Most companies engage in the marketing planning process. They set goals, identify programs and activities in which to engage, establish a budget and assign responsibilities. In the process, however, there’s one key element that’s often overlooked: strategy. According to the Content Marketing Institute, marketing strategy focuses on engaging an audience and driving profitable behaviors. When
Category: Marketing
A Primer of Marketing Communications Projects
An integrated and effective marketing plan consists of a variety of marketing tactics for communicating with your target audiences. There are hundreds of types of marketing communications available. Here’s a guide to help you determine what to use and why. Types of Marketing Communications Bylined Articles Informational articles and opinion columns position you and your company
5 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2016…from 2014
In 2014, digital marketing analyst Laura McLellan wrote about five predictions for 2016… yes, 2016 and not 2015. While the trends she identified applied to large companies (based on Gartner research), there are lessons for small and medium-sized business as well. Digital Marketing Predictions 1. Customer experience will be the battleground marketers are fighting over.
The Real Truth about Advertising and Articles
Pick up any magazine, and browse through the ads. What do you see? Catchy slogans, free-trial or limited-time offers and wild claims. In other words, companies make use of that medium to actively promote their products or services and try to persuade readers to buy them. But sometimes this backfires. At best, readers might overlook
Animate Your Marketing with Videos
Are you looking for a way to spice up your marketing? Try adding videos. Think about it. Which would you rather do? Spend 10-20 minutes reading a corporate brochure or 2-3 minutes watching an engaging video? The answer is clear. In fact, a Forbes Insights/Google survey discovered that if both text and video are available
Is it Time to Redesign Your Website?
As technology advances, the expectations of internet users advance with it. According to a Forbes article on top technology trends for 2014–2016, “A great digital experience is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a make-or-break point for your business as we more fully enter the digital age.” Does your site provide a “great digital experience” or
Ten do’s and don’ts for your annual report
Annual reports can be useful documents for your stakeholders—if they’re prepared properly. All too often, an annual report is a bland, meaningless collection of buzz words, truisms that apply to any business and vague promises of growth or innovation. To make your annual report a valuable document, here are 10 do’s and don’ts for your
Five invaluable communication tools
Today, there is no shortage of communication tools. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of the new apps and platforms that developers introduce every day for our smartphones, tablets, and even our sneakers to help us monitor our heart rates and count calories while exercising. However, too much can be a bad
Ebooks: Five advantages of paper over pixel
Ebook sales are a tsunami crashing onto the shores of the reading public. While some are saying that sales are slowing, that’s simply not true. As Eoin Purcell writes, One of the problems is that ebooks have become so large a market, more than $1 billion in the US alone in 2013, and have grown
Defining expectations clearly, part II
In my last post, we heard the story of an employee who had rubbed the board president and a few board members the wrong way with her overconfidence and perceived dismissiveness. The board president had given the employee’s manager instructions to solve the problem—only to immediately say that perhaps she had misjudged the employee, and
Proofreading: a forgotten art
I’ve noticed that in today’s business world, which can best be described by the adjective “now!” (exclamation mark and all), it’s easier than ever to make typographical errors—or worse: missing words, spelling errors, improper subject-verb tense agreement and more. The pressure to respond instantaneously causes our brains to move faster than our fingers can comply.
The Market Segment You Can’t Ignore
The hit television show “Mad Men” depicts the lives of New York City ad executives during a time in American history when women had little clout in the workplace, the economy, the home—you name it. Those times have changed, but it might be interesting, surprising and even shocking to know how much clout women wield
“The general erosion of editorial standards”
Lauren Indvik posted a piece on Mashable Business this week titled “Magazine Get Serious About Ecommerce” in which she examines the approaches a few different pubs have taken to combine editorial content with links to products in an effort to get consumers purchasing and offset declining print ad sales. In this piece, Indvik writes: It’s
Case Studies: Just the Facts, Ma’am
Most of us don’t remember when Detective Joe Friday from television’s Dragnet series in the 1950s said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.” This phrase, and its truncated version, “Just the facts, ma’am”, are pop culture buzz-phrases, surviving for more than a half-century. Ironically, the early days of television (and radio) were a time
Sell the Sizzle
About five years ago, Copyblogger Media CEO Brian Clark posted an entry on the copyblogger.com site titled “Discover Your Hidden Remarkable Benefit.” While the wording is a little cumbersome, a “remarkable hidden benefit” is something that sets your company apart from the competition. Clark gives two real-world examples of hidden remarkable benefits, those of Schlitz beer
Five tips for would-be reporters
More and more of the day’s news is being reported by rank amateurs. That’s right—rank amateurs: sheer, utter, total non-professionals, with no training in digging up the story or writing it up once they have it. This is not entirely a bad thing. In the world of smart phones and the Internet, amateurs can be
Media Observations
FTC to investigate Apple Since Gerri Knilan’s first post on the iPad, the Federal Trade Commisson has decided to launch an investigation into Apple’s policy of not allowing makers of competing devices to gather data from their ads on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. This data is considered indispensable, because it reveals how effective
