A few weeks ago I met a gentleman who said I couldn’t predict what his customers would do. “Our customers’ tastes dictate what they’ll buy,” he told me, “and you can’t measure an intangible like taste.” He was quite surprised when I told him we’d been doing it for years. And I suspect he didn’t… Read More
Marketing in a downturn takes nerves of steel. Study after study shows that, tough as a downturn can be, it’s actually an opportunity. Marketers with the guts to invest when conditions look bleak always emerge from a downturn stronger than if they’d headed for the storm shelter and pushed marketing to the back burner till… Read More
You can’t kick back in this business. Over my many years producing software, I’ve learned that you can’t relax and coast on previous work. There’s always room for a better version, even when you have produced something as game-changing as Longbow, our SaaS platform that aspires to be ‘direct marketing in a box.’ And of… Read More
Relevance has always been the key to successful marketing. Long before the rise of advertising and mass distribution local merchants knew their customers needs because their customers were their neighbors. The relationship was 1:1. It worked but it didn’t ‘scale’. Now, 21st century technology has made relevance possible once again. And what we’ve learned with… Read More
Direct marketing to your existing customers, the best way to grow revenue for most companies, is like a three-legged stool. The three legs are customer data, customer analytics, and customer campaigns. Remove any leg and the stool falls over. Without customer data, you’re flying blind – forced to use newspapers, TV, pay-per-click, and take a… Read More