Social media hype drips from the keyboard of many enthusiasts. Yes, it’s a way of developing a conversation, yes it’s a way of improving rapport and yes it’s possible to display your expertise. However, without making sales, or promoting sales the whole exercise with social media is pointless and a complete waste of time. Remember [...]

Manchester has an interesting funding arrangement at the moment. It’s called Creative Credits. Creative Credits aims to help Manchester SME businesses get creative input from other businesses registered on the Creative Credits gallery on their web site. The way it works is as follows: Creative Credits As A User Initially eligible users register on the [...]

Heraklietos a Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia and a staunch believer in change said: Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up [...]

Yes, those canny Apprentices completely fail to get the point of the task. Which is to value the 10 items and then sell them at better than the value where possible.

Wonder who should be in a proposal team? Wonder no more!

Social networking pioneers lament that too many use social networking for marketing or Search engine optimisation. Some I’ve seen say they believe that marketing is pushing out the relationships constructed through social media sites, before marketing was used. And yet good marketing is all about building relationships with the people you know are the right [...]

Social networking pioneers lament that too many use social networking for marketing or Search engine optimisation. Some I’ve seen say they believe that marketing is pushing out the relationships constructed through social media sites, before marketing was used. And yet good marketing is all about building relationships with the people you know are the right [...]

Your business, every business, faces issues at the moment because of the fear generated through the current economy. That fear has slowed demand and made some organisations delay orders to their suppliers and consumers put off their own purchases. We can all see it simply by watching the news every day. In fact now is [...]

Marketing myths get propagated around businesses. I’m going to pick on two and debunk them. If you want you can debunk your favourite marketing myths in the comments. "Referrals Are The Best Source Of Customers" It’s true that referrals are a great source of customers. And there’s no doubt that they are more loyal and [...]

Strategy vs tactics looked at in isolation is the wrong way to go about it. Every company has a number of tactics they’re working right now that they would be foolish to throw away. When you get the opportunity to step back, or use someone like me to help you, you can review and set [...]

Armando Alves show an example of brand hijacking by Twitter users. The users were fans of the AMC Series “Mad Men” about advertising agencies in the 1960′s. They set-up the character names on Twitter and simply extended by Twittering as though they were the cast.  And of course I just had to follow the David [...]

"When do we stop marketing for Christmas" is a question I sometimes get asked around this time of year. It’s a perfectly fair question, after all unless you’re in retail everything starts to go quiet in the last few days before the Christmas holiday period. And in some companies staff have put up the Christmas [...]

Do desperate times mean that a business should pay more attention to their marketing? Let me look at a few marketing strategies/tactics that Jay Abraham usually incorporates in his marketing to answer that question. The Strategy of Preeminence Jay Abraham often speaks about the strategy of preeminence. In a nutshell it’s all about the following [...]

Forbes reports that Jay Conrad Levinson (father of Guerialla Marketing) had this to say about companies that cut back on marketing in the tougher times: “In times like this, people think the first thing to do is to cut back on marketing to save money. But that’s kind of like ditching your wristwatch to save [...]

The Northwest Business Exhibition was even better than last year, check my comments on Manchester Business Exhibition 2007. I noticed that it wasn’t completely full and there were one or two no-shows, which I know is not unusual. I bumped into the company who ran a Lamborghini competition last year. I discovered that although they [...]

Whenever I go into do a business or marketing strategy audit one of the questions I ask clients is what they and their staff think about marketing. And almost invariably the reply comes back that it’s a complete waste of time, so why waste cash on it. And yet everyone is exposed to marketing all [...]

It seems as though a lot of people are turning to sales and marketing to get money into their company. Given the current economic climate that’s no surprise. The issue is that it can be difficult for a company struggling with bad payers and their own debts to invest in marketing. And yet, research shows [...]

I got off at a distinctly quiet GMEX Metrolink stop and walked almost alone into the GMEX-based Online Marketing Event. Inside I found what seemed liked countless numbers of email marketeers. And they were all parroting the same sales spiel that has been uttered for the last few years… Things like, we can track the [...]

On the popular GrokDotCom they’ve commented on a piece of research that shows e-commerce is still too complicated. Not just for the over 65′s but for everyone pretty much equally. If it’s too complicated people will leave the site rather than confuse their brain cells further. So in the interests of improving web sites sales [...]

I’ve been coaching a client who has a product that almost everyone needs. She is competing with a number of other providers in her area. One of those has been established about 12 years longer than her business and has built up a set of loyal clients. The issue is that my coaching client has [...]