I’ve been invited to present at a meeting of a business referral networking group tomorrow. Topic: How to create a business referral marketing program.
Most of the group’s members work for small businesses or have their own businesses. A few work for banks or insurance companies, but must build their own customer base through marketing. What [...]

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Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have a notoriously short lifespan. But some allegedly good news was just reported by John Quelch in Harvard Business Publishing:
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are holding on to their jobs longer. Spencer Stuart’s annual survey of CMO tenure at the 100 most advertised brands in the USA reveals average time on the [...]

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Like many businesses, in my business my partners can be my competitors. Take one of the bigger marketing and advertising agencies, for example. It doesn’t have to be that big. If it’s got ten full time employees, that’s ten times what I have. They have a media buyer, web expert, creative director, copywriter, designer—I have [...]

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You work hard and invest valuable resources to earn new customers. You should also invest to keep them loyal over the long term. Repeat customers tend to be highly profitable because it costs much less to keep a customer than to get a new one. Repeat customers are your best source for new referrals. Repeat [...]

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Dear Dave:
Our company sells this nifty project management tool to small medical device manufacturers and we’ve got good market share. Then just last month we closed our biggest deal ever selling the PM tool to a telecommunications service provider, where the decision maker there knew our VP of Sales through a previous personal relationship. Now [...]

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Dear Dave:
My company is significantly cutting our marketing budget for 2009, but I’m still expected to deliver results. What should I do?
Signed
Desperately seeking marketing budget
Dear Desperate:
Welcome to the “do more with less club.” A recent survey of Chief Marketing Officers by marketing services company Epsilon revealed that marketing is usually among the first casualties in a [...]

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In Part One of this series, I discussed the first marketing steps a new company should undertake: naming and positioning. In Part Two, we move on to every creative person’s favorite – logo development, which is the visual foundation of your branding strategy.
Here’s the assignment: Create a logo and visual identity that reflects the essence of your company’s market [...]

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Some companies tend to scale back on marketing investments when economic conditions are difficult, yet history is rich with examples of companies that gain advantage by maintaining or increasing marketing during challenging times.
What at first may seem like a bold or risky strategy – funding a variable cost such as marketing during a time of financial [...]

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You’re an entrepreneur launching a new start-up. When and where does marketing fit in? The short answer is that marketing fits in from the beginning, but in small, staged increments.
By the beginning, I mean you have a product or service that’s already passed the first hurdles of market acceptance: you’ve conducted market research, you’ve had [...]

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Dear Dave:
My boss keeps talking about guerilla marketing. She wants our marketing department to scale back our budget and ”attack” different markets with little campaigns to see where we get the most traction. What does this mean?
Signed,
Fatigued by War Metaphors
Dear Fatigued:
It means your boss doesn’t know your target audience or how to reach them. In fact, [...]

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