Tips and Tricks

Marketing Events are supposed to be good for your reputation

An acquaintance of mine recently sent me a solicitation for a marketing event. It ended up killing any respect I had for them. I host webinars, I know how hard it is to put yourself out there. I don’t mind invitations, people invite me to things all the time.  If it looks interesting or valuable, I’ll try to attend. But this one was different – it got my attention – but in the wrong way – I couldn’t believe how many things they had done wrong – way wrong.

Find out what they did wrong….

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Not just questioning your assumptions, but asking the right questions, is one of the keys to success in any marketing campaign.

A bad assumption can ruin the best online marketing plan

Asking the wrong questionsI regularly give online marketing webinars. My bad assumption started when someone gave me an innocent suggestion about when I should hold them. They suggested that lunchtime would be ideal. Most really bad assumptions start off making sense – at least initially. Lunchtime made sense, and as I created my campaigns, I really never thought about the timing again.

But I had a problem – attendance wasn’t so great. I thought it might be my landing page, so I worked on it. Then I thought it might be my email promotions, so I worked on them. Finally I thought it might be the titles of the events, so I worked on updating them. find out what was wrong with my campaign…

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How Small Businesses Can Stay Smart

November 14, 2011
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Small businesses have to stay up to date on marketing trends or risk falling behind their competition. Unfortunately the pace of change in online marketing continues to speed up, and our ability to absorb information isn’t increasing fast enough. Advice and how-to information in the various disciplines of marketing is out there, but you have [...]

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The Right Focus for Your Online Marketing

November 3, 2011
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You really don’t care about me That’s OK, I struggle to care about you, your products or your services too. Nothing personal, we are just hard-wired by thousands of years of evolution to care only about ourselves and our immediate family. That doesn’t mean I won’t care, it just means that I have to work [...]

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Asking the Wrong Questions

July 26, 2011

This article originally appeared in my Coach’s Corner email.  Sign up and be the first to know. The wrong questions will get you the wrong answer I get this question all the time: “what should I do?”  Invariably it turns out what my new friend is really asking is how to use a specific online [...]

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Learning from Bad Examples

June 28, 2011
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Here’s a twist: Collecting good online marketing examples is helpful, but sometimes you can learn more from studying the bad examples. Sometimes things stick with you In my second year of NROTC, an instructor remarked that he was able to learn as much, even more, from a bad example as a good one. He went [...]

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Accelerating your marketing

June 6, 2011
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When does your marketing turn the corner? When do you move from chasing every lead to where people are finding you? After all that’s the promise of online marketing.

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Online Marketing and the DIY Trap

April 13, 2011
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Business is about evaluating trade-offs, and online marketing is no different. Can you violate one of the basic “rules” of project management to get an online marketing result that is high quality, delivered quickly, and not terribly expensive?

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2D Barcodes and Stupid Marketing Tricks

February 26, 2011

Don’t be distracted by the latest shiny new object.  Just because 2D barcodes work in some applications doesn’t mean that they work everywhere.  I’ve recently seen two very bad implementations and on silly suggestion around 2D barcodes. Someone recommends you place a QR code in your LinkedIn or Facebook Profile to prove your technical prowess [...]

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Email Spam by Accident?

February 7, 2011

Don’t be an Email Spammer! Attention Small Businesses: A sloppy approach to email marketing can ruin your brand, damage your reputation or, in the worse case, kill your ability to conduct business by email. You may be a spammer and not even know it. We all know the “old” email spam, advertising Viagra or get [...]

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