A lot of small businesses realize that marketing is essential to their business, but many often don’t have the time and experience to put together a formal marketing plan.

Here’s a template for a 2-page marketing plan that provides a clear framework to help focus your marketing efforts.

If you’ve already read classics on brand and marketing strategy like Blue Ocean Strategy, Positioning: The Battle for your Mind or the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, here are some of additional books that will help you do a deeper dive on the subject and provide some enhanced insights

If you’ve ever had a “creative block” trying to come up with a new marketing idea, here are some simple exercises to get you unstuck.

Here are some questions you should ask to determine if a media opportunity really makes sense for your business.

All strategies are made up of these 5 basic parts.

One of the keys to developing effective marketing is to create communications that speak specifically to your customers. The more relevant it is to their unique viewpoints, needs, challenges, goals and life experience, the more likely they'll believe your message.

We used to focus all of our energy on trying to develop ads that would communicate a singular message about our core value proposition in an intriguing and compelling way. If we could do that, people would buy.

Any economist will tell you that scarcity can increase demand for the product and typically the price. We want what we can’t have. The fact that we can’t have something for some reason makes us want it more.

The Bayes’ theorem is a statistical model that describes the probability of an event, based on conditions that might be related to the event.

Strategy is defined by the obstacles we must overcome. If you have a goal you haven’t accomplished yet, there must be something stopping you from it, even if it’s just laziness. Use this exercise to outline each obstacle individually and identify ways to address them.