virginiareuter.com

In the last couple months I have worked with clients to name 4 different companies. I helped name 10 or 12 before that, including my own (Firefly Creative), but I’ve never been completely happy with any of them. Some of them have gone on to be pretty popular, and people have said they liked them. […]

Your e-mail list is your most valuable tactical tool in your marketing kit. It’s your direct connection with customers. It’s where you’ll find your raving fans. It’s full of people who want to hear from you. So take this rough piece of coal and polish it into a diamond, so when you connect with your […]

You can probably guess why I love the Super Bowl, even though I don’t watch professional sports during the season: the ads. I love getting blown away by some wildly creative ad: one that takes advantage of the limited time, that makes you smile or say “Wow,” that make you want to know more about […]

When I moved from bustling Boston to the California wine country in 2001, there was a period of adjustment. It took 5 months of teeth gnashing and hair-tearing before I accepted the fact that print jobs would take longer (a lot longer), nobody had the latest technology (PDFs? Never heard of ’em!), and there was […]

My business counselor reminded me that proposals do not close a sale. And yet I spend a lot of time on each one. I thought I was being so precise in case someone came back and accused me of not doing what I’d promised. But, in 20 years of writing hundreds of proposals, no one […]

Wineries with a robust online marketing strategy… 1) ARE THEIR OWN BEST MEDIA. How do you get people talking about your wine? Answer: incorporate online social networking into your traditional public relations strategy. This feeds the emotional connection customers have to your brand. 2) TALK DIRECTLY TO A HUGE AUDIENCE. Approximately 64 million people in […]

Get an RSS feed reader. I think I’ve walked 14 people through subscribing to an RSS feed in the last six months. It’s not hard—in fact, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication— it’s just not intuitive. But once you have a feed reader, it will diminish that hyperventilating some people do when they think about […]

Here’s the best thing about these 5 tactics of your online marketing plan: you are probably already doing some of them. The second best thing is that they are fun, at least for a geek like me. So enter each one of the numbered items below in your “to do” list, and then, when you […]