The Innovative Marketer's Blog

When I first overhead the term hashtag used at a cocktail party, I have to admit I thought people were talking about some new effort to stigmatize marijuana users…and, these people really need a social media policy... so don’t feel badly if you’re thinking to yourself, didn’t we call that a number sign(#) or pound sign?

Hashtags are social media speak for an affinity group and they are one way to share your ideas, conversations and content beyond your loyal group of immediate followers on social media networks like Twitter. For example #business may represent a group of people conversing about business issues. #b2bmarketing may access business to business marketing conversations, etc. Hashtags are included in a tweet using the convention #<tag> and one or more can be included in your tweets.

There was a time when schools had to hire a specialist to come in and grade their enrollment marketing programs and recommend a strategy for increasing brand awareness and filling the enrollment funnel. No longer. Hubspot’s FREE marketing grader provides a great assessment of your strengths and weaknesses as well as pointers for improvement in about 30 seconds.

In 2011 I blogged on the question of whether schools should blog. The topic generated spirited discussion online, and in Twitter, with schools marketing advocates like Chuck Will, Brendan Schneider and Neil Pierson  sharing their views on the positive impact of school blogs. Those discussions led to a lot of questions about how to actually start a great school blog. So our Innovative Marketing schools team began collecting our experience, knowledge and advice to create a short webinar on starting a great blog at your school. If you missed the live presentation, no biggy, we recorded it along with answers to the most popular questions and the whole thing runs under 25 minutes.

Apart from the obvious need to have a place to ‘park’ a domain, it’s a question I’ve thought about a lot lately.  I cut my teeth on website design when Jerry Yang was serving up his first few hundred URLs with Yahoo 1.0.

Back then we all believed that homepages were like internet billboards and that people just cruised around an internet where the most exciting billboard would cause them to pull over and buy your stuff.  In fact we even had awards for the best billboards – the Webby.

I’m a self-confessed contrarian. When everyone says social media, I start thinking direct mail… here’s why… Do you remember the days when your mailbox was chock full of ‘junk mail’? As a direct marketer, one of your largest concerns was trying to differentiate your offer from the stacks of postcards, #10 envelopes and self-mailers in your prospect’s mail box. Not so much anymore. The talk around the water cooler concerns getting the most followers on Twitter or defeating the spam filter in the email inbox; leaving the mail box relatively empty and ripe for the savvy contrarian marketer.

If it takes Carnac The Great to figure out your direct mail offer, chances are you're not getting much bang for your buck. Direct mail remains a viable and effective means for businesses to get their message out—if they follow a few simple rules. Innovative Marketing Resources has been in the direct mail business for 18 years. We've seen a lot of really great campaigns - and some real duds. These three tips will help you get the most bang for your buck on your next direct mail campaign.

When On Page SEO Just Isn't Enough...
Whether you’re a small business, independent school, non-profit, high tech company or travel agency, once your inbound marketing is up and running and the initial shock and awe of “getting found” by your first few prospects wears off, you may begin to experience symptoms...

Over the past 12 months our inbound marketing engagements have increasingly caught the attention of C-level executives. In a small business, this is often the owner. In larger companies, it tends to be either the Chief Marketing Officer or the CEO. When I ask why these C-level executives have taken a sudden or renewed interest in online marketing, the response comes in three flavors:

After a lead generation assessment, one of the first things a new client will often have us to do is a website re-design. Sometimes the redesign is minor; sometimes it’s a complete overhaul. When a client has an old website 1.0, online brochure kind of website, they often have had “the web guy” acting as translator between them and the site (which is one of the reasons the site sat there as an online brochure… but I digress).

That kind of relationship with your website is a little like talking to someone on a string telephone. You know someone's on the other end but you're not building a relationship. This blog can get you comfortable with modern website basics so you can feel in control of what’s going on with your website and see it less as a mystery and more as the lead generating machine it can be.

I realize that politics is the third rail of business blogging, but this is one political tactic that every inbound marketer should take note of. For those who pay attention to the behavior of the Republican candidates, I apologize for the brief recap of the situation, but I believe it’s fascinating to see a candidate taking a page from Brian Halligan’s book on Inbound Marketing and using the web, content and conversion opportunities to turn the tables on better funded and arguably more appealing competitors. Why is it that Newt Gingrich's rivals don't see how the power of inbound marketing is shaping the GOP political landscape?

Newt Gingrich has been one of the most inconsistent candidates in the race for the GOP nomination. When Herman Cain was running, you knew every other word out of his mouth would be ‘999’. You could set your watch to it (although he also referred people to his website). Whenever Ron Paul speaks you know he’s going to tell you how a loss of civil liberties is the root of all our problems.