Social media has become a very cost-effective way to connect with, and influence, various audiences including customers and potential customers. In fact, over the years, we have come to rely less on more traditional forms of marketing communications (e.g., print or broadcast advertising, direct mail, etc.) and more on digital channels of communication, like social media.Social Media Tips to Drive Sales for Small Businesses
October 7th, 2021Social media has become a very cost-effective way to connect with, and influence, various audiences including customers and potential customers. In fact, over the years, we have come to rely less on more traditional forms of marketing communications (e.g., print or broadcast advertising, direct mail, etc.) and more on digital channels of communication, like social media.Creating a Plan to Improve Corporate Communications
October 5th, 2021
Effective corporate communication has always been important. Now, though, in a hybrid and continuing uncertain corporate environment, it’s more important than ever for organizations to determine how effective their corporate communications efforts are, and what adjustments or improvements need to be made to keep employees engaged, productive, and employed!What worked pre-pandemic almost certainly doesn’t work anymore. It’s critical that corporate communications and HR staff work together to create a strategy and plan for moving forward.
Battling Blind Spots to Boost Management and Marketing Effectiveness
September 30th, 2021
Blindspots are something we all have based on our past experiences, interactions with others, and the opinions and values we’ve formed over time. I remember learning early in my career about the Johari Window in a leadership seminar I attended. It’s a model designed to help us understand and improve communications through the recognition that we all are impacted by the things we don’t know. Human nature is such that each of us has biases and blind spots that we’re generally not aware of.
Best Practices for Managing Remotely (You Already Know These…)
September 28th, 2021
Man Working From Home Having Online Group Videoconference On Laptop
Over the past several months I’ve been very interested, even excited, to see how well the forced experiment with remote work has evolved. Since 2008 I’ve been working remotely. Even prior to that, I had several writing clients that I worked remotely for; most I’ve never met. Read the rest of this entry »
What Your Employees Don’t Know Could Hurt You: How Effective Communication Builds Strong Brand Ambassadors
September 16th, 2021
I’m often surprised that the most overlooked audience, when it comes to communicating with key constituents, is the internal or employee audience. Companies are generally pretty good about recognizing that they need to communicate with customers and prospects, but employees tend to be an afterthought. This may be because of the assumption that since employees are part of the organization they somehow “know” what’s going on. After all, it was in the newsletter or on Slack, wasn’t it? The fact of the matter, though, is that companies can’t leave it to chance that employees are paying attention to the messages they’re sending, or that they understand which are the key messages that they should be paying attention to. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Your Company, Product, or Service Name Doesn’t Really Matter
September 14th, 2021
Throughout my career, I’ve been involved in numerous naming and branding initiatives and am always struck by not only the intrinsic challenges of getting a group of people to agree on a particular name/brand for a company, product, or service—but also by the enormous amount of angst and emotion that becomes part of the process.
In truth, the process of coming up with a name—whether for a company, a product, a campaign, a department, or whatever is a process that is virtually destined to be an emotional and difficult one from the get-go. Why? Because everybody has an opinion, everybody has an emotional stake in the outcome and everybody wants their brand to be the next Nike.
5 Quick Tips for Writing Headlines for Digital Marketing Efforts
September 3rd, 2021
In the newspaper business, the above-the-fold headline is a crucial aspect of grabbing a potential reader’s attention and enticing them to pick up the paper and read on. The same is true of online headlines – the hyperlinks that come up in a list when you search for something in a search engine. In addition to page ranking, an enticing headline is an important way to drive traffic to your site. With that in mind, here are some tips for generating great headlines. Read the rest of this entry »
Creating Content: A Role for Your Contacts and Connections
September 1st, 2021
Group Of Multi-Ethnic People Social Networking
As content marketing has emerged as a top go-to tactic for marketers of all kinds in all industries, the challenge that many have been faced with is how to generate the massive amounts of content often required to feed the funnel. Even large organizations with internal staff dedicated to marketing and communications often find themselves turning to others for content creation.
That’s certainly a great thing for firms like ours, and we help a number of individuals and organizations create a variety of content. But there’s another great source of content that can be leveraged in big and small ways to help feed the demand for content: Read the rest of this entry »
Tips for Finding Experts in Content and Content Marketing
August 17th, 2021
I do a lot of presentations (and since the pandemic emerged, webinars) on marketing-related topics. When I do, I try to provide as much practical and useful advice as I can. I don’t worry about “giving away my secrets” for a couple of reasons:
- They’re not that secret—they’re just good, proven, elements of effective marketing and communication.
- Telling someone how to do something rarely translates into the ability to actually do that something.
- The small business owners and entrepreneurs—and, often, even senior and very seasoned marketing executives in large organizations—simply don’t have the time to do it themselves.
They often need to call upon others—agencies or freelancers—to help them out. Read the rest of this entry »
Tackling the Special Challenges of Building and Sustaining Strong Service Brands
August 12th, 2021
Much of my work over the years has been with “service brands”—brands that are not tied to a particular product, but to the delivery of some type of service—educational services, healthcare services, energy services, engineering services, consulting services, etc.
Developing and maintaining a strong brand for a service is, in my opinion, significantly more challenging than developing and maintaining a strong brand for a product. Why? Read the rest of this entry »
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