It’s the ad break on your favourite television show. Up pops an image of a man at a supermarket till, who’s just finished his shop. “And how will you be paying, sir?” asks the cashier. “By credit card!” he answers. The camera zooms in to the plastic card he holds up. “It’s as good…
How often should you email your list? When companies launch a new email marketing campaign, this is often something they get nervous about. They seem to think that there’s an optimum frequency, and that if they get it wrong, their marketing will go down the drain. I blame all those Internet memes and blog posts,…
Last month I took my little daughter for a haircut (bear with me for a minute here!). As I tried to pass the time by pretending I was examining all the hair products on display, the manager approached me. “While you’re sitting here, would you fancy a haircut yourself? One of our stylists just had…
“I never thought I’d find myself engrossed in a book about web design!” I was talking to a client who had been thinking about having his website re-done. He’d downloaded the ebook because he thought it just might give him some background into the latest trends, but wasn’t anywhere near ready to appoint a…
In my last two posts we’ve talked about why your company needs a ‘Value ladder’ – and what other companies’ value ladders look like. But if you don’t have one, how do you get started? I think it’s important to acknowledge that most companies probably have bits and pieces of their value ladder already…
“The last thing we want to do is annoy people with too many emails.” I was speaking to the CEO of a healthcare company with over 6,000 email addresses on their database. They were desperate to market themselves better, and wanted to talk about all kinds of options: Social media, direct mail, LinkedIn advertising. But…
We’ve been moving to a new marketing automation system, and while dealing with that process, I’ve taken the opportunity to re-read some of the messages I wrote last year. Looking at them with fresh eyes, sometimes the structure doesn’t quite work. There are too many enthusiastic exclamation points (!!). They could also be more…
Early on when I joined Brainstorm Digital, I made a massive marketing error. We were looking to target a new niche, and I pushed the case for companies selling into the Pharmaceutical industry. My thinking was that here was a sector that really needed our services. They were massively behind the curve in online…
It was a bad week for Donald Trump’s wife, Melania. Speaking at the Republican National Convention, she talked movingly about the values she had inherited from her parents and hoped to pass on to her own son. The only problem: Some of the words were lifted directly from a speech given by Michelle Obama…
Every once in a while, I come across company owners who are enormously sceptical about online marketing, because they have invested enormous sums of money in a sales funnel campaign – only for it to bomb completely. It’s usually an enormous shock. Their team spent a lot of time coming up with concepts and…
