As a proud women- and veteran-owned business, Cork Tree Creative continues to champion opportunities for women entrepreneurs. In March 2023, team members Jan Carpenter, Laura Reed, and Sue Webb traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) National Conference. Hosted at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center from March 20-23, this annual event unites corporations and women business leaders to foster connections, growth, and innovation in women-led enterprises.
For the second consecutive year, the Cork Tree Creative team joined thousands of fellow women business owners at the WBENC National Conference to engage in dynamic discussions, gain industry insights, and explore new opportunities for collaboration.
A highlight of the event was the recognition of Laura Reed, who received the esteemed 2023 "Women's Veteran's Business Enterprise We Love" award from the National Veteran Owned Business Association. This honor, presented at the annual Women's Veteran's Business Enterprise of the Year Awards Dinner on March 21, underscores Cork Tree Creative’s dedication to empowering and celebrating veteran women in business.
Beyond award recognition, the conference provided an invaluable platform for Cork Tree Creative to connect with other like-minded entrepreneurs and leading corporations. Key highlights of the event included:
As a company that has held WBENC certification since 2016, Cork Tree Creative is committed to leveraging these resources to drive success, innovation, and inclusivity in the business world. Additionally, as a certified Veteran Business Enterprise (VBE), we take great pride in our mission to support fellow veteran-owned businesses and amplify the voices of women leaders across industries.
Participating in the WBENC National Conference not only strengthens our business network but also reinforces our dedication to advancing opportunities for women and veteran entrepreneurs. We look forward to continuing to build on these connections and empowering more businesses to thrive in the years ahead.
As a Veteran-owned business, we acknowledge the significance of supporting the Veteran community. They often face underprivileged circumstances, and we strive to give back to them. That’s why we worked with Rebuilding Together, a nationwide volunteer program focused on revitalizing the community by making homes safer and improving the lives of local citizens.
During our time volunteering, we met with a seasoned volunteer to guide us through our day. We began by removing fixtures such as lights, outlets, and baseboards in the home. After, we were put to work painting multiple rooms and ceilings. While the rest of the team finished painting, some team members assisted in putting down fresh flooring in the home. We had so much fun jamming out to music, learning new skills, and chatting with our volunteer mentor.
During our time spent volunteering, we were able to get to know the home’s occupants as well as the volunteer and learn more about the program. We are thankful for the chance to improve the quality of life for a family in our community.
At Cork Tree Creative, we consistently try to keep up with the latest trends in marketing. Learning about new ways of doing our jobs can be intimidating, but adapting and incorporating new methods can also be exciting. AI in marketing is changing how people do things, and we're here to unpack it for you.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a tool that has completely changed the way businesses do things. AI uses machines to solve problems strategically, adapting over time to become more intelligent, just like humans. When you apply this technology to marketing, there are no limits to what you can use it for. From understanding clients' wants and needs to catering to messages to consumers, AI marketing is taking off fast and shows no signs of slowing down. Follow along as we dive deeper into how AI marketing can help your business.
By automating and streamlining marketing processes, AI allows marketing to happen with limited human oversight. The technology enables machines to create products and services for customers, strengthen existing products and services, and overall build greater customer satisfaction.
AI is generally very smart and can build on its previous knowledge, which can assist in knowing what products and services a customer is likely to approve. AI pulls ideas from across the internet for social media content creation and uses those that get the most engagement. For example, the chat generative pre-trained transformer (ChatGPT) function, added on websites, allows people to chat with machines about questions or ideas they want feedback on.
Another AI ability is reviewing what a user engages with and, in turn, giving them targeted advertisements or placing products where they are likely to purchase. You can achieve this by accumulating information over time about what users have interacted with in the past and predicting what they are likely to want in the future. AI functions faster than a human can, saving time (and money) for companies in the long run.
At Cork Tree Creative, we have begun experimenting with AI in our various service areas. For example, we have asked ChatGPT questions about how we can further enhance our SEO marketing. We’ve also explored how AI can help overcome writer’s block and provide synopses on complex topics when drafting web content. Additionally, we have tested the AI chatbot’s ability to troubleshoot lines of coding formulas for websites. By exposing ourselves to what AI is doing right now, we can adapt as an agency and create unique marketing items for our clients.
