I read a great article about “Five Signs You Need a Marketing Makeover”. Susan Gunelius at Entrepreneur has a few warning signs that it’s time to take your company’s approach in to the shop for a complete overhaul.

1. Nothing matches.
Strong brands consistently deliver on their promises to consumers in every brand interaction. Inconsistent messages and visual imagery can confuse consumers, forcing them to turn away from your brand in search of one that does continually meet their expectations. If your website, signage, ads and marketing materials look like they come from multiple companies, then you need to redesign them so you communicate a consistent brand at all times.

2. You don’t know what you want.
If you haven’t mapped out your one-year and five-year goals, then your marketing efforts might not be helping your business. Take some time to determine your business objectives and then revamp your brand and marketing efforts to help you reach those goals.

3. You don’t know who your consumers are or how to connect with them.
If you don’t know who you need to connect with and where to find them, then you could waste a lot of time building relationships with people and spending time in places that won’t drive the business results you need. Instead, define your target audience and determine what benefits and messages matter to them. Only then can you find where your target audience spends time (for example, watching television, listening to the radio, on social media, reading blogs, and so on), so you can connect with them and deliver the kind of valuable information and conversations they want and need.

Read the rest of the article: Five Signs You Need a Marketing Makeover

Below is a fake letter I would send to RIM on the news about their play in the tablet market. I feel they are not making a valid attempt at positioning their product in the market properly. Maybe its because their product is inferior to Apple’s.

RIM (Research in Motion), what are you thinking? Releasing the PlayBook, not only, very late in the timeline for tablet market innovators, but also with a price tag that’s no advantage against your competitor. You may argue, The iPad is in a different submarket – the consumer tablet market – but as you’ve seen in the past, the consumer smartphone marketing is larger and more vocal. Much more money to be made there. Will the PlayBook sell anywhere near as many as the iPad. No.

RIM, you’re gong after small fish. When will you try for the consumer market? You say the Torch is? Well, how are you doing there?

I realize I sound like an Apple fanboy, but I’m not. I’m a realist. I own a Blackberry, I’ve never owned an Apple device. I currently own a Nook Color which is an ereader device, but when “rooted” becomes a near-fully functional tablet (minus a camera, GPS, and mic).

For small businesses and SOHOs, its very important to think about Internet marketing. Even though it’s true that traditional marketing works for most businesses, those delve into online activities normally expertise a boom in their business dealings. Hundreds of billions of individuals are surfing the web every day, so if your company is visible on the internet, it can reach a wide range of clients across the globe. You ask, why would I want to reach someone across the globe? Well, its not necessarily those people you care about, its the local people, and they can be reached just as easily by targeting them.

The way you want to market your organization online are very different from traditional ways of advertising. But you can underestimate the Internet’s capability in offering your business with a bigger consumer base. It will also help you reach your target customers with a lot ease and less expense. You can also use a lot of tools and resources that are extremely powerful in helping you advertise your small business without sweating.

Here some guidelines that will make your online marketing a rewarding encounter:

• Build a well-optimized website.

  As soon as you have a website, Search engine optimization must come next. You will need to make sure every single method involved in it is completed properly. Just before you determine to promote your organization or items on the internet, make certain you already have an optimized website. Search engine optimization (SEO) does play a massive role in online marketing. It entails different tactics that are to be carried out correctly. Among these are: 

  • Keyword research and keyword development
  • Keyword placement in the content, descriptions and tags
  • Back link creating and link exchange
  • Search engine submission
• Reach your potential customers via search engines.

  In doing online marketing, you will understand that in each step you take, you have to determine your target audience. Of course, you will pick those keywords or key phrases that are typically searched by your target audience. But you should never forget that all the strategies you are employing are search engine friendly.
  As you attempt to reach your target audience, you must also seek to be indexed and get the highest position in the search engine results page. The top search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo! in Canada and the USA.

• Make use of social networking.

  Nowadays, online marketing for small business is mostly accomplished by way of social networking because of the ever growing popularity and traffic these websites receive. Aside from marketing through blogs and forums, social networking websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Yelp, and others are becoming extremely popular. Marketing and advertising on these websites are extremely efficient because millions of folks are visiting them each and every day so you are assured that your business will not be left unnoticed. By creating keyword-rich and quality content on your blog or website, you’ll be able to communicate well with your customers and get their trust.

I’m sure you know by now, the iPad 2 has been announced and will be released in early March (late March for us Canadians and other places around the world). But why are they launching this product so soon after the iPad’s first release? Especially with its short list of minuscule upgrades. Faster processor, thinner shape, and new OS is hardly a warranty to put out a new piece of hardware.

It’s all to do with squashing the competition. RIM’s PlayBook isnt said to ship until April, as well as HP’s TouchPad and anything in the form of a Windows tablets are not even close to being ready. Apple wants to dominate the market before anyone else has a chance to make a footprint. Quite honestly, its an excellent more on their part but at the cost of a lackluster product launch that underwhelmed the general population. I’m sure there’s some Apple fanboys out there who have bought the iPad 1 and are set to buy the iPad 2 the first days its available. From a marketing prospective, its great PR to have a new product. From a product marketing/management prospective, it seems like they’re prematurely releasing a product before its ready. It’s probably not the case and the plan all along was to release an upgrade that features the equivalent of adding icing sugar to the top of a brownie.