The media produce millions of stories on a regular basis and if your company is like most, you are in none of them. That’s a huge marketing mistake. I’m half way through Steve Jobs’ biography. Like every other historical account of his company’s assent, the biography...
Every four years, marketers compete for media space with presidential candidates. This year will be no different. Faced with a choice, reporters will often choose a timely election story over a product news story. Fortunately, there are ways around this. Our...
In addition to owning and running a marketing company for over twenty years, I teach marketing at the college level as a way of staying sharp academically. Marketing is complex, and there are so many terms and concepts that it’s impossible to hold them all in your...
What follows is the most profitable headline and story you may ever read … “No matter how many millions are spent on advertising, nothing sells a product better than free publicity.” The headline for this article was not written by me. It is a sentence I copied...
I write a lot about the value of publicity. I know how well it works because I see the success our PR clients have every day. I also take my own medicine and I’d like to share some recent results with you. As a business hobby, I’ve started a website for artists: Post...
If your product or service is fairly new or complex, traditional ads probably won’t work for you. After all, how will you explain why your new product is better than the competitor in a 30-second TV spot? Or how can you make an unfamiliar audience understand why they...
Here’s a simple trick to see if you are spending your marketing dollars in a way that will give you the most bang for your buck: arrange the three main elements of the promotional mix in order of low cost/high reach to high cost/low reach and then see where you are...
The days of expensive websites are fast coming to a close. We can now build most companies’ websites for less than what we used to charge for giving them an estimate. Also gone are the days of web companies “owning” your site; either legally or simply because...
Last week I wrote a draft of a marketing letter and sent it to my head writer with this note: please proof and send it on its way. She proofed and polished it up, sent it as a mass email, modified it for our blog, posted it to our fan page, and began tweeting about...
If you are having a hard time turning social media marketing into sales, you’re not alone. As you invest to figure it out, make sure you aren’t losing sight of the old-school promotional channels on which your company was likely built. Unlike social media, you know...
