Marketing drives sales for businesses of all sizes by ensuring that customers think of their brand when they want to buy. Marketing helps a new business to become better known and attract and retain customers so it can survive and grow.  Marketing can be used for many specific reasons, for brand awareness (especially useful for … More If you think marketing isn’t important for start-ups, think again

Do you have some key facts about your organisation’s growth?  Data such as the number of new subscribers or customers.  Have you branched into a new demographic or geographical reach? These kind of statistics can be used to create infographics for inclusion on your website, for use in social media or email campaigns. Many organisations … More Creating free Infographics – shout about your business!

It has recently come to my attention that many smaller organisations, all of whom will have either a product or a service to offer, do not always have a useful database of contacts or leads to campaign to. We are not talking huge investment in large, and often complicated CRM systems, but simply having a … More Building your CRM…..

Here I am focusing on some free online marketing tools which are really useful for marketers to use: Google Alerts – https://www.google.com/alerts – still possibly the best way to set up keyword alerts for any mentions of your brand name, a competitor name or keyword of your choice. Tweetdeck – https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ – for posting tweets, scheduling and reviewing … More Time for social media and tracking activity….

Another great tool for creating and designing presentations, social media graphics, and more with thousands of beautiful layouts, many are free to use, some have small fees attached. Once complete you can download in a .JPG or .PNG format or share with social media. https://www.canva.com/

I thought I would just go over a few useful free tools which you might use during marketing activity: Doodle Poll – http://doodle.com/free-poll – you can easily and quickly create a free poll and send it off via Doodle’s built-in mailing system or via your own email account.  Great for setting meeting schedules, training workshops or a … More Useful free marketing tools….

Today I have discovered the world of Prezi, an online presentation tool which is free to sign up for the public profile and you can create presentations with a range of templates and functions such as https://prezi.com/1iyurtkesyrh/researchfish-infographic-for-researchers/

Right, you have now written your marketing plan, which highlights your organisation’s aims & objectives, you can see where your marketing needs to focus in order to achieve these. You can now begin to look at marketing resources available, including budgets, people and physical marketing collateral.  If your organisation needs to target more customers face-to-face, … More Next steps, marketing tools & resources

If you are a small organisation you may already have a small marketing team and consider yourselves successful in your marketing activity, monitoring and reporting on analytics and may have a fully-functioning CRM system. If you don’t, I suggest going right back to basics, by completing a marketing plan which will give a detailed overview of … More Let’s get started….