Category: Blog

For many small businesses, determining the direction of a marketing campaign depends on the answer to this critical question: “Should I market what I do, or who I am?”

This is a challenging question, of course, because ideally you would like to choose both. Marketing “what you do” refers to advertising and promoting your services. In other words, if you’re a plumber, you’d advertise your ability to fix leaks, install water heaters or assist in remodeling.

Marketing “who you are” is about establishing your brand in the mind of your customers and your market. As a plumber, marketing who you are would mean establishing yourself as a reliable, high quality solution to plumbing challenges. It would mean emphasizing the qualities that set you apart from your competition, whatever those may be.

Continue reading “Small Business Marketing: ‘Who You Are’ or ‘What You Do?’”

Selling is not for everyone, but paying customers is what every business needs.

You can create expert positioning by establishing yourself as an educator and advocate for your prospects success.

Continue reading “Selling without Selling”

Gimme traffic, gimme traffic, gimme traffic.

It seems like that is the answer to all internet marketing problems. At least that’s what the “Front Page of Google” peddlers would have you believe.

Yes, traffic is important, for sure. But the answer isn’t always MORE TRAFFIC.

I love when I sit down with a business owner to talk about their online marketing and they think our whole conversation is going to revolve around getting more traffic.

It’s been beaten into their heads, over and over, and often times the only “buzz word” they know when it comes to internet lingo.

They fear that I’m going to hit them up for a huge Pay Per Click budget. It’s what they are prepared for.

They are stunned when I say “before we dive into getting more traffic, let’s find out if that’s what your really need”.

“Well, what else is there”?

Conversion…

The most neglected and, in my opinion, most important part of local internet marketing.  If I had to pick one single thing to be great at, it would be conversion.

Continue reading “I Need More Traffic! … You sure about that?”

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One question I get a lot when it comes to making “talking head” videos for local businesses is…

“Most business owners are horrible in front of the camera and the videos just don’t look professional, how can I make these kinds of videos for my clients without hiring a professional crew?”

I can tell you that I struggled with this for a long time until I started using simple little framing tricks that you see on TV all the time but probably just don’t recoginize what is happening.

Here I demonstrate extremely simple framing techniques that will make a HUGE difference in the effectiveness of your video and solve a lot of problems shooting “non actor” clients.

Continue reading “Framing Techniques For Local Business Video”