Tips To Market Your Business Effectively

This is a contributed post to JMLalonde.com. For more information on contributing a post, please see our contributing policies.

When it comes to your business, it’s important to do what you can to help further its success. Part of that success comes from how you market your business. It’s worth looking at your current marketing strategy and working on how best to achieve a better action plan. Here are some tips to market your business effectively.

Know Your Customers

It’s good to know your customers when it comes to marketing because it’s going to influence how effective your campaign is when hitting the right audience. If you’re not looking at who your customers are, whether it’s their interests or where they live, you’re going to find that many of your promotional campaigns and marketing opportunities will likely miss the mark. There’s so much data available thanks to the internet, and most of it is free to access. Google Analytics is a great example for those who are looking at selling and marketing through its website. It’s good to take the time in understanding who your customers are, what they’re about, and how you can best market your product or service towards them.

Quotes And Leadership Lessons From Top Gun

A Reel Leadership Flashback Article

Muscle-bound guys. Volleyball on the beach. Fast jets. It’s gotta be an 80’s movie. And it is!

Top Gun, the classic Tom Cruze, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, and Meg Ryan movie is jam-packed with leadership lessons. With Top Gun 2 releasing soon, I thought looking at the leadership lessons in Top Gun would be a fun experiment.

You cannot walk away from Top Gun without thinking of the ways you can lead better.

Anthony Edwards and Tom Cruise in Top Gun 1986

Top Gun will help you become a better leader… If you watch it with a Reel Leadership eye.

I know you. You can do this. You will do this!

So, let’s dive into the leadership lessons in Top Gun.

Quotes And Leadership Lessons From Top Gun

1. Shiny objects can blind you to the dangers around you:

Cougar (John Stockwell) and Merlin (Tim Robbins) were pursuing a MIG fighter plane. They were on its tail only to lose the plane.

Are You Addicted To Struggle Porn?

We already know traditional pornography is dangerous. Watching porn changes the way our minds are wired and gives us an unhealthy view of sex. There’s even more issues with porn than I can list.

Men, especially, struggle with porn. The allure of a beautiful woman. The fantasies that get to play out in front of you. And the lust of the heart. These can be so hard to resist but we must.

Woman leaning against a wall with her head down

Photo by Eric Ward

Be careful of porn. Porn is dangerous. It destroys lives and relationships. There’s another kind of porn that destroys lives as well.

This porn is what I like to call Struggle Porn.

What Is Struggle Porn?

Struggle porn is a growing problem for leaders and entrepreneurs. Struggle porn has recently crept into our lives because of masterful copywriters and their knowledge of what draws people in.

5 Big Data Mistakes That Could Cost Your Company Big Time

This is a contributed post to JMLalonde.com. For more information on contributing a post, please see our contributing policies.

As an entrepreneur, you’ve likely had your fill of buzzwords. From bottleneck to Blue Sky Thinking, from Granularity to Red Flags, from SEO to Advertorial, your days are likely littered with such cliches. One of the greatest challenges is separating the useful, the actionable and the timeless from the fads and the deliberately bamboozling jargon. Big Data is one example of something that needs to be taken seriously… despite its somewhat obnoxious and buzzword-y title. 

As a business leader, you take insight wherever you can get it. From books and movies to anecdotal conversations with your customers. You know that the right insight at the right time can help you to implement the policies and procedures that could lead to sustained business growth and prosperity. Especially in this difficult time when many businesses are floundering, all are trying to engage their customers in an age where consumer confidence is low, and all want to position themselves as trustworthy and earnest in the eyes of their clientele. 

The Power Of Self-Reflection

If you could go back in time and communicate with yourself, what would you tell your younger self? Michelle Hoverson had this idea and acted on it.

Out of her idea was birthed the book Mentoring Moments With Myself: Letters To My Younger Self About Life, Faith, Love, And Leadership. In this book, Michelle writes letters to her younger self. She shares the insights she has gained from the painful and joyful experiences she endured.

Two men looking at a MacBook laptop

The book is a joy to read.

More than that, Mentoring Moments With Myself allows you to reflect on her stories and think about what you would say to your younger self. These moments of reflection are introspective and help you clarify your thinking.

I enjoyed Mentoring Moments With Myself so much I wanted to share with you my takeaways from the book.