Can you tell me simply what your company stands for? It’s a question that a lot of people have trouble answering. Your company exists for a purpose, and that purpose is not to make money or produce a specific product. It has a broader problem it’s trying to solve, or at least it should if you want to have long term success. What I find with a number of the clients I work with is that they can’t simply state that mission. They’ve always got a convoluted, detail-oriented, mixed-message explanation that would vary if you talked to different decision makers in the same company. Quite frankly, if you fall in to that category of people, that’s hurting your brand.
Author: Michael McNew
Web developer, marketing innovator, technology enthusiast, and founder of Visceral Concepts, Michael McNew has developed a passion for delivering value to small business, turning his creativity towards branding and content marketing for small business owners.
3 Tips to Expand Your Instagram
If you’re not aware, Instagram is a social media platform well known for it’s varied cliches (my favorite are mirror selfies – you see some strange things in the background), but also well known for the rate of speed at which you can grow an account. In reality, using Instagram properly can grow your social media business at wildfire rates of speed. It’s important for every business to know how to use Instagram, but that importance is double or triple if you have a product or service that is highly visual.
Why It’s Time to Prioritize Your Content
Whenever I get a lot of questions on a particular topic, I know it’s time to write an article on that topic. Lately, the questions have all revolved around SEO, which is the practice of optimizing your website so search engines will find you based on certain keywords. Most of the questions are something along the lines of “How do I improve my Google rank?” Here’s my out-of-the-ordinary, difinitive answer.
4 Secrets to Maximize Your B2B Sales
We don’t treat our business clients the same way consumer companies treat consumers. I understand that the sales process can often be different when selling to a company than it is when selling to a consumer, but there are a lot of things that we do that aren’t conducive to successful marketing. We need to take some of the practices of B2C and learn to treat our business clients like people. In that spirit, here are 4 things you should do in your B2B marketing process.
The 5 Reasons You Need To Start Blogging
If you’re not blogging as a part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Blogs have a way of doing a number of different things for your business that you can’t reasonably do any other way, and they also tend to be avoided as sort of a hobby action that’s neither important nor worth the time they take. However, that perception is hugely wrong. Check this out.
The Magic Number 45
I’ve seen small businesses make the same simple mistake when advertising their events a little too often. It’s time to set the record straight about what they (and likely you) are doing wrong and how to fix it.
Why Context Beats Content Every Time
There’s a lot of talk out there, especially in the marketing world, about content. I think we’re getting so lost in the idea that we need to produce content as a message that we’re not looking at one of the most important factors about content. That factor is context, and I really want to lay that out there because I feel that if we put an over focus on content, we kind of start to produce crap.
Let Me Be Clear
Recently it came to my attention that the Visceral Concepts website wasn’t very clear about what it is we do as a company. People mentioned to me, “I was visiting your website recently, and I couldn’t figure out what it is that you do.” Heh, ok, that’s a clue. If I had only gotten that from one or two people, I might have written it off as fluke, but it was from a significant number of people, so I listened.
The Value of Email
Have you already discarded email marketing? Let me share something with you. Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing on the web, especially in terms of your customer lifetime value. If you’ve discarded it already, you need to pick it back up.
The New Definition of Marketing
There’s something that’s been bothering me a lot in the business world. We’ve almost lumped marketers in to the pinky-wearing, hard-push, bad polyester suit, old-school used car salesman category. Quite frankly, it’s because a lot of them are.