The Basics of Brand Positioning.

brand positioning

A brand is an amalgam of beliefs and concepts. These beliefs are most often formed by messages a brand delivers. That being said, positioning a brand becomes an easy to understand concept whereby  you identify who needs to hear what.  It becomes a matter of creating a message about your brand that people can relate to and by identifying what you need to tell them.  You can also create an overarching message about your brand – for example, Audi – Truth in Engineering.

To position a brand, you have to identify the stakeholders that make your business succeed. This overarching term is used to describe multiple niche groups including employees, investors, vendors, customers, government, regulators or media for example. Each of those stakeholder groups forms an opinion about your brand and is a link in the chain that forms your position and identity.You can shape that opinion by using targeted messaging. Carry those messages through taking advantage of social media, speaking engagements, hosting events, and publishing white papers; there are many ways to get your message delivered to your stakeholders.

Over time, as your brand matures, the perception of your brand in the mind of your target audience will become more consistent, building brand equity. This is crucial to running a business that people trust in the long term. All brands change their positioning as their needs change over time and as their business  evolves. Sometimes, when a brand has strong brand equity, they are forced by their publics to change their messaging and to evolve as a business. If you can’t evolve, you’ll lose your business entirely.

Take McDonald’s. Health freaks seek and find completely different messages about McDonald’s than the average person does who enjoys McDonald’s. Over the past few years, the health messages outweighed McDonald’s brand messages, through the organic food craze, Supersize Me, shows like the Biggest Loser and people like Jamie Oliver. They challenged McDonald’s to be transparent about their food making practices and to bring in healthier options. In turn, the franchise was forced to change its brand positioning to the point that it revamped their menu to allow healthy substitutions in kids meals, added a plethora of salad options, and started listing the nutritional values of all of their food on their in-store menus for all to see.

The Keys to the SEO Kingdom

SEO

There are many factors that matter when boosting SEO on your site, but as always, some are more important than others.

 

Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short is a term that encapsulates everything you need to do to improve your web site’s ranking position in the various search engines. This includes configuration settings you have to apply on the website (that’s on page SEO) and techniques you can use outside the boundaries of the website (that’s off page SEO).

Is on-page SEO more important than off-page SEO?

To achieve maximum exposure in the search engines and keep your users happy you need both off-page SEO and on-page SEO. In my opinion on page SEO is more important and I will explain below why.

1) ‘Speak’ the search engines language: It makes more sense to start with on-page SEO and get it right rather than trying to convince search engines to give you better ranking with off page SEO. Search engines are computer programs (software) and they understand a particular language. With SEO and especially on page SEO you ‘speak’ their language and your goal is to help them understand what you website is about. In other words the more signals you can give them, the more are your chances of achieving better rankings.

2) On Page SEO is about the user as well: Never forget that your primary target is to keep your users happy. Off Page SEO may bring traffic to the website but if it is not setup correctly, if it is not user friendly the results will be disappointing.

3) Many websites get it wrong: It’s amazing but it is true that the majority of websites today are not optimized for search engines. Despite the plethora of information about SEO many website owners believe that it does not worth to even do SEO and they quit before starting. For those cases on-page SEO has a lot to offer both in terms of usability but in terms of traffic as well.

4) On Page SEO is sometimes all you need: If you are running a website for a small business and you need to get local customers searching for various terms on Google then on page SEO is all you need to do.

5) Off page SEO comes after on page SEO: In order to start thinking on how you can promote your website you need to be sure that the website is optimized and in good condition. So the first step is to work with on-site SEO first and then go off-site.

5 on page SEO techniques for better rankings

Now that the theory about SEO and importance of on-page SEO is justified, let’s move on to the practical part.

There are many on page SEO techniques and not only 5, but for the purpose of this post I will explain below what I think are the absolute settings you have to apply on your website today.  I strongly suggest that you also read (links will open in a new window):

1. Content comes first

A website with brilliant content can do great with or without SEO, a website with bad content will not survive with or without SEO, a website with good content can become even better with SEO!

So, what is considered good content?

Original Content (articles, text, images, videos, presentations, infographics, comments etc.) – No copies or re-writes of existing articles

Content published on your website first – Even if it’s your own content, if you have already published it on another website then it’s not good for your site.

Content that includes text as well – Try to have text to accompany your non-text content. For example if you post videos on your website try to add a text description as well. If you add images try to describe in words what the image is all about.

