Avi Hein

If you owned a store and no one came to the store, you would worry. You wouldn’t say, “Well, I did my job. I opened up my store. There’s even merchandise here and a semi-functioning cash register. Someone who really wants to buy can.” If that was the case, you would wonder what was wrong. Perhaps you would invest in a promotional campaign: maybe take out an advertisement, contact local media to try to get a story, give a sales

I’ve touched before on the importance of strategic planning before: decide what you want to do before you decide what services or tactics you want to implement. One of my colleagues, The Cline Group’s Josh Cline (Disclaimer: I’m a past director at TCG and currently sit on the firm’s advisory board), also wrote about this on his company’s blog. Josh wrote: So, what is the big problem? Companies today are forgetting the traditional holistic approach to marketing strategy. They are

Is your email newsletter readable on a mobile device? Mobile email is not an option today but a must.

What are the best time and worst time to send emails? Are you testing your best times? If not, you may not be seeing effective results.

Frequently, when planning marketing campaigns or discussing how to market a brand or product, there’s a demand for creative ideas. The first stage of many people’s planning is looking for creative ways to “promote” their campaign. But, frequently, what they are missing isn’t creativity but rather a working strategy: What’s the strategy? Who is the audience? Usually there are multiple audience stakeholders What’s the core messaging (values/benefits for each target market) Are you positioned in the right market? Are you

Strategy must embrace the entire sales funnel: from branding and positioning and defining market position to determining the best tactical approaches to bring a lead into the sales funnel and nurture them until the sale is closed and they are a brand evangelist, creating more leads for you. This is not a one time approach. Strategists – frequently outside consultants – tend to come in and build a positioning. But, without the knowledge of time to implement, the strategy sounds

In my last post, I wrote about how marketers need to understand technology and web and software/hardware development. But do developers also need to speak the language of business and marketers? Developers need to understand marketing, to understand that the needs of the users who will be using their product, understand their personalities, and understand the needs of those who are actually buying the product. Particularly in a business-to-business environment, the person signing the check is usually not the person

Being called a computer geek before I ever worked professionally, I am sometimes shocked by the clashes between web and software and hardware developers, and marketing. In my mind, they both need to work together in order for the company to achieve its goals. I assumed developers understood the need for a clear message, and, like me, I thought marketers loved technology and computing. In this first post, I will discuss why marketers need to be technically literate and understand

The world has changed. Digital is the new platform. The entire Internet and digital platforms are social. Social media is not the responsibility of one person — all media is now social. Social media is not about technology. It’s about the people.