Business Thoughts

Still Crazy After all These Years

With deference to Paul Simon, you know you’re doing the right work after [41 plus years] if you still get excited when one of your clients is featured on the front cover of a leading publication! Over breakfast, I was catching up on reading and shouted “yes” when I saw Laser Research Optics on the…

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Have You Tried Using Grass?

Many years ago I was visiting my folks in Florida and they had a pond in front of their condo. As you may know, that’s not unusual for those retirement communities down there. So, one day I was fishing for bass in the pond. I was using a rubber worm that I brought from home…

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Clients are Like Spouses: Tell Them You Love Them

I was enjoying lunch with a Professor from Babson College and discussing a couple of book ideas when he asked me, “why do you have so many clients who have been working with you for 40 years? There are three reasons, I told him: 1. “I clearly and simply explain what services I provide and…

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PRODUCT PUBLICITY CREATES GLOBAL SALES OPPORTUNITIES

Product publicity programs for companies seeking exposure for their products in specific regions around the world to replace or support their advertising and marketing programs are available from Venmark International of Wellesley, Massachusetts. Venmark International Product Publicity Programs target specific regions around the world to help clients take full advantage of product publicity to find…

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Why do you get up in the morning?

“A man’s got to have a reason to get up in the morning.” This was a favorite expression of my uncle, an extremely successful entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. In fact, what got him up in the morning for the last 10 years of his life was giving away much of his fortune.  He said…

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The Great Power of Underestimation

In 1976, Sales Development Associates blasted onto the advertising scene with a disruptive approach which most misunderstood and many underestimated. I know the story because it is mine. I was 28 years old and started the company from a spare bedroom at my folks’ house and then six months later moved into our office building…

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Think Outside the Box to Get More Product Publicity

My brother owned an auto parts business and like most small business people the last thing he wanted to do was sit around and chat with salesmen. He didn’t have the time, but didn’t want to alienate his vendors either. In the auto parts business, salesmen liked to stop in a chat and it took…

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Marketing Amplifier Brands Your Company & Produces Enormous Inbound

Bill Gates said, “A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.” Is this true for marketing? According to the American Marketing Association, “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization…

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The Forgotten Role of Product Publicity

There is so much emphasis today on digital marketing and communicating directly with your prospective customers that it is easy to overlook a major role that product publicity plays in the media. That is, for content creation, data gathering and dictating the future editorial focus of a media outlet. I remember the day, early in 1977,…

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Entrepreneurship and Product Publicity

Peter Drucker, recognized as the dean of America’s business and management philosophers by The Wall Street Journal, wrote “Entrepreneurship is ‘risky’ because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing. They lack the methodology. They violate elementary and well-known rules. This is particularly true of high-tech entrepreneurs.”   I believe this assertion…

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Are You an S.O.B?

There was nothing remarkable about the small industrial building as we drove into the company parking lot. It was a brisk November day back in 2007. The leaves had already been raked and the walkways were well groomed. What prompted the memory of that day is Thanksgiving. I’m always prone to reflection this time of…

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Niche Marketing is About Problem-Solving

We’re all conditioned today to believe that “content is king on the web” and there is a lot of truth to that expression. There is also truth to the fact that there is a lot of content on the web that sucks! Good content is critical and people want to read about how to solve…

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Listen to Your Customers and Solve Their Problems

When I received the October issue of “Fabricating & Metalworking” which featured FABTECH 2015 I was thrilled to see our client, Esco Tool featured in the section entitled “Tube & Pipe Fabrication.” There are many reasons for Esco Tool’s success. Chief among them was the philosophy of Al Brennan who purchased the company in 1975.…

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Is Fake Web Traffic Costing You a Fortune?

