Reading Time: 2 min Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of AI. There are some great things coming from it, but I generally prefer the old way of doing things, and wish that all creativity came directly from human minds. However, it’s not something I can control so I’m digging in deeply to understand AI as well as I […]
Marketing
There is no average person
Reading Time: < 1 min While building audience personas is a vital piece of any marketing campaign, it’s also a bit strange. We build this very specific idea of who the customer is, knowing that this exact person doesn’t exist. In his book, “The Design of Everyday Things“, author Don Norman says: There is no such thing as the average […]
Always build the foundation first
Reading Time: < 1 min I love the processes behind the work we do at GreenMellen. By taking things in the right order, the results are far more likely to be successful. However, there is a downside to this approach; you can’t just jump into the middle of a campaign and hope to be successful. In the book “The Dichotomy […]
Yes, that’s spam
Reading Time: 2 min As time goes on, my definition of spam has gotten larger and larger. If you’re thinking about sending something and wonder “would this be considered spam?”, yes, it probably would be. My definition of spam has grown to simply include any cold contact. A cold email, a cold LinkedIn message, a cold phone call — […]
Thought leaders are everywhere
Reading Time: 2 min Depending on your marketing goals, one approach might be to reach “thought leaders” so that they can spread the word about your product to their audience. It sounds good in theory, but determining who a thought leader is can be nearly impossible. There are well-known authors and celebrities, for sure, but the people that others […]
Your real customers are a level or two deeper
Reading Time: 2 min In any kind of marketing it’s essential to know who your real customers are, but it’s sometimes a little trickier than it might seem. As I shared earlier this year, the people that we build websites for aren’t the ones that we’re actually building them for. When we build a site for a client, we’re […]
You are advertising to a moving parade
Reading Time: < 1 min Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy had many tremendous ideas when it came to advertising, but one of his big ones was to stick with what works. In his mind, companies switched from one marketing tactic to another far before the first one had run dry. If you’re sick and tired of the ads that you’re running, […]
The clarity of an idea is based on the person receiving it
Reading Time: 2 min When sharing ideas and strategies with others, I try to be very clear. This takes two forms: First, it’s not magic. It irritates me when people tell me they have someone “doing SEO” for their site, but they have no idea what they’re doing. We strive to be clear and transparent with what we do, […]
We are impossible to imitate
Reading Time: 2 min Over the years, an interesting thing we’ve done at GreenMellen is to literally give all of our “secrets” away. Across dozens of podcast episodes, hundreds of Meetup events, and thousands of blog posts, we don’t hold anything back. I often joke that our Meetups are when our competition all visit and we tell them all […]
If it’s on the slide, it gets written down
Reading Time: 2 min Over the years, I’ve tried to make the slides for talks that I give have fewer and fewer words on them. Generally speaking, that’s a good thing to do. For example, here is a slide from a typical Apple presentation: Or Google: Or someone like Seth Godin: Funny enough, one of Seth’s talking points about […]