Do you reward your referral sources? Do you even know where your referrals are coming from? If your business is anything like mine, it thrives on referrals, so that's where I focus the bulk of my advertising dollars. "Your closing ratio for non-qualified leads is 10% versus a 60% close ratio with referred leads." - Tom Hopkins, world-renowned sales trainer [...]
Make your mail stand out from the crowd. Save envelopes and packaging then reuse it to send mail to your clients. Keep pieces that have a great texture, eye-catching color or an interesting postmark for this to be especially effective. To do this well, make it intentional and have branded return labels printed. If you're going to adopt this as [...]
Creative Idea - Custom Air Fresheners We like this product for: Gym Owners - a great way to keep lockers fresh. Bakeries - a "fresh" way to spread the word. Pet Shops - make customers happy with a new air freshener for Spot's room! General Contractors - give these out to all your subcontractors, they're always in their vehicle and what better way to have [...]
Pricing is one area of business where I think businesses should (mildly) concern themselves with their competition. Take a look and see how they're presenting (ie packaging) their product or service and ensure that you're either in line with industry standard OR distinctly unique in your offering. When pricing a service, be sure that the process and deliverables are clearly [...]
People often focus on the advertising aspect of marketing. Doing so may result in frustration as the greatest advertisement won't necessarily bring in more business if you're missing the mark in other areas. Advertising falls under "promotion" and is just one tiny piece of the marketing pie. The 5 "P's" of marketing include: Product Price Place (Distribution) Promotion People Note! The marketing mix [...]
If you're like me you're constantly trying to achieve greater success in your business by balancing a personal touch with efficiency. I am devoting this article to a discussion on the pros and cons old-school relationship building and new age automation and how to use aspects of each to your advantage. Here are some common client relation tasks along with [...]
During the Olympic games a few years back, my husband and I went out to take in the much anticipated Canada vs Russia hockey game. Wing night at a pub in a community dubbed "Hockeyville" seemed like an obvious place to go. Were we wrong, was the game not on at 5:30 pm? No, that wasn't it. The problem was [...]
Avoid hyphenation in your copy. The difference between poor copy and professional typography is in the details - like hyphenation. Proper line breaks are essential to readability. Here's some tips for typesetting like a pro: Don't have two lines of type in a row that end with a hyphen Don't have too many hyphenated line endings on a single page Keep [...]
