Goals vs. message. I often find there’s an internal conflict clients need to overcome before advertising online to help them understand the difference between explaining their business and showing people the benefit of being a customer. This is especially true for clients who sell experiences over products, but knowing the distinction is helpful for all businesses. Ultimately in advertising online, showing the benefit…

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Hubspot marketing meeting

I recently attended a very cleverly marketed and presented sales pitch by HubSpot called #GrowWithHubSpot. The conversation was about how to launch a successful inbound marketing program, even though the goal of the event was to sell HubSpot’s very elaborate content marketing and metrics program. My two favorite parts about the event were the initial email in which…

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It should come as no surprise to anyone that companies are maintaining or upping their marketing budgets in 2016, but what’s notable is the massive push of marketing dollars to inbound marketing tactics. What is inbound marketing? Funny you should ask. Marketers always throw out that term to clients, expecting them to pick up on the nuances — as…

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Not my regular posts, but I always have fun watching Washington go nuts with snowstorms, whether just a doom-laden forecast or the real deal, which this storm (on my parents’ 51st anniversary weekend) turned out to be. I took the fun to the next level and got an op-ed published on FoxNews.com. So here’s my piece…

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Improving your appearance on Google is one of the most important and rewarding tasks you can do for your business. But many business owners either don’t know how or are not interested in doing it themselves. And so they leave it on the to-do list, lonely and unfinished. Why is this? People often know the…

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Here are four things I’m betting you didn’t already know about Italy’s Pirelli tires. 1) It is the fifth largest tire manufacturer in the world. 2) 99 percent of its business is tire manufacturing. 3) It operates manufacturing facilities in 14 countries. 4) It’s 87 percent majority-owned by China’s national chemical company. All interesting factoids,…

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Anyone who works in marketing or is looking for opportunities to tie a client’s products into a wildly popular gimmick is salivating over the successes of this month’s annual Black Friday events — so much so that lots of companies start Black Friday on the Monday before Thanksgiving, or even in the beginning of November. And it’s not…

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