January 9, 2020

How a DMO can Sell Greatly by programming or influencing a first time visitor’s destination experience to maximize the value for both the visitor and the destination marketing organization.

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March 5, 2019

As I embark on yet another Fat Tuesday, I can’t help but flashback a decade (yes, it’s been 10 years since I first invited you to experience Mardi Gras via my Tweetstream) and marvel at the power of Social Media to build brand perception. Back then, my little experiment was novel (no one had ever

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December 27, 2018

Everyone loves digital advertising for its tracking capability vs traditional advertising. It’s easier to prove digital marketing ROI vs traditional advertising because digital makes the invisible buyer visible. But is this focus on clicks causing you to miss conversions? Let’s talk about that today. You Can’t Sell To Invisible Buyers In our zeal to prove

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December 20, 2017

We all want the Google Juice. We’ve been told it’s the silver bullet to inbound marketing success. But we’re wrong. The only way to truly Google Proof your website, and your online marketing efforts, is Propinquity. Today we’ll talk about why propinquity marketing is a better long-term strategy vs the classic Google/Inbound strategy for most

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November 28, 2017

Do you struggle with connecting your sponsorship sales leads and attendee leads lists? Leveraging people on each to help you create qualified sales prospects for the other? If so, this post is for you. A friend of mine produces large conferences and she struggles with leveraging the folks on each list, whose colleagues present sales

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July 21, 2016

Travel planning is entirely different today than say even 10 years ago. Today’s travelers are invisible prospects to you and your marketing team, often until after they’ve made their vacation destination selection. Combine that with a consumer whose needs are more complex, stresses more numerous and media choices that have literally exploded over the last

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January 7, 2016

What if I told you I could create a 161% change in consumer perception by simply changing the background of a headshot photo? Would you believe me? Would you believe that something so small could cause such a massive improvement in your consumer marketing programs? And not just any perception, a meaningful one — the

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December 2, 2015

I was reading an interesting statistic this morning that “almost 69% of online shopping carts that contain at least one item are later abandoned, according to the Baymard Institute, an e-commerce consultancy based in Copenhagen which analyzed 31 studies over the past few years. That is up about three percentage points from 2012, says Christian

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February 17, 2015

Mardi Gras has, and continues to be, one of the most well known, interesting and misunderstood free festivals in the world. An enormous content marketing and digital marketing opportunity for brands — think brand activation, content creation, brand awareness, social media opportunities and good old fashioned sales incentives trips — Mardi Gras offers it all.

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February 11, 2015

Recently the super smart Jeff Rohrs of ExactTarget/Salesforce wrote a great post about the lack of CTA’s (Call to Action) in Super Bowl ads. You can read it here. In it, Jeff makes the argument that Super Bowl advertisers that fail to place a mobile friendly CTA in their ads are guilty of “marketing malpractice”

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November 5, 2014

Everything you once knew about marketing and sales prospecting is wrong. Or at the very least, social selling is quickly rendering it obsolete. Once upon a time, companies treated information about their product as sacred. After all, information is power. The traditionally held belief was that a company’s marketing efforts should force prospective customers to call and

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March 12, 2014

Do you give presentations for living? Do you make sales calls, deliver conference presentations, or even just make internal presentations to your boss or peers. What do you do with these presentation decks after you deliver the presentation?  If you’re like 95% of the people I know, you file them away on a hard drive

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August 9, 2011

If there is one thing that binds all marketers together, it’s lack of enough marketing budget to properly fund all of your marketing efforts to create an optimum marketing mix. This is especially true for brands and destinations engaged in international marketing. Over the last few years I’ve experimented with combining brands and social media

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December 20, 2010

Is your social media program fully integrated with your traditional marketing program, or are you just bolting on “Follow me on Twitter/Facebook” to your ads and fooling yourself?The Integration QuestionIf you’re running a truly integrated program, congrats. You’re among the elite. Like the Marines, you’re part of the few, the proud, the enlightened. But for

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March 2, 2010

I’ve always felt like Marketing was like legalized gambling. but with all the new challenges, technologies and such, it seems one of the greatest challenges folks are having in today’s expanded marketing environment (digital, social media, traditional advertising) is understanding how to gamble their precious marketing dollars in ways that favor them and not “the

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May 14, 2009

I find the biggest mistake folks make with a new marketing effort is the failure to plan. To do the necessary strategy grunge work before they start the flashy, cool ideation/creative work. But you have to do the grunge if you want to have a basis for truly insightful, powerful marketing campaigns. The goal is

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