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While I am usually preaching differentiation to large businesses, I have been working with a lot of small businesses lately in my workshops and online courses. Seems like 2012 is the year that a bunch of small businesses decided to get serious about digital. And some of them aren’t always happy about my advice, because their differentiation has always been about their location. If you own a retail store or a local service business, your marketing has probably been lame, but you’ve never had to pay for that before. With digital marketing, you must differentiate or die. Let me explain. more »
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I spend a lot of time speaking and consulting on agile marketing–what I wrote about a lot in Do It Wrong Quickly–and I often use the example of television commercials as the very antithesis of agile marketing, the epitome of old media. Agile marketing is all about experimentation, feedback, testing, data–just about the opposite of anything you can do with TV commercials. While you certainly can run tests for commercials and you can get some data, it is very expensive and very late in the process. more »
Image via CrunchBase
One of the oddest things about all the updates that Google has made over the last few years concerns the lack of impact that some of the changes have had on some businesses I know. Google Panda and other ranking algorithm changes have caused significant drops in traffic for many of these companies. But that’s not the odd thing. What’s strange, at least at first glance, is that a number of these companies have suffered only small drops in sales. This goes against everything we’ve ever thought about in search marketing–I mean, the reason that you work so hard in search is to get traffic to your site, because the more traffic you get, the more you sell–right? Google says wrong–at least partially wrong–and they have a good reason why. more »
Image via CrunchBase
Many of you probably got an e-mail last week from Google announcing its new privacy policy. Every site has a privacy policy, and as a marketer, I understand the need to make some use of the information. After all, Google gives a lot of stuff for nothing–I depend on Gmail, Google Calendar, and many other free functions–so it is only fair that we give something back. I personally am fine with allowing Google use of my data, but I do like to read exactly what they are allowed to do. That’s where I ran into trouble. more »
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Every time I come to New York City, I see the same scene. At the subway stations and on the street, I pass multiple people yelling, “AM New York” to passersby, as they attempt to hand out free newspapers to commuters. But very few people take them. Lately, the hawkers are adding more come-ons to the pitch (“Coupons for 20% off electronics”), but I don’t think it is markedly increasing the uptake among commuters. As someone who grew up devouring newspapers, and did so daily for 35 years, it saddens me a bit when I see this. And even fewer are buying newspapers. more »
