Sway Engine Marketing

Great writing is one of those things we take for granted, because great writers make it look so easy. If it’s truly great, we absorb the message without thinking about the actual words. We never really notice great writing unless it’s side-by-side with bad writing.

A ‘lab environment’ is a low-risk, low-expectation means of trying new strategies. The goal is to learn valuable lessons and tinker with new ideas.

An innovation network is simply a group of people who constantly provide you with new ideas and stimulate your imagination.

A Technology Review Committee led by employees who understand the company’s mission and strategy is an effective way to vet new technologies and recommend how a company should incorporate them.

Remember that over time, the same marketing mix will not produce the same results.

You can influence your brand’s perception among customers, but it starts with identifying what your perception of the brand is or should be.

Successful brand management means knowing when to let go. However, this doesn’t mean companies don’t have any control over what their brands mean.

A brand is essentially emotional and ambiguous, what David Ogilvy called “The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.” That said, there are ways to make the intangible more concrete, and to make sure your brand identity isn’t left to chance.

It isn’t easy to find a silver lining in postage increases, but I’m going to try.

What criteria do you use for choosing the most effective promotional products? Is it price? I hope it’s not price.

Two companies execute the same inbound marketing strategy in exactly the same way. Each company authors a whitepaper on the same topic. The whitepaper is offered free to a targeted mailing list. The same number of people are intrigued by the offer and request the free whitepaper. Both companies follow up with these prospects in exactly the same way. Yet, one company converts significantly more business than the other. Want to know why?

Marketing isn’t for small businesses. It’s for small businesses that want to grow. If you want to grow, if you want your revenues to go from $500,000 to $50 million, then you better start marketing and branding your company now.

One of the great challenges of conference management is getting people to attend. What a struggle conference marketing can be, especially when times are tough and everyone tries to save money on travel and lodging. All the old marketing message and techniques no longer seem to work. Fortunately, there is a new way to attract people to your conferences, but the method is counterintuitive. It takes a new mode of thinking and a desire to reach out to more prospects than ever before.

Yes, there are successful business models built around aggregated content, but Hearst and other companies aren’t counting on those models. When you think about it, they can’t.

The better the content on your website or in your newsletter, the more likely people will find out about your company and start to develop a relationship with it. However, that can take a long, long time, and you probably don’t want to wait forever. So don’t discount traditional marketing techniques. They may not be as effective as content marketing in the long-term, but they’re invaluable (and necessary) when you’re just starting to build an audience…unless you have a few years.

Before you start planning the next marketing campaign, here are questions to ask about your last marketing campaign.

There are too many whitepapers floating around, and most of them are too broad to be effective. Niche marketing with whitepapers is more likely to produce actual sales.

A good place to find marketing messages that work is by asking your sources for ideas. Your sources fall into at least two categories: Employees and Customers.

A marketing template is the mandatory design, layout and copy applied to your collateral, whether it’s postcards, brochures, posters, promotional products or websites. Inherent in every template is the ability to customize some, but not all, portions of the collateral. Every industry uses some version of templates. For example, when you buy a car, you choose the color but not the chassis.

Many email marketers see requests for more information as ends, but what if none of those requests converted into actual sales?