February 2012
1 post
3 tags
Meeting Vs. Making →
An interesting quick post from Seth Godin.
January 2012
1 post
4 tags
Website Smackdown: Which Homepage Wins? →
Check out this article from Inc.com. Good reading, especially if web design and navigation are your responsibility (or interest).
August 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Stop Following the Leader, Create Something
Too many of us marketers are complacent to simply consume what is produced for us. We look at industry trends, and follow the ones that are successful. However, very few marketers actually create. In a creative field like marketing, I’m surprised at this “follow the leader” mentality that has emerged lately.
I don’t mean to insult the accountants and financial wizards of...
2 tags
“We fail when we fall in love and believe there is no next step.”
– Seth Godin
June 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Top 10 ways to tilt your campaign From Crowdtilt →
Here is a very nice post from the folks at CrowdTilt discussing some advice on promotional campaigns. This is good stuff, well worth the read…
crowdtilt:
Here are a few quick tips on how to get your Crowdtilt campaign started off on the right foot.
1. Never stop promoting the campaign.
Send e-mail, facebook updates, or tweets to your friends and family. One of the single most important...
8 tags
Why Every Marketer Should Have a Swipe File
First of all, you may be asking “what is a swipe file”? Basically a swipe file is a journal of ideas, keywords, concepts, etc that you’ve taken from other sources which you may or may not use in your own business.
You might be thinking to yourself ”that sounds kind of…. evil”. Well, what can I say, it kind of is. But that’s not to say that you...
April 2011
2 posts
2 tags
How to Use Twitter as a Marketing Channel
Here is an interesting graphic that I’ve taken from the MindJumpers blog.
10 tags
Developing Intellectual Firepower
I was doing my rounds, checking out the usual marketing blogs the other day, and found an interesting article on Robert Middleton’s site Action Plan Marketing about what he called intellectual firepower. Basically he talks about how in order to be successful you have to put in the work. This is all really easy to agree with; I’ve always been a fan of hard work. The truth of the matter...
March 2011
4 posts
20 tags
How to Alienate Fans and Lose Millions of Dollars...
Anyone that knows me, knows that I’m a gamer. You can read all about it on my other blog. Sometimes I spend some time looking through videos on YouTube of games that I’m interested in buying so that I can see if they’re worth the purchase or not. Why then are video game companies forcing YouTubers to take down videos of playthroughs and such? Don’t they understand that this...
10 tags
Study: Mature Consumers Less Likely to Cut Back →
Check out this link from the Marketing Charts website. It’s a new study that shows that older consumers are less likely to cut back on products and services than their younger counterparts. Even if you don’t specifically target older demographics, understanding this data may be worth some money to you and your company. The folks at Marketing Charts have their own ideas about why this...
3 tags
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
– Walt Disney
4 tags
The Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization →
If you’re new to Search Engine Optimization, or just want a recap, check this out. It’s a free online manual from SEOMOZ (a company that provides SEO tools). Very cool stuff. Know any other guides or places of knowledge? Drop your links in the comments below and share the knowledge.
January 2011
2 posts
7 tags
Be Solution Oriented
It’s very easy to complain about something. All you have to do is point out faults and you’re done. But to actually be useful to your company, you need to be focused on actionable issues that you can solve. You need to be solution oriented. This means that instead of just looking at what is wrong, you need to focus on what you can do to correct those errors, mistakes, problems, etc....
6 tags
Be Aggressive
If you want business, you have to be willing to do what it takes to get it. The days of sitting back and waiting for your phone to ring are over (and have been over for a long time). Not only do you need to actively look for new opportunities, you need to know when and how to negotiate. Why let some new business walk out the door, when you could easily come to some sort of agreement. I think many...
December 2010
1 post
6 tags
Traditional Weapons of Marketing Part 3:...
You may be thinking, sponsorship isn’t really that big of a weapon. Yeah, tell that to Subway who for years has been beating us over the head with the story of Jared. Jared is a guy that reportedly lost a ton of weight by walking to a local subway and eating one of their sandwiches every day. Now he’s basically the face of Subway. Sponsorship can help you communicate to your intended...
November 2010
2 posts
7 tags
More about advertising
I struggled to make a point about advertising the other day, but there is really quite a bit more to the discussion than what I had originally posted. One of my friends saw the post and sent me a link to a recent article by buysight.com (thanks Francisco). They post a graphic and host a discussion about how advertising has changed over the last 50 years or so.
This is some interesting stuff, so...
1 tag
Traditional Weapons of Marketing Part 2:...