Content that is useful – Don’t publish content for the sake of publishing. Before hitting the publish button make sure that what goes live adds value to your website.

Content that is well researched – Users don’t want to read quickly prepared posts and neither does search engines. If you are writing about a certain topic or answering a question make sure that what you write is justified and covers both sites of a story. Long articles are proven to rank better than short articles.

Posting frequency – 2 things are important when it comes to posting frequency. First is to have fresh content on your website and second to establish a publishing strategyand stick to it.

2. Page titles, description and formatting

This is SEO 101 but very important as well. When search engines are reading your pages among the things they check includes the page title, the description of the page, the major headings and images. They do so because they need to understand what the page is all about and then based on other factors as well (off page SEO, domain authority, competition etc.), they will place your page in a position in their index.

Page titles – Each page must have a unique title that will help both search engines and users understand what the page is about. A page with title “On Page SEO Tips” is better than a page with title “index.html”.

Descriptions – The page description is what the searcher will see in the search engine results page. So it has to be descriptive, up to 150 characters and unique for each page. It’s your opportunity to advertise your page and convince the searcher to click your link and visit your website rather than selecting one of the other links.

Formatting – A page needs to be properly formatted. Think of it like a report which needs to have a heading (h1) and sub headings (h2). Important parts of the report are highlighted with bold, underline or italics.

Do not just throw text on the page but make sure that it is readable as well. Besides the formatting practices explained above you also need to use a good size font (at least 12px) and split the text into small paragraphs (max 4-5 lines).

Images – Images are important but these should not increase the loading time of the website. Best practices for using images:

1) Use original images. If you need to use an existing image from the web you need to reference the source.

2) Optimise the size of the images – the smaller the size (in bytes) of the image the better. Use yahoo smush it to reduce the size of an image without sacrificing the quality.

3) Use ALT tag to describe the image – This helps search engines understand what the image is about.

4) Use descriptive filenames – Don’t just name your image ‘image1.jpg’ but try to use descriptive filenames, for example ‘Man doing push-ups’.

5) Use a Content Delivery Network – If you have a lot of images in a single page you can use a CDN service (from Amazon or Google) that will make your page load faster. In simple terms your images will be hosted and served by a number of servers and this speeds up the loading process.

You can also read my seo tips for beginners article for more examples of optimized titles and descriptions and for best practices about the use of images.

3. URL Structure

The URL structure is an important part of on-page SEO. Whenever I talk about URL structure, I prefer to split it into 4 major parts:

1) Permanent links – Permanent links are the URL’s of each page. Good URLs should be less than 255 characters and use hyphens to ‘-‘separate the different parts.

2) Categories – Group your pages into categories to help users and search engines find what they want faster. It’s like having a warehouse with lots of uncategorised items versus a warehouse with all the items assigned to a dedicated category. You can have sub-categories as well but my advice is not to go over one level. For example a good category structure is:

Reliablesoft > Social Media > Facebook and not Reliablesoft > Social Media > Facebook > Tips

3) Breadcrumb – A breadcrumb is also important for all your pages because it allows users to navigate your website in a structured way since they always know where they are and how deep below the home page.

4) User Sitemap – One of your options in the main menu should be the User Sitemap. This is an html file that represents the structure of your website.

4. Internal linking

Linking to pages within your website is very important for SEO because:

1) It’s like building your own web: If you watch the nice tutorial by Google on how search works, you will see that the first step a search engine spider will do is follow the links they find. So when they arrive at your page, if you don’t have any other links within the text they will read your page and go but if you have links pointing to other pages within your website they will take those into account as well.

2) It’s a way to let search engines know about your other pages: As explained above when search engines find a page with links, they will go and read those pages as well so you can use this technique to tell search engines about pages of your website they have not yet discovered.

3) It’s a way to tell search engines which are your most important pages: Every website has some pages that are more important than others. Internal linking is one of the ways to pin-point the most important pages by sending them more internal links.

4) It’s a way to increase time on site – A user that is reading your post is more likely to click on a link to read more about a certain subject and thus increase both the time spend on your website and the number of pages per visit.

Best practices for internal linking:

1) Don’t use keywords only for your internal links

2) Add internal links when they are useful for your reader

3) No more than 7-8 internal links per page (this is my opinion and not based on any research or studies)

4) If applicable you can also use ‘related posts’ at the end of each post for internal linking

5. Speed and authorship

Last but not least, 2 SEO techniques that are becoming more and more important especially after the release of penguin 2.0 (or 4.0 as some people like to say it): Speed and authorship.

