How to Use Your Brand Voice to Be Heard in Social Media
Social media is the noisiest place on the planet. Every day, there are over 1 billion Facebook posts and 400 million Tweets.If you’re straining to be heard amid the social media din, try using one of your most powerful marketing assets: The voice of your brand.Here’s why brand voice is important in a smart marketing strategy, especially for social media marketing.
How Breaking a Customer Promise Can Hurt Your Brand
our company’s brand represents the value customers receive when they interact with your business. It's a promise: When you choose to purchase from us, this is what we will deliver to you.When you break that promise – through defective products, shoddy workmanship, or poor service – you might lose the customer.But in this age of social media, you might also lose your reputation. Remember the musician who made a YouTube video about United Airlines breaking his guitar? It got more than 12 million views and spawned a whole culture of people creating videos so showcase their service complaints.How can you avoid mistakes that hurt your brand? And what can you do if those mistakes happen? Here are four insights from my recent experience for your smart marketing strategy.
7 Ways to Make Social Media a Top Marketing Priority
Whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers, social media marketing should play a prominent role in your marketing plan. Here are seven ways to make social media marketing a top priority in your smart marketing strategy.
How to Create Great Advertising with Storytelling
Top 10 lists are everywhere this time of year. One of the most interesting lists for marketers is the Top 10 Most Viewed Ads on YouTube, as reported on Mashable.com. These are TV spots people chose to watch online, by the millions. That’s an advertiser’s dream. But what makes these ads so popular? It’s not crazy gimmicks or over-the-top production techniques, though some of the ads have spectacular visual effects. I think it’s about storytelling. The most watched ads of 2011 engage viewers in a compelling story. Here’s why storytelling is such an effective advertising technique and how to tell stories in your smart marketing strategy.
Shut Up, Already: How Over-Marketing Kills Relationships
Permission-based marketing is now at the heart of relationships between companies and their customers and prospects. People opt-in to receive your emails, like your company on Facebook, subscribe to an RSS feed from your website or your channel on YouTube, or follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn.But having permission to market to someone isn’t a license to bombard them with marketing messages. In fact, not knowing when to shut up is a classic marketing mistake.Here’s how over-marketing can kill a customer or prospect relationship and 7 ways to avoid this costly error in your smart marketing strategy.
New Sales Rep, Key Account: Top 10 Tips for B2B Success
Smart business-to-business (B2B) marketers work hard to create and keep great relationships with their clients.In my last post, I shared the story of how a new B2B sales rep nearly destroyed a 10-year client relationship with my marketing agency by making six crucial mistakes in the first meeting.But transitioning a legacy client to a new sales rep doesn’t have to be a sales minefield. When handled well, assigning a new rep to a key account can be an opportunity to increase the client’s satisfaction and boost sales.Here are 10 things a new sales rep can do to ensure a smooth transition and earn a long-time client’s trust.
What Makes Bad Advertising So Bad? It’s Not Believable
When an advertising campaign is so bad it makes you groan out loud, there’s usually a simple reason: It’s not believable.The worst offenders are campaigns that attempt to portray real-life situations. The dialogue often is so forced or the setup so phony that your only reaction is to roll your eyes and think, “Yeah, right.”But lack of believability in advertising is more than annoying. It’s a waste of the marketer’s money.Here are two ways to achieve believability in your advertising and two examples of smart marketers, including one in Northeast Ohio, who are doing it right.