The cover story on Bloomberg Businessweek was entitled, “Fake web traffic will cost companies more than $6 billion this year. An exclusive investigation into the bots that ate your ad budget.” Then you flip to the article itself and see another headline, “Marketers thought the web would allow perfectly targeted ads. Hasn’t worked out that…

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Leverage Your Marketing Budget

I’ve been in business long enough to remember the introduction of the fax machine, the word processor, personal computer, mobile phone, Al Gore’s internet, the tablet, smart phone, and all of the related software and apps. There has been no time period which has impacted B2B marketing more than the last 10 years. One phenomenon…

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First Rule for B2B Marketers

It has long been said, “In the real estate business the three most important factors when selling a property are location, location, and location.” In marketing, the three most important factors are: repetition, repetition, and repetition. Therefore, the first rule B2B marketers should never forget is that repetition creates sales opportunities. Why? Because repetition puts…

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Bonefishing and Product Publicity

I’ve enjoyed bonefishing for many years in the Florida Keys, Turks and Caicos, and Belize. For a fisherman it is the ultimate. Bonefish, also known as the grey ghost, are challenging to catch and are ferocious fighters. You actually hunt and stalk them while they cruise the flats feeding. Seeing them is a challenge, as…

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An Exchange of Unaltered Meaning

While enjoying the sun, sand, and warm breezes on the beach at Key West recently, I saw an interesting exchange between a resort guest and an employee that reminded me of a seminar I attended way back in 1979 which dealt with interpersonal communication. A woman was standing about twenty feet away from me awaiting…

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What is Product Publicity Worth?

There has probably been more written about determining the value of publicity than any other element of the marketing mix. In a paper considering various publicity metrics, James L. Horton, wrote, “There are several ways to measure publicity value, but they largely ignore the process of persuasion and credibility of a journalist’s independent assessment. Publicity…

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Growth of Small Business & Free Enterprise

Growth of Small Business is Our Core value. Most of our clients, especially those small businesses we’ve been partnering with for nearly four decades have leveraged our work. To understand why we encourage them do that, here’s the reason I started Venmark in November, 1976. The following graphic resulted from a six week exercise with…

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Publicizing Your Website is a Must

If you create a terrific website and don’t employ the best marketing tool in the mix to let your customers and prospective customers know about it, you’re making a huge mistake. Take advantage of this opportunity! Effective website publicity creates exposure in important media outlets, reinforces your brand, generates web traffic and sales leads, enhances…

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Build Your Business by Being Distinct

On the wall in my office is a framed copy of a quote which was given to me by Manny Affler, a great client many years ago. He was in his 50s at the time and hired me multiple times for several years. He recognized that Venmark was a different kind of company. It was…

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Don’t Let an MBA Get in Your Way

In an interview, Kevin O’Leary from the successful television show “Shark Tank” said that MBAs drove him crazy because they have never built a business, are arrogant, and think they know everything. Well, I work with some very savvy clients who have MBAs and respect their achievements, but understand totally why he feels that way.…

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Esco Tool’s Products Featured on Two Magazine Covers

Keeping Esco Tool’s products in front of the world has been an honor for me since 1977. During our last monthly meeting, I showed Matt Brennan, their president, the front cover of “Process Cooling” magazine’s 2014 Product Guide Issue which featured Esco’s Battery-Powered End Prep Tool for Welding Pipe. Then he said, “If you think…

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Common Small B2B Company Marketing Mistake

S.I. Hiakowa, the semanticist and former United States Senator said, “A cow is not a cow, is not a cow.” In other words, not all cows are the same, even though they are all cows. The same applies to writers. Not all writers are the same, even though they are all writers. The genesis of…

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7 Reasons why Product Publicity Fails

1.   The copy is filled with superlatives. Many years ago, “The Wall Street Journal” ran an article featuring the 20 words most likely to get a press release rejected. They included terms like unique, revolutionary, and world-class. You get the idea. An advertisement dressed up like a press release is still an advertisement! Lipstick…

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Why PR is Becoming the Future of SEO

A recent article in INC Magazine entitled “Why PR is Becoming the Future of SEO” caught my eye. It was written by Adam Heitzman, the co-founder of a nationally recognized SEO firm. Mr. Heitzman concluded his article with “The moral of the story is this: Now, what Google seems to value most is what public…

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Some Very Smart People Make Very Stupid Mistakes

While catching up on some business reading Saturday morning with “Fortune Magazine,” an article entitled “A Visionary Tech Founder Returns” caught my eye. It was about Cher Wang. If you’re like me, you never heard of her. She was the co-founder of HTC, a Taiwan-based smartphone maker. Her name was bandied about with Steve Jobs…

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The Secret to Getting Widespread Publicity

Over the years we have received numerous comments from editors and the key ingredient to all of their feedback is that Venmark International gives them press releases [product news and information] about products and product applications in a format that helps them create superior content. This idea of providing “solutions-based content” has been critical to…

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