Speed: Google is investing a huge amount of money to make the web faster. In every Google I/O someone will talk about the importance of speed and their desire to include the fastest websites in their index. In order to ‘force’ web site owners to take speed into account they have officially added speed as one of the ranking factors.

So, we know for sure that web site speed does matter when it comes to SEO and ranking. As a webmaster your job is to make sure that your website loads as fast as possible by taking into account Google’s recommendations.

Google authorship: Google is preparing for the next generation of Search and their effort is to rank higher webpages written by people who have authority on the particular subject. One of the ways to establish authority is by correlating the content you publish on the web with your Google+ profile. Then depending on how many followers you have and who follows you, your ranking may change.

Google authorship is still at its early stages but it’s gaining ground fast so you have to create a Google+ profile and bind the profile with your content.

The Beginners Guide to Email Marketing

1. Determine your goals -Before you can do anything with email marketing it’s important to distinguish why you’re doing it. Are you trying to increase sales? Build awareness? Nurture leads? Perhaps all three of these? . Figuring out the why before hand will help you tailor a custom strategy that will work towards your specific needs. For example, building a campaign with the objective of increasing sales will most likely involve a lifecycle campaign whereas building awareness and nurturing leads would lend it self more to weekly newsletters or updates about your business.

2. Realize that email marketing is MORE than just newsletters. Perhaps you determined that your goal is simply to keep in touch with already existing customers. That’s fine and well, but even so, email newsletters are just the tip of the iceberg, but it is a great start, so start there and move forward.

3. Start simple. Use an email template and a known newsletter provider. There are a multitude of email service providers and CRMs to choose from when you’re getting started with email marketing and most are very intuitive and simple to use. An added bonus of most of the top email newsletter tools is that have ready to use templates that you can simply plug your information into to get started. As you become more experienced with email marketing, you may get to the point where you’d like to start designing your own customized templates from scratch. This is all well and good but it’s important to realize that building in email HTML is much different from standard HTML because some email clients have limited CSS features. Besides these limiting factors, designing a template from scratch is time consuming so to begin with, just choose one of the many  email templates available and customize the heck out of it.

4. Determine the content your audience wants to hear about. Spend about 20 min – 1 hour spitting out all the ideas you can on what your audience wants to hear about. If you have trouble coming up with a decent number of ideas, don’t be afraid to ask your audience what they’d like to hear about via social media channels. Feedback is going to be key going forward as you pinpoint your email objective. Refine your list, put it on a content calendar, and get ready to send emails about it.

5. Choose a frequency. How often do you plan on contacting your subscribers? Daily, weekly, monthly, or only based on activity? While it’s always good to maintain contact, it can also be detrimental to your business if you contact your audience too often, often times becoming annoying and a bit of an nuisance. So, choose a lower frequency at first, maybe weekly, and then test using the data collected on open rates by your chosen email service provider, and optimize over time .

5. Collect email addresses using a tool from the following list. This could be a form on your site, a link to a landing page, pop-up plugin, survey tool, Facebook etc. Here’s a list of tools that will help you collect email addresses: List of Email Marketing Tools

6. Send and Optimize. This is where the real work begins. Where you’ll discover what works for you and what doesn’t. Thing of this stage as the AB testing phase. Try out different subject lines with the same content to see which gets more opens and responses. Try out different email timings throughout the day. Try sending emails with images or no images, etc. This is the step where your subscribers will tell you want they want in their inbox every week, month, etc. There are numerous other articles out there that will help you optimize your emails.

7. Continue to build your list – Not everyone is going to want to give you their email address right off the bat and that’s fine. List building is a huge part of the job in email marketing. There are tons of different ways to build a list and as you gain more experience you’ll figure out which methods work best for you. You’re going to be in the website traffic and email marketing list building stage for a while, so use that time to focus on what is and isn’t working. Blog posting and networking through social channels etc. will build the traffic that will build the list. You don’t need a large list to be super effective at email marketing so don’t get discouraged if you struggle to build a list at first.

8. Go out and do it. Now that we’ve covered the basics of email marketing the best way to get better is to go out there and do it and learn through immersion. Good luck!

