More articles about Marketing, Sales, and Business

Featured image for “Marketing In A Recession: How To Weather The Storm”

Marketing In A Recession: How To Weather The Storm

Marketing during a recession can increase brand awareness, visibility, reach, and engagement. But only when you have someone with advanced marketing experience.
Featured image for “How To Convince A Marketing Skeptic”

How To Convince A Marketing Skeptic

How do you convert a marketing skeptic into a supportive advocate? By showing them you know what you’re doing.
Featured image for “Privacy Protection: Why Ad Tracking Must End”

Privacy Protection: Why Ad Tracking Must End

The abuse of user tracking has not only resulted in less effective marketing. It threatens to jeopardize the entire marketing industry.
Featured image for “Marketing Isn’t About Being Brave: It’s About Being Effective”

Marketing Isn’t About Being Brave: It’s About Being Effective

Marketers need to restore creativity to the forefront of business success, while ensuring that something that may appear to be brave is actually low risk and ultimately effective.
Featured image for “Why Seeking Consensus Prevents Business Innovation”

Why Seeking Consensus Prevents Business Innovation

Managers look for easy consensus, instead of looking to build a corporate culture of trust able to support vigorous debate.
Featured image for “Why Your eCommerce Site Isn’t Generating Sales”

Why Your eCommerce Site Isn’t Generating Sales

Some of the more common mistakes we see in the presentation and marketing of e-commerce sites.
Featured image for “Marketing Isn’t (Just) About Marketing Any More”

Marketing Isn’t (Just) About Marketing Any More

Today’s truly effective Marketing Department needs to expand into previously-restricted departmental silos such as sales, support, and even finance.
Featured image for “COVID-19 Makes Marketing More Important Than Ever”

COVID-19 Makes Marketing More Important Than Ever

The structural and behavioral changes brought about by COVID-19 means marketing has never been more important than today.
Featured image for “Why RFPs Don’t Work When Selecting A Marketing Agency”

Why RFPs Don’t Work When Selecting A Marketing Agency

RFPs are an ineffective way to find a marketing agency partner for your business.
Featured image for “Reading The Room: Marketing During A Crisis”

Reading The Room: Marketing During A Crisis

Marketing during a pandemic is not the time to beat your corporate chest. It’s time to be seen as a valued corporate citizen. The world does not need vague and insincere promises of support.
Featured image for “How Changes To Search and Social Media Negatively Affect Your Business”

How Changes To Search and Social Media Negatively Affect Your Business

While social media seems to be more about media and less about social, Google seems to be taking search clicks away from businesses.
Featured image for “Selling A Premium Product Is About More Than Its Price”

Selling A Premium Product Is About More Than Its Price

Many businesses charge less than they could for their products and services. Pricing based on research and cost analysis provides the confidence to communicate and position a product’s true value.
Featured image for “What You’re Doing Isn’t Marketing”

What You’re Doing Isn’t Marketing

There’s a trend for every answer to be a digital one. But all the data analytics, martech, chatbots, and targeted ads in the world won’t matter if your core messaging falls flat in its face.
Featured image for “The Importance of Marketing Strategy in Today’s Evolving Free Market”

The Importance of Marketing Strategy in Today’s Evolving Free Market

Any great marketing strategy has at its core a deep and fundamental understanding of customer behavior.
Featured image for “Top 10 Small Business Marketing Mistakes”

Top 10 Small Business Marketing Mistakes

Creating strong, engaging marketing for your small business can be tough. Learn the top 10 mistakes to avoid as well as how to fix these common problems.
Featured image for “Why Do Customers Buy From Your Competitors? Because They Can”

Why Do Customers Buy From Your Competitors? Because They Can

The majority of your potential customers are not buying from you, for reasons that make perfect sense to them. What are you doing to find meaningful competitive advantage?
Featured image for “Customer Service Begins Before You Have A Customer”

Customer Service Begins Before You Have A Customer

Considering how important it is for any business, Customer Experience should be thought of as a strategic business pillar in the same way as marketing or sales.
Featured image for “Choosing The Right Marketing Agency For Your Small Business”

Choosing The Right Marketing Agency For Your Small Business

Is your marketing agency a ‘supplier’, or a ‘partner’? Here are some tips on evaluating your current marketing firm, and what to consider if you’re looking for a new one.
Featured image for “Why Marketers Need To Learn The Language Of The Finance Department”

Why Marketers Need To Learn The Language Of The Finance Department

Marketers need to better understand how the Finance department works – and thinks – in order to work together to deliver better decisions and outcomes for the business.
Featured image for “What Your Customer Wants – Spoiler Alert: It’s Not Your Product”

