Who is More Useful to Your Business? A CMO or a CRO?

I think I can safely say that you don’t go into business to lose money… unless you intentionally do so for a tax write-off. Yet making money is not as easy as it’s often characterized. It takes a great idea mixed with execution. It takes hard work mixed with luck. And, it takes money mixed…

Look Over There? How to Turn Distraction into Disruption

I have had multiple people ask me about using AI in marketing. They had this perception that I would show them how it works so they could replace my services with this marketing Golden Ticket that has a psychological or hypnotical effect to magically convert the internet to an ATM. I would be happy to…

Seconds… Chance Interactions

If you manage your own or other business websites, I imagine you are using Google Analytics or another data manager to explore the traffic to your website. The beauty of using Google Analytics is that you have a baseline to judge your traffic against other similar websites. I know this because I manage over 100…

Could You Improve a Customer’s Journey with Artificial Intelligence Marketing?

Last week, I made a mistake. I grabbed a soda out of a cooler, and it was a Diet Pepsi. I’m living in Pepsi Country. Pepsi was founded in nearby New Bern, North Carolina. But I gave up diet drinks a while ago because I don’t like the taste of artificial sweeteners. Artificial is generally…

Making An Argument For Better Marketing

Is your marketing working for or against you? In any case, you are the judge. I recently took a college course on The Art of Debate. It was with a Wake Forest professor named Dr. Jarrod Atchinson. It contains over 24 half-hour lectures and digs deep into the history, purpose, and strategy of debate. In…

Making Connections… Where are the Wires?

CONNECTIONS I grew up with wires, LOTS OF WIRES. Being a musician and an audio-video and computer geek, I still have bins filled with wires. Audio cables with RCA, XLR, TRS, TOSLINK, MIDI, and banana clip connectors. Video cables with BNC, VGA, DVI, S-VIDEO, and HDMI connectors. Computer cables with SCSI, Ethernet, USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire,…

I Lost It All… And Why I’m Happy About It!

Have you ever watched the movie “A Christmas Story”? There is a scene where Ralphie is helping his dad change a tire for the first time. He was holding the lug nuts in the hubcap, and his dad’s hand hits the hubcap, sending the hardware flying through the air, glistening in the lights of the…

Tag… You’re In! Segmenting Secrets

I have been listening to an audiobook by music producer Rick Rueben called The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rick is a little eclectic but highly prolific. He discusses how inspiration is found, cultivated, and acted upon to create art. Art is not just music to him. It is anything that we as humans make.…

How Can A Junk Drawer Help You Build A Healthy Business?

We all have one. Some of us have multiple. You may even have one in every room of your house. It’s the junk drawer. True Story: I was looking for a piece of wood in my garage to prop up my desk for a project. It was not until I took and posted the image…

Your CPA Wants to Know Your CPA

Mistakes… They are only bad if you don’t learn from them. Now, there are different levels of bad. You can put the wrong creamer in your coffee bad, or the Three Mile Island, nuke the east coast of the United States bad. But if you live to tell about it, you can always learn something…