The Simple Steps to Increasing Social Media Engagement

social media

Social Media: Fans, Friends, and Followers

Growing a following on social media is a major component of running a business. It’s a major source of interest that tends to lend towards lead conversion, so it’s important that you do it correctly or else risk being dead in the water. It can be an intimidating process, but that’s only if you look at it from the wrong perspective: treating it purely as a business tool. This follows the philosopher, Kant‘s, categorical imperative  which dictates that you should not treat people as a means to an end but rather as an end in themselves. Put more simply, in real life you do not try to make friends simply so that you may use them to satisfy some other need but that you try to make friends because you want them to be your friend. Social media is no different if you go about it the right way. Rather than approach it as a way to build your business your should approach it as a way to relate to others and give to them what you get back. That being said, here are a few tips that will ensure you are able to build successful social media channels going forward.

Win the first impression battle

What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform useful and worth their attention? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.

Be human

Humanize your brand. Realize that your brand is everything about you from what you tweet to how you respond to comments on Facebook. Don’t hide your employees. Let them shine and be a living, breathing representation of your brand. People don’t want to have a conversation with a cold corporate account.

Be patient yet persistent

You aren’t going to capture your community overnight or on the first day you launch any social media site. Building and launching an integrated online community takes time. Give yourself and your team the time to do it right. Have patience and persistence. Practice different methods of attracting new followers with A/B testing. Slow down, work hard, and do it right, and at the end of the game you’ll be the winner, guaranteed.

Teach them

What knowledge can you share with them that will make them smarter? How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best stuff, not just the same old same old you wrote two years ago that is over used and over sold, by everyone everywhere.

Connect emotionally

Make them feel. If you want to grab my attention on social media, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything. When I have a super busy day managing our clients’ account, and I am replying to posts I have no choice due to the amount of them and time constraints but to choose where and when I am going to respond. It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention. The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh, playing the emotional card. Take this example and flip the script. You should be the one grabbing attention by making people feel good, by making them laugh, etc.

Focus on relationships

The life of social media is people. People like you and me. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard. Offer value to the people in your community with a goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge so that those relationships become cemented and so that new connections are lured into wanting to start a relationship with you.

Inspire them

Inspire your communities to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. Inspire … Connect …Achieve. To do this you must know their objectives and goals. You must know them. When you know your audience then you can know how you can help them be better. How can you help them learn? How can you help them go faster? Work smarter? Be smarter? Share more valuable information with their colleagues, clients, partners and friends? Figure these answers out and use them to help.

 

Make it easy

People want to connect. They don’t want to be spammed at every opportunity. Give them an opportunity to engage with you, your brand, and your team and not the other way around. Be available. Open up your comment stream on your blog. Listen and be relevant and responsive.

Listen

The most important thing you can do to create a positive engagement is to listen carefully. Listen with a goal to understand. Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen, similar to real life. In summary, building a positive social media community engagement is very similar to making friends. Keep it simple and be genuine.

10 Lessons in Startup Marketing

 

marketing

 

So you started a business and you’ve got a product, but don’t know how to go about marketing it to your community? Let us help.

 

1. Marketing is about making people want you before they need you. The truth is, less than 1% of the population is in the market for what you probably sell right now. With the exception of paid search, reaching people who want what you sell right now is like playing the lottery. You’re just trying to get lucky. The right way to go about marketing is to start influencing people’s decisions long before they need to make them.

2. The best way to tell a great story is to be a great story. Creating a bar that revolves around being  a dog park is a more effective way to make people believe you’re a fun and dog-loving bar than merely telling people you allow dogs. Actions will always speak louder than words. When you make this actionable, you’ll appreciate just how much marketing influence you actually posses.

3. You’re probably talking people out of doing business with you. The main goal of any marketing endeavor is to get new customers through the proverbial door. But we can assume everyone, including already existing customers, that calls you, emails you or walks in your door is looking for a reason to do business with you. Keep old customers in mind when developing marketing strategies by generating incentive for them to return such as rewards programs while also looking ahead. Also, ask yourself the following questions: What is your closing rate? How can you improve it? This opportunity is neglected far too often.

4. Win the heart and the mind will follow. Decisions aren’t made in the left brain. With every decision you take, every judgement you make, there is a battle between intuition, logic, and emotional response.According to Simon Sinek, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”. You have to establish an emotional connection. Today, it’s all about Engagement Marketing. When people are shopping, who do they shop for? Themselves. Not for you, not for me. So you need to become their friend, and as a friend, you look out for their best interest. That  in and of itself is the basis of winning over the heart of a customer.

