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The Evangelist Marketing Minute is a weekly thinking launch point that is always short enough to read in about 60 seconds. It covers marketing, branding, positioning, language, and public relations. Your email address is never shared, with anybody, for any reason.

Here are five major marketing improvements you can make — think of these as marketing resolutions for the new year:

1. Simplify significantly.
2. Shift your focus from process and technology to emotion, lifestyle and value.
3. Change your press relations from pitch-centered to relationship-based.
4. Make sure your product or service name is easy to remember and communicate (create a nickname if it’s too late to change the whole name).
5. Ensure your marketing is based on the language of your customers’, not the language inside your conference rooms.

Attack them one at a time, moving each one forward significantly before moving on to the next one.

And here’s the key: incremental progress can be made in 15 minutes per day or less. Read that sentence twice, because it’s hugely important, and not just to your marketing. For example, you can simplify one page of your Web site in 15 minutes. Similarly, on another day, you can call or write one media member to help them and begin a relationship. The next day, call another.

Fifteen minutes is easy. It’s not threatening. It’s hard to justify avoiding. It’s only 15 minutes. And it’s a new year. Opportunity is everywhere. What’s stopping you? Will you improve your marketing?

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