After the stage of doing your market research, the next step is to market your company and what it does, you need to consider how you are going to target potential customers and how much money are you willing to spend doing this. 

Depending on your business here are the top five ways to market yourself.

1.)  Word of mouth. Happy customers are happy to recommend you, and it’s free.

2.)  Mail shots. Quite expensive on paper and postage, and consider three per cent successful sales a bonus. However, it does work, so long as you’ve carefully thought who to send the information to.

3.)  Your own website. This is now very cheap and easy to do and gives you a presence on the internet, and it’s one more weapon in your marketing armoury.

4.)  Press releases: A well-written press release can get free coverage in newspapers, TV and radio and can tell millions of potential customers about your product or service. Free give-aways are always very popular, especially at business events or shows, samples of your products of competitions and prizes are a great way to get mentioned and noticed.

5.)  Be a media expert in your field. Local radio stations and papers are hungry to fill their airtime and pages. If you have an expertise, offer yourself as a pundit to the local media.

Its new business includes Gorey in Wexford, Gullivers in Ballymun in Dublin, Blackrock Shopping Centre in Co Dublin, Ashbourne in Meath, Southside in London, Kingsgate in Dunfermline and Cameron Toll in Edinburgh.

Spirit provides marketing services for more than a quarter of all retail space in Ireland, including Belfast’s Victoria Square, Craigavon’s Rushmere, Londonderry’s Foyleside and in the Republic, Liffey Valley, Whitewater and Mahon Point retail complexes. The company recently appointed Stephen Kelly, former chief executive of the Federation of Retail Licensed Trade in Northern Ireland, as its chief executive.

Mr Kelly said: “With the retail and leisure market now faced with the impact of harsh economic conditions, an increasing number of shopping centres are looking to Spirit because of our proven track record in delivering results in difficult environments.”

The marketing company have promised to deliver a innovative marketing approach and the main aspect of this is to help to build relationships with customers and deliver a product and service which adds value and help shopping centers to increase sales and benefit shop owners and retailers.

Nunneley has already had a successfull career and he worked for BZW training as a fund manager early on in his career and joined the army in 1974 and retired from the Black Watch in 1991, after this he returned to fund management, starting at Brown Shipley Stockbrokers and going on to become a director at Mercury Asset Management and Cazenove. He now joins Braveheart from Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander where he served as a director since 2006. 

In addition, Braveheart’s legal counsel, Stephen Hart, who has been on secondment at Braveheart since April, has now joined the company permanently, he studied European & international trade law at the University of Leicester and then trained with Maclay Murray & Spens in London qualifying as an English solicitor in September 2001. 

He says: “The tools available on Bebo enable more advertising needs to be met and reach out to a younger demographic audience. We have changed the way youth communicate from traditional e-mails and text messaging to real-time banter online. ”

He points to its most recent series, The Gap Year, which incorporated product placement. Sony used the show to promote the PSP by showing viewers how to use it to take pictures. He adds: “Not only did this get 500,000 views, but we saw 70% of those people taking part in PSP-related polls and talking about it on the show’s profile.”

“We would like to extend on this and work with brands in more and more innovative, yet unobtrusive ways.”

Sony Computer Entertainment UK boss, Ray Maguire, has admitted that Sony needs to improve the marketing of PS3-PSP functionality, improving the ways in which they explain cross-platform features to the consumer. A recent interview by gamesindustry.biz made Maguire admit that his team needs to work harder to promote the message of how the Play station 3 and the PSP consoles can be used together.

The play station boss said “When we first started, because all the functionality on the PS3 was radical we talked about that functionality, at the same time though, because we have been out for a couple of years now, people are starting to understand and discover the functionality of things like PlayTV and that has created the desire for people to upgrade to larger hard disk sizes, I just recently put a 320GB drive in mine”

And in a display of being very honest he also admitted that people know very little about the relationship between the PS3 and PSP and the Remote Play functionality – “Those are the things we need to work a little harder on, the GPS functionality, the camera functionality, all those elements which give us content to sit on the PS3.”

So many businesses cut their marketing budget along with their Duchy Originals biscuits at meetings, committing potential brand suicide in an economic slowdown.  History has shown that those brands who commit to pushing through recession with clear and consistent marketing campaigns emerge as the strongest survivors.

Tim Lindsay, Chief executive of advertising giant TBWA says, “There’s tons of evidence from the last 2 recessions showing that brands which continue to invest in marketing communications during a recession prosper mightily afterwards.  The tea market is often cited as an example: PG continued to invest last time round and grew its share.  Tetley and Typhoo didn’t, and are much diminished as a consequence.”

