4 Questions You Must Answer to Develop Your Marketing Strategy | Duct Tape Marketing

March 30, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Developing a marketing strategy for your business can be tough, especially if you don’t know where to start or what to focus on. I’ve found that if I get stuck while putting together my own strategy, or a marketing strategy for clients, I just need to refer back to the four questions below to help guide the way. I hope they help you get started down the right path as well.

Why do you do what you do?

I know I’m not the first person in business to discuss the value of identifying why it is you do what you do, but here are my thoughts nonetheless.

When I talk about the “why,” I mean your personal “why.” How are you trying to change the world? What wrong are you trying to make right? What gaps are you filling?

How a German-Jewish Mystic Created an American Soap Company Determined to Clean Up the Planet | Adweek

March 15, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Read the label on most soaps and you’ll find a few words about freshness and lather. But pick up a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s and you’ll read this: “Whatever unites us is greater than whatever divides us! … Only if constructive-selfish work, perfecting first me, like every arctic owl-penguin-pilot-cat-swallow-beaver-bee, can I teach the Moral ABC.”

It goes on. And on. Hundreds of these tiny, preachy, semi-coherent phrases cover every inch of the bottle. All of them are the work of late visionary Emanuel Bronner, a German-Jewish soap maker who escaped Hitler, then came to America to preach his vision of a unified mankind. Bronner’s mystical rantings landed him in a mental institution (he escaped that, too), after which the good doctor (who wasn’t really a doctor) started selling his family-recipe peppermint soap to finance his itinerant sermonizing—only to begin printing his sermons on the label once he realized people were more into his soap than his teachings.

Are traditional or digital marketing methods best for your business? | The Startup Magazine

March 10, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

With so many marketing methods available, business owners can find it tough to decide what will benefit their company the most. Whilst there are numerous successful strategies, the real question is: is there a marketing method that best suits your industry?

Leaflet distribution specialist Direct Letterbox Marketing has compiled some data on the best marketing methods for different industries. Where does your business sit? Find out below…

Direct marketing

Target Marketing Magazine analysed some of the most successful companies’ direct mail campaigns of that year. In the top 10 results – the following industries appeared:

Why Do People Fail at Marketing Their Business? | Getentrepreneurial.com

March 9, 2017March 9, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. Peter Drucker

People fail at marketing for a variety of reasons. This list is not meant to be all-inclusive but here are the most common reasons I encounter:

Never been trained in marketing

Don’t understand the psychology of marketing

Are not consistent in their marketing message

Don’t ask for help because they don’t know who to trust

Don’t want to do it for themselves

Don’t know what works and do not want to spend the money

On Promises | marketingforhippies.com

February 20, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The purpose of marketing is to make promises.

The purpose of your business is to keep them.

Most traditional cultures in the world are overflowing with proverbs around the importance of keeping your word and doing what you say you will do.

Want to Produce Great Content? Get Your Employees On Board | The Startup Magazine

February 14, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

You want your customers to be your brand ambassadors, but truth be known – your employees already are. And on a side note – if you aren’t confident that they are ambassadors for your business, why are they working for you?

Your employees have superior knowledge of the products or services that you offer and have the most interaction with clients, meaning that they are attuned to the demands, expectations and concerns of the customers.

All of the content that a business creates, should provide value to the customer base and target audience. With your employees having first-hand access to the questions and concerns voiced by customers, it makes good sense for them to be involved, or be kept up to date with the creation of the content.

Take Complete Charge of Your Content | Duct Tape Marketing

February 7, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

In 2016, content was in supreme power expected to be delivered in the form of compelling, personalized and interactive stuff that can be rated well and ranked high in all search engines. Overall, the strategy of content marketing saw a significant shift in 2016 compared to a year ago. The year 2017 is predictable. Brands, big or small are slowly preparing themselves to deliver value added real-time contextual content with videos, images, GIFs and infographics.

Content creators and marketers get a chance to enrich their customers with a more personalized content, those that can add value to the brands and those that can stand out. The key point here is to keep appearing with different sets of quality content. But, the majority of the marketers are still lacking the confidence to take complete control of their contents. Campaigning such content is no doubt going to be complex. Efficiency in creating contextual content, formatting them as per the need of their target audience, and distributing them through proper channel needs little homework.

5 Steps to Marketing a Micro-Business | Small Business Daily

February 1, 2017February 6, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Is your small business marketing working as well as it could be? Marketing even the smallest businesses has gotten both easier and more complicated in the digital age. Easier, because online marketing is so affordable; more complicated, because there are so many options to choose from.

To find out how small business owners are keeping up, Vistaprint recently surveyed “micro-businesses” (U.S. small business owners with fewer than 10 employees). Here’s what they found.

Despite their small size, micro-businesses in general have moved into the digital marketing age. More than two-thirds (68.8 percent) say they market their businesses both online and offline. Over half (52.7 percent) say their online presence is “very important” to their marketing efforts, while 30.4 percent say it’s “fairly important.”