MOBILE METRICSTime it Right
If you’re considering a mobile marketing campaign this holiday season, blast those customers who signed up for your texts at a time they’d likely be eating lunch or meeting friends. If your promotion is an exciting one, there’s a good chance they’ll share the news with friends or workmates, boosting the campaign’s impact, Paul Hurley, founder of Ideeli.com, told the Wall Street Journal.
HEY, BIG DREAMERThink Small
Big dreams have their place, but it’s the sum of the little things that get you there, says John Jantsch of Ductape Marketing. To ensure you’re focused on the right things — making more sales calls, networking in the local community and, yes, taking a journalist out to coffee, Jantsch suggests you create a scorecard with 10 marketing-related actions and rate each one for importance, say five points for attending a local women’s group meeting and one for writing on your blog. Set a daily target of 20 points. This routine should help you stay focused on what’s really important.
THE FONTHEADTake a Letter
This is possibly the best website we’ve seen — ever — for fonts used in logos and signs: letterheadfonts.com. Check out the samples. Pick a favorite. Tell your designer you want “something in this general ballpark” and give him $100 to buy the fonts.
PSST! OVER HERE!Ask Yourself
Tom Hopkins, author of How to Master the Art of Selling, claims that what you’ll read at the end of this paragraph is the secret to a life of productivity. But there’s a caveat. “I’ll tell you, but you’ll never look at what you’re doing in the same way ever again,” Hopkins quotes his own mentor as telling him. “You might even get angry at me for telling you, because you’ll never get it out of your head.” Bet you can’t wait, huh? OK, here it is: Hang a sign in your workspace that asks one question, and ask that question of everything you do. The question? “Are you doing the most productive thing possible right now?” Yep,
that’s it.
CATALOG OF ERRORSLearn From Sears
For the last 15 years, Sears has been experimenting with its iconic Wish Book Catalog. Last year, Sears returned to a traditional catalog of gift suggestions. Some of the other lessons the retailer seems to have learned from its tinkering include: Carefully targeted distribution, the option to view it online and “Ready in 5” items — products that can be ordered online and picked up within five minutes of the customer arriving.
TALENT SCOUTRethink Your Payroll
Do you think of your staff as “payroll,” “employees,” “human resources” or “talent”? Author Seth Godin thinks you should view them as the latter, arguing that such an understanding holds the key to success in today’s skills-based business environment. “What if you started acting like the vice president of talent? Understand that talent is hard to find and not obvious to manage,” Godin writes on his blog. “Talent is too smart to stay long at a company that wants it to be a cog in a machine. Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.”
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