Success in marketing isn’t about finding the one thing that works; it’s about cultivating a range of activities that, cumulatively, bring in the customers you need. Some of the best activities cost little and exploit your own interests.
Here are examples from 3 Cleveland Heights businesses that do a good job at making themselves seen, known and remembered:
Community involvement: Every year on New Year’s Day, Tommy’s Restaurant hosts a ...
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Most business owners rightly feel they have better things to do than play around with social media.
At the same time, it’s not an exaggeration to say social media has revolutionized marketing. It allows any business to engage in “content marketing” – essentially developing its own audience at little or no cost, and engaging with them to drive interest in sales. To ignore this is to ignore the behavior of your customers and prospects.
You’ve received quotes for advertising from two publications or websites; one wants to charge $150 and the other $350. How do you know which is the better deal?
Creating an apples-for-apples comparison between different publications is difficult because it involves so many variables.
The most common calculation for this job is cost-per-thousand (CPM), which measures the amount of money it takes to reach 1,000 people. You can use it for any medium ...
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If money were easy to come by, every ad would run in every issue as a full page. But a buck is hard to make and compromises are a fact of life.
So what’s more important: running a big ad or running an ad often?
Advertising – any advertising, whether print, online or broadcast – works best through repetition. Look at it this way: You know that if you send a direct mail piece or a mass e-mail, only a small percentage of ...
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Work boots are like soccer shoes in the sense that they both provide a protective covering for your feet. But if you play soccer or work in a steel plant, they are anything but interchangeable.
Your marketing materials are purpose built in the same way. A brochure isn’t interchangeable with a frequent buyer’s card any more than work boots are interchangeable with soccer cleats.
People who run their own small businesses are hard-working and busy. They typically seek to leverage time and ...
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What really happened that caused traditional media to shrink so much over the past decade – and why are so many still struggling to come back?
That’s the subject of this presentation, which I’ve given several times over the past few years.
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Seth Godin, one of the best marketing bloggers I follow, says wants and needs are often confused. He writes:
That pays off for any marketer that has persuaded his market that they need what he sells. It backfires when those ‘needs’ are seen for what they actually are–luxuries.
I agree with Godin in both his point and his brevity. But in being admirably concise, he omits a noteworthy nuance. People are more eager to buy things they want than things they need. They’ll ...
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I moved from the editorial side of the publishing business to the money side in 2000 and my timing couldn’t have been worse.
In my first month of selling advertising, it was my job to convince would-be advertisers why they should select my products as opposed to anybody else’s.
By the second month, I was answering a much more difficult question: Why they should advertise at all.
Even in 2000, at the height of the first internet bubble, marketers were figuring out how ...
Read More >A small B2B media company contacted me to talk about enhancing revenue by adding some new digital products to its portfolio. The company already offers a digital edition, business directory, email newsletters, web-seminars and a number of other digital B2B staples. Non-monetized but just as important, it has a reasonable Twitter following, a large group on LinkedIn and a Facebook page that is basically just a placeholder.
I’m sure there are more products the company could implement. It doesn’t have any ...
Read More >Alan Mutter, who calls himself the Newsosaur and whose opinions on the news business I deeply respect, points out that newspapers are now well into their sixth year of declines in advertising demand. In a recent blog post, he noted that annual newspaper sales hit $10.7 billion in 2006 – and now stand at $4.3 billion, about the same level as 1983. And they continue to drop.
While the drop in advertising isn’t new for newspapers, it hasn’t always ...
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