The Idea Farm's Blog

  If you are a professor or graduate student, you know more about your field of study than most of the writers giving written sermons on opinion pages, Quora pages, Sub-Redditt’s, Twitter feeds, and possibly bookshelves right now. Your research and education informs your point of view. You know what you’re writing about — but commentators might know better how to write for a general audience. This means that the voices who have the most to contribute to public discourse are often getting drowned out. If this is something you struggle with, here are some writing tips to reach a broader audience: Don’t approach your introduction like it’s the warm-up before you get to the good stuff. Approach it like your only chance to attract your reader into your thoughts. Your lead is your opportunity to engage your reader: You’re conveying that your words are worth the reader’s effort. If you have writer’s block, look at the opening paragraphs of a practiced columnist, someone like Maureen Dowd ...

  Implementing integrated marketing strategies and delivering measurable results is the essence of comprehensive marketing solutions for businesses across all industries. Due to budgets, specializations, and trust concerns, finding a marketing agency is challenging for many companies. Agencies help businesses develop marketing strategies that capture leads and engage them through advertising. Instead of focusing on the low-hanging fruit and quick fixes, an agency provides long-term strategies and results-driven initiatives and campaigns. A marketing agency or firm can help with the following 5 bedrocks of marketing strategy 1. Uncover Solutions to your current business challenges and market environment. 2. Identify Goals of your main marketing objectives and sets specific, quantifiable goals. 3. Create Strategies that are within your budget, customizing plans to assist you with reaching goals. 4. Generate Campaigns and executes them to attain the short-term and long-term goals ...

Foremost Insurance, founded in 1952, has evolved from its agents selling coverage face-to-face in lots packed with RVs and mobile homes to an independent agent network of 161,000 fueled by social media platforms. Jeff Bair, head of independent agent marketing and national accounts-independent agent distribution for Foremost Insurance, discussed this evolution during an Insurance Marketing & Communications Association webinar with AM Best TV. What are the biggest challenges for insurance marketing? “One of the challenges we face in insurance marketing is probably consistent with what a lot of marketers face. That’s breaking through the clutter of existing communications. One of the concepts we use is C cubed. (With) each element, each C is symbiotic. They add to the strength of each other one when you’re deploying all three together. It would be for your marketing to be clear, concise and creative. The second challenge of the two is tied to the first one. That’s creating content th...

Nothing is what happens when you go through the motions instead of utilizing social media to advance the goals of your product or organization. Below are the most essential actions and the most common mistakes organizations make. 1. Do Make a Social Media Plan. You need to decide first what you’ll post (both words and images), how often to schedule your posts, what “brand voice” and “brand design or look” you’ll use and who’ll keep your profiles up to date. 2. Don’t Let your accounts fall by the wayside . The fundamental sin of social media is not keeping to a routine schedule of updates. 3. Do broadcast and Do not chat . Your presence on social media is about conversation and visibility. If you’re blasting messages into either the wrong venue or target, you’re missing the benefits of engagement. 4. Do respond quickly . One recent survey showed that a third of customers who contacted businesses through social channels expected a response within half an hour, regardless of the hour. 5. ...