Excel spreadsheets, handwritten notes, emailing yourself details about a customer's preferences . . . all of these are ways that we input and track information about our leads, prospects and customers. Then there's the encyclopedic knowledge you or your team members have stored in your heads that no one else has access to. But what happens if you or a point of contact in your company gets hit by the proverbial bus?

When we engage with a community entity for a branding or marketing initiative—whether it is a school district, a destination marketing organization, a city, an economic development organization or a regional collaboration—we often hear a lot of comparisons to cities like Madison, Wisconsin and Austin, Texas, among several others. 

These communities aren't necessarily looking to emulate the vibe or brand of these communities, but they certainly look to their success and ask "How do we get that?"

The answer, every time, is "Be yourself." 

I love drones.

One of the main reasons behind my obsession is the perspective they give. When you’re viewing something from 400ft or higher, you can’t help but feel a bit awestruck. Yes, a normal camera gives you a wide field of view, but a drone offers you a view that’s normally out of bounds for humans.

As the pilot of a drone, I can zoom around capturing video and photos from high in the sky. Buzzing around, I have complete control to capture gorgeous content from a bird’s eye view.

There’s nothing else like it.

It Never Felt So Good to Declutter

At the start of the year, soft-spoken lifestyle guru Marie Kondo swept the world off our feet by getting us to finally pick up a broom. In her Netflix series, Tidying Up, Kondo laid out the basis for her minimalist philosophy on household organization. The idea? Organize your house, get rid of your junk and a cleaner, less cluttered life will follow.

What are alt tags?

Alt text, or alt tags, are used to describe images on a website and their function on the page. Alt tags aren’t something you see when you normally view a website. They’re primarily used by screen readers for people who are blind or visually impaired, and by search engine crawlers that help identify and categorize images. 

Long gone are the days when you just slapped your message on a billboard and hoped the right people drove by. Companies and organizations now expect to be able to target a very defined and very specific audience with messaging tailored specifically for each audience segment.

Blogs are an important part of your long-term marketing plan. They keep customers moving through the funnel. They lend authority to your business. And they drive organic traffic to your site.

But when it comes to business blogging—specifically to a B2B crowd—one of the most common SEO strategies can be one of the most damaging to your readership.

Summary of this blog: you're writing too much. Keep it as brief as possible and then give them a link to more.

At the start of the new year, de Novo moved into our new office on the second floor of the Cherry Building—less than two months after signing the lease. The timeline was fast and the stakes were high. This is how we made it happen:

In the world of marketing, there's a cycle that happens with almost all brands that reach a certain size: as they expand, the CMO or C-level position decides that things are doing well and that they can put things on simmer.

It's not a bad strategy necessarily—especially in terms of (at least perceived) cost savings and the ability to pivot or refocus. But as brands, their offerings and their customer bases grow, they often need more marketing support to keep up with the constant churn of collateral, digital content, website updates, proposal writing, etc.