10 strategies for SME’s to beat the supermarket gorillas at their own game.
Any business that has done business with the supermarkets knows that they are not there to do you any favours. They have shareholders to keep happy, customers to sell to at the lowest prices possible consistent with their margin objectives , competitors to beat, and...
Marketing Plumber
You know the old story, the plumber who goes around fixing other peoples dripping taps, but has a houseful of leakers himself. This site has been my home since march 2009, and it has been full of leaking metaphorical taps. All the things I admonished my clients to do,...
Mapping Social Media
Most Aussies will probably recognise the diagram above, the London Underground. The first time anyone arrives in London, an underground map is a vital piece of paper, even in these days of mobile phone enabled GPS tools. The underground system in London is pretty...
Start with the things you can do.
No business can do everything, so the easy way to start is to do the thing you can do well, as long as it is at least partly the thing that also makes you different. In a suburb not far from me in Sydney, there is a street that over the last 5 years or so has evolved...
Mixed marketing metaphors.
I have a mate who is an academic economist, a really smart guy used to arguing a point of view, and with a box of stats on call to support any contention he makes, alternatively to pull down anything that runs contrary to his argument. He is very convincing. An...
3 points to measure e-marketing productivity.
When looked at from the "helicopter perspective " there seems to be three points of threshold competitive activity that you simply have to get right, or all else is irrelevant. Having a few meaningful measures at those three points is essential to understanding the...
5 practises for successful blogging
Over the weekend, my sister, a writer, called me a "blogging machine", recognising the challenge of producing 3 or 4 worthwhile posts a week. Caught me a bit by surprise, because I just blog, write about what seems important to me, and that I think will be of...
Beginners guide to SEO
Seeking a simple metaphor to explain how SEO fits into a digital strategy to a "digitally challenged" client running a successful small business, I struck upon the map of the London Underground. If you look at the map, there are stations on single lines, stations with...
The sure way to make a significant profit.
How many monopolies have you seen that do not make a good profit? Very few I bet. On the other hand, how many very sensible, responsible, customer focussed businesses in competitive markets have you seen go to the wall? Which would you rather be? Our consumer...
6 reasons you might be “engaged”.
Many put forward the notion of "Engagement" as the objective of Social Media and web based activity, it crops up with the regularity of a hot dog seller at a big football game. However, I have yet to see a definition of "engagement" that I am comfortable with....