Marketing with an edge

I've worked at many different types of companies, from small 15-person startups to global public companies. With that experience, I have learned the valuable lesson of how much strategy is actually required to get desired results. In a larger organization, there are usually more resources in money, time, and people. You have more specialized roles, so ...

A website has many different content contributors. It's important to work with the internal stakeholders to present relevant, accurate information that will help achieve the goals of the website. However, some of these groups may mistakenly think they have free reign in "their" section. They should not be dictating design or wordsmithing copy. They are ...

You'd think after seeing enough episodes of "The Apprentice" that the every day person would understand some basics about ad copy. Sometimes people fall in love with their words and just vomit it out on the page. It's fun to be a copywriter for a day and just type away...until I come along with my ...

During this website project, it's interesting to see how different people cope with stress and how their day-to-day personalities are challenged in a highly stressful environment. I love analogies and often come up with oddball analogies to illustrate my point. In this instance I'm going to turn to sports, specifically soccer (my fave). If your team ...

Sometimes I get caught up in the daily grind that I forget about what I really love doing and what I'm really good at doing. Every now and then it's nice just to take a step back from that and dig into something new. I like being creative. I always have ideas about how to solve ...

In reviewing website content, it's very interesting to see the different writing styles. And by "interesting" I mean I want to poke my eyes out. But that's what happens when you have different content contributors. None of them claim to be writers, so they know the content will likely be changed. Drastically in some cases. So ...

There are some prerequisites for new grads or junior marketers. You're coming in without enough knowledge or experience, so you have to stand out somehow. Below are the three qualities that I look for. Work ethic You must be a workhorse...and keep up with my energy. Whatever needs to get done, you're there to help. However tedious ...

I'm going to have all new marketing team members take an SEO basics course during their orientation even if they aren't directly working on SEO. SEO is a big program for us, and everyone on the marketing team should know the basics. Everything they do should have SEO in mind. I'd actually like to have all ...

There are three main stages of a press release: 1. Writing 2. Review and approvals 3. Distribution Writing There are some standard topics: product customer partner personnel event etc. However, they're not my favourite marketing piece to write since there's less creativity involved. There's a standard format, and very few press releases are actually newsworthy. So you've got a ho hum topic that's only interesting to your ...

I put together a corporate style guide just for copy. I've seen a number of examples, and they're all very dry. I guess it's not so much a style guide as some branding rules and quick tips for writing. There's also a section on creating SEO-friendly copy because it's critical that all content contributors understand ...