The Heinzeroth Blog

In most organizations, there are several people who speak on behalf of the company. The marketing team may oversee your company’s website, sales reps give presentations, and each employee might set up their individual email signature. It’s important that everyone keep your company’s message on-brand. A brand guide provides a framework for your organization's internal and external communications efforts and helps to ensure that all marketing materials, be they print, web, or multimedia, communicate a unified feel.

The old adage “Change is the Only Constant” hardly seems to capture the rate of change that has impacted consumers and brands since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rules of retail are in a state of flux as consumers learn to navigate new social behavior requirements, working from home or job loss, financial uncertainty and home-schooling children. How does a brand ensure that they will not just survive but thrive?

Whether your business involves Consumer or B2B products and services, changes in the digital marketing landscape continue to expand the potential role digital activities can play in your media outreach. Newer tactics such as retargeting campaigns, contextual advertising, programmatic buys, chat bots and other ways of engaging with customers certainly make digital activities as complex as anyone would want to manage. 

To maximize effectiveness of an advertising media plan, one of the basic questions still remains: Should you place greater emphasis on digital initiatives today? Or should you continue to allocate a significant share of your budget for traditional activities such as print advertising that you have used in the past? What is an appropriate mix? The balance of this article provides general thoughts on that central issue.

When the annual budget process comes around, marketing managers naturally hope to see all key elements of their marketing plan receive funding. Wouldn't it be nice if top management could evaluate your proposed budget along with some supporting evidence of marketing's positive and measurable impact on your business? These 5 metrics may be a bit theoretical and simplistic, certainly not the end-all rationale for setting budgets. For certain types of businesses, they might also be difficult to calculate. Still, knowing things such as your Customer Acquisition Cost may make it possible to explain and verify marketing's impact while establishing some new benchmarks for future tracking.

Not to make too much of our recent milestone, but I am a bit reflective as we celebrate our agency’s 25^th anniversary this week.

There are many ways to build brand awareness through early adopters and others we might target to achieve positive product reviews and referrals as well as more frequent sharing of your product story. Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Videos and Influencer Marketing are some of the techniques considered to be effective in getting the conversations started. Within that spectrum of person-to-person initiatives, Advocacy Marketing is a tool specifically intended to harness the power of consumers who are already sold on your brand.

After several years of subdued gray tones and whites dominating (or should we say “minimizing”) the design landscape, it’s nice to see that more vibrant colors may be back as inspiration for graphic design and marketing overall. This shift is trending in recently announced paint colors by major coatings brands as well as in the predictions of leading influencers such as Color Marketing Group, Pantone and others.

With generally lower prices and up to 8,000 20-second video plays on built-in batteries, small video players are finally getting there as a practical and versatile demo device for point-of-sale uses.   

While inbound marketing (content marketing) is becoming an ongoing initiative for many companies, its adoption in industrial OEM markets is growing at a somewhat slower, yet steady rate. Do inbound marketing methods apply to industrial OEM and component businesses that target engineers and other technical professionals? Even if those businesses sell to only a small number of companies? We would say Yes! Here’s why.

When it comes to retail trends, no single organization has done more to change the way that people shop in recent years than Amazon. This remarkable company is innovating at a faster pace than everyone by improving the shopping experience with rich, easily searchable content and by adding the immensely popular Prime. Sellers who ignore the impact of this marketing juggernaut run the risk of missing a huge opportunity to reach a constantly growing number of customers who shop online first.