When you're a marketer, you spend a lot of time and money focused on developing your digital assets and getting potential customers to engage with them. You are always looking for ways to increase your digital footprint and grow your traffic. There's some low-hanging fruit that you've missed, though. And it's hanging out right under your nose (or down the hall in a less metaphorical sense). The Hyper-Connected World Makes Everyone a Marketer Instead of looking at marketing as something only the marketers do, what if you considered everyone on your team to be a marketer? With the rise of social media, almost everybody has a … [Read more...]
3 Easy Questions That Get Marketing and Sales On the Same Page
How do you create sales and marketing alignment? How do you get the sales team and marketing team to actually work together? There’s a lot of talk about the increasing need to align sales and marketing functions within organizations. More and more, customers are expecting a seamless experience. And it’s getting harder and harder to split the different parts of the customer life cycle between the sales team over there, and the marketing team over here. Instead of keeping the two separate and distinct, it’s clear that the new buyer’s journey requires them to merge. And at the same time, both marketing and sales professionals are … [Read more...]
Stop Stalling and Get Writing: What You Need to Do to Actually Write That Book
Have you been thinking about writing a book? Is it a perennial entry on your New Year's Resolution list or that idea that keeps popping up? Is it that promise that you make to yourself, "Someday I'm going to sit down and write my masterpiece!" Writing a book is an extremely gratifying experience, and also an incredibly daunting one. It's challenging to sit in front of a blank screen or blank piece of paper and start knocking out the words. Here is a step by step process that can kickstart your journey to becoming an author. 1. Clarify why you want to write a book. There are a lot of reasons to write a book, and it's crucial to … [Read more...]
Create a 19,900% Advertising Bump in 67 Seconds
A few months ago, I went to a birthday dinner for a friend at an Italian restaurant in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood. It was a fun night - great conversation, delicious food, and pretty tasty wine. I'd never been to Saporia Trattoria before, but I had a good experience and I said to my girlfriend as we were leaving, "Hey, we should come back here sometime." Now, Chicago has a lot of great restaurants. So even though we enjoyed ourselves, it wasn't necessarily on the top of our list to get back. But I had signed up for their mailing list when we were paying the bill (I get excited when small businesses do marketing right so it's … [Read more...]
Should You Really Put Recent College Grads in Charge of Your Social Media?
"Give the job to Mikey, he understands this stuff!" "Mikey" in this scenario is a 24-year-old recent college grad who is looking for his or her first job in marketing (or probably anything because of the crappy job market). "This stuff" is the entirety of your company's social media marketing and branding work. Strategy, tactics, execution...the whole shebang. Instead of kids trying to get their brother to eat cereal, it's executives trying to fill their social media positions. It's an understandable response considering how quickly social media has evolved and how much influence it is exerting on business. Trying to keep up with … [Read more...]