Archive for the ‘Marketing Communication’ Category
Tuesday, November 24th, 2020
While there’s a debate about where the phrase “content is king” originally emerged, Bill Gates is widely given credit for the phrase and wrote what Fox Business calls a “remarkably prescient piece” back in 1996 in which he “accurately foresaw the content boom years before Google, WordPress, Facebook and YouTube even existed.” The rest, of course, is history.
Organizations of all kinds have jumped on the content bandwagon, recognizing that the trusted relationships they have with patients puts them in a prime position to share content on a wide range of topics of interest to, and representing value for, their audiences. (more…)
Tags: advertising copy, B2B content marketing, business communication, communicating during the pandemic, content marketing, COVID-19 communications, creating content, Customer Communication
Posted in Content Marketing, Customer Communication, Marketing Communication | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020
It’s fair to say that few, if any companies—or their communication staff—were prepared to respond quickly and appropriately to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, a pandemic that has swept the world and decimated lives and economies.
As millions of employees suddenly found themselves working remotely from their homes and millions of customers found themselves suddenly shut off from the companies and brands they typically engaged with, communication professionals found themselves grappling with important questions:
- How do we continue to communicate with a suddenly dispersed audience?
- How do we find the right balance between standard key messages and the need to address the ravages of the virus for employees, customers and the community at large?
- How do we strike the tone—certainly not too flippant, but also not too alarmist?
There have been some important communication lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked content marketers to share their key takeaways—what has worked well for them, what hasn’t, and how the experience will shape their communications for months, maybe years, to come. (more…)
Tags: communication best practices, communication during COVID, digital marketing best practices, marketing best practices, marketing during COVID-19, strategic communications
Posted in Customer Communication, Marketing and Branding, Marketing Communication | No Comments »
Thursday, October 29th, 2020

The 3 C’s of Marketing (company, customers and competitors) is a popular model used to help businesses and marketers develop marketing strategies by encouraging them to think about their customers and what they value, what they have to offer that address what customers value/need, and what others (competitors) are offering. It’s a model that also aligns very well with another three-pronged marketing approach: segmenting, targeting, and positioning.
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Posted in Competition, Customer Communication, Marketing, Marketing and Branding, Marketing Communication, Strategic Communications, Strategy | No Comments »
Monday, October 26th, 2020
Like many things we see all of the time, email subject lines are easy to overlook, especially when drafting them. Too often, though, copywriters, content marketers, and others fail to give enough thought to their email subject lines. They’re an afterthought. Something quickly thrown together and easily overlooked, not only by those writing them but those seeing them in their email inboxes! And that’s the problem.
Fail to pay enough attention to your email subject lines and your audience will too. (more…)
Tags: best email subject lines, content marketing, digital marketing, email marketing, email open rate, email subject lines
Posted in Content Marketing, Customer Communication, Direct Marketing, Marketing Communication | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 4th, 2020
We launched Strategic Communications in 2008, at a time when the country was plunging into a deep recession. It wasn’t a great time to land new clients. But it was a great time to take a deep dive into something that was relatively new at the time, at least from a business perspective–social media. At the time there was an interesting talent gap that represented an opportunity for us. Most businesspeople didn’t have experience in using social media channels for marketing purposes and colleges weren’t yet educating students about these new marketing tools. So we were early adopters and spent quite a bit of time learning about and experimenting with the tools that were best positioned in the business-to-business (B2B) space: LinkedIn and Twitter.
Since that time we’ve built our social channels organically and have helped a number of clients do the same. There’s no real magic to this. In fact, the basic tenets of effective marketing via social channels are really the same as they are for using any marketing tools. We recently responded to a reporter’s inquiry about our top tips for marketers using social media as a lead generation tool. We pointed to six:
(more…)
Tags: linkedin, Social Media, social media best practices, social media strategies, social media tips, twitter
Posted in Business Development, Content Marketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Branding, Marketing Communication, Social Media | No Comments »
Monday, March 16th, 2020
by Linda Pophal
I have a love/hate relationship with search engine optimization (SEO). I understand SEO. I very often use the concepts in my own writing—and often use the concepts in writing for clients. Sometimes, though, and probably because I was a writer long before SEO was even “a thing,” I balk at what can seem at times to be a misguided focus—a singular focus—on SEO to the exception of everything else. (more…)
Tags: content marketing, copywriting, search engine optimization, SEO, SEO writing, slave to SEO, writing copy, writing for bots
Posted in Content Marketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Branding, Marketing Communication, SEO, Strategic Communications | No Comments »
Monday, December 2nd, 2019
by Justin Grensing, Esq., MBA
The tension between the marketing function and the operations function has a well-established history. Marketing wants to sell, but operations has to deliver. Sure it’s great to come up with an idea to sell custom-built widgets at a low price with quick delivery. But, ultimately, someone (operations) actually has to deliver. (more…)
Tags: Chick-fil-A, effective communications, marketing and operations, marketing blunders, marketing fails, marketing mistakes
Posted in Marketing and Branding, Marketing Communication | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 1st, 2019
by Linda Pophal

Strategic Communications has been working with clients for a number of years now (since 2008). We’ve helped dozens of clients establish themselves as thought leaders and/or drive traffic to their websites to generate leads and drive conversions. Long before then (I won’t even say how long because it scares me!), I was writing features for business and professional trade publications and spent a number of years as a copywriter, writing marketing copy as part of my full-time job.
(more…)
Tags: blog writing, brochure writing, content marketing, copywriting, feature writing, sales writing, web content writing
Posted in Content Marketing, Direct Marketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Branding, Marketing Communication | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 6th, 2019
One of the persistent challenges for marketing departments is the ability to determine a reliable and justifiable return on investment for their marketing spend. One common reason given for this challenge is the difficulty in attributing revenue to specific marketing activities. But in an article for Forbes, Stephen Diorio argues that there is a need for improvement in how the money that is spent is categorized and tracked. (more…)
Tags: marketing analysis, marketing evaluation, marketing metrics, measuring ROI
Posted in Advertising, Analytics, Marketing and Branding, Marketing Communication, Marketing Measurement | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 9th, 2019
Social media marketing is an inexpensive and effective way to engage with your target market and position yourself as a thought leader. But to make it an effective tool, you need to be diligent in keeping your content up-to-date and post regularly. An infrequently-updated blog or social media page with stale posts can actually do more harm than good to your brand and engagement efforts. But many small business owners struggle to find the time to keep their social media profile up to date.
One solution to this is to use a content calendar.
(more…)
Tags: content calendar, content marketing, content strategy, editorial calendar, planning content
Posted in Blogging, Content Marketing, Marketing Communication, Publishing | No Comments »