This afternoon we heard from PR 20/20 CEO Paul Roetzer. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a pretty heady subject, so I want to start with two disclaimers: The content of this talk and this blog are meant to be more high level – what’s happening with AI, where it’s trending, and how it’s being integrated into marketing and sales. AI is still in the early adoption stage. Even though we’ve been watching sci-fi movies with AI for years, most of that AI has not been created yet. We’re still in the…

This morning we heard from HubSpot’s Director of Marketing, Rachel Leister. A pint-sized powerhouse, Rachel is full of incredible insights and information. In this presentation, she’s talking about how to grow and manage your growth marketing team. In her talk, she shares the keys to running a successful marketing experiment. As marketers, we know that part of growing is testing and optimizing our content, landing pages, copy, emails, and pretty much anything else our audience interacts with so we can improve conversions at each point of the marketing funnel. Rachel…

You’re talking. Your colleagues are talking. Your boss talks. Your sales team talks. The new guy is definitely talking. It’s happening face-to-face. Online. In email. On your website. On social media. In press statements. And wherever you think anyone might be listening. When you’re not talking in real-time, you’re automating all of the talking. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a guide for what to say? Or if you were confident everybody talking was saying the same thing? You can be. You just need a messaging framework to make…

With hundreds, maybe thousands, of marketing softwares out there, and equally as many articles touting the benefits of each, how are you supposed to choose the right marketing software for your needs? First of all, let’s start off with:  what is a MarTech stack? A MarTech stack is essentially all of the tools and softwares you’re using for your marketing. This can include your CRM, your automation platform, email marketing, social media, and just about any other tool you use when marketing your business. While we, of course, have our…

Online reputation management (ORM) is about monitoring and improving how your business is viewed online. It means looking and analyzing what a potential customer, reporter, or partner will discover about your brand, your people, or your product/service when they perform a Google search. Before they ever land on your website or pick up the phone to call you — what will they find when they look for you? And will they like it? Said simpler: Is your online presence working for or against you? This is the idea behind online…

We like to think that there are phases to SEO. Phase 1 is an often overlooked but critical component of SEO: technical SEO. This is not on-page or off-page, but almost “in-page”, including a lot of sitemaps, source code, crawling, indexing, mobile load times, and more. The purpose of this phase is to make sure that Google can find your pages, crawl them, render them quickly, and render them as a mobile device would. Other things like site architecture and scripts can also be meaningful in this phase of technical…

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Digital Marketing/E-Commerce MBA students from the College of St Rose about marketing and design. Professor Braathe asked me to prepare an assignment for the students to tackle. With the oversaturation of tweets, blog posts, and podcast about how to market to millennials, I thought it might be fun to flip the script and have them research and write up the top 10 ways to reach GenX in today’s media climate. Below you’ll find the students thoughts and insights on reaching GenX. 10…

So you’re considering hiring a marketing agency, but you’re not sure what to look for or how to make sure you’re picking the RIGHT agency. You’ve come to the right place. As a marketing professional who not only works at an agency (so I understand the ins and outs), but who has also done corporate and small business marketing and hired agencies (both good and bad), I’m here to help you save yourself the time, money, and headache of picking the wrong agency. We’ll take it step by step: Selecting…

PRSA Boston puts together a Social Media Summit every Spring that provides actionable insights for Social Media Strategists and Public Relations professionals. This year, I was lucky enough to attend and learn from folks who are encountering the joys and challenges of working in the ever-changing world of social media. This year’s theme, Breaking Barriers, is particularly apt, as algorithms continue to change, privacy concerns rule the conversation, and the toxicity of some channels lead us to consider how best to use the different platforms that are available. Read on…

2017 was a great year for our agency. We strengthened our leadership with the appointment of a COO and CMO We signed exciting new clients, in a variety of industries and verticals (and have become obsessed with them) We wrote, designed and produced award-winning creative that was engaging, purposeful, and downright beautiful We helped our clients grow their businesses and see great success We hosted amazing events like TEDxAlbany in our liveroom We received a visit from Tri-City ValleyCat’s Southpaw We were named a Best Place to Work to work…