Last week Mannix Marketing held a seminar to help local businesses learn how to use Facebook and Twitter to help market online. It was a tremendous event with an outpouring of interest from both large and small businesses from the local area. We were pleased to see the amount of interest exemplified by the audience. The attendees asked a lot of great questions and we tried to capture them all here:

Facebook Questions

• Do you have to have an individual Facebook account to make Facebook business page? (more…)

I recently heard some great tips listening to a morning radio show on my way into work. It was about managing email and spring cleaning for your inbox.

One tip in particular stuck in my mind for email management: OHIO. It’s a cute abbreviation that stands for Only Handle It Once. The basic idea is that you get an email and deal with it right then and there. What’s the point in reading an email and then saving it for later when you will only have to reread it in order to refresh your memory? If you have time to open the email, you have time for a quick reply or appropriate filing. Do it right then and there. (more…)

If you’re like many small business owners lately, the economy has got you in the slumps. Things are slow. Business is hurting. The future looks grim. How can you afford to do any extra promotion in a time like this?

It’s not that you have to cut promotion; it’s that it’s time to be more cost-effective in your marketing strategies. If the economy is headed for a recession, we have a choice… dig deep and cut marketing, which will result in a negative downward spiral as fewer new clients are exposed to your business… or choose to fight!

You can fight by improving your marketing and the cost effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Now, what does that mean? That means taking time to stop and consider if your advertising dollars are being well spent or could be better spent elsewhere. Are you running a radio ad that costs hundreds of dollars and plays only a few times in a day? Are you running a costly newspaper ad that will only be seen by readers of that day’s paper before they’re on to the next issue? Internet display ads generally cost about the same amount of money, but offer a considerable difference in visibility. (more…)