The Wax Blog

12 Jun

Posted at 11:59h in Integrated Marketing, Public Relations by
Note: This does not apply to any of my Wax clients so if you're reading, don't get paranoid, K?  wax marketingI was talking to a PR colleague of mine about client management yesterday. There are many, many things that can screw up a marketing/communications campaign but lack of trust is probably one of the biggest obstacles to good results. You might think an intangible like trust wouldn't have such a strong impact, but it does. Perhaps it's due to some new age universal energy factor, or maybe it's The Secret, but if you don't trust your marketing or PR person you're going to get terrible results. Every time. I promise. Here are five non-new agey ways in which trust plays a part in your campaign results.
  • Lack of trust often results in micromanaging. When I'm nervous about a project, I tend to micromanage my staff. Business owners often think they "know marketing" because they see it all day long. But micromanaging your marketing person has a huge negative impact. Your marketing or PR person loses confidence when constantly questioned. And without confidence, it's impossible for them to be at their creative best or pitch your story with enthusiasm. The best people are always second-guessing themselves all the time anyway. Add your own partly-uneducated helicoptering and you will circumvent many of the things you hired them for in the first place;  experience, passion for the project and organizational skills. 
  • Lack of trust often results in impatience.

03 Jun

Posted at 16:32h in Integrated Marketing, Sales, SEO by
Google changes "Trademarked words" policy By Joy Gendusa, CEO of Postcard Mania, a direct marketing firm Google Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be a great addition to your small business marketing arsenal. It allows you to build brand awareness and generate leads by displaying targeted ads to prospects on any of the millions of websites within the Google Display Network. However, it can be a complicated process. There are 4 ways that you can maximize the benefits of PPC marketing to build business growth. Let’s take a look at them...  1. Organize campaigns into niche keyword groups

30 May

Posted at 16:02h in Integrated Marketing by
Here’s the  last of a small series of blog posts by Jeanne Bradford, a innovative leader with a track record at AOL, Cisco and Apple. Jeanne shares her wisdom and advice for accelerating innovation in today’s business environment.  B. Below is a sample of the results of a Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard.  The boxes in grey indicate those areas where the mean value is less than 3.0.  The team will want to consider further preparation in these areas before launching a social implementation to increase the likelihood of success. By analyzing the results of the self-assessment and collecting any further information, the facilitator should be able to create an an action plan. Your organization will have a prioritized list of initiative areas to improve the readiness of your social innovation efforts. Jeanne Bradford                   The Benefits of The Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard
  • Provides a new methodology for accelerating innovation and time to market in your product development organization

22 May

Posted at 17:04h in Integrated Marketing by
Here's the second of a small series of blog posts by Jeanne Bradford, a innovative leader with a track record at AOL, Cisco and Apple. Jeanne is a brilliant new product marketer and manager. She shares her wisdom and advice for accelerating innovation in today’s business environment.  B. 

How to get started using social innovation

When companies first applied social media to their enterprises, there was a big rush to implement a social strategy. Unfortunately, many companies stumbled because they jumped before they really understood the framework they needed to be successful. They needed new tools, processes, roles & responsibilities, and decision-making models for successful implementation. Getting the most out of social communities also requires changes in how organizations share information and make decisions. It’s critical to understand these nuances to optimize the effectiveness of this methodology. We developed the Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard to quickly solve this problem and allow the management team to provide their organization with their best chance at success and ensure that you get the most out of increasing the quality of ideas while accelerating the rich collaboration that leads to groundbreaking innovation.

16 May

Posted at 15:29h in Integrated Marketing, Social Media by
I'm thrilled to host a small series of blog posts by Jeanne Bradford, a innovative leader with a track record at AOL, Cisco and Apple. Jeanne is a brilliant new product marketer and manager. She shares her wisdom and advice for accelerating innovation in today's business environment.  B. 

Social Technology: The New Secret Weapon for Accelerating Innovation & Speed in Product Development

By Jeanne Bradford Never has it been more important to innovate on an accelerated timeline. Yet many companies are stuck in the myth that you cannot achieve both innovation and speed in new product development.  This is not true! Our research has found that you can get both by tapping the collective minds of your employees and your customers to ideate faster by using social technologies.  Many companies use social solutions in marketing and customer support, but they can also apply them to the product development process to increase both innovation and time to market. The most important aspect of applying social technologies to product innovation is the ability to create a “community” of technical thought leaders where they can share, build upon, and develop ideas. However, you need a methodology to prioritize and implement these solutions. You can apply social communities internally to harness the innovative thinking and problem solving across the company. You can also use them as an ideation and collaboration platform with your customers. For geographically dispersed organizations, social solutions are a superior method for gathering, evaluating, and managing internal ideas.  And there are several third-party social collaboration tools that are available from companies including Spigit, BrightIdea, Communispace and Innocentive, to help you collect and manage the new set of data that comes with social innovation. While similar to the concepts of Open Innovation, broader research demonstrates that applying social technologies can extend throughout the entire product life cycle.  The use of community can add value to innovation and accelerate product delivery beyond ideation to product design, testing and early feedback. The application of new social technologies in the product development space is a new approach for companies, and we see it becoming an increasingly important methodology. TCGen conducted a benchmark study to identify what companies are applying social technologies to product development and to identify emerging best practices.  Here are the key takeaways:

23 Apr

Posted at 12:50h in Integrated Marketing, Small Business, Social Media by

Mobile marketing is the latest trend in attracting more consumers to your products. People  are becoming more engaged in using  mobile devices in everything that they do from shopping, browsing for information, communicating with others and for entertainment purposes. There are unlimited things that you can do with mobile technology making it the best platform for marketing products and services.

Online marketers  invading the mobile platform in their marketing strategies. You can use mobile apps to build a brand and attract the consumer world using the mobile platform. But before you take a step in launching a mobile apps marketing, you need to know these 3 marketing strategies for mobile apps to reach your goals successfully.

19 Apr

Posted at 15:41h in Digital Marketing by
Where does your audience get their information? One reason to really, truly know your audience is that the answer to this question is "Everywhere!" In the old days, we had print and TV (and only three channels) and signage and it was an easy bet as to where to place your messaging. Today's world contains everything from text messaging to billboards to social media. Chances are your audience is looking at about 7-8 different messaging channels a day. You've heard of many of the popular ones but others like a podcast ad or a GPS-enabled mobile banner may not be as obvious. Knowing your audience means you can identify trends. The younger the audience, the more they tend to change channels regularly. The older audience typically finds something they like and sticks with it.