Clients do business with people and companies that occupy a position of expertise.  But how do you prove expertise?  By the book.  What if you devoted a portion of your marketing budget to publishing a guide to help your clients and prospects succeed — a book that gathered the cumulative knowledge of your team into…

In the digital age, online marketing tools — SEO, banner ads, retargeting and more — get all the sizzle and use up most of the oxygen in any marketing discussion.  But smart marketers use the tools that are most effective in reaching and persuading the prospects they most want to reach.  And some of those…

On the same day that a mail house sent an e-mail touting their ability to match an IP address to a physical address — to deliver digital ads and direct mail to the same person — this comment was posted online, pertaining to an article on ad blockers.  “The issue that the ad industry refuses…

Have we turned the internet over to the mechanics?  It’s beginning to look like it.  As companies spend more of their online budgets trying to improve the search engine rankings of their websites, they’re spending less of those budgets on the sites themselves.  The result?  Rather than creating sites that help build the brand, that…

When it comes to focusing on benefits over features by using customer-generated content, GoPro has few rivals.  They realized quickly that the more customer-created videos they can post that show their cameras used across a wide range of activities, the less they have to “sell.”  The benefits — ease of shooting, ease of editing, brilliant…

More than any other medium, social media offers the highest potential to get distracted by the unimportant.  Companies sometimes expend their energy getting fans and followers, when what matters more are the views, likes, shares and retweets — the evidence that your audience is engaging with your content.  Likewise, posts on your pages by followers…

Tucked away inside Southwest Airlines’ masterful new “Transfarency” TV spot are three little words that may never have been uttered on behalf of an airline before: “We like you.”  Why is that a big deal?  At least two reasons.  First, it suggests subsequent action: because we like you, we do more things to make your…

In the fourth film in the Rocky franchise, the Italian Stallion faces the Russian behemoth, Ivan Drago.  In his corner between rounds, Rocky groans, “He’s winning…I see three of him out there.”  Brother-in-law Paulie offers some encouraging advice: “Hit the one in the middle!”  “That’s right,” echoes cornerman Duke, “hit the one in the middle!” …

With all the emphasis on emerging technologies and digital media, it’s easy to forget that the small details of execution still matter.  Take type, for example.  It’s long been shown that all uppercase type is harder to read (because all the letters are the same height, words lose their distinctive shapes) — yet there’s no…

Recently, a marketing professional read a research report about millennials’ TV viewing habits…and dismissed it out of hand, because it didn’t coincide with what she saw.  But the environment each of us lives in is not a lab — and the observations we make about how people around us behave, while potentially important, do not…