Since the pandemic has many of us hunkered down right now, this is a great time to tackle those “big picture” marketing priorities that so easily get sidelined by day-to-day demands.  You want — and need — to come out of the current crisis as quickly as possible.  Here are three examples of big marketing…

For your consideration: eleven suggestions for sales and marketing in this new environment. 1. Stop sending emails with “Coronavirus” or “COVID-19” in the subject line. Seriously.People are inundated with these emails. They’re nearly all the same. Same phrases. Same steps. And they’re constant Coronareminders. Don’t waste your customer’s time and trust with another boilerplate message about what you’re doing. Put it on your…

Our March Brews & Brands last week was, hands down, the best session ever. And it began with a simple question: What now? In light of current events, how do we all pivot from a high-touch way of doing business?   What followed was two hours of fantastic conversation, questions, insights and ideas. Here are just some of…

A recent article talked about a marketing campaign intended to push traffic to a website, where consumers could make a purchase. Tracking showed that while the campaign was indeed driving people to the site, those people weren’t buying once they arrived. So the company shut the campaign down.And online sales plummeted. What the company misunderstood was customer…

Before marketing can have any impact at all, it has to do one thing. It has to grab your attention in under three seconds. Three seconds. That’s where more than 95% of all marketing fails. Which means marketing dollars wasted. Here are five ways to stay in the 5% instead. And you have to do them in your headline, in…

Wernher von Braun, the only person ever to win two individual Nobel prizes (and one of the only two recipients of Nobels in two different categories), offered some advice that applies as much to marketing as science: “Look for problems and bad news.” In marketing, that approach offers two powerful benefits. 1. Outperform Your Competition…

Our second Brews & Brands gathering of 2020 focused on clarifying your audience so you can tailor your marketing as narrowly as possible.  It may sound obvious, but as you’ll see from what follows, there’s a lot of nuance along the way, and more than a few ways to screw it up.  Here are just…

The price for a 30-second Super Bowl spot reached $5.6 million this year. Did advertisers get what they paid for? Some did. Here are six ways they can remind you how to get your money’s worth from marketing. Weird and engaging aren’t the same thing. Every marketing message has to answer the same question: what’s the point? Take Planters’ “Baby…

It happens a lot. Companies — especially smaller ones — hire a social media person whose sole qualification is that they spend a lot of time doing their own social media. Then reality sets in. This person you hired may know which filter to use with a selfie. But they rarely know your company. Or your customers. Or your…

Our first Brews & Brands session of 2020 focused on social media.  What follows are just a few of the valuable insights and ideas shared during this month’s session.  Since most of the participants represented B2B companies, much of the focus was on maximizing LinkedIn. Setting Goals Everyone emphasized the importance of setting goals for…