Duct Tape Marketing

Holding educational workshops has always been a very good way to build business. The problem with this strategy though is that it has become increasingly difficult to get prospects to come to workshop type events.

Recently, businesses of all shapes and sizes are turning to seminars conducted by phone or teleseminars to easily present information to groups of prospects.

Most marketing folks extol the virtues of the concept of the target market. Yet, experience tells me that few businesses have any sort of well-defined target market. In order to grow your business, and get out of competing on price, you must identify a hungry target market and do everything you can to make your business as attractive as possible to that market.

Pick-up any business publication these days, and you will likely read about blogs or blogging as a business tool. There are very many good reasons to publish a blog, but the real power of blogs and why they have caught on so lies in something called RSS.

Building value and trust, while proving how your small business is different from every other small business that says it does what you do, is pretty much the game. Prospects come to the party with a large amount of skepticism and doubt. Your marketing should do everything it can to offer proof that you do indeed walk the talk.

This week, I want to tell you about a technology that will take the marketing world by storm in 2005. The generic term for the technology is RSS, which stands in some circles for Real Simple Syndication.

One of the greatest ways to generate new marketing strategies is to look for new ways to apply proven techniques.

Heck, some of the greatest business innovations of all time came about when someone took something that worked in one industry and found a way to apply it to a new industry.

Many times, when someone sees what he or she believes is advertising, the radar screen goes up. Immediately, a bit of mistrust comes into play.

Writing articles and submitting them to relevant publications and web sites is one of the best long-term marketing strategies you can adopt – online or offline.

Most small business owners miss the boat when it comes to getting a constant flow of referrals because they start off looking in all the wrong places. If they seek referrals at all, most small business owners think only of their clients.

What’s the purpose of a business? Or, perhaps more specifically, what’s the purpose of your business? Do you ever think about that throughout the course of the day? Or, does it only haunt you at night or when you are trying to clear a jam in the copier?

Customers are kind of funny. They will rarely tell you how you messed up; they will simply leave. Poof...gone!

Don't just take the order and run. Remember, it is a lot easier and a whole lot more profitable to do more business with your existing clients than it is to find new ones. So, do whatever it takes to make sure those existing clients are happy campers.