It’s so simple an idea that it’s easy to overlook. Most of the customers or clients you win came from a competitor of yours. This means that you have a rare opportunity to ask why? Why did they switch? How long did the relationship last? Why leave now? The answers can do more than give…

All consumers, and especially women, are attracted to companies and products that share their values. And marketing provides the best tool for demonstrating those shared values. You see this done all the time in beer commercials, where no one ever drinks alone. Beer is a magnet for good friends and good times in these spots,…

Conventional marketing wisdom says that buying a list of e-mail addresses is always a bad idea. But “always” is a bit broad. If you sell primarily to other businesses, and if you have relevant information and ideas that you can send out to prospects over a period of time, buying a targeted e-mail list can…

If you’re marketing in the B2B space, one way to make LinkedIn work harder for you is to start a group. Ideally, your group would attract the kind of people you want as clients or customers, so consider it’s name carefully— what terms would your prospects use to search for such a group? Start conversations.…

One of the most common marketing mistakes is not taking advantage of the unique benefits of the medium in which you’re advertising. Radio spots that don’t use sound to create a potent mental image. Print ads without a compelling headline or image. TV spots that don’t use sound, or that don’t take advantage of the…

If you don’t understand a new technology or tactic, or if you need to know more about how it works, it’s a safe bet that there are plenty of other people in the same boat. So try this. Educate yourself on the topic — really dig into it — and as you do, write about…

When someone gets a new iPad — or anything they really like — they’re happy to talk about it and even show it off. A new PC? Not so much. One test of a brand is whether ownership of its products or services confers status on the consumer. It could be a new pair of…

Want to do better at e-mail marketing? Sign up for e-mail from everybody else. Let all those retailers and service providers market to you — then pay attention to who does it well and how they do it. What subject lines catch your eye? How long or short is the copy? Do they use photos?…

Ask one of your best customers — the kind you’d like to have more of — to name one thing they’d change about the way you do things if they could. The answer may surprise you — and give you something you can do to retain good customers and attract more. And if it doesn’t…

Aristotle was fascinated with how persuasion works, and one of his most basic ideas — one many of us learned in middle school — is that true persuasion requires three ingredients: pathos (emotion), logos (logic) and ethos (credibility). He also found that the most persuasive arguments relied twice as much on emotion as on logic…