Marketing Spark Mark Evans

Why the power of storytelling can lead to a marketing spark in B2B firms

After spending six weeks traveling through Southeast Asia with my family in 2017, I came home to more than 2,000 emails! We are inundated with information: blog posts, videos, social media, advertisements, podcasts, infographics, photos, bill- boards, videos, direct mail and more. The growing embrace of storytelling is an attempt to make sense of the […]

Startup Marketing Smarts: Podcasts, visual storytelling will be hot trends in 2016

What’s ahead for startup marketing in 2016? Which trends will impact your B2B startup? In many cases, it will be more of the same: content marketing, social marketing and storytelling. If there is an underlying theme, it may be agility, flexibility and the ability to capitalize on opportunities to stand apart in an increasingly noisy […]

How to host a fun (but professional and responsible) office holiday party

Everyone loves a holiday party…except the people who organize them. Having to deal with different tastes and lifestyles while trying to be fun and responsible can make the holiday party a fierce creature. In theory, holiday parties are an opportunity to celebrate successes and recognize employees for their efforts and achievements. But holiday parties can also […]

Startup Marketing Smarts: What B2B marketers can learn from Movember

It’s November so it must be Movember, right? Throwing caution to the wind, men are growing moustaches with various degrees of success. Regardless of the final “product”, it is all for a good cause – raising awareness and money for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer, testicular cancer and men’s mental health. From humble beginnings in […]

Should B2B companies still advertise the old-fashioned way?

For many startups, advertising means digital – AdSense, Facebook, Twitter, retargeting, etc. It’s a landscape they know and like, particularly given how many activities can be tracked and analyzed. What about traditional media such as radio, television and print, which have lost much of their luster as digital marketing becomes more popular? Is traditional media […]

Want to run a tech conference? Learn from Mark Evans and Toronto’s mesh [Part 1 of 2]

It was never my plan to start a conference. I was a technology reporter for the National Post, who wrote about telecom, venture capital and start-ups. I covered conferences; they were not things that I organized. But sometimes things happen through serendipity or luck. The impetus to create the mesh conference – an annual digital […]

The TalentEgg story: Knowing the right time to sell your company

While Lauren Friese says there are no hard and fast rules for selling a business, she noticed the signs indicating the time was right to sell TalentEgg, the company she founded in 2008. Among the leading indicators were two factors: Friese recognized that her personal contribution to TalentEgg’s success was becoming less important, and there was […]

Learning from Twitter

Dick Costolo’s recent departure as Twitter’s CEO was not surprising. Twitter’s revenue growth is failing to meet expectations, which is a problem exacerbated by its status as a publicly traded company. Twitter needs to meet the expectations of investors and Wall St. analysts. One of the biggest lessons from the company’s financial struggles is the […]

How to make your company website rise above the competition

It goes without saying that websites play a crucial role for SMBs that may not have huge marketing budgets. A well-designed and customer-friendly site can be a SMB’s most powerful marketing and sales tool. But there are many examples of SMB websites that have obvious flaws. I would suggest the leading culprits include: Homepages that are cluttered and […]