There are three main types of AI marketing: machine learning AI, big data AI, and analytics AI. AI machines use these concepts to create marketing tactics of differing advancement levels, making it easier for companies to choose which ones they want to implement. Machine Learning AI relies on machines to collect all relevant information and enhance the industry they are focused on. On the other hand, big data and analytics AI are used to show the bigger picture behind the numbers, which in marketing can help identify what is working and what isn’t. Creators developed AI marketing tools and platforms to manage the massive amounts of data being collected and to comprehend the information thoroughly.
To understand how to use AI for marketing, we must first understand what the technology can do by itself. The basis behind AI is using machines to understand information better and faster than humans. The rate at which AI machines have been learning has significantly increased in the past 10 years. This is due, in part, to the integration and reading of the data collected. Using four different learning systems, machines can learn differently than humans, and it’s becoming successful.
Putting all the systems’ information together gives a comprehensive picture of marketing data. If you program the machines to learn about your desired data, a company can gain valuable knowledge about their clients.
Cork Tree has experience with successfully managing our clients’ machine learning AI programs. We’ve utilized targeted digital advertisements, which allow us to advertise their company or product to a group of people with similar attributes. By doing this, we are reaching a population that is most likely going to invest in a service or product because it is relevant to them. This, in turn, gets our clients more business leads and a higher chance of people investing in their company, product, or service.
Data is power, and having a lot of it can be overwhelming. When AI machines learn, they understand the data, whereas humans try to understand knowledge. For example, in marketing, you create an outcome that benefits a particular company or business. To understand and use your data correctly, you must set parameters to ensure you read it correctly. If you ask a machine to collect all data, it will have no value since there is nothing to compare it to. However, when used strategically, big data and analytics AI can harness data and provide legible, insightful information that may not have been uncovered by a human alone.
Once the AI machine collects your data, you must find a way to interpret it. Again, using marketing and platform tools will give you the most comprehensive look into your data. Depending on what you are using AI for, the platform tools will create an easy and effective way to understand what it has gathered. For example, three of the top ways marketing AI is used include finding what people say about a product or business, overall market trends, and what competitors are doing.
You can use AI tools for email drafting, copywriting, digital advertising, influencer marketing, and more. The addition of search engine optimization and search engine marketing tools allows for your content to rank high when searched on Google, Bing, and similar platforms so people can find your business and services easily. AI tools can automate most of these tasks by providing suggestions or writing for your specific topic or agenda.
You may not realize it, but many programs available to the public are programmed by AI. Grammarly, a real-time writing assistant, can be relied upon to ensure that a sentence's grammar, structure, and overall flow are clear and concise. The application uses machine learning AI to understand and adapt to the language used in different industries. Grammarly creators programmed their AI system to learn sentence structure and flow to adapt to customers' needs in many languages.
Zapier is software that assists with automating tasks for businesses. It connects with 5,000 website apps to assist you in using its tools. These tools range from scheduling content to adding filters to ensuring the software is used when certain conditions are met. Additionally, the platform creates if-then scenarios so that tasks are fulfilled without oversight.
Olay’s Skin Advisor is an excellent example of an advanced AI system. This system asks customers to take a picture of their faces and answer a few questions. AI marketing will give customers feedback on what products to buy for their skin. Olay accomplishes this by AI viewing the photo and using its knowledge of data from the past to understand each person’s skin type.
We understand that not all of our clients have the time and resources to understand and implement these strategies for their company, which is where we come in. Our comprehensive marketing services and experience with using platforms similar to Zapier, among other AI marketing tools, allow us to implement an individualized plan for every client and track its ROI.
AI marketing may be the industry that is benefiting the most from the technology. Many marketing firms will use AI to generate advertisement placement, add a ChatGPT function on web pages, and perform other smaller tasks. Automating these tasks frees up employees' time to work on other tasks that require manual attention.
When deciding how to design an AI marketing strategy, you should start by finding which kind of AI you want to use. A marketing agency can help you navigate what you need to succeed. To accomplish this, you need to figure out what your goals are for your business or product. There are stand-alone machine-learning apps and integrated machine-learning apps, which many consider to be more advanced since they are an addition to an existing system of AI. Conversely, stand-alone task automation and integrated task automation apps are less developed since they work independently.
If you aim to take tasks off your plate and allow yourself more room for other tasks, using AI to help you automate your tasks is an option. If you’re looking for more intuitive and problem-solving AI, consider using one of many apps to help you with your writing, brand design, and more.
