Reading Time: < 1 minMarketing is about building and promoting a brand that attracts people to what you do. It’s everything your company does and how the world views you. Advertising is about interrupting people at expected times. Running TV commercials or Facebook ads are great ways to spend some money to interrupt people when they are expecting it. […]
Marketing
It intentionally doesn’t scale
Reading Time: 2 minLast year I shared some thoughts on doing things that don’t scale. In that case it was about invoicing, but I’ve seen this idea continue to pop up. Lumpy Mail The first is the idea of sending “lumpy mail”. It’s easy to send 1000 emails, and rather easy to send 100 letters in the mail, […]
Visceral responses matter
Reading Time: 2 minGenerally speaking, I’m not a fan of AI. There are some great things coming from it, but I generally prefer the old way of doing things, and wish that all creativity came directly from human minds. However, it’s not something I can control so I’m digging in deeply to understand AI as well as I […]
There is no average person
Reading Time: < 1 minWhile building audience personas is a vital piece of any marketing campaign, it’s also a bit strange. We build this very specific idea of who the customer is, knowing that this exact person doesn’t exist. In his book, “The Design of Everyday Things“, author Don Norman says: There is no such thing as the average […]
Always build the foundation first
Reading Time: < 1 minI love the processes behind the work we do at GreenMellen. By taking things in the right order, the results are far more likely to be successful. However, there is a downside to this approach; you can’t just jump into the middle of a campaign and hope to be successful. In the book “The Dichotomy […]
Yes, that’s spam
Reading Time: 2 minAs time goes on, my definition of spam has gotten larger and larger. If you’re thinking about sending something and wonder “would this be considered spam?”, yes, it probably would be. My definition of spam has grown to simply include any cold contact. A cold email, a cold LinkedIn message, a cold phone call — […]
Thought leaders are everywhere
Reading Time: 2 minDepending on your marketing goals, one approach might be to reach “thought leaders” so that they can spread the word about your product to their audience. It sounds good in theory, but determining who a thought leader is can be nearly impossible. There are well-known authors and celebrities, for sure, but the people that others […]
Your real customers are a level or two deeper
Reading Time: 2 minIn any kind of marketing it’s essential to know who your real customers are, but it’s sometimes a little trickier than it might seem. As I shared earlier this year, the people that we build websites for aren’t the ones that we’re actually building them for. When we build a site for a client, we’re […]
You are advertising to a moving parade
Reading Time: < 1 minAdvertising tycoon David Ogilvy had many tremendous ideas when it came to advertising, but one of his big ones was to stick with what works. In his mind, companies switched from one marketing tactic to another far before the first one had run dry. If you’re sick and tired of the ads that you’re running, […]
The clarity of an idea is based on the person receiving it
Reading Time: 2 minWhen sharing ideas and strategies with others, I try to be very clear. This takes two forms: First, it’s not magic. It irritates me when people tell me they have someone “doing SEO” for their site, but they have no idea what they’re doing. We strive to be clear and transparent with what we do, […]