Bertie is working on getting more customers for his business.  He's recently cut back on newspaper advertising, because he found that when he measured the response from it, he was spending more than he was getting in return. (…)

Yesterday I heard a remarkable story from one of my clients.
They are on track to equal, or even beat, their best ever month in terms of sales.  Not so remarkable, you might think. (…)

Two years ago, I was the business coach hired in the final few weeks as a last-gasp desperate move by a company that was terminally ill from bad credit control. (…)

Do you need more small business marketing ideas to bring in more enquiries?  Often, lead generation is the biggest challenge that small businesses have.  We've got smaller budgets, fewer people and no specialist knowledge to make the most effective use of our marketing spend. (…)

At school you were taught to write properly.  That's properly as in old-fashioned, dry and deadly serious English.  In your small business, it's the equivalent of pouring cold water over your client as you're talking to them about your products and it's just not going to help you sell. (…)

As I've just created the free Guide To Writing Your Fast Growth Business Plan I thought it might be helpful to put something out for those who get stuck for marketing ideas.  There are literally hundreds of different ways to market your business, so I put down my basic top 10 marketing tips for small business as a starting place for you. (…)

In communist Russia during the cold war, the Government would create a 5 year plan for the country that was their blueprint for producing food, employment, clothing, housing and everything else that goes into running a country effectively. (…)

Homer Simpson is doing an impression of how I felt when hearing about a small business marketing campaign yesterday.  A client in the property lettings industry was talking about a competitor who has a TV advertising campaign to get landlords on board. 
I am horrified at the thought of TV advertising to get landlords.  They must be spending £25,000 or more for this campaign and have little hope of achieving much, if anything with it.  Here are at least 3 smarter things they could be doing that would cost them a fraction of what they have wasted on TV commercials…

Update their website and use Google Adwords to get some targetted traffic (their website is terrible, a complete waste of money)
Start a referral scheme for landlords and tenants to get leads almost for free
Get local mortgage brokers to introduce them to property investors

I could make the list a lot longer, but you get the point, I hope.  You need to make sure that any advertising you do will clearly target the right customer groups and will give a return on investment reasonably quickly.  If each landlord is worth roughly £3,000 per year in profits, a TV campaign will have to bring in 8 or 9 new landlords and keep them for a year before they even break even.  Horrific.  Enough to make Homer Simpson scream. (…)

For years I have been a sceptic about how useful a Blackberry mobile phone and email device could be for handling email as well as phone calls. (…)

Too often, marketing is about image and has nothing to say about the product itself.  It is trying to position the product in some way to catch the eye of a trendy few.  The trouble is, when the trend passes, so does demand for the product.  You can learn from what the "big boys" do in marketing too. (…)