What Your Customer Wants – Spoiler Alert: It’s Not Your Product

Why should customers buy from you, rather than your competition? If you don’t have a compelling value proposition for them, customers will buy on price – meaning you’ve probably lost the sale.
Featured image for “Better Business Marketing Means Having A Better Business”

Better Business Marketing Means Having A Better Business

At its most fundamental, marketing is about effecting change. The challenge is educating, informing and/or entertaining your audience to be perceived as the change you want to happen.
Featured image for “Embracing Imperfection: Flaws Make Your Business More Likeable”

Embracing Imperfection: Flaws Make Your Business More Likeable

Customers already assume brands are fallible. Admitting weakness is a tangible demonstration of honesty and, therefore, makes your other claims more believable.
Featured image for “The Business Myth Of First-Mover Advantage”

The Business Myth Of First-Mover Advantage

Markets aren’t controlled by first-mover advantage. Market domination is determined by whoever is first to best meet the needs of the customer.
Featured image for “Effective Marketing Doesn’t Have To Mean Expensive Marketing”

Effective Marketing Doesn’t Have To Mean Expensive Marketing

It’s impossible to express any sufficient level of credibility of the value promise, unless the extent to which you promote the promise is commensurate with the significance of the product or service concerned.
Featured image for “A Marketing Campaign Doesn’t Have To Be Digital”

A Marketing Campaign Doesn’t Have To Be Digital

The notion of ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’ marketing being separate is outdated, since all marketing includes digital components.
Featured image for “A Question Of Customer Trust: The Secret To Building A Successful Business”

A Question Of Customer Trust: The Secret To Building A Successful Business

Customers won’t buy from you if they don’t feel they can trust you. How does a business create that feeling of trust?
Featured image for “Does A Customer-Centric Business Exist?”

Does A Customer-Centric Business Exist?

Businesses may believe they are behaving in a customer-centric manner. However internal obstacles often prevent their actions supporting more than one or two stakeholder groups.
Featured image for “Thanks to Martech, Marketing Comes Back To Its Roots”

Thanks to Martech, Marketing Comes Back To Its Roots

The future of marketing is a diverse and modern combination of data analysis, technical and semantic SEO, social, and creative disciplines working together.
Featured image for “Why The GDPR Will Improve Your Marketing”

Why The GDPR Will Improve Your Marketing

The European Union’s GDPR legislation provides perhaps the single biggest opportunity for businesses of all sizes (and locations) to improve their marketing performance.
Featured image for “What Do You Do When Your Marketing Isn’t Working?”

What Do You Do When Your Marketing Isn’t Working?

Effective marketing isn't about adopting a piece of technology, being clever, or winning awards. It's (still) about appealing to basic human emotions.
Featured image for “Stop Calling Your Small Business A ‘Startup’ – Because It’s Not”

Stop Calling Your Small Business A ‘Startup’ – Because It’s Not

Your small business is struggling for the same reasons that any business struggles. Which is precisely why you’re not a startup.
Featured image for ““Millennials” Don’t Exist As A Marketing Segment”

“Millennials” Don’t Exist As A Marketing Segment

Being a millennial is not a ticket to a different kind of mindset. The myth of the “millennial segment” makes a mockery of just about every principle of marketing segmentation.
Featured image for “The Evolving Relationship Between Sales And Marketing”

The Evolving Relationship Between Sales And Marketing

The traditional roles of sales and marketing have evolved, as technology has shaped and influenced customer buying behavior. Marketing now does more, but that doesn’t mean the role of sales is now irrelevant.
Featured image for “The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics”

The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics

The marketing industry has been upended over the past decade from marketing technology. The result is many businesses focus on tactics and forget about strategy – with disastrous results.
Featured image for “Offering Fewer Product Features As A Marketing Strategy: The 80/20 Rule”

Offering Fewer Product Features As A Marketing Strategy: The 80/20 Rule

How many of us wake up and ask ourselves how we can offer LESS than our competition? Probably no one – yet that may be the most important question you can ask yourself about your small business. Welcome to the 80/20 Rule.
Featured image for “Digital Disruption Isn’t Digital Adoption: Technology Isn’t Changing Society “Like Never Before””

Digital Disruption Isn’t Digital Adoption: Technology Isn’t Changing Society “Like Never Before”

Meaningful digital disruption is not about society adopting new tools or technologies. It’s about society implementing new behaviors.
Featured image for “The 10 Minute Rule For Keeping Audience Attention”

The 10 Minute Rule For Keeping Audience Attention

Businesses of every size need to create exceptional, remarkable marketing experiences for their audiences if they are to have a chance of being remembered.
Featured image for “Most Business Marketing Advice is Wrong”

Most Business Marketing Advice is Wrong

Most advice from so-called marketing gurus aren’t worth the blogs they’re written on. That’s because most of them have little basis in reality and are merely regurgitations of everyone else’s marketing articles with the same hopeless and ineffective ideas.
Featured image for “Marketing To The “Connected Consumer””

