This year on the Crayons & Marketers blog, we answered some questions our small business clients have asked us and covered best practices that we follow ourselves. Where we started We began the year with a conversation about the power of keeping it real over the next twelve months, letting authenticity give our marketing a…
The last couple months of the year aren’t just for stuffing turkeys and pitching a tent outside your local big box retailer. Retail businesses are engrossed in the holiday marketing mashup while service providers are picking over low hanging fruit, trying to book as much revenue as possible before year end. Tis the season to…
By now, you have a pretty good idea of how your marketing fared this year. You either pulled off a total win, came in about average, or completely lost the battle. And if the latter is you, don’t be too tough on yourself. Finding your way around the marketing landscape can be a little like…
The only way you can gain an appreciation for or dislike of social media is to be on it. And regardless of which side of the coin you land on, social media is here to stay. Sure, the popularity of certain platforms will change, and new ones will emerge. But the force that is social…
Posting to social media has never been easier. Social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer make it almost inexcusable not to post updates routinely to your social media networks. And the benefits! Once you link up all your accounts, you can schedule posts to publish when and where you want them to, all from…
What does your brand stand for? Before you compose a Facebook message or send an email, defining why people should care about your brand is a question that can’t go unanswered. Because good marketing messages aren’t composed of a laundry list of features. Convincing marketing messages derive from a brand that knows their worth and…
Unlike more traditional forms of marketing, digital marketing gives you the ability to easily create, publish, and share mass quantities of content in just a few clicks. In an instant, your content embarks upon a long spiraling journey through cyberspace destined to land, in many cases, at the bottom of a news feed – if…
You don’t have to own a Fortune 500 business to run a marketing campaign. Both the small business owner with limited staff and the non-profit hero running on fumes can create one. To do that, you have to start off changing two things: first, your mindset. Marketing has to be deemed important and non-negotiable. Secondly,…
How many times have you set up what you thought was a great marketing campaign only to see if fizzle out on the back end? Probably more often than not, especially if your internal processes lack a marketing system. What is a marketing system? Just as stereo systems have various components like volume control buttons…
Posting to social media is easy. You type something in, click a button, and it’s out there. You’re done, right? Wrong. Not if you want to survive social media. Building a strong social media following for your business isn’t about you. It’s about building a community who engages in a conversation driven by you, but…
Summer is in full swing. And you know what that means, lazy days punctuated by long lunch breaks, summer hours, and flip flop Fridays. And perhaps the biggest disruption to the entrepreneurial workflow is summer vacations. Those long seven-day stints with your toes buried in the sand do wonders to refresh the spirit, mind, and…
Many small business owners find themselves torn between working “on” their businesses or “in” their businesses. And more often than not, especially when you’re a 1-2 person shop, working in your business wins, hands down, leaving little time to do other things that’ll help grow your business, like marketing. But there are some who’ve found…