn’t enough to say that you sell the “best product ever” or have the “largest selection [...]

Rob over at BusinessPundit recently wrote about his experiences at a Shell Station where a speaker in the petrol pump played an advert to him while he was filling his car. He has this to say about it:

I think it is a smart idea to market to me at the gas pump. Usually I just [...]

If there’s one thing that really puts me off dealing with small business “professionals” it’s being presented with what is clearly a free business card. You know the ones, they have something like “Get your 250 FREE business cards from www.aprintingcompany.com” on the back of them.
Now I appreciate that small businesses have limited budgets and [...]

In the sporting world if you’re loosing then you and your team set about practicing more, perfecting your technique and studying the other teams to look for their weaknesses. You then try to exploit those weaknesses using the skills and team work that you’ve developed during your practices.
Business is much the same. You should study [...]

How many of you entrepreneurs can’t get a break in marketing your small business? Is your competition too fierce? Are your clients too hard to reach? Is your location too far off the beaten path? Is your domain name not very memorable? Is your brand too hard to differentiate?
As a small business development specialist, I [...]

Most people see Halloween as a time to profit from selling candies; I see it as a time to profiting from brand building. If you’re a huge a corporation or even a small time business entrepreneur, you can surely build your brand in Halloween. I’m not talking about giving candies away to build your brand [...]

Here’s the great irony of the end of the year. This is when your business needs the most money, but has the least. Your marketing budget for this year was spent months ago, and it seems like every other company out there is ramping up their advertising efforts to take advantage of pre-Christmas spending. If [...]

Seth Godin originally posted this list in relation to blogs and websites but I believe the lessons are equally aplicable to offline marketing material. So here’s my version of his tips:

Use numbers and bullets. Prospects don’t read, they scan.
Give people a place to go next. Give the prospect some pointers to actions they can take [...]

Most small businesses owners complain “Nobody knows who I am or what I do!” of course the cause of that problem is “They don’t tell anyone!” Even if they are marketing their business – they’re not doing it effectively. They forget who their customer is (target market) and give little consideration to how to reach [...]