Maria Morton

What can you learn from people that never buy from you? A small investment in time to survey your 'non' customers has the potential to increase your sales conversion rates and irevenue without the need to spend more money on promotional activities!

Company websites are common place, and it is actually quite rare to find that a business does not have an online presence. But, just because we all have one, does it mean that all websites are doing a good job, or could they be doing more harm than good when it comes to putting the best ‘online’ foot forward to potential customers?

When people think about public relations (PR), images of schmoozing with clients and excessive amounts of champagne may come to mind. But professional, properly-executed PR activities involve much more than a free lunch, and have the power to gain enormous exposure for your business, build your brand, attract new clients and customers, as well as improve internal relations between staff and management.

Costly errors can occur in businesses because time is not spent on the critical tasks of planning, ongoing research, testing, measuring and evaluating against the objectives identified in the company’s marketing plan. Ideally the plan should be viewed as a living document; it should be updated, changed, referred to and constantly reviewed to ensure the activities are reaching the desired outcome.

If you are starting up a new business that is a little ‘left of centre’, or you are launching a product which puts a new spin on traditional offerings, it is worthwhile to research your target markets to see whether their reaction is going to be as positive as you envisage.

If you are working hard at creating a particular market perception of your business, you had better make sure reality fits your intended perception or you could waste considerable effort attracting the wrong customers or, more importantly, miss out on clientele looking for what you have to offer.

These days, companies have numerous avenues for promoting their goods and services, but there is still tremendous benefit to achieving positive publicity (managing bad publicity is another story!) through traditional media such as newspapers and printed publications. If you haven’t had a lot of exposure to this public relations technique, it is important to understand the two basic ways to gain publicity through newspapers – editorials and advertorials.