Here’s a joke: what do Dracula, an obnoxious camel, a frustrated caveman, and a talking gecko have to do with car insurance? Answer: NOTHING. Don’t get the joke? That’s cool; my sense of humor is weird. And so is Geico’s marketing strategy. They’re pioneers of what I call absurdist marketing — a strategy that completely […]
I saw American Hustle in a jam-packed theater, and the laughter in the room was irrepressible. Proud and pompous beer guts, wavering British/New Joisey accents, and a cast clearly enjoying the hell out of themselves, made for perhaps the most uproarious cinematic experience I’ve had in a long time. But it also reinforced a sobering […]
I recently had a chance to address the executive board of one of our customers about a marketing topic of my choice. I spent a long time preparing my remarks — and even longer trying to figure out the solution to a problem that I thought would be worthy of their consideration. I was extremely […]
Everyone loves a good infographic. Complex information translated into a visually compelling, easily digestible little information snack? Hard to top. So are infographics effective? Yes. But those informative little eye candies often take a deceptive amount of time, effort, and expense to create. Why make an infographic when you could simply use a bulleted list and/or […]
A recent article on PPC trends caught my eye. It reports that the average CPC for paid search ads rose again across all search engines in the fourth quarter of 2013; it currently stands at $1.33. Mobile, of course, continued its inexorable rise. And Bing is once again a market-share afterthought at 15.6%. (Thanks to The Search […]
We recently launched an ambitious content marketing initiative… for ourselves. Since we do similar projects for clients all the time, I figured that we knew what we were doing. Surely writing for ourselves, about subjects we knew so well, would be easier than the ghost-writing, prodding, and project management that goes into a typical client […]
Content marketing. It’s all the hotness these days. If you attend a marketing conference or read the journals, you can’t avoid it. Incredibly, content marketing has even displaced social media as the new battleground between traditional PR and advertising agencies. It’s that hot. So. Is this just the latest marketing fad? Or is content marketing […]
SEO Best Practices You could drive yourself crazy worrying about Google’s 200+ ranking factors for SEO, or you could just focus on writing good content that speaks to your audience, promote it wisely, and stick to these 7 golden rules of SEO: Figure out your targeted keyword(s) – use Google AdWords Keyword Planner or others as a […]
There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what the heck content marketing actually is. People tend to immediately drill down to tactics when asking: “What is content marketing?” Is tweeting a bunch of infographics content marketing? What about writing white papers? How about videos? Yes, yes, and yes, but those are all […]