Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

Four First Steps to Make Your Marketing Authentic

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Authenticity. Everyone wants it. Nobody wants anything inauthentic. Fake. Substitute. Artificial. Ersatz. Even though it's intuitive, too many marketers ignore this basic desire and put out advertisements and campaigns that come across as phony. Marketing needs to be authentic. Marketers need to understand that their customers want something real and deliver it to them in every way – in the product, in the promotion, and in their language. No customer wants to be sold. Or on the receiving end … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: What Is Greeking? And Why Is it Latin?

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Marketingspeak is my occasional series on interesting words I encounter in my day job in marketing. I do my best to channel the late great William Saphire, whose 'On Language' column brought a smile to my face many a Sunday. – TM Greeking is a typesetting technique where intentionally incomprehensible dummy text is used to test the layout of a document. Since the reader can’t understand the text, they focus on the layout, which is the point. Plus, the designer doesn’t have to wait for the … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: Butter Bars and Hamburgers

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Marketingspeak is my occasional series on interesting words I encounter in my day job in marketing. I do my best to channel the late great William Saphire, whose 'On Language' column brought a smile to my face many a Sunday. – TM In an occupation chock full of fluff, it was nice to encounter these two hearty web marketing terms. No empty calories here. This combo is a protein-packed marketing value meal. Butter bars are rectangular notifications that appear at the top of a web browser, … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak – What’s a Burn Pixel?

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I’d heard of pixels being fired, but never burned. The term burn pixel was a new one on me. To understand burn pixels, you first need to know about tracking pixels, which are single, transparent pixels placed on web pages. We all encounter tracking pixels while browsing, we just don’t see them. When a web page is downloaded, so is the invisible tracking pixel. That allows the marketer to track how many people visited the page. In digital adman parlance, tracking pixels are “set” or “added” to … [Read more...]

Demand Generation Through the Fisherman’s Eye: Three Ways Haul in Leads

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I was preparing recently to clearly explain to an executive the different marketing channels we use in demand generation. It can all get technical very quickly, and I didn't want to cause his eyes glaze over. I was trying to come up with an analogy I could use. I'm not sure why fishing came to mind. I was in the pool when the analogy popped into my head, but I don't fish empathy triggered the idea. The image of hooking a lead may have shaken loose in my skull. Or perhaps it was the memory of … [Read more...]