5. Get customer input. The endgame of any business endeavor is to to generate a profit and the only way to do this is to be a company that people want to give their hard earned cash to. So, what better way to become that company that to keep your ear to the ground and listen to what people are saying when they talk about your business? Granted, it won’t always be positive, and it might make you upset, but you should treat criticism as an opportunity for growth and fine tuning.

6. Don’t stop marketing once you’ve reach your sales goals. After someone makes a decision (either to buy from you or not) your agenda with them, technically, is stripped. What you do in these moments speaks significantly louder to people than what you do while trying to get a piece of their wallet. How about going above and beyond after the fact and creating an experience they can’t help but tell people about? “Hey, you’ll never believe what happened when __________.” This is easily accomplished through generating incentive through rewards programs, discounts, great customer service, and going above and beyond expectations.

7. Blog Blog Blog! It’s one of the easiest ways to be seen as an expert in your field and lets people know that there are real people behind your business who care about them, making it easier for people to relate and reciprocate. Creating your own content, no matter the medium allows you to control the conversation and free up new marketing channels.

8. Help people without asking for anything in return. This goes along with tip number 6. Going above and beyond and being altruistic is a quality that can never be overrated. Most people need to see you as a resource – someone who has something valuable to them before they choose to buy anything. You need to be the one who starts the conversation.

9. Fine tune where you need to be present. There are more types of marketing media out there than ever before and the field is only going to get more and more crowded. Jay Walker-Smith, President of advertising firm, Yankelovich, says, “we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970’s to as many as 5,000 a day,” today. Just because a marketing tool or opportunity exists doesn’t mean you need it. It’s better to have one quality marketing campaign that to have 30 average ones. Do research on your target market and fine tune your efforts and opportunities to reach those people instead of wasting resources trying to be everywhere at once.

10. If you’re taking shortcuts, you’re bound to fail. Becoming successful only comes with hard work unless you’re born with a golden spoon in your mouth. There are no shortcuts in marketing. The less effort you put into your outreach, the less likely it is to be innovative, the more likely it will come across as artificial, and the more likely it is to be ignored. Creating things that gain and hold attention is difficult. That’s why it requires so much work to get right.

My Moving Nightmare: Good Marketing. Bad Product.

MOVING ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE FUN, BUT IT’S EVEN LESS SO WHEN IT EXEMPLIFIES WHAT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN WITH MARKETING.

moving

Straight out of the gates let me tell you that this week’s  post is going to be more of a rant and reflection on some of the things I’ve talked about of the last three weeks rather that a post in its own right. Over the last 3 days I’ve lived out a nightmare that most people over the age of 21 might be familiar with: moving. Moving is never fun. Either you, A, have to pack everything up yourself and coerce/bride your friends to help you with pizza and booze, or B., have to spend upwards of $500 dollars to get a moving company to do it for you. Then, on top of all that, if you’ve been living in an apartment you have to make sure the place is spotless or risk losing your deposit. Over the last 7 years of my life I’ve moved 4 times, all of them terrible. The first three times, I went for option A, bribing my friends with a celebratory afterparty and feeling guilty the whole time. I thought that was bad enough. The final time, which was finally finished early this morning (THANK YOU SWEET BABY JESUS!) I foolishly went with option B, and I regret avery single second of it. Here’s why:

Let go back a few weeks in the blog to when I discussed paid, earned, and owned media, focussing specifically on earned.

Simply put, earned media accounts for brand exposure your company has receive through word-of-mouth. Whether it’s the content of your website or your social media channels, your customer service reputation or community influence, earned media refers to the recognition you receive as a result. This often comes in the form of mentions in the press, reviews  and recommendations on sites such as Yelp and Glassdoor, shares on social media sites, content you post in collaboration with other companies and more. Some of the benefits of earned media are that it’s the most credible (because it comes unsolicited from people not connected to your business), it’s transparent, and its long lasting. However, there are a few negative trade offs such as you not being in control of it. Take a look at the trainwreck that used to be Amy’s Bakery. Negative press killed that business (Not that it wasn’t deserved). Earned media is usually at the top of the funnel for lead conversion and is what gets people initially interested in your company.

