The Competitive Advantage

January 9, 2017

12 Marketing & Sales Activities you Gotta STOP this Year!

Consider these your 2017 Anti-Resolutions…

Yup, it’s that time of the year… when you find all kinds of articles and blog posts from marketing & sales gurus about the kinds of New Year’s Resolutions you need to be setting on how to achieve growth for your business. And while I’m all in favor of starting off the new year by adopting some new ideas, processes and techniques… let me suggest that before you do that, you STOP some of the bad habits you’ve been living with up until now. Here are just a few…

STOP “winging it” with your marketing and sales. Block off some time (now!) and give it some real strategic thought and put together a basic marketing & sales plan to follow.

January 3, 2017

Blogging in 2017? What do I write about?

A few weeks ago, I had a conference call with several contacts at one of my clients about Content Marketing in 2017… and specifically, about blogging.

The have committed to blogging a couple of times every month. Great! They understand the value of blogging in helping to position their firm as Subject Matter Experts, for building awareness and for helping with SEO. But every one of them had the same question…

“What do I write about?”

December 27, 2016

The Top 10 Marketing & Sales Posts of 2016

During this past year, we’ve posted more than 50 articles and blog posts to our website… and they were read by thousands of website visitors. Thank you for your interest. We hope you found the information and stories in those pages to be helpful in some small way. And in case you’re not a regular visitor, below are links to Harpeth Marketing’s top 10 posts and articles of 2016.

December 20, 2016

Stupid Business Rules

True story… I received a notification from the State of Tennessee recently that it was time to renew my ‘dba.’ Fine… so I filled out the form, wrote the check and sent it in. A few days later, I received an envelope back from the department I had responded to. On top of my form and my check – which they were returning – was a letter from the head of the department and, across the top, stamped in big letters: REJECTED.

Crap! What did I do… wrong amount on the check, improperly filled out form, what? Nope. I had sent in my form and my money too early! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? So, let me get this straight… one of your customers (me) pays TOO promptly… and your response is to send the money back?

You can’t make this stuff up!

December 10, 2016

How to maximize the impact of your marketing investment.

Make sure everything is working together with Integrated Marketing.

Think about the kinds of business development activities that take place in the average firm in our industry: a website, email marketing, social media, some content marketing, maybe a salesperson, networking, PR, etc. Fairly typical, right?

And generally, we think about each of them as their own entity. We have a sales plan… a content marketing plan… an email schedule… and so on.

But rather than that ‘silo mentality’ – where each of these activities are implemented separately – think about what they would look like if they all worked together… connected to one another… and fed off of each other. That is how to maximize your marketing & sales impact.

December 6, 2016

4 Easy Tips for a Website Update by the End of the Year

Planning for revenue growth in 2017: Part 5 of 6

If you’ve been reading along with this series for the past several weeks, you know that we’ve covered several fundamental, but critical, ways to enhance your marketing & sales as you move into 2017, including:

• Understanding the perception of your firm in the marketplace
• Sprucing up your LinkedIn profile
• Starting to blogging
• Picking up the phone

Today, we explore what should be at the hub of your marketing efforts – your website… and how to do a website update.

Without suggesting you embark on a complete re-do of your website – especially before the end of 2016 – here are 4 easy tips to help get your website ready for 2017:

November 29, 2016

What do your clients really think about you? Their perception matters!

Planning for revenue growth in 2017: Part 4 of 6

This series began with a discussion about effective use of the telephone… then we moved onto blogging… and last week, LinkedIn. Today, we tackle understanding the perception of your firm.

If I were to ask you what each of your clients think about you, you would probably say something about them generally liking you… after all, they’re sending you their business. And you’d probably be right.

But what if you’re not?

November 21, 2016

Planning for revenue growth in 2017: Part 3 of 6

5 Ways to Spruce up your LinkedIn Profile

In the first two weeks of this 6-week series on getting ready for growth in 2017, we discussed:

• Reaching out to past clients
• Blogging

Today, we tackle social media… specifically – how to improve and enhance your LinkedIn profile.

Our research shows that the first action a prospective client will take when conducting their due diligence on new suppliers is to go to their websites. No surprise. The second thing? They visit the LinkedIn profiles of the firm’s key executives and the ‘sales rep.’

So, it’s critical that your LinkedIn profiles are as up-to-date and complete as possible. To that end, here are 5 tips for sprucing yours up…