What once was a thriving trade show program in your marketing budget has been hit hard by COVID-19. While 2020 budgets may get a break by removing the high cost to attend and exhibit at shows, so too have the…
Strategy
Is Working with an Advertising Agency Affordable for Small Businesses?
Once upon a time, small businesses grew organically with a local storefront, serving the immediate community’s needs. Once flourishing, a small business might open another store in the next town, and so on and so on, until it was operating…
Outsourcing Marketing Yields a Positive Return on Investment
Before we get to the good stuff on why outsourced marketing yields a positive return on your investment, let’s first address the elephant in this blog. Determining ROI on marketing is difficult. Not all marketing efforts directly result in a…
How Much Money Should a Small Business Spend on Marketing?
Wow! What a loaded question “How much money should a small business spend on marketing?” has become. Marketing budgets are at the mercy of outside forces—events both under and beyond a business owner’s control. Worst case scenario is that the…
How to Write an RFP for Outsourced Marketing
Outsourcing marketing services is a rapidly growing trend. Now, more than ever, company leaders are looking for ways to expand their marketing capacity without hiring additional employees. Similar to writing a Request for Proposal (RFP) for an advertising agency, outsourced…
We’ve looked at your website, and there are some problems we can fix…
Every business owner has received this unsolicited spammy email. We see them all the time. We get them too. Yes, even us. If you don’t have access to your junk email folder right now, here’s what that email looks like….
The Importance of Social Media Marketing
An invitation went out to thousands of people inviting them to the free event. All you had to do was register online and attend. These invitations were EVERYWHERE. On websites, inboxes, at the bottom of people’s email signatures, on billboards,…
The Battle Over Minimum Wage: Small Business Consulting in a Time of Debate
The minimum wage debate carries on. Earlier this year, retail giant Target announced that it will raise its minimum wage of $12 by $1 this summer with the goal of reaching $15 an hour by 2020. Similarly, Bank of America…
Sales Vs. Marketing: Brand Strategy Can Eliminate the Vs. Once and For All
Your salespeople. They are knowledgeable and well trained. They are often the face of your small business and brand. Your brand strategy. It’s the culmination of countless hours, resources and an enormous amount of energy spent establishing what your company…
How to Develop a Strategic, Somewhat Future-Proof Nonprofit Marketing Plan for the Future
The strategic marketing planning process, the way we’ve known it thus far, may be becoming inadequate for nonprofits. Any marketer will tell you that to stay contemporary with customers, you can’t just react to change. You must anticipate change. The…
