Posts in category how to
Crowd surfing for target customers
I’ll bet you know someone who says with complete confidence: I don’t need a target customer. My customer is everyone who _____. Ah . . . but it doesn’t matter if your customer is everyone who golfs, everyone who reads, or even everyone who eats. You need a focused target customer strategy so you can avoid weak brand messaging and take advan [...]
Why you might need a writer
Writing is damn difficult. It means strapping yourself to your chair on a daily basis. It means absolutely rejecting words that don’t resonate. And boy howdy, that’s hard to do, no matter how adept you are with a pen.
Writing is damn difficult, even if you’ve been writing nearly every day for 30 years, like I have. And writi [...]
Brand story party of the century
I’ve worked with Doug Kamerer for years now, meeting up with him as his career takes him to one great opportunity after another. His current gig is as Minister of Culture (cool title, huh?) for A.D. Farrow Co. Harley Davidson. A.D. Farrow is the longest continuously operating Harley dealership in the world. This gives Doug, a passion [...]
Memorial Day’s long-lost brand voice
Memorial Day may be the unofficial start of summer, but it has a much bigger brand story.
USA Today’s Memorial Day story has these main topics: Travel Tips
Weather Updates Granted, they are both important topics. I myself have used Memorial Day as a great excuse to travel, sleep in, or do way too much gardening over a 3-day wee [...]
Why there’s no “easy” button for great content
I just hung up from a long talk with my brother Dan about the value of good content. During a rambling 45-minute conversation about all things digital, I ranted on about the difference between really great content and content that just tries to manipulate Google’s latest algorithm.
His take, and it’s brilliant, is simple:
[...]
Mom’s 3-part brand story
All advertisers have two brand stories to consider: 1.) their own, and 2.) the brand story of their target audience. The objective, of course, is to make your brand story part of your customer’s brand story. But when it comes to marketing to moms, do we truly understand the story we’re trying to become part of? Is a lack of deeper insight res [...]
5 tips for the occasional copywriter
It can be pretty tortuous to put pen to paper if you’re not someone who writes copy every day. Most people would rather do anything else. Yet copywriting remains one of those chores that’s difficult to outsource. After all, you took English in school. You can certainly write your own brand story. Easy, right?
I wish that were true [...]
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