TOPIC

Marketing

Marketing means more than just slapping up an advertisement on a wall. Marketing means knowing your customers -- who they are, what they want and what they're willing to pay. It also means knowing yourself -- who do your customers think you are, and how you compare to your competition. We have some advice to help you figure out the basics, if you've never done it before.

Features

Online reputation management -- Bad news beats good news.

Online reputation management means telling your story before someone else tells it for you.

The basics about advertising

A formal advertising campaign takes some time, some effort and, yes, some money, to work right. You need to know how it works and what you can expect.

Articles & Advice

Hiring customer service staff

How do I find customer service folks who aren’t jerks to handle inquiries and complaints? Here's a starting point -- look for people who care about people.

Marketing to the best customers for you

Who are the best people to try to sell your stuff to? Well, we recommend you start by selling to people who have money. Fine. But which people with money? The answer is called market segmentation. Here's a primer.

How to price what you're selling

What should you charge? Pricing questions keep consultants and MBA-folks employed. It’s the most fundamental question you’re going to ask. Here are five ways to think about setting a price for what you're selling.

Five Lessons Every Small Business Can Learn from The Renaissance Festival

You might not think a modern small business owner can learn anything from the Renaissance Festival, except that jousting never really lost its appeal to the 8-year old kid in us all.

Five Lessons Every Small Business Can Learn from IKEA

Swedish big-box home furnishing store, IKEA, has tailored its customer shopping experience in a way that would make M.C. Escher proud. Its goal, like yours, is to drive up volume and drive down costs.

Buying Guide: Online Surveys

There are four steps to working with data. First you have to get it. After that you need to understand it, interpret it, and apply it to your business strategy. Think of the data as bricks—if you want to build something using bricks, you also need to know how to put the bricks together so your structure doesn’t fall down. It’s not simply a matter of buying bricks.

Buying Guide: Sales Outsourcing

Whether you're Verizon Wireless or Jim's Tin-Can-and-String Phone Store, your needs are, on some level, just the same. Revenue in, reputation up. And not necessarily in that order.

Search Engine Optimization - A high-wire act of marketing and meta-tagging

Few things make us happier here at Company.com than seeing smart people going into business for themselves. Laura Lippay, the former Technical Marketing Director of Yahoo! Media, has joined forces with Vanessa Fox one of the creators of Google Webmaster Central at NineByBlue. We asked Laura about SEO, where and why small businesses get it wrong, and the inherent dangers of trusting content you find on the Internet.