Inc. Magazine is on of the top publications that entrepreneurs and small business owners read. Over the years, I’ve been interviewed for stories on marketing and small business, topics.
Better Together: Tactile/Hard Copy and Digital Marketing
“With the online/offline marketing combo, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” said Jeremy Brandt, CEO of We Buy Houses®. “We leverage both online and offline marketing in a complementary manner to connect with customers.
“Pairing extensive television, direct mail and billboard advertising throughout the U.S. with online marketing forms a connection in prospects’ minds: “Often when a consumer sees a TV spot, the first thing they do is search online for information about the company. Digital ads ensure that we capture these searches and can direct them to the appropriate solution.
“Once a consumer engages with our website, digital retargeting enables our ads to ‘follow’ them around the Internet. Because we know they were already searching for our solution, these ads are high-impact and result in a significant conversion rate.
“And it works both ways: when someone goes online to sell their house and sees our ad, they are more likely to click if they’ve seen our TV spots, billboards or other offline marketing,” Jeremy continued. “By maintaining brand consistency across all channels, we grow the trust home sellers have in us. The more familiar our brand, the more likely they are to contact us to solve their problem.”
How to Manage a Crisis Before It Destroys Your Business
Focus on your niche. – “When housing prices started falling, our real estate investor clients were cutting every expense they could to stay in business. As a result, we lost 60 percent of our clients within a single year. To survive, we asked ourselves, ‘What is it that only we do, and what other markets could we serve with our expertise?’ The answer came in shifting our focus to the home owner. They still needed to sell fast, and if investors aren’t serving that need any longer, then their next best option would be to work with a real estate agent.”
4 Benefits of a Student Internship Program
“One unique way we’ve utilized interns to solve specific problems is to hire students from the local law school to help with trademark and copyright enforcement on the Internet. It’s expensive to have a law firm send minor notices, so we hire interns to do trademark research and send out simple notices letting people know they are infringing on our trademarks. This has been a very successful program, and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees over the years. The interns love it because they get to see how the law works in a real business, not just classroom theory.”
6 Things to Consider Before Jumping Into a New Partnership
“Most partnerships end, whether they fall apart or the business sells,” says Jeremy Brandt, founder and CEO of online cash home buyer WeBuyHouses.com. That’s why it’s important not to shy away from unpleasant conversations about the future — and the end — of a burgeoning partnership.
“Answer questions about how each partner would get out, buy the other out, handle a non-performing partner, deal with a death or a divorce, and handle one partner wanting to sell when the other doesn’t,” he says. “Write it all down in the partnership agreement.”
In Praise of Selflessness
This was a great article about servant based leadership and selflessness, both of which I think is very important for leaders to have. We helped put together a group of entrepreneurs for the story, and it was great to see Chris at Venturity, Rob at The Ward Group, and Ari at Zingerman’s featured.