We’re often told that these days marketing is a visual art. You need stunning, dynamic images that will grab your audience’s attention and make your other content really pop. And to produce those images, of course, you’ll need top quality dedicated graphics professionals.

There is some truth to this idea. Quality images can definitely make your content stand out, and potential customers will quickly turn away from large, ungainly blocks of text. But do you actually need to spend a fortune on top quality graphic design? Should you attempt to do some of it yourself?

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What you don’t know can’t hurt you, so we’re told as kids. When we grow older, we quickly find out that not knowing about something can ruin our day before we can even say our first ‘Good Morning.’ As a small business person, you know the best way to avoid problems is to anticipate them ahead of time, which is why you track your results to stay ahead of the game.

But are you tracking the right results? 

Like it or not, texting has become a communication standard in today’s world. Whether we’re setting up a meeting or simply asking our significant other to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home, texting is often our go-to means. According to a 2015 report by Informate, a mobile tracking firm, U.S. smartphone users are sending and receiving five times as many texts as phone calls, and that trend is even more pronounced among millennials.

So if texting is here to stay, should you be using it in your marketing?

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Novice marketers focus on getting the lead, but experienced marketers know that the job is only done when dollars exchange hands. You can cut the cost of generating a sale by 50% or more when you monitor and track how well incoming calls are being handled.

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Last week, our article was about how storytelling has worked for thousands of years to get a message across and have it stick. I got to wondering why it works so consistently, so I did a little research and here’s what I found.

Stories are fun or interesting or engaging or profound or touching or scary or, well, you get the picture. But why they ‘stick’ in our heads was an interesting question to me and my research taught me about the physiological and chemical changes that happen in our brains when we hear a story.

In a previous article, we took a look at making a five-year plan for your business. The next step is to put that plan into action. What resources do you need? What steps do you need to take to get started? To make it even more challenging, you’re also trying to predict future events you might not fully be able to control.

Getting started is pretty simple though, and it begins with writing your plan down. There are many good reasons for writing down your business or marketing plan. This makes you take the time to think your plan through and will make you feel more confident in it.

Do you remember all those predictions for the future? Some of the wilder ones included flying cars, colonies on Mars and personal robots to cater to your every need. What about your prediction for your business? Where will you be next year, or in 5 years?

While the future is always a little murky, it’s important to create long-term goals for yourself and your business. The best business plans are more than just documents you create and stick in a drawer somewhere. They’re more than just simple vision statements. Instead they’re living roadmaps for reaching your goals.

When you get a new lead, how many times do you touch them before you give up? By touch I mean contact, not physical touching obviously… but if you can actually meet them and shake their hand all the better, although that is frequently not an option.

Or worse, do you get a new lead and immediately hard sell them… bad, very bad.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those words still count. With all the technological toys at our disposal, great copy is still the heart and soul of any great marketing effort. It has to immediately grab a reader’s attention and then hold onto it. In today’s market, you have about 7 seconds to hook a visitor before they decide to move back to their search engine results. Great copy can set your brand apart and make all the difference in your conversion rates.

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If you’re in business, you’re in the marketing business. And you’ve been handed a gift worth $8.4 B (that’s billion!). In fact, this is a gift that repeats annually and has increased in value by 60% in the past 10 years. Run all the way to your bank with it!

Halloween is big business and there’s no reason you can’t cash in on some of it. Think about your audience and how to creatively engage them using Halloween to promote your business, your products, your services, your brand.

Summer is coming to an end, and your marketing calendar is about to get a lot busier. Starting with Labor Day and continuing on through the end of the year, there is a virtual cornucopia of great holidays. Is your marketing ready for the blitz?

Do you have the resources you need? Unless you have an exceptionally large marketing budget you can’t go after every holiday, or you’ll risk spreading your resources too thin. What about some of the new marketing holidays that have sprung up in recent years?  Events like Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday may not appear on a traditional calendar, but they may be extremely valuable to you.

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When our son calls, his daughter almost always wants to get on the phone, saying “Daddy, I want to see Grandmom and Granddad!” (make the call a FaceTime call) and once we are visible, odds are she will say “Can you read me a story?” She usually asks Kerry, I guess her storytelling is better than mine, at least in our granddaughter’s eyes.

What’s the point, other than a cute antidote about Eva? The point is that we identify with stories from the time we are very young… we’ve been reading stories to Eva since she was just a few months old. We relate to stories, we learn from stories, we start to better understand our world through stories. Stories help us see things that cold hard facts would not allow us to see.