Marketing SOS

Starting a new business is always a challenge. Starting a business as a new immigrant to the United States whose food products are unfamiliar to the American palate is doubly challenging. Lets see what we can do to help this new business owner out.

When it comes to starting a new company, what should you focus on? Our listener question today comes from someone building a new company that offers a slew of digital marketing services. Their question is based around whether they can also offer clients financial services as well. Can they? Should they? Let's get into it.

In this episode, a newly minted Director of Marketing is doing an overhaul of his new companies visual identity and recreating their website and marketing collateral. Unfortunately, he doesn't have much in the way of a team and needs to outsource. But what should he do? Does he find an agency that can help him or does he look to hire the services of various freelancers?

When it comes to marketing strategy, the Head of Marketing at an organization is usually the one who sets the strategic priorities. But what happens when you disagree with their approach? Or in this case their lack of one. Today's listener question features an engineer who believes her company needs a corporate identity and brand guidelines - something the Head of Marketing disagrees with. Who is right? And what can our engineer do to convince people that this is needed?

Disagreements in a partnership are always a challenge, how you come out of them can really define your business moving forward. In this episode, we have a question from a listener looking for help answering one such partner disagreement - are Facebook and Google marketers just scammers? Well dear listeners, lets dive in and find out!

When it comes to marketing to specific individuals and industries, it really pays to put yourself in their shoes to learn how to speak, and market to them most effectively.

Today we have a question from a listener who wants to know if all marketing teams are as dysfunctional as theirs. This listener works in the legal industry and their Chief Marketing Officer seems to care very little about what they are producing as long as a box gets checked.

So you've been given the green light to get some new interns in your marketing department - now what? What do you give them to do and how do you trust them to take the ball and run with it? Should you delegate freely? Micromanage? What's the best course of action?

On this episode our dear listener questions features a OBGYN who has poured her own savings into a free app for women to get accurate information, answer questions and track their pregnancies without trying to make a dime off of them. So how do you market and app, and more importantly can you do it for free? Let's kick it off in today's episode.

Creating an effective landing page is critical to converting people into paying happy customers. What do you do if you don't have a clear offer and your company wants multiple products and service to be featured in a landing page? It's time to dive in and figure out the bigger problem with your company's strategic vision.

One of the downsides of there being so much free content available on the internet is that it's super easy and hard to track plagiarism. Stealing work, not from coworkers, but from others on the internet and passing it off as your own can make you look great but can also have devastating effects on your reputation and career. It can also negatively impact your company and its search engine rankings. So what do you do when you notice a coworker passing off other's work as their own?

Times are extremely challenging for small business owners who are facing a dramatic change in the way they do business and how their customers interact with them. It is an unprecedented challenge that no one could prepare for. With the future being so uncertain, this is a critical time to pivot or change the way you do business in order to survive the challenges ahead.

The world of SEO advice is filled with videos and forms full of potential strategies to one up your competition. When you dive into this world, you'll find 'white hat' strategies, often considered good or friendly to search engines and 'black hat' strategies that are often riskier and frowned upon by search engines.. When you are looking for an edge, is it worth taking the risk and trying one of the 'black hat' techniques in order to get ahead?

There are lots of ways to fund a new project or venture. You can invest your own cash to bootstrap it, take on a debt loan from a bank, beg and borrow for funds from family and friends or raise capital through outside investment. One of the less sexy ways that is usually reserved for academics is by applying for grants. Grants are setup to fund certain types of projects. While there are lots of hoops to jump through there aren't as many strings attached to them (in most cases).

Despite working in the marketing field, the terms in each industry can be vastly different. This episode a marketer from the world of big established brands dips their toe into the start up world and is confused by the term Product Market Fit and believes the entrepreneurial process behind it may be inefficient.