Unlike advertising and public relations which create publicity and awareness, product promotion delivers a call to action. Typically, the call to action is for the customer to buy now; often there is an incentive offered to encourage the customer to do so. The goal of product promotion is get the product in front of the…
Superior negotiators come in all genders, shapes, and sizes, but they tend to have a few things in common. Here is my list of the seven habits of superior negotiators: 1. A superior negotiator is always prepared. Abraham Lincoln said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening…
Chris Anderson’s business bestseller, The Long Tail, is widely quoted and the term “long tail marketing” is now as ubiquitous as sustainable competitive advantage, value proposition, and the other business clichés. With this cliché status, the term gets abused and misused. What Anderson meant is that there is a new economy that provides an economic…
Article marketing is one of the best ways to optimize your website, create new sales leads, and to garner new publicity. The really good news is that it is free and relatively easy (OK, it does take some time and a few brain cells). If you are not familiar with article marketing, it is the…
Simply put, a market is a group of buyers that are willing and able to buy your product or solution. A market is made up sub-markets or “market segments”; market segments are groups of potential buyers who have similar wants, needs, experiences, or problems. In fact, a wise man once said, “There is no market;…
Your latest e-mail campaign was supposed to create new leads for the sales team. Sadly, most of the recipients greeted your e-mails with the delete key. All they saw was another piece of spam. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone since most e-mail campaigns struggle to be read by the intended recipients. While…
Everything is online. If this is not the case for your business, it probably means you are going out of business. Since you are reading this blog, you are probably on the right track. Here is my story. Call it mid-life crisis, but a few months ago I was desperate for a red Corvette. The…
Viral marketing is very hip and everyone says that it works. Yet, my experience is that few people can define what viral marketing really is or give tangible examples other than to say, “Like YouTube”. So, let me take a crack at it. Viral marketing is not new. In fact, it has been around for…
“Companies will spend a record $31 billion this year to advertise everything from toothpaste to home loans on the Internet, supporting countless news sites, social networks, video exchanges and blogs” (Reuters Online 10/12/07). Online advertising has come of age. It was only in the year 2000 that online advertising expenditures were too small to measure.…
It was not that long ago when formal business letters were the primary selling tool for B2B selling. The customer would say, “Send me a proposal” and sales people would willingly oblige with a multiple page letter, stamped, sealed, and delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. E-mail has changed the landscape and the formal business…