Fuzion Web Blog

In the beginning, most small businesses do all of their marketing in-house. This is a good thing, but when you are writing all of your own press releases, designing your own brochures, and stamping your own direct mailings, you run the risk of getting burnt out. 

Placing an 800 number on your marketing collateral and advertisements can get you noticed by as many as 20% more people. Generally speaking, nearly twice as many people will respond to a 800 number as compared to a local number. I recommend writing your 800 number in a large font and placing it in the bottom right hand corner of your advertising.

We have all head the saying, “It takes money to make money.” In marking that could not be more accurate. If you refuse to spend on marketing, how do you expect your business to grow? I recommend that clients change their perception of marketing spending and think of it as investing rather than as spending.

One of the single greatest lessons to learn about marketing and business development is simply to always be improving. Never complete a campaign or a project and sit back to admire your job well done. Every day is a new chance to improve on what you did the day before. It can be a simple thing like your email signature, or a broad sweeping thing like improving your company image. With this advice you will always be headed in the right direction.

There are two basic perspectives to view a business - internal and external. People often view their company from an internal perspective alone. This, in an of itself, is not a problem. From the inside you are best suited to see strengths and weaknesses. However, it is important that you are aware of the external view customers, suppliers, media, and analysts have of your company. A proper marketing assessment gathers insight from both perspectives.

Marketing plans are not optional. They are the groundwork for action and the basis upon which informed marketing decisions are made. Creating a marketing plan is a way of committing your ideas to action. By assessing your goals and ideas and defining your Objective, Rationale, Project Leader, Timeline and Budget, you will be committed with time, staff and money to the project and dramatically increase the likelihood of success.

Many marketers get into an unhealthy habit of following trends in only their own industry. Unless you want to be closed minded, you have to get out there and study other industries. If you are a service provider, take a minute to examine how children’s toys are marketed. If you are a manufacturer, study you local real estate agencies. Then ask yourself, “What are they doing differently from us?” and “Why?”

I cannot over stress the importance of marketing daily. If you ever find yourself confused about what marketing activity you should do first, just consider your time and money. Think, “What marketing activity can I do with the time and money I have right now.” Take your answer and go from there. Set priorities for this week, and don’t be afraid to re-prioritize next week.

Americans everywhere are looking for savings and they are turning to the Internet to do it. With people performing cost-conscious searches such as “best deal on ____” “discounted ____,” “cheap____,” or “lowest price on ____”, now is your chance to tap into an emerging group of searchers - the budget minded. Proper optimization of both paid search ads, SEO, and video campaign efforts to include these phrases in can offer huge returns and meet a growing demand.

Marketing strategy should follow through to your website and a website could, and indeed should be a major part of your marketing mix. If a large portion of your marketing is conducted through the distribution of company brochures for instance, there is no reason why these cannot be ordered through your website, or indeed in today’s age, customers are more than used to downloading a PDF brochure online. One major plus being that a PDF is virtually free for you to distribute by comparison to a printed brochure, and friendlier to the environment to boot.

But don’t stop there, the Internet offers the business owner a huge range of possibilities when it comes to their website … use the Internet to offer your customers real interaction with your brand and what it stands for; blogs, podcasts, forums, live online support, networks and more.