Marketing

Are You Fukushima-ing Your Emails?

The purpose of the email is to gradually step a person into your nurturing cycle. Giving them everything in the email is like showing up on a first date with your family and a proposal for marriage. Email nurturing should be more like Ravel’s Boléro.

Read More

What Direction Will a Gift Come From?

I believe that a good portion of your networking and connections can be from people you don’t expect to get anything from, or who may need something you. There’s an old expression that says you can’t tell what direction a gift will come from. The number of times I’ve received something back when I didn’t expect always surprises me. So whom have you mentored lately?

Read More

Dunbar’s Number, Connections and Stocking’s Number

I get a lot of requests on LinkedIn and other social media for connections. What’s interesting to me is that very often these requests come with no introduction other than the standard boilerplate request. This leaves me trying to guess why the person wants to connect. Without any information I have to guess and then decide if I want to connect. So what criteria should I use for deciding?

Read More

What? No Way I’d Appear on Video!

Share One of the biggest challenges marketing has is to get customers and clients to tell your story on video.   The customer is naturally reluctant, and sales, though they understand the benefit, is loath to ask a customer anything risky.  They’d rather let someone else step forward.  So how can you create a library of […]

Read More

People Don’t Read. What Are You Going To Do About It?

Sales people like to talk. The good ones listen. Marketers, on the other hand, tend to be verbal but more focused on reading and writing. They wind up working on the copy for websites, PR releases, direct mail, email, literature and whitepapers. The problem is… no one reads any more. So much of this activity is wasted. Too bad. What are you going to do about it?

Read More

The Women’s Lot Narrative and the Helpmate Role.

There is a long cultural history in the US of women taking on the role of “helpmate.” George Lakoff calls the situation women face the “Women’s Lot” narrative. For a long time women could only be nurses, not doctors. However, they could help doctors. They can help in HR but not become CEO. They can help their families or their spouse. So what characteristics does a helpmate have, whether they are male or female? They work hard to serve others, often getting little credit for them selves. Any marketing narrative and message to this prospect constituency must contain these key elements.

Read More

Eight Simple Steps for Adding Gender to Your Database

Regardless of your gender, if you’re a B2B marketer and not considering it, you are missing a key element in messaging. While 90% of marketers may acknowledge that gender is important, I find only 10 percent of 1:1 marketing campaigns or databases have any data on gender. Here’s a simple deep dive technique to add gender to your database.

Read More

Metaphor 7: The Messaging Summary

Over the last set of posts, I’ve discussed the subtleties of messaging in relation to how we think and how the brain works. I have a strong conviction that most B2B messaging is still stuck in the facts and figures mode, and most companies are trying to use reason and logic alone to persuade prospects to buy their products. As a result, they are missing huge marketing and sales opportunities, especially when positioning for market growth.

Read More