If optimizing your website is spring cleaning (see part 1 for that), improving your digital presence is gardening. You need to carefully weed the comments, plant seeds for customer reviews, and add lots of water, sunlight, and fertilizer to your strategy to make it yield sweet, sweet new business. Like a beautiful garden all you need is a little time, effort, and a solid game plan to turn those seeds into leads.   But what does this mean in less flowery terms? Well simply put, you need to stay in control of your external referral sources. This means Google, social media platforms, yelp, B ..read more

Spring cleaning is always so satisfying. Maybe not during the actual, time-consuming act of cleaning, but the end where you get to stand back and admire your handy work. It incites me to want to do more around my home. Suddenly my kitchen is a more exciting place to try a new recipe, my bathroom is a personal spa, and my cleared desk beckons me to sit down and write. But what does any of this have to do with marketing? Now is a better time than ever to spring clean your brand’s web presence and make it more inviting to your potential customers. Free time is a luxury many small businesses don’t ..read more

The funny thing about marketing is that it’s often a moving target, even at the best of times. If there was one ‘right’ way to do things to guarantee results, then everyone would be doing it! But marketing more often looks like a series of well planned scientific experiments; identify an objective, form a hypothesis, develop a plan, execute it, and then measure results. And if something isn’t working, shift priorities to one of the other ‘experiments’ that is working. It’s no different during turbulent or uncertain times, it’s just a matter of setting things up with a different set of variable ..read more

Running a business is hard on a good day but running a business during a crisis is especially tough. It’s hard to know to what to prioritize, where and how to change messaging, and how to try to maintain work (and even grow) while still striking an appropriate tone of voice. Marketing is still important, your business can’t just stop completely, but what you put out to your audience in your content might need to change a bit. While every organization is different, there are some universal rules of content marketing during crisis that we’ve learned from our 20+ years in business. Act with empat ..read more

A Valentine’s Day Special Recently, a lead reached out to me via Everbrave’s website form. They said they were interested in learning more about our services and looking for help with marketing. I did what any business development person would do and got them onto a phone call ASAP. I thought the call went wonderfully. We talked, we laughed, we shared goals, we marvelled at all the things our businesses had in common, and we made plans for a second date meeting. And then I got ghosted. I’m sure you can relate. It’s happened to all of us in business and —if you’ve ever sailed the rocky seas of ..read more

In many businesses, there is an underlying tension between sales and marketing teams. It can create a sense that the two are not rowing in unison, causing the company to spin in circles. Fortunately, this is changing. With its emphasis on customer-centric content and prospect engagement, inbound marketing is proving remarkably effective in its ability to support sales efforts at various stages of the sales process. That’s good news because when sales and marketing efforts are aligned, the results are telling. Companies with close alignment between sales and marketing report 38% higher sales wi ..read more