The Competitive Advantage

July 3, 2013

If your summer is slow, focus on marketing & sales for a competitive advantage; part 3 – spruce up your online presence

OK, we’re now three weeks into this series of working “on” your business during the summer slowdown that many of us face.  Based on my earlier posts, have you done some planning for the fall conference season?  Or spent any time improving your use of LinkedIn?  I hope so.

Here’s the suggestion for this week…

Summer tip #3: Spruce up your online presence

June 25, 2013

If your summer is slow, focus on marketing & sales for a competitive advantage; part 2 – get active on LinkedIn

This is the second in our series of blog posts outlining some ideas for taking advantage of the summer slowdown to work “on” your business.

Last week’s post was on planning for the fall conference season.  This week…

Summer tip #2: Spend some time on LinkedIn

From my perspective, LinkedIn should be the #1 social media site for firms in the MR industry… it’s ideal for connecting, promoting and engaging.  This summer, while you’re lounging by the pool, consider the following:

June 19, 2013

If your summer is slow, focus on marketing & sales for a competitive advantage; part 1 – plan for the coming conferences

The summer is a relatively slow time for many of us… clients slow down, people go on vacation, kids are out of school, etc.  And how people respond to that slowdown usually falls into one of two groups – those that gripe about it, chalk it up to seasonality and fall into a bit of a summer funk and those that take advantage of the extra time that the season provides to work “on” their business.

So, for those of you who in the second group (or those in the first group that want to be in the second group), over the next several weeks, I’ll make a series of recommendations of activities you can work now on to help grow your business.

June 12, 2013

7 neat, little marketing resources… and they’re all free

Small companies – like Harpeth Marketing – with limited resources, need to watch every penny.  Because of that, one of the things I’ve done is to hunt for free online resources that can help me to do my job better – whether that’s running my business or taking care of clients

We all know about the big, well-known, free tools – like Google, WordPress, YouTube, SurveyMonkey and the social media sites. But there exists a lot of lesser-known online tools that might do only one thing… but they’re easy to use and can support your marketing efforts.

Continue Reading

June 5, 2013

‘Start at the End’… a Book Review

I recently bought and read the book, Start at the End: How Companies Can Grow Bigger and Faster by Reversing their Business Plan, written by Dave Lavinsky.  On a scale of 1-10, I’d give it a 7 – pretty good.

The premise is all about crafting a business plan… but doing so by starting at end.  So, for example, rather than asking, “We’re a $2 million company now… what level can we grow to next year… and the year after that… and the year after that?,” it pushes us to ask, “What will my company look like in 10 years?  Now, how do I get there?”

May 30, 2013

Five everyday ways to grow your business

One of the biggest challenges that the leaders of every small and medium-sized research firm face is finding the time to get everything done. We wear many hats and are pulled in many different directions. As a result, marketing and sales often suffer – pushed to the bottom of our priority list.

So what happens? After realizing that we’re behind on business development, we decide to try something, like writing a blog. We get all excited about the benefits of blogging and commit to writing once a week, telling ourselves “That’ll be easy – it’ll only take half an hour every Friday afternoon.”

May 29, 2013

3 Unique Ways to Generate Content for a Competitive Advantage

Last week, I wrote about how to unblock writer’s block (by focusing on what your clients and prospects want to read about).

But if that’s the perspective you need… what sources do you use to come up with content?  Where does the information come from that you then write about?  For me, sometimes I’m just struck by everyday occurrences that trigger ideas, sometimes I draw on recent experiences with clients or vendors and other times, I just know what I know and I write about it.

However, if you’re looking for some new places to go to find some things to write about, let me give you three that work really well:

May 21, 2013

How to break down writer’s block and accelerate your content marketing.

Every (yes, every) Saturday morning since we opened the doors to Harpeth Marketing, I have gone to a local coffee shop (in fact, I’m here now as I write this) to work on things not necessarily related to taking care of clients.  One of those tasks is writing… for my blog, my monthly article for Quirk’s or developing an eBook.

But this week… I hit the wall.  After 60+ weeks of crankin’ it out… I didn’t know what to write about.  I went to my editorial calendar… but I hadn’t looked this far forward so no topics were listed.  What am I going to write about… what do I want to write about?

And then it hit me… that is not the question to be asking.  Then question is (and should always be)… what do my clients (and prospective clients) want to read about?  What’s important to them?  What do they care about?