Blog - plain talk

During the two years of the pandemic, we were forced to stay home and not travel. Business was anything but “business as usual.” Overnight, The B2B world had to grow new synapses to reach, educate, and sell to new and existing clients remotely. While phone and Zoom calls picked up much of the slack for B2B marketers, digital marketing was also forced to evolve significantly. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll outline the three biggest industry changes that will “stick,” how they affect your B2B digital marketing strategy, and what you need to do about them.

For many years brands, and not surprisingly, the advertising industry shared the opinion that it was between difficult and impossible to bring the services that a traditional marketing agency provides “in-house” to the client company. There was pretty good evidence that this was the third rail of advertising. Many large companies tried to build in-house agencies only to shut them down or struggle as the quality of their marketing mysteriously slumped. However, today there are some pretty compelling success stories for in-house agencies (IHAs). So, we thought rather than ignore this truth, we would have a closer look. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll help you examine what conditions might be necessary to succeed in in-house marketing. We’ll explore what you gain and lose and whether in-housing might be for you.

As marketers, we continue to seek an understanding of how our brands can consistently produce awesome search engine result page (SERP) rankings on Google. That’s a heavy lift without having some understanding of the engine that’s under the massive hood of the search hotrod that is Google. This edition of Plain Talk will share what you need to know about Google algorithm update history. Use this information to gain a meaningful understanding of Google search algorithms and how they impact your brand.

Influencer marketing is here to stay. Let me repeat this one more time for the people in the back. Influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere. We all probably thought that influencer marketing was a fad at one time. We saw social media influencers first start on Facebook promoting products, then came the thousands of long-form reviews and unboxing videos on YouTube, followed by the birth of Instagram, where a new group of influencers took flight. Most recently, TikTok arrived with its explosion of short-form videos that made the social influencer landscape an entirely different ballgame. In today’s Plain Talk, we will explore the world of social commerce and the role influencer marketing plays in “helping” us find our next purchase.

Community is a multifaceted word. There are hundreds of touchpoints where your firm can connect with and do good for your local communities. Every day the phone rings or something arrives in the mail with a new suggestion on how your firm can help and give back to your community. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll review the best way to approach corporate citizenship for law firms and how community engagement can help your firm grow.

Your brand is the aggregate of what you say it is and what regular people on the street, or probably more correctly, the internet, say it is. In fact, there has never been a time when consumers had more power over what a brand “means” than right now. Consumers scrutinize and comment on everything about a company and its brands these days. Beyond a product’s execution against its functional claims or qualities, everything from supply chain ethics to senior-management retreat activities to the diverse hiring practices of your company is public and affects your brand’s image. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll discuss your increased brand exposure and why brand honesty is more important than ever.

We’re on the phone, trying to check the weather, prepping for the workday, and getting kids off to school and all the while being hammered with ads on TV, the car radio, the cellphone and the laptop. And it’s not our imagination either. The latest statistics show that in addition to being over scheduled, the average adult is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements each day. Attention is a valuable commodity, and sometimes there isn’t enough to go around. In today’s Plain Talk, we’ll pay attention (get it?) to just how to catch attention in advertising and make sure your ads can break through.

It’s a question that we as consumers get asked several times a day: “Would you like to sign up for our rewards program?” In fact, it’s become a key part of the customer checkout experience. Rewards and loyalty programs have long been a way for companies to connect with their customers in a unique and engaging way while generating compelling reasons to buy more or more often. These types of programs have evolved over the years to address proposed customer needs and wants, but companies are now looking for ways to predict what their customers will want and/or expect next in this ever-evolving, immediate-satisfaction business world. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll noodle the current state and future of customer loyalty programs and how your business can adapt.

We learn about our world from the stories we read, hear, and watch, and historically, storytelling has been a foundational element in cultures across the globe. In marketing, it’s been scientifically shown to be extremely effective in helping people remember and engage with our brands; in some cases, it’s as much as 22 times more likely to remember. In today’s edition of Plain Talk, we’ll give the humble story its due and talk through the value of B2B storytelling in marketing, specifically to your customers.

While we are still having trouble unseeing the awkward “hero” chip bags in the Lay’s and Doritos ads, Frito-Lay brands nailed their diversity efforts. Sam’s Club, InBev’s AB brands, Unilever’s Hellman’s, GM, Vroom, and others did as well. Additionally, it was no shock to see the metaverse make a debut of sorts in big-dollar ads by Meta, Crypto.com (with Matt Damon), and Bud Light NEXT. However, it was what we heard that really got our attention in this year’s Super Bowl ads. In this special Super Bowl LVI edition of Plain Talk, we’ll foot-tap our way through our thoughts on the growth of music nostalgia in advertising. We’ll explore how it supercharged big game commercials and what this could mean for you.