Once you’ve set up a Referral Rewards Program, the next step is to get proactive and make asking for referrals a part of your sales and account management processes. This way you aren’t waiting for clients to think of you to offer them up. With a good process in place, you create a steady stream [...]

Prospecting has never been harder – or easier. Yes, it’s hard to get responses, but you have all the tools at your finger tips to increase your odds of grabbing the attention of your top contacts and getting a reply. Gone is the dialing for dollars mentality. You can do better than that. You can [...]

With literally millions of websites, pages and blogs on the internet with every search, new and seasoned businesses alike are eternally seeking the holy grail of a simple and cost-effective method to being found by local prospects. Of course there are many ways to advertise via the more popular websites; however, these are becoming increasingly [...]

I find events to be one of the most effective strategies to uncover qualified leads. The people who participate choose to come because they’re interested in your topic. You get to share your perspectives and recommendations, highlighting yourself as an expert they want to work with. The prospects who attend feel as if they know [...]

Well, it’s that time of the year: generally a significant time of the year for retailers, they’ll be hoping huge Christmas sales will bring them a prosperous end to 2009. The Big retailers will use £millions flexing their marketing muscle, bringing awareness to their products. It’s a colossal advantage over the small retailers, but the [...]

So why are incoming links important? Because they are the search engines’ way of assessing how good your site is. And if they think your site is good they’ll send you lots of visitors. The logic goes that if lots of sites (particularly good quality, high traffic sites) are linking to your site it must [...]

So, what makes a blog style website different from the traditional static type of websites? Traditional websites have been the ‘hot thing’, however, today its blogs. Why? Well, frankly it’s because technology is moving at such an incredible rate of speed and new ways of doing things are being developed all the time. And blogs [...]

Relationship Marketing involves using methods and tactics to develop long term relationship with customers in order to retain them and their loyalty. An organisation must exceed customer satisfaction in order to retain them and develop a healthy relationship with their customers. Traditional transactional marketing involved the organisation focusing all of its marketing efforts on attracting [...]

Written by Jenny Nguyen, Marketing Manager, Signposter.com for Bytestart.co.uk 29th July 2009 ”The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about” Oscar Wilde was the master of the snappy one-liner, but unbeknown to him his words of wisdom were to prove particularly relevant, in the early 21st century, to small businesses. [...]

Know the rules We all talk about opt-outs and opt-ins under the general heading of permission but there are some very specific rules defining when you need to apply positive consent (opt-in) versus a negative option (opt-out). Understanding these rules and deciding what your permission strategy will be is the first thing you need to [...]

Lately I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how to get referrals. No doubt about it, they’re one of the quickest ways to fill your pipeline. They’re definitely easier and less stressful than cold calling.  They’re more accessible, and there’s less competition to close the deal. Knowing this, more and more sellers are asking [...]

The majority of clients we get coming to us these days are looking for a simple marketing strategy that’s established and relatively ‘untouched’ by the recession. Not asking much you say! Actually though, not such a tall order because there are certain things that these same clients are consistently not doing. Importantly these are generally [...]

Local press has been having a torrid time of it lately.  It seems that scarcely a week goes by without reports of more problems for titles and groups within the medium.  It’s also a tough time for small businesses, who are seeing their profits squeezed by the downturn while knowing full well that there has [...]