General Marketing

Whether you‘re new to marketing or a seasoned pro, our General Marketing category offers tips, tools, and expert advice to boost your marketing efforts. Learn from top experts and enhance your marketing skills.

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General Marketing5 min read

The FCB Grid: What It Is and How It Works

If you’ve only used keywords to understand how to market your product, you’re not tapping its potential. Lists of keywords tell us what people want. They don’t tell us why. Boredom, fatigue, illness and hunger ... people buy for a reason. Maybe you think of these ideas willy nilly as you type, but how can you engineer them without fail? With the FCB Grid. Also called the Vaughn Grid, it’s a tool that was designed by the Senior Vice President of Foote, Cone and Belding way back in 1980. Since then FCB has grown to a more than $9 billion dollar company with clients like Cox Communications, Seaworld, AmTrak and Air New Zealand; they’re responsible for the Lord of the Rings on-board air safety video, and the Bilbo Baggins luggage carousel. To understand the FCB grid, I spoke with creative director Bruce Bendinger, who is the author of the Copy Workshop Workbook, and who has introduced concepts to students of copywriting and marketing the world over.

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General Marketing8 min read

7 Modern Marketing Frameworks Every Startup Needs To Know

As a young marketer navigating the digital landscape, I love frameworks. Not only do they help me plan and prioritize, but they help me visualize how everything I’m working on fits together. No, I won’t be talking about (and I’m looking at you, classically trained marketers) the 4Ps, Porter’s 5 forces, or SWOT analyses. Sure, those frameworks have their place, but they don’t provide much direction for startups looking to focus their energy on growth. Plus, they’re getting pretty old. The frameworks below were developed by modern marketing gurus. Together, they’ll help you make a growth strategy, select traction channels, and influence your customers’ behavior.

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General Marketing5 min read

How To Use Excel To Create a Keyword Strategy

Everyone knows keywords are a big part of SEO, but I feel most people don’t really appreciate the work that goes behind setting up a strategy that is based on keyword performance. Maybe it’s because most people don’t understand what measures are taken to create large SEM campaigns with thousands of keywords that need to be strategically selected. When dealing with large pay per click campaigns in AdWords, using the right keywords means everything. Since there are great tools out there like Semrush and Google Analytics, we can get great keyword data from our competitors or our websites that we manage easily. But managing that data can be tricky at times (especially with ecommerce data). As a member of a PPC management company, it’s important that I am efficient and strategic when selecting keywords for our clients. I wanted to share some of the ways I use Excel to create a keyword strategy very quickly using simple concatenation in a not-so-simple way.

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General Marketing5 min read

16 Ways To Prepare for a Lightning Talk

Last week I delivered a speech at a large, local technology event. I was one of five speakers to address the crowd during the lightning talk session. What is a lightning talk? Generally speaking, it‘s a micro presentation or pitch of some sort to your audience. Organizers can choose different metrics, from time length to topic. The event I participated in was part of a week-long gathering for those in the tech and new media community. On Tuesday, I spoke under the umbrella topic, “The Future of Digital Marketing.” Speakers could use visual aids, demonstrate a case study or pitch their company. Oh, and we only had three minutes to present.

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