Passive marketing – or how to get clients knocking at your door

During the first week of January this year, we took on two new clients and had two existing clients ask us to do more work for them. I wasn’t at work during the first week of January, and, as one of my members of staff pointed out, I hadn’t been out networking or meeting clients [...]

When a workshop is more than just a workshop

If you offer any kind of service to customers, running workshops are a great way of marketing yourself and your business.  They inform and advise and can act as a great way of speaking directly to your target customer audience.  Also, as will become apparent here, they are not a one-off event in terms of [...]

The case in the defence of Twitter

A client recently remarked “let me know when you get a sale from Twitter”.  In other words, “I bet I’ll never see the day we get a sale as a result of Twitter!” A statement said many a time I would wager.  My answer, said smiling: “No, you probably won’t if you just use Twitter [...]

How many marketing activities do you need?

In the last couple of weeks I’ve heard two different marketing presentations that give very different advice and I wanted to share them with you and let you decide which is right. More is less At the first presentation, we were shown the idea of a wheel with a number of spokes. The presenter said [...]

The importance of long-term marketing

Businesses have a varied view of what marketing is for, and how it can be used, and it invariably depends on their financial position, the product or service they are promoting, the mindset of the management, the resources available to them, both personnel and technical, and the general attitude towards marketing and selling tactics. But [...]

What sort of thing can you write about in your newsletter?

In my spare time I read all sort of things, and one of them is the National Trust magazine. It has recently been redesigned, bright, colourful and modern, but the thing that struck me this morning was how informative it was about what the National Trust is doing. There is also a broadsheet-style newsletter-featurette for [...]

The importance of a personal email list

None of us like receiving spam. So considering we all hate spam so much, why do businesses still pursue buying lists of contacts to sell their wares? Why is it that they cannot wait to build up a personal communications list – is it because it takes too long, it is too much hard work [...]

Don’t waste your time writing that newsletter!

I’ve just spent an hour catching up on reading newsletters. I often don’t have time to read them as they arrive, so put them somewhere safe and then read them when I have time. I copied a bunch of these newsletters onto my laptop, so that I could read them, while I sat in a [...]

How do you integrate your online marketing, to save time and money?

The number of ways that you can promote your business through online marketing is constantly growing. It is now accepted that you need an online presence in order to market your business. I was asked to speak about this at a recent FSB IT event in Reading, so I thought I’d share with you a [...]

How not to do newsletters

There are three secrets to publishing a great newsletter, that gets read and that will bring you business. 1. Planning – don’t do any. Just make it up as you go along, because otherwise you’ll waste lots of time. Write when you feel like it and publish whenever you want to. There’s no best time [...]