Which Page Is Your Website’s Homepage?
You don’t get to decide on which page your visitors join your website – search engines do. Every page on your website needs to be strong enough to stand on its own, as much as being part of a wider, integrated brand experience.
Are Your Customers Getting Bored With You?
Are your customers still the same eager advocates for your business that they were? Today, any business has a realtime barometer that gives them detailed information on customer opinion, sentiment and loyalty.
The Inevitable Convergence of Media With Marketing
The distinction between what’s media and what’s marketing is eroding. The inevitable result is a convergence and integration of the two – even if the business models required to support such evolution haven’t emerged in the same way.
Sales Lead Nurturing: Keeping Prospects On The Boil
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships, reputation and trust with sales prospects in ways that are consistent, timely and relevant.
Social Media #FAIL: You’re Spreading Yourself Too Thinly
If your brand has multiple social-media presences but lacks a content strategy to populate these social spaces, you’re probably spreading yourself too thinly on what’s achievable for your brand in social media.
Why Your 1995 Website Isn’t Working in 2023
Is your company website working for you, or against you? Simplify and optimize both website content and overall design to help increase traffic and lead generation opportunities.
Marketing Is Not About Technology
Marketing technologies such as social media and online video are simply a means to an end. It’s not about technology itself, but about imagination, creativity and inspiration.
How Do Your Social Media Efforts Compare With The Biggest Brands?
The companies that get social media interaction right aren’t necessary the ones who’ve been doing it the longest, or the ones with the largest resources – or with the deepest pockets.
Specialize Your Business To Increase Profitability
Many startups and small businesses fall into the trap of taking on whatever business opportunity comes their way. But could your business do better by saying “no” ?
A Company Blog: Your Top Business Content Marketing Priority For 2023
Do it right, and your company blog can be a massively valuable business asset. Do it wrong and it’ll be a waste of time, money and effort. It’s your choice.
Why Customer Complaints Are A Good Thing
Any business worth its salt gets complaints, but how easy is it do you make it for your customers to complain?
Review: APE by Guy Kawasaki: How to Publish A Book
Ever felt like you could write a book? A new book by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch might be just what you’re looking for.
Your Business Communication Sucks
Your company’s marketing sucks big time. Sorry, but it has to be said. So what are you going to do about it?
Marketing To Your Ideal Customer? Be Careful What You Wish For
Rather than focus everything around a solution-driven proposition, try extending your marketing and lead-generation efforts around creating greater awareness to the factors that contribute to the problem.
The Growing Voice Of Customer Choice
Many businesses hate unpredictability – even if by aiding, developing and strengthening predictability takes precedence over meeting the needs of the customer.
Fake It Until You Become It
If you can’t be confident, passionate and enthusiastic about your business value proposition, then how can you reasonably expect your prospective customers to be?
What Does It Mean To Do Business With Your Business?
Today’s digital lifestyle is tightly woven into the fabric of a new “networked” customer experience. How relevant is your business in this new world?
How Social Media Puts The “Service” Back Into Customer Service
It seems inevitable that as Customer Service embraces social media, it becomes part of Marketing – which, in reality, it always has been.
Selling Means Knowing When To Shut Up
I don’t want salespeople repeating marketing copy or technical specifications from the website. If I want a parrot, I’ll buy one.
Why DIY-Marketing Your Startup is a BAD idea
A word of advice for anyone thinking that they can get away with starting a company without having professional marketing resources on board: don’t do it. DIY-marketing a startup business is a recipe for disaster.
Small Business Marketing: You Can’t Be Half Pregnant
Your business marketing is struggling because your value proposition is no longer perceived as having the same relevance with its target audience.
Customer Lifetime Value: A Marathon, Not A Sprint.
Companies must assess the real worth of their customers’ business over the course of the buying relationship – and treat them accordingly.
Sorry, HBR. Marketing is most certainly NOT dead.
Marketing is everything from what you sell, to how you sell it. To say that Marketing is dead is like saying that business itself is dead.
Every Business Is A Global Business: The Illusion Of Location
20 years ago the very fact your business was local was enough for customers to buy from you. Today that’s no longer enough.
Being A Social Brand Doesn’t Make You A Social Business
The creation of a social brand has become commonplace. But building a social business is an investment in customer relevance for the future.
Marketing The Buying Experience: How Do You Make Them Feel?
Every business today is actually marketing two distinct value propositions to its customers – and probably doesn’t even know it.
Marketing Your Business: How Different Are You Really?
You can no longer get attention by shouting louder, like you could in the old days (i.e. anything more than about 3 years ago). Today, you get attention by sounding different.
Marketing Strategy and Sales Strategy: The Need For Integration
“Spray and Pray” can no longer be relied upon. There’s increasing importance in aligning a company’s marketing strategy with sales strategy to form a single cohesive revenue capture model.
Being The Best In Your Business
Customers need to be sure that you’re the best choice – for them, at this particular point in time, based upon their list of influencing factors. What are you doing to help them make the right choice?
Your Business Is Competing With Apple
Or Coca-Cola. Or McDonald’s. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you’re competing with such commercial giants. You’re not the one who’s making the comparison. Your customers are.
Measuring Social Media ROI With The Wrong Tape Measure
Many companies are designing their social media strategies around “Likes” or “ReTweets”. Instead, we should be designing for an action or an outcome – something that results in a transaction of some sort.
Even The Best Salesperson Can’t Save a Poor Product
Today – more than ever – you better make sure that your product delivers on its promise. In today’s connected-customer environment where product information is so freely available, the sales division can no longer cover-up product weaknesses in the same way that it used to.
Business Change Is Inevitable
If you’re not happy with the way things are going, what fundamental, radical, extra-ordinary changes are you prepared to make to your business to change things?
