Advertising and Marketing: The Real Deal or Fake News?

Still tasting the raunchiness of some phony baloney served up to me as legitimate business fare, I felt motivated to tackle a controversial yet in-your-face-everyday topic, and an important one in business: attempted consumer manipulation. You can even call it fake news. Now well past the Industrial Age, we’re neck deep into the Information Age which… Read More »

Congruence of Branding and Experience is Sales Power!

“Do this and you will succeed.” That’s the general implication behind just about every performance coach’s or personal trainer’s program. Following the suggestions in this post may be as close as I can come in a marketing blog to saying: Do this and you will succeed! Consistency is a term very often used by marketers… Read More »

Your Website’s Hook and Anchor

What are you looking for?  You’ll know when you see it! Great marketing design, whether digital, print or environmental, has one thing in common. For your marketing messages to be effective, all you really need to start with is this one thing. Without it, people will gloss over your web pages, eblasts, brochures social posts… Read More »

The Secret Weapon in Your Communication Tool Box

Emails are focused, written communications that are easily searchable and provide a permanent record of discourse. Email is also a handy tool for file and link sharing but emails are woefully ineffective in a very important area of business communication; impetus. Emails lack the moving energy to solve problems or improve situations. They become buried,… Read More »

Online Marketing Best Practices: What’s Best for You?

Best practices in marketing vary from customer to customer. Whenever you hear or read the phrase, “marketing best practices” think of it as a series of tactics that have worked well for a collection of businesses at a recent point in time in a specific industry. In my own industry, digital marketing, I’ve been seeing a… Read More »

Website Maintenance Maintains Business Growth

Choose a website hosting plan that actually works hard for your business! Your website has parts that will break or expire and cause communication problems, just like your car’s parts will eventually break or malfunction and cause transportation problems. If you have a website for any length of time, you’ve surely experienced a utility malfunction,… Read More »

Marketing Automation automates what you feed it!

Marketing Automation requires effort and for some, it’s well worth it! Marketing Automation (MA) works amazingly well when careful planning and diligence are behind it. But caution: you cannot throw money at a third party professional, sit back and expect MA to generate qualified leads. Building an effective marketing automation platform requires an investment in staff… Read More »

Word of mouth or word of millions?

One of my valued colleagues tweeted out a provocative blog post that got my juices flowing and here I paraphrase the essence of it: Forget your friends’ advice. Just Google it! Do you need a certain product or service about which you know little? If so, Google wants you to ignore your friends and pay… Read More »

The Formula for More Business with Less Stress

Stay relevant, better yet, indispensable! I tend to worry a little about business in the summer. I know myself and I know human nature. Summer in New Hampshire is like paradise if you’re an outdoorsman. The calls of the lakes, mountains, golf courses and beaches pull us from our office chairs on beautiful afternoons and sometimes even… Read More »

Change your words to grow your business!

If you confidently walk away from price competition then you’re probably a better communicator than your competitors. While they talk about how great their quality and service are, you’re already “rolling up your sleeves” with the prospective client and pointing out how you will help change their business and improve their lives. There’s nothing new… Read More »