Action goals are a powerful but seldom-used technique for business goals that reduces employee anxiety while increasing performance results
Business Goals Will Never Feel the Same Again
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Articles in the "Marketing" Category
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Marketing Fundamentals 2: Target Audience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwd2zDI5QvY We're talking about the three layers of marketing, and how you want to start at the bottom by helping your target audience solve a real problem with your unique product. Then, you want to design your customer experience...
Marketing Fundamentals 1: Overview
https://youtu.be/xpiC3c1WD7Y Entrepreneurs start out with a lot of misconceptions about how business really works, and that's understandable because nobody really ever teaches them. Marketing, in particular, is one of the least understood concepts by business owners....
This is Marketing in the Real World
I’m trying to teach businesses how marketing works in the real world. I've been involved in some kind of marketing at pretty much every point for the last quarter of a century—which kind of makes me contemplate my own mortality, but whatever. For about half that time,...
Using Content Marketing in a B2B Setting
Content marketing is a way of marketing that focuses on creating and sharing valuable content with your audience. The goal is to educate and engage your audience, so they'll want to buy your products or services. It can be used in a number of ways, but for B2B...
Don’t Let Your Marketing Get Lost in the Numbers
Measuring marketing isn’t easy, and there are plenty of challenges you’ll face when attempting to measure the effectiveness of marketing strategies and tactics. Some of the biggest challenges include:The difficulty of isolating the impact of marketing efforts:...
What’s the Difference Between Sales and Marketing?
There are a few reasons people can get confused about the difference between sales and marketing. One is that the words "sales" and "marketing" are often used interchangeably, and many people may not fully understand the distinct roles and responsibilities of each....
When Does Skim Pricing Make Sense?
Skim pricing is a pricing strategy in which a company sets a high initial price for a product or service, and then gradually lowers the price over time. This strategy is often used when introducing a new product or when there is a high level of demand for a product or...
Marketing Truths No One Will Admit
In a recent thread on /r/marketing, the question was asked, "What is something no one in marketing will admit, but is definitely true?" While some of the answers in the thread were obviously snarky or pessimistic, there were also several answers that held a lot of...
The Product Design Pyramid
If you make it to the top, you'll have one of the best and most delightful products in your market The product design and user experience design industries are full of vague phrases like "delightful experiences" without a lot of specifics about how to get there. Many...
Smart People Always Want to Mess This Up
Several weeks ago, my company released a new product: a tool that helps small service businesses with client follow-up. We did it very quietly, late one night after most of the department had gone home. A few of the product leaders made the decision, flipped the...
You Don’t Get Long Walks on the Beach with Your Customers
Products are complex, but consumers typically won’t invest the time required to truly explore and come to understand the intricacies of your product. They’re not lazy or superficial; most companies just don’t provide enough value for them to see the point in spending...
Don’t Talk About Your Positioning—Prove It
Customer experiences are almost always indirect. You don’t feel good because a company told you to feel good. You feel good because that company set up a scene that had the right feel-good elements.Every bank wants to think they’re “a different kind of bank,” yet...
Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing
It's easy to get whipped up into the hype of social media marketing. Maybe you're just getting started with a new brand account, or maybe you've just been put in charge of all the company's existing followers. Either way, here are some basic principles that'll help...
Purpose-Driven Companies Make More Money
“A real purpose can’t just be words on paper. It has to get under the skin of every member of your organization…. If you get it right, people will feel great about what they’re doing, clear about their goals, and excited to get to work every morning.”— Roy SpenceWhen...
What’s Your Company’s Internal Compass?
One of the hardest questions we ask in our discovery workshops is also one of the simplest and most fundamental: “Why does your company exist?”You’d think most CEOs would have a ready (and passionate) response to that question, but most don’t. When asked that...
Six Hard Questions Every Business Owner Should Be Able to Answer
“Imagine if Walt Disney had conceived of his company’s purpose as to make cartoons, rather than to make people happy.” — Jim Collins Companies typically start with a clear purpose in mind, but over time they find themselves drifting away from it. They hire, fire, and...
The 5 Key Customer Motivators
Far too many experiences are designed around the assumption that people want to be engaging with them. It’s an easy mistake to make. If you’re designing, say, an ecommerce site, it would be natural to assume your customers have an internal drive to find a product they...
Why Business Owners Fear Customer Research
Customer research is fundamental to the design process. It’s been well established that relying on assumptions alone leads us to make biased decisions that often fail to reflect the reality of the customer’s needs and wants, leading to poor results (including reduced...
Getting Past “Pretty”
You can’t solve your problems with a fresh coat of paint Let’s say a company comes to our firm interested in hiring us. We’ll call them SynergyCo. They make about $100 million/year in revenue selling a niche software product. They’ve had their market cornered in the...
Marketing is Food, Not Medicine
Coca-Cola may already be one of the most recognized brands in the world, but they nevertheless spend billions of dollars every year on their marketing efforts. (And you can bet they’re not doing it on a whim. They know exactly what those dollars will bring them in...
Customers Want to Know: Are You Friend or Foe?
To understand what's going on in your customers' heads, sometimes you have to get back to basic human psychology. Let's skip all the high-concept marketing talk, and get back to basics for a few minutes here. Branding and marketing isn't about fluff, or trickery, or...
Simplify Your Logo to Amplify Your Logo
It's tempting to jam your corporate identity full of bells and whistles, but the strongest identities are still the simplest ones. When designing a logo, it's easy to go overboard. There are so many great elements you can work with (colors, textures, patterns, shapes,...
What Makes Videos Go Viral
The basic elements of highly successful online videos are really just fundamental principles of human interaction, and you can apply to nearly any form of communication (especially marketing). While there's no way to guarantee that anything will "go viral," studying...
Understanding the Humans Behind the Demographics
When people talk about their company’s target audience, you typically hear things like “individuals between the ages of 13 and 25 who enjoy playing video games and have a mobile phone,” or “active consumers between the ages of 25 and 45 who like to hike and rock...