Your business is awesome.  It's growing and thriving.  Your customers love you, but you have those pesky competitors out there nipping at you constantly.  They are stealing your ideas.  They are learning from you. They suck and here are the sneaky reasons why. Competitors Don't Play Fair They Steal Your…

You have heard the term influencer marketing, but what does it mean? It is a simple idea, where you get one person (or group) to change the directionality of your brand with their influence on their audience. You can accomplish this by reaching out and helping them with their specific…

Many businesses use email to communicate with customers. It can be incredibly effective if used correctly.  According to experts, every dollar you invest in your email marketing, you’ll make $38 back. That sounds great, of course, because it means one email could make you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.…

The primary goal of almost every business is to get customers to buy something.  It doesn't matter if that business is the little dress shop on the corner or the online giant Amazon.  There are of course many factors that go into whether a business will succeed or not, but…

106,859,714 That is the number of copies of Minecraft sold between its launch in 2009 and June this year. Minecraft is a stunningly simple game: you play in a world comprised of building blocks. These blocks take different forms, and the objective is simple: mine for resources and build things with…

Last week I posed a question: Could we stop looking at our marketing audience and personas through the framework of a funnel and look at it through a framework of building blocks? To be fair, the idea of using a framework of building blocks did not occur to me all of…

40 years. The music director at my wife’s high school taught and led band for 40 years before he retired this summer. My wife, who twirled tall flags in the early 1990s for him, and I attended his retirement ceremony this past Saturday. The event was lovely. Hundreds of former…