Working from home: Some people love it, some people hate. But when left with no other choice, we do it. So how can you make your home office as efficient and effective a workspace as possible?

When the ‘work from home’ movement started over 20 years ago, some would scoff at it and say, ‘How can you be productive? Do you sit on your couch and eat bonbons all day? Are you really working or are you just taking an extra day off during the week?’

A crisis hits, clients start calling, and the next thing you know, potential budget cuts are on the table.

Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? What your customers need to hear right now, during this coronavirus outbreak or during other periods of crisis, is that they have no reason to worry when it comes to the services and products your company provides them. Going dark is the last thing a company should be thinking about at this point. The reality is, making smart choices for active tasks in your marcom program, rather than pulling back, will help guide you through this temporary wave of business uncertainty.

As the world is still speculating just how far reaching the Coronavirus will be across the globe in terms of business continuity, healthcare services and personal impact, some important aspects about business operations have come to light.

To put this in context, we’ve found that during a market upturn as well as downturn, much of the current news and hub bub doesn’t touch upon the impacts we might feel in the business-to-business (B2B) community, yet. Our experience has shown that B2B generally starts to see the effects of the mainstream market a few months after we are hearing about things on the news.

Thanks for sharing in our fun! We chose some of our favorite holiday movies and TV specials to feature in our card this year.

We can all agree, creativity isn’t a linear process, and brainstorming is a great example.

In a good session, ideas abound, leaping off each other, morphing into different viewpoints and even bordering on the ridiculous sometimes! (…as it should be…)

Brainstorming is about the good, the bad, and the downright ugly, or silly, or “what the heck did he just say?”. You need a mix of people who bring different perspectives. It’s the antithesis of group think. You want people to expand on the ideas of others. You need people to disagree and push the envelope.

Writing is poetry, regardless of what type of piece you are creating. With the onslaught of content marketing, and the push to be SEO-optimized, some of that seems to have been lost in translation.

Writing should evoke an emotion. But all too often, marketers create content that they think will resonate with their audience, just to find that they missed the mark.

Having worked in the business to business world for the past few decades, it is always interesting to see companies try to apply consumer-based principles directly to B2B programs. While there is a component of B2C marketing that carries over to B2B, the tactics need to be applied in a way that makes sense for this particular business segment as well as the intended audience.

Take social media as one of the more recent examples. A few years ago, our clients gave us questionable looks when we said we needed to get their social media profiles in order. What could it possibly have to do their businesses? They mainly target the industrial and electronics folks, which is a very engineering-focused crowd.

While sitting in my office today, my office mate looked at me holding up a picture of a map with lines running across the page and up and down the page. She pointed to the lines and said, “What are these called? I can’t remember. I’m having a mental block.” I told her that they were longitude and latitude lines. I further explained that I would NEVER forget the names and directions of the lines, because my 7th grade social studies teacher taught me that the ones that go up and down the page are longitude, the LOOONNNGGGG lines (long is in the word longitude) and the ones that go across the page are latitude (And the way to remember them is to remember how the two t’s are crossed in the word latitude (latitude lines go in that direction).

After explaining how I’ve remembered this information for countless years, she looked at me and said, ‘Oh, that’s right! I learned to remember latitude by saying lat is flat (meaning the latitude lines are flat).’

So, you have a new product and you need to figure out how to market it to the masses. You decide to call a brainstorming session in the conference room with a group of your most creative, smart and thought-provoking colleagues.

You all sit around the table and throw out ideas, cut the ones you think won’t work, keep the ones you think will. Whittle them all down to one and there you have your idea. Right? Wrong!

“Social proof” is a modern, digital age term, but the concept is one we all know. Back in the day we called it being a follower. Not like a ‘follower’ of today where you follow a story, a tweet, a Facebook page, but following along with everyone else’s actions and thoughts. Not making a decision based on your knowledge or knowledge that you garnered through research, but just following along because ‘everyone else is doing it’.

As modern marketers in the age of ‘brand globally’, we truly understand the need for visual consistency and message clarity across business units, different geographic regions and even from tactic to tactic. This ensures there is continuity across a company’s internal and external touch points.

But it doesn’t mean your marketing materials need to be dull. It should be a formula that still adds up to your full brand identity when the right variables are used.

Those of us in marketing are looked upon to be equal parts creative and logical. Develop imaginative concepts for meeting the goals of very organized and results-oriented strategic marketing plans. This is usually the result of a team of people working collaboratively to meet all those criteria. Most people are not usually an even mix of those attributes every day or on every project.