Since May, 2016, I’ve been sending a daily marketing tip to hundreds of people who signed up. They seem to find them very useful — I get lots of comments and very few unsubscribes. Continue reading
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is known for sales, lines and crazy shoppers. Except at REI.
Last year recreational equipment retailer REI announced that they were closing all of their stores on Black Friday, giving employees a paid day off, and encouraging them and everyone to take the day to get outside and do something fun. They promoted it with the hashtag #OptOutside Continue reading
Brands market around many holidays, and Halloween is a leader. And it’s not just about selling hundreds of millions of miniature candy bars.
Of course each holiday has its own particular emotional resonance, and commercial opportunities. For Halloween the emotion that brands typically go with is “scary fun”. Continue reading
Twitter has announced that it’s phasing out its six-second video tool, Vine.
It’s not that Vine wasn’t popular. In 2015 Twitter announced that it was displaying 1.5 billion vine loops every day. But since Vine defaults to looping, the actual number of people watching may have been considerably lower. Continue reading
A critical early step in developing a content strategy and calendar is auditing your existing content. Typically organizations have way more content than they realize in the form of web pages, social media posts, white papers, blog posts, webinars, videos, and so forth. And much that they’re aware of may not be being used to its fullest; it’s estimated that 70-80% of content developed by marketing for sales is unused. Continue reading
I remember when I was a young cub in the marketing world I read an article (today it would probably be a blog post) of career advice that said that if you want to get ahead professionally, just say Yes. When you’re starting out, grab every opportunity.
The same advice could apply, to a degree, to marketing today. Continue reading
A couple weeks ago I wrote about creating customer personas. These are an important tool in understanding your customers and passing that understanding on to the marketing team.
Don’t create too many personas, though, if you’re just starting out: three to five personas will be plenty, if not too many.
Continue reading
SMS marketing, commonly known as text marketing, let’s you take advantage of the platform in your customer’s pocket and purse: their smartphone. Over 95% of texts are read. Can you claim that for your other marketing channels? (SMS means “Short Message Service”.) Continue reading
Website load speed can be important for two reasons. Google says it can impact search rankings, although SEOs are divided on how much it actually does, and even more directly it affects whether people will wait around for your pages to load – especially on a smartphone. (Remember: mobile now accounts for over half of all Internet traffic.) Continue reading
Some people and companies are reluctant to build up their marketing programs because they think they won’t see results very quickly (or at all). Are they being asked to spend money for months without knowing if it’s making any difference? Continue reading