If I asked you to tell me about your best friend, how would you do it? Would you use a PowerPoint presentation with slides of bullet points, or would you tell me stories of long talks and adventures and other shared moments? Obviously, the first option is silly and you would never use it to […]

Most business owners find marketing both critically important as well as a challenging part of their success. There are so many elements of a successful marketing strategy to master: branding, competitive differentiation, story-telling, digital, social, thought leadership, sales enablement, ongoing customer communications, and more.  I had the recent pleasure of being a guest speaker on […]

You may recall that traditional marketing is all about building awareness for products and brands. In traditional marketing, the emphasis is on getting new customers and very little attention is paid to customer retention. But according to best-selling author and marketer Stan Phelps, traditional marketing is dead. Instead, it’s time to focus on retaining customers […]

What makes your business unique is the key to its success. If your industry is like most, you and your competitors may all offer fairly similar products. Sure, there are various technical differences, but if you’re a baker, what makes your bread different from the baker across the street? If you’re a college, what makes […]

For content marketers, it’s a publish or perish world — but have you ever thought about the balance between quantity and quality of content? In most cases, it’s a simple equation: more quantity often does not mean greater quality. The key in content marketing — as in most areas of life — is to find […]

Story branding requires connecting with a customer on a personal level. Famed author Maya Angelou once said, “They will forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” When we create content and illuminate a brand, we mustn’t forget that we are doing more […]

To connect with your customers, it is tremendously important to speak their language. Here, we don’t mean language like what you studied in high school — we mean direct customer communication that is easily understood, without cumbersome jargon. When it comes to a brand’s success, there might not be two more necessary ingredients than communication […]

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with Dr. Pelè — bestselling author, musician, and Founder of VelocityJam™— on his podcast “Profitable Happiness.” In our discussion, we explore the importance of building clarity into your life and business, as well as sharing best practices, dispelling marketing myths, and so much more. Hope you […]

Companies and organizations are not the only entities that need strategic planning and branding—so do people. What if you are already leading a good life with a great career, and you are looking to take your game to the next level? Or perhaps you would like to tweak some things to be a little happier […]

Do you use the power of personas in your marketing? If not, you are missing out on one of the most powerful means of segmenting your customers and creating content that connects with them. Personas are composites of the vital attributes of your customer. They represent specific demographics of your key customers and these fictitious […]

Mark Willoughby and Jennifer Faherty of Modera recently invited me to speak on their inaugural episode Hard Work and Personal Responsibility of Decision Dialogues, a podcast series featuring stories from successful business owners. It was a different spin from my typical talks around marketing and branding advice. In this podcast, I get pretty personal. I talk about my varied […]

I had the pleasure of being a podcast guest on Stephan Spencer’s MARKETING SPEAK to talk about creative B2B marketing insights for developing a competitive advantage. It was great fun! thank you @StephanSpencer #marketingspeak # #b2b#contentmarketing#brand#podcast#sales. Here are a few excerpts from our conversation… When you are selling B2C, it’s a shorter sales cycle. It’s a lot more […]