Robert Hall, founder of Loft Interiors, which supplies furnishings to buy-to-let landlords says, “It is companies that maintain a strong brand throughout a recession that emerge on the other end far stronger as a consequence.  As their competitors melt into the background, businesses that have maintained visibility and credibility can steal market share once that market becomes buoyant again.”

Pepsi and Coke are another example of where handling a recession in the right way can make a huge impact.  During the last recession, Pepsi massively increased its marketing during the downturn while Coke decreased its spending on advertising.  As a result, Pepsi managed to increase its market share, and has held onto it.

Companies need to get creative. PR can be a cheap way of keeping your company profile high.  Networking and online marketing come into their own, as outlay is minimal.  With a sprinkling of creativity, the impact can be huge.

The managing director of the company that created the game stated that Jeremy is a loved character but he has stepped over the line this time. The game will give angry truck drivers a chance of getting some revenge.

The BBC have now received around 1,950 complaints about his comment during last week’s episode of Top Gear, he said that driving a truck must be a hard job. You’ve got so much to do such as “change gear, change gear, check mirrors, change gear, murder a prostitute, change gear, check mirrors, murder another prostitute, change gear…”

He did claim in his defence that he was referring to the Yorkshire Ripper and the Suffolk Strangler who were both truck drivers. The BBC stated that the number of complaints was mainly down to the media broadcasting his remarks opposed to people who actually saw the show. It was a similar effect that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand received.

A Labour Party MP, Chris Mole stated that Jeremy Clarkson should be dismissed. He was the MP that represents the constituency of the Wright murders (Suffolk Strangler) and they were horrendous and dreadful events. For him to make light comments such as this will have a serious effect on many people so should be dismissed without any thought.

Has Jeremy Clarkson stepped over the line or has the epidemic of complaints just over the top?

It’s easy to get carried away in the drive for new business and to seek new sources of income.  But with the current economic climate and constant predictions for more doom and gloom, now is the time to focus on looking after those loyal customers that bring in the bulk of your business.

Did you know that poor customer engagement is reported to cause up to 75% of lost sales, and that loyal customers buy more, and will often pay more for better service? And did you know that a good increase in customer retention can boost profit by up to 100%?

In the past two or three decades, brand loyalty has decreased with today’s average consumer only being around 75-85% as loyal s they were in the 1970’s or 80’s.  This decline is resulting from several factors including:

Wider brand / product choice creating higher competition.
Own brand and me too offerings.
With the increase in new media, consumers are barraged with a huge quantity of advertising on a daily basis compared to previous decades.
Today’s consumer is often more savvy in their purchases and will research many similar brands / products.
Information to facilitate this research is much more readily available through the Internet, consumer magazines and national press.
Price competition has increased.

Each of these factors needs to be considered in each company or product’s brand development strategy. `There is no point spending marketing budgets on building new business and brand awareness if on winning that business, customers never repeat their business with you.

To increase brand loyalty and make your brand or product number once choice repeatedly is a difficult thing.  Loyalty schemes are by far the most effective way of making your brand or product, number once choice, securing repeat purchases.

To help secure a businesses future through a difficult economic climate businesses should look at their best customers and how they can secure repeat custom from these.  If you can hold onto these customers through economic uncertainty, your core business can remain largely unaffected.

A North-East SMS and mobile marketing firm landed a contract to run the text messaging service for Hillary Clinton’s Democrat nomination campaign and the company may have played a major role in the outcome of the US election. Mrs. Clinton made reference to the success of the service in her first speech on the campaign trial, and this led Barack Obama to employ text messaging during his successful presidential election campaign.

Colin Stewart is the UK account director for Interlinked Media and has said the contract came about when the company had opened an office in Dallas and met members of the Clinton campaign team. Colin has said “Having seen what we had achieved in the UK, we had some backing because mobile marketing wasn’t widespread in the States at that time, and with our previous track record we were able to negotiate the contract, we got a lot of positive feedback and it had an effect on the Obama campaign because they had seen it was so successful and started their own text marketing”

Mobile phone marketing is a major method and not just a form of communication, but it is perfect for marketing to the public as it is communicating to the public through a device that people have in their pocket 24/7 and is always switched on. 95% of text messages are read, and only 25% of e-mails are always red.

As campaigns were sent overnight, the team managed and analyzed responses during UK working hours and subsequently provided the Clinton camp with real time reports at the start of their working day. “Winning the pitch for the Hillary Clinton election campaign was a massive coup for our business.