Marketing To The “Connected Consumer”

Your brand communication isn’t just being hijacked. It’s being held to ransom by the perceived quality of your customer experience. The consumer has assumed the role of Judge, Jury – and Executioner.
Featured image for “What Brands Must Know About Storytelling”

What Brands Must Know About Storytelling

Companies of all shapes and sizes must evolve their messaging from simple one-dimensional slogans or taglines, to multi-tiered, story-based communications.
Featured image for “Small Business Marketing: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know”

Small Business Marketing: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Many small businesses either fail to align their marketing with a business-related issue, or mis-diagnose the root cause of why their marketing isn’t working
Featured image for “Your Market Isn’t As Big As You Think”

Your Market Isn’t As Big As You Think

The definition, scope, and size of a market can only be based upon current buyer understanding on what that market represents. If customers don’t understand what your product is, and how it compared to other products, the truth is that you’re in a new market.
Featured image for “Presenting A Unified Customer Experience With Your Marketing”

Presenting A Unified Customer Experience With Your Marketing

To provide a unified customer experience means a new way of doing business. one where the entire organization delivers a seamless, personalized and relevant customer experience, no matter where the interaction takes place.
Featured image for “The Specialization of Business Process”

The Specialization of Business Process

Instead of continually dividing a business into niche areas of specialization, there’s an argument for the return of what we could call the “informed generalist”.
Featured image for “All Products Have Become Commodities”

All Products Have Become Commodities

Products, no matter how great they may be, are commodities. How much your brand is liked is the new barometer of how much advocacy it will generate.
Featured image for “Why “Good Enough” Leads To Marketing Mediocrity”

Why “Good Enough” Leads To Marketing Mediocrity

“Good Enough” is no longer good enough. Today’s business marketing successes are where someone refused to accept the status quo, and instead set out to change a fundamental rule of that industry.
Featured image for “Mobile Marketing Isn’t Just For Apple Devices”

Mobile Marketing Isn’t Just For Apple Devices

If you’re targeting an audience who uses a mobile device that’s different from the one you personally own, then you owe it to them to (at least) be familiar with that device.
Featured image for “Today’s Marketing Combines Big Data With Sound Intuition”

Today’s Marketing Combines Big Data With Sound Intuition

Today’s marketers can’t just simply rely on Big Data for their decisions, any more than they can rely purely on gut feeling. Today’s marketing is about the combination of the two.
Featured image for “Everyone Is Not Your Target Customer”

Everyone Is Not Your Target Customer

There are any number of reasons why your target customer doesn’t think your product is all that.
Featured image for “Your Business Competition Isn’t Who You Think It Is”

Your Business Competition Isn’t Who You Think It Is

You can’t really market successfully to your audience until you understand the choices that they are making, and can see the alternatives from their eyes. The more you try to unearth your “stealth competitors”, the better your marketing will be.
Featured image for “Growing A Business: When Bigger Isn’t Better”

Growing A Business: When Bigger Isn’t Better

The problem with building widgets faster and more cheaply is that you’re assuming the demand for those widgets will never wane – but that day will surely come. Today the innovation opportunity lies in the ability to address more transient customer needs.
Featured image for “When Customer Choice Is Bad For Business”

When Customer Choice Is Bad For Business

Offering too much customer choice in your business, product or services prevents customers making any choice at all.
Featured image for “Conversion Rate Optimization For Your Website: Knowing vs. Guessing”

Conversion Rate Optimization For Your Website: Knowing vs. Guessing

Conversion Rate Optimization is the combination of the objective with the subjective – making creative content decisions based upon quantitative data.
Featured image for “A Mobile-Friendly Website Now Impacts SEO”

A Mobile-Friendly Website Now Impacts SEO

Having a website that’s optimized for mobile-devices has been growing in importance for some time. With Google’s latest search algorithm changes, it’s become critical.
Featured image for “Review: The Art Of The Start 2.0 by Guy Kawasaki”

Review: The Art Of The Start 2.0 by Guy Kawasaki

2004’s “The Art of the Start” ranks as one of the best book around on the subject of startups. Now Guy Kawasaki has updated it. If you are looking to read just one book on start-ups and business development, your journey has ended.
Featured image for “Are Legacy Products Hurting Business Growth?”

Are Legacy Products Hurting Business Growth?

Are your organization’s legacy products, features or services still pulling their weight? If you’re not focused on maintaining and growing them, then you should be focused on replacing them.
Featured image for “Your Customers Don’t Believe Your Marketing”

Your Customers Don’t Believe Your Marketing

There’s an alternative to spewing-out hype and rhetoric. If you choose to tell your story in a way that’s more believable, then you have half a chance of your audience choosing to give you their attention.
Featured image for “iBeacons In Your Marketing: This year’s QR Codes?”

iBeacons In Your Marketing: This year’s QR Codes?

