Most marketing people I know worship at the altar of Seth Godin. He’s a larger than life marketing guru — a best-selling author several times over, an accomplished entrepreneur, an in-demand speaker and teacher, and a revolutionary thinker.

In Seth’s own words:

My favorite thing about Seth Godin, though, is his blog. It’s always an eye-opening, thought-provoking, perspective-shifting few words that arrive in my inbox every day. For the past 11 years. It’s a streak.

“Streaks are their own reward.

Streaks create internal pressure that keeps streaks going.

Streaks require commitment at first, but then the commitment turns into a practice, and the practice into a habit.

Habits are much easier to maintain than commitments.”

Frequently his blogs are just a couple of paragraphs, sometimes they’re longer and more involved. Sometimes they’re deep, and sometimes they are lighter fare. It doesn’t matter. He gets his ideas out there and he does it regularly. And people love him for it.

We preach this philosophy to our clients all the time. The important thing is to blog. Regularly. Dependably. Habitually.

It doesn’t need to be overthought. We hear it all the time – How will I find the time? What will I write? Are my ideas worthy of a blog? Do people really want to read it?

The answer is yes. Your customers (and your potential customers) want to hear from you. They want to get to know you and what you have to offer. They want to make an emotional connection with you. Blogging does that.

So just do it. Take a page from Seth Godin’s play book – start a streak and allow it to become a habit. You’ve got this.

It’s almost the 4th Quarter, and here on the Porch, it’s all about cooler weather, football, holidays and … 2018 plans. The time is NOW to schedule your 2018 winning game plan. We can help you Play. To. Win.

Here are 6 Things to Think About as we head into Q4:

1. Volunteering.

   Folks, the need for volunteers is going into overtime to help hurricane victims. Our fellow Texans will persevere, but still need our help in Q4 and beyond. Over the last five weeks, the Front Porch Marketing team has donated some serious rocker time to help our clients whose teams were affected and to raise awareness for their fundraising and donation efforts. If you are looking to support hurricane victims in Texas and elsewhere, check out TrustedWorld.org. This fantastic organization based in North Texas helps us all keep on helping.

2. Supporting Women.

   Does your playbook include doing business with and promoting women-owned businesses? Look for WBE certified businesses by visiting Women’s Business Council-Southwest. Consider joining this great organization, and if eligible, get certified. Front Porch is proudly certified WBE, HUB, SBE and WOSB and recently attended the WBCS Business Works Expo in Arlington, Texas. We will gladly answer your questions!

3. Working Social Media.

   Are your fans crazy about your brand? Are they visiting your sites, watching you play and win the social media game, reading your blogs and newsletters and wanting more? It just takes one good quarter to make some great plays. Start now.

4. Celebrations.

   4th Q wouldn’t be 4th Q without events that celebrate family, friends and don’t forget – your team. We love it when our clients such as Mister Sweeper celebrate the team and let us help them plan it. Hint: Cinemark. Star Wars. Private Screenings. Make sure you have plans in place now to thank your team for 2017.

5. New Clients.

   Now that the Back to School huddle is over and everyone is settled into the new routine, we want to take a moment to shout out to two new clients who spend every day helping teachers do a great job of educating the children in our communities. Faith Family Academy and Catch Up & Read are North Texas organizations that demonstrate it’s all about having a passion for what you do.

6. and lastly …

   Friends, if you have to pick one of six things to do in the 4th quarter, pick this – Find. Your. Purpose. Like this one.

Our purpose at Front Porch is to rock your world and help you play to win. See you on the field.

Research, branding and reboots … The latest version of our own Pick Six (for six glorious years in business, natch …) finds us walking our own proverbial yellow brick road in search of marketing nirvana.

We always say (but it bears repeating), marketing is more art than science. Finding the perfect mix of marketing strategy and tactics that will deliver the biggest impact for clients is never a one size fits all exercise – it’s a bit of a journey! And we have to admit … we absolutely love the journey.

Research, branding and reboots, oh my!

Enjoy these exciting and fulfilling stops along the way:

1. Research and Branding – The research and brand architecture exercise that we are undergoing with Mister Sweeper gives us serious back to basics euphoria! We live for this stuff, friends.
2. Newsletter Refresh and Reboot – We love giving a long-standing client a refresh, and the end result is fantastic! Check out the latest Corps Team Client newsletter. Phenomenal!
3. Blogging – We can’t say enough about blogging and the importance of it in your content strategy. Blogs we love include, but aren’t limited to, The GEM, TodoModo Group, PeopleResults and Feizy.
4. Learning – The Chief Rocker’s association with Vistage continues to be an invaluable one. Lots of great ideas were shared recently by Communications Specialist Michael Allosso, who was the guest speaker at a business owner’s event.
5. Team Straight Talk – Even when our Rockers aren’t delivering the skinny ON the Porch, they are telling it like it is OFF the Porch. Check out Tara (aka The Rock) in The Dallas Morning News.
6. New Connections – We love that our clients and friends spread the word on our behalf! Meeting with new people and prospects to see if we can help is always a charge.

