I am an author and content marketing consultant from Pittsburgh.
I help brands find a voice that resonates. Drawing upon my diverse professional background in journalism, publishing, and video games, I develop uniquely engaging campaigns for a variety of businesses and industries—from financial services professionals to best-selling health authors.
My experience spans:
I can help your business grow, using a strategy that outpaces and outshines the efforts of your competitors.
Would you spend $75 to keep a customer with a total gross lifetime value potential of $6,500? This blog was inspired by my experience with MSI, a gaming laptop brand who chose the $75.
In the past, I’ve written about how cost per acquisition (CPA)—what you are willing to spend to get a new customer—can be a powerful tool in your marketing, but we should also take into consideration what we are willing to spend in order to keep a customer.
Yes, you read that correctly. If your content is well-developed and well-executed, it should drive some people away. Intentionally. By design. On purpose.
This is not me being hyperbolic for the sake of getting clicks. As much as that sounds counterintuitive, I genuinely mean it, and if you think this way, you can actually make your marketing content much more impactful.
Recently, we had the opportunity to run a condensed strategic planning workshop for the Washington County Watershed Alliance, a local nonprofit that serves as the mother-support-ship for the individual watershed organizations working across our county. I’m proud to say I’m an At-Large Board Member, so that makes me biased toward the organization, but the work was a reminder of just how easy it is for even the most passionate organizations to lose sight of their true direction.
This is why the most successful businesses and organizations use strategic planning. For the sake of clarity, here is the Wikipedia definition of strategic planning: “Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy.”
The internet marketing world collectively panicked when Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to how Facebook would display content to users. You should read the post in its entirety, but this paragraph is likely what triggered worried phone calls and emails:
“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.” (emphasis is mine)
For many businesses, social media marketing—and therefore Facebook, given its size—is a key element of their marketing mix. The idea that an algorithm change would automatically make your Facebook marketing less effective is naturally alarming, but the unbridled panic may not be justified. Your business can still leverage social media marketing to drive retention, acquisition, and revenue, but your social media strategy is going to have to change.
Content marketing is a broad term that can describe everything from television shows to email campaigns. For someone working in this space—hello, that’s me!—this makes content marketing exciting and interesting. The variety makes each marketing mix unique and opens the door to a huge swath of creative potential.
For clients, the folks deciding whether or not use content marketing, that same broadness can be confusing and crippling. Many times, when there are so many things that you could do, the response can often be to do nothing. Analysis paralysis, feeling overwhelmed—however you describe it, more choice is not always a good thing.
When I talk to business owners about content marketing, their initial reaction is often to say, “Oh, like blogging?” which is shortly followed by “We tried blogging. It was a waste of time.” They aren’t being mean. Running a blog is a time-consuming process, and for it to produce no measurable return is understandably frustrating. The reality of blogging—a small facet of what content marketing encompasses—is that the vast majority of business blogs are abject failures.
To blame for these failures is a range of common mistakes and misconceptions of what a blog should do or how it should add value to a business. Even if blogging is a clear opportunity for your business, executing a blogging strategy incorrectly will do nothing but drain budget.
In this episode, Marshal and Meesha sit down with David Manes of Kraemer, Manes & Associates, a Pennsylvania law firm with offices in Pittsburgh and Philadelphi and focuses in employment law for employees, business law, litigation, and civil issues. We talk marketing, the business of law, and growing a multi-location business from scratch.
In this episode, Marshal sits down to interview Eric Perelman, the owner of Nartak Media, a Pittsburgh-based advertising and media buying agency. Marshal and Eric talk about the role of traditional media in a digital world and Eric’s inside perspective on how businesses can better leverage advertising. To learn more about Eric and his work visit: http://www.nartakmediagroup.com/
In this episode, Marshal sits down to interview Andrew McGuier, the founder of Echo Gate Tech. They talk about technology, apps and software development, and what business owners should know before dipping their toes into any of those pools. To learn more about Andrew and his work, visit his website at echogatetech.com/
Despite its prevalence, the power and purpose of content marketing still perplex many business owners. They equate content marketing with blogging, and they just can’t see how blogging could help any business grow, let alone theirs.
Content marketing is far broader than blogging—though blogging is sometimes included—and the goal is to build and strengthen relationships between your brand and your target audience. The best way to do that will vary dramatically from brand to brand and audience to audience, but the core of content marketing comes down to leading and participating in conversations that are emotionally important to your audience.