Spark Rocket in New York: Marketing planning NOW!
Spark Rocket Marketing’s new office location in New York — the MetLife building
Marketing budgets in the digital age
Marketing budgets in the digital era are a good news/bad news proposition. The good news is digital ads cost less. The bad news is, you have to stand out and to do so, you must make sure you budget for digital experiments & creative support
“I eat whole bags of Doritos on the couch” (aka., things “Big Data ” won’t tell you about your customers)
I eat whole bags of Doritos on the couch. Or at least I can. I mean, I don't do it every day. It's just an occasional thing. I mean I hardly ever do it. Really. Shhhhh...Don't. Tell. Anyone. Oh, crap. Now I've done it. Big Data has my human frailty in its clutches....
Mktng101: Public relations is more than party planning!
For today's Marketing 101 Monday -- we tackle public relations. Public relations is more than planning parties. Don't get us wrong -- we love a cocktail, a reason to dress up and an over-the-top theme as much as the next Vegas hotelier, but that's not the whole of...
Celebrate Starters! A get it started playlist
Start-up tech brands are ugly. Here’s why.
When we attend presentations and conferences in tech and high-tech communities, we are astounded by the lack of visual and verbal appeal of many tech brands. And often, tech brand campaigns: whether targeted to investors, partners or end-users, are similarly bland,...
No F*cks Left Friday: Stop Crowdsourcing Brand Development!
Stop using social media, friends and family to test and make decisions about your brand development. We mean it. PLEASE. JUST. STOP. Why? 99% of the time, your personal network is nothing like your customer profile. When it comes to brand development, if you're not...
Who are you? A brand-inspired playlist
Dog Days of Summer Playlist
We're road tripping to SUP-X 2018, so crank up the volume & make the miles fly by with our "dog days of summer" playlist! We hope to see you there!
Rocket-Fueled Playlist
We're leaving soon to road-trip to Tampa for the 2018 Florida Early Stage Angel Capital Conference in Tampa, FL. So we compiled a rocket-fueled playlist to get us there! Enjoy a little Elton, a little Sinatra, some Bowie, Bad Company and Katy Perry. Wait, Katy Perry?...
Mktng101 Monday: What is CSR?
There's nothing technologists love better than a TLA -- no? Well, even marketers are guilty of the occasional three-letter-acronym and the one that stumps people the most is CSR. So for Marketing 101 Mondays, we're going to tell you about CSR -- or, Corporate Social...
No F*cks Left Friday: Let’s talk about Facebook
Sigh. It's obligatory for an agency to talk about Facebook and how it relates to marketing these days, no? So here's our take. But, you might be surprised by what we think is most important about the Facebook controversy Do you REALLY need Facebook? At Spark Rocket...
Messaging: It matters more than the means!
So when we venture out to share the messaging about what we do with the B2B and tech communities we love, we are bombarded with questions about how we achieve marketing success for our clients. And inevitably, people jump to asking questions like: Do you do social?...
No F**cks left Friday: A marketing budget should ramp down, not up
We work with a lot of start-ups and early stage companies. It’s our specialty. We love to launch things – we love to create high impact campaigns from the first spark of an idea! And we even pride ourselves on being so creative that we know we make a huge impact with...
Start with effective marketing strategy
Every call we get for marketing services starts pretty much the same way. The caller says "I need a social media plan" or "Can you do SEO marketing?" or something similar. They ask us to perform a tactic. We get it. For example, if we called...
Building a rocket ship takes a lot of parts. So does your marketing.
We help our clients create strong marketing elevator pitches. But, paring down marketing services into a 30 second elevator speech is not necessarily the best -- or at least not the easiest -- idea. Oh, don’t get us wrong -- we have a number of elevator phrases our...
No F**ks Left Friday! High Tech Marketing Isn’t Geeky
Your high tech marketing isn't supposed to be geeky. "But of course it is," you cry. "If you don't tell them the specifications, details of the product and how hot this new technology is, you won't be able to get them to see what you've done is out of this world." We...
“Hey, how do you like my logo?”
“How do you like my new logo, is it good?” A friend to our firm “re-branding” his consulting firm asked us this today on LinkedIn. And in the simplest terms, we might have responded “looks nice, tighten up the font so the name of the company is easier to read and...
No F***s left Friday: Guerrilla doesn’t always mean “good”
We LOVE guerrilla marketing campaigns. We can't get enough of them. We build flash mobs, send out flying pigs, create dragon costumes, give away cute plush puppies... Our campaigns are fun, engaging, memorable, socially shareable and really stand out in an...
PR & Politics on No F***s Left Friday
In this highly charged U.S. political climate, we see many brands staying away from the PR & politics fray and many diving in. So the question becomes: in PR & politics, do you tie your brand to a political side or not. Is there an advantage to choosing...
TBT: Dancing hamsters – creative & tech DO mix!
We're at the Florida Venture Forum, and at yesterday's Women in Venture Capital event we were reminded how often technology companies forget that creative campaigns work! So with a nod to Throwback Thursdays, we wanted to share a story of how the unexpected brought...
ROCKET-FUELED READ: Online is nothing without offline
We believe that in B2B marketing, elements of offline marketing like corporate social responsibility, speaking engagements, events, promotional items and even old-fashioned direct mail give your online campaigns depth, soul & dimension. We call it integrated...
No F***s Left Friday: An unplanned post
We had a completely different post planned for today, but in light of the events of the past three days, we decided to take a different tactic. With a large part of our team based in Orlando, we've been through the wringer in the past month. And yet the...
ROCKET-FUELED READ OF THE WEEK!
We like the following post from Heidi Cohen. We're planning a future post to help technology business builders by providing our view on the differences between marketing, marketing communications and the many marketing sub-categories. We think it can be incredibly...
Corporate Social Responsibility
The Vision: LAUNCHPAD CHALLENGE: Maximize clients' CSR Efforts AXIS had long been a large sponsor of the security industry's Mission 500. Both corporate giving and employee support had increased year over year. For the fifth...