Fusion Marketing on Entrepreneur.com

A nice article about fusion marketing techniques on Entrepreneur.com

Fusion marketing is simply a term used to describe businesses creating alliances, partnerships and informal agreements to collaborate in their marketing. It can mean something simple like having each others' business cards on display or something much more formal like joint product offerings, packaing your services with another's.

The article gives a few simple ideas and a step-by-step checklist for using fusion marketing relationships.

Certainly worth a read.

More meat in my stew please

By and large we Irish like our stew. Me, I love the stuff but have noticed that stew is becoming more and more potato and less and less meat. Until that is, I found a tiny little cafe (actually it has no seats so it's probably not a cafe) that does really meaty stew.

It's a five minute walk further down the road but even on a rainy day like today I'd rather make the trip than get a meatless stew from the place at the end of the road.

How much more meat could you add to your product?

Referral Programs Mean Business

If there is one thing you can do to create more business without spending any cash upfront then it has to be a referral program.

Hopefully you already generate business from referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations. That's brilliant. But a formal plan to help cultivate both the quality and quantity of referrals you receive can pay huge dividends.

Before you get started - or even if you already have - it's worth considering the types of referrals you want to receive - PASSIVE referrals and/or ACTIVE referrals.

PASSIVE REFERRALS come about when A asks B if they 'know a good place to get x'. This kind of referral is in response to an enquiry.

ex. Joe asks Bob if he knows a good accountant. Bob recommends speaking to you.

Or, Bob likes the look of Joe's sandwich and asks him where he got it.

The best way to generate passive referrals is to deliver a quality product and service. Of course, you can make it all the more likely by providing Bob and Joe with simple tools that make passing along your message all the easier (business cards, flyers etc...).

ACTIVE REFERRALS are slightly different. In this case Joe actively seeks out Bob to tell him about the great sandwich he had or Bob sends Joe an email about the new website he found. You can make this happen organically by providing a phenomenal product or service - compelling Bob and Joe to talk about it.

You can also make it much more likely by providing them with both the tools AND an incentive to talk. Active tools would include things like tell-a-friend buttons on your website, gift certificates designed to be given away or free samples to pass along.

The incentive can be anything from the sense of 'being in the know' and standing in the community that Bob will have (think Digg and del.icio.us), to financial rewards like competitions and discounts on future orders. To encourage someone to actively refer, they must believe that the information they are passing on will be of value to the person they speak to - you can help create that by rewarding both the 'referrer' and 'referred'.


Of course, every business should look to cultivate both passive and active referrals but it all starts with providing a genuinely great product and service. Fake word-of-mouth - i.e. that generated solely through incentives - has a funny way of coming back to haunt you.

99 Web Tools you can use to create buzz online

Great list of web resources from Ron at Buzzoodle



99 Web resources to promote your business and create some buzz

Where to put your good ideas

2 simple 15 minute tips:

We all have ideas, some of us too many - you can't act on all of them immediately otherwise you'd never get anything done. So what do you do with good ideas and new contacts and how should you use them?

1. Start up a 'to contact' spreadsheet (call it something fun) and start adding in ALL the potential contacts you have that could be of help in ANY way. Run a separate page for specific businesses, organisations, media outlets etc... you'd love to work with or sell to. Fill it out as you go and find new ideas and opportunities. The goal is to move people from the 'love to' page onto the contact page and then from the contact page into actually working with them.

2. Start a 'great ideas' word doc and every time an idea pops into your head, type it in in one paragraph or less - review it every few weeks and pick out ideas to action, flesh them out and give them a try.

Between the two you'll start collecting dozens of ideas and contacts to follow up on when you're at a loss or need to push things along.

Better yet, start getting in the habit of contacting people and trying ideas when things are going well - you'll be more confident, have a great picture to paint and can negotiate from a position of strength.

Expectations: How a party lost a vote

Following quickly on from my last post, a short point about expectations.

Your marketing - for that read 'everything about your business' - forms an impression in people's minds, an expectation of a certain level of service, a price, a way of doing business. When the reality doesn't meet those expectations it 'jars' with people.

That can be a good or a bad thing.

Surprise people with better than expected service or a great price and it's a positive. Don't live up to the expectations and it's a negative. You wouldn't necessarily expect a mint on your pillow and fresh flowers in your room when you stay in a 1 Star 'hotel' and so would be presently surprised. If that's all you got in a 5 Star resort you'd be demanding to see the manager.

So what inspired this post?

It's local election time here and I today received a pile of leaflets from various candidates. I took no notice of any of them except the one from the Green Party - on what looks like crisp, new, tree-detroying, un-recycled paper.

Not good.

Small Business Owners: Don't send it out if it fails this test

I've a simple little test I do with client and in-house marketing materials - it's called the "meant for" test.

Take any letter, ad, logo, website, whatever and take a quick look - 5-10 seconds at most. Then ask the question, "Who's it meant for?" Man or woman? Young or old? Rich or poor? Student or professional?

If the answer doesn't match your target audience then you need to rethink it.

People are exposed to so many marketing messages every day that they've become extremely adept at filtering out what doesn't concern them - and quickly. You can also use the test to improve and more clearly target your audience

Let's take the headline to this post:

Small Business Owners: Don't send it out if it fails this test

How can we improve it? If I'm a business owner I'd say it was meant for me but if you were sending it out just in your home town, you could easily change it to:

Small Business Owners in MyTown: Don't send it out if it fails this test

And you can do the same with just about anything, from the look of your premises and the style of your business cards to the logo you use or the tone of your letters. If you can say who it's "meant for" with just a glance or by reading one line, it stands a much better chance of appealing to that market.