We all know what advertising is, so there really isn’t much to say here. The first thing most people think of when you talk about marketing is advertising. It’s been such a big tool for marketers in the past, and continues to be one of the dominant weapons in the arsenal. Over time though, the nature of advertising has changed quite a bit. In the old days, you simply had to reach a...
October 2010
5 posts
22 tags
Traditional Weapons of Marketing Part 1: Marketing...
Check out any marketing blog today and you’ll see pages of posts about social media and relationship marketing. While social media is a very important and effective tactic, I think we all need to step back and realize that it will take more than one tactic to win in this game called marketing. While you may say that traditional marketing is not as effective as it has been in the past, I...
9 tags
Profiting from your competitors
A while back, some information came to my attention that just made me smile my evil marketer smile. It was something I had never really thought of before, but is a real no-brainer common sense move. I’m not going to name any names, because that’s not the point. Apparently this company has learned a way to make some bucks off of its competition. Let me explain how…
Company A owns...
4 tags
6 tags
September 2010
2 posts
14 tags
Is the obvious next step social retailing?
I read an article in the Dallas Morning News today about retailers using Facebook as a platform for building online stores. You can read the article online here. People have been attempting to monetize social media since the phenomenon began, but this is the most direct effort I’ve seen. With over 50 million people active on Facebook, there’s plenty of incentive for retailers to get in...
11 tags
Understand your customers mindset
Everyone likes to think that they understand their customers, but how many of us really try to completely understand the customers mindset? Every year, Beloit College puts together a “mindset list” describing the thoughts and mindset of their incoming freshmen class. Why would they do this? So that their professors will be able to discuss their topics with relevance, and...
July 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Asking for the referral
Referral’s are good. In consulting, the hardest thing to do is finding the next job. The work itself is usually no problem, but it’s always difficult to find companies that can use my services, and then even more difficult to convince them to hire me. This is where referrals can really help. A proper referral system can have business steadily coming your way. But how do you implement...
“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the...”
– Douglas Adams
1 tag
Corporate Excuses →
Here is an interesting and pretty funny link that discusses corporate excuses. One of my favorites is Nintendo “misjudged excitement”. That’s right up there with wardrobe malfunction.
June 2010
1 post
20 tags
Social Media for Business to Business Companies
I was going over some data at the marketing charts website and was kind of surprised to see a report stating that business to business companies don’t have much of a social media presence. I read the report, and it got me thinking. What could these companies accomplish with social media, and how should they use it to their advantage? It seems we (as marketers) focus alot on business to...
May 2010
7 posts
5 tags
Three requirements for a satisfying job
I read alot of blogs during the day, and came across a very interesting post on the My Money blog discussing the three requirements for a satisfying job. They didn’t come up with these all by themselves; it comes from observations made in the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. To be honest, I haven’t read the book yet, so I have no idea if it’s good or not....
8 tags
How to create a lifelong customer and brand... →
Like many young students, Helen was learning how to write letters for a class project, and she and her fellow students were given the task of writing to a company. Helen chose to write to one of her favorite companies, Nintendo. She explained that she was a big fan, and wrote that she had begged her parents to buy a Nintendo DS for her, which they refused to do. Check out this link to see her...
3 tags
Multiple Dumbnesses →
Here’s an interesting link from Seth Godin. He explains that we are all excellent at one type of intelligence (Bodily-kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Verbal-linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Intrapersonal, Visual-spatial, Musical, and Naturalistic). Of course this means that we are bad at the other 7 types of intelligence. This means that people may be viewing you (or me) as dumb, when really we...
13 tags
An orgy of marketing! Enjoy the results of...
Anyone that knows my dad knows that he’s a huge sports fan. He has season tickets to the Texas Rangers baseball games as well as the Dallas Mavericks basketball games, and never misses a game. He usually comes back from the game with some interesting stories, and I remember a few weeks ago he told me something that got my wheels turning. Let me tell you about it… So he was at the...
4 tags
“You can observe a lot just by watching.”
– Yogi Berra
4 tags
9 Critical Tasks Before Launching Your Small... →
By now, most business people understand the benefits of social media and especially blogging. A blog can help turn you into an authority on your given subject, it provides useful information to your customers that will keep them coming back to your site, it provides a way to interact with your customers, etc. When you are developing a blog for business, rather than just a hobby project, there are...
8 tags
That's one smart horse
So I was at a baseball game with my dad last week, watching the Texas Rangers against the Chicago White Sox (Texas blew the sweep). Since we got to the game early, I started flipping through the program and found something interesting. One of the articles promoted the blog of the team mascot, The Captain (a big furry horse). Wow, what a great idea! I wonder why more companies don’t have...
