Tag Archives: Marketing

1 Minute Exercise to Writing Better Marketing Messages

Why is so hard to write a marketing message in one sentence? Use these Marketing Plan Templates (5 x MS Word templates and 10 Excel spreadsheets) to summarize the Who, What, Where, When, and How questions of marketing and sales activities for the planning year.  Download Now I’ll be honest, I’ve never loved grammar. It goes back to primary school and […]

Excel Template – Customer Referrals

Use this Excel template to track customer referrals. Download Excel template Download: Customer Referrals File format: Excel.xlsx How to use the Excel template Enter values in each of the cells. Right-click on the chart. Refresh the data. Template Contents For each employee, capture the following: Customer Name Your company’s product Customer contact name Customer Phone […]

How to Write a Technical Datasheet

In this tutorial, we look at how to write, review, design and improve your datasheets. What is a Datasheet? Definition: A data sheet is a summary of technical product. It identifies the core features, specifications, and other criteria that the reader will need to understand. If this is your first time writing a data sheet, […]

How to improve the subject line of an email

First, think of the response you want from the reader. Second, put the most important point at the start. Third, highlight one thing only. The problem with most subject lines in emails is that they’re written either: As a placeholder, something to put in while you write the actual email After the email is written […]

The Netflix ‘Audience Analysis’ Dilemma

If you use Netflix, you’ll be familiar with the way it tries to anticipate your interests and suggest movies according to your previous viewing patterns. What’s interesting here is that it’s quite good at it. After using it for a few months, Netflix has started to suggest movies that, reluctant though I am to admit […]

12 Ways to Align Your Marketing Plan to Product Roadmaps

Wouldn’t it be nice if your marketing plan aligned with other department’s activities? One of the reasons it’s so hard to implement a marketing plan is that what you’re trying to do may clash with other dept activities, schedules, and deliverables. This often happens when there is a dependency on the software or product development […]

Do ‘Aggressive’ Sales Tactics Work?

While we teach our kids to be respectable when in school, we then encourage them to tear the opposition asunder when they play sports. Getting the right balance between competition and aggression is very difficult. I see this with team leads who try to bully others into working harder (ironically, these targets are usually the workhorses) and with sales people who try to intimidate others into buying products.

How to create a Social Media budget

The terms social media and social networking have been tossed around for quite some time now, but businesses are struggling with how to implement these strategies in their budgets.  How much is too much, how much is too little?  There are many factors on how to plan a budget, and the same goes for social […]

Facebook: The Quickest Way To Get More Fans

Ask. That’s it. If you want more Facebook fans, ask people to connect. But, here’s Catch 22. You have to ask in the right way. Asking strangers doesn’t work. Here’s how I do it. Facebook: the Quickest Way To Get More Fans I run twelve Facebook pages and this seems to work best. To get […]

What You Can Learn From BMW’s Innovation Philosophy

How Would You Re-Define BMW’s Innovation Philosophy? How do you define innovation? Graham Horton has translated BMW’s definition of innovation for those who don’t speak German. I (used to) speak a little German and hope to get the original translation from Graham.