Thanks for walking our yellow brick road with us, friends! We continue to be thankful for each and every one of you.

Join us elsewhere if you want jams: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn!

Here on the Porch, social media marketing is king. A strong social media plan is key to a healthy, robust presence on-line – which in turn leads to increased brand recognition, increased brand loyalty, more traffic, and ultimately more customers.

Using social media to grow your business can seem like a daunting task. But it needn’t be! Here are our 6 top tips for developing a strong social media presence:

• Have A Social Media Plan for Each Channel. Please people, don’t just create one type of content and blast it across every social platform! Identify your audience and your goals for each platform – they are very different creatures. Ensure your posts are true to your brand and strike the tone you wish to convey. Develop a calendar and stick to it.

• Create Meaningful Content and Deliver it Consistently. Quality content that excites and engages is worth its weight in gold. Make sure everything you post is valuable, relevant to your audience, helpful, and/or entertaining. And get it out there consistently!

• The Key Word in Social Media is Social – Interact! Engaging with other users on a regular basis is key. Like people’s posts. When people comment, reply! Comment on other people’s posts. Retweet. Give people a shout out! Encourage communication and conversation.

• Optimize Your Content with Visuals and Links. Visuals grab people’s attention, so don’t neglect this important piece of the puzzle. Photos, infographics, memes, videos – all valuable tools. Mix it up. Then don’t forget to drive traffic back to your site! Always link back to your products and services.

• Blog, Blog, Blog. We can’t stress this enough. Develop blog posts that are easy to read,  highlighting ideas that are interesting and thought-provoking. Creating original content in the form of blogs is a win-win! Don’t become overwhelmed, blogs don’t have to be long. Just do it!

• Get Your Entire Team In On the Action. Everyone has a valuable point of view and cache of experience, so encourage everyone to help your marketing efforts. Get them to blog and share their expertise. At the bare mimimum, ask them to follow and comment on the social profiles of your company and your clients.

We always say, marketing is more of an art than a science, and that is true! Take the human approach when developing your social media strategy – it will pay dividends!

It’s been a rockin’ year at Front Porch Marketing and for our blog, Off Our Rocker. 

Our team shares their musings, wisdom and counsel about branding, marketing, trends, pop culture, being a working mother and motherhood in general here.

We love to blog for clients, our team members, advocates and ourselves and have decided to countdown and share with you the five most-read blog posts for 2016.

We would love for you to look back and read them again or maybe read them for the first time.

So, we will leave you with these.

Happy almost New Year.

No. 5 Blog

Motivation: 5 Ways to Find It When You’ve Hit a Wall, by Ann Marie Bishop

No. 4

Do Your Actions Speak Louder than Likes?, by Darcey Newsum

No. 3

4 Lessons Learned By Losing, by Vanessa Hickman

No. 2

5 Rockin’ Things About Branding & Marketing Businesses, by Julie Porter

No. 1

Being a Working Mom: Five Things That Saved Me This Summer, by Jacqui Chappell

Everyone has his or her own morning routine – mine happens to include hitting the snooze button at least once, a big cup of coffee and a quick scroll though Twitter.

Twitter is how I keep up with friends, keep up with the news, but most importantly- how I keep up with marketing. By following my favorite branding and strategy experts, I am able to learn their insights from decades of experience that I don’t have.

Over the past few months, I have curated a list of marketers that I follow to cover all the marketing bases, and here are just a few of my favorites.

Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog) – Author of the book, Purple Cow and others, where he discusses how to transform your business and yourself by being remarkable, posts daily about permission marketing and tips on how to be the “purple cow” in a field full of competition. His twitter is purely reposts of his blog, which ranges in topics from how to turn your creativity into a profession, to how to power a digital future for your brand.

Jay Baer (@jaybaer) – If you want a daily update on all different aspects of digital marketing, follow Jay, as he is the most re-tweeted person in the world among digital marketers. His posts include influence marketing workbooks, six step playbooks for handling social media complaints, and everything in between.

Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) – If content marketing is your thing, then definitely follow Ann, as she is “waging a war on mediocrity in content marketing.”

Bonin Bough (@boughb) – He is currently chief of media and eCommerce at Mondelēz International (formerly Kraft Foods), and specializes in digital strategy that crosses paid, earned, owned and shared media. Posts a great deal of social media tips, and if you know Front Porch Marketing, you know we LOVE all things social media.

Marie Forleo (@marieforleo) – Guru of how to achieve the perfect work/life balance. Posts about how to build a business you love, increase customer trust through social media, and increase productivity in every day life.

Robert Caruso (@fondalo) – Another expert content and digital marketer, who tweets about innovative ways to improve your social media, tips on how to increase brand awareness for startups, and how to get results in B2B marketing.

Kim Garst (@kimgarst) – As one of Forbes top ten social media influencers, she is the queen of social selling strategy. Her tweets range from Facebook advertisement jumpstart guides, tips on how to keep the cost of SEO down, and “cheat sheets” for selling on social media.
Bryan Solis (@briansolis)- Expert on digital marketing who provides step by step help for brands looking to transform their digital approach to create a brand experience.

