Blogs

Summer is a time for travel and vacations, but that doesn’t mean your marketing efforts should take a timeout. While you and your staff are recharging body, mind, and spirit with a little summertime R&R, there are plenty of things you can do over the next several months to ensure your business growth efforts don’t…

Do you know what success looks like for your new project, product launch, sales/marketing campaign, or branding/re-branding efforts? Courtesy of Merriam Webster, the standard definition of success goes something like this: “the degree or measure of succeeding; a favorable or desired outcome; the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence; or one that succeeds.” As you…

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past month and need a reminder, Father’s Day is on Sunday. It’s time to break out the steaks and BBQ grills, fill coolers with ice and cold brews, and restock your Dad’s inventory of ties he shouldn’t wear but probably will. To all the Dads…

With a personal slogan of “More Creativity, More Ideas, More Fun!” and a company logo that feature’s a blue monkey with a big, wide grin, it should come as no surprise that humor finds its way into my social media posts and blogs quite often. Humor is an important part of who I am and thus…

Whether you’re a prolific novelist, journalist, musician, poet, or blogger, I’ve got to believe one of the worst feelings in the world for a writer is to have writer’s block—to struggle to find the words when the words have always seemed to be there before. Ditto for content marketers, when the lifeblood of their businesses…

As marketers, we’ve probably all faced one or more of these situations: We’re not converting Web traffic to sales No one’s subscribing to our email list Our free download just sits there with no suitors, like a wallflower at the high school dance We’re getting no takers on our offer of a free consult No…

A blog on the topic of personal branding seemed like a natural follow-up to last week’s “I Know My Brand … Do You Know Yours?” As I started to ponder what to write, I had the strangest sense of Déjà vu. Seems I’d touched on that subject a few years back, so why re-create the…

What if I told you that you could market your product or service to a handful of key individuals and be just as successful, if not more so, as you would casting a wider net to reach a bigger audience? Would you think, “Paul’s been spending too much time on the volleyball court” or “What’s…

Marketing 101 teaches us to define our ideal client or customer (our “target audience”) and to gear our communications and marketing efforts toward that broad group. Not to the exclusion of others, of course, but the idea is that if we communicate what we need to the people we most want to be our customers/clients,…

The mid-winter blahs have no doubt hit our friends to the north, while we southern Californians bask in February sunshine that’s not too hot and not too cold. For me, this always seems like the perfect time of year to get sociable and share a slice of my “life in the sun” (at least virtually)…

With presidential and local campaigns in high gear, I got to thinking about how heavily these campaigns rely on public relations. After all, winning an election is as much about public perception as it is about policy and decision-making. So who do you think, so far, is winning the PR battle? Take a look at…

Back in 1600, when Shakespeare penned Juliet’s now-famous line “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I doubt he ever imagined it would be used in a 2012 business blog about “branding.” But here it is. And with my sincere apologies to The Great…