The highly entertaining Donald Trump’s search for an apprentice turned into a hit reality TV show captured attention of millions of Americans and week after week delivered great insights into leadership, business and marketing savvy.

In one of the episodes Trump challenged the two opposing teams of apprentice wannabes (Apex and Mosaic) to put together a bridal gown sale.

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Each team had to contact vendors, secure inventory, and most importantly, attract qualified prospects to generate the maximum profits. And here is the kicker – they had just 24 hours to do it.

(For more details see the blow-by-blow outline of this episode.)

Mosaic moved very quickly. They…

I have been working with a management team who have dreams of growing their small business by developing their market offering. Most small businesses grow because the products and services that they offer happen to find favour with their customers. How refreshing it is to work with business people who plan for growth.

We started by reviewing the marketing strategies that Bill, Gary and Tim have for their four products. Some products are doing well but one of them needs to be re-positioned in the market and Tim worried about how this might change the company strategy.

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Options in Your Market

For each product, we explored four distinctive marketing strategies:

1. Penetrate your current market to reach more customers (with your current product).

Social networking platforms build buzz, boost business and serve small businesses as low-cost/no-cost marketing tools. Small business owners need to understand how these tools strategically serve and support small business first so they best implement social media strategies to sell products and/or services.

Social Media, simply put, serves users and organizations in marketing in three ways:

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1. Communication

Marketing is all about building relationships — relationships start with communication. New web tools like blogging, micro-blogging (Twitter), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning), podcasting (BlogTalkRadio), video distribution (YouTube), event coordination tools (Meetup), wikis (Wikipedia) photo sharing (Flickr, Photobucket), and product review sites (epinions.com) allow small businesses to communicate, educate and share information directly with their current and prospective customers.

It seems as if most of the entrepreneurs I’ve encountered lately are looking for the “get rich quick” version of small business marketing. Unfortunately, such a thing doesn’t really exist, but if you’re looking for some tried-and-true marketing principles that can accelerate your success, I’ve got a few to share with you:

Pull Marketing Works Better Than Push Marketing

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I’m not sure who coined the terms pull marketing and push marketing, but the idea behind them is simple. With push marketing, the small business pushes its advertising towards its prospects who may or may not be interested. With pull marketing, the small business attracts (pulls) its prospects with interesting content and materials which aren’t strictly advertising based.

In my business, I frequently receive calls and inquiries from agents who are looking for a big marketing breakthrough. When I ask about their marketing strategies and how I can help, they reply, “I’m not sure. I just want to know what’s really working for everyone else.”

Here’s a newsflash: The next big thing is that there is NO next big thing. I don’t mean to be negative, but seriously, marketing results are rarely achieved with one sizzling hot activity. Marketing isn’t about one-hit-wonders. It’s about consistently communicating with the right audience with the right message until that audience is ready to buy.

Marketing in general is a vast and complex beast which requires knowledge and effort to truly master and leverage it to its full potential to grow your brand, let alone your business. Any good internet marketing strategy can effectively help you build your business online. However, as many internet entrepreneurs look to expand their online presence and grow their businesses further, I find that many of them fail to create a complete marketing and business development strategy, focusing the majority of their efforts online. Sadly, this is a HUGE mistake on their part.

There are several small business marketing strategies that can provide optimal success when choosing the web as your marketing venue. Small businesses today are at a great advantage with the internet providing several tools and resources for internet marketing and traffic generation. Knowing what these small business marketing strategies are and how to use them in order to locally market your business properly is very important before you get started.

1- Business Marketing Strategies: Start with the Site

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When you want to employ top small business marketing strategies online, you want to start with the site because you just cannot get anywhere without your base. This site will be where you are directing your target audience in order to find out more about your business or purchase goods and services from you online. This site should consist of several elements to ensure that there will be a high search engine ranking such as:

If you’ve started a home based business, it is time to learn more about targeted home based business advertising. Through this article, you are provided five huge home based business marketing ideas.

First of all, when it comes to targeted home based business advertising, there are now organizations and associations available to you both in the brick and mortar world and on the Internet that can assist you in your marketing efforts. You want to give serious consideration to linking up with one are neither these groups.

Are these customer relationship mistakes damaging your business?

The relationship between a small company and their customers is a tricky one. While not as intense as that with family members, surprisingly enough, long term business relationship have similar risks for both parties as any other “friendship”.

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The situation between you and a customer can be damaged by broken promises, business betrayals and lying or giving false impressions.

These “relationship killers” can result in you missing out on opportunities, sales or even becoming involved in a costly legal action.

Of course not every business relationship goes bad or ends in a lawsuit. Many small businesses have maintained amicable and profitable relationships with their customers for decades.

Local online marketing is taking the web by storm, and more and more brick and mortar businesses are in danger of getting left behind in the dust. Here are 3 easy strategies to ensure that your local online marketing plan is set up to help you succeed.

Strategy #1: Optimize Your Website to Get RESULTS

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There is absolutely no point in marketing your business website if people get to it and just click away. Or even if they browse it for a bit, then leave without giving you any way to follow up with them. The first and foremost step in your local online marketing strategy is to make sure that your website is ready to capture information from those people who are really interested in who you are and what you have to offer. This gives you a chance to then become someone they know, like and trust – so they will buy from you in the future.