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Good marketing makes the company look smart.

Great marketing makes the customer feel smart"

~ Joe Chernov

Which is more important to you? How your brand LOOKS? Or how you make your customers feel?

It's an interesting question, and one that Joe Chernov sums up nicely - because while good marketing isn't actually all that hard to do, GREAT marketing isn't something you can just wing. There's a sort of formula you can follow, a recipe to create and implement a great marketing strategy - whether you're launching a website, rebranding, creating packaging, blogging, email marketing, or really, anything else, you simply need to:

• Research
• Write/create
• Post
• Promote
• Rinse
• Repeat

It is no longer enough to satisfy your customers. You must delight them.- Philip Kotler

I mean. Philip Kotler. Really I could just stop there...but I won't. Because if you're a marketer in any facet, and you don't know the "Father of Modern Marketing Philip Kotler," then I owe it to you to introduce you to him.

There are a number of reasons I love and follow Kotler, so many, in fact, that it's probably just easier to bullet point some of my top highlights for you:

• he was born, lives, got his Master's at and teaches (at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern) in my beloved Chicago-land (best place in the U.S.)
• he has a PhD from MIT and did post-doctoral at Harvard and University of Chicago (so smart)
• he has written more than SIXTY books (again. so. smart.)
• he's bridged the concepts of economics and marketing (two things I am wildly fascinated with)
• he won American Marketing Association's (AMA's) Marketing for a Better World award (love it)
• I have a secret-almost-crush on him (like in a grandfatherly way...he's smart, funny, charismatic, and totally adorbs)

Those who know me well will tell you...I can apply movie quotes to just about any scenario in life. Jerry Maguire, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Field of Dreams are a few in particular I tend to over-use.

"Show me the money," 

"It's not show friends..."

"YOU'RE Abe Froman...the sausage king of Chicago???" 

and, of course,

"If you build it, they will come..."

But the latter really isn't true when it comes to marketing, or at least when it comes to content marketing. Because it doesn't matter how awesome your content is...if you're not throwing the gasoline on it, it's probably going to die out. So how do you add that spark to your content marketing flame?

One way is the oh-so-powerful social media. Social is bringing brand awareness through influencer marketing, audience connection, inbound marketing and even the odd unboxing trend that seems to have weirdly taken off in the last couple years.