How does a person become a better marketer?

I believe that marketing must be studied.

It has been said that if you want to become a master at any subject you need to spend about 10,000 hours studying and analyzing the topic. There is no substitute for an educational approach to marketing. Remember that the word education is derived from the Latin word educare, which is related to educere which means to bring forth what is within and ducere which means to lead.

So if you look at the definitions using an educational approach means that you use the knowledge from within and lead. So you don’t copy others marketing ideas and try to make them work with your company. You need to lead and stand out from the crowd. As a client of mine wrote me many years ago, “In the past we just pieced together ideas from many different sources for an ad. Then we would try to blend it so that it would work.”

Blending just doesn’t work as it fails to implement the strategies of creating effective marketing. With my 30 plus years in marketing, I can help you overcome the challenges of creating effective marketing.

Doesn’t it make more sense to use your skills at what you’re good at? That way you can leave the marketing to someone who is thoroughly educated in the proven principles of effective marketing.

If you don’t want to work with me, choose someone who is thoroughly educated and has proven their knowledge and expertise with marketing results.

Why are some ads not effective?

This is a question that has presented to me many times over the years.

Unfortunately many businesses have failed to realize that what they are buying with any advertising is the white space. Whether you write a letter or put an ad into a newspaper or are creating the front page for your web-site, it is what goes into that white space that makes all the difference. If you don’t know what is important for your prospective client (from their point of view) the marketing effort is guaranteed to fail.

The question becomes how do you do that?

What you need to do it connect a sound influencing technique with an imaginative approach. When you do that with interesting writing you will have marketing that pays for itself.

To make your marketing more effective, call me at 519-539-2267 today.

Who is your target market?

In the life insurance business years ago it was stated to me that ‘anybody that can fog a mirror was a prospect’.

What a bunch of garbage!

As you know you can’t be everything to everybody. I write that because when you try to do that you will be nothing to everybody. You’ve got to have standards in business. There are going to be times in your business life when you don’t want to work with a particular client. If you want to be everything to everybody and you decide to do business with that client you will find out that you have more headaches from one person that all the others.

When you target your market you will become well known in that market and you will be pleased at the amount of referrals that come to you.

Doesn’t this make sense?

Are you being unreasonable enough to succeed?

I get so tired of people saying we did everything reasonable to succeed, but it couldn't be done.

To me this is a cop-out. I say that because when you take action you need to evaluate your results. If you say you did everything reasonable and still failed it means two things. Number one you are afraid of change and number two you never evaluated your actions close enough to see that what you were doing was an absolute path to failure.

Think about this! Isn’t it the unreasonable business that changes the rules to the game in an industry? Think about Apple. Isn’t it the unreasonable person that sets new benchmarks that their competition has trouble even getting close to? Think about Steven Spielberg.

Isn’t it time that you moved your business forward and not tried to blend in with the rest of your competitors?

Have you ever questioned your customer service?

Many of you will say that you would never question it.

The word question means to evaluate. If you are not regularly evaluating your customer service you and your business could be in for some very tough times.

Why do I say that? It is because if you are in a profitable business there will always be other people starting up to be in competition to you.

I want to tell you a story of a wonderful experience I had this past weekend. It is the story of a business that appears to be constantly evaluating what they do for their customer’s. I stayed at a Bed and Breakfast near Winchester Ontario (which is just south of Ottawa). My hosts were Annette and Jim and when I say hosts - I mean hosts. They treated me with respect and were very interested in serving me. 

In my discussion with them I found out that they are always willing to try new ideas as long as these ideas were customer focused.

Can you say that you are willing to try new ideas that are customer focused on a consistent basis?