There’s never a good time to start something hard.  There’s always a reason — or three — to put it off.  But in this marketing environment, hard is where the money is.  The easy stuff doesn’t work, at least not the way you need it to.  Everything that makes marketing better — building a brand,…

Not every business has samples they can share.  But for those who do, use them!  Letting potential customers sample your wares is still a proven way to generate new customers.  If you’re a designer or printer, drop off samples of that cool new piece you just finished to similar businesses.  If you’re a publication, put…

During World War I, British soldiers started out wearing brown caps.  And dying of head injuries.  So they switched to metal helmets.  Makes sense, right?  Then they noticed the number of soldiers with head injuries was actually increasing.  It would be easy to conclude that helmets weren’t helping, right?  Not so fast.  More head injuries…

Want more referrals?  Be a better customer.  Wherever you go, when you’re on the customer or client side of the transaction, you’re making an impression.  If you’re intentional about becoming everyone’s favorite customer, those people — and there are probably a lot of them — are much more likely to pass your name along when…

Think of the three or four words or phrases someone is likely to use to find a company like yours online.  Those are the same keywords or phrases all of your competitors use to boost their search results.  So just using them in your copy or in an AdWords campaign probably won’t move the needle…

Want to know if your company really has a brand?  Here’s a simple test.  Take one of your marketing messages — it could be a TV spot, a magazine ad, a banner ad, a radio spot, a billboard — whatever.  Remove your company’s name and replace it with your competitor’s.  If it still works, you…

There are plenty of good marketing ideas floating around.  Gazillions, really.  Know why you don’t see more of them?  Because a great idea, executed poorly, isn’t great anymore.  Execution rings the bell.  The right image, the right voice, the right copy, the right color, the right typeface at the right size, the right amount of…

There are professions — and you know who you are — whose default marketing position is to put their own pictures on everything, as if simply seeing those bright, shining faces was enough to compel people to use their services.  This is marketing as afterthought, blending rather than branding.  And it’s a cautionary tale.  If…

At a recent presentation on sales by members of the Dale Carnegie Training team, they summarized their talk in three key points that apply as much to marketing as to sales.  Have a process.  Dramatize your ideas.  And make it about the other person.  Those three keys can unlock a lot of opportunity.  Would your…

In sales, we often feel compelled to provide an instant answer to every question a prospect asks.  But of course, no one has all the answers.  Which means that some of the time, every salesperson is winging it.  But imagine responding with, “Let me think about that.”  A few good things happen.  First, it’s probably…