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The goal of marketing is to win the hearts, minds and trust of people. If you win them over, you might win their business too. It has taken a lifetime of experiences to learn these timeless laws of marketing. Being the youngest of 11 kids, losing my Dad at 6, being raised primarily by women and becoming a bridge builder shaped my worldview towards human-centered marketing. I hope you find them beneficial. 1. The Law of Humanity Great brands always remember that prospects, customers, users, ambassadors and loyalists are real people, with real needs, wants, motivations and ambitions. They never forget that they are in the business of making the lives of their customers easier and helping them realize their ambitions. Be empathetic. Treat customers like human beings. Humanize your brand. 2.The Law of Findability If they can’t find you, they can’t buy you. If a prospect can’t find you on Google page 1, your product or service won’t be … Continue reading
Posted in: Elliance culture, Marketing, Marketing Strategy
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Today, more than any other touch point, a website is the digital soul of an organization. All roads lead to it. As one of Pittsburgh’s longest standing website design agencies, Elliance has been delivering prosperity with websites for regional, national and global clients for the past 30 years. Our arsenal of best practices includes: 1. Start with the Wise Strategy Revenue Strategy, Communication Strategy and Search Engine Ranking Strategy are the three building blocks of Website Strategy. Bake each of them into every stage of website development. 2. Make it Beautiful Strategy is invisible. Good design makes it visible. Milton Glaser, the iconic designer, once said “There are only three reactions to a piece of design: no, yes or WOW! Wow is one to aim for.” We couldn’t agree more. Create a beautiful website with contemporary aesthetics. And like retailers, refresh it periodically so if reflects the most current aesthetic. 3. Delight Prospects and Customers You can’t bore people into … Continue reading
Great marketers are a rare breed. They are shapeshifters who play ten crucial roles and gracefully switch between them: S T R A T E G I S T As strategic thinkers, they imagine new possibilities, combinations and offerings that don’t yet exist. They don’t confuse strategy with planning or tactics. They play to win. D I R E C T O R The daily work of a marketing leader is to orchestrate in-house and out-sourced talent in service of larger goals. They recognize, motivate and unleash talent…wherever they can find it. I N T E G R A T I V E T H I N K E R They understand that marketing is a highly interconnected, mutually reinforcing and complex ecosystem of paid, owned and earned media tactics – part digital and part traditional. They have the capacity and the desire to work through its complexities. E V A N G E L I S T They help … Continue reading
Posted in: Marketing, Marketing Strategy
This manifesto for effective enrollment management is a distillation of our key learnings from our team serving more than 100 colleges and universities in the last 25 years.
In the past 25 years, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with more than fifty college chief marketing officers. Whether they are recruited as a change agent or a strategic visionary, they are increasingly expected to liberate new growth for college by focusing on the 3 R’s of prosperity: Revenue, Reputation and Rankings. These three currents flow under the fifteen practices for managing and running a successful college marketing operations in this manifesto: 1. You become the story you choose to tell.It’s how institutions make meaning from the arc of their history, and operate with a sense of destiny to create purpose that propels them into the future. This story is what students, parents, donors, funders and partners buy into. A brand rarely exceeds the size of its ambition and the story it chooses to tell about itself. 2. Students, not the institution, are the real heroes of your story.The best colleges and universities realize that students, alumni and faculty … Continue reading
If a company’s culture is shaped by its leader, then here are my personal mantras that are shaping the culture of Elliance, a Pittsburgh digital marketing agency serving clients worldwide. 1. Follow the poetry of your soul. Just like a lotus flower, every person has an inner gift yearning to unfold. Feed your passions. Follow your intuitions. Trust the natural process of your soul slowly revealing itself. 2. Greatness doesn’t only belong to others. It’s our birthright too. In every project, produce something special that makes others wish they had created it. Greatness often comes from ideas in unrelated disciplines applied to your domain. Study greatness in other fields. 3. Do hard things. Do consequential things. Create mountains, not hills. Fear nothing. Do things that matter, that touch/change lives, and that make a meaningful difference. 4. Be a merchant of hope. The light of hope moves life forward towards our ambitions, destinies, and lifetime achievements. Hope makes us try harder … Continue reading
Posted in: Elliance culture
User experience design handles the strategic, narrative and structural design of digital experiences in service of persuasion, conversion and delight. There is a science and art of user experience design for marketing websites. Here is the list of best practices we have developed over the last 25 years: 1. Recognize that customers, not you, are the real hero of the story. Great brands help their best prospects realize their personal hero’s journey. Resist the temptation to talk too much about yourself. Stay focused on your prospects. 2. Put the needs of the right-fit prospects first. Begin your project by writing various use cases that capture the functional wants and psychological needs of your best prospects. To arrive at these, conduct primary research and review all secondary research you can find. Understand elements of brand value. Identify distinctive hooks that appeal to your prospects. 3. Sharpen your business strategy and your authentic brand position. Ask your senior team simple questions: “What … Continue reading
In our professional lives, we’re constantly in motion. We serve our clients by solving tough problems, meeting their needs through strategy and innovation, and often under shorter and shorter deadlines. Amidst all of that lies the research, experimentation, client collaboration, endless tweaking, and production – all leading to myriad deliverables that everyone can be very proud of. Intertwined in the demands of work life, is our life outside of work: our personal passions, our charities, our deepest held beliefs, and of course, our families. This is the life we lead – our visible, active life. And those of us, who haven chosen advertising and marketing as their life’s work, know it all too well. We thrive on it. After nearly 40 years, I still love what I do. But there is another, arguably more important, life – our invisible, contemplative life. It’s where our imagination lives and our creative thoughts are born. This life fuels our active life, and it does so expecting nothing from us … Continue reading
Since the day I walked into Elliance, a digital marketing agency, for a “meet and greet”, my preconceived idea of what life looked like inside “the business world” was shattered. Elliance was something I’d never expected – a place full of life and character and uniqueness. I have been working here now for roughly two months and walking through the door is just as exciting now as it was on day one. So I thought I’d give you the low down on three things that classify Elliance as a breed of its own, from the new kid’s perspective. Culture of respect In June, I returned from a trip where I had spent 11 months doing volunteer work with 45 other individuals. The way we orchestrated as a community was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. There was a mutual trust and respect for those you were working alongside each and every day. You did not doubt the abilities of those around … Continue reading
Posted in: digital marketing agency, Elliance culture