Marketing Strategy

A short spring Tuesday Tip from March 2019: let your digital marketing blossom this season, and look around you for fresh ideas to try. This post is a one-line seasonal nudge to refresh your marketing, not a full article.

Drop a pebble in a still pond and the ripples fade as they spread. This short 2018 post uses that picture to explain marketing reach. The people closest to you see your message first, and reaching further takes either a bigger rock (more budget) or a smarter way of throwing it.

In 1628 the Swedish warship Vasa sank just shy of a kilometer and a half into its first voyage, reportedly after its design kept changing mid-build. This 2018 post uses the Vasa to explain scope creep, and why new ideas belong on a list for the next round instead of in the project already underway.

This post is a short Facebook video from the May 2018 Tuesday Two Minute Tip series. Its message fits in four words: find what inspires you. The post itself holds only the link to the video, so the full tip lives in the video.

Written for the start of 2018, this post turns a vague goal like reaching more people into something you can track. It lays out three steps: set a concrete number, decide how you’ll measure it, and know when you’ll switch to Plan B. It also suggests letting a marketer work on your business while you work in it.

A mid-sized service business had used the same advertising for years and was ready to grow. Wild Iris modernized its website, freshened its logo, added weekly tips on social media and ran targeted ads. The response rate came in three times higher than average, and the company cut its advertising costs nearly in half.

Weeks of tweaking our own new website taught us the lesson we give clients: at some point, you release it. This 2017 post shares a client who launched before every edit was done and got great feedback, and it introduced the then-new AlphaPixel Reach website (the company’s name before Wild Iris Marketing).

Wild Iris founder Mindy Hanson traces the winding road that led her to marketing: student teaching in special education, work at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, event catering, and running sales and marketing for a three-person software company. It ends with how she works with small businesses and non-profits, including plans with itemized pricing.

Budgets are limited, and one person can’t do everything well. You call a CPA about new tax laws and an IT person when your computer crashes, so why hand your social media, website and newsletters to a teenager just because they’re good at Snapchat? This 2017 post makes the case for delegating outreach to someone who does it every day.

The cobbler’s children have no shoes, and for a while our own blog sat untouched while we wrote articles and blogs for clients. This short 2017 note marked the return of our blog, with a promise of useful information and fresh perspectives to come.