Can Experimenting With Your Marketing Hurt Your Business?

I thoroughly enjoyed my first trip to Winnipeg, speaking to a couple of hundred marketers at the Canadian Marketing Associate Digital Days conference. (You can download the slides for my talk, “How Web Marketing Changes the Old Marketing Rules.”) I spent lots of time hammering away at how to do it wrong quickly, how to experiment in marketing, and how to measure the results. And someone from the audience asked a great question, “Can experimental marketing alienate your customers?”

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Do Endless Marketing Feature Updates Hinder Campaigns?

In the past year or so, I’ve been at a number of technology platform user summits and at some point on the agenda, there is always the product feature enhancement announcements. With much fanfare I listen as they roll out enhancement after enhancement, and I can’t  help thinking: do people really use all these features? Continue Reading »

Focus On Your Social Media Strategy First

It’s a debate that’s more common than you might think. Strategy or Tactics first when it comes to social media? Many companies approach their participation on the social web tentatively, picking a popular tool like Twitter, Facebook or for the more adventuresome, a blog. The exercise of setting up and populating a profile, friending others and seeing what happens is akin to the proverbial “throw spaghetti against wall to see if it sticks” school of marketing.

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Gaining Marketing Insights From Reality Television

I used to dream of a good marketing TV show. Not one that makes the world of marketing into a scripted drama, like Mad Men. Or one that pretends to be about business but actually ends up being about relationships and emotional conflict like The Apprentice quickly became. The Shark Tank on ABC comes close, as up-and-coming entrepreneurs try to sell their ideas for funding to a group of ruthless investors … but even that format is a bit abstract when it comes to more of the day to day reality of marketing. Continue Reading »

How To Use ‘Remarketing’ To Target Potential Customers

Last week Google Adwords announced that it is rolling out a feature called “Remarketing”. This feature is essentially “Retargeting” which I described in my blog post Retargeting 101

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Using Collaboration To Increase Your Marketing Reach

I’ve been thinking a lot about collaborative marketing lately, and how we can turn co-existing businesses more into partners and less about missing opportunities. I think there’s a great untapped market for someone that really wants to grab collaborative marketing and run with it.

For example – imagine you’re going on a trip. You have to fly to get there, so there are a few processes you need to go through before, during and after:

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Franchisees Lose In The Internet Marketing Arena

I have been speaking to several owners of local franchises recently about Internet marketing and it has opened my eyes considerably. Purchasing a franchise has long been a way for people to get away from having a “regular” job and live the American Dream of owning a business. In this day and age with people having the worst job security in generations there are more an more of these small shops opening up.

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