Marketing Ideas for Your Small Business

It’s been a while since I’ve done an article round up.  This week I’m including some of articles that have interesting marketing ideas in them for you to think about.

The first is my book review of “Flip the Funnel” on Small Business Trends:  The “duh” of an idea here is to spend more effort and energy on the customers you have than on the ones you don’t have.  That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go looking for new business – just don’t go bringing on new customers only to mistreat them and ignore them and take them for granted later.

Social networks and social media have to evolve.  And John Jantsch’s article “The Future of Social Networks is Vertical” sounds like the most logical place for it to go.  The idea here is to observe how cluttered the social media space is and notice how people have been creating vertical groups.  There was a study out there somewhere that said that we really aren’t capable of managing more than 500 relationships – and based on our natural segmenting behavior – that appears to be true.  Maybe we will evolve to higher numbers as technology helps out — I think that number might be something like 1500 – but that’s a stretch.  What do you think?

If you want to see the cutting edge of social media, mashable’s weekly list of trends is the place to go.  Check out this week’s “22 Essential Social Media Resources You Make Have Missed” you can build a year’s worth of content just reading this list and adding your expertise to it WOW.

Industrial firms might finally be getting on board (whew) with online marketing.  Marketing Charts has a great study summary with “Industrial Firms Step Up Online Marketing”  I’m not sure why they wait so long for everything.  You’d think business to business, industrial technical type people who are so stingy with marketing dollars would be all over online marketing.  Go figure.

OK – so check all these out and let me know YOUR ideas!