In both our personal and professional lives, the start of a new year brings a time to set our faces toward living out our best selves. Where do you want to go, and how will you get there? Same old, same old won’t cut it, will it? Reaching your 2019 goals will require setting [...]
Do you like intrusive ads and pushy sales pitches? Yeah, we thought not. Your customers don’t either. If you’re wondering how to generate quality leads for your business, outbound marketing is out and inbound marketing has taken the lead. Outbound marketing means you’re shoving ads in front of people without any indication they might [...]
Is direct mail dead? Nearly everyone on the planet is reachable electronically these days, right? So why would you keep forking over cash for the printing and postage of actual printed advertising? The big players all do it. Grocery ads, back-to-school big-box ads, home improvement store ads all arrive in our mailboxes every week. [...]
You go to a networking happy hour, strike up conversations with other business owners and exchange business cards. You go home and one of you follows up with an email proposing a coffee date. You meet and chat more. You add them to your database, hoping that someday, surely, if the stars align, you [...]
Have you ever researched a product or service online and gotten frustrated because you couldn’t find the information you needed? How long did you stay on that site? I experienced a variation on this theme once when I was looking to make a job change, right before founding Lumen Marketing & Communications. I was [...]
We all know social media marketing is an essential part of a good overall marketing strategy. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter – the list goes on and on. Is it simply a matter of creating a post and sharing it all over the place? Hint: the answer is almost always no. And what happens when [...]
Let’s face it, we are living in a cultural crisis of credibility. Too often it erodes government, religion, and our business communities. As business leaders, most of us really do want to contribute to improving the world while also providing for ourselves and our families. On both counts, success depends on people trusting us. [...]
Have you ever grown a garden? If you have, close your eyes for a moment and envision what goes into growing veggies. If you haven’t, we’ll try to condense it to the high points, because the whole process of planting, watering, cultivating, and harvesting has six key lessons to teach business leaders about marketing [...]
“I need a logo. If I tell you what I want, can you just design it?” “My business needs a website. What will it cost?” Businesses call us with these kinds of questions all the time. They have one particular need and they want a solution to it. We all understand that, right? But [...]
Marketers spend a lot of time developing resources that explain products, answer questions about services, and in general are meant to cultivate customer relationships and support the sales staff. Webinars, white papers, website content, or leave-behind collateral — they all cost any business a chunk of change. So why is it that so often all [...]
