Marketing and branding
Paid Search: Are You Wasting Your Money?
Ross | March 12th, 2013Are you wasting your money on paid search? A brand new study from eBay suggests that you might be throwing your money away. Paid search marketing is the paid use of search engines (such as Google or Bing) to promote your product or service. Paid search marketing is also sometimes called CPC (cost-per-click), or PPC [...]
Publicity Stunts: When Good Ideas Go Bad
Mike | March 6th, 2013Every so often a company gets a great idea about how they might garner so great free publicity. Perhaps some manager or marketing team thinks to themselves, “If we can only get some free press, we could be huge!” The wheels start turning, the ideas start to flow, the budgets get prepared and the next thing [...]
2013 Super Bowl Marketing and Small Business: More in Common Than You Think!
Mike | February 4th, 2013We This time of year is seems that all the marketing mavens want to talk about are this year’s batch of Super Bowl commercials. The oxygen is being sucked out of the room at a rate of over $7.5 million per minute. Mercedes Benz, Pepsi, Budweiser, Axe deodorant, Best Buy, Chrysler, and Century 21 real [...]
How To Avoid Disaster In Your Small Business Digital Marketing Efforts
Ross | January 22nd, 2013Small businesses are changing how they spend their money on digital marketing. These changes are driven, in part, by the growth of social networks and media platforms. For example, in a recent report from BIA/Kelsey, 63% of SMBs said they use social media as a marketing tool for their business. In the last five years, [...]
Applying Digitial Marketing Techniques To Retail Shopping
Ross | December 23rd, 2012As consumers, we are constantly interrupted online by all forms of advertising. Many of us have learned to tolerate these interruptions. Some of us completely ignore them. But if you run a business, have you considered how your online marketing activities are impacting your customers and potential customers? Here’s a fun look at how retargeting, [...]
Key Digital Marketing Trends For 2013
Ross | December 20th, 2012Whether you run an established small business or startup, or plan to start one in 2013, you will need to understand how to leverage digital marketing to find new customers and increase sales. Market firm eMarketer recently put together a helpful slideshow, highlighting digital marketing trends they believe to be most important. The five key [...]
The Power of Thinking Long-Term
Ross | December 19th, 2012Amazon is an unusual company. It focuses on the long-term (typically 10 to 20 years) instead of short term (typically quarterly earnings). For example, in talking about the Kindle, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, offers the following insight: Go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago. There you just have [...]
What Job Are Your Customers Hiring Your Products To Perform?
Ross | December 18th, 2012If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner developing a new product or service, how can you figure out what jobs people want done that they have difficulty doing? If you have an existing product or service, how can you improve that product or service to increase sales? Clay Christensen suggests an interesting approach: [...]