Artificial intelligence may be a step ahead of humans' ability to understand and apply data. AI marketing enhances the industry, but humans may need to assist it in moderation. AI marketing is indispensable for understanding natural language processing, ever-growing machine learning, and overall computer vision. In the future, intelligence will continue to grow and show significant leaps in predictive analysis, personalized content creation, and automated split testing.
A marketing agency can help you create an AI marketing strategy for your unique business. We can use AI to dive into your goals, needs, and desires, identify which AI marketing strategies will fit best, develop the AI marketing plan, implement and optimize the campaign, and analyze how the campaign is working over time. All these techniques can keep you ahead of the marketing game. At Cork Tree Creative, we can help you find the best uses of AI marketing for your business. Get in touch with our marketing agency to hear how we can help.
In a recent design project for our client, Archford®, our graphic designer, Amanda, utilized AI software as a starting point to create a custom avatar character. She manually photoshopped the original AI output image to better resemble the employee's facial features and structure. In the featured image above, we show the various stages of the AI output and Photoshop process to the final product.
To celebrate and honor Women’s History Month in March, Cork Tree Creative sponsored Gori Law Firm’s first-ever Women’s Day Celebration 5K. As a Platinum sponsor, Cork Tree Creative supported Gori Law and a local scholarship fund as part of its Cork Tree Cares initiative. The proceeds from the event are put toward The Gori Law Firm Scholarship at Edwardsville Community Foundation, which aims to support women in the community seeking higher education after high school.
Not only did the women-owned and operated firm sponsor the event, but numerous team members partook in the event, walking and running alongside their friends and family. To learn more about the Gori Law Firm and its events, visit https://www.gorilaw.com/.
We are thrilled to announce the opening of our new office in the Cortex Innovation Community. Located at 4220 Duncan Ave. in St. Louis, this expansion marks an exciting milestone in our growth and deepens our commitment to serving businesses throughout the Metro East region.
Jan Carpenter, our co-founder, shares our excitement about the new space: “We are elated to be a part of the Cortex Innovation Community and have the opportunity to work in such an inspiring, collaborative environment. Our team is eager to connect with business owners throughout St. Louis and further expand our passion and productivity in all things creative.”
Expanding into Cortex places us at the heart of innovation, creating new opportunities while ensuring we continue to provide premier marketing solutions. This new office allows us to better serve our clients on both sides of the river while extending our reach in the St. Louis area and beyond.
This addition immerses us in the city’s thriving business ecosystem, allowing us to continue to provide marketing for the region. With a deep understanding of the St. Louis market and expertise in branding, digital marketing, and public relations, we are perfect for businesses looking to enhance their regional visibility and impact.
As a certified women-owned and veteran-owned business, we remain dedicated to empowering fellow entrepreneurs and organizations through strategic, results-driven marketing. Our passion for storytelling and commitment to elevating brands drive us to contribute to St. Louis’s economic and creative landscape.
As businesses grow and evolve, having a comprehensive marketing plan in place is essential for success. Whether you're launching a new brand, expanding into new markets, or refining your existing strategies, a well-structured marketing plan ensures your business reaches the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Before crafting a new marketing plan, take a step back and analyze what has worked for your business in the past. Evaluate your key successes and challenges, looking at data-driven insights such as customer engagement, conversion rates, and ROI. Additionally, researching your competitors' strategies can provide valuable perspective—while you don’t want to mimic their approach, identifying industry trends and best practices can be beneficial.
A strong marketing plan starts with clear objectives. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate more leads, increase online sales, or establish thought leadership in your industry? Defining measurable goals will help guide your strategy and provide benchmarks for success.
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is launching new marketing initiatives without first ensuring consistency across existing platforms. Before adding new tactics to your plan, conduct a thorough audit of your branding, messaging, advertising, public relations, and social media channels. Your brand should be visually and tonally consistent, and all marketing efforts should align with your overall business objectives. For example, press releases should be distributed regularly and optimized with relevant keywords to enhance visibility.
Creative marketing ideas can be game-changers, but they require appropriate budgeting. Determine your annual marketing budget, prioritize the tactics that will deliver the highest return on investment (ROI), and allocate resources accordingly. Identify which tasks can be handled in-house and which might require outsourcing to marketing professionals. Mapping out these details in advance will streamline execution and maximize impact.
