As the calendar flip races upon us, it’s time to once again check in on your marketing game plan. The ODEA-ites have rounded up their top tips as we all buckle up for what appears to be a wild ride in 2025. READ MORE >>
For one week, let’s tally up all the unsolicited emails and voicemails offering to help us sell our business or buy another. We could even turn it into a contest—think “guess the number of jellybeans in the jar,” but with unrequested pitches instead of jellybeans. Closest guess wins! With $796 billion US dollars worth of deals announced in the first quarter of 2024 (and forecasts showing the momentum to continue into 2025) thanks to Boomers and elder Gen X’ers stepping back, businesses are changing hands again after a slow 2023. Consolidation is touching every industry we know so, like us, READ MORE >>
At first, I was telling my team I thought professional services, such as marketing firms like us, would be transformed by AI but those of us 50+ could keep on (largely) as we were. It would take years for what we do to be taken over by the AI bots. The 20- and 30-somethings were the ones who needed to reinvent themselves. Or so I thought. Then ChatGPT came on the scene. Then Claude. And Gemini. And too many others to name. I slowly realized the transformation I originally thought would take at least a decade was happening in months, READ MORE >>
I read a recent Gartner report that proposed the new role for B2B sales teams was “sense-making”. Their research indicated 44% of millennials did not want to interact with a sales rep at any phase of their B2B buyer’s journey. That means B2B sales pros must reinvent their role. Gartner proposed their best way to service prospects was to make sense of all the content we marketers have been producing for years now. This is an interesting concept for sure. But shouldn’t we marketers be helping to make sense throughout the buyer’s journey as well? We already know B2B buying READ MORE >>
I know. We should have told you. You may not have even noticed. But we took a break during the second half of 2022 – from social, from blogging, from everything involved with our own marketing. Why? I can blame it on “busy”. I can say we concentrated on clients’ projects instead of our own. I can justify it as “research” on what happens when you stop marketing. And all that is true. But equally true is that we were short-staffed, still working out the kinks in our “new normal”, and more often than we liked, we were feeling drained, READ MORE >>
Sniff, sniff.. Is that Spring we smell?? (If you are in our neck of the woods don’t let those April snow showers fool you, Spring has indeed sprung!) Time to get out the marketing Swiffer and clean up some habits. Now is the perfect time to do a bit of marketing housekeeping. Here is ODEA’s spring cleaning to-do list for 2022: Commence Content Creation If 2022 is the year you pledged to overhaul your website or make that brand video you have been dreaming of, you need to get started NOW! Supply chain issues aren’t confined to hard goods. Web READ MORE >>
Why would a marketing firm become a member of a global non-profit whose vision is to maximize steel’s contribution to a sustainable society? Because it is the right thing to do. If you know us ODEA-ites, you know we love to geek out about industries others often consider dull, like steel. We are proud to say we’ve had a steel client, or a few, on our roster for as long as we’ve been in business. We also wholeheartedly support organizations that emphasize the importance of ESG (environment, social and governance) pillars, which we believe are the lens consumers now use READ MORE >>
In our last blog, we talked about how sometimes the clicks reported by LinkedIn, Facebook or other digital advertising platforms don’t always jive with what you see in Google Analytics. In this article, we are going to tell you about a nifty little tool – the UTM code – that will make it easier for you to track those ad clicks (and more!) through to your analytics. There’s a very good chance that you are interacting with UTM codes, and you don’t even realize it. Once you know what to look for you can spot them hiding in plain sight READ MORE >>
After weeks of hard work, you’re finally to the finish line. Your LinkedIn campaign is set and running. Now it’s time to sit back and watch that hard work pay off as your LinkedIn engagements increase and Google Analytics metrics climb. Break out the bonbons! But as you compare those LinkedIn clicks to Google Analytics sessions, things aren’t matching up. It’s a relatively small discrepancy, but it’s still a discrepancy that has left you scratching your head. The good news? It’s nothing to worry about. The even better news? We have an explanation for the mismatched analytics. It all comes READ MORE >>