Courtesy of Canada Post’s Venture One Program

1. Identify your objectives. What do you want to communicate? What action do you want the customer to take? Do you want to build a relationship?
2. Sell benefits not features. A feature tells what your product does, while a benefit tells how your product satisfies a need or overcomes a problem. Customers want to know, “What’s in it for me?”
3. Include an offer. Give your prospects a reason to respond—now. Make it relevant, irresistible and worth their time and effort.


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As you may know I operate businesses in Kelowna, Vancouver, and Calgary.  With that come alot of road trips.  Kelowna is where I went to highschool and Okanagan University College before moving to Toronto, Calgary, Europe, and then eventually back to BC again.

On one of my recent commutes from Vancouver to Kelowna my muffler decided to turn my usually enjoyable ride into an adventure.  I had to drive with the windows rolled down for fresh air as the cab filled up with exhaust.

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Should you pay attention to internet marketing?  Social Media?   The statistics are certainly putting new light on the power of the internet.   Like any other advertising and marketing tactic, be sure to look at the long term strategy.

In my opinion social media is a fad. It should be part of your marketing mix but it shouldn’t be your only marketing tactic, and certainly not the predominant one.  If Internet Marketing is not part of your mix, you better add it right now!

Here are some interesting social media and internet statistics by Jess 3:

Canadian Economic Report from this morning:  20,000K New Jobs were created and our Unemployment Rate went down from 8.3% to 8.2%

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics were a great success and have motivated many Canadians to cheer on the Olympic Team that brought us the first of many Gold Medals on home soil, breaking several world records.  The numbers are impressive now, but it wasn’t easy to get there.

What do the Olympics have to do with Marketing?

There are many marketing lessons to be learned here, and this I can’t stress enough, I’m not referring to the big corporate fancy advertising campaigns, tv ads, or BC’s “You’ve gotta be here” commercial.  (Which by the way I quite like).    Instead the focus should be behind the scenes, dig deeper, and you’ll see that there are many Marketing lessons  to be learned here.

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RSS What? You’re not the first to say that…  RSS is one of those mysterious techie tools that many don’t understand.  And it’s not so much that it’s hard to understand, it’s just hard to explain what RSS does and how it will help you.

In a nutshell, RSS feeds have content come to you instead of you going to the content.
…and it does so without email


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Marketing Your Small Business with direct mail and unaddressed admail is a breeze with Canada Post’s Venture One Program.  In case you’re not familiar with it, the VentureOne program is a small business loyalty program from Canada Post and is available to any small business that ships parcels and documents, and that sends brochures or flyers to connect with their customers. It’s FREE and easy to join; there is no contract to sign and no minimum purchase to make.

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Everyone thinks they’re great at it.   When in Reality the majority don’t know what they’re doing!