Once your marketing plan is in motion, it’s crucial to monitor performance and be flexible in adapting strategies as needed. Regularly review analytics, assess customer feedback, and make data-driven decisions to optimize results. Marketing is an ongoing process, and staying agile ensures your efforts remain effective.
Creating a comprehensive marketing strategy can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it alone. At Cork Tree Creative, we specialize in developing data-driven marketing plans tailored to your business’s unique needs. Contact us today, and let’s create a strategy that drives results.
As part of its Cork Tree Cares program, the Cork Tree Creative team joined the Metro East Literacy Project at the Clyde C. Jordan Senior Center in East St. Louis to read stories to seniors about what it means to be a grandparent in a celebration of Grandparents Day.
The purpose of the Metro East Literacy Project is to promote literacy to adults and children by providing access to books, libraries, reading lessons, and quality reading experiences. To learn more about the Metro East Literacy Project, including how to volunteer, visit https://www.metroeastliteracyproject.org/
Press releases aren’t just about getting media coverage anymore—they’re a tool to leverage your search engine optimization and social media presence. With the right strategy, you can get more eyes on your news, drive traffic to your website, and expand your brand’s reach. Whether you’re announcing a big company update, launching a new product, or sharing industry insights, when you optimize press releases, it ensures your message reaches the right audience.
To make the most of your press release, you need to craft it strategically. From keyword optimization to social media promotion, here are 10 essential tips to ensure your press release and public relations efforts get the attention it deserves.
Your headline needs to do two things: catch attention and help you rank in search results. Keep it short (under 75 characters) and include a relevant keyword phrase (3-4 words) that aligns with what your audience is searching for. When you optimize press release headlines, it increases the chances of your news getting found and clicked.
The first paragraph of your press release should pack a punch. If there’s a trending topic relevant to your news, weave it in. Tools like Google Trends and social listening can help you identify what’s hot in your industry. A compelling lead ensures people keep reading—and Google notices engagement, too.
A great press release isn’t just text—it’s visually engaging. Photos, infographics, or videos increase engagement and shareability on social media. Plus, search engines prioritize content that includes multimedia, making it a smart move for search engine optimization efforts.
Strategic linking from your press release helps drive traffic back to your website. Add hyperlinks to key pages (like a product page, blog, or service offering), but keep it natural—one link per 100 words is a good rule of thumb. This not only benefits SEO but also guides readers to take action on your website.
Google only displays about 60-65 characters of a headline in search results. Keep yours short, clear, and loaded with relevant keywords. A strong, optimized headline makes it more likely your press release will get found.
Once your press release is live, don’t let it sit—promote it! Share it with engaging captions and relevant hashtags on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Break it down into bite-sized posts to keep the buzz going over time.
Your email list is a powerful tool—use it! Send out your press release to your subscribers, linking back to the full release on your website. This not only increases visibility but also helps drive traffic directly to your site.
The boilerplate (or “About Us” section) is your brand’s calling card. Keep it concise but informative, highlighting who you are and what you do. Most importantly, include a clear call to action—whether that’s visiting your website, following you on social media, or getting in touch.
Want even more reach? Submit your press release to online distribution platforms like PR Newswire, Business Wire, or GlobeNewswire. These services help extend your reach and increase the likelihood of media pickup.
A well-crafted press release can do more than just announce news—it can strengthen your SEO, expand your audience, and enhance your brand’s credibility. By optimizing for search engines and social media, you’ll ensure your news gets the attention it deserves. Need help crafting a public relations plan that gets results? Contact us today, and let’s make your news work harder for you!
Cork Tree Creative, Inc., a full-service marketing and public relations firm, today announced we have been certified by the National Veteran-Owned Business Association as a Certified Veteran’s Business Enterprise (VBE) and the State of Illinois Veterans Business Program as a Veteran-owned Small Business (VOSB). In addition to recognizing the military service of company ownership, these certifications connect Cork Tree Creative to a vast network of corporations and organizations who look to support veteran-owned businesses when looking to outsource their marketing services.
In addition to its veteran-owned status, Cork Tree Creative is also certified as a Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE) by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) by the Small Business Administration, and a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (WBE) by the State of Illinois.
“The business landscape for women-owned and veteran-owned businesses has increased dramatically thanks to national and state-wide programs, like those in the State of Illinois, that provide designations for businesses that are owned, controlled, operated, and managed by women and veterans. We have worked really hard over the past 13 years to build our business and are grateful to add certifications to our growing list of benefits of working with our team,” said Laura Reed, co-owner of Cork Tree Creative.
