PR offers some excellent opportunities for small businesses, but before you hire a PR firm you should consider these five things a small business owner should know about PR.

The explosion of social media options over the past four years has presented some great opportunities and many challenges for small business owners. Common questions that I hear include: What exactly should I be doing?; How often do I need to do it?; Will it grow my business? The answer is complicated, but here are a few rules of thumb to consider when you’re facing the great sea of social media marketing opportunities.

Are you maximizing every opportunity to tell your clients exactly why your product or service is the best? Here are four strategies to improve your sales communications. Describe the need. Every product or service must fulfill a need, or remedy a “pain” for its customers. Before assuming what the pain is, check with your customers and make sure you’re right! Make the need urgent. There are two types of needs – the critical need and the luxury need. It’s quite easy for you to position

Many entrepreneurs believe that being the “first mover” or first-to-market is the key to success. They’re wrong. According to a study cited in the Harvard Business Review, 47% of first-movers have failed. These are about the same odds any entrepreneur faces when starting a business, whether it’s a standard-issue Laundromat or a cutting-edge new technology. One of the key challenges is that companies overvalue innovation, while consumers undervalue them. Research by John T. Gourville of Harvard Business School has suggested that while consumers are skeptical

Marketing materials are the “face” of your company. Unfortunately, however, they are often created in “panic marketing mode,” when you’re desperate to have something – anything – to show your prospects. They might be working fine as-is, but it may be time to update them if you have made major changes to how you visually and verbally describe your business. The New Year is a good time to look at your marketing materials and decide whether they need to be updated or, in some cases,

Maintaining a steady stream of business can be a challenge, no matter what size company you run. To keep your revenues rolling, you need to constantly market your products and services. This is no small task, and many businesspeople become exhausted trying to maintain meaningful contact with customers and prospects. There is one easy way to keep your business growing though: get your customers to do the selling for you! This sounds too good to be true, and you certainly can’t expect your customers to

One of the most important and hard-to-attain attributes of a successful brand is a good reputation. Whether you’re choosing a new accountant or a new car, you consider brand reputation, often subconsciously. A recent example of a company struggling to change its reputation is Hyundai. After working hard to improve quality and backing its cars with powerful warranties, many people still have a strong bias against them; due to a number of missteps upon entering the market, they have long been considered “cheap.” A common

A powerful, consistent brand is important for two reasons. First, it allows your clients and prospects to understand exactly what you do and why they should purchase from you. Perhaps even more importantly, especially for a busy entrepreneur, is that having a brand identity in place means that you aren’t constantly starting from scratch when you market your business. In fact, it will streamline all your activities, from making a sales call to creating a brochure, and make your marketing activities much simpler as well