Authentic Blog - Marketing Insights for Growing Businesses

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…

Brand Messaging Guide: 9 Moments to evolve your brand narrative

A brand narrative is the story your brand tells the world. It serves as the foundation of your marketing and communications strategy. This story should concisely describe why you do what you do, how you do it, and what makes you stand out from the sea of sameness. Most importantly, the story must be framed with your target audience in mind: helping them to “see themselves” in the narrative. When you create a brand narrative, it’s important to remember that it’s a journey, not a destination. The lifecycle of a business includes a tremendous amount of change: from launch, through…

How to build an effective on-demand marketing team

The modern marketing ecosystem has changed the way businesses market themselves. Marketing programs now require an entirely different array and a longer list of skill sets than they did 20 years ago. The agency of record no longer makes sense because one agency cannot provide all services a business needs or provide all of them effectively. Companies now need access to a long menu of service providers skilled in various areas, including content, creative, search, paid media, events, analytics, and more — and they need different services at different stages of their growth. But not all businesses have the strategic bandwidth or experience to…

Is the agency of record irrelevant in today’s marketing landscape?

Twenty years ago, most businesses outsourced their marketing capabilities to an agency of record: One single agency that provided the entire landscape of marketing services. At that time, there were only a handful of traditional marketing services that businesses needed their agency to provide, including branding, public relations, advertising, copy, and creative. Fast forward to today, and the marketing landscape has changed dramatically and exponentially. One indicator of this is how much the marketing technology landscape has grown. From 2011 to 2020, there was a 5,233% increase in the number of marketing technologies available, and these technologies spanned numerous subspecialties. Some of…

In-house marketing vs. agency or freelancer: What’s best for you?

There comes a time in every business’s lifecycle when it needs to invest in marketing to continue growing. Some of the most important decisions are when and who to hire to develop and manage your marketing programs. Your business has what seems like endless options: in-house marketing vs. agency, consultant, or freelancer. But these resources also vary in their seniority and experience in various functional areas (e.g., digital, content, analytics, traditional). Without strategic marketing leadership at the helm, it can feel impossible to make sense of all of the options available and which are the right resources for your business. In this…

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