Q&A

Very important! You can have the best service or product in the world but without a strategy combining good branding, marketing and touchpoints no one will know about it. Many companies treat branding and marketing as an afterthought and that kind of thinking often results in more business for their competitors. But what they don’t realize is that having a better brand allows you to have better, higher-paying customers.

Branding sets you up with everything the company needs to meaningfully stand out and compete not on price or quality, but on the power of your brand alone. Marketing generates leads and helps make happy customers. Together, they allow your company to be the best it can be.

Certainly! As a matter of fact, it’s even more important to continue marketing in an economic recession, because “In times of crisis, winners are made.” Your competitors will likely cut back, allowing you to come in and grab market share. Marketing in recessions doesn’t need to be expensive either - it just has to happen with smarter spend.

Here’s another saying: “Cutting marketing to save money is like removing your watch to save time.”

A touchpoint is anything related to the company that interacts directly with customers. This typically includes marketing materials, stationary, advertisements, physical locations and so on.

This is a cornerstone of effective marketing and allows you to see what your target audience is actually actively searching for. Knowing this allows you to build your brand and marketing materials to make it easier for customers to find you, as well as find new, untapped potential that can give you a leg up on the competition.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of creating content that aligns with what your target audience is searching for, and then making it easy for search engines to see this content so you can show up in search results. There’s a few different kinds with different technicalities, such as Technical, On-Page and Off-page SEO, but by optimizing them you’ll be able to rank higher in search results.

Local Search Optimization makes it possible for customers to find you on services such as Apple Maps, Google Maps, Yelp and so on. This is incredibly important for businesses that have provide services or products.

Pay Per Click is a catchall phrase that essentially means ads on Google, Facebook and other search or social platforms. While there’s a great deal of variety, each with their own pros and cons, I help your business choose the best way to advertise, come up with a strategy and budget, then execute and monitor results.

Search Engine Marketing is a popular sub-type of PPC with paid ads specifically on search platforms, such as Google Ads.

Account-based Marketing is a methodology that allows for more effective marketing. It involves connecting to the CRM or other similar system, selecting the most important prospects and creating custom-tailored marketing and touchpoints to attempt conversion with maximum effectiveness. Very common in B2B, this methodology is finding its way to B2C as well.

Performance marketing is a constant process involving advanced analytics. The goal is to improve the effectiveness of marketing and other key metrics by making data-driven decisions and using techniques such as A/B testing, etc.

Integrated Marketing is focused on making sure marketing efforts maintain a unified voice, vision, look and style. It ensures and tightly controls a uniform perception of the brand and what it stand for - across every touchpoint that interacts with customers and other stakeholders. This is paramount to building and maintaining brand equity and goes a long way to increasing the right perception of the brand.

360 marketing takes that a step further and creates integrated campaigns that leverage all available PESO (paid, earned, social, owned) marketing channels to exponentially increase the chances of being seen by the target audience. A highly targeted message, customized for the each channel, increasing campaign success.

Inbound and outbound marketing (AKA pull and push marketing) are two very important marketing strategies.

Inbound marketing (pull) is focused on creating compelling & useful content that customers will seek out themselves via search and social. It’s an organic way of getting more business and is much better for brand recognition and awareness than traditional outbound marketing efforts.

Outbound marketing (push) is a collection of all other, more traditional marketing efforts that are used to actively get more business in the brand’s direction. This is marketing that the brand projects & controls by itself, targeting specific audiences with specific adverts, messages and CTAs.

An integral and very effective kind of inbound marketing, this technique focuses specifically on creating content that customers are actively seeking out online through search and social media with info that's useful and informative to the target audience. Playing an especially big role on social channels, content marketing benefits from consistency and regularity.

It’s also a way of bolstering a brand’s reputation by showcasing expertise in the brand’s area of doing business, leading to more exposure and thought leadership (when a brand becomes an authority in a certain area).

This is a set of strategies that has two goals: reach out and create marketing materials that are directly needed now, at the current moment (downstream) and also look ahead, work with relevant stakeholders to figure out the long-term needs and trends of the market (upstream). This can be thought of as short-term and long-term marketing, as well as tactical and strategic.



An important detail here is that upstream marketing work can anticipate trends and needs long before competitors catch on, giving the brand an advantage. In some cases, combining thought leadership and upstream marketing can even create demand in areas where there was none projected - by offering customers something they didn’t know they needed until the brand offers it to them.