Substance and Style

    Category: Uncategorized

    • Effective Positioning Strategies for the Digital Age

      In marketing, positioning refers to the way people perceive your brand, company, or organization compared to your competition. In the past, companies could set themselves apart with price, quality, customer service, and expertise, all of which are still important elements in a positioning strategy. The marketing landscape has changed drastically over the last few years.…

    • 7 Ways to Improve Your Email ROI

      In spite of the many messages we all scroll past or delete every day, email marketing is not going anywhere. In fact, according to Constant Contact, email remains popular because its ROI is pretty high. They state that you can expect an average return of $36 for every $1 you spend. If you’re not quite…

    • Case Studies for Nonprofits

      With one of the highest conversion rates of any type of content, Case Studies are the gold standard of content marketing. Because they provide social proof from the peers of potential customers, they are seen as inherently more trustworthy than other marketing endeavors. They’re almost always a good idea in business, especially in the B2B…

    • Ten Ways to Create Better Presentations

      Keep your purpose in mind. Training colleagues on a new policy, teaching students geometry, and pitching an idea to a client all require a different approach. Your design should reflect your goal. You wouldn’t present 40 slides of text with no visuals to land a design gig, and you wouldn’t present a deck of nothing…

    • What to Share and Not Share on Social Media

      Social media has completely changed the landscape of marketing. Almost everyone uses it because it’s free and the audience is huge. However, if you’re just starting out, it can be overwhelming. If you post whatever you feel all the time on every channel, you won’t meet your marketing goals and you might post things that…

    • Five Ways Get and Hold Attention in Your Marketing Videos

      Go for the gut with your first impression. You’ll appeal to hearts and minds with your content; use impactful design to grab immediate attention. You can do this with high contrast colors, catchy music, symbols, animation, and imagery. Use colors and thematic elements that are associated with your brand or with things you’d like to…

    • Effective Content for Every Stage of Your Social Media Marketing Funnel

      We hear a lot about the stages of a social media marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, advocacy), but very little about what specific types of content we should be providing for each stage. Done properly, each stage will end with a question that, when answered, will move your customers to the next stage. Here…

    • Six Free and Easy Ways to Make Your WordPress Site More Secure

      If you don’t have a lot of traffic or sales going through your website, you might think it’s safe from attack. However, the motivations for hacking are many: installing malware, taking advantage of your search rankings to slip links or ads onto your pages, taking advantage of your good reputation to send spam from your…

    • Elevate Your Elevator Pitch

      Whether you own a business, run a nonprofit, or work in marketing, you likely need an elevator pitch. We’ve all been to meetings where everyone goes around the room and talks for 30 seconds about their work. The problem is that many of us spend most of the time thinking about what we’re going to…

    • Three Non-Fundraising Fundraising Activities for Your Board

      While some nonprofits have engaged Boards that regularly bring in revenue, there are far more that don’t do any fundraising at all. This can be a problem when it comes to finding new grants; many foundations will not even consider funding organizations that don’t have 100% Board contributions. With only slightly over half of nonprofits…