Marketing Strategy: What You Need to Know Before Spending One Cent

If you’ve been feeling like your marketing dollars are being wasted and not delivering on what you had hoped…you’re probably not wrong, and you’re definitely not alone. Small businesses have a notoriously difficult time making sound decisions with their marketing budgets without expert guidance. A survey of small businesses last year found that at least …

The Giving Approach to Community Engagement

In an age where the public has become inundated with mass marketing and ever more distrustful of corporate greed, businesses and brands today face an ongoing challenge: How to earn the trust of their community. Achieving this trust won’t happen with mere lip service—people today are naturally skeptical, and they can spot phoniness and ulterior …

Marketing to Gen Z and Gen X—The Major Differences

One of the biggest differentiators in how people respond to messaging is age—or, more to the point, the generational culture in which they grew up. We hear terms like “Gen X” and Gen Z” tossed around often in market-speak, but many people are confused as to what these terms mean or how they can affect …

5 Strategies to Understanding Your Target Customer

[vc_row margin_bottom=”0″][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1585245872816{margin-bottom: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;}”][vc_column_text]When developing a brand or marketing a product or service, identifying your target community is only the first part of the process. Now you need to learn the target customer and what makes them tick—their needs, desires, fears, motivations, and so on—so you can begin to understand how your …

2017 LA Small Business Academy

You know when you sign up for something and aren’t sure what you’re getting yourself into? That’s what I did when I applied to participate in the 2017 LA Small Business Academy at USC. In it’s fifth year, the Academy is sponsored by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), Los Angeles World Airport …