Neil Patel (@neilpatel) – If you want to read a little bit of everything about digital marketing, Neil is your guy. As a Forbes columnist with years of experience in marketing, he combines motivational business tips with the knowledge necessary to succeed as a modern marketer.

While these are just a few of the hundreds of successful and influential marketers to follow on Twitter, by reading a few of their posts daily I am able to keep up with the ever-changing world of marketing. In addition to following experts in the field, a lot of successful marketers follow venture capitalists, as they see and predict new innovation that affects most industries and markets. Effective and influential marketers have to keep up in order to connect with their target market, so why not utilize social media to do so?

Rachel Mains is an intern at Front Porch Marketing. Follow her on Twitter.

We all recently celebrated Thanksgiving, spending the day focusing on what we’re grateful for. But it shouldn’t end there. Gratitude is not a moment, not a day, not a week, but a way of life.

There are obvious things to feel grateful about – food, shelter, family, friends. But don’t stop there. Be mindful. What does being grateful really mean? Where did the feeling come from?

According to The Gratitude Experiment, focusing on gratefulness and expressing gratitude raises our level of well-being and happiness. In an experiment, a test group was divided into three, with one group directed to journal gratitude, one group directed to journal the things that irritated them most during the day and one group was allowed to choose their focus. Not surprisingly, the group focusing on gratitude had a much greater sense of well-being. Statistics show that cultivating an attitude of gratitude increases overall happiness by 5%.

Dr. Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at University of California, Davis is leading a research team to quantify the causes of gratitude and its effect on health and well-being. They feel strongly that it begins with children. If we can raise grateful children, we are way ahead as a society.

Our friends at The Gem also focus on gratitude as part of their recommended daily regimen. It has a place of honor in the daily GEM journal distributed during their “Day in the Life” series. In fact, it is part of the mentality surrounding their brand. As an element of integrative nutrition and holistic living, gratitude is near and dear to the heart.

There is always something vying for our attention. The holidays bring commitments and distractions, professional to-do lists are ever-growing, our culture of connectivity brings with it no shortage of dismal world news, anxiety over the economy and political positioning, and the responsibilities of our home lives loom large. But take a moment at the end of each day and reflect on at least a couple of things to be grateful for. Some days it will pour out. Some days, you’ll be lucky to be thankful for the roof over your head. With practice, it becomes easier.

As a member of the rockin’ team on the Porch, we are actively and mindfully grateful for our wonderful clients and the chance to have an impact on their business and grow with them.

What are you grateful for?

As our Chief Rocker continually espouses, marketing is not a science, it is an art. There is no one size fits all. It is a continual effort to fine tune your strategy including your message and its delivery.

Like an actor playing to an audience, there is a relationship – the transfer of energy and interaction from stage to audience is palpable. If an actor correctly reads the audience’s cues, the energy feeds on itself. The same holds true of marketing a product or service.

As an entrepreneur or small business, you’ve done your demographic research for your target market – your audience. Don’t fail to use it. This is your chance to tell the story of your brand and your value to potential customers and to let them know what makes your product stand apart.

Content and delivery are both important. And as new apps and technologies are continually evolving, it’s important to remain relevant. There is an element of trial and error. Pay attention to shifts. If it’s not working anymore – move on! Remember to know and address your audience.

Melissa McCarthy’s blunt and physical brand of comedy is a sharp contrast to Helen Mirren’s more serious and dramatic performance. While both are wildly talented and entertaining, they each have different “brands” and vastly different audience appeal. Bridesmaids plays to a very different audience than Queen Elizabeth. Both are great. But, there is an audience for each.

Know your audience. Remember, you are telling the story of your brand. Focus on the artistry of conveying your brand’s voice and message.

After the long, cold winter, the arrival of spring is a welcome influx of new growth and new beginnings. Spring flowers, Easter and Passover celebrations and the kickoff of baseball season brings us happiness and warmth. We embrace this change.

Change is good.

In business and in life, the one thing we can be certain of is that change is around the corner.

Change is necessary. And change is rarely smooth.

Change can often be tumultuous – just google spring weather and take a look at the storms created by the replacement of cold air with warmth. But then think about the spectacular aftermath … after the spring storms depart, we are left with a rewarding burst of color.

Anything worth doing well comes at a price. Successful disruptors are revered, and for good reason. To have the vision for necessary change and the courage to enact the plan is not for the faint of heart. Patti Johnson notes in her book, Make Waves, “Even though each change is different, there are common patterns, habits and strategies that fuel those who start grassroots changes”

In order to grow, evolve and meet today’s rapid pace of change. It is vital that you and your organization are ready to meet the needs of the process of change and the new environment created:

• Have a vision.
• Have a strategy (identify the end goal and plan how to get there).
• Make sure the vision and plan are clearly communicated.
• Be prepared. You need the right team of like-mind folks.

Remember change is good, necessary and it is rarely smooth. As you begin to implement changes, be watchful of results and ready to adapt. Communicate those changes along the way. You will find the results well worth the pain and effort of getting there.