Marketing with Stories Blog

Guidelines for Using Employee Photos for Marketing
You know a stock photo when you see one, don’t you? Authentic photos of a business and its people are much more effective at nurturing trust and building relationships with potential job candidates and prospects than a generic stock photo. Getting great employee photos, however, takes a lot more effort than just browsing through a library of stock images, and you need to take care to make sure that using real photos of your people will be a good experience for employees and that you’re not violating privacy concerns.

Consulting Services Make It Easier to Be a Marketing Department of One
Courtney Casey is the Director of Marketing for Accent Computer Solutions, now VC3 after being acquired in 2022. Being responsible for marketing in an extremely competitive industry means that Courtney has a very comprehensive marketing strategy and is active in multiple channels, from content development, advertising and email marketing to customer communications, sales enablement and networking.

First Steps to Take to Promote Your Customer Success Story
You just published a client success story on your website. As you look at the text on the web page, you recall all the effort that went into the piece. It’s not always easy to get people to open up, but not only did you get a unique angle with which to describe the outcome of your work, you also got some great insights about your client’s experience that you can take to your team. Now is no time to sit back and bask in your client’s glowing words. It’s time to get to work to promote your success story.

What is Recruitment Marketing?
We’re getting quite predictable, you and me. We use our consumer behaviors to shop for just about anything, be it a new dishwasher for our home, a software tool for work, or even our next job opportunity. Don’t believe me? Answer these questions. What do you do first when you need to buy a product or service? You go to the internet to research the problem that you need to solve, and you learn about the options available to solve it.

Lori Creighton Certified in Recruitment Marketing
Lori Creighton has earned Recruitment Marketing Certification through the Smashfly* Transform Academy. The certification is recognized by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Professionals) and the HR Certification Institute as eligible for continuing education credits for HR professionals. Recruitment marketing is the use of marketing tactics to achieve recruiting goals. It’s considered an emerging discipline within the field of HR but it requires a very different skillset.

How Buyer Personas Help You Fish in the Right Lake
Imagine for a moment that you went to a lake, launched your boat, and started to fish without knowing if the body of water was an environment where fish could thrive. Your results will be hit or miss. You could be super lucky and get a bite with every cast. You could go through the whole day without a single nibble. Maybe you have a bit of success and you bring in a few fish in return for the investment of your time, your equipment and the energy you expended to plan your day and get there.

Three Scenarios Where Hiring a Marketing Consultant Makes a Ton of Sense
Can I assume that you’re outsourcing some services that your business needs right now? It could be accounting, IT support, or maybe HR and hiring. Perhaps your company provides one of these outsourced services for other businesses. Outsourcing makes a whole lot of sense when you want to bring in expertise that you don’t have internally.

Jobs Theory for Marketing: Simple But Not Easy
I was recently introduced to “Jobs Theory” and decided to learn more about it so I have started reading the book, “Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice” by Clayton Christensen. Before I even finished the book, I liked how the author distilled the purpose of business down to a very basic level. Of course, I have applied it to the work that I do as a marketing professional and here’s my insight: marketing does the job of developing and sustaining relationships.

Resonance - The Simple and Profound Reason We Need to Be Storytellers
Something a client said at a meeting recently has been mulling around in my head. What she said was a great compliment, although I don’t think she realized it. She validated that my work with their organization is not just to help them with marketing, but it’s also to change the way they think about who they are trying to reach by getting into their story. Here’s what she said. “I keep hearing your words in my head, Lori. Why are we doing this?”

The Single Most Important Ingredient in Your Success Story
What's the single most important ingredient in your success story? I won’t keep you in suspense, but first-- what it isn’t. The single most important ingredient in your success story isn’t success. It’s distress. Surprisingly enough, when you leave out the struggle that led to your success, you really have no story at all.

Do You Know How to Find Your Stories?
I know why you haven’t started using a storytelling approach to your marketing and communications. You’ve been hearing about it everywhere – from your industry organization, in your social media feed, at training events. You’re sold on its power to connect, persuade and motivate people. You just haven’t taken that first step. Here’s why. You don’t know how to find the stories you need to tell.

Storytelling Isn't Just For Telling Stories
Storytelling for business isn’t anything new. It’s been an on-again, off-again buzzword for a long time. At face value, the word “storytelling” seems a little fluffy and certainly, everything that is being called a story is not a story. The reality is that companies that have embraced a storytelling approach to communications are finding benefits in all areas of their business, not just marketing. They have found that storytelling isn’t just for telling stories.