Have you updated your marketing plan lately?

I’m here to say, it’s 2016 and marketing has changed. A lot. Marketing is no longer centered around your product, but your customer.

Now’s a good time to update your marketing plan (you have a marketing plan, right?). Make it your road map for this year’s marketing initiatives. Use it to set goals that you can check on from time to time—and say, “Oh, yeah, lookin’ good” or “Oh, sh*t, we’re totally off.” If you Google “marketing plan template,” you’ll find a standard outline consisting of about ten things you could include—like a SWOT analysis, USP and pricing strategies.Read full post...

Writing is quickly becoming an important skill for marketers to have.

I’m no writer. Which might become evident as you make your way through this. When I was in college, nobody told me how important writing would be once I landed a marketing job. Maybe they didn’t think it was important because of how fast everything in marketing and advertising changes. But I’ve come to accept my fate as a marketer—I must be a writer. As marketers, we can’t deny it or pretend it isn’t a huge part of our jobs. With marketing and advertising making a shift from traditional to digital, more of our everyday job has become writing. Emails. Blogs. Content. Tweets. Press releases. Proposals. StrategiesRead full post...

I happen to be an early millennial (1986), and my brothers came around at the end (2000 & 2002) And the three of us consume content very differently, and much differently than mom and dad.

If you’re not a millennial, you probably have a mental image of how we behave—we can’t put our phones down, we can’t pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds, we aren’t following the traditional 9–5 workday and we can be kind of difficult.

It’s all true.

But we’re also an important demographic—and we’re changing the way marketers do their job.Read full post...

Whether you have separate teams dedicated to marketing and new business development, or you have one person responsible for both, you need to start an inbound marketing program. What makes inbound so important?

Let’s start with something everyone (especially our b2b clients) realizes: The buyer’s journey has changed. There’s now this Zero Moment of Truth—the moment when a person identifies a problem and then heads to Google to research a solution. If you don’t come up on that first page, chances are your competitors do, and they will snag that lead and eventually that paying customer.Read full post...

If you’re a B2B company and aren’t blogging on the reg yet, what in the world are you waiting for? While your competitors are blogging to generate new leads, you’re going to become a victim of falling behind. But I get it – you’re busy – and in charge of everything from strategic planning, running the day to day, your social media, answering to the sales department and having to prove marketing’s ROI to the boss-man. But if a blog is done correctly, it can be a powerful lead-generating tool, SEO booster and all-over knockout way to prove your organization’s expertise and knowledge.Read full post...

Bad emails can ruin your nurturing strategy!

Earlier this week I received the following email, and because of their confidentiality notice I’m just going to paste the copy:

Subject: Additional Sales Leads

Hi,

Are you currently in need of help in generating leads or appointments for your business? We can help you through our Multichannel Marketing Solutions.

I’d be happy to talk to you and discuss our program. Please let me know the best way for us to connect. Read full post...

Inbound or content marketing is nothing new. As marketers, we’ve been creating content — e-books, white papers, webinars, infographics, blogs — for years. What’s new is using inbound to build business. Here’s how: We create content that potential buyers want and need, optimize the website, build trust with the prospect through personalized lead nurturing, and eventually turn that prospect into a customer.

And we do all of this in real time, while we track what’s working and what isn’t, enabling us to show the ROI of marketing. Statistics tell us inbound methods cost 62% less than outbound methods, and generate three times more leads. Those are some pretty awesome numbers.Read full post...

Motivation is like a muscle, it won’t grow on its own! You need to push it!

I finally hit my one-year anniversary at AB&C — and every day I still wake up as excited as I was on my first day of work here. I know, sounds totally cheesy — but whatever. I refuse to get into a rut. Because once things get stagnant, I quit pushing myself to become better. Like at the gym. Doing the same old routine gets old real fast and, before you know it, going just seems boring and skipping becomes a lot more appealing. But if you keep your routine new and exciting, you’ll always be looking forward to going.Read full post...

Tips for your marketing plan in 2015!

If you’re anything like me, you’ve already plunged headfirst into planning for 2015. But with the marketing industry in a constant state of change, you have to hustle to keep up with the latest ways to reach your customers. What will your most effective marketing efforts look like in the New Year?Read full post...

When the Department of Public Health asked us to promote HealthyDelaware.org — a resource to help Delawareans learn about cancer prevention, screening and treatment programs — we knew social media would play a key role.Read full post...

Working with a full-service agency brings a lot of benefits to clients.

The advertising industry has evolved since the days of the Mad Men. Full-service agencies have given way to specialty shops. These shops usually focus on one marketing tactic — PR, SEO, website design or maybe inbound marketing. And they tend to concentrate on only one or two industries.

I heard this line over and over at a recent conference:Read full post...

Conferences are still a good marketing tactic

Conferences come in all forms and sizes. They can be cheap or expensive, close or far away, worthwhile or totally pointless. As a marketer, should you still attend?Read full post...

10,000 marketers from all over the world attended Inbound 2014 in Boston.

I spent all of last week in Boston at Inbound 2014. The conference was full of ridiculously smart speakers — Martha Stewart, Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Sinek were all wonderful keynotes. It was impossible to leave a session without being fired up. But I don’t want to go on about how awesome every session was (I’m sure a few other fellow attendees will do that), or how strongly I believe inbound/content marketing is the way to go (that’ll be a separate post), or even how great the beers and bars in Beantown are. I really want to comment on some interesting things I noticed about the people.  Read full post...

Are you spreading your marketing dollars too thin?

Each year it seems that marketing budgets get smaller. But your boss wants a higher return on everything you do, right? You have to be careful with your budget — and show how your marketing dollars lead directly to an increase in company revenue.

As a marketer, you may feel overwhelmed staying on top of all the new tricks of the trade and figuring out if they’re even relevant for your business. Read full post...

How does an ad agency not become the shoemaker’s child?

By doing its own advertising and marketing. As a 43-year-old agency that expanded into the city of Philadelphia — known for cheesesteaks, relentless sports fans and a statue of Rocky at the steps of the Art Museum — AB&C wanted to be noticed. And kick-ass print ads alone weren’t gonna cut it. Giving back to the community in some way seemed like a bright idea. So we came up with a way to help a local business grow, which in turn would help the community grow: a competition — just like the Hunger Games — to find a great business with an innovative idea. The reward? A year’s worth of free marketing services. (OK, it was nothing like the Hunger Games. That would’ve gotten us noticed for all the wrong reasons.)

Read full post...