The blog.

The endless “brand awareness vs sales activation” debate is rather like arguing whether it’s better to eat breakfast or dinner. They’re both important meals. They just work on different timeframes and satisfy different hungers.

Small businesses should adopt a more nuanced understanding of their customers, informed by behavioral insights and grounded in real-world observations.

As digital marketing continues to evolve, understanding the power of “dark” social becomes crucial for marketers seeking to tap into the hidden currents of online conversations and drive meaningful engagement with their audiences.

Marketing during a recession can increase brand awareness, visibility, reach, and engagement. But only when you have someone with advanced marketing experience.

How do you convert a marketing skeptic into a supportive advocate? By showing them you know what you’re doing.

The abuse of user tracking has not only resulted in less effective marketing. It threatens to jeopardize the entire marketing industry.

Marketers need to restore creativity to the forefront of business success, while ensuring that something that may appear to be brave is actually low risk and ultimately effective.

Managers look for easy consensus, instead of looking to build a corporate culture of trust able to support vigorous debate.

Some of the more common mistakes we see in the presentation and marketing of e-commerce sites.

Today’s truly effective Marketing Department needs to expand into previously-restricted departmental silos such as sales, support, and even finance.

RFPs are an ineffective way to find a marketing agency partner for your business.

Marketing during a pandemic is not the time to beat your corporate chest. It’s time to be seen as a valued corporate citizen. The world does not need vague and insincere promises of support.

While social media seems to be more about media and less about social, Google seems to be taking search clicks away from businesses.

Many businesses charge less than they could for their products and services. Pricing based on research and cost analysis provides the confidence to communicate and position a product’s true value.

There’s a trend for every answer to be a digital one. But all the data analytics, martech, chatbots, and targeted ads in the world won’t matter if your core messaging falls flat in its face.

Creating strong, engaging marketing for your small business can be tough. Learn the top 10 mistakes to avoid as well as how to fix these common problems.

The majority of your potential customers are not buying from you, for reasons that make perfect sense to them. What are you doing to find meaningful competitive advantage?

Considering how important it is for any business, Customer Experience should be thought of as a strategic business pillar in the same way as marketing or sales.

Marketers need to better understand how the Finance department works – and thinks – in order to work together to deliver better decisions and outcomes for the business.

Why should customers buy from you, rather than your competition? If you don’t have a compelling value proposition for them, customers will buy on price – meaning you’ve probably lost the sale.

Customers already assume brands are fallible. Admitting weakness is a tangible demonstration of honesty and, therefore, makes your other claims more believable.

Markets aren’t controlled by first-mover advantage. Market domination is determined by whoever is first to best meet the needs of the customer.

It’s impossible to express any sufficient level of credibility of the value promise, unless the extent to which you promote the promise is commensurate with the significance of the product or service concerned.

The notion of ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’ marketing being separate is outdated, since all marketing includes digital components.

Customers won’t buy from you if they don’t feel they can trust you. How does a business create that feeling of trust?

Businesses may believe they are behaving in a customer-centric manner. However internal obstacles often prevent their actions supporting more than one or two stakeholder groups.

The future of marketing is a diverse and modern combination of data analysis, technical and semantic SEO, social, and creative disciplines working together.

Your small business is struggling for the same reasons that any business struggles. Which is precisely why you’re not a startup.

Being a millennial is not a ticket to a different kind of mindset. The myth of the “millennial segment” makes a mockery of just about every principle of marketing segmentation.

The traditional roles of sales and marketing have evolved, as technology has shaped and influenced customer buying behavior. Marketing now does more, but that doesn’t mean the role of sales is now irrelevant.

The marketing industry has been upended over the past decade from marketing technology. The result is many businesses focus on tactics and forget about strategy – with disastrous results.

How many of us wake up and ask ourselves how we can offer LESS than our competition? Probably no one – yet that may be the most important question you can ask yourself about your small business. Welcome to the 80/20 Rule.

Meaningful digital disruption is not about society adopting new tools or technologies. It’s about society implementing new behaviors.

Businesses of every size need to create exceptional, remarkable marketing experiences for their audiences if they are to have a chance of being remembered.

Your brand communication isn’t just being hijacked. It’s being held to ransom by the perceived quality of your customer experience. The consumer has assumed the role of Judge, Jury – and Executioner.

Companies of all shapes and sizes must evolve their messaging from simple one-dimensional slogans or taglines, to multi-tiered, story-based communications.

Many small businesses either fail to align their marketing with a business-related issue, or mis-diagnose the root cause of why their marketing isn’t working

The definition, scope, and size of a market can only be based upon current buyer understanding on what that market represents. If customers don’t understand what your product is, and how it compared to other products, the truth is that you’re in a new market.

To provide a unified customer experience means a new way of doing business. one where the entire organization delivers a seamless, personalized and relevant customer experience, no matter where the interaction takes place.

Instead of continually dividing a business into niche areas of specialization, there’s an argument for the return of what we could call the “informed generalist”.

Products, no matter how great they may be, are commodities. How much your brand is liked is the new barometer of how much advocacy it will generate.