Category Archives: Marketing Insight

The world of small business marketing is ever changing and expanding. With Social Media Marketing adding to the slew of other information outlets, it’s hard to make heads or tails from all the available opportunities. In this category, we use real world examples to illustrate good marketing practices.

Marketing Monday

Today I am going to start a new habit: Marketing Monday.  As a small business owner, marketing is the forgotten child in my business activities.  It never seems to get enough of my time and it’s hard to balance how much time marketing should get compared to customer projects. I feel behind even when I’ve accomplished some marketing of my business.  Thus, I have formed a new plan.  I call it Marketing Mondays: I will spend 1/2 hour marketing my business and advertising every Monday morning and then I will stop.  I will have accomplished an important step both in balancing my action items and in actual outreach for my business.

Starting off the week feeling accomplished will setup me up for a great week.  I am looking forward to it already.

Here is the Monday check list:

  1. One blog post
  2. One facebook entry on the company page
  3. One email or call to a client or coworker (past or present) who has been out of touch for a while.

Item 1 done.  2 more to go.

Condensed Twitter Marketing Strategy

I read an excellent ebook by HubSpot on Using Twitter for Business.  Now I am summarizing it for some of my customers (although I encourage them to read it also).  Here is what I’ve come up with:

1.  When starting to use Twitter, be sure to setup your account properly.  Either read up on the subject or have a marketing consultant set it up for you.

2.  Put a few tweets (say 10) out there before you look for anyone to follow.

3.  Be on the look out for people to follow.  Usually followers follow you in return, so step 1 and 2 are crucial before you get to this step since people will look at your profile to see what you’re like and the type of information you will supply to them.

4.  Tweet regularly.  Twitter is a constant stream of information and if you want to be noticed and create a conversation around your business or your brand, you have to insert your throughts into Twitter regularly.  And be sure that they are quality posts and not just always promotional.

I’ve created a background for my own Twitter account and can do one for yours.  Contact me (dmark at browncouchconsulting.com)  if you’d like more information.

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A friend of mine and I were discussing a small craft business that was closing its doors this year.  Of course, we started speculating on the causes of their demise.  One issue that seemed prominent was that they were charging groups of knitters to meet at their location while other places, say the library or a local coffee house, held such gatherings for free.  I’m not sure that this was the only issue with their business plan, but free services are an important part of any business and should be well thought through.  Continue reading →

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum

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I attended a meeting yesterday on Effective Networking orgnized by the various groups on Brookline that support women-owned businesses.  Usually, these networking things spend about 95% of the time with a guest speaker who talks all about the different tactics on networking and then 5% of the meeting is alloted to meeting the people present and well, networking.  I was pleasantly surprised that this meeting was actually more intent on us putting the networking advise to practice rather than sitting in uncomfortable chairs listening to a speaker drone on and on.

So, what’s so funny about this event?  Well, you see, there was a raffle from the attendee’s business cards – pretty standard stuff. I didn’t have a business card, so I filled out a blank.  I completely forgot about this towards the end of the meeting because I met amazing people and the raffle had not real consequence to the proceedings.  So, as with all of these things, there is usually a raffle administrator looking for someone to pull cards from the pile.   I step up and lend a helping hand (literally) and yank a card.  In my usual, off handed way, while I do this, I say – “Would it be a problem if I pulled out mine?”  A split second later I pulled out my business card from a pile of at least 60 cards.