One of the funny things about humans is we all expect other people to communicate in the same way that we do. However, what researchers studying a science called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) have found is that people see and make sense of the world differently.
We each have our preferred ways of representing the world in a similar way that we prefer to use either our right or left...
Throw your hats in the air and celebrate - it is end of financial year time again! I love end of financial year as it is a great time to reflect on what worked and what didn't for you and your business in the past year.
But ... when you look at how successful was your marketing expense in the past financial year - you need to look your results against a number of definitions of success (and...
Many small business communications suffer from the same flaw - they appear more interested in themselves than the customers. What do I mean? Let's take a typical website introduction.
"Welcome to the ABCD website. ABCD have proudly been in business since 1987. We are a family owned company that prides itself of the great service we provide."
It is all about ABCD and nothing about the...
Let's assume you have a brilliant product or service, and you want to make it an absolute no brainer for people to buy it. What can you do? One of the best things you can do is to take away all the risk for the purchaser and give a guarantee.
People these days are worried about being ripped off and want some reassurance that you will not do that to them. By offering a guarantee you reassure...
There has been a major shift in how people buy things and relate to companies in the past 3 years and this trend is brilliant for small business. The trend is away from "buying a brand" to "buying the person behind the brand".
We have been disillusioned by big business so now we are looking to know the faces behind the names of the brand. We want to know their personalities, what makes them...
When most small businesses start up they automatically think: "if I get a Yellow Pages ad all will be well".
The challenge is that over the past few years the way people search for businesses has changed. It used to be that whenever anyone wanted to find a business they went straight to the big yellow books. Now the majority of people will go to their computer first.
At the 2007...
Many businesses use competitions and lucky door prizes as a way of generating leads or building their data base. But if done incorrectly you will end up losing customers and could even find yourself on the wrong side of the law.
So how do you run lucky door prizes or competitions that are legal and get you brilliant results?
Top 10 Tips for competitions
1. Work out your intent. You...
When you are in business, your task is to meet the wants, desires and needs of your customers. Easy!
This is much harder than it sounds. Each person is totally unique and if you look at their individual wants, desires and needs you will never be able to satisfy them all and you will go broke trying.
This is where statistics comes into play. If you get a large enough group together they...
When working with businesses on letters they send to potential clients trying to get an appointment with them, we often see the same mistakes being made over and over when we look at their existing letters.
To help you not make the same mistakes, here are our top 10 tips for effective appointment letters.
1. Be realistic in the response you are looking for. People are not sitting by the...
One of the strongest trends for small business is the need to build connections with your clients -giving them an insight into who you are and what you do. You need to do that through words, stories or parables and testimonials. Written words can only go so far.
The trend I am seeing coming from the US in marketing is the addition of video to things like websites, promotional DVDs and blogs....
