by Eddie Reeves on March 8, 2010
If you want to develop effective, efficient and affordable marketing strategies to help take your small or medium-sized businesses to new levels of growth and success, read on:
What is marketing?
Marketing means many different things to business people. To small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) it often means advertising, sales, networking or an expensive website with bells and whistles that the owner doesn’t understand nor need.
In virtually every case, it means expense — sometimes substantial expense.
I continue to be amazed at how much so many small and medium-sized businesses — the very entities that are the lifeblood of the economy — struggle with marketing themselves effectively. When I engage with them as consultant or coach, i invariably find that they have all kinds of misconceptions about what marketing is, what it can help them do, and how to implement it in a way that gets maximum results for minimum cost.
Let’s spend the next couple of posts helping cut through some of the marketing fog that has left so many entrepreneurs blind.
Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern business management, said that the purpose of any business is to create and keep a customer. That’s marketing, folks.
What marketing is really all about is simple, though not necessarily easy: It means is understanding all there is to know about your business’ capabilities, customers, competitors, and the overall market, then figuring out how to present yourself to the right person, at the right time, with the right offer, at the right price to get that customer to choose to do business with you.
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by Eddie Reeves on October 16, 2009
Want to gain notoriety in the news media?
Want to get exposure you to the most important people in your city?
Want to position yourself not just as a smart and knowledgeable expert, but also as one who cares deeply about the health and well being of your community?
Want to do all that in a way that cost you virtually nothing?
If you answered “yes” to those questions, then authoring guest columns on the op/ed page of your local daily newspaper could be for you. Having interesting pieces published there is one of the best opportunities for gaining notoriety in the news media.
So what’s an “op/ed”? While many assume the term is shorthand for “opinion editorial” the term actually stands for “opposite the editorial page”, which is where these guest columns are published. Usually found on the next-to-last page in the first section of the newspaper, the op/ed page features essays and opinion pieces from national political columnists, politicians and other pundits deemed to be authorities on the issues of the day.
They don’t get as many readers as the front page or the sports section, but what op/ed pages lack in numbers they more than make up for in quality: The editorial and op/ed pages are read deeply by the community’s top political, business, cultural and civic leaders.
Editorial page editors, who decide what appears in these pages, are always on the lookout for local voices to add to the op/ed page, and a well-written piece that offers a fresh perspective on a timely issue will frequently not only find its way into print, but will often be positioned prominently on the page.
Here are four tips to make your op/ed column successful:
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