Here are two similar questions with vastly different meanings.  “Who’s your bank?”  “Who’s your banker?”  The first one is easy to answer.  The second one is increasingly harder, but a lot more important.  People are loyal to companies where they feel some personal relationship exists.  “Personal service” is a cliche, but the idea remains a…

A frequently heard refrain over the last three years is this: “We’ve never really had to market ourselves until now.”   The problem with that statement is that it’s probably not true.  The companies in question, assuming that they wanted to reach their potential, should have been marketing all along.  It’s a great reminder that…

Back in 1989, USA Today introduced their Superbowl Admeter.  Each year a small group of people sits in a room during the big game and rates each commercial from 1 to 10.  The results show up in the next day’s paper.  Advertisers immediately took their eye off the ball and instructed agencies to create ads…

Yes, Facebook is closing in on one billion users, but the social medium may be most effective when the online world meets the real world.  In Britain, fans of Heinz could nurse sick Facebook friends back to health by having a real can of Heinz soup sent to them.  A laundry detergent cranked up the…

How often do customers hear from you?  Probably not often enough.  Most businesses focus their marketing on prospects rather than customers, so it’s a safe bet that your own customers might be hearing from your competitors more often than they hear from you.  A drip marketing campaign is one way to cost-effectively keep in touch…

If you place online ads using keywords, keep a couple things in mind.  First, be as restrictive as possible.  Since you’re paying per impression or per click, even if it’s a small amount for each, you want each to count.  So target not just with the keywords themselves, but also confine results to your geographic…

How much would your company pay for a marketing strategy?  There’s no single right answer, of course, but there is a best answer for you.  It’s all about return on investment.  How much new revenue does the plan need to produce to be considered a home run?  Let’s say a new marketing strategy takes an…

No matter the medium, if you can engage more of your audience’s senses, your message is a lot stickier.  If a radio spot invites you to smell something cooking, or a TV spot lingers on silky skin, the effectiveness of those messages goes up.  It’s a great creative challenge: how can you engage at least…

From billboards to print ads, social media posts to e-mail, the tendency is often to squeeze in a little more.  But often, that squeezes out the people you want to reach.  A busy billboard or an ad packed with copy get no readers.  A long-winded Facebook post or bloated e-mail blast?  The same.  Decide on…

Psychologists have long recognized a phenomenon called confirmation bias.  We tend to seek out people or sources of information that confirm what we already believe, and dismiss any information that questions or contradicts those beliefs.  For marketers, that’s the kiss of death.  We can easily lull ourselves into thinking that our own perceptions are reality,…