Authentic Blog - Marketing Insights for Growing Businesses

How to hire a marketing leader: A guide to discover what your business needs

The task to hire the right marketing leader has become increasingly difficult. Growing businesses need experienced marketing direction, and they can’t afford to get this hire wrong. A bad hire in the marketing leadership role is not only painful from a talent turn-over and expense perspective, but it runs the risk of damaging the company’s overall brand reputation, culture, and revenue potential. This reality begs some important questions, which we’ll address in this Guide to hiring a marketing leader: Why is it so hard to hire a marketing leader? How can you confidently bring strong marketing leadership to your table?…

Random Acts of Marketing Guide

It’s a story we hear all of the time: A business grew rapidly in its first years by focusing on sales and pursuing whichever opportunities came its way. Eventually, though, growth leveled off. The company needed to do something to jumpstart its sales and fuel its next-level growth. Executives recognized it was time to invest in marketing. (more…)

What’s to come with corporate events? 4 Considerations for Business Leaders

Many of the businesses we work with at Authentic have long relied on traditional, paid corporate events to increase brand awareness and support business development efforts. Nearly every Authentic client has (or had) a line item for events on their budget. The future of corporate events and their role in a company’s marketing strategy got thrown into question in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic halted all travel and in-person events. Some businesses quickly, nimbly, and effectively pivoted in-person events to virtual ones, while others canceled their participation in events altogether. Today, as the world begins to return to its…

How to Harness Trust to Build Brand Equity and Grow Your Business

There is nothing more valuable to a business, its relationships, and its brand than the trust it creates and maintains with its stakeholders. Trust is your most valuable brand currency, one that builds on itself over time to increase your brand equity, the brand’s worth in and of itself. Companies with higher brand equity experience all types of financial benefits: greater profit margin and better customer acquisition and retention. Building brand equity through trust can be an overwhelming effort for company founders and CEOs. But as a business leader, you don’t need to strive to achieve the brand equity of…

How Business Leaders Can Build a Personal Brand

Your personal brand is how you show up in the world personally and professionally. It extends beyond what you do for work to encompass deeper and more personal attributes, including your hobbies, passions, values, and beliefs. But too often, business leaders stop short of developing and sharing their authentic personal brand. Instead, they tie their personal brand exclusively to their employer’s brand, limiting it to what they do for work, who they work for, and the organization’s values. The trouble with this approach is that your brand isn’t really your personal brand; it’s simply how you relate to your employer’s…

Trusted Employees: Client Story

Strategic marketing creates exponential exit for software company "I care about top line revenue but most importantly I care about the bottom line and what the company makes. ...So I wanted to scale the business profitably, and I was working with Authentic on this and [they] did a fantastic job of finding out who my [ideal] audience was. So instead of focusing on hiring very high priced sales executives, we pivoted and created an inside sales team that was closing $100,000 more per month in business. With marketing and sales automation, we scaled the company, and our EBITDA grew from…

Comply Foam: Client Story

Traditional B2B manufacturer engages Fractional CMO to quickly build a scalable B2C business model "When we engaged Authentic to help us build out our marketing group, we found that our leadership team really lacked the understanding of how to engage consumers in a very effective fashion. What Authentic provided was a very low risk way for us to build really quickly. We were able to get engagement with consumers essentially right out of the gate. [And] we were building all these processes and this infrastructure that is going to be really meant for the future." Chris Hudson, President, Comply Foam…

Summit 360: Client Story

Fractional CMO services help established technology company maximize their marketing investment to successfully launch new offerings and brand "CMOs - whether fractional or full-time - are not cheap, but we had a big task ahead of us with this business launch... and I knew that we could not do it by ourselves, and I wasn't confident [that we would] even be able to make the right hire for that role. And so...it was a pretty easy decision. ...When I looked at the task at hand, the opportunity costs could be tremendous. And I did not want to get it wrong.…

Ecessa: Client Story

Technology company invests in marketing leadership to achieve a successful acquisition "Marketing is the most important thing you can possibly do in a technology business, period. You can have the greatest service you can have the greatest widget, but you're never going to sell any if the world doesn't know you're there. And if you don't have a good marketing strategy - if you're not focused like a laser beam on where you want to win and where you can win - you won't win." Mike Siegler, SVP Services & Customer Experience, Communications Systems, Inc. https://youtu.be/LoANQnFM1L4 Story Summary When Mike…

Should we fire our marketer?

Growing businesses commonly reach out to Authentic because they aren’t sure if they have the right marketing resources on staff. Typically they’re facing one of two scenarios: The business has capable and skilled “doers” who are loyal to the company and willing to work hard but aren’t strategic. The business has strong marketers and marketing leaders, but they don’t feel like marketing is progressive enough; their marketers aren’t pushing the bar or bringing enough fresh ideas to the table. Business leaders at these companies often come to us faced with a stressful decision; should they fire their doers in favor…

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