5 Free and Easy Ways to Promote Your Small Business Today

Twenty minutes. That’s all you need. Ten minutes to read this blog. Ten minutes to carry out one of the five actions below. Time: twenty minutes. Cost: zero. Not too much to promote your business is it? OK, so let’s get on with this. Tell one stranger you meet about your business In a supermarket…

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7 Reasons for Startups to Maximize Early Visibility

It’s still popular these days for startup founders to operate in stealth mode, meaning no details about the idea or progress are shared with anyone until the big reveal and rollout. The common reason given is that this prevents any competitor from stealing their idea and beating them to market. In my view, this paranoid…

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Do Promotional Products Really Work for Marketing?

Usually dismissed as an old-hat marketing technique, are promotional products making a comeback? In the world of ephemeral digital connections, could it be that a tangible product is actually a great way to promote your brand? Let’s look at how you can leverage promotional products as part of your brand strategy in 2016. The power…

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Real-Time Personalized Marketing: Engaging Across Channels

Customers today no longer differentiate between online and offline channels. Many of today’s purchases cross multiple channels and the customer considers them all part of the same brand experience. The new differentiator is providing an omni-channel experience to your customers. Brands with the most solid omni-channel buyer engagement processes retain roughly 89% of their customers.…

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How to Get New Customers by Targeting New Markets

Many entrepreneurs assume that everyone will love their solution as much as they do, so they tune their marketing focus based on their own needs and wants. That’s the right place to start, but real growth and scale requires attracting customers who are not like you. Expanding your market into these areas requires thinking outside…

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5 Email Marketing Strategies to Consider in 2016

It’s tough breaking into an already busy industry, but there are startups created every day. Hopeful founders dream to lead their new company in a strong direction, no matter the trials they might have to pass to reach success. However, the competition is fierce, and one of the biggest concerns of the modern age is…

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My Fish Bowl Story of Marketing Mistakes

Here’s a mistake I made that taught me a lot and helped me teach others. The Mistake Many years ago, I took a new product—early business planning software—to its first trade show. We did the standard booth thing, brought along products, and sell sheets, business cards, and so forth. And we put a plastic fishbowl on…

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In Marketing, Practice Like You Play

Anyone who has ever played organized sports (or music or dance for that matter) is probably familiar with the coaching axiom, “practice like you play.” In other words, if you practice sloppy, you’ll play sloppy in the game or recital. The same thing holds true in marketing communications. Marketing communication involves the different ways a…

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