After I signing the lease on my new apartment and letting the previous complex know I wouldn’t be renewing I began to take the steps necessary to ready myself for the move. The first step was seeking recommendations from both my current and previous complexes for moving companies who would pack and deliver everything in my apartment. Between the list of recommended from the two was a single shared preference for a company that I won’t bother listing, but long story short, I took the next logical step and did my own online research finding generally positive earned media across the board. Naturally, I decided I would use this company and made reservations, scheduling my itinerary for what would need to be done in terms of number of boxes needed, packing services, types of furniture to be moved, timeframe, etc. This was about a month ago. Fast forward to Monday morning, January 18, 2016 and entire the nightmare of a bad product not living up to the hype of good marketing and earned media. To start off with, I had prepared everything to be packed Sunday night and laid it all out in neat piles so that packing would be easier for the movers. I also called the moving company the morning of to confirm my order. My scheduled window for the movers to arrive and start packing was between 11:30AM and 2:30PM. Three hours is a ridiculous amount of time for an arrival window if you ask me, so imagine my frustration when the movers didn’t show up until 3:30 and casually brushed it off as if it was no big deal. Imagine my further frustration when they get up to my apartment and tell me that they didn’t know they would be packing all of my stuff as well as moving it. Granted, that last bit wasn’t their fault as we compared order tickets and they had clearly not been given the correct information on my order by whomever is responsible for delegating such things. From there things got worse. Because they didn’t know they were packing for me, they didn’t have boxes. Because they were an hour late “working another job that went over time,” they didn’t know if they had time to do mine because “the law prevents moving company employees from working more that 14 hours per day.” And because the universe usually finds a way to make things go from bad to worse, we had to wait an additional 30 minutes while the company manager slowly made his way to my apartment to inspect the situation and decide whether it could be done that day. Mind you, I had to be out by 4pm the next day when I had maids coming in to scrub the place down top to bottom. After it was decided that the job could be done, an additional 30 minutes passed while a second truck delivered the 40 boxes that I had originally requested. In that same time frame the cost of my move had to be recalculated from the original $550-$720 estimation to a new estimated range of $850-$1300 (JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE!). At this point I was too frustrated to care. I needed it to be done, so I grudgingly accepted my wallet’s fate 2 hours later. Would that that were the only hurdle along the way. In the 2 hours it took these guys to pack my stuff the tally of damaged items grew as follows: the legs of my antique dresser, a vase that a good friend of mine made specifically for me, 3 dishes, a wine glass (it’s supposed to be a set of four, not a set of three, you heathens), and my college diploma. Yep. you read that correctly. They dropped my framed diploma and the frame and glass broke in such a way that it ripped the actual paper. Lovely. So, now I have that to deal with. As if this weren’t bad enough, worse still was that I had to smile through it because I NEEDED it to be done ASAP. So, we get through this first bit and loading it all in the truck and it’s finally time to move it all to my storage unit (I’m couch surfing for 25 days while I wait for my new place to be readied. yay homelessness!). This part I can say went off without much of a hitch, probably because the movers were as tired of working as I was of watching after them to make sure no more of my stuff got damaged, and alas, 6 hours  and ~$1000 later, it was done and I was able to head to the nearest bar for a stiff drink. The lesson learned in my inebriated reflection? Something I talked about last week.

Marketing means nothing without a decent product. While the quality of his clothing line cannot be derived from simply watching DJ Khaled’s snapchat (which is why I bought a pair of his sandals. They’re super comfortable.), what cannot be argued is the vitality and success of his music. You can’t say you’re the best at something without having the proof to back it up and Khaled can do that. Over the last decade DJ Khaled has had anthem after anthem go platinum. These were all before he was on snapchat too. He is the living embodiment of what it means to have a top quality product before you can even start thinking of pitching it to the masses.

Let me repeat that for you. MARKETING MEANS NOTHING WITHOUT A DECENT PRODUCT! This company had everything going for them from a marketing standpoint: great online reviews on both Yelp and Google, top SEO results, fantastic word of mouth marketing from both my previous and current apartment complexes (I now feel like they get a cut for the referral), and seemingly good customer service…over the phone at least. So imagine the deep seeded disappointment I felt and continue to feel when the product/services I received failed to live up to everything that I had heard. This isn’t meant to smear the company in question, which is why I’ve refrained from naming them. Nor do I believe my experience is the standard at which they operate as is evidenced by the numerous positive reviews they have. It’s just meant to be an unfortunate anecdotal reflection on what i’ve been talking about over my last three posts.