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.
Do You Have a Dream?
I saw this quote this morning: “We’ve got to have a dream if we are going to make a dream come true.” ~Denis Waitley And I was reminded, again, of the importance of planning. Sometimes we focus so hard on…
Your Competition Makes You Better
Think about it — you know what your competitors really offer. You know, often better than the customers do (at the outset) what kind of service and product a new customer will receive from a business. “If we’ve identified our competitors wisely, we should know how our product meets their needs better than the competition,” Critical…
Why Should I Care About Your Offer?
Is your business volume not quite where you’d like to see it right now? Thinking of doing some advertising to drive traffic to your business? Great idea! But before you get too crazy, please stop to consider why the consumer should care. Ask yourself, if I were the consumer, “Why do I need Hep Five?”…
Marketing Resolutions for 2011
It’s that uncomfortable time of year when we take stock of our lives and make resolutions for the things in our lives that we want to change. The same should be true for our Marketing Plans. If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably written your 2011 Marketing Plan in October and November. But this is…
Focus on Your Target
Focusing on and choosing a target market is often the hardest thing for a business to do. The reasons make sense: you don’t want to exclude any potential customer and you don’t want to show preference to one customer over another. But here’s the thing — getting good at target markets makes you not only…
How Good is Your Elevator Speech?
We’ve all heard it, we need to be able to describe our company and what we do in the space of time that it takes to travel from one floor to another in an elevator. And even in knowing it, it’s still difficult to conceptualize and spit out unless you’ve taken time to think about…
Just Because it's a "Deal" You Shouldn't Always Buy
From time to time, we all get an amazing “deal” that comes across our desk from the media. And it’s tempting to throw $300-$500 dollars at something that we’re getting for 75% off or even 50% off. But in those moments, it’s critical that you remember what your strategy is, and why you pursue it.…
Examining Your Marketing Environment
As you begin to put together your new strategic marketing plan, you should be sure to take into account the internal and external factors playing in your marketing environment that will be affecting you in the upcoming year. In my previous post, How Effective is Your Marketing Plan? I asked you the following you the following…
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…
What’s Your Brand Story?
From start to finish, a well-executed brand is really just about telling a good story. Well-written stories are fairly predictable in their format, they have a beginning, middle, and end. The pieces of the story that are being told are consistent with, and advance, the storyline. They don’t pursue irrelevant tangents, and each paragraph and chapter…
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…
Using and Buying Media Wisely
This seems like a good time, before we get fully into planning season, to talk about the best uses of media. I touched on this briefly in my recent post the Intersection of Planning and Improvisation. But this is really a topic that deserves a full post before annual plans are laid for 2011. The first thing…
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…