You know your business or organization needs a website. And, you probably have one (or maybe more than one). But does your website reach your audience? So now you’re probably thinking, “But, we have more than one audience.” Your website needs to speak to all of them. 

You know email can be an effective marketing tool. Email marketing averages an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent. (DMA National Client Email Report 2015) And you've heard auto-response and other marketing automation tools can make email marketing easier and increase success. Then again, you see a lot of lousy email messages in your inbox. Successful email campaigns require strategy and consistent planning. (Lousy email campaigns don't.) Let's look at the differences.

So you’ve decided to invest in a multi-faceted, multi-channel marketing campaign. Your presence, message and branding will appear in many channels—online ads, a website, a video on your website, newspaper ads, magazine print ads, signage, brochures, etc. Wondering how you will achieve a consistent look across all these iterations, and what just exactly is "marketing consistency" anyway? 

If you think about the time and resources needed to develop and produce a fantastic video for your nonprofit, it makes sense to repurpose and leverage your video content through other content channels. By recycling your raw footage into other types of content, you can extend the value of what you thought might have been an investment in a one-time project.

Advertising works. Businesses get results with strategic advertising. Why else would so many businesses spend so much money if it didn’t? And big businesses have the proof it works. They track everything from views, clicks, calls, mentions (social media), and especially sales. Using this data, advertising messages and channels are honed, tuned, tested, retested, and refined.

Everyone tells you that you need to research your potential customers, but no one tells you much about how to do it. Whether you are in a small organization or at a large company, you need good prospect research, and you may wonder where to begin and how to add useful details to that shadowy group known as 'potential customers.'

Going to a Hubpot marketing conference for the first time can be be pretty exciting– the disco lights, the vibe, the 14,000 creative smart people all in one place, and of course the many  presentations by smart creative people. This year, I focused my agenda schedule on content marketing, strategy and storytelling. Here are my top takeaways.

A few weeks ago I spent the day in our garden, playing catch-up. After 9 straight hours of weeding, clipping, digging, mounding and watering, I realized that work in the garden has similarities to the marketing efforts you use to grow a business and build a brand. From the day you decide what to grow and when to start, to the first harvest when your kitchen table is covered with tomatoes, the entire process of gardening has remarkable parallels in the marketing world. There are many metaphors for life in gardening, but they all seem to come down to the same basic thing: tend to your garden and you will be rewarded. Reap what you sow.

Helping your community emotionally engage with you is a great indicator of marketing success. Building an emotional connection can take many forms. And because of one company’s success in connecting, I recently found myself in a position that would never have occurred to me. I had to explain to my eight-year-old son that the president of his favorite company passed away. My husband and I actually had to sit down and discuss how we were going to handle it before “the talk.”

You’re not Alice. You couldn’t be more different. You want to create mission-driven change, to change minds, motivate action, build a movement. You're not like Alice…

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.

Are you thinking like I’m thinking that it is getting murky out there? My fog meter is registering an increase in befuddling language about sponsored content (aka native advertising), which makes it unnecessarily difficult to evaluate your options. Major traditional publishers such as The New York Times, the Atlantic, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker have joined Business Insider and Forbes so now each offers sponsored content in some form. Seems like it is time to revisit the basics and the latest guidelines for paid media for values-led businesses.