by Brian | Sep 20, 2018 | Building a Business, Marketing in London, Ontario
Ryan McFadden of Revival Renovations told me about the “Tea and Cookies Meeting” a while ago. Most business these days can be done by email and phone. In the renovation business you need to see the space, get measurements and make some choices. Then nothing happens for 4-8 weeks as things are built, cut, and prepared.
During this quiet time, he makes a point of having a brief face-to-face meeting with the client where he updates them on the status of the project, and there’s usually tea and cookies. (more…)
by Brian | Jul 18, 2018 | Building a Business, General, Marketing in London, Ontario
Back in April as we started thinking about what we wanted our company to become, we set out to create values. We asked the question “What do you Value?“. We knew that these were going to be aspirational, and that we’d revise them over the next little while as we put them into place. What became immediately obvious to us though was that there were too many, that they weren’t specific enough, and that the only two we could remember were “Provide Ludicrous Value” and “Have Fun”.
We knew we had some work to do.
Then an interesting thing happened. We ended up working with a few companies that didn’t align with what we wanted to do. Those projects didn’t fit our vision of what we wanted to become, and many of them were “one and done” type jobs where we did something, but didn’t have a long term vision on how to work with the client. (more…)
by Craig | Jul 12, 2018 | Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Marketing
There is a good chance your marketing is all wrong or the guy you pay is doing it all wrong.
I read an article 4 Signs You’ve Hired the Wrong Marketer (And How to Avoid It) by Fab Capodscasa at Hoosh Marketing that was interesting and spot on.
One very specific thing stood out to me as ridiculously important. (more…)
by Brian | Jun 16, 2018 | Content Marketing, Hot Buzz, Marketing in London, Ontario
Hot Buzz was an idea that Craig and I had inspired by Hot Ones from First We Feast, what if we got together with some folks, ate some chicken spicy chicken wings, and asked some hot marketing questions.
Our very first episode was an experiment in just seeing how we would do a show, and if it could be successful. We live streamed it to Facebook, and Craig created a fun little logo of a bee spewing fire for our initial episode. We didn’t take a lot of time with production or editing, the idea was just to get it out there and see what people thought of it.
We do this with everything that we do. We try things, experiment with them, and over time make them better.
Here’s the thing. If you wait in hiding and polish your idea something perfectly shiny and brilliant you face a few problems. Your idea might never see the light of day, perfect is the enemy of great, and making that perfect thing takes time. You might make something perfect that nobody wants to see. You will invest a ton of time into something that might not work.
(more…)
by Brian | Apr 18, 2018 | Building a Business, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Marketing
Our Manage Comics blog was recently suspended by Medium for no justifiable reason. To date the only explanation we have been given is that we were accidentally caught in their spam filter.
This caused a huge impact on our business, saw our page rankings plummet, created dozens of orphaned links from sites that had referenced us, and left us scrambling to solve a problem that our vendor has not been able to give us a reasonable explanation behind.
Because of the negative effects on our business, and Medium’s lack of a reasonable explanation for what happened, we have removed all content from Medium, and we are firmly advising our clients against using Medium as a blogging platform. (more…)
