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Content Marketing

How to Build a Marketing Fire

If you think of building a fire, what comes to mind? Likely, the first things you consider are the...

How to Use Livestreaming As An Audience Growth Tool

With the rise of on-demand services, today’s consumers have learned to want more from brands,...

What photography can teach us in the digital age

To create something new requires making a series of decisions. When you’re creating, all you are doing is deciding what to leave in or leave out. And it takes discipline to leave the right stuff out. That’s why I love photography. There is no purer constraint than a photo frame. Recently I met someone on […]

3 Content Marketing Trends Shaping 2016

Marketing using “content”—be it blogs, storytelling, visuals, or audio—is quickly becoming an industry-wide trend: roughly 70% of marketers surveyed in 2015 by the Content Marketing Institute reported having produced more content last year than the year before. Nearly 90% of the marketers surveyed said they were doing some type of content marketing overall, the Institute […]

3 Ideas about the Future of Blogging

For decades, blogs were the Internet’s currency—if you had one, you could command an audience, if you didn’t, gathering a digital following was much harder. Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Seth Godin, and the personalities behind Boing Boing used their digital platforms to launch online empires that engaged millions. But with the growth of social media […]

4 Articles on the Present and Future of Email

As we discussed last week in our podcast, our email accounts are likely to follow us around for the rest of our lives. We need an email address to sign up for online services, to access digital accounts, and, increasingly, to receive crucial mail that no longer arrives in paper form. All of this makes […]

Listen To: Mike Lichter on Writing for the Web

For this week’s podcast, I sat down with Matt Hansen to talk about my thoughts on writing for the web, expanding on my Q&A from last week. We chat about scanning versus reading on the web, how to structure information before it hits the Internet, and why old school writers still win when it comes […]

Are Snapchats More Memorable?

As we discussed on our podcast last week, Snapchat has an advantage over other social media networks, and it’s inherent to the product: “snaps”, as the ephemeral messages are known, disappear. Sure, technically you can capture an image of your smartphone screen to preserve a snap for posterity, but with the average Snapchat user receiving […]

Q&A: Mike Lichter on Writing for the Web

As a creative director and copywriter, I frequently work on projects that incorporate a web-first component. Whether it’s writing copy on a website or restructuring important content online, I share some of my best practices with Matt Hansen in this conversation. Q: What are some fundamentals companies should keep in mind when writing websites? A: […]

The Braggart’s Dilemma: Social Change and Where Brands Fit In

The reactions came quickly, and they were blunt: the company was suffering from a mid-life crisis, was a negative force in low-income urban communities, was patronizing, was elitist, was naive. And that was just day one of Starbucks’ “Race Together” campaign. The multinational coffee company waded into the national debate over race relations in America […]

How Social Media Has Transformed Political Campaigns

Politicians have always used their ability to connect with the public on a social and personal level as a campaigning tool. Now, with the rise of social media in the United States, politicians can communicate to the public on a larger scale with minimal effort. This is a dramatic shift in society that yields both […]

Listen To: Three Networks, Three Strategies

With more than half of American adults on Facebook alone, social networks have become big business. But so many mysteries remain for organizations and brands looking to share content, promote their business or simply engage with customers within these networks. What’s appropriate to post and when? How should organizations craft a particular strategy for each […]

Insight of the Week: Who Reads Your Content on Social Media?

Here at CMO Central, we analyze the impact of social media frequently— within industries, in the context of the week’s business news, and inside cutting-edge research. There are many worthwhile reasons to explore the way social media influences our habits and buying power, but ultimately it all comes down to the sheer scale of social […]

4 Articles to Read This Week on Social Media

We love it, we use it, we increasingly depend on it: social media has evolved beyond a way to effortlessly “check in” throughout the day into an often surface-deep exploration of our lives. This week, we compile some perspectives on the ubiquity of social media in our everyday interactions and ask whether it’s always a […]

Q&A: Mike Lichter on social media and the stories we tell

Each week we sit down with Cardwell Beach experts on marketing, sales and business strategy. This week, Matt Hansen interviewed me about my role as Creative Director at Cardwell Beach, about the ways social media is changing the way we communicate and about the current status of copywriting in marketing. Q: In your view, how […]

Insight of the Week: Ask Your Customer’s Advice

Facebook is often referred to as a “walled garden,” an enclosed ecosystem all to itself, where users are purposefully kept within its confines to maximize the amount of time they spend on-site. But within that garden, users talk about all kinds of things that take place in the outside world, including, of course, companies and […]

Your Blog is (also) a Sales Tool

Blogging is usually very clearly a marketing function, many times expected to drive traffic through SEO and being shared on social media. This stereotype makes it easy for sales-driven organizations to opt out of blogging. “We don’t care about SEO.” “Social media doesn’t drive leads for our business.” and of course… “We don’t have time […]

Creating Custom Sales Team Apps

You’ve likely seen good examples and bad examples of mobile or iPad applications used by sales reps to enhance the consultative selling experience. How do you create your own? You’ll want to start with a rock-solid buyer insight. In short, you want to identify an unmet emotional need and find a way to tie that […]