If you’re trying to take your business to the next level, let’s talk marketing. In fact, let’s chat about the greatest marketing of all time, word of mouth marketing.

Common sense says I market, I get customers, I give them great service. And that’s certainly one way to do it. That’s the path that gave us advertising, postcards, slogans and logos.

Unfortunately, many of us are stuck in that protocol.

A lot of people use social media….. A LOT! Most are just playing and having fun. Others are trying to leverage Social Media to increase engagement. For those folks, here are five simple tips:

1.Start with a plan. Three things, what’s your message, who is your audience and which platforms are they using.

I’m teaching a class Thursday called Setting the course for 2022. It’s primarily, I guess, a business planning class. I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a life class. I think it’s a class about intention. I think it’s a class about being on the path to having a great life.

Is that a little heavy? A little overdone? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The choices we make in our business, our family, our friends, what we choose to believe, and the path we choose to follow are all the manifestations of the course we set in our lives.

Let’s talk about learning. There are tens of millions salespeople in this country and most of them are just marking time, just getting by. A few, maybe less than 10%, maybe less, want to be the best they can be every single day. They believe in growth, they believe in excellence, they believe in learning.

Yesterday we focused on identifying your strengths as one of the three ways we can utilize them to catapult our business. Here are #2 and 3

2. Once you have identified your strengths, closely look at how those strengths might help someone who works with you. If you're a fabulous listener, how could that help the people you work with. Maybe you're the product/market expert. Surely you can identify ways that would help someone who worked with you

There are basically three steps in utilizing your strengths to catapult your business: identification, examination, outreach. Let’s handle one today and the others tomorrow.

1. Identification. This is touchy. To identify our strengths, we must first be self aware enough to know what they are. That may or may not come easy for everyone, so here are five tips to uncovering your strengths.

Last week, I participated in the Coldwell Banker Sales Rally and Marketing Roadshow, something I haven't done in, maybe 13 years. While it was a nice opportunity to take a trip down memory lane with some old friends and also meet new ones, it was mostly a chance to talk about one of my favorite topics: your strengths, and why they are so important in your business, your ability to do your job effectively, AND maybe the rest of your life.

When I am designing a Keynote slide and wish to use a picture to anchor a few words of text as well as my verbal message, it’s important to know how to use the Arrange feature. The arrange feature let’s the user decide which should be in the foreground and which should be sent to the back. Without this feature your message would get stacked onto itself and could be lost.

One of The keys to success is a person’s ability to know what’s important, to know the things they should be spending time on as opposed to the things that simply suck away time. It takes several steps to do this well: 1) having a plan to guide you, 2) being able to prioritize within that plan, and 3) actually DOing the more important thing.

Yesterday’s driver rant has given me an idea. Fully enforce, with officers, cameras, whatever it takes, two things: speeding (let the demarcation line be 7 miles over), andrunning red lights (one of the most dangerous habits that just seems SOOOO common). Mail the tickets, charge the fines, take away the licenses. MOSTLY charge the fines.

We could balance the budget in a year.