Marketing and Sales

When faced with a choice—to deal with what is in front of you, or to take time to determine your strategic direction—how many times out of 10 would you opt to deal with the demands of the days?

If you've not yet taken any time out this year from the busy day-to-day demands of your business to develop a clear marketing strategy, you need to ask yourself why. Now is the time to "think strategy."

According to branding firm Landor Associates, the top marketing trends for 2015 include more hyper-personalized marketing to the individual (rather than the masses); customized packaging thanks to 3-D printing; shorter and easier to remember names, and authenticity.

"You have to be more agile, faster, more flexible and willing to try new things. Doing the same thing you did yesterday is less and less likely to work," Allen Adamson, North America chairman for Landor, told Marketing Daily. "People are busier today [with] more multitasking and more scattered than ever before. You need to be simple, sharp and direct."

In this world of round-the-clock obligations, people are monotonously reaching for the latest tech devices to send messages faster. It’s not breaking news that these devices usually come with glitches (like, does Siri really understand you?).

Would you buy from you? Many people struggle with this question only to find that their best response is a "maybe" or the noncommital "it depends."

Technology moves about a mile a minute these days. You've finally mastered Facebook only to discover the next big thing has already happened.

Every entrepreneur has heard that success requires the right combination of skill, experience, timing and luck. But that last, intangible piece of the formula has always been tricky. "He just had a run of bad luck," explains away an excusable business failure, while the opposite expression serves as a backhanded compliment from a jealous competitor. Over the past decade, some observers have begun to understand luck not as a random, uncontrollable phenomenon but more as a behavior that happy, successful people employ, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Marketing is a never-ending quest to connect with new prospects, new customers and new email subscribers. This makes a high-performing email contact list one of the most impactful tools in any marketing professional's arsenal, no matter what their core business. Unfortunately, the average email list churns by about 30 percent every year. To keep this pool of prospects fresh, marketers must employ a number of tactics to consistently cultivate a vibrant and vested subscriber base. To help, here are a few easy steps to help build your list—and boost your business.

Consulting firm Gap International recently conducted a survey of more than 500 global business leaders to answer this question: What thinking leads to extraordinary results? The answers are both powerful and illuminating. Most surprising to the researchers was the fact that leaders who achieve extraordinary results are more focused on others than on themselves. According to Gap International, these eight ways of thinking can lead those who practice them to extraordinary results. If you adopt these mindsets for your own, you too can achieve extraordinary results.

Are you trying to recruit a salesperson for your distributorship in order to even out the workload? Did your top salesperson just leave and you have no idea how to replace him or her? 

You want to stay in touch with your customers. (Or as Jack Nicholson might say, "You need to stay in touch with your customers.")

The reason is simple: You want to turn transactions into ongoing relationships.

But that's not easy, especially when all you can think to do is send a "Thinking of you—hope you're doing well!" email that sounds like you're just fishing for business. Want to stay in touch with customers without seeming obvious or gratuitous? It's easy. The key is to stay in touch in a meaningful and memorable way.