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Today is the fifth anniversary of Coherent Marketing. For many small businesses, surviving five years is a significant milestone. For my company, the first year and a half was an Everest. I'd left a corporate environment helping North Carolina develop a sustainable advanced biofuels sector to start up my company. I needed the personal flexibility to support my wife whose breast cancer had returned. I juggled the responsibilities of managing a startup with trips to the hospital for surgery, radiation, and pain management. My laptop travelled with me. I serviced clients on hospital wifi and from my Samsung Note. When they sent her home, I set up a desk at the foot of her hospital bed in the living room to care for her and for clients scattered across the globe, collaborating with designers and data geeks in North Carolina and Australia in between catheters and tracking her meds. She lost her battle against breast cancer, which had stalked her for the entire 13 years of our marriage. I lost a friend, a counsellor, my book-keeper, and the co-founder of my business, and so much more. The struggle in the long, dark nights with little sleep while caring for someone for whom the stakes are so much higher teaches hard lessons that simply are not found elsewhere.
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The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has selected work done by Coherent Marketing with the North Carolina Advanced Manufacturing Alliance for a book titled Models for Labor Market Intermediaries. It sounds dry, but it's a compilation of case studies to help economic developers by providing successful approaches - and good local jobs are what are needed to revitalise our economy.
The work we've done with these organizations has helped attract thousands of jobs, which in turn has impacted many families for the better and is an accomplishment of which we are proud.
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LinkedIn has selected Norman Smit at Integrated Media Strategies (the name of Coherent Marketing at the time) for a Best of 2016 badge in Marketing Communications, PR Consulting and SEO consulting.
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Coherent Marketing has partnered with the Johnston County Building Industry Association for two years, helping to raise the visibility of the organization and its members. We started by redoing the website and providing training to staff on how to use it effectively, populate the member directory with information from members and creating a useful database of content. This means that when a visitor comes to the site to find a reputable builder, but who doesn't use 'builder speak', they will be able to find the information that they need.
On a limited budget, we then worked with the association to effectively connect the site to Google analytics and begin the process of building content relevant to stakeholders, the local community, members, and other interested audiences. We provided seminars through the association to members on content marketing so that they could tap into the digital resources available to them through the association.
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Nationally, community college budgets are tight. They are being called upon to do more with less. Most community colleges have never been particularly well-resourced by comparison to universities. One place where colleges may be able to get more bang for their buck is in how they are producing or procuring video. Video is an expensive medium and video services departments are often hard-pressed keeping up with the multiple demands they face.
Fayetteville Technical Community College in North Carolina contracted Coherent Marketing to review operations. The brief was to produce a report that looked at several key areas, including:
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Coherent Marketing has formed a strategic partnership with Malteez, a South African digital agency. The partnership will provide clients in Africa seeking access to the American market and wanting a digital agency that is African and at the same time, is well-established in the US market. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, English is what divides the English-speaking world and the United States. Companies seeking to do well in the U.S. must be capable of adapting to the idiosyncrasies of a country made up states - each with their own laws and cultures - and a national, federally-governed marketplace. This is even more true when seeking entry into regulated sectors such as finance or pharmaceuticals.
The partnership allows for Malteez and Coherent Marketing to connect with clients as Africans, yet function effectively in guiding those clients to success in the US marketplace. Coherent Marketing has a deep contact list of people and organizations with which it can partner and recommend, making for a seamless transition for African-based companies. With its experience in working on projects with state government, higher education, the biopharmaceutical industry sector, advanced manufacturing, other regulated sectors, numerous startups, small business and on federally-funded projects in the the U.S. and in Canada, it can help make entry to the US market as painless as possible.
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- Career development website
- New website for AFLI
- New site for drug testing company
- Experience makes us better - a birthday retrospective
- Years of work at risk
- ROI of $1.3 billion
- Integrated campaign for pan-African group
- Helping Africa's future leaders communicate
- Church service on a tablet
- Virtual Camelina extension service