Mobile marketing is the same as any other marketing: Give an irresistible and compelling reason for your audience to allow you to contact them and they’ll come – whether it’s iBeacons, QR codes or whatever else is around the corner.
Featured image for “Your Customers Aren’t Stupid: Stop Marketing To Them That Way”

Your Customers Aren’t Stupid: Stop Marketing To Them That Way

Being “simple” is about being understood quickly and easily by using the right words and phrases. Being “simplistic”, in contrast, assumes that your audience won’t understand what you’re saying unless you dumb it down to death.
Featured image for “You Had Me At Hello: Your Customer’s First Impression”

You Had Me At Hello: Your Customer’s First Impression

The problem with first impressions isn’t that they’re not important – because they are. But that we have no idea when that first impression is going to manifest.
Featured image for “There’s No Room For Fear In Business”

There’s No Room For Fear In Business

Fear is never far away when starting or running any business. If you want an easy life then find another job. Fear, insecurity, uncertainty, and anxiety are part of what you signed up to.
Featured image for “Stop Trying To Be Different With Your Marketing”

Stop Trying To Be Different With Your Marketing

Customer attention can no longer be held by things they don’t care about. Somehow businesses have come to believe that “standing out” is about “being different”. The truth is that what really moves customers is emotion, not hyperbole.
Featured image for “Is It Time For Your Company To Ditch Facebook?”

Is It Time For Your Company To Ditch Facebook?

With the continuing changes that Facebook makes to its algorithm, Facebook Business Pages have essentially become less effective – unless Page owners are prepared to spend significant amounts of money to promote their content. It’s time to evolve your company’s social media tactics.
Featured image for “Why Your Product Demonstrations Are Costing You Sales”

Why Your Product Demonstrations Are Costing You Sales

The demo is there to back-up the claims that your solution will solve the problems that you’ve said it will solve. It’s not about features and benefits.
Featured image for “The King’s New Clothes, Or Today’s Business Narrative?”

The King’s New Clothes, Or Today’s Business Narrative?

People buy from companies and individuals that they feel have similar positions, thoughts and ideals to their own. Don’t be afraid to tell your story. Say it in places where your audience congregates, and your customers, fans (and evangelists) will come.
Featured image for “Following The Herd Leads To The Slaughterhouse”

Following The Herd Leads To The Slaughterhouse

These “thought leaders” go from conference to conference giving presentations but being dead-wrong, and everyone is so terrified of being thought odd or old-fashioned that they refuse to speak up.
Featured image for “Sales Is Not A Dirty Word: Without It, Your Business Doesn’t Exist.”

Sales Is Not A Dirty Word: Without It, Your Business Doesn’t Exist.

Selling has grown-up in the face of information symmetry between buyer and seller. Today’s sales people are advisors and curators as much as persuaders.
Featured image for “Business Innovation Isn’t (Just) About Customer Benefit”

Business Innovation Isn’t (Just) About Customer Benefit

Innovation in business has less to do with economic swings, and more with the strength of a company’s passion to avoid knee-jerk reactionary rhetoric and disjointed activities.
Featured image for “Why Marketing Automation Tools Aren’t Improving Your Marketing”

Why Marketing Automation Tools Aren’t Improving Your Marketing

There are many marketing automation products available to help reduce the inertia and increase productivity. But using them means one less excuse as to why your marketing’s not working.
Featured image for “Why Are You Extending Your Brand?”

Why Are You Extending Your Brand?

Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should. Ask yourself this one question before you extend (dilute?) your company or product brand.
Featured image for “The Changing Face of Marketing: Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report”

The Changing Face of Marketing: Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report

The way that we consume, interact, and share information and content continues to change, as our media consumption tools evolve at an even faster rate. The challenge for marketers and business owners is to overlay such trends data in the context of their own value message and customer buying experience.
Featured image for “Marketing Today: Doing It Your Way”

Marketing Today: Doing It Your Way

Today’s business success is driven by the ability to adapt to market conditions and customer expectations by finding and communicating in your own, authentic voice.
Featured image for “Your Customers Are Evolving. How Are You Evolving With Them?”

Your Customers Are Evolving. How Are You Evolving With Them?

Customer experiences are becoming ever more concerted and connected every day. Today’s always-on, empowered consumer is out-gunning and out-marketing even the largest corporate heavyweights. What’s your response?
Featured image for “Why Business Branding Takes Care Of Itself”

Why Business Branding Takes Care Of Itself

A business doesn’t become successful because of getting its brand in shape. Get your basic business values in place first, and your branding will take care of itself.
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