Kristin Zhivago Blog | Revenue Coach

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Death by website: 5 website design mistakes to avoid

A good website design will grow your business; a bad website design will kill it. It is definitely possible to create a website and then watch it suck revenue right out of your company. We wouldn’t like that to happen to you.

Real-world branding strategy: Your brand is the promise that you keep.

I have a real-world definition of branding strategy, based on working as a revenue coach for hundreds of companies and interviewing thousands of customers. It is this: “Branding is the promise that you make; your brand is the promise that you keep.” To help company leaders put this truth to work to increase their own revenues, I explain that they keep (or break) their branding promise with five tools: products/services; people; processes; policies; and passion.

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Digital marketing strategy: What you can expect—and how to manage it

We’ve all heard the management adage: “You can’t manage what you don’t understand.” Unfortunately, digital marketing has gotten so complex, specialized, and fast-moving that it’s harder than ever for busy CEOs and entrepreneurs to understand what is really going on.

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Digital marketing and cybersecurity: A very practical checklist.

Those of us who work in digital marketing deal a lot with confidential information, and we need to do what we can to protect it from the bad guys. But there are other more recent threats that are increasing the importance of cybersecurity. Many recent cybersecurity examples often involve ransomware—where a hacker gets inside of a corporate network and “dwells” there for months, figuring out where the important information resides, and learning how to shut down the company’s network.

Office workers using their mobile devices together

Essential management skills in the Age of Apps

We are living in the Age of Apps. I guess you could call this the App Age, like the Industrial Age and the Agrarian Age that came before. All business is now run on apps (or applications, which is how many people refer to software running on larger-than-mobile systems; I’m going to use “apps” here for all types). We communicate with each other on apps.

The most successful branding strategy: Mindset Immersion

Branding strategy is usually an “inside” affair, created in windowless (or now virtual) conference rooms. “What do we want to be known for? What is our mission? What do we do better than competitors?” What’s missing from this conversation? Customers. Who buys your product or service? Customers. No wonder so much marketing doesn’t work. My