Every once in a while, I’ll come across a post suggesting that social media is dead. With all of the recent buzz about Twitter—given Elon Musk’s takeover of the company and predictions of doom—I wondered if marketers’ usage of social media is declining. The short answer is no.
A longer answer is that while social media still makes up a significant part of most marketers’ communication efforts, how they use it and which channels they use have shifted. That is likely to continue. The effectiveness of marketing channels ebbs and flows; newer channels and newer entrants to the space tend to reap the benefits of early adoption, while laggards may never experience the same results. This means that marketers of all kinds—and especially content marketers—need to stay up-to-date on these shifts and continually evaluate their social media strategies to ensure they’re making optimal use of these platforms. In this column, I look at some insights from experts in the field about how their social media use is shifting and how they stay on top of new trends. Continue reading “The Role of Social Media in Your Marketing Efforts”
Marketing is a must-have for businesses of any kind and any size. In fact, all businesses are using marketing to some degree whether they know it or not.
Whenever I’m called upon to offer a critique on or advice about a company or consultant’s copy – whether it’s on a web site, in a brochure, an ad, a blog, or whatever – the first thing I do is read through the copy to see whether the focus is on “we/me” or “you/your.” Most of the copy I look at is the former. A quick, easy and relatively painless way to improve it 
I’ve been doing a 
There’s a raging — and quite interesting — debate that I continue to see taking place in various online forums about the relationship between PR and marketing. I’ve found it especially interesting because I recently was engaged in the same debate while teaching PR courses at a local university. Surprisingly to me, there is a group that believes quite strongly that PR is not part of marketing: that it is a separate and distinctly different function within an organization.
As businesses slowly begin to open back up, many find themselves doing business far differently than they may have before the pandemic. Safety is top of mind. Not all customers feel comfortable at this point, interacting in person with the businesses they may have frequented without fear in the past. That means for many companies, a combination of in-store/in-person and online or socially distanced interactions. Many are operating on the fly, figuring things out as they go. But now may be an excellent time to take a step back and update, or create, a marketing plan to help you move forward more strategically. 
In the digital age of rapidly increasing technology and here-today-gone-tomorrow fads in fashion, popular culture and consumer tastes, it can seem like the rules of marketing are constantly changing, rendering obsolete what may have been sound advice just 10 or 20 years ago. But despite the near-constantly changing winds at the edges and frontiers of the marketing industry, the vast majority of the core principals remain unchanged and have stood the test of time. 