Marketers are humans, too. Their personal inboxes aren’t immune to an onslaught of daily, automated emails. They also spend their mornings combing through the irksome pack, deleting, unsubscribing and bemoaning the voluminous load over coffee. In our culture, this daily waste of time has become a ritual. Yet we continue to enlist in the process: subscribe, purge, repeat. Why? Because sometimes these emails are actually good. So how can marketers rise above the pack of digital gadflies and avoid the evil unsubscribe button?
Continue reading “We’re tired of lazy email marketing.”
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Indy’s so-called tech boom doesn’t matter.
Indianapolis is pharmaceuticals and sinus-cleansing shrimp cocktail. Brick kissing, milk chugging, and Vonnegut’s sardonic verse. The blue fog of industry and blue-collar politics. It’s basketball courtesy of the state’s countryside and football courtesy of Baltimore.
One thing Indy hasn’t historically been: a tech hub.
Continue reading “Indy’s so-called tech boom doesn’t matter.”
Is SEO Still Important?
You may have seen the phrase “SEO is dead” floating around in recent years. With search engines moving towards sorting their SERPs by content quality rather than keywords, it’s no wonder many think that SEO is dying. They may not be altogether correct, but the phrase gets one thing right: marketers have to change the way they use SEO to attract organic web traffic. It’s no longer good enough to throw in random keywords and links. Both are still relevant, but what’s more important to search engines is the quality of links and text content.
Continue reading “Is SEO Still Important?”
Easy Marketing Isn’t Enough. Go Big.
Good Marketing is hard. Easy marketing, which the majority of Indianapolis small businesses do, is doing what everyone else is doing. Looking, saying and showing up just like everyone else. It’s not hard and there are tons of examples. It’s doing the same thing every year. It’s being stagnate.
Good marketing is being risky, vulnerable, edgy. Good marketing is moving the needle. Good marketing may fail but it taught you enough to get better. Good marketing is saying, designing and acting on tactics and strategies that make you nervous.
Don’t be stagnant. Aggressively go after your sales goals. Invest in good marketing and move the needle.
Why Service, Quality, and Price Don’t Matter in Sales and Marketing
Service, quality, and price don’t matter.
If you’re talking about service, quality, or price in your sales and marketing as a differentiator, you are doing the opposite…you’re presenting yourself like everyone else.
This trifecta of over-marketed jargon isn’t important. As a company you should have the best quality of product or service. Your price should be competitive. Your service should be the best. These aren’t “nice to haves” anymore. They aren’t differentiators; they are necessities for companies to be successful.
Instead, sales and marketing should target the problems that your products or services solve. What truly differentiates your company from competitors are the people, experiences and value that constitute the buying process. Focus sales and marketing messaging here and results will change.
One question that can change the way you do business
While I was a Lushin and Associates, the owner always asked me, “What’s next?” We would roll out great marketing strategies that would kill it, and he would say, “Good job! But what’s next?” At the time, it annoyed me because I wanted to bask in the glory of my success, not jump into another time-consuming marketing plan.
In retrospect, I realize he was teaching me a sales mentality. The “What’s next?” question instilled in me the thought process of never being satisfied, always keeping my head up, and focusing on the vision. It never allowed my work to stagnate.
Continue reading “One question that can change the way you do business”
How Every Marketing Strategy Should Start
The Very First Step in Building a Marketing Machine
Sales always comes first — think of it as the power source to your business. It doesn’t matter how good the product or the marketing is, because if your sales process isn’t working, nothing else happens. Validating sales ensures that when the marketing strategy gets rolling, the wins will come. Continue reading “How Every Marketing Strategy Should Start”
Data Driven Marketing
“If you don’t understand how to use technology in marketing, there is no point for your existence,”
said Tim Kopp, former chief marketing officer of ExactTarget and current advisor and venture partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners. He was speaking as a panelist at the Indianapolis Business Journal Power Breakfast Series for Technology. Continue reading “Data Driven Marketing”
3 Ways Not to “Wing” Marketing
You leave a workshop or a three-day conference of business owners sharing success stories on how they’ve doubled, tripled, quadrupled business in a matter of a few year or months. You sitting back saying “Wow if he/she can do it. So can I!” You’ve taken copious amounts of notes and they’re all full of marketing tactics that this company has done to be successful. Things like social media, content marketing, or email and you go into your office on Monday and you hold a company meeting with your heads of marketing and sales you say “This is what we’re going to do (insert tactic)!” and your people are just as fired up as you are but what happen 11 times out of 10? It doesn’t work. Why?
Continue reading “3 Ways Not to “Wing” Marketing”