April 2010
12 posts
3 tags
“If you really think about it, marketing is ALL about influence.”
– Robert Middleton
19 tags
10 business tips for noobs
Everyone’s got to start somewhere, and no one becomes an expert overnight. Attending an excellent business school is a great place to start, but as they say, there’s no substitute for experience. In my career as a marketer so far I’ve had tons of experience both good and bad, so let me share what I’ve learned with you… 1. Be patient: I’ve talked about this...
5 tags
The A-Z of Professional Blogging Tools →
Here’s a link from a fantastic website called Problogger that lists tons of online tools for you fellow bloggers out there to use. Within the link is a list of recommended tools that is also worth looking at. Do yourself a favor and check out these tools and see what each of them can do to help you.
Do you have any suggestions that aren’t listed in the link? What are your favorite...
9 tags
Remember what is important (pick your battles) →
I was playing around on Facebook today, and I saw a link to this news story which was posted by one of my friends (thanks for the link Mary). Okay (for those of you that can’t / don’t want to risk clicking on the link) so basically this lady was celebrating her 35th birthday with her 8 year old daughter and so they decided to dress up as princesses and go to Disneyland in Paris. She...
5 tags
Who judges your work →
Here’s a link from Seth Godin that asks a very good question. Who judges your work? He’s correct, when we’re young, we let everyone judge our work and deem it worthy or not. This will shape your attitude and progress for years to come. As we get older, we should become more selective about who’s opinion is valuable.
Personally, I think it pays to have a smart group of...
4 tags
Good marketing doesn't have to be expensive
I went out this weekend with my girlfriend, and we decided to grab some food before visiting with her sister. The place we decided on was Eddie’s Deli, a local place that specializes in Chicago style hot dogs. I heard about this place from my girlfriend’s brother-in-law, who is originally from Chicago. I’m from Dallas, TX, born and raised, so before he took me to this place, I...
5 tags
Stop squandering your social media opportunities →
Here’s a link worth checking out if you are involved in social media. I’ve seen alot of corporate social media pages, and I have to agree. Most companies still don’t really get it. There’s so much that you can do with social media, but most just exist. Check out what Mikal Belicove on the American Express Open Forum has to say about it.
4 tags
10 ways for small businesses to use LinkedIn →
Thanks to the Marketing4Nerds blog for bringing this to my attention. If you haven’t already, you should pay them a visit. If you own a small business, you should already be familiar with what LinkedIn can do for you. Check out this link for some tips on what you can do to maximize what you get out of using it, then come back here so we can discuss.
30 tags
Know your enemy
Wise words from one of my favorite bands (Rage Against the Machine), “know your enemy”. In marketing, you are competing with other companies, and even industries (look at how movie theaters compete against DVD, and television) for scarce money. In order to succeed, you need to arm yourself with all the knowledge you can about your competition. You need to know their strengths,...
2 tags
“You learn more about yourself through adversity.”
– Clint Hurdle
6 tags
Vote with your wallet →
I’ve been saying it for years, and will probably say it again… People vote with thier wallets. Check out this link for an example. Remember my post “marketing is a game, and money is how we keep score.” That is exactly why descisions are made in business. If it makes money, doesn’t damage your brand, and isn’t illegal, then the answer is yes. It’s not...
10 tags
Dealing with failure
The sad truth is that at some point in your personal and/or professional life, you will encounter failure. Sometimes it comes when you lose a key client, or deal. Sometimes it’s when you let someone important in your life down. Sometimes the door closes behind you and you get that realization that you’re about to hear some bad news. It’s hard. I know all too well from experience....
March 2010
12 posts
4 tags
Let's talk about patience
It’s been a while since my last post, so I guess now is a good time to discuss patience. It’s one of the most crucial personality traits that a good marketer must have. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a good marketing campaign end prematurely simply because the results didn’t come fast enough. Let’s get this straight, it takes a while for marketing to...
3 tags
Telling a Story on the Label →
Check out this link from Seth’s blog. This is a great example of using your product packaging to tell a compelling story. Remember, marketing is a relationship, and telling a story that grabs attention is an excellent way to establish this relationship.
Check out the link, and let me know what you think in the comments below.
14 tags
The seven types of websites
We all know that a good website is essential to branding and marketing your company online. Here is a list of the seven different types of websites that currently exist…
The informational / brochure site: This type of page is intended to provide information to the user. They usually include a home page, products page, FAQ, testimonials, and a contact us page.
Opt-In page: This type of site...