Marketing Strategy

Some of the best marketing doesn’t look like marketing at all. Teaching free classes, volunteering, donating to silent auctions and having coffee without counting the RoI all build the kind of trust that turns into referrals, sometimes years later. Here’s why networking works better when you stop treating every conversation like the start of a sales funnel.

Most small businesses don’t struggle because of a bad product. They struggle because people can’t find them, don’t understand them or aren’t nudged to act. We break growth down to three pieces (a website that converts, visibility where it counts and consistent messaging) and show how each one supports the others.

Some weeks at a marketing agency feel more like running a fire station. This short post lists one real week of surprise jobs, from recovering a lost non-profit Instagram account to reviving a website knocked out by outdated plugins, and none of it was on the calendar when Monday started.

The Valentine’s post goes up the day before, and the back-to-school sale launches after school has started. Sound familiar? Published mid-summer on purpose, this post explains calendar holidays versus seasonal rhythms like ski or tax season, how to build a seasonal marketing calendar, and why disappearing in your slow season means reintroducing yourself every year.

You’ve seen the “Sponsored” results on Google and the ads from strangers in your Facebook feed. Here are the basics of Google Ads, social media ads, display, retargeting and video ads, when paying for visibility makes sense for a small business, and what paid ads can’t fix on their own.

A member of the Wild Iris team lost his mother just weeks before Mother’s Day, and the holiday marketing didn’t stop. Three emails did feel different. DoorDash, Ancestry and Nespresso each offered a simple opt-out. Here’s what those emails got right and how your business can market around emotional holidays without forgetting who is on your list.

You expect your accountant to tell you when the numbers don’t add up. Your marketing agency should too. Here’s why a good one will push back on a brand color that hurts readability, an SEO plan that casts too wide a net or a timeline that isn’t realistic, and why that honesty is what you hired them for.

A hotel bar served coffee in the morning and cocktails after 2PM, and turned away every guest who wanted one with the other, even though both sat on the same counter. That’s a common business gap. Here’s how listening to client requests led Wild Iris to add content writing, and how a local realtor built a downsizing service.

Your agency sent the invoice and the content is showing up. But who actually built your website, and who (or what) is writing your social posts? Here are four plain questions to ask about outsourced web work, AI-written content and recycled material, so you know you’re getting the work you paid for.

Who owns your domain, your Google Analytics and Ads accounts, your email list, even your phone number? If the answer isn’t you, changing agencies can leave you starting over. This post shows how businesses give up ownership without realizing it and what a healthy chain of ownership looks like.