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Six Keys to Writing a Great Proposal by Doug Stern, Jaclyn Landon
:ooking for ways to create a proposal that sets you and your company favorably apart? Ways that capture the great things you have to offer? Here are six suggested best-practices intended to not only maximize your chances to stand out ...
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Achieving Relevance in Direct Digital Marketing: Overcoming Organizational Constraints by Bryce Marshall
Organizational challenges can be the silent killer to achieving relevance in direct digital marketing, placing constraints on innovation and on the adoption of technology and best-practices, or limiting the manpower to create compelling campaigns and programs.
You can do everything else ...
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What Stonyfield, Method, and Green Mountain Roasters Know (and You Should, Too) by Ted Mininni
New vision and approaches can add significantly more value to brands over their competitors. Some brands can easily become commodities. Unless they choose otherwise.
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Selling Like Billy Mays: Five Essential Character Traits That Make a Product Easy to Sell by Barry Densa
Billy Mays, who, sadly, passed away at age 50, was a potbellied, black-bearded Atlantic City carnival barker who wore a blue long-sleeve shirt and a white undershirt. And direct marketers loved him. According to Mays, to be great and an ...
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Ten Steps to Clear a Passage Through Today's 'Frozen' Economy
by Michael DotsonWe are facing economic challenges the likes of which many of us have not experienced before. As professionals, how do we break away from this stagnation and take advantage of opportunities to grow your business?
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Problem Solved: How Do I Turn a Touch Into a Relationship? by Claire Coyne
"Relationships don't just happen, they are built—one experience at a time," says Joel Book of ExactTarget. And lucky for us, Joel has mapped out the process of doing just that via email marketing.
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The Top Five Ways to Attract and Keep Customers in Any Economy by Barry Densa
The economy still stinks. But only if during the long-gone good times your business was on cruise control and you saw your customers as dollar signs and not people. Some marketers are suffering far less than others, because they cared ...
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Five Paid-Search Tips to Boost Quality Score (and Drive Higher ROI) by Matt Lawson
By using new campaign-management techniques, smart marketers can gain a sizable and lasting advantage over the competition in the auction for keywords—ensuring their ads show up high in search results without dampening ROI.
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Is Your Homepage Overwhelming and Underperforming?
by Kathryn RoyAre your website visitors like tourists strolling through Times Square on their way to a matinee with little time to spare, or are they a captive audience willing to watch and absorb all you hope to communicate? Websites increasingly appear ...
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Ten Ways to Drive Consumer Action With Online Video by Bud Rosenthal
There's no question that online video is fast becoming a favorite of Internet users around the world. But the hit-or-miss nature of viral video, the brand quality considerations of user-generated content, and the general disdain for television commercials online have ...
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Five Ways to Build Trust—and Tipping Points for Choice by Anthony Cirillo
A column by noted coach and businessman Harvey Mackay contended that trust is the most important word in business. It made the point that people buy from people, not from companies. To help build trust, start with the following five ...
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10 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Generate Leads
by Brian CarrollYou need to rethink the way you use LinkedIn. Without some of us even noticing, it has developed into a useful lead-generation tool for marketers and salespeople who are looking to build relationships with prospects.
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10 Best and Worst Internet Company Names of the Decade by Laurel Sutton
Like the internet phenoms they trumpeted, Internet company names of the last decade have been, by turns, wildly inventive, deeply troubled, breathtakingly silly, serviceable (if dull)—and, occasionally, brilliant. Here are the trends and names that rose to the top (and ...
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What Every CMO Should Know About Music by Ruth Simmons
Sir John Hegarty, the man behind the Levi's jeans and Lynx deodorant ads, once claimed, "Music is 50% of an ad's success." Yet even today very few metrics are regularly applied within the planning and creative processes to measure the ...
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Look at Business Presentations as a Process, Not an Event by Joseph Sommerville, PhD
If you look at creating an effective presentation as a process rather than as an event, you'll quickly realize that it isn't a Sisyphean task. A process has the advantages of being both learnable and repeatable, so once you master ...
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True Stories: A Cautionary Tale of Rebranding Gone Astray
by Liz ConlinMost of the branding articles that you read are happy, glowing tales of how an agency rebranded a client and turned that client into a superstar brand with double-digit growth. Well, this is not one of those stories. We often ...
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Embracing Cross-Channel Analytics to Create a Competitive Advantage by Laura Patterson
If you are using multiple channels and you want to understand both what's really working and enrich your customers' experiences with your organization, then you'll have to step into the world of cross-channel analytics.
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Marketers' Choice: Run With the Big Dogs, or Stay on the Porch by Traci Gere
Marketers need to establish and institutionalize the processes for drawing and communicating Marketing's impact, consistently and repeatedly. That means running with the "big dogs" in Finance, Sales, and the chief executive's seat... and speaking their language, and framing decisions in ...
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Selling B2B Social Media Internally: Ten Arguments to Win Over the Boardroom, Part 1
by Christina "CK" KerleyIt's that time to rally internal support for the "newest" programs in your marketing plans. If yours is a B2B company, 2010 is the year you'll want to start integrating social media into your marketing mix… or have it play ...
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Bearing Bad News: Six Ways to Reduce the Sting When Your Message Stinks by Jonathan Kranz
I can't promise you that by following these suggestions you'll recover from bankruptcy or resurrect your business. But you can move on with dignity. And, sometimes, when your organization faces its darkest hour, choosing dignity may be the best, last ...