No, I’m not talking about Labor Day. You should be at a cookout or the beach for that holiday. What I’m talking about is the upcoming Christmas and New Years holidays. Yes, I know that it’s well over 3 months away, but an effective marketing campaign during the holiday season starts long before it’s too cold to get in the pool.

Whether you are handling your own marketing, or a marketing firm is handling it, the creative work that goes into it must be prepared in time to work out all of the details. Then, the appropriate advertising space must be reserved with the appropriate television and radio stations, magazines, billboards, and web sites. Any direct mail marketing will need to be printed, labeled and mailed, and if you don’t have a suitable mailing list, that will need to be purchased as well.

Still think you’ve got plenty of time? Think about your potential timelines. Regardless of the medium, it’s likely that the creative process will take between one to four weeks, possibly longer if you are shooting footage for a commercial. Don’t expect that your marketing firm or graphic designer can just work overtime to complete your project in time. Their workflow, like yours, is often scheduled in advance and chances are they’re already working around the clock at this time of the year. Plan for at least two weeks for completion of any printed materials and often another week for labeling direct mail, which then has to travel from the post office to your consumers, taking up to two more weeks. Don’t forget to take into account that you aren’t looking at a target date of December 25th, you’re looking to reach your consumers before that make their holiday buying decisions, preferably several times. With the timelines that we’ve discussed so far, you should expect that it can take you between four to nine weeks, possibly even more to put your marketing message in front of your consumers, which is right around November, if you start now.

So, take advantage of the opportunity to be ahead of the power curve and get your holiday marketing campaign ready, and then when the time rolls around, you can enjoy a nice glass of egg nog and relax at the company party while your competitors are jumping through hoops.

As children, we were all taught never to talk to strangers, and many of us still don’t. As adults and business owners though, it’s important to do just that if we want to grow our business. Not only do we need to get out there and get face to face with other businesses during our cold calls and our networking, but we also need to strike up conversations with random strangers throughout the course of our day, such as while standing in line at the bank or grocery store, while browsing the local office supply store, or even while sitting in the stands watching your children?s t-ball game.

A page on the Dodge web site contains a link near the bottom of the web site for details about the Dodge Charger. Evidently, Dodge thinks it’s a good idea to tell their visitors that a computer is recommended to use their web site. Perhaps it didn’t occur to them that their web site visitors are already using a computer to view their web site.

For most of us, even the over worked small business owners, the answer is always going to be no. In a constant effort to grow, business owners are almost always looking for new clients, and while we can find them through effective and consistent marketing, we can also find them through effective and consistent networking. For some of the smaller businesses out there that literally have no budget for marketing, networking is a necessity.

All that you need in order to network is a handful of business cards, a winning smile and great attitude, and some other business owners to network with. So where do you find these other business owners? Well, you can try your local chamber of commerce as well as any local networking groups, fraternal organizations, and social clubs. If you don’t know where to find any of these sort of groups, you can always visit your favorite search engine and look up “your city + business networking groups” to find a few. In the unlikely event that you’re still unable to find one, there is nothing to say that you can’t start your own.

With business cards being as inexpensive as they are, you really should be handing them out at every opportunity you have. Even if it doesn’t result in you getting a new client right away, chances are that they will hold on to it, and give you a call in the future when their needs change. And to further increase the chance of your business cards generating new clients, you can distribute them through a variety of other methods, such as:

• Leave a card on the table when you leave a restaurant
• Leave a stack of cards in a rack at your dry cleaner
• Drop a card in each bill you mail out
• Thumbtack a few cards to the bulletin board at your local coffee shops 
• If you utilize a virtual office, ask them to drop a card in each mail box
• Place a card in several relevant books while you’re at the book store
• Give your family, friends and clients a stack of your cards to hand out
• Drop a card through the mail slot on business doors after hours
• Leave a small stack of cards on a table in the waiting area of your bank

For most of us, even the over worked small business owners, the answer is always going to be no. In a constant effort to grow, business owners are almost always looking for new clients, and while we can find them through effective and consistent marketing, we can also find them through effective and consistent networking. For some of the smaller businesses out there that literally have no budget for marketing, networking is a necessity.

All that you need in order to network is a handful of business cards, a winning smile and great attitude, and some other business owners to network with. So where do you find these other business owners? Well, you can try your local chamber of commerce as well as any local networking groups, fraternal organizations, and social clubs. If you don’t know where to find any of these sort of groups, you can always visit your favorite search engine and look up “your city + business networking groups” to find a few. In the unlikely event that you’re still unable to find one, there is nothing to say that you can’t start your own.

I know that the tooth fairy isn’t real, global warming is, determination can be more valuable than knowledge, and that for your marketing to work, you have to be consistent with it.

Sending out 50,000 postcards will probably land you a few new clients, but if you’re planning on making it a one-time effort, you probably won’t see very impressive results. The same goes for any form of marketing. A single television commercial aired during a popular program or time of day (including during the Super Bowl) may deliver results, but will not have nearly as much impact as the same commercial aired multiple times during more affordable times of the day.

As our consumers’ lives become busier than ever before, effective repetition in marketing becomes even more important. Simply running the largest ad or a television commercial during the most coveted air time is no longer enough, and in fact, can have an adverse effect. Instead, today we need to focus on reaching our consumers where they want to be reached on a consistent basis across multiple mediums. A careful balance of an effective message distributed across the right blend of advertising mediums on a consistent basis will produce results every time.

You may be thinking that you can’t afford to effectively reach your prospects on a consistent basis. Guess what? You can! In this case, you’ll have to think small to think big. Instead of reaching out to a large number of prospects narrow your list down. After all, would you rather convince 5,000 people 10% of the way to do business with your company, or would you rather convince 50 people 100% of the way to do business with you? Take a smaller, more targeted list and reach your consumers on a weekly basis across multiple mediums, such as internet advertising, direct mail, and small publication advertising. As you acquire new clients, you can begin targeting a larger list.
That’s what I know. Apply that along side your knowledge of your industry and you’ll be a powerful and dominant force a lot quicker than you may think.

There are lots of ways to effectively market your business. You can send direct mail, utilize a search engine optimization campaign, advertise on cable television, or even wage a guerrilla marketing war.

Thanks to the growth of the internet, there are more ways than ever to market companies in just about any industry, but on the other hand, thanks to the internet, there are more ways to look like a fool as well. We recently posted an article about article re-writing software, but that’s not the only way that these less than intelligent people try to generate exposure for their businesses.

A tactic used by some of the less than ethical internet marketers is to use specialized software to make an entry in your web log files, causing it to appear as if your web site received a sizable amount of traffic via a link from which ever URL they plugged into their software. The result is sometimes that a webmaster viewing their logs will click on the link to see where this traffic is coming from. On the surface, this may seem like something that would work, even if it isn’t an honest way to get traffic, but in reality, it doesn’t work. In fact, it will only irritate people. Think about it like this — the only people that check their logs are the technical type. You are not going to fool them with this nonsense and on one else can access the logs, so it’s a complete waste of time.