IIINNN THIS CORNER… Never Enough Tiiiiime

IIINNN THIS CORNER… NNNot Enough Monnnneeyyy

Every day for a small business owner feels like fight night, not enough time versus not enough money. It’s a tough one because growing your way out of the pinch takes sales, and sales takes marketing. The OTHER problem is that Fast and Cheap solutions almost never give you what you expect.

The temptation is to join your competitors who are galloping full-tilt after leads and chasing down sales using a carpet-bombing approach, but a healthy, sustainable focus on marketing may get lost in the dust. And it only gets you part way there.

Stories abound of would-be miscreants who sabotage their own success by forgetting a critical detail. There’s the story of the man went into a drug store, pulled a gun, announced a robbery while pulling a Hefty trash bag face mask over his head. Only then did he realize that he'd forgotten to cut eyeholes in the mask.

Or how about the bloke who walked up to a cashier at a grocery store, took out his wallet (to fill it, apparently) and demanded all the money in the register. When the cashier handed him the loot, he fled, leaving his wallet on the counter.

No matter what kind of business you’re in, the success of your company depends on your lead generation prowess. People who are coming to your website, interacting with your social media accounts, and making decisions about buying or not- they are the critical difference between plenty and famine. As your number of good leads goes, so goes your bottom line.

Remember the Floppy Disk? Not the friendly little brightly colored plastic ones, no- the Big Mamas. The flexible eight-inch platter of raw storage power. At least that’s what they were in their heyday. More than one megabyte could fit on those suckers! The ubiquity of floppy disks in all their iterations has long since gone, and you’d be hard-pressed to find one, let alone the equipment to read one...

...except in the control centers of those famous underground nuclear missile silos that dot our midwestern landscape!

Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table.

- Alfred Hitchcock       

And, we would add, on the desks of marketers who are trying to attract leads with outdated strategies.

Alfred Hitchcock always had a way with suspense. Often his murder scenes occurred in mundane, simple ways that the audience would never have guessed in the beginning.

In your effort to convert contacts to leads to buyers, are you inadvertently killing your chances at a smooth flow from stranger to delighted customer? Wondering why you can’t seem to generate the leads you need to succeed?

The city flag of Milwaukee, Wisconsin has been nominated by design expert Roman Mars as one of the worst logos ever. A flag is a logo, fitting nicely into most definitions of the word, like this one from Wikipedia:

"[a] graphic mark, emblem, or symbol commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition. Logos are either purely graphic (symbols/icons) or are composed of the name of the organization."