“Fight or Flight” Business Marketing
The vast majority of companies aren’t very good at producing marketing experiences that pass the “Fight or Flight” test. I’ll go as far as to say that I’m betting that your company is one of them.
“Agile” Business Marketing: Repeating and Refining
Call it persistence, stubbornness or sheer bloody-mindedness, but sometimes marketing your business means doing something knowing that it will fail, simply so that you can do it over and make it a success.
Marketing Your Business Means Simplifying Your Business
When marketing your business value to customers it’s imperative to match your communication to their expectation level at the time.
Change Your Business? Change Your Perceptions
If you’re a business owner today, the single most important thing on your mind right now should be focused on how to keep your business value remaining relevant in the minds of your customers. Change is always going to happen. What we see as novel today becomes trite and cliché tomorrow. The challenge is refining your value perception at the
The New Definition Of Business Marketing
Who is responsible for your business marketing? Most would assume that it’s the Marketing department. While that’s still partially true, the responsibility of a company’s marketing has transitioned to a wider sphere.
Selling Margarita Pizza Is Boring
Today’s commercial opportunity exists in the periphery. The product or service that’s been made to appeal to the widest possible audience already exists.
Trying To Out-Google Customers: Why You’ll Lose At Web Search
Don’t try to go up against your customers when it comes to content for web search results. You won’t win.
Dollar Shave Club: Definitely Standing Out
The genius of how a young upstart took on the big guns.
If Your Business Doesn’t Stand Out, it’s Invisible.
Today it’s about standing out, not fitting in. It’s the only way that your customers can see you. So, why do so many businesses choose to blend in, rather than stand out? One word: Fear.
Marketing Is About People, Not Technology
Business marketing today is not about the technology behind the initiatives. It is about connecting and providing value to meet customer expectations.
It’s not what you’re selling. It’s what customers are buying.
If you want to grow revenues, increase customer satisfaction and drive your brand’s visibility and awareness, then you need realize that “selling” has changed. Customers don’t buy what you sell; they buy what they see as your value to them.
People To People: Business Comes Full Circle
Every business is a people business. Thanks to a newly-empowered, more demanding customer, businesses must treat their customers as individuals if they are to compete.
Why Small Companies Beat Big Companies
Small companies have the flexibility to react to market changes and capitalize on opportunities. Why? Because they have to.
Yesterday’s Marketing Doesn’t Work Today
We don’t care about marketing because most marketing doesn’t care about us. Businesses need to create an environment where customers will market stuff to each other.
Shouting Can’t Compete With Storytelling
Today’s communication is less about shouting your message AT your customers, and more about telling your story TO them. Creativity is the new currency.
Marketing Has Become The New IT
The roles of two historically-separate business units are coming ever closer together.
Customer Experience: The Difference Between Marketing & Selling
How is your business promoting its value offering? Are you still talking about acronyms, minutiae and and techno-jargon that no-one but you and your staff care about?
Customer Communication: Stop Talking Gibberish
Customers today are more demanding than ever before. They’re smarter than ever before. Because they have more knowledge – and therefore more POWER, than they have ever had. So why should they buy from you, as opposed to the company down the street, or the next town – or half way across the world?
21st Century Sales and Marketing
Update your marketing perceptions to delivery more effective customer campaigns.
Less Shouting, More Communicating: Advertising Grows Up
Customers are more savvy than many marketers give them credit.
Using Flickr To Help Generate Backlinks
Flickr (and other image sites) can be an effective backlink strategy for SEO.
Business Value Can Be Stating The Obvious
What’s obvious to you may not be so obvious to your customer.
The Greatest Customer Service Strategy
What’s the best customer service strategy? The answer is more obviously than you may imagine.
Email Marketing: It’s a Question Of Value
It may not get the headlines any more, but email is still an amazingly effective communication medium.
Buyers Are From Mars, Sellers Are From Venus
Buyers and sellers often have different opinions on the reasons of buying a particular product or service.
Risk & Assumption: Making An Ass Out Of U and Me
Assuming anything in the customer buying journey makes as ass out of you and me.
When All Businesses Are Remarkable, They’re All The Same
You cannot position your company based upon attributes that can be used by your competition. Your business value proposition needs to be something that the other guys can’t claim as their own.
Trying to Please Everybody Is Pleasing Nobody
Trying to please as many people as possible with your marketing ends-up pleasing no-one, as the message gets diluted.
The Price Of Value: When A Gold Card Loses Its Shine
More and more, customers are looking for product packages centered around them, not the vendor.
Howzat! Communicating Information like Twenty20
Customer content consumption habits have evolved. Attention spans have decreased. Your marketing information needs to be shorter, sharper, and to-the-point.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
The passing of a legendary business figure.
There Are Lies, Damn Lies – And Social Media Marketing
The reason your social media marketing is failing is because you’re missing a key point.
Review: “We Are All Weird” by Seth Godin
Every marketers’ favorite blogger has a new book out.
Fame at Last: KEXINO blog now featured on Alltop!
We’ve hit the big time. Well done us.
Cold Calling Sales Conversation Over A Ruby Murray
Cold sales calls haven’t died. They’ve evolved.
The Mobile Web Isn’t The Web
The mobile version of your website needs to present content differently from the desktop version.
Social Media Hasn’t Killed Company Blogs
Think social media channels means you can kill your blog? Think again.
Have Product Brochures Become Obsolete?
The role of a marketer has changed, to now include the curation of user-generated content and use the company’s visibility to push this content to the their audience. So do we still need product brochures?
Content Isn’t Everything. It’s The Only Thing.
Few businesses take the content of their customer-facing collateral as seriously as they should.
When’s The Best Time To Change My Company Logo?
Your logo is an important marketing asset. But it’s not the most important.Even more articles!