• Read more about You Are What You Link

You often hear the term, “you are what you eat” - It’s cliche, yet an accurate statement. The principle ideology for this term is that your overall health is determined by your eating habits. In simpler words, the better you eat, the better you feel. This same concept can be said to be true in the sphere of online marketing. Bottom line, the richer the content you use on your platforms, the healthier your brand is but the only draw back: you must know your audience in order to capture what content they are specifically looking for.

Let’s pretend websites, online marketing channels and social media platforms are your “body”, and the content that you put online is the “food”. What am I talking about? Your brand! Each platform serves a similar purpose; to connect and convey a message. The value of strong, unique and consistent content is a must. If you mock others, choose content that doesn’t reflect your brand, or don’t care much in devising and developing a well put together platform… well, it’s like you just ate 4 Big Macs, 13 Kit-Kats and a dozen donuts. It's unhealthy to eat those things right? Well it's just as unhealthy to have a lack of knowledge about your audience and the content you are posting.

Buzzwords can get thrown around such as “digital branding” and “digital footprint”, few understand what these mean, and fewer know the value. I’m here to explain the importance of why your digital brand must be taken care of so that your brand succeeds online.

Vanilla or Voluptuous?

Some people like cookie cutter online techniques, websites and social profiles. Others just want to stand out. In order to produce the results you want, you must understand your brand and your audience. It is imperative to recognize that the process of developing a brand is a much larger, and can often seem like an on-going task that is never-ending. It stretches beyond social media, web development or even dumping money into Pay Per Click ads, you must DIG!

Having a website, marketing strategy, and social media channels is a great start but it's just the beginning. I have a few simple guidelines: You must be passionate about your brand, you must have clear goals that link back to your company, you must understand who your target market and audience is. After these steps are completed you can then create a strategy across your different platforms to best plan how you want to convey your message. Having rich content can influence your brand as well as your reputation, remember, branding gives meaning to why we do what we do.

Data is everything

Any follower, friend, foe, potential date, or client will want to know everything about you before they meet you. Where do they start? Google of course. And for some, Bing. Whichever search channel they choose to use, they will more than likely find you (hopefully). So what does your company portray? Are you really great at what you do? Why? Does your presence showcase this? These are just a few of many questions you need to internally ask yourself in order to develop a marketing strategy that works for your brand. Do not create content just because you think it might work…

It’s not a race, or a marathon… It’s a lifelong commitment.

If you have a unique combination of experiences, and characteristics that create the foundation for determining your niche you are on the right path for success. To be successful in the digital space, it behooves you to choose an area of expertise that you can engage with overtime. Over the course of your business and life you become more intimate with your work and the world around you. The process of branding is always evolving and fluid, so you must be proactive versus reactive to your brand presence. I suggest consistently connecting with the world around you.

Now the question is how will you make your mark? How will you serve your audience? How will you stand out? Have you asked your peers for feedback on your digital presence? Make your impact today.

• Read more about Why Weird Marketing Works

How do you get noticed when money is tight and the bigwig is who you’re after?

By talking to them in big bold letters. Add a fuchsia backdrop, plaster it on a board, throw in a few GIFS, and put it in the center of NYC---directly across from their window. That’s how!

Last Monday, Intridea launched our first billboard experiment; talking to a hopeful client through the art of bright banners and GIFS. It's unlike anything we've done before and completely out of the norm, but sometimes that's what it's all about...

As entrepreneurs, we have to get creative to stand out these days. Marketing is crazy competitive and long gone are the days of mere emailing, phone calls, and Google search.

So what’s a young business to do? Get weird, that's what.

If you want someone’s attention, reach out to them in any way possible. Don’t be timid and don’t second guess yourself. Market in an unconventional way and you’ll get unconventional (and more often than not) - positive responses. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.

Uber | Kittens + Cupcakes

Uber is great. Add kittens and cupcakes to the mix and you’ve just made a friend for life. On National Cat Day, Uber went out of their way to celebrate their feline loving fans. On this day, NYC, San Fran, and Seattle Uber users could “request a kitten” and enjoy a cupcake --- all because Uber said so! Talk about odd, out-of-the-box, and interesting.

Airbnb | Hollywood + Vines

Back in 2013, after a series of renter mishaps, Airbnb turned its focus to user experience. With their campaign, titled Hollywood & Vines, Airbnb created a four minute short film utilizing six second Vine videos from users all over the world. It was an uncommon route, but excellent platform for partnering with Airbnb users and capturing their adventurous spirits.

