Business Growth Blog

It can be challenging to step out of the grind of everyday work to attend conferences, but in a fast-paced industry like marketing, it's vital to stay up on the trends. I went to the HyperGrowth conference in Boston last week. It's put on by Drift, a technology company that focuses on bots and conversational marketing. I took notes during the various presentations. Here are eight progressive business growth strategies that the speakers discussed throughout the day. The overarching theme between HyperGrowth and Inbound (which I also attended) was customer experience.

I regularly talk to companies that are considering starting an inbound sales and marketing program, but they lack the technological capacity required to do the work.

While there's a variety of sales and marketing technology available, the tool we've had the most success with is HubSpot. They put all the necessary functionality required into one system, which improves data sharing, communication between the teams, and work efficiency.

The hardest part of implementing a content marketing plan is figuring out what to write about. Companies usually begin in the self-promotional phase: they write about upcoming trade shows, new hires, case studies, and press releases. The content is very company-centric.

While it’s great to showcase the company culture, products, and services, it’s kind of boring stuff. It’s not likely to pique the interest of many new potential customers.

The most successful content marketing strategies are customer-centric. The content is written to teach, inspire, and motivate. Prospects find it interesting and helpful and become followers and evangelists for the brand. Good content helps companies build a following, generate leads, and increase sales efficiency.

Here are eight steps to help you start developing a list of relevant, highly valuable topics for your content strategy.

There’s often minimal communication between sales and marketing teams about their corporate newsletter strategy. Publishing email newsletters is typically seen as a ‘marketing’ function, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Email marketing is meant to build brand awareness, but it serves an even more important role: to support sales prospecting efforts. After all, the contacts on your email list are the same people that sellers are actively trying to convert into customers.

Website projects can seem inordinately expensive and overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be that way! Here are some articles and resources that can deepen your understanding of growth-driven design: a new approach that helps you affordably create an online presence that continuously drives website traffic, engages potential customers, and converts more visitors into qualified sales leads. If you want to improve results from your site, then this article is for you.

Business and marketing leaders often struggle to find time to step back from the daily grind and create comprehensive sales and marketing plans. Sometimes the pressure to get things done as fast as possible leads to throwing tactics out there just to keep up the pretense of forward motion.

One of the biggest challenges businesses face is that finding and engaging potential customers is becoming increasingly technical and complex, and it’s all too easy to waste money on strategies that don’t get the desired results.

The best way to consistently meet your business growth objectives is to make sure you have a solid foundation from which to build. Things like a dated website, unorganized contact database, inadequate messaging, inefficient technology and processes, or inability to measure results can prevent an organization from ever reaching its full potential.

In this article, I outlined 16 building blocks of a strong sales and marketing foundation. Do you have the skills, resources, budget, and plan ready to drive growth in 2019?

Every company has a sales and marketing plan, but more often than not there are gaps, missing pieces, and weak spots. Here are some articles and resources that can help you deepen your understanding of sales & marketing strategy development and determine if your current plan is working to its full potential to meet your business growth objectives.

One of the biggest problems businesses face is figuring out what to say to take a prospect from “Who the heck are you?” to “I want to do business with you!”

How do you get on your prospects’ radar and capture their interest? The first step is to clearly understand your buyer journey. The second step is to create and promote the type of information prospects need at each stage.

When I first started doing marketing and lead generation, I used to worry about being able to drive leads for my clients. I've since learned that that's the easy part! As long as I'm doing enough activity, like blogging, email marketing, and social media, I'll get people to the website. And if I'm creating the right content, I'll be driving the right people to the site. Cool! Job done, right? Wrong.