Articles

Ego Is Killing Your Marketing Efforts

Super Bowl XLI just ended and we were blessed with a slew of funny, entertaining, and creative marketing and advertising by some of the world’s largest (and deepest pocketed) brands. As an inspired member of your company’s marketing and advertising team, the gears in your head are spinning for ideas on how you can execute something memorable for your next campaign. You and your team work day and night thinking of a campaign, spoke to your agency on execution strategies, getting your budget approved after a rosy projection on how great the campaign will be, and a week after you launch, you got some PR firm mentioning your campaign, some colleagues posting it on LinkedIn, but ultimately, no one outside your company cared. What happened?

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14 Lead Generation and CRM Mistakes ALL MARKETERS Make

We’ve reached the end of our 3-part, first-party data and lead generation series of articles. If you missed the first two, read them here and here. Now that you’ve identified your 1PD initiative and picked a tool to streamline the process, let’s cover the most common mistakes that EVERY SINGLE marketer has committed and how to avoid, and ideas on how to fix them. This is a huge article, so grab some coffee and let’s dive right in.

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Getting Started First-Party Data for Small Businesses. 5 Strategies You Can Implement TODAY!

First-party data is all the data that is generated and collected directly by a company’s own properties and audience. Companies are able to use this data to improve their products and services, understand customers’ needs, and generally provide a better customer experience.

First-party data is immensely valuable for your business as you have ownership of that data. The data you’ve collected can be used for better customer service, increased understanding of your customers, more precise messaging for your marketing and advertising, and knowing for a fact that a 3rd party such as Facebook, Google, or Amazon can’t just change their algorithms and take away customer data from your business.

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By David Tong, ago

How I (Am Trying to) Deal With Pandemic Mental and Emotional Work Burnout

Have you ever felt like a part of your brain is shorting out and burning? Or do Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays feel like days to worry about the upcoming Monday more than respute for the current week?

Since the pandemic hit, I think more people are aware of burnout phenomenons be it career or personal life situations and it’s a serious problem that many of us don’t know how to deal with.

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By David Tong, ago

Free CRM Tools to Help Your Small Business Capture and Manage First-Party Data

In our opening article about first-party data, we’ve shared why collecting first-party data is important, particularly for small businesses, and also covered some easy-to-implement ideas for your team to try.

Before you can USE your data, you need to collect them, which we covered in the previous article. After collecting the data, you need to have a place to store, analyze, and use the data, and that’s what we’re covering.

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By David Tong, ago

The Need for NOW. How Modern Online Shopping Demands Affect Delivery Workers

Shopping Used to Be an Event

As consumers, we’re always conditioned to consume through a number of signals from companies. After all, without consumerism, much of our economy won’t exist and most of us probably won’t have a job.

Back in the olden days, consumerism tends to focus on thematic periods that justify spending.

This could be the classic holiday season, birthdays, graduation, weddings, and similar peaks spread throughout the entire year. This event-based relationship with shopping tends to make us think more carefully about what we buy, especially during cash/cheque-dependent days.

However, today’s shopping malls and commercial areas blanket every corner in most metropolises, and the prevalence of credit-based shopping made impulse purchases easier than ever. Efficiencies in production and globalization also contributed to most non-essential goods being more accessible to purchase than ever.

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By David Tong, ago

Tips for Marketing & Advertising That Will Get You Noticed, Not Grind Your Audience’s Faces

You were enjoying a casual, relaxing stroll in the park on a lovely Saturday morning,

It was an absolutely perfect day. The sun shone brightly, the birds were chirping and the air was crisp. You walked through the park on a winding trail, taking in all of nature’s beauty. You spent the week stressing about work and home duties and you finally were able to kick off those leather heels and put on your bright pink hiking shoes to tackle the outdoors.

Out of nowhere, an overzealous character leaped out behind the park bench and said:

“Excuse me, are you hungry? There’s a great delicatessen nearby!”

You politely declined and quickened your steps by a few paces thinking “well, that was weird, but at least he’s gone, let me get back to this wonderful stroll”

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By David Tong, ago

Empathy In The Workplace – As a Boss and an Employee

Empathy is the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another.

You’d think that this is such a core human trait that everyone practices empathy daily, but unfortunately, empathy tends to vanish when work is involved.

Many of us are not empathetic at work. We easily become insensitive to the feelings of others, use them for their own personal gain, or just don’t care. Working hard, hitting targets, climbing the ladder seem to be the only things that matter in our professional lives.

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By David Tong, ago