Does your business need a marketing workout for the new year to get you and your team fit for marketing. Well if it does then our brand new service might just interest you. In just a few weeks time in February we will be launching a completely new marketing membership site, for a small fee each month you will get access to marketing guidance, tips, updates, presentations and much much more. To register your interest just visit http://www.marketing-workout.com where you can find more.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The new year has arrived and here at Brighter Marketing we have decided to make 2009 the year of internet and social media. This blog was the starting point and although we started it towards the end of 2008, it has only really gathered steam in the last few weeks. We are also busy building profiles on Facebook, Myspace, Hubpages as well as developing some great marketing video tutorials to upload to You Tube, Viddler and other video websites.

However, one of the more enlightening things that we have done is join Twitter. To be honest, I had no idea what it could do for us this time last week, but I have learnt fast and it is driving traffic to our site. In small numbers mind you - but it is working. However many people haven’t even heard of Twitter and if they have they aren’t sure what it can do for them, therefore this excellent blog from CopyBlogger http://www.copyblogger.com/grow-business-twitter/#more-1981 could be just what you need to find out what you need to know. I have read this and have the following to add Read more…

A new year is upon us so this year make sure that you use marketing to help your business achieve it’s goals. Here are just a few tips to help you make 2009 the most successful year ever, despite what the gloom mongers may say…

A focused marketing approach has the power to revolutionise your business. However it also has the means to take you places that you might not want to go. You must make sure that you are clear about where you want your business to go before you spend money on marketing activities. Read more…

I have just read an interesting blog on http://blog.buzzoodle.com/index.php/2008/12/29/old-school-marketing/ that reviews that although all the new marketing techniques such as using Facebook, blogs and other types of Internet marketing are good, you shouldn’t ignore some of the marketing staples. This includes word of mouth - which when used correctly can be a very effective way of marketing your products and services. One way that word of mouth marketing can be used is by asking your clients for referrals. This may sound like a simple thing to do, but how many people actually ask their clients for referrals on a regular basis? Read more…

Here are 5 simple ways you can use to increase the effectiveness of your next marketing campaign.

1. You must know who you are selling to

This may sound simple, but you must be clear who you are selling to. The more focused you are on the individuals who really want to buy your products and services, the more successful your marketing campaign will be. It is vitally important that you laser beam your marketing activities on those people who will be receptive and actually have an interest in what you have to offer. For example, it is much better to send out 20 direct mail pieces to a carefully selected target audience, than to issue 100 random direct mails, hoping that at least one will reach the right person.

Read more…

We have mentioned that we want to use the power of networking to get our book on the best seller list on Amazon - which is really a form of viral marketing, in that we are getting our friends, colleagues and trusted associates to let their friends, colleagues and trusted associates know about the book and forward it to their friends, colleagues and trusted associates. However, viral marketing is often not an easy concept to explain, but Seth Godin has done it beautifully on this recent blog and has included a 197 page PDF book all about viral marketing for you to download. Read more…

As promised here is the next installment of our book launch diary for our new book - The Brighter Marketing Bible for Small Businesses. It is now available on Amazon but we are not actively promoting it until mid January. The reason for this is that we want to focus on making the book a best seller on Amazon during a 24 hour period and we spent a whole day last week developing an action plan to help us do this. We want to demonstrate that even though we are a small business we can achieve a great deal through a focused marketing approach. So here is an outline of what we will be up to over the next few weeks. Read more…

We haven’t discussed search engine optimisation on this blog to date, but I stumbled across this useful article on Ask Enquiro.com which details 10 key areas that business to business marketeers should take into consideration if you want to take a look at it here is the link - Top Ten Web Optimisation Tips .  We have certainly inceased our website and search engine knowledge in the past 12 months and it has been worth it and we have seen our website appear for certain search terms in Google. For example Read more…

Since we are quite new to blogging - I went out on the WWW to try and find some blogging tips I found are are every where, some better than others. However, while I was trawling through the results on Google, I came accross the following blog entry by Drew McLellan at the Marketing Minute blog, that gave some simple no-nonsense advice about how to use a blog for your business.  He points out something that we have just learnt, which is for your blog to be successful, it’s not just about posting your own articles, its also about reading other blogs and commenting on what they have to say. Which is exactly what I have done here. And more importantly you have to keep them fresh, up-to-date and invest some time in them otherwise they can just fall into oblivion. So if you are considering starting a blog for your business then take a quick look at what he has to say on here other posts. They are definitely worth looking at.

I have just read a really short but interesting article on Seth Godin’s blog - if you haven’t visited this then take a look at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. He really is a great marketing Guru and has some original and thought provoking ideas. It was one of his latest posts about the importance of headlines that I thought was worth commenting on. Read more…