Filling potholes in the customer journey.
The path from your brand to your customer must include your dealer’s brand. Manufacturer brands that sell through independent dealers often ignore those dealers. And in cases where the dealer isn’t completely ignored, they’re taken for granted—and treated as an in-house sales rep. Manufacturers and their dealers often end up fighting over customers like a divorced […]
Three ways to fill the holes in your digital strategy.
Having a digital strategy is a good thing. But there’s a problem. We count on digital metrics to make an impact in the non-digital world. And frankly, they’re not enough. Most products exist in a form other than just pixels. They’re on a shelf, in a showroom, or on your porch in an Amazon box. […]
A little help for your in-house creative groups.
As those of us in advertising and marketing busy ourselves with definitions of new norms, and point to trends we’ve observed during the current value-pack of crises, I’d like to focus on one of the fastest growing entities in the marketing world: in-house creative teams. Over the past few years, in-house creative—collectively the staff and […]
Here’s what I’ve learned from being laid off a bunch of times. You may find it helpful.
I’ve worked in the ad agency and creative firm business my entire adult life. And that’s a long time. For about half of that time, I’ve run my own shop. I realized that folks in this business are uniquely wired to cope with the current crisis. I see people in the corporate world struggling to […]
It’s hard to be engaging over Zoom. We can fix that.
Web meetings are hard under the best of circumstances. These days if you’re preparing content to share with internal or external stakeholders, the visual representation has to work a lot harder. You may be a great presenter in a conference room or on an event stage. But when you’re the size of a postage stamp […]
The world is changing and good marketing matters more than ever
For most B2B brands out there, the role of marketing has changed drastically during the COVID-19 crisis. Marketing, as we understood it a few short weeks ago, has fundamentally changed. My guess is it will continue to change for months to come. But more than even a few weeks ago, getting marketing right matters. Here […]
Helping Your Dealers Starts with Understanding Their Business
Heavy equipment and truck dealers manage a lot of competing priorities: Staffing, sales and marketing, evolving technology, and dealing with market forces. Brands often want to help, but many run into an obstacle that prevents them from making a difference. They just don’t understand the dealer’s business from the dealer’s perspective. Understanding that perspective means […]
In the world of dealer sales, a little understanding can outperform a lot of technology.
Here’s a common story: A brand introduces a technology platform designed to support marketing and selling through their independent dealers. It fails after a long, painful implementation process. No one – brands or dealers – is happy about the experience. You wanted a happy ending? There can be one, but only if the story starts […]
Three essential branding tools that improve lead gen and ROI
Every marketer is concerned with lead gen and ROI. Every marketer gives lip service to the importance of branding, but few make it a priority.
Tell better stories, get better results: 4 rules for communicating technical marketing messages
Every holiday season, I repeatedly witness a phenomenon that we can all relate to. Every family has at least one person who insists on monopolizing the conversation, regaling us with lengthy accounts of bygone days. What I observed is that it isn’t so much the stories are bad, they are just badly told. And that […]
Handing off a warm lead to a dealer is precarious. We can fix that.
Only one out of three independent dealers respond in a timely manner to an inbound lead generated from a brand’s marketing campaign. Let that sink in: 66% of inbound leads—your leads—end up in a digital black hole. Marketing campaigns get complicated when your brand sells through independent dealers. You put in a lot of time, […]
Stop making the same mistakes: Start your annual planning now
We all start the planning season, usually in the final stretch of the current year, with a B2B marketing version of New Year’s resolutions. This year will be different. I won’t fall into the same traps that have tripped me up in years past. Just like that treadmill in the corner collecting dust, we begin […]
