Summer can be a tough time for marketing. You’re busy and your customers are busy, and that can make it a challenge to create an effective marketing strategy. However, those challenges also make it a great time to get back to basics with your marketing! Here are four tips that will help you bring your marketing back to basics.

1. Focus on Who You’re Talking To
This is the heart of any good marketing strategy, and focusing on the audience you’re reaching out to is the best shortcut to market effectively even when time is tight. Think about whether you’re reaching out to existing customers or new customers, and then use what you know about those customers to create a strategy. What media do they engage with? Can you send an email, or do you need to reach out using ads in local media or a direct mail piece? Focus your efforts where they’ll be most effective, and let your audience be your guide.

2. What Is Everyone Else Doing? Consider Doing the Opposite
One of the best ways to stand out is to do what nobody else is doing. If your competition is advertising through email, for example, a simple handwritten note could be the best way to make your business memorable.

3. Think About What Worked in the Past but Isn’t Used Now—And Think About Why
Sometimes, marketing strategies are dropped for good reason. You might have stopped putting your energy into newspaper advertising, for example, because you got better results from focusing your efforts on creating a quality email campaign. However, if you dropped a marketing strategy for other reasons—you didn’t previously have the time to pursue it, for example, or something new took your attention instead—it might be worthwhile to revisit that strategy. As an added bonus, you might be able to get inspired for new marketing efforts by examples in your files from these old projects.

4. Always Be Willing to Learn New Things
With new technologies arriving every day, the marketing landscape—especially for smaller businesses—is constantly changing. While there are a lot of tips that can help you navigate that changing world, nothing will serve you better than a willingness to learn. Staying open to new information will help keep you from getting stuck in a rut when it comes to your marketing strategy, and it will keep you flexible enough to adapt to new options when they arrive.

What marketing tips can’t you live without? We’d love to see your tips and tricks in the comments below.

When you carve out time in your busy schedule to hold a meeting, you want to make sure you use your time effectively and make the most of your time together. However, if you aren’t communicating well, you might be ruining your meetings. Are you making these mistakes—and do you know how to keep them from ruining your meetings?

1. Forgetting the Important Information
If you have important information that should be reviewed before the meeting starts, don’t forget to share it! Not only will this ensure that everyone is on the same page, but it will also save you time in summarizing that information.

2. Having Too Few People at Your Meeting
Have you ever been at a meeting and, midway through, wished that you’d included someone? Sometimes, your meeting can grind to a halt when you don’t have that person there, even if you’re able to track them down or reschedule.

However, there are definitely ways to keep this from making too big of an impact. Did you forget someone important? Was someone not able to be there? Make sure that you take the time to catch up with them after the meeting. This can mean taking notes of all the decisions made at that meeting, keeping note of the questions that you want to ask them, and the pros and cons of undecided issues.

Of course, having too few people at your meeting isn’t the only numbers issue you might face…

3. Having Too Many People At Your Meeting
If you’ve been to enough meetings, you’ll probably have come across an overstuffed meeting before and be very familiar with the issues that these meetings face. It can be hard, with so many people, to have important points heard. And if your meeting has too many people in it, you might find yourself facing another issue…

4. Having Multiple Relevant Conversations Going on At Once
Have you ever been to a meeting where the attendees walked out of the meeting feeling like the group came to very different conclusions? One of the reasons for this might be that the meeting splintered into a few different conversations. This can easily lead to different attendees hearing different information and coming to different conclusions about what the next step is, and that can be a big problem for your projects.

So how can you fix this when two groups of people within the meeting need to address focused points? Don’t just let the meeting wander off into multiple conversations. Instead be intentional when these conversations break off, and make sure to share the decisions with the group when you come back together.

Have you made these communication mistakes? Are we missing a mistake that has impacted your meeting? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.

Whether you are looking for a way to connect with new customers or you’re hoping to have a good conversation with other professionals, a networking event could be a great way to create those new connections. However, these events are what you make them, and creating a quality connection is as much about your skills at networking as it is about the event. Here are four networking tips you must know.

1. Listen When You Join A Conversation—And Show That You’ve Been Listening
When you’re approaching a group of people already engaged in conversation, take some time to listen. Not only will this allow you to have a good understanding of what the group is talking about, but it will also give you a chance to figure out if the conversation is relevant to your interests.

And, when you do join in yourself, acknowledge a point that has been made rather than refocusing the conversation on yourself. Not only will this ensure that you enter the conversation smoothly, but it will ensure that you maintain a friendly tone.

2. Don’t Focus on What You Want—Focus on What You Can Offer
You’re going to the networking event for a reason—usually to make new business connections and possibly make a sale—but don’t let that reason keep you from having a good conversation! Focus on what your customer is saying and how you can speak to the challenges they are facing in their business.

And speaking of that focus…

3. Polish Up Your Elevator Pitch
We’ve talked about elevator pitches before, and a networking event is tailor-made for these one-to-two-sentence summaries of your business. And you can tailor your pitch according to the event. If you’re going to a networking event for social reasons, keep your pitch focused on who you are as a print professional. If you are going to the event to connect with prospective customers, keep the pitch focused on what your business can do for them.

4. Find a Reason to Follow Up
If you’ve established a rapport with someone, keep that relationship going! Once you’ve got their contact information, be sure to reconnect within a week of meeting them. Whether it’s sending an article relevant to the topic you discussed or giving them a call to discuss their product needs, finding a practical reason to follow up can help keep the conversation going.

How do you make the most out of your networking efforts? We’d love to see your suggestions in the comments below.