Let’s face it, marketing can be hard! In each marketing blog post, we hope you’ll find the information you need for your business marketing success.
Marketing During a Recession
Early in October 2022, Jamie Dimon, Chief Executive of Morgan Chase, warned the United States is headed to a recession. Because of the intense rates of inflation, the war in Ukraine, and the sharp increase in interest rates, Dimon feels a recession is inevitable by the middle of 2023. Our last significant economic downturn of…
5 Trends Your Marketing Team Should Budget For In 2015
Choosing the best ways to market your product or service isn’t always easy. A company needs to stay ahead of current marketing trends if they want to see a successful campaign. That being said, there are many things your company can budget for ahead of time so that your marketing team is ready for 2015.…
How to Get Your Finance and Marketing Executives on the Same Page
Being on the same page is still a popular idiom used today, even though we’re turning less actual paper pages in our digital age. With all of today’s modern technology available at our fingertips, it is important that we are all still communicating effectively and performing collaboratively as a team. Finance and marketing seldom see…
Strategy Toolkit for 2015
As you might be able to guess from our affinity for ducks here at Paradux Media Group, Mike and Tisha are pretty big University of Oregon Duck Football fans. (see if you can find them in the gigapixel panoramic photo here) In fact, one of us (Mike) is on our way right now to Levi…
Marketing Budget Template
It is imperative that a business proactively set a marketing budget for their business. The reason is simple, if you don’t set a budget and make a plan, you will instead make a series of small, and at the time, inconsequential choices to promote your business that are both costly and ineffective. At the end of…
Cause Marketing for Brands
How many times has a news story broken that reveals a profound injustice? Too often I’d argue. If you’re not an Auburn fan (or you don’t know one) you may not have heard about the poisoning of the trees at Toomer’s Corner by someone claiming to be an Alabama Fan. These trees were more than a…
What’s Your Logo Saying About Your Brand?
Logo. Your brand needs one. It represents your company, it communicates the subtext of your brand in one nice, neat, package. Ada Stoy defines a logo by saying ,”A logo is not just a piece of graphics – it is something that echoes a business’s brand through the use of symbols, fonts, images, colors, and…
Meet Your Customers Where They Spend Their Free Time
Image the power of knowing exactly what your customers like to do in their free time. If you knew that they generally owned horses – you would have the ability think creatively about where your messages could intercept them. The regional section in the Horse Fancier’s magazine? Sponsoring a show? Partnering with the local grange…
Limited Money, Limited Time – Where’s the Biggest Bang for the Buck?
Lately, I’ve had a lot of conversations with business owners about where the biggest bang for their buck is when it comes to advertising their business. Since it seems to be a common theme this month, I thought you might be interested in it as well. The first question I always ask is how quickly…
Using Online Advertising to Spread Your Message
Advertising online is an easy, and relatively inexpensive way to spread your message to your targeted audience. With most online advertising you only pay for those ads that are actually clicked on, and you have the ability to target who will see those ads. You certainly can look to smaller sites (television and newspapers for…
Blue Sky Marketing (NOT!)
Remember when our marketing lives were easy? Unlimited budgets, no concerns about the economy, fabulous television ads… those days have been gone now for awhile, and I think that as marketers, we’ve gotten better, smarter, and more responsive. We’ve had to think carefully about every dollar we spend, we’ve had to project and hit ROI…
You Need a Target Audience
A couple of days ago, I asked you, “How Effective is Your Marketing Plan?” The first question on the Effectiveness Quiz was: Did your plan clearly articulate your target audience, including demographic information?(The correct answer would be something on the order of 20-34 yrs old, middle income, attending “X” school and living in “Y” neighborhood.…
How Effective is Your Marketing Plan?
It’s officially fall, and that means many marketers are in the middle of another year of planning. Unless of course, you’re ahead of the game – in which case, congratulations!!! But since that’s probably not the case, as you begin to work through the process of another year’s planning, it is useful to consider how…
Branding a Local vs National Company
I had the opportunity the other day to chat with a friend who is a brand marketer for a national brand. During the course of our conversation, I was struck (again) by the same-ness and at the same time, the different-ness that comes with branding a national vs. local brand. At its core, branding is…
Visual Identity on a Budget
Brand strategy and positioning, image attributes, and brand architecture can become overly complex when there are hundreds of thousands of dollars involved. Many small to mid-size companies (with fewer than 500 employees) want the same thinking and quality that define a major branding initiative. It is just too expensive. Seeing no alternative, these companies search…
Online Advertising in the Age of Adwords
With the advent of our new economy, we’re seeing a pretty significant move from traditional media dollars to online media. The reasons are several-fold. Traditional advertising takes a big bite out of a limited marketing budget. Online advertising is quite cheap in comparison with traditional media. Marketing budgets are getting smaller – not larger. Online…
5 Reasons Social Media Should be in the 2011 Marketing Plan
Social media certainly is all the rage right now – but is it going to be in your 2011 Strategic Marketing Plan? If not, here are five reasons it should be: Your customers are on social media. They have Facebook accounts, Twitter profiles, Foursquare checkins and are on Linkedin. If you’re business isn’t on them,…
Marketing Plan: Intersection of Planning and Improvisation
I thought I’d take a moment before the frenzy of annual strategic planning begins to discuss some strategies you might want to consider as you start to build your annual strategic marketing plan. Naturally, your strategic marketing plan should contain your best guess as to how you’re going to advance your brand and product positions…
Grassroots Marketing: Where Social Media Makes Perfect Sense
We belong to a local Chamber of Commerce that represents a lot of small communities in the area that we live. It represents small communities with populations as high as 8,000, but most closer to 1,000. Like a lot of small communities, the summers are filled with unique and creative events on the weekends. The…
Social Marketing: Why it matters.
We do believe that social media and social marketing has radically altered advertising. We believe that social media can level the playing field between Madison Avenue and local business owners. It’s not a fad, the landscape of social media has changed dramatically over the past three years, and what we see today will dramatically change…