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.
The Bright Side of Postage Increases
It isn’t easy to find a silver lining in postage increases, but I’m going to try.
How to Choose the Right Promotional Product
What criteria do you use for choosing the most effective promotional products? Is it price? I hope it’s not price.
Promises Produce Interest, but Content Converts
Many email marketers see requests for more information as ends, but what if none of those requests converted into actual sales?
Marketing Templates: Good or Bad?
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.
Let Your Sources Suggest the Marketing Message
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.
Niche Marketing with Whitepapers
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.
What Did You Learn from Your Last Marketing Campaign?
Before you start planning the next marketing campaign, here are questions to ask about your last marketing campaign.
Okay, Content Isn’t the Only Thing
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.
Brands Do Better With Original Content
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.
Content Marketing Only Works if the Content Is Good
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
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.
Conference Marketing with Content
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.