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Marketing Insights & Strategy

Feb 10
When Is Marketing Not Marketing?

When Is Marketing Not Marketing?

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Readings

When it comes to marketing there are a lot of ways to do it. And it’s wonderful to have so many opportunities but at the same time it can be so overwhelming that we end up with decision paralysis.

Marketing fundamentals may be the same: provide a good product or service that people need then get them to want it so they’ll buy it. But the mechanics of making that happen – the strategies and tactics that you’ll ultimately employ – will vary greatly.

Here are just a few things to consider about whether a marketing idea is good – for you.

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Jan 27
It's Time To Consider Your Business Super Fan Bubble

It’s Time To Consider Your Business Super Fan Bubble

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Readings

The super fan bubble is a collection of dedicated and loyal fans. Fans that will not only consume your content but take action on your behalf. They’ll buy your products, listen to your shows, share your tweets. The super fan bubble is great, but it can also be a plateau that slows growth.

The goal of any business endeavor is to continue to grow your audience or customers. So you need to cultivate relationships with the people in your super fan bubble while creating strategies to help you grow the bubble to include more super fans.

This is my perspective on getting out of your super fan bubble by collaborating with the competition.

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Jan 07

What Happens If Your Web Developer Dies? And Other Such Musings.

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Readings

Almost every business I came in contact with in 2014 had no idea where or how their business domain name was registered. Other people were paying vendors such as web developers or marketers but had no contract or work agreement. They simply paid and had no expectation of what they were to get in return.

In one case, a prospect of ours was paying three different companies for the same service – and they didn’t even need it.

Don’t let this be you! Here’s a short list of things that you should do before the end of January to assure business continuity and peace of mind in the new year.

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Jan 06
Skip The Marketing Resolutions. Lead With Results Instead.

Skip The Marketing Resolutions. Lead With Results Instead.

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Readings

Every year the gurus explode with books and blog posts telling you how to REALLY lose weight/get smarter/stop smoking/start running/volunteer more/work less.

I Googled “marketing resolutions” before writing this and discovered no shortage of advice for everything from “create a delightful mobile experience” to “be more consistent with marketing.” And while some of the advice is solid, most of it is all about the “what” and lacks a focus on the “why”.

So this year, do your business a favor and skip the resolutions. Try approaching your marketing from results first and see how the resolutions make – and keep – themselves.

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Dec 23
Butter & Beast Presents ‘Adapt and Reinvent: The Good, The Bad, and The Delicious’

Butter & Beast Presents ‘Adapt and Reinvent: The Good, The Bad, and The Delicious’

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Readings

Today’s short form podcast is a story that I wrote for Butter & Beast, a storytelling project hosted by my friend Téa Silvestre of The Story Bistro.

It’s 12 days of stories from entrepreneurs that tie a business tale into a recipe – perfect for sharing and eating during the holidays!

If you’d like to read the article or get my Arroz con Pollo recipe, visit ButterAndBeast.com. While you’re there, subscribe so you’ll be notified when the next story and recipe is published!

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Oct 29
Web, Search And Social Marketing: DIY Or CTM?

Web, Search And Social Marketing: DIY Or CTM?

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Readings

Ralph and I have a shared philosophy when it comes to things like home improvements, automobile repair and event planning. It’s the CTM philosophy and it involves one or the other of us picking up the phone to Call The Man.

It’s our generic way of saying, “Let someone else deal with it, preferably someone who knows what they’re doing.”

When it comes to marketing, there are some things you can DIY and others you definitely shouldn’t. Here’s what you can comfortably tackle (and when) and what you should think about hiring out (and why).

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Oct 15
Improve Your Marketing By Tapping Into Your Failures

Improve Your Marketing By Tapping Into Your Failures

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Readings

So many times businesses fail to gain momentum on their marketing because they want every campaign to be flawless. When a campaign takes an unintended left turn, a business becomes hesitant to try again.

While you should do everything you can within reason to avoid failures, missteps in marketing are inevitable.

I want to share three of our recent failures so that you can (hopefully) laugh along with us and perhaps learn from our mistakes so you don’t make your own. Or if you do make mistakes, you can learn to pick yourself up and keep going.

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Oct 14
How You’re Being Tricked Into Wasting Your Marketing Dollars On Ineffective Programs

How You’re Being Tricked Into Wasting Your Marketing Dollars On Ineffective Programs

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Readings

Have you seen the $4,000 toothbrush?

It’s real, I swear.

And it begs the question: what makes a toothbrush worth $4,000?

The answer is pretty simple, actually. It’s worth $4,000 because that’s what someone is willing to pay for it. But when it comes to business the idea of value still lies in the return that a product or service yields. That makes it more challenging to work in the B2B space, because it’s a lot harder to sell something that doesn’t promise a better outcome.

And yet, paradoxically, it’s also a lot easier to trick you, as a business, into spending your marketing budget on something completely worthless. Today I want to talk about one of the most common marketing tricks that will get YOU to part with your hard earned dollars, all in the interest of improving your own marketing. And why you should shut your wallet every time you encounter it.

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Oct 13
This Podcast Is Worth One-Point-Seven Trillion Dollars But You Can Have It For Free

This Podcast Is Worth One-Point-Seven Trillion Dollars But You Can Have It For Free

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, Ralph and Carol Lynn

In today’s episode we revisit our conversation about SEO from last week because I call Ralph out on the fact that he said he had a “big objection” to the article we discussed… but never ‘fessed up to what that was. And that takes on a whole life of its own.

Listen in as we talk popups (good and bad), the reality of discount pricing and how to pronounce “Moleskine”. Plus we share our own email segmentation method so that you can try it for yourself.

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Oct 09
Facebook, Email And Landing Pages: Brought To You By The Power Of The Sun

Facebook, Email And Landing Pages: Brought To You By The Power Of The Sun

By Marketing Insights & Strategy, Podcast, With Guests

Plenty of people have “a big idea”. But not a lot of those people take their idea to fruition and watch it grow and thrive.

Yet that’s exactly what Glen Koedding did. One day he was hanging out in the pool with a business colleague, thinking about how to use solar energy to heat the pool and nine months later he was running his own solar business. Since then he’s grown the company into an impressive enterprise by doing all of his own marketing.

We talked with him about just some of the incredibly smart strategies he employs – from social to email to website. There are more good ideas here than miles to the sun.

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