Our RAPID Benchmark has now been run on over 500 Australian SME(Small to Medium) Enterprises and the results have been astonishing to say the least. Commentary on the benchmark was featured in this month's 10th Anniversary Virgin Blue In-flight magazine. Australian businesses are only doing on average about half of the important marketing activities that they could be doing to grow their business. Some key gaps include not researching customers needs and wants, not communicating to their database, not writing a marketing plan and not measuring the return on investment from their marketing. We'll replicate this benchmark in the USA shortly to compare. In the meantime, Australian SME Business owners need to do more marketing to help their businesses flourish.

Marketing has no off switch

I've recently published my first book, "Marketing has no off switch" - in this book we introduce the five step RAPID Marketing System - Research, Analyse, Plan, Implement and Detect - that we use successfully to help our clients boom their businesses. Also in the book, we provide practical exercises for the reader to complete and review real life case studies where application of the RAPID Marketing System have resulted in significant growth. I'm also running seminars in Sydney and Melbourne to groups of small business owners to share this information with them. Small business is the backbone of our economy and the better they market themselves, the strong the economy.