Marketing Strategy

The digital revolution has leveled the playing field when it comes to winning at marketing. It’s no longer necessary to have a huge marketing budget and to work with a pricey agency to increase your sales. With the right digital marketing strategy, you can reach your audience, drive traffic to your site, and optimize conversions, no matter how limited your budget is. But you can’t expect to be successful in…

How many people do you know who truly love their jobs and are happy at work? How many times have you complained about your boss, a coworker, or a difficult customer? One survey found that the Director of Marketing or Sales is one of the unhappiest jobs you can have. You might think the key to being happy is to leaving your current manager or even to change your job.…

When I wrote Mean People Suck, I wanted to get across the point that empathy is more powerful than most of us realize. I wanted people to see it as more than a tool to use or a great asset to have. Empathy can change the way we relate to others, giving us more understanding. It can also invite others to want to engage with us. This is critical in…

With a long career in sales and marketing, I’ve had direct experience of how persuasive storytelling can be. But storytelling is a useful tool not just for selling things. It can be an effective tool for learning, too. This won’t be a surprise to anyone with a background in teaching. And you’ve probably had personal experience of learning from a story. Stories, after all, have been used to pass down…

In the last couple of months, the world has changed. This change has been dramatic and has had huge repercussions on the way we live and work. If you thought you weren’t ready for digital transformation before, you may no longer have a choice. The recent disruptions have forced businesses all over the world to change the way they operate. Lockdown policies in many countries mean that non-essential businesses have…

Companies in all industries were struggling with the incredible rate of change brought on by the digital revolution even before the more recent crisis. And, we’re not done yet. In fact, fast-paced change appears to be the new normal. We operate in a business environment where every day brings new innovations, new mergers, new expectations, and new software solutions to help us keep up. While all this newness is useful,…

Brand awareness allows B2B companies and marketers to understand how well their target audience and potential customers know their brand and their specific products or services. While brand awareness is a critical part of the buyers’ journey, it’s sometimes undervalued because it can be difficult to fully grasp and measure. Companies with strong brand awareness benefit from increases in revenue in the short-term and improved customer retention in the long-term,…

In marketing today, one of the most impactful trends is the use of employees to build trust with customers and to establish your brand as a thought leader within your industry. I call this employee activation – a concept that goes much deeper than boosting your marketing ROI. With activated employees, you have access to a vibrant, creative, collaborative culture. Employees are motivated to succeed not only for personal interests…

LEGO is a brand known throughout the world. It’s been a staple of childhoods for decades—one of the most popular toys for boys and girls. LEGO inspires creativity and innovation. But in the late 1990s, LEGO was facing the probability of bankruptcy. They needed to turn things around before they became simply a memory. In writing Mean People Suck, I was struck by the story of LEGO, as depicted by…

In chapter four of Mean People Suck, I talk about the link between empathy and sales. Because digital technologies have disrupted the way we do business and customers have developed a distrust of brands, traditional advertising has lost its effectiveness. The growth of the internet has altered the customer journey significantly. I was particularly struck by this research by Salesforce that found that 90 percent of the buyer’s journey is…