Business

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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By David Tong, ago
Photo by Marcus Aurelius

Did Hybrid and Remote Work Improve Corporate Culture or Gave Presenteeism and Bias a Boost?

I watched a segment on hybrid and remote work maturing in 2022 by The Economist triggered some interesting questions that many of us haven’t had much thought of.

The impact of remote and hybrid work shifted how we approached work over the past 20 months in massively positive ways but also raised some concerns that we may be moving in the wrong direction without seeing the warning signs.

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By David Tong, ago

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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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

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

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

12 Steps On How to Get Your Digital Marketing Transformation Right

You’re the head honcho of a business who’s finally realized that your business won’t be relevant without a cohesive, professional presence online.

As the owner, you realized that with everything going online during this pandemic, your business barely has any online footprint to show for as you’ve always done well with just offline presence but nowadays, you now see “digital marketing” in every piece of business article you read and you decide to finally take a peek at your own businesses’ online presence.

You or one of your staff probably created a Facebook business page and Instagram account years ago and you realize that apart from the cover photo, logo, and basic About Us information, all your posts date back when Gangnam Style was still all the rage.

Yikes.

“Better late than never!”, you thought and your digital marketing journey begins.

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By David Tong, ago