Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

My YouTube Awakening – Five Things I’ve Learned So Far

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Every few years I have a head-smacking moment where I realize I've been missing a trick. A while back I admitted I was wrong to be a content marketing naysayer. Just this year I realized how I’d been missing the boat on YouTube. I’ve known about YouTube, of course. It saved my life teaching me how to fix my Samsung freezer’s ice maker (154,289 views!). My kids don’t really watch television anymore. Just about everything they view is on YouTube. But I never took it seriously as a tool for B2B … [Read more...]

Presenters – Please Tell Me a Story

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Two young lovers kill themselves because love is forbidden by their families. A captain is so obsessed with the hunt that he puts the lives of himself and his crew on the line. An orphan farm boy leaves home to fight an oppressive empire and discover who killed his family. You, no doubt, recognized the plots of Romeo and Juliet, Moby Dick and the original Star Wars.  These are classic stories that have withstood the test of time. We remember them because humans love stories. We love to … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: What is ‘Ducking’?

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With the rise of content marketing, more and more terms from broadcasting and publishing are finding their way into marketing conversations. We just launched a podcast at my current company, and during the production we found ourselves unequipped to give direction to our freelance audio engineer. Podcasts have a jargon all their own. Which is how we came to learn a new term, ducking. Ducking, in audio recording, is a technique that assures that the host's or guest's voice can be heard clearly … [Read more...]

How to Set the Pace for Your Marketing Team

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Marketing. A never-ending river of tasks. How do you make sure you get enough done without drowning your team? Or, to mix metaphors, burning them out. I’d like to introduce you, as a marketing leader, to the idea of pace, or what some people call tempo. I often hear these two terms bandied about while I’m watching Premier League soccer early on weekend mornings in my office (my way of procrastinating before I get down to writing). The idea is that the dominant team sets the tempo and thereby … [Read more...]

The Five Benefits of Curiosity in Marketing

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If you are reading this post, my guess is that you are a curious person. The kind of person who is inquisitive by nature. A life learner. I’ve written before about the traits that make up a good marketer. Curiosity was top of the list. And I’m not the only marketer who values the quality. Here’s what Seth Godin had to say: “If you are not curious, you are not going to learn.” I think learning is the point. It’s not just asking a lot of questions. That just makes you nosey. It’s seeking a … [Read more...]

Ten Marketing Terms You Need to Know

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Marketing lingo has broad and varied origins. The provenance of the terms on the list below spans astronomy, the Industrial Age, television and Yiddish. So, you’d be forgiven for not knowing them all. Then there are newer terms that have been created to describe concepts that have only just been developed. The explosion of martech makes it hard to keep up. Below are ten terms that I think are essential if you are a modern marketer: five old, and five new. Old Boilerplate A boilerplate … [Read more...]

The “Helper” Play: How to Take on a Large Incumbent in a Big Market

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I gave a talk a few months back at Products that Count, hosted at Airbnb in San Francisco. My talk was about adapting your marketing strategy based on the maturity of the market. The talk was well received, but it was my description of “the helper play” that drew the most attention. I don’t know who initially conceived the helper play, but I came to know if from a successful company in the cybersecurity market, Palo Alto Networks. The startup wanted in on the large firewall market. But in … [Read more...]

CMO Tip: Use Magazines to Define and Maintain Your Style

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Approachable. Friendly. Trustworthy. Fun without being snarky. Ever see direction like this in a style guide? I have. I’ve even written some of those words. The problem is that they are open to interpretation, and therefore not consistently effective. So, how can you communicate what you want to a wide and changing group of employees and vendors? Here’s an idea. Use one or two magazines to help build your style guide. Magazines are widely available, and more importantly, they are tangible. … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: What is a ‘Lower Third’?

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Originally from the television industry, but now applicable to all kinds of video, a "lower third" is the graphic overlay that is typically used to identify the speaker. It can be used to convey any kind of information to the viewer. The graphic appears at the bottom, to be the least obtrusive, and in what is known as the safe area - an area viewable by all television screens. There is no hard and fast rule that it must be one third of the screen, and it can be either a horizontal bar with … [Read more...]