Can Your Business Afford to Stand Still This Year?

If your business is standing still – always doing the same things, the same ways, for the same people – then you could be missing out on new opportunities and new business. Your competitors will be innovating – looking for different ways of making money – which means that you could be losing business to [...]

Where is your business?

When you first set out on a journey with a map, you need to know where you are. If you don’t know where you’re starting from, you can’t work out the best route to your destination and you can’t determine how long it’s going to take you to get there. The first thing you need [...]

Do you really fit the best with Everest?

At the weekend we ordered some double glazing for our house, to replace the drafty windows that let the heat out in the winter. We called Everest on the Friday and got an appointment with a salesman the following day. He turned up with lots of samples and talked us through all the options. He [...]

What gaps are in your communication strategy?

The fourth assignment for my CIM Professional Certificate in Marketing involves creating a communications audit on the organisation I have based my assignment upon. After I had fathomed exactly what was required, I started to enjoy analysing every aspect of communication the organisation did, including the ‘external’ stakeholders involved, such as the media and pressure [...]

How important are your competitors?

All businesses, whether large or small, should always be aware of their competitors. But this doesn’t mean you should be frightened of them, or even ignore them. Competitor awareness should become part of your marketing strategies, to analyse what they are selling, what processes they have in place – even down to what suppliers they [...]

20 uses of the hash tag in Twitter

If you’re prolific in using Twitter you’ll notice that some tweets include a hash key (#) before certain words. This makes these words become hash tags, or specialised keywords that can be tracked. Why would you want to use hash tags within your twittering activities? Here are 20 reasons: to focus on particular keywords that [...]

Is tweeting a waste of time?

To the uninitiated Twitter may be considered a useless pursuit. The idea of reading these little ‘messages’ that rapidly zip past your eyes, all seemingly unconnected with each other, blathering on about nothing in particular, would seem like a waste of time. Until you analyse why people do twitter. Social networking is about being sociable, [...]

The definition of a brand

A brand is perceived in many ways by the customer, and by the company. There are many misconceptions like a brand is the logo: a name, symbol, colour, font, slogan or whatever, but it is more than that; the logo is merely the brand’s element that is immediately recognisable, and differentiates it from its competitors. [...]

What’s added value in marketing?

In one of the questions I answered in LinkedIn, one responder asked me what I meant by added value. He thought it referred to the difference between the cost price and the manufactured price of a product. It may do, but when you use the term added value in marketing it takes on a different [...]

Use a SWOT analysis to look for new opportunities for your business

Every month the team at Appletree gets together to talk about how we’re doing and where we’re going. It’s a great opportunity to share ideas and discuss any issues that have come up. At our last meeting, we did a SWOT analysis on the business. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths are [...]