Over the years, “sustainability” has become more than just a buzzword. Now more than ever, consumers are highly aware of the environment and the steps they can take to sustain the globe for future generations. According to a study completed by IBM, 57% of consumers are willing to change their purchasing habits to help reduce negative environmental impact.  So, how can your company adopt a sustainable business strategy to meet consumer needs? We’ll discuss this and more in this week’s blog.  What is Sustainability Marketing? Sustainable marketing describes the practice and promotion of socially responsible values. Sustainable brands sell quality [...]

How sales and marketing departments align within businesses is radically changing according to a way of thinking called smarketing. This concept of smarketing, first coined in 2005 by Brian Halligan, reinvents the relationship between sales and marketing teams by improving the customer journey, smoothing out the process of acquiring leads and then converting them, and generating new revenue. What is Smarketing In this business model, sales and marketing teams must be integrated and not managed as separate entities. Smarketing requires frequent and direct communication, where mutual goals for both sales and marketing mean mutual accountability. Cooperative in nature, this model [...]

Marketing automation sets most of your repetitive marketing functions on cruise control. It allows your company to focus on value added tasks and personable service during critical 1:1 touchpoints.   Yet, many companies out there are not seeing the convenience and scale they need to make marketing automation work for them. Like an unfocused driver on the highway, they set their cruise control to the wrong speed or activate it during the wrong situations. This makes them have to constantly intervene rather than sit back to let the system do the work.   Worst of all, many companies do not [...]

Interested in reaching out to your customers in a new way? Consider video production. With this style of marketing, you can speak to your clients and leads like never before…by actually speaking to them! Maybe you’re looking for something serious and professional to instill a sense of confidence in your brand; or perhaps you’d like to lighten things up and convey that you’re not just a faceless corporation, that you have a fun side and you are in fact an enjoyable organization with whom to work! Regardless of the style of video you’d like to build, it’s important to do [...]

Time is ticking away and the short work week is almost over. Now that we’ve only got three days to get our weekly work done instead of five, I find myself wracking my brain trying to make sure all our recurring deadlines are met. Although it would be all too easy for me to put social media postings at the bottom of my team’s priority list, I know how important it is to maintain our schedule. Plus, it’s the last few days before Thanksgiving. I’d be crazy to think that a significant portion of the country’s workforce isn’t wasting a [...]

“Social Media Marketing?” you ask yourself, scoffing internally. “Isn’t that just for hip coffee joints and the latest viral video about soap or tortilla chips or beer?” Your business already creates beautiful graphics, your emails have a consistent open rate, and your trade show presence is reliable, professional, and fun for attendees. With all of these marketing methods conquered, how much use could your business possibly derive from social media marketing? A whole lot. If you do it right, that is. There is incredible value in marketing on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or even on Snapchat, you just need to harness [...]

Tired of losing potential customers because you don’t have time to nurture all of your leads? Consider marketing automation. If you've ever wondered about how massive corporations like Amazon.com deliver targeted recommendations and advertisements to customers, encouraging new sales along the way, marketing automation is the answer. These companies understand that not all of their leads are going to make a purchase every single day. However, they also understand that nurturing those leads and consistently updating them with new product offerings and deals will eventually pay off with higher levels of lead conversion. They have come to the realization that [...]

Throughout our lives, we’re taught that originality and creativity are some of the greatest talents a person can have. We’re taught that recreating or tweaking something is not nearly as noble a pursuit as creating something new, right from the structures of our own thoughts. However, in the business world, building everything from scratch is not always time-effective or cost-effective. That’s where template development comes into the equation. It’s a matter of fact that when it comes to business, time really is money. You may love the idea of building a gorgeous website template all on your own, or of [...]

Are you thinking of creating a new logo for your company? There’s more to consider than you may initially think. When most of us see famous company logos, we imagine that the images, designs, fonts, and concepts used in those logos simply must have appeared out of nowhere one day, in a single graphic designer’s fiercest burst of inspiration. But while a hallmark of many great logos is their incredibly simplistic and timeless look (think of Coca-Cola’s classic logo or Google’s instantly recognizable design), most of those images are the result of a long and labored graphic design process, wherein [...]