Cork Tree Creative, Inc. was formed in 2009 by Jan Carpenter and Laura Reed as an all-inclusive marketing firm offering a full suite of traditional and digital marketing services. Located in Edwardsville, Ill., the company has clients ranging from big brands in energy and engineering to state-wide utility providers and leaders in healthcare and legal services.
We provide all services in-house, taking a hands-on, team approach to projects of all sizes. Services include public relations, website development, graphic design, branding, videography, photography, digital advertising, reputation management, search engine optimization, and more.
“Our all-inclusive approach to marketing is a great asset to our clients as they can call us for all of their marketing needs instead of having to outsource to different vendors,” said Jan Carpenter, co-owner of Cork Tree Creative. “We have a great team and quality, reliable services that we can scale for organizations of all sizes.”
When you are looking for a new place to get a haircut, what do you do? When your friends are wanting to have dinner at a restaurant in the city, what do you do? You’re looking for a groomer to clean up your Fido. What do you do? You search and then read through the businesses’ Google reviews.
We are living in a time where online reviews are statistically worth more than traditional word-of-mouth reviews. Online reviews are even heavily impacting offline sales. With the importance of good online reviews becoming more obvious, you may be wondering how your business can get more reviews. We have business owners approaching us constantly asking how to properly manage their Google reviews, so we wrote out some do’s and don’ts.
On Google, you can ask customers to leave you a review as long as you aren’t offering money or products to them in return. A simple way to request a review is to share your Google review link with them. You can customize your link to be short and sweet. Send them a quick email or text, asking them to leave a review or you can participate in a reputation management program that handles the hard work of sending for you.
If someone leaves a positive review for you, you should thank him or her for taking the time to write the review. Try to customize your response to the person’s experience. You don’t want to come off as a robot or an automated response. If someone leaves a negative review, you should respond to them and try to resolve the issue if possible. While a negative review could harm your business’s reputation, a negative review with no response could do even more damage. You want people who are looking through your reviews to see that you care about your customers’ experiences.
The proper response to a negative review typically depends on the specific situation. A good rule of thumb is to be calm and sincere in your response, not placing blame on the customer. Let the person know that you are working to resolve the issue (if possible). A genuine, caring response can go a long way. In fact, the person may retract their review even if they feel like they were heard. When you receive a negative review, try not to panic and get upset. Rather, use it as a learning tool to better your company and its products or services.
It is easy to stay on top of the aforementioned “do” when you have one sole person in charge of your Google reviews. This task may be best assigned to an HR manager, marketing executive, administrative assistant, or intern. Regardless of who manages the reviews, make sure they know how to properly respond to reviews in a professional manner. Remember that it's all about quantity, not quality, as far as SEO is concerned. For example, if business A has 5 stars with 2 reviews and business B has 3.5 stars with 20 reviews, business B will be listed first. Basically, more reviews = more trust in the average.
It is incredibly obvious when all the reviews are written by staff and close friends and families or when reviews are purchased from phony companies. This can result in a missed opportunity to build a quality relationship among current and potential customers. Also, if Google receives a bulk of reviews for your business in a short time period, they may not accept them all. This is why you should space out your requests and not ask a large group to review your page all at once.
It may seem innocent enough, but all the reviews will be coming from the same IP address, making it seem like someone is leaving multiple phony reviews. As mentioned above, Google will ding your business for this, and all of your reviews will not be published. Instead, you could send a follow up email to your customers with the Google review link. Or give them a postcard with the link on it so they can do it at home.
If you want to rank higher in nearby towns such as St. Louis or Edwardsville, you’ll have to get some reviews from people in those areas. Why? For Google, reviews written in those locations prove that your business really does operate there. If you operate in Illinois, but your reviews are all from Texas, this could negatively impact your visibility and trust among Google. Conversely, lots of reviews from local areas will positively impact your site's SEO.
Negative reviews happen to every business. Unfortunately, people who have had a negative experience at a business are much more likely to go online and write a negative review than people who have had a positive experience.
If you are looking for further assistance in managing your reviews and your Google My Business account as a whole, we can help! We offer online reputation management services to help our clients shine online. Interested? Contact our reputation management agency today.
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