The BUZZ Blog
The Buzz is a blog about small business marketing. Tools, tips, strategies and success stories. Subscribe and enhance your marketing position.
-
Three Magic Questions That Drive Sales
Some of our best business conversations happen in the most unlikely places, including our daily walk to the local coffee shop we fuel up in, and the dog park where Liz takes her border collie, Mike.One of our dog park buddies is a woman we’ll call Mary. She’s a self-employed consultant who knows we’ …
-
All about technological progress.
I was watching a TV show the other day. It was a series about a New York Ad Agency in the 1960's. As far as what passed for technology in those days, the IBM typewriter was IT. The secretaries actually put the dust covers on when they left work each day!The only other hi-tech contriviance in evidenc …
-
Basic Mistakes Retailers Make When Times Are Tough
We originally wrote this for the AMEX OPEN Forum August 25 09 There’s an old story in the ad business about a man who ran a hot dog stand. He did really well selling his hot dogs. One day, a customer mentioned, while adding mustard to his hot dog, that he felt there was an economic downturn …
-
The Marketing Secret My Client Paid Me to Learn Again
This post was originally featured in the AMEX OPEN Forum, Sept. 2 09.We got a surprising phone call last week. It was great news – a nice piece of business – but surprising because we had written the lead off several months ago. We had been consistently ignored and then rejected when we finally mana …
-
How a Branded System can Increase your Accounting Firm's Value
From my AMEX OPEN Forum post, July 23 2009 Whether your accounting firm has been successful by acquisition, the efforts of the partners or just through organic growth, you are likely facing a big challenge as the partners mature.The firm may be undervalued, a worrying issue for senior partners reach …
-
"After finishing The Black Swan, I realized that there was a cancer"
From my post on the AMEX OPEN Forum, Sept 21/09 The anniversary of the Lehman Brothers melt-down has given pundits and newspaper business sections lots to write about. One person whose opinion is courted is Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of th …
-
Who is answering your phone? Do they give your business the right image?
Telephones used to be so easy—you could place calls and receive calls. That was it. Suddenly things got a lot more complicated—not only could you do the aforementioned, you could add another person to the call, take a message automatically, call forward, actually identify who is calling before you a …
-
Where do you live on the net? The importance of a good address.
Remember when a common expression was, “He (or she) lives on the wrong side of the tracks”? That was back when we all had only one address—where we lived. Business owners realize they have a home addresss, where they live, as well as a business address, where they do business. But there’s another ve …
-
Don't get bamboozled by 'spec' creative
If you own a small business, and you have decided to work with a marketing or advertising firm to get to the next level—congratulations! You’ll about to have more learning, more challenges and more downright fun than you’ve likely ever had in your business career.Good agency people know you are hiri …
-
How to create a marketing company RFP
You are thinking of hiring marketing professionals for your organization. Many people use an RFP - Request for Proposal – process as a way to feel confident of making a good choice. But beware! There are pitfalls in the RFP process that are easy to fall into. If you’ve never worked with a marketin …
-
The Single Biggest Mistake Small Business Owners Will Make This Year
Did you know that small businesses could actually double their sales by simply following up with leads and contacts? That’s right: 99 percent of small businesses do not consistently follow up with their prospects and customers.Look at the math: If you close 25% of 100 leads or sell to a quarter of 1 …
-
What difference does satisfaction make?
Some time ago, we read a survey from US thought leader Rain Today(1) on “How Clients Buy”. Every year, they ask buyers of 8 service areas (accounting and financial consulting; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services …
-
Who is your customer?
Have you ever entered a store or business and been totally ignored?Or worse, have you ever been "dusted off", literally dismissed as not worth the time by a salesperson or business owner who thinks they have better things to do than talk to you? Have you ever done this to a person who has come throu …
-
Im conserned at all the bad spellin
As the title of this post so graphically suggests, I am concerned about what passes for proper spelling these days. Seems that as written communication has become so much more popular, what with email, texting and computer usage in general, bad spelling has been revealed to be a worldwide epidemic. …
-
A list of online advertising opportunities
Just ran across this list of places online where ads appear...if you are not using the web for advertising the breadth of the opportunity may surprise you!Ads embedded in emails YouTube and other websites where you watch but cannot download video clips Promotion or sponsorship specific website …
-
Fix Follow Up Failure Final
Check out this SlideShare Presentation: Fix Follow Up Failure FinalView more presentations from KevinBarrett.
-
How to Take Your Customers from Happy to Wowed
We ran across this article by Stacy Blackman on BNET. We hear a lot about customer service that's just good common sense, but this adds the extra dimension of solid research to back it up. Enjoy!We’ve all experienced it. The clerk who sees you waiting in the checkout line behind the hundred-coupon c …
-
Four easy ways to increase idea flow
Here's some good, sensible ideas on keeping the ideas flowing.By Karen Post, a.k.a. The Branding Diva®, an international authority on branding, marketing, and entrepreneurial matters.One of the most important attributes of a being a successful entrepreneur is having the ability to generate fresh and …
-
What's Your "Active Ingredient '90' "?
When I was growing up in the 1950's, Shell, the gasoline company, was advertising that their fuel contained "TCP" an additive that increased horsepower and made your engine run better. There was no reference to fuel economy that I can recall—who cared? ...gas was about 20 cents a gallon! Anyways, Sh …
-
Top three security concerns are viruses, spam, and data breaches but most companies don't have prot …
We like this article so much we recommend our IT clients send it out to all their customers!New Surveys on Small Business security and SuccessBy James E. Gaskin , Network World , 04/23/2009Understanding small business is tough because there are so many of them and they vary so widely. But all small …
The BUZZ Blog
