According to marketing guru Seth Godin, if there are 2 million Google matches for a search, the number one match gets 10,000 times more traffic as the number 40 match in the search. What this means is that if you don’t make it to the first 2 pages of a search, you won’t be found.…
Unlike advertising and public relations which create publicity and awareness, product promotion delivers a call to action for a product, service, or event. 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…
A study by Yahoo! and Starcom/Mediavest Group offers some interesting insights about women and how they interact with the web. The survey interviewed 1199 women about how they use the Internet. Here are a few of the findings: • The Internet is the preferred media among women and is the 4th most time intensive activity…
I get this question a lot from sales veterans who remember what selling was like before the Internet. My answer is that things are different with some aspects of selling harder and other parts easier. The biggest change in selling is the rise of the better informed buyer. Prior to the web, buyers had fewer…
Online advertising has been hailed as one of the most effective and economical ways to reach customers in the new millennium. Google Adwords, Google Adsense, and Yahoo! Pay-Per-click are three of the more common publishers of online advertisements. Recently, Click Forensics, a web market researcher, determined that 13.7% of clicks are fraudulent. Google and Yahoo!…
Every successful firm needs a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) which is fancy marketing talk for the reason a customer will choose to buy your offering. If you don’t have a UVP it means that your offering is a pure commodity and you should not be reading this blog—I cannot help you. A UVP states your…
“We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.” Douglas MacArthur A good business plan makes a great compass to guide a firm’s daily decisions but you must be flexible about reviewing the goals and initiatives associated with them. Just because you wrote, sold, and implemented the plan doesn’t make it “right” or…
“In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” – Carl Sagan, Astronomer Creating new products can be complex but it is not as complicated as the above quote suggests. Rather, I think new products need to withstand a feasibility test, also known as a concept test. This feedback…
Marketing campaigns, sales quotas, and sales awards are soon forgotten. Yet, your reputation seems everlasting—it is the essence of what others remember about you. How will you be remembered? Mark Twain said, “If you tell the truth you won’t have to remember anything”. This adage makes sense to me. I don’t want to have to…
Franchises fail at an alarming rate. Yet, your likelihood of start up success increases when you buy a franchise, but franchise failure rates are higher than you’d think. Research on franchising in the US by Timothy Bates, a Wayne State University Economist, suggests that a franchise is not a safer haven over raw business start…