Time in short supply! Support in big demand!

OK with best intentions I’d be blogging everyday but life has been just a bit manic lately, not least due to having my garden wall demolished before it fell down into the lane and my kitchen ceiling collapsing because of a water leak in the bathroom above. Ah the joy of living in an old cottage!

Win Customers With GOOD Service

“Win Customers With GOOD Service” - you may think this is stating the obvious, but having shopped on-line for a number of years now I have become very aware of those businesses that are well organised, efficient and good at serving me as a customer. And at the same time I am also aware of those businesses that trade on-line and offer a poor service.

Simple Marketing Part 9: Supplier Marketing

You may already do this without realising it, but getting the most from your suppliers is a way of helping you to keep costs down, which in-turn helps your business to be more efficient and ultimately more profitable.

More Good News!

Christine Holvey, the Chief Executive of Opportunity Wales has been honoured with an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, for services to eCommerce for business. This is an exceptional achievement and as you can imagine everyone in the Opportunity Wales team is delighted for Chris.

Don’t forget to sell your services!

I like using independent retailers both on-line and on the high street, but it’s all to easy for customers to overlook them as the major retailers have huge marketing budgets at their disposal to get their messages across. Effectively this can knock the small retailers off the shopping list of potential customers.

Thoughts for tourism businesses

I won’t pretend to be an expert in tourism marketing, but at the same time and considering the drop in visitor numbers to Wales and the current Credit Crunch, I’ve given some thought as to how businesses in this sector can start to take practical actions to counter the current economic situation.

Simple Marketing Part 8: An Example

One of the simplest ways for me to illustrate how the Simple Marketing approach to building your marketing strategy works is to give you an example based on my own experience. So here in Part 8 I will explain how I developed and deployed the marketing strategy for Opportunity Wales. I hope this will help to contextualise the previous 7 parts of the Simple Marketing Series and also help to develop the marketing focus within your own enterprise.

Simple Marketing Part 7: Pull it all together

So far the Simple Marketing series has asked you to do a lot of thinking about your business which is essential before you begin to build or review your marketing strategy.

At this point its time to reflect on everything you have found out about your business and start to create a list of priorities. This is useful, because its impossible to do everything at once and by sorting your actions into priorities you will be focusing your time on the most important actions first.

When the going gets tough…….

I returned from holiday last week to a very different UK, it seemed that in the space of just 10 days that the country had lost all its confidence and that gloom and doom was now order of the day.

Simple Marketing Part 6: Know Your Customers

Well who hasn’t said that it’s important to know your customers! But as with all information the true value comes when you collect the correct information and use it to your advantage.