Archive: Marketing in a Global World

Why all Marketers Should Aim for a T-Shape

A young, fresh-out-of-college marketer who was just starting out approached me the other day. She was smart, she was ambitious, and she was hungry for some advice. What should she focus on moving forward? My answer: drill down on the marketing aspects that interest her, but stay T-shaped. There has been much talk in digital marketing circles about the T-shaped web marketer. Rand Fishkin’s summary is excellent, and I recommend you check it out if Read more…

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Marketing When There’s No Marketing Department

It’s a very common scenario, shared by start-ups, entrepreneurs and freelancers. You need to market your business because you know that’s what’s going to bring in new sales and the revenue you need for your organisation to thrive. But – and this is a big but – there’s no marketing department or marketing person to do the work. Here’s the thing. Just as you have to go out and buy toilet paper and light bulbs because Read more…

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30+ Free Tools and Resources To Help You Become More Productive

PLEASE NOTE NOTE: This is an archived blog post that has not been updated for a while, so quite a few of the tools suggested aren’t around anymore (although you should be able to find suitable replacements relatively easily).  One of the most frequent complaints I hear from freelancers is that they struggle to do everything they are expected to do to run their business. As a result, marketing always ends up at the bottom Read more…

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Marketing for Freelancers: How to Come up with a Killer USP

Freelancing is on the rise. In today’s insecure job market, being your own boss has never been more appealing. In the States, one in three workers is freelancing, and where the U.S. leads, the world follows. To them, I say: come up with a killer unique selling proposition (USP). If you are thinking about becoming a freelancer, or have become one, you are presumably good at what you do. But that’s not always enough to create Read more…

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Why Personas Are Here to Stay

Many companies are using 2D persona cut-outs these days, an approach that has limited success. But you can really get some amazing results from your buyer personas if you take the time and effort to dig a bit deeper than everyone else when creating them. What is so amazing about personas? The wonderful thing about the persona approach is that it helps marketer think in concrete as opposed to abstract terms. Addressing a generic segment is Read more…

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Marketing and Statistics, a Match Made in the Cloud

I’ve been teaching a marketing metrics course recently. It’s a great opportunity to reflect on concepts that I often take for granted, topics that I am familiar with but don’t think about much in my day to day. For me, one of them has been statistical analysis. I took several statistics courses back at university as part of my degree. I enjoyed the subject at the time, but I hadn’t actively used statistics in years. The exception is, of course, election Read more…

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3 Things to Be Aware of When Recruiting a Brilliant Marketer

I recently saw an article on recruiting for marketing positions that got me thinking. Benji Hyam’s post “Why Marketing Has Become The Hardest Position to Hire for” hits the nail on the head on some things, but these are the ones that resonated the most with me regarding my personal experience and what recruiters have shared with me: 1. You need the help of a marketer to hire a marketer It’s obvious, yet often overlooked. The input Read more…

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7 Ways to Manage your International Marketing Campaigns More Effectively

I have just completed an international marketing campaign that involved working across several countries in four continents. The scale of the piece was particularly substantial, but, somehow surprisingly, the issues that came up were very similar to the ones that I had encountered in previous global projects of minor scope. I got thinking about the importance of certain things when it comes to successfully planning and executing a marketing project across different countries. How best Read more…

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6 Ways to Make Your Business Global-Friendly From Day One

Who’s your ideal customer? Perhaps your business is most definitely local, and all you are after is the money your neighbours can spend on your product or service. But if your offering can in any way be shipped overseas or delivered remotely, think again. The decision to expand a business globally is often the result of careful planning, but if you’ve got a website, you’ve already addressing a global audience. Anybody can find you on Google, Read more…

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How to Roll Out a Full Rebrand and Keep Your Sanity

After much agonising, you’ve finally taken the pick from the design proposals you had on the table and you have a new corporate image. Congratulations! But how should you roll out your new brand so no strands are undone? Rebrands are notoriously tricky. There are so many elements involved that it’s not an exception to occasionally see the old logo pop everywhere (presentation slides, email signatures, spreadsheets, proposals, invoices, you name it!). International rebrand operations are Read more…

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Why Content Marketing is The Thing to Do Now

When I was a little girl, I spent many hours at my grandparents’ home, which was a vintage hunter’s paradise. It was jam-packed with antiques, old clothes and plenty of quirky things, from ancient postcards to long lost buttons. Amongst the many treasures I found in the long childhood afternoons spent at their place, I vividly remember an old book titled “Cooking with Maggi”. It had a tiny Maggi logo on the back, and guess Read more…

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The Two Simple Things you Have to Do to Succeed

Last week I had the privilege of hearing Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist Eric McAfee speak at the Startup Summit in Edinburgh, a day packed with startup and entrepreneurial inspiration organised by the visionary folk at We Are The Future. Eric McAffee is a wonderful storyteller and shared with the audience some of the experiences he’s encountered in his professional journey. He also gave us his view on what it takes to succeed. His Read more…

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Online Marketing: it’s Complicated. Or is it?

A few days ago I wrote an article on why the online marketing vs offline marketing debate is totally pointless. One of the main ideas was that you shouldn’t have a separate marketing budget or strategy for your digital activity. But I hear you: how are we supposed to work otherwise if we don’t have the required online marketing capabilities in-house? After all, according 72% of digital marketers in a just-released Marlin Software industry study, Read more…

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The Rise and Rise of the Creative Technologists

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, artisans and makers were at the heart of the economy. They built, sew, forged and made products with their bare hands, one at a time, lovingly creating each piece from scratch. Then the focus switched to productivity and churning as many products as possible in the most efficient way that could be engineered. It was all about operations and achieving clockwork-like precision in the manufacture Read more…

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Why Integrated Marketing will Make Your Campaigns More Successful

I hear it all the time. “We’re hiring an online marketing person to take care of all that”. “We’ve allocated a budget for online marketing”. “We’re doing an online marketing campaign”. And this is, oh, so wrong. The divide between online and offline marketing doesn’t exist. It’s all marketing, people. Fair enough about having that kind of separation twenty years ago, when Google didn’t even exist. But today the game has changed. Just as individuals Read more…

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Why This Marketing Blog Might be Just What the World Needs

That’s what you’re thinking, I know. As if there weren’t enough marketing blogs in this world. Well, this is a different marketing blog, run by a normal person for normal people (notice how I said people, not organisations or brands). I’ve worked in B2B marketing for longer than I care to admit in companies of all shapes and sizes: startups, mega-corporations; client-side, agency-side; in one country only, in international set-ups. Perhaps I haven’t seen it Read more…

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