Your customers are your lifeblood. A happy customer is a repeat customer.  Are you taking the time to listen to what they say? Barriers to listening can be a lack of focus or as I like to call multitasking.
I am also sometimes guilty of reading emails while listening to phone messages or worse yet, during [...]

I’m blogging for a school assignment today. Instead of blogging about small business marketing, as I usually do I decided to write about a new blog I discovered. It’s called blog fun spot. I turns out that their fun is really big business. It is really a link farm of ads by Google and [...]

You have to buy this book!!!!!
Big Black Pencil is a small business marketing agency in Chicago. We learn many of our marketing strategies from the very best . Today I learned something about Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think. I recently visited his web site and thought I had uncovered a [...]

Talk to your marketing agency about how you can make your Chicago business website become more visible. There are two ways that you can improve your website visibility.
1. Have your marketing agency create a blog (web log) for your company to let people know about your products or services. Once your blog is online, you [...]

Chicago is a competitive market for small and medium size businesses. Selecting the right sized marketing agency that understands your business can give you an advantage over your competitors. Here are 10 marketing tips guaranteed to make this year’s marketing plan a success.

Create a marketing budget that you can afford. If you’re only allowing a [...]

 
You have 30 seconds to grab your customer’s attention online. Your website need to get down to business.
Successful small and medium sized businesses in Chicago know that an outdated website can be worse than no website at all.
Big Black Pencil Marketing can review your website and help you find your unique attribute and help you [...]

Many small businesses in Chicago are blogging to get business. Chicago-based marketing agencies like Big Black Pencil are helping their clients grow with user-generated content.
It supercharges your website with viral marketing shared through the use of networking through
a variety of blended medias.
Your Chicago small business blog can contribute by sharing content through [...]

Speed up sales when your small business sales are slow. Make your Chicago-based small business more profitable by communicating with your past customers. Turn to the customers that trust you most. Here are 3 easy ways.

Create special offers or incentives for bulk or repeat purchases for past customers only in a letter or post card.
Pick [...]

Make 2008 a better year for your Chicago business. Get a FREE website review from a small business marketing agency in Chicago. USA Today says, Nearly $670 in online sales were recorded on December 12th, 2007. Follow these 10 resolutions and your business will be on the way to more website traffic and [...]

Enquiro has an interesting post in their blog.
4000 Ads a Day, and Counting. It speaks of the over 4,000 marketing messages your customer receives each day. It’s a hard pill to swallow for small business owners in
Interruptive marketing is getting so overwhelming that even when you Tivo a commercial, the marketers have figured out a [...]