positioning Archives

The ultimate guide to planning and presenting an engaging webinar

Thanks to the advances in technology, the rise of digital marketing, and recent world events, webinars have grown in popularity as people have looked for ways to engage more online. It's likely you've been invited to more webinars in the last 18 months than in your entire career combined. The number of online meeting tools that have popped up - and the Zoom share price - alone is evidence enough of just how big this tactic has become. Webinars are a hidden goldmine of potential for you to meaningfully connect and engage with your audience, prime READ MORE ›

By Alice Antonov|Tactics|

A Leaders guide to crossing the chasm post-Covid

Back in 2016, I wrote and shared an article that looked at how you should consider market maturity as an input to setting effective go-to-market strategy. The article was originally triggered by a conversation with the owner of a prospect (later a customer of align.me) Justin Annesley the Managing Director of local printing company Inkifingus. Justin was struggling with accelerating his SME print business revenue during a period where traditional printers like his needed to transition from long-run print to shorter run, digitally enabled solutions. Many of his traditional buyers were moving away from him to lower READ MORE ›

By Brett Bonser|Strategy|

Being authentically useful with your content marketing

As a company, we're pretty successful sales and marketing specialists (if I do say so myself). As part of our everyday offering we: plan the sales and marketing for many large and small companies globally contribute to a part of the marketing for a handful of large companies - also globally do (almost all of) the marketing for around 50 smaller Australian businesses. But at the same time, our own marketing often suffers. We don't have enough time, worry that we don't have enough worthy ideas, and sometimes struggle with a consistent brand voice. We work super READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

The absolute basic sales & marketing must-do’s for DIY B2B digital marketing

In a perfect world, businesses across Australia would have access to the means to perform high-quality, efficient B2B digital marketing practices regularly. However, if this last year is anything to go by, for many finances are tight and extra time is non-existent. This means business leaders are faced with the tough choice of where to invest their resources. The reality is that many small B2B businesses can't afford outsourced marketing functions - or professional in-house teams - due to low revenue and the need to be cautious with expenditure. For these businesses, many are moving towards undertaking READ MORE ›

By Callum Youla|Tactics|

What can we learn about sales and marketing from legendary sportsman Captain Blood?

For those of you who know me beyond my business pursuits, you will know that – like 100,000 other Australians – one of my passions is Australian Rules Football (to my American friends: no, this is not rugby) and one club in particular: The mighty Tigers – the Richmond football club. In our history, we’ve produced many great champions but probably the greatest of all is the legendary Captain Blood himself, Jack Dyer. Dyer was renowned for being one of the toughest men ever to play the game. Why Captain Blood, you ask? Well, I answer you READ MORE ›

By Brett Bonser|Sales|

Why you should fix your brand credibility before your visibility [video]

We marketers spend a lot of time making our brands visible. Before you do that though, make sure your brand is credible before you make it visible. Here are 4 ways to increase your brand credibility. What your brand stands for is important, but it's not important if you're not being considered. You need first to be in the considered set of companies or brands like yours, or as I like to say, 'positioned in the category'. In plain English, what people think about you doesn't matter if they're not thinking about you. We absolutely need to READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy, Tactics|

B2B marketing and the Black Swan [video]

I've just been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan. It is a fantastic book with some really important lessons for marketers. Essentially, a Black Swan is a rare, unpredictable and big impact event. Despite this, we try to retrospectively fit justification to explain why it occurred. If your forecasts are less than 100% accurate, then there are some great lessons in today's show. https://www.youtube.com/embed/qtmJMdgz7Cc What he said: Let me give you the theory of The Black Swan. Taleb makes appropriate apologies to West Australians, my fellow countrymen, about Black Swans, because over there they're READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy, Tactics|

Sales and marketing blogs [video]

Indexes of thousands marketing blogs are great for SEO. Make really sticky content. Today we're going to review five of those indexes and explain how, and why, the sites have created those indexes of thousands of marketing blogs. Let's start with I've concluded and then I'll explain why I've concluded that. Number one: find the best blogs that you personally enjoy reading. There's no point creating content that you're not personally interested in. That's inauthentic. Secondly, though edit that list with your audience in mind. Third, summarize the content and link fully. Don't steal copy. You're just READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales, Skills, Strategy, Tactics|

How do you sell to the C-Suite? You don’t

It’s a question that comes up a lot, and sometimes we even ask ourselves: How should you approach the c-suite? How do you get the attention and time of that elusive senior person who you need to get onside early and who, ultimately, can approve your deal? Often, the answer is: you don’t. And you shouldn’t. Let me show you why. Before we sell, we solve – so who is having the problem? Often the person who can approve the deal is not the person who actually has the problem that the deal is going to READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to position your brand in the category

We get this wrong all the time. Businesses seek "brand awareness" in order to position their brand prominently in a given category. Unfortunately, while this is all fine and dandy in theory, it is inevitably followed by salespeople complaining about the marketing departments feeble attempt at positioning the qualities of their products and services relative to competitors. Getting your image right sounds like the over-riding priority, but the issue for many businesses is having their brand considered by buyers at all.. In this blog, Hugh helps us think about positioning a little differently, and suggest two approaches and eight tactics we READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy, Tactics|

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