For a small business or a new startup, marketing can be a real challenge. It’s not just the financial aspect; it’s also finding the right channels to get your brand in front of the potential customers you’re after. While some businesses have found success in outlandish publicity stunts, we don’t recommend such a dramatic approach. Continue reading “Content Marketing: Developing Your Brand With Consistency and Regularity”
Category: Customer Communication
The Art of Creating Compelling Email Invitations
For many organizations, corporate events form a key part of the overall marketing strategy. Since the advent of email, it’s no longer necessary to spend money on fancy paper invitations and the associated postage. However, that doesn’t mean that style and etiquette are thrown out the window with a slightly less formal medium. Whether your target audience is potential employees, business partners or customers, crafting an effective email invitation is an art. Here are some best practices to help you create compelling copy for email invitations: Continue reading “The Art of Creating Compelling Email Invitations”
Are You Creating, or Removing, Barriers for People to Buy Your Product/Service?
Sometimes I think the most simple thing that we can do as businesspeople and marketers is to “put ourselves in the shoes” – literally – of our prospects and customers. Are we making it easy to buy? Or are we setting up unintentional barriers, however “slight,” that may interfere with – or obliterate – the purchasing process? Continue reading “Are You Creating, or Removing, Barriers for People to Buy Your Product/Service?”
Being (Appropriately) Social Online: The Etiquette of Social Media Engagement
As the name suggests, social media is often a very informal means of conveying information. It’s familiar, colloquial and often has a personal touch – it’s social. So, when you’re using social media to support your business’ marketing needs, how should you behave? What’s the appropriate etiquette? Continue reading “Being (Appropriately) Social Online: The Etiquette of Social Media Engagement”
What South Park Can Teach Us About Transparency in Advertising
As we’ve discussed so often, content is king when it comes to modern online advertising. One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to provide fresh, relevant content that is interesting and desirable to your target market. This isn’t advertising, because you’re not directly promoting your product or service. The goal is to entice audiences to visit your site and keep coming back because you provide a useful service. Hopefully they’ll look around your site a bit and start to develop a strong impression of your brand, whether it’s because they see you as an expert or because they feel that you represent the same values they do.
But there’s a line between content and advertising that is often crossed, and when that line is crossed, we end up with what is commonly referred to as native advertising. Continue reading “What South Park Can Teach Us About Transparency in Advertising”
Rebranding? Make It Pay!
Recently, we discussed the sincere contemplation and soul-seeking that should go into any decision to rebrand your business. Entrepreneur’s infographic “The 8 Must-Follow Rules for Rebranding Your Company” notes that competition and a changing audience are two primary reasons for rebranding, and points out some successes and failures among a few big-name brands.
So, even though we’ve covered this, it can’t be overstated: think long and hard about rebranding. Still want to rebrand? Ok, here’s how we suggest going about it. Continue reading “Rebranding? Make It Pay!”
Twitter: Beyond Promotion
Like most forms of social media, Twitter is largely used by businesses to promote a message, product or service. However, there are a number of uses for Twitter beyond purely promotional activities. Twitter, and other social media tools, can actually provide big benefits to businesses in multiple ways. Some of the ways we have used Twitter outside of traditional marketing include the following: Continue reading “Twitter: Beyond Promotion”
The One Thing You Need to Do to Build Your Brand: Walk the Talk!
PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S. chairman Robert Moritz has discussed the issue of engaging younger employees in an article for Harvard Business Review titled “The U.S. Chairman of PwC on Keeping Millennials Engaged.” While the article contains a number of intriguing insights, one point that stood out from a marketing perspective was a comment Moritz made in relation to how an organization and its leaders are perceived to reflect the stated values of that company. Continue reading “The One Thing You Need to Do to Build Your Brand: Walk the Talk!”
Direct Mail Part II: Tips and Tricks for Making Direct Mail Work for You
In a recent blog post we discussed the great potential inherent in the oft-overlooked marketing strategy of direct mail. We discussed how direct mail has a more personal feeling and how it can grab the recipient’s attention more effectively than an email, which may be ignored or filtered into junk mail or spam folders. Hopefully we converted some skeptics.
Now we’d like to take a deeper dive to look at specific tips and tricks for making direct mailing campaigns work for your organization, something covered in greater depth in our book “Direct Mail in the Digital Age.” Continue reading “Direct Mail Part II: Tips and Tricks for Making Direct Mail Work for You”
Brand Building for Service Professionals: Some Practical Tips
We recently received an inquiry from a physician regarding ways to develop and manage his online brand, and it seemed like a good time to take a look at brand building tips for online brands for professionals in general. Whether you’re a physician, an attorney, an accountant, a business consultant or any other type of service professional, your business’ brand is necessarily tied closely to your own personal brand. We wrote extensively on this topic as it relates to the legal profession in “Business Development and Marketing for Lawyers”; however, the concepts are applicable to any profession. Continue reading “Brand Building for Service Professionals: Some Practical Tips”