Reading Time: < 1 min In Simon Sinek’s excellent book “Start With Why“, he offers a simple premise: People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it That’s entirely true. However, people also may buy from you based on how you make them feel. In a TED Talk that Simon gave back in 2009, he offered the […]
Marketing
It’s people, not platforms
Reading Time: < 1 min In the book We’re All Marketers, author Nico De Bruyn makes a pretty clear statement that a lot of people seem to miss: To be an effective marketer, you need to recognize that it’s people, not platforms, that influencing today’s buyers. Put another way, Facebook isn’t going to help your company — Facebook users are. […]
Use URL shorteners for better QR codes
Reading Time: 3 min With the “don’t touch anything” approach to handling COVID, particularly at restaurants, we’re seeing a bit of a resurgence with QR codes. Couple that with the fact that iPhone and Android both read QR codes from the main camera app (instead of needing a separate app) means that they’ll likely stick around to some degree. […]
Some first steps with Google Search Console
Reading Time: 4 min You may be familiar with Google Analytics, used to track traffic on a website, but not as many are as familiar with Google Search Console. I thought I’d take a minute to explain why you might want to set it up. The great thing about Google Search Console is that there is nothing you need […]
Ask more questions to avoid survivorship bias
Reading Time: 2 min I find the idea of “survivorship bias” fascinating. If you’ve not heard of it before, this short video from Eddie Woo is an excellent overview of it. I see two places where this comes up in some of the areas where I work. Our non-clients We frequently talk to our clients about why they chose […]
Does your website pass “The Grunt Test”?
Reading Time: < 1 min While building a proper messaging strategy for your company can take some time, an easy place to start is with “the grunt test”, as popularized by Storybrand. Put simply, can someone look at your content, with no prior experience with your company, and quickly understand what you do? Specifically, they should be able to find […]
Thinking through “A Brighter Web”
Reading Time: < 1 min We’ve been running various aspect of A Brighter Web, an educational arm of our agency, for quite a while now. We’ve hosted our Meetup every month (sometimes more) for about nine years now, we have a reasonably active Facebook group, and we’ve played with podcasting and other media. So what’s next? To be honest, I’m […]
“Designed by” is a big red flag
Reading Time: 2 min It’s generally not a good idea for a web designer to put a “designed by” link in the footer of websites that they create, and they usually know it too. The main reason is Google; putting that link down there will hurt the site that it’s on. It’s a tiny amount, but it’ll still hurt. […]
Why do I care if your company is 50 years old?
Reading Time: 2 min Why do I care if your company is 50 years old? I don’t, really. At least not yet. Yet many websites continue to lead with something like that at the front of their site. When a users visits your site for the first time, they don’t care about you — they just want to know […]
How Slack Builds Trust
Reading Time: < 1 min A few weeks ago, I mentioned a few companies that I tend to trust. In all of those cases, it was the humans at the companies that helped build that trust. However, Slack (the chat app that we use) does something automatic that I think is brilliant. If you add more users, they automatically charge […]