I was flipping through the pages of a book in Borders today and found a business card tucked neatly into the middle of a book. It’s good to know that people are applying the marketing tips they find on our blog.

It’s the time of year when we start looking for Christmas (or Hanukkah) gifts for family, friends and associates. While I can’t help you choose something for everyone, I can help you by making some suggestions for the business owners in your life. Being the knowledge hungry creatures that we are, books written by people that have already achieved what we’re trying to achieve are always a good choice, so below are some recommendations:

School’s Out: A Real World Guide to Marketing Your Business from A to Z

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

Little Black Book of Connections: 6.5 Assets for Networking Your Way to Rich Relationships

Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!

If your company caters to other companies rather than consumers, it probably slows down around this time of year. While that’s generally a cause for concern, it can be used to your advantage by utilizing the extra free time to strategize and plan for the New Year, something most business owners don’t have time to do very often.

Sit down and take an objective inventory of where your company stands in the eyes of your prospects. What image do you present? How is your customer service? Have you set the most optimal (that doesn’t always mean the cheapest) prices? Now look at your closest three competitors. From a prospect’s point of view, how do you stack up? What are your strengths and weaknesses compared to them? Then ask your self, or better yet, your clients and prospects, what’s missing from your products or services. Ask them what needs are not being met by the industry. Find out if there are things that companies in your industry focus on that really don’t matter to them.

Now you know where you stand, where your competitors stand and exactly what your prospects want. It’s up to you to present the most powerful image and tailor your products or services to meet those needs. Sharpen your pencil and get to work!

We just wanted to take a minute to thank all of you for the success that you’ve helped us to earn here at Wildfire Marketing Group. We couldn’t have done it with out each of you, our clients, our employees, our vendors and all of you that help us spread the word about our services. We’re looking forward to yet another powerful year of helping even more businesses grow like wildfire!

For many business owners, this week is a relatively slow period each year because a lot of people are taking time off for the holidays. However, those of us that are in business-to-business industries can gain an advantage because the prospects we’re trying to reach are also business owners. Many of whom are using the slow period to catch up on things. This means they’re in the office, most likely not tied up in meetings or on phone calls, and often without a gatekeeper in place, which makes it a great time for your sales calls to these tough-to-reach prospects.

During the early days of business on the Internet, visitors would arrive on your home page 99 times out of 100. Today, most of your visitors skip your front door completely and go directly to the content that they’re looking for, usually through a search engine or an in-bound link. When they arrive there, do they still have everything they need to take the action you want them to take? They should be able to do anything that they can do on your home page and navigate to any other page in your web site from every single page in your web site. If not, you’ll lose a lot of potential business.

I was recently speaking to someone who insisted that “advertising was pointless” and offered Coca-Cola as an example. Her opinion was that it was ignorant for them so waste so much money when everyone already knows what they offer.

At first glance, maybe it seems logical. But when you look at why the situation is what it is, it all becomes a lot clearer. Everyone knows about Coca-Cola products because of the billions upon billions of dollars that they have wisely invested in their advertising over the last one-hundred and twenty-one years. To get even more granular, their investment was never to simply let people know that they existed. It was to create an emotional bond. Think about your own memories of their (or competing) products. They may involve trips to the beach or picnics with your family as a child, or perhaps your first trip to a baseball game. It’s these memories that made their advertising successful. If they had just came out and said “here’s who we are and here’s what we do,” the message would have quickly faded into obscurity and a different soft-drink company would be a household name instead.

Think about this when you’re advertising your own company. Your goal should never be to simply let people know that you exist, that’s what a press release is for. Instead, it should be to develop a strong emotional bond with your prospects. The big picture is what your company does and the benefits your products or services provide. The little picture is the emotional bond that your consumers have with your company, but this is the most important aspect of your advertising. Of course, it should also contain all the basics of any successful advertising campaign: a clear explanation of the benefits, a powerful call to action and of course, contact information.

On the surface, the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin seems perfectly logical. In the real world though, it’s not. When it comes to investing, any money that you don’t spend can safely sit in your bank account collecting interest. However, when it comes to business, you have overhead and competitors eroding your revenue every single day, and simply not spending the money that you have will only delay the inevitable day when you’ll have to close your doors for good. That is, unless you invest it in the continued success of your company through effective and consistent marketing.

The businesses that make it are the ones that understand this. They are the ones that see marketing as an investment that generate more revenue, rather than an expense.

You don’t need to start by investing thousands of dollars in marketing each month, but you do need to start. Incrementally, your marketing will build upon itself until one day, you become a dominating force in your industry. Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and many other companies routinely invest millions, if not billions of dollars in their marketing each year, but they started at the same level you’re at today.

Google recently updated their toolbar PR, and as usual, web site owners everywhere are making a wide range of speculations as to what it means. So what does the latest PR update indicate and what does it mean to your search engine optimization campaign?

Not much really.

Google has been trying for some time now to actively combat the practice of web site owners buying and selling text links, both through their algorithm, and manually, with little success. Their latest PR update was a result of attempting to achieve that goal by devaluing what they deemed to be paid links, as well as irrelevant links (links from web sites unrelated to the target web site).

So what was the end result? Many suffered varying degrees of toolbar PR decrease, however their ranking and traffic remained the about same, so other than a slightly bruised ego, most web site owners were not affected. On the other hand, this is definitely a sign of things to come. Google is serious about cleaning up the spam in their results and they have the resources and brains to do it, and if the updates over the last few years tell us anything, it’s that they don’t mind hurting a few hundred thousand small businesses to do it. After all, if you lose all of your traffic overnight, the only way to regain even a portion of it is to begin a PPC campaign, which benefits them.

You may be asking yourself “How do I avoid all of this?” The short answer is you can’t, at least not with absolute certainty. You can however, minimize your risk by not relying on any one source of traffic. Utilize a search engine optimization campaign along with an online advertising campaign and traditional media, such as print advertising or direct mail. In regards to your SEO, keep it relevant. Don’t be afraid to buy or trade links, but be sure that they are relevant to your web site. Also, don’t try to trick the search engines with black hat techniques. Most no longer work, and when you get caught, your web site will get banned.

Our latest project consisted of corporate identity/logo design and web site design for Key West Home Theater, a Tampa, Florida company that specializes in custom home theater design and installation. As a brand new division of an existing company, they needed to set themselves apart from their parent company and project a powerful, professional image, while still maintaining the casual, laid-back atmosphere that has come to be associated with the Florida Keys.