Gray Matter at White Space

I subscribe to a daily inspirational email newsletter, which doesn’t always spark me as so much “inspirational” but rather a bit preachy. However, from time-to-time, the creator (Jerry Del Colliano) gets me into a light-bulb state of mind. One recent topic was, “People Want to Buy, Not Be Sold.” The writer prefaced his quick snippet of wisdom with the following:

That’s true not only of merchandise and services, but ideas and concepts.

If you have a great idea for your team, spend much of your effort into getting them to buy it from you rather than have you sell it to them. If you have a daughter or son who could benefit from your wisdom, don’t push it, get them to buy it from you.

Sometimes content marketers and their writers get lucky. A client who has diverse blog content needs is a near-ideal situation, particularly if the topic matter is fresh, new, and ever-changing. I specify blog content, because the downside to this situation would be spending exorbitant amounts of money to continually produce other assets, like brochures, ebooks, one-pagers, and the like.

I’m forced to prioritize daily—and many times throughout the day. My daily routine actually starts the night before when I put my workout clothes next to my bed (wishful thinking!). If I make the girls shower at night, that’s 10 or 15 extra minutes the next morning… so, let’s do that.

Once they’re on the bus to school, there’s no more hiding from the beastly inbox of things waiting to be addressed. Sometimes that’s not so simple to determine what comes first. The same applies to business and marketing. You know certain pieces of strategy are more pressing than others, but how do you select, definitively, the order in which they rank?

When asked how I define my role at White Space, I like to say that I take Ilene and Adrianne’s good thinking and strategic planning and bring it to life with our team’s tactical execution. Admittedly, I’m not particularly patient. I’ve been on mind-numbing internal phone calls where these two were debating if something was a strategy or a goal.

As badly as I want to get to the tactics, wading through the strategic process is an important step. Plotting out marketing scenarios in the beginning makes for better, more actionable decisions in the future.

When you hit a plateau—in business or life—it can mess with your motivation. Oftentimes, it’s even more frustrating than hitting a “wall,” because that would mean there is a clear obstacle in your way and there are defined ways to get around it. With a plateau, there may not be a clear hurdle to get over or anything glaringly negative in terms of performance results. It may just be… boring.

Of course, this happens all the time in business, and many times marketing is leaned on to shoulder the burden and get out of the rut. A campaign levels off, then starts to become ineffective. Budget cuts can create a challenge and often require creativity. Senior leadership isn’t interested in what you have to say, making it easier to stay placated and say, “I guess this is fine…”

It’s anything but fine.

OMG 2019. That is just way too close to 2020. It means my kids have crossed over into adulthood. Lou and I will be married 25 years, we’ve lived in our “new” house for 12 years.

In 2018, one of the strategies we implemented focused on expanding our blog presence. Part of that approach included getting more of our team members involved, contributing to the conversation with their own areas of expertise. What resulted was a diverse representation of our team’s experience and knowledge.

Here are the 10 blogs from this past year that received the most readership.

 I love a charcuterie board- those little piles of nuts and seeds, clusters of grapes and cheese cubes, and tiny jars of fig or kumquat jam. Olives, savory spreads, and spicy salamis line up like gleaming soldiers. And, the brilliant orange dried apricots, although often left uneaten, add just the right pop of color. The pistachios mingle with the raisins and the olives run into the crackers. Everything is served up on a flat wooden board, showcasing these beautiful edibles that complement each other.

It’s the end of the year and my annual “unsubscribe from emails” project is underway. I put on some holiday music, make myself a pot of spicy hot cocoa, and sit at my laptop to remove myself from email lists that are no longer relevant to me. The results are often mixed—a better, more pertinent inbox for me, peppered with frustration over the various poor unsubscribe experiences I have to slog through to complete this simple task.

When I was visiting my sister and her family over the Thanksgiving holiday, we got into a conversation about customer service based on an instance where my two nephews were attempting to order at Panda Express. The key word here is “attempting.”