Authentic Blog - Marketing Insights for Growing Businesses

Step Out of Your Comfort Zone – Give Marketing a Seat at the Leadership Table

Let’s go out on a limb and assume that your company has a leadership team meeting every week or so. Perhaps you lead it, perhaps you muddle through it, lay low or like to stir things up. Who gets invited? Finance, Operations, HR, IT, Sales, Compliance and Legal? What about Marketing? Some of the time or all the time? In all honesty, why are they really there? As company leaders, to elevate the marketing function, this is a question you should clarify so your Marketing leader is delivering what the business needs. (more…)

How to have a Marketing Strategy rather than “Random Acts of Marketing” – an interview with Jennifer Zick

Jennifer Zick, Authentic's Founder and CEO, was pleased to join Benjamin Wolf as a guest on his podcast: Win Win - An Entrepreneurial Community. In this episode, Jennifer shares lessons learned in entrepreneurship (many shaped by experience in working with and for EOS-powered businesses), as well as advice for growing businesses on building a strategy-driven marketing program. Listen in to learn: (1) how to develop a marketing strategy and Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® (2) why you must sell what your product or service solves for your customer rather than just how great it is; and (3) the elements of a successful marketing plan…

Have a Rising Star On Your Marketing Team?

Determining who the right leader is for your marketing department can be challenging for any business. But staffing for the marketing leadership role requires additional nuance when you have a rising star already on the team. Should you elevate your marketing coordinator / manager to the leadership role? Or should you hire someone with “been there, done that” leadership experience? (more…)

Marketing and Sales: Getting to Alignment

Building an aligned marketing and sales strategy that can weather the ups-and-downs of a growing business is tough. We know it’s essential, yet alignment continues to be a significant challenge for many companies. (more…)

Jennifer Zick Makes Guest Appearance on The Schmidt List Podcast

This week, Jennifer Zick joined Kurt Schmidt, host of The Schmidt List Podcast, to discuss Jennifer's entrepreneurial journey and how Authentic helps organizations grow with Fractional CMO leadership and Authentic Growth Methodology: a proven methodology for strategic planning, alignment, and accountability. (more…)

What is this “Voice of the Customer” thing and why is it so important?

There are several types of primary marketing research that businesses can use to help them gain valuable business insights. Many companies are looking for opportunities to become more customer-centric in their offerings, messages, and brand experiences. In that process, Voice of Customer research is growing in popularity. (more…)

Now is the time to build.

We're already so busy... This is a surprisingly common sentiment and statement made by business leaders when sales are strong and the project backlog is full to overflowing. With all of that work already in the pipe, why on earth should the company put focus and resources into additional marketing and sales efforts? (more…)

Beehive Strategic Communication: Client Story

Strategic communication firm invests in a Fractional CMO to support next-level growth. We knew that something had to change to drive our own consistent growth. That's when we turned to Authentic for a Fractional CMO partner, and that's been game-changing. [...] In order to grow and be competitive in environments that are transforming faster than any of us can predict, we have to invest in our own businesses. There’s no choice. Those investments have to be smart, focused, and strategic. And that’s what Authentic helps us do." - Lisa Hannum, CEO, Beehive Strategic Communication Continue reading

Coherent Solutions: Client Story

A large software development company engages a Fractional CMO to accelerate growth. We knew we needed [marketing] leadership... but to hire a full-time marketing leader, we didn't really have the function structured, we didn't have any momentum in it, we didn't even have a common vision among our leadership team as to what the marketing leader would do and how the function would integrate with the rest of the company. Authentic introduced the idea of Fractional CMO as an alternative solution. That was very appealing to us, to hire someone at a lower allocation...but still get access to great leadership,…

Boundary Waters Bank: Client Story

Expanding community bank matures in their marketing efforts. As bankers, we like to think we know a lot about [marketing], but in all actuality, we don’t. We know nothing about marketing or advertising. And what we tend to do - and what this bank has done in the past - is waste dollars on different types of advertising or marketing, thinking we were getting our name out or the product out to the people. What brought us to Authentic: We were getting nowhere, we needed some traction, and we needed somebody with the expertise to bring this bank into the…

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