Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

What if your business sold a product that, once demand kicked in, you couldn’t make any more product?
Well, you could always raise prices, but that may not slow demand or be possible due to competition.
While it may appear that I am speaking about widgets when I refer to products, I’m actually talking about service businesses [...]

Lead generation is a numbers game and a momentum game.
Generally speaking there is no one magic way to generate a tons of leads. Granted, for some businesses there are more effective ways, but on the whole long-term effective lead generation comes down to a combination of advertising, public relations and a systematic approach to referrals [...]

OfficeLive Small Business is an ambitious and almost overwhelming omni application. For some it may be attempting to do too much. But one thing I like about it is there are lots of nuggets buried inside it that can offer some real and immediate benefit, even if you don’t try to integrate the service in [...]

Marketing podcast with Paul Gillin (click to listen, right click and Save As to download)
Paul Gillin has written about technology and now social media’s influence on it, for years. Recently he stopped by to talk about his book The New Influencers on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.

For many a PR firm the concept of bloggers, [...]

SCORE, “Counselors to America’s Small Business,” is a offering two free workbooks to the first 1,000 people to sign up.
The two workbooks are comprehensive guides to starting and structuring a business, and are great resources for any entrepreneur. To get your free copy of How to Really Start Your Own Business and How to [...]

Most marketing materials suffer from too much focus. Now, I’m a big fan of focus when it comes to message, but it’s the delivery of that message that needs to be flexible.
Here’s what I mean. Within the very same, narrowly defined, ideal target market there exists many different personalities and just as many different learning [...]

Quite often these days I get asked to explain the core components in the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system. The key word in that last sentence being system – yes marketing is a system just like making it, fixing it, shipping it, and paying for it is, we just don’t treat it as [...]

It seems like small business owners get so caught up in the terminology of social media that they forget the objectives involved in employing any marketing tool or tactic.
Mind you, it’s not their fault, the media is always quick to promote the next new, new thing – I mean blogs are so social media 1.0.
If [...]