7 basic measures of email marketing success.
Email marketing is the stuff of small business dreams. For the first time they can communicate with their markets, being able to measure the effectiveness of their efforts. Unlike the days of broadcast media where the return on any set of marketing activies was...
8 Myths of social media marketing that trap small business
Myth 1. Fans, followers, and likes are valuable. Reality. What you need to attract to your site is people who for one reason or another are willing to part with their money in exchange for what you have, or at least move towards that decision point. There are only...
How do you describe your brand?
People in market research always describe brands in human terms, they are tough, or easy to live with, or friendly, cold, and so on. It is the easiest way to describe them. It follows then that when thinking about the dimensions of your brand, you would do it ...
Self-induced brand catastrophe
Every now and again I see something so stupid, so irrational, and so destructive of a valuable brand, that I think that perhaps the loonies really do have the keys to the asylum. One of them happened yesterday. There was a radio news report that Akubra...
Why create value before you make a sale?
It happened again last week. A client asked why I advocated giving away a lot of information on their products and supporting technology, seemingly for free off their website. For them it is a challenging idea, one that runs against everything they have ever thought...
6 essential questions underpinning digital strategy development
I find myself writing a proposal for the development and implementation of a digital marketing strategy for a bunch who know they need it, because I suspect their kids told them, but have no idea what it is. Part of the challenge is to figure out how to balance the...
A bakers dozen routes to small business success.
Small businesses have few resources, so they need to get a lot of mileage out of what they do have. How do they generate successful marketing campaigns that generate revenue and a long term position in a market without breaking the bank?. Following are 13 ways...
4 essential pillars of digital success
It often happens at events at which I speak, big or small, does not seem to matter. Someone afterwards comes up to get some advice on their particular scheme to make a million from an online business. It happened again last week, one very sensible business...
What does the emerging FMCG landscape look like?
Watching the rather sloppy way Grant O'Brien was moved on by Woolworths last week, I got to thinking about all the converging things happening that will impact the FMCG landscape over the next few years. A superficial look would suggest that things are pretty...
The 4 strategies to scale a small business.
Most businesses want to grow, even just a bit, it is not only in the DNA, but some scale makes life in most areas easier. So how do small businesses go about it? 4 basic strategies. 1. Empower the team. Make every front line person as well as the office...