Ben & Jerry’s | Tweet for Ice Cream

I love B&J’s CORE ice cream campaign. Traveling around the US and setting up shop in various cities, BJ is giving out free ice cream to anyone who tweets them. Its awesome, fun, and super convenient for their lovely fans. Plus not only is it free, but they hand deliver them to your specific location - talk about customer loyalty!

Don’t get wrapped up in the details. Go out there and do something crazy; it's the only way to succeed as an entrepreneur. Too much thinking wastes too much valuable time.

Drops mic.

Keep the conversation going! We'd love to hear from you.

• Read more about When Programmers Need Marketers

If you’re a programmer these words might make you feel unwell. To an outsider it seems like the Marketing crowd dresses themselves with esoteric buzzwords in order to mystify and confuse the rest of us. But to be fair, most (real) marketing professionals are creative and brilliant problem-solvers and avant-garde engineers within their own culture — just like most programmers. It’s best not to mark and avoid the otherworldy marketers, though it might be tempting. Whether or not we understand their language and their seemingly mystical approach — we need them.

In just under four years at Intridea we’ve grown organically from a small 3-person startup with a great idea to a full-fledged, profitable company of nearly fifty employees. Most of us work remotely, and we are spread out across the United States and even across the world in a few cases. There are certain aspects of this operation that we have mastered over the years: we know how to hire brilliant engineers and designers; we know how to deliver outstanding quality; we know how to nurture a strong and respectful relationship with our clients. But as our company grows to new heights we encounter new challenges. Currently we’re faced with the challenge of hiring a strong Marketing Director to build and promote our brand, develop advertising strategies, and help to increase our presence. Finding the right person is a lot harder than we thought it would be.

As a web and mobile development shop, we have interviewed our fair share of developers over the years. Github is a service that has actually made this task significantly simpler. It’s hard for a sub-par developer to hide behind bad code that’s visible to the world. And since most Ruby and Rails developers these days have Github accounts, it has become easier to make more informed decisions about who to hire. The same cannot be said for hiring marketing professionals. As a company of developers, designers, and QA engineers entrenched in the web and mobile development communities, we’re not exactly tuned in to the wacky world of marketing. Trudging through the marketing muck (and trust me, it gets mucky) has proved to be toilsome.

The biggest problem is that there isn’t a clear way to vet people that claim to be marketing professionals. We have found that simply looking at their career history is not a good enough indicator of their level of competency. It’s too easy for marketing pros to sound “expert” by lavishing their resumes and Twitter profiles with extravagant buzz words and phrases. And every marketing expert and their first-born have worked for at least one large corporation. Who’s to say that they actually did anything of value during their one year stint for Pepsi Co? Or that they were actually responsible for the strategic branding of Urban Co-Op Something-or-Other that sold to Bigger Co-Op Something-or-Other?

Additionally, it’s hard to find a Marketing Director that has experience working specifically with web development companies and distributed teams. A Marketing Director for a growing Ruby on Rails and mobile development shop will need a different set of skills and expertise than a Marketing Director for a large Fortune 500 company. And since most marketing experts are not programmers or techies in general, they won’t already be familiar with our culture or our existing brand and strategy.

Marketing experts and people pretending to be marketing experts are both good at one thing: they know how to talk. They sell themselves really well. So how do you tell the really good ones from the “I have 3000 Twitter followers so I’m a marketing expert” types? We don’t know. And that’s why we haven’t hired a Marketing Director yet.

How do other growing companies approach this problem? Aside from combing through resumes and giving thorough, speculative interviews, how do you sort through the scores of self-proclaimed “gurus” to find the brilliant marketing types? We know that marketing is a legitimately necessary field and that most of the people in that field are awesome at what they do. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of noise at the entry level and it can be difficult to identify the true experts. Without code samples and a tight-knit community, it’s hard to know who to trust and where to find the innovative marketing experts that can really take our brand and presence to the next level. We would love to hear how other development companies have approached this challenge!

If you’re reading this and you’re bursting to tell us that we’re totally wrong about marketers, and you know because you happen to be the kick-ass marketing expert that we’re looking for, then send us an email and tell us why we need you. Talk to us candidly about what makes you different from the rest!