Unfortunately, there have been many small business failures even though they have had unique products or services with excellent location to market them.

Contrary to popular belief, this situation can be linked more to inadequate marketing and promotion rather than an economic downturn.

So often, some small business owners tend to overlook the importance of exposure and promoting their businesses.

Here are some ways to promote your business without investing a lot of money.

Seasoned entrepreneurs know that a proper corporate branding strategy is critical in developing a product or service to bring to market. They know that building a successful brand is a multifaceted task that takes time.

But suppose your ingenious eight year old has come up with a promising idea…

How do you teach the concept of corporate branding to a budding young entrepreneur like him?

So you’re advertising for a new job, you mention the businesses benefits in general – the pension scheme, annual leave entitlement, salary, progression or training opportunities.

But what about those hidden extras which are often so important.

The things you don’t mention in interview but staff will find out about once you start.  How important are these seemingly small creature comforts?

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are commonly used to act as a benchmark for performance.

Christmas is well and truly over and staff are definitely in that January Blues mood.

Nothing to look forward to over the next few months and no bank holidays often contribute to the rise in holiday bookings at this time of the year.

This makes it all the more important for businesses to look at how they are preparing for the influx of annual leave requests and how to cover the holiday periods.

Focusing now on planning holiday cover will decrease the panic of holiday cover later in the year and will give staff guidance on their entitlements.

So we’ve all heard about recycling and how everyone has a responsibility to recycle as much as possible.

But from a business perspective this can sometimes be costly in terms of both time and money.

So why should you invest in creating an ethos of recycling in your workplace?

We see many businesses now claim to be ethical and green but what does that really mean?

And how far do you have to go to be able to make that claim?

So Winter is well and truly upon us.  The cold weather has arrived, snow has come down in most parts of the country and people are starting to stock up on their winter essentials.

And there are many promotional products you could use to help customers through these cold, cold nights.

Items they would truly appreciate with the weather getting colder by the day.

So here’s my top 5 winter promotional items.

Having spent the past week or 2 with 9 spread sheets full of supplier, customer and all our past order data and no where for them to go. I set about selecting a new piece of software for us to use as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

The term CRM is used very broardly in the tech world to describe a whole maner of things.  Usually anything to do with tasks and opportunities and project management etc is scooped into the term CRM.

Something we have been careful not to do with our new order process system is bulk it out with loads of features that go beyond what we originally designed it for.

ProMart is brilliant for managing orders start to finish and knowing where everything is upto.  However we needed to look at a database system that could look after customer interactions and was fast and easy to search for contacts and viewing all the extra information about a client that can be stored. 

Over the Past 3 Months Promo Gifts has moved onto a custom built order system, we have developed ProMart specifically for our company and the way in which we work.

It’s so far taken us 3 years to get to this point and the project has snowballed into a highly automated user friendly system that can provide quotes to our clients far faster than we have ever been able to do before.  

Just wanted to publish this article as a Mr Preson Moore just emailed my to give me the answer to a problem I had been searching for some months back.  We had many many spam registers on one of our pages and I had nearly 3000 users to manually delete from the database.