The Wax Blog

It’s important to change up your marketing efforts and try new things…without throwing out the things that work.One of the hardest things to measure is the synergy that develops when you combine marketing mediums. It’s the basis for integrated marketing communications (IMC) concepts but no one has really captured where the actual motivation occurs to get your customer to buy, call, whatever.  To keep tweaking your marketing recipe you constantly have to look for new ways to get your message out there…here are a few ways to do that each month that won’t take much time. (more…)

Marketing – as opposed to sales remember – is one of those proactive tasks that seems to get pushed aside for more urgent ones. An astute commenter in my last post mentioned you need to always be planting seeds for future business to grow. Just like your workouts if you put marketing time on your schedule each week and hold it sacred, you’ll see the benefits very quickly. Here are some tips for finding the right time to work on your promotions, social media, advertising, whatever you consider ‘marketing’. (more…)

How much time should you spend on a weekly basis doing marketing and promotion tasks? It will vary of course but there are some rules I’ve learned working with a broad swath of companies and industries over the past couple decades including B2B, B2C, online and retail.Feel free to poke holes in my theories here…but tell us all WHY so we can learn from your successes. (more…)

Rather than reinvent the wheel, here are some links to blog posts and articles  to help you figure out the right mix for your business…

For blending social media with traditional media, and choosing the right mediums, check out my blog post at Main Street Savvy

To follow steps for picking the right marketing vehicles for your business, go to my post on Evobloggito

Some ideas for starting social media are right here on the Wax Blog “How to Bake a Yummy Social Media Souffle”

If you’re sick of me, Entrepreneur has a great piece on this topic “3 Steps to Finding the Right Marketing Mix”

For B2B’ers, SalesVantage has a great post on the topic too.

Keep in mind it might take a bit to find the right recipe…and it needs to be measured and tweaked on a regular basis to keep working well.

Wax Marketing mug to the first 5 who ID this photo

I got so many questions about my last post “7 Steps to Bigger Marketing Muscle in 2010″ I thought I’d give you some detail on each one of the steps.  Measurement seems to be really tricky for people – but it’s actually pretty simple. Once you have some basic measurements in place and you feel a need to go deeper, visit KD Paine’s measurement blog – she’s the real guru. I’d love to hear specific examples of how people are measuring their own results, so comment away! Here’s my quick and dirty take – (more…)

I  tell my clients that marketing is a lot like working out – you have to be consistent or you won’t see results. No one expects to see muscles popping out all over after one visit to the gym. For the same reaons you can’t expect immediate, lasting results from one promotional campaign. As you look toward 2010 and what will surely be a better year for all of us, it might help to build a marketing practice that looks a bit more like a workout schedule. Here are few ways to do just that. (more…)

John Wooden, the greatest coach of all time

A couple years ago I started a coaching service called Waxcoach – it was a fun and inexpensive way to help small business owners, authors and entrepreneurs learn the basics of PR and tactics for doing it themselves. And then I got REALLY busy working on some high profile campaigns like Dan Buettner’s The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest , Yale University’s Weight Bias Campaign and others.

Time’s a bit more manageable now and I’m really excited to announce that I’m doing one on one coaching again. Here’s the scoop – it’s pretty affordable, you just buy a package of hours – minimum of 10 at $125 per hour. Folks who read this blog also get a 30 minute phone consultation totally free. (more…)

Since we all just had a good time talking about what NOT to do on LinkedIn I thought I’d post some things you SHOULD do. LinkedIn, according to Mashable just surpassed 50 million users. Although it’s clearly not the sexiest of social networks (the media loves them some Facebook and Twitter) LinkedIn is incredibly valuable, especially for the B2B set.  You can definitely market your business but remember – you’re building relationships one to one. That means there are no shortcuts.

These are things that are working for me but I would love to hear any cool ways you’re using LinkedIn successfully. Remember,  there are no experts in social media just the intellectual capital of the collective. (Seriously I just made that up ) (more…)

(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

Sorry old school journalists, savvy advertising experts and prickly control-freak publicists but it’s time to realize something. To survive you can no longer be storytellers – you have to be information managers.  Here are some examples:

Rachel Maddow is an information manager. She takes the current news trends, analyzes them and offers up her opinion. She translates and disseminates information using a liberal, celesbian lens. We know it, we’re fine with it, we’ll watch her if we like that slant – and her numbers are through the roof.

Katie Couric is a storyteller. She takes the current news, tells the story she thinks we will find most interesting (called a HOOK or ANGLE) and puts a pretty package together hoping no one else has that same ANGLE.  Boring, yawn, her numbers are in the toilet.

Jon Stewart is also an information manager. He takes the current news, translates and gives it to us with using the funny lens. His numbers are great. Even Perez Hilton, as much as we love to hate him, is  an information manager. Perez takes the celebrity news and translates it with a snarky, ‘I used to be a geek and now I’m more powerful than you’ lens. His traffic numbers are still incredible.

Just try to ‘package’ a story or launch a brand these days with a clever message and a nice dose of spin. What happens? The public’s immediate attitude is that ‘WE WILL TAKE YOU DOWN, MOTHERF*&#ER’. (Remember Motrin Moms?) Today’s social media/citizen journalists love nothing better than to debunk a story, expose an exclusive, steal a headline from a print paper, or do whatever else it takes to prove they can get there faster and more provocatively than traditional media. And guess what? They’re winning the race.

It’s time to admit what we haven’t wanted to admit for a long time -  information is  too real-time and too accessible for us to believe the ’stories’ any more. We want to pick our chosen lens and get our information there.

Who’s your favorite information manager?

photo courtesy of vitrue.com

Wax is an integrated marketing firm – the only other “Wax” I’ve found in the U.S. Of course they’re in Miami so I imagine it’s a little different corporate culture (if I actually have one) than here in Minnesota. But since all their posts come up in MY google alerts I tend to read them. And they’re good. (Maybe someday they’ll want my URL and pay me big bucks for it. )

Take a look at a post on trends in Facebook that may help you if you’re starting to market in that particular social network. Enjoy! waxcom.com/impressions