When you’re a solo entrepreneur or a small-business marketer, you can’t afford to blanket the airwaves with advertising, casting a huge net with the hopes of landing some fish. Your outreach to potential customers has to be count. It has to be focused, well-targeted, and efficient. Therefore, when determining your target audience, you should ask yourself a sequence of simple questions: 1. Who needs my product/service? 2. Who knows they need my product/service? 3. Who knows their need and can afford to purchase it? 4. Who, in that last group, can I actually reach? That is your target audience. Everyone…

Do you find yourself wondering, ” What else can I do to get more business?” You know all to well how frustrating it is to pump good money into marketing programs only to realize lack luster results. Chances are good that your marketing mix is sound but your message isn’t resonating with your targeted audience. What you need is what is called a positioning strategy. Your positioning strategy refers in part to what differentiates your company from the competitors. Not only what differentiates you, but how you are going to exploit that difference to make you more money. You have…

One reviewer’s opinion of “Punching In” a book by Alex Frankel. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to work at UPS, The Gap, Starbucks or Whole Foods? Well Alex Frankel takes us on an inside journey in his new book: “Punching In”. In 200 pages, Frankel gives you some very good honest insight into the cultures that makes these companies stand-out brands. In many ways the experiences remind me of the rash of reality shows we see on television. Corporate voyeurism at the front-line level. I found it an amusing read, quite unlike many books I’ve read…

Ok so I’ve already given you A,B,C and D…so here’s the next (hopefully!) insightful instalment into my A-Z of business. Experts. So you’ve set up in business and your probably producing a widget or providing a great service and that’s the thing you will be an expert in your given area. That does not necessarily mean you will be an expert in all areas of business, especially if you are just starting out by yourself for the first time. Still not sure what I’m talking about…? Ok when you set up a business it will be something like this -…

A number of years ago I had the privilege of having dinner with Tony Buzan the originator of mind maps. Tony has written over eight books on the mind and how to use more of it. He has coached olympic athletes, business people and even Governments to raise the intelligence level of a whole country. Lets just say he has had a positive influence on the lives of thousands, if not millions of people. During the dinner we got talking about purpose and what it means. He asked me what was mine, I said “to help people”. He looked at…

While killing time in a Chicago-area mall last week, I saw a large floor display for Discover Card (Discover Financial is based in Chicago, I believe) with a new branding approach. The solid orange letter “O” in the Discover logo was now lit up, and the one word tagline being featured was the word Brighter. Not having seen this marketing initiative anywhere else, I searched on the web, and apparently it is not a flash in the pan (pun intended), but part of a campaign. From a visual standpoint, the execution was OK, but the tagline just isn’t doing it…

How can you get a handle on your corporate brand? What is it your brand stands for? How can you determine what the perfect positioning strategy would be and how can you validate your findings to be sure that your brand experience is genuine? I think I may have just what you may be looking for to answer these and other nagging brand questions. I’ve just launched a digital solution that addresses many brand issues and shows you how you can re-build your corporate brand using a differentiating strategy. That solution is “DIY Brand Builderâ„¢”. DIY Brand Builderâ„¢ is a…

Regardless of the size of your business or the industry you operate in, aligning your business with complimentary organizations that can help you expand your reach and even your set of offerings can be a highly effective way to succeed, especially if you are a small business with limited resources. Business partners can serve a multitude of purposes in the course of a mutually beneficial relationship. Here are several examples: 1. Help you expand and round out your set of offerings – if you’re a law firm and want to also offer a lower-end “product”, you can align yourself with…

I had a meeting this week with an old business aquaintance of mine called Caroline Anstee who has a firm of IFAs which is run by women for women called Elements. We were talking and she was telling me how much her business had taken off in the last few years and that the “pink pound”, where women were concerned, was certainly alive and kicking. It seems that women want to do business with women, and that more and more often they either hold the purse strings to the family income or are very independent and are earning their own…

There lies, in the relationships you have with your customers, an opportunity to increase profits by developing products that could become important profit centers. Commodity relationships with customers is probably the greatest frustration experienced by sales staff world-wide. Day in and day out, your sales teams are bombarded with the demand to deliver the lowest price per product. Over time they are demoralized and endeavor to define their relationships with customers solely based on price and have hanging over their heads the reality that the customer will jump ship if you can’t deliver on lowest price EVERY time. You’ve heard…