We wish you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year in 2012 and look forward to talking again soon.

Because we all work hard to develop our businesses, achievements seem exciting to us. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be so exciting for anyone else.

Take awards schemes, for example. It could be a big achievement to win an award in a specific sector, but if a journalist receives awards stories from three other businesses at the same time, it’ll seem like just another award accompanied by yet another photo of more people in evening dress.

Grabbing people’s attention and making the story individual is the challenge. Sometimes it can be really easy and at others it can be more of a challenge.

Start by thinking what is likely to excite your customers or target audience: they are the ones you want to impress. It’s also a good idea to analyse the types of story that specific publications publish so you can develop an angle that will fit in with their style.

What’s the point of this? To ensure that any press release or material you produce has got a better chance of success.

Time and effort spent on producing something that is unlikely to grab people’s attention is probably better spent on doing something that will work.

With a bit of thought and practice it becomes easier to identify an interesting angle for your story as you learn what excites your readers and what journalists want to publish. This will improve your chances of obtaining valuable PR coverage.

Reasons often given for inaction include lack of time or money, but perhaps another reason is that many people don’t know where to start.

This is a shame because there are many useful actions businesses can take that are quick, easy and don’t cost anything.

One way of looking at marketing is as storytelling. People love stories and somewhere in every business there is at least one interesting story to tell.

Stories break the ice when you’re networking, help you build business relationships, enable you to sell your products and services without realising you’re selling and can win you valuable PR coverage. A story can translate into many different formats.

Can anyone tell a story?

Yes. When I am working as a journalist, the part I enjoy most is when someone calls up out of the blue and, sometimes hesitantly, starts telling me a fascinating story about their business, products or services.

I search for stories like this to interest and excite my readers. Often these stories are more interesting than press releases which some PR agencies write at considerable expense to their clients. (There are also very good PR agencies and we like to think we write a mean press release ourselves.)

So as a result of picking up the phone and telling their story that business has obtained valuable newspaper coverage. It can and does work.

How can this help us start marketing?

It’s just one example of what we can achieve when we think about it and take that first step to do something. Yes, pay marketing specialists when you have the budget, but don’t let that stop you before then.

What is important is to start telling our story. If we don’t, no one will hear it.

In these z2ztips I want to share some ordinary observations on marketing that I hope will be useful. If they help just one business, that’ll be reward enough.

If we stretched our imaginations – really stretched them – I suppose these days a problem with a car engine’s ignition could create a comic scene, as in silent movies when the motorist’s head emerged from under the bonnet covered in soot and grime, which could end up on YouTube and create PR exposure.

Yes? No? OK.

If an engine’s ignition is not properly set, the car won’t start.

If a joke isn’t set up properly, the punchline won’t be funny.

If a press release is sent to media contacts after the deadline, it won’t achieve any PR exposure.

In all cases, the secret is . . .

. . . wait for it . . .

. . . timing.

You’ll notice we don’t have a humour blog category. You’ll be relieved to know we’re not planning one either.

Even if you don’t worry about commas in the right place or correct use of apostrophes, proofreading ensures that basic information is correct.

This is what happened in several cases where text was not proofread properly:

1. Editorial staff accidentally mistyped a contact phone number for an event listing so that a private individual was annoyed by nuisance phone calls and the event organiser lost customers.
2. Marketing staff at a theatre provided incorrect performance dates for a newspaper events guide so readers could have missed out on seeing a production.
3. A PR agency included the logo of its client in a press release but never referred to it in the text, instead mentioning the parent company. The confusion required research into the relationship between the company and its parent to make sense of the press release.

Getting basic information right is essential. Proofreading often highlights simple but important errors. It also highlights confusion or unclear meaning where the reader has no idea what the writer is trying to say.

How much do errors and confusion cost businesses in lost customers or sales? Is it worth building time for proofreading into production schedules?

And all the time I seem to be exhorted to love this and love that. I must love parks or love my heart or cycling or fish or [pluck any word out of the air].

Some people in marketing must have fallen for the love concept big time.

I haven’t.

I like raspberries. I grow raspberries. I like picking and eating plump, juicy raspberries. I like making raspberry jam and raspberry sponges. I don’t love them though.

Nor do I love cars, confectionery, gadgets, television programmes, web sites, power tools or [insert randomly generated name of object].

I love those dear to me: my wife, my family and special people in my life.

This lazy marketing concept debases real love.

Does my wife really want to be placed on the same level as a manufactured dessert or a mass produced garment in a high street store?

Please stop it.

And now I’m going to make sure I don’t say I love this or that so that each time I do use this special word it conveys my full meaning.