Tactical Marketing

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How to cut your marketing budget without hurting your brand image.

When it comes to belt tightening, most marketing managers have it all wrong. The minute the boss gives them the bad news… “gotta cut your marketing budget”  they go straight to the list of tactics and start chopping off the bottom of the spread sheet. Not a stylish trim around the ears, more like a …

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Garbage In, Garbage Out — How to avoid waste in advertising

I took a load to the local dump the other day. As I hucked yard debris and unwanted consumer goods out the back of the truck, I got to thinking about waste in advertising… There are mountains of it. Despite all the analytics that are available, the digital targeting and the plethora of specialized channels, …

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The lingering effects of your brand identity design – good or bad

Never underestimate the power of brand identity design. For good or bad. Decades after you’ve completed that important but undervalued project your brand identity will either be a tremendous asset to your business or an anchor that continually drags you down. It’s not just about looking good — it’s about selling more, building goodwill, and …

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Ecommerce niches – the best thing ever for MANkind

Ten years ago I couldn’t imagine getting all my Christmas shopping done from the comfort of the man cave during timeouts in the football game. For most guys, the idea of a world without trips to the mall was pure fantasy. And ecommerce niches built specifically for men? Hell yes! Ecommerce has been exploding ever …

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What business owners can learn from political advertising

Every election year there’s a deluge of dumb, annoying political ads from both sides of the aisle. And as much as we love to hate them, there’s a lot that business owners can learn from political advertising. From a creative standpoint it’s rare to find any political ads that are noteworthy. As a genre, they …

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Logo contests: A bad idea for any good brand

Sometimes the most powerful branding case studies fall into the “what NOT to do” category. Take, for instance, logo contests. Specifically, a logo contest from the Australian Ministry of Tourism. It’s a big deal down under. This isn’t some neighborhood non-proft looking for a new logo. This is a multi-national tourism marketing effort for a …

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How to make your copywriting more compelling – Introduce incongruity

Sometimes, one single word is everything. The difference between a marketing home run and a dribbling bunt.
I recently ran into a client who was completely fixated on one word in a headline: “Precious.”
“Babies are precious, not parking places,” she argued. “Yes, but diamonds are also precious. And what’s more valuable than diamonds?” I countered.

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Catching frogs and campfire songs — Branding lessons from summer camp

I find branding lessons in some pretty funny places. Like on a wart, on a frog, on a log at summer camp. Every summer when I roll up the sleeping bag, pack the bug spray and make all the preparations for another camping trip, memories of my childhood summer camps come flooding back. We sang …

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Crowdsourcing logo design (Getting literal for little.)

Crowdsourcing logo design is a sore subject in the graphic design community. I could easily write 10,000 words and show 1,000 examples of why crowdsourcing is a bad idea. But I’m just going to focus on two practical reasons that you probably haven’t considered… These two ought to be deal breakers for many people who are trying …

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“High-Quality” Content – Finding or providing something genuinely worthwhile.

High quality content is a completely subjective — and massively broad — subject. For one person it means hilarious Tic Toc videos. For someone else, it means authoritative educational content that helps them finish their PhD. For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to focus on the kind of high-quality content that helps …

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The new normal for Ecommerce — How to sell more stuff online.

Ecommerce is exploding. The COVID 19 pandemic has created a tidal wave of activity in that industry. One of our clients has seen a 550% increase in online sales. A year ago they were wondering how to sell more stuff online, and now they’re wondering how to handle the operational implications of this new normal …

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Effective Personal Branding — The corporate head shot is not the ticket.

Recently we had a client who didn’t like the photos we had taken for her website. She didn’t appreciate the fact that we had done something different than the usual, corporate head shot. She said they didn’t look “professional enough”  — didn’t think it was good personal branding. The problem is, her idea of “professional” …

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As long as first impressions matter, website design will matter.

There was a group discussion on LinkedIn recently that started with this statement: “Website design doesn’t really matter. It’s a waste of money.” It’s nonsense, of course, but that headline served its purpose by provoking quite a debate… Graphic designers and advertising people in one camp, web programmers and entrepreneurs in the other, arguing their respective …

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Marketing for financial advisors – beyond gift baskets

It was one hell of a gift basket, piled high with a delicious assortment of treats… Not unusual for the holiday season, except it came from my financial advisor. First gift ever from a planner who I’ve worked with for more than 10 years. Apparently, the stock market’s rise inspired her to do a little outreach. …

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Take your next agency for a spin.

You wouldn’t buy a BMW without getting behind the wheel. You have no idea what it can do. Same with BN Branding. So let’s go for a test drive… just one small assignment to prove how well we handle whatever you throw at us.

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