“Safe advertising is the riskiest advertising you can do.” – Bill Bernbach, Co-founder, BBD Advertising Agency Creativity is what sells, and being creative means taking risks. In my book, Branding Insights for Small Business, I point out that creativity is marketing’s most underutilized tool. An ad, brochure or website is…

Where are marketers’ biggest opportunities this year? Big Data, personalization and precision targeting are trends to watch in 2015. It’s interesting to think just how far marketing has come since I began in the business more than 30 years ago. If I had tried to describe 2015 then, I don’t think…

Think about what you should say, before you decide where to say it. It’s the foundation of an effective marketing strategy. In my more than 30 years helping businesses build better marketing strategies, the thing they want to discuss most is marketing tactics: How can we get in front of…

Will Panda 4.1 affect your organic search rankings? The Panda update can work in your favor, if you know what it’s looking for. A few years ago, Google released an update it called Panda, which aimed to weed out low-quality content in its organic search results. While the intended target…

Thinking of renaming your business? Use these three simple rules to create a name that rocks!

How does Google’s latest search algorithms affect  your SEO strategies? Each year, search engine giants Google and Bing roll out new algorithms (they control the answers we get to our search queries) that impact the way businesses approach search engine optimization (SEO). Sometimes the changes represent a major sea change in SEO thinking….

With 259 million members, LinkedIn is the leading professional networking site. It used to be that the sole way for busy professionals to connect involved hustling at networking events – donning nametags and making forced introductions over brunch buffets and stale coffee. Anyone who’s attended these events, often hosted by…

Proposals can be effective sales tools – with the right preparation. If your business sells products or services to other businesses, at some point you’ve probably been asked to submit a sales proposal. It’s equally likely that you weren’t too thrilled by the idea. Ideally, we like to control the…

Some argue that brand loyalty is an outdated concept. In a recent article in The New Yorker, writer James Surowiecki makes a bold assertion: There’s no such thing as brand loyalty anymore. The internet killed it, and brands are a thing of the past. Brands, his argument goes, came about…

Google’s new AdWords extensions change the way your PPC campaigns are ranked. In the last year, Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) has become even more integral to a business’s search engine marketing (SEM) strategy. One reason is that organic search results on Google are getting pushed farther and farther down the page,…