While reading this interesting article about branding and marketing cattle farms, from the cattle network written by Dan Frobose of Ohio State, I was reminded about a conversation with Pat McKay (who insures commercial embroydery businesses and non-profit organizations) during lunch yesterday where we celebrated her 15th anniversary of her business.
We were talking about the economy and how will high end, expensive businesses like Alpaca Farms make it during the economic downturn?
For anyone who wants to market and brand their farm, I would recommend reading everything that Julie Wassom has published and written on the subject of marketing an Alpaca Farm. She's a marketing expert who loves alpacas and her advice is spot-on.
What are the components of print?
Collateral:
Johnstone Supply seems to have an important solution for greening up existing buildings --- one where the ROI payback comes in less than a year. I met them at a recent GREEN BUSINESS event in Cleveland where over 200 business leaders networked, discussed and learned from experts about how to help with the 3 P's - people, planet and prosperity. Read more at Branding & Marketing
Marketing and sales are two different functions but often are confused or merged with each other.
How can you increase your marketing effectiveness to get better sales results?
Read more at:
Selling vs Telling. What’s the Difference Between Sales and Marketing?
Hat tip to Spotlight Ideas and several bloggers who compiled and wrote about the top 250 marketing blogs.
If you are involved in trade shows for your company, now is the time to unpack your booth and make sure it's whole. Don't wait to the last minute to find out there is a problem.
Read the full post at Branding & Marketing.
Links:
Trade Show News Network
Trade Show Week
Chicago Trade Show Displays
Video Advertising is just beginning to take off on the internet.
Check out this little diagram (Click on it to enlarge) that I found on Flickr of one person's plan to help visualize the complexity of our production flow for burntwire.tv
Although I've been out of corporate America for more than 10 years now, I sure appreciated all the stories in "Elephants can't change... but Leopards Can" by Michelle Griffin. The stories were familiar -- a real life study of organizational dynamics -- and brought back lots of memories for me.
My question to you -- are you branding yourself personally as an elephant or a leopard? Trying to whip an elephant who is stuck in his/her ways can be really difficult and will sap your energy. Nimble, forward thinking and quick -- not slow, lumboring and in the "that's the way we do it here" rut seems so much more appealing. By the same token -- changing your spots sometimes has a negative connotation as in not being sure of your direction. I think its really a balance.
If you get a chance, read thru Michelle's book - I think you'll like it.
Ever feel like word of mouth advertising is your best way to build the business? Then your business may benefit by gathering testimonials from your satisfied customers. Read more at Branding & Marketing.
July is the month to review your marketing plan, because in August you'll be creating the 2009 marketing budget! Take a look at these 8 questions to see if your plan needs to be improved.
Looking forward to the next meet up! July 31st 9:30 am Arabica's in Stow.
Marketing is about making you FEEL it, TASTE it, SMELL it...
Check out the rest of the story about the www.NeuroscienceMarketing.com/blog and using all 5 senses when marketing at http://brandandmarket.com/ on June 6, 2008.
It used to be the 30 second commerical. Then it went to 15 second commercials. Now it's 140 characters in Twitter. When someone asks, "what do you do? can you anwer in 140 powerful characters? I'm still working on my 140 characters, but please share your statement in the comments below.
I got this idea following the Twitter contest. Copyblogger sponsored a contest for the best Twitter stories. I was amazed at the depth and emotion in some of them. Now that's a short story!
Ron Gould was the first place winner. Here's a link to the winners and a link to all of the 331 entries.
I didn't get my entry in, so here it is -- it's a love story:
Once upon a time they fell in love. Had a misunderstanding. Shed a few tears. Reconsidered. Made up. Now they’re living happily ever after.
Our 2005 Cover Story, "Blogs Will Change Your Business," is still widely read online and off. But frankly, we underestimated the vast universe of social media and the ever-widening implicaitons for business. An update.
I'm at SOBCon '08 in Chicago this weekend and have met some amazing people!
The session Saturday was so packed full of ideas that inspired me and lightbulb moments that my brain was numb by the close of the session.
Some highlights:
Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com:
Chris Garrett from Chrisg.com and co author of ProBlogger with Darren Rowse -- He offered great practical ideas for working your writing:
One great thing about having a popular branding and marketing blog is getting branding and marketing books to read and review.
I'm behind in my reading -- I've jumped in and starting reading/skimming each of these, but not ready to write the reviews quite yet.
Although I moved this blog to http://brandandmarket.com/ in January, the blogspot version continues to come up extremely high in the search engines। Perhaps because blogger is a subset of Google. Perhaps because I transferred all my 500 old posts to the new blog and Google saw the new blog as a copy?
I turned off the Settings that told Google to crawl this blog, but for some reason, Google loves this one!
Each day I learn a little more about WordPress. It's much much more powerful than Blogger with lots of options. But also much much more complicated. Today I was trying to learn how to create a sitemap of my wordpress blog. Got about 1/2 way thru and decided just to do a blog post.
If you continue to read in this blog, you're missing some great branding and marketing content that is posted over at Branding & Marketing.
Even after I have moved this blog to http://brandandmarket.com at its own domain, this blog continues to have top ranking by some ranking sites.
See updated content at our new Branding & Marketing location!
The Personal Brand Awards honor five individuals each year who express what it means to create and execute on their brand value to achieve their dreams. Deadline: July 1, 2008.
