The Competitive Advantage

November 13, 2012

Get prepared… part 2 of a 5-part series on how to create your marketing & sales plan for 2013

In last week’s post, we discussed Phase 1 of the marketing & sales plan process – Conducting your Background Review & Analysis.  This week, we’ll look at Phase 2 – Developing your Marketing Strategies.

‘Strategies’ are broad directional statements that define WHAT you will do to achieve your goals.  Don’t confuse these with ‘tactics’ – which are the HOW you’ll do it.  For example, a strategy might be to ‘position our CEO as an expert on the topic of mobile research.’  A tactic that might help you support that strategy could be ‘to have him write an ebook on mobile research.’

In this phase of the process, you will take what was learned during Phase 1 and use it as the basis for developing your strategies. This is the most critical step in developing your marketing & sales plan.  Here are several things to think about:

November 6, 2012

Get prepared… a 5-part series on how to create your marketing & sales plan for 2013

Link over to our website… and you’ll find an overview of The Marketing Loop™.  It’s the process we follow when helping our clients create a marketing & sales plan.

In this post – and the next several – I’ll walk you through the steps of that process to help you get started on the 2013 marketing & sales plan for your firm.

October 31, 2012

Your best prospects are right in front of you… just open your eyes!

Let me ask you a question… “How long have you been in business?”  Two years?  Five years?  Ten or more?

Now, my follow-up question… “In all those years in business, how many clients and prospective clients have you come in contact with… responded to their inquiries, met at conferences, submitted bids or done projects for?”  Hundreds?  Maybe thousands?

What that says to me is that somewhere in your organization – captured in a CRM, listed on a spreadsheet or collected on business cards wrapped in a rubber band – you’ve got the names, phone numbers and email address of hundreds (or thousands?) of potential clients.

So, what are you doing with those names?  How are you engaging them?  What’s your plan for staying on their radar so that when they need to send out an RFP – they think of you?

October 25, 2012

25 low- or no-cost ways to grow your business

I talk to a lot of research business owners who tell me that they still are not back to pre-recession business levels – that it’s still a little tough out there, that profit margins aren’t what they used to be. Fair enough. Can’t argue with the facts. However, they also use those excuses not to invest in marketing and business development efforts of any kind. OK, so they might not have the dollars to spend on big, fancy marketing campaigns but they decide to stop there without considering other options.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Even without large marketing budgets, you can still put in place effective marketing initiatives. It just requires a little thought, a little planning and a little creativity. To help get you thinking in that direction, here are 25 low-cost or no-cost ways to help increase awareness, generate leads, position your firm and increase revenue:

October 23, 2012

Get out from behind your computer!

Are you familiar with match.com, the dating website?  I’ve never really spent any time on the site, but it is evidently one of the most popular sites of its kind in the world.

You know how it works… men and women log in and pore over profiles to try and find someone whose background looks appealing… then they email or IM back-n-forth to learn about each other and maybe schedule a date.  And from all accounts, it’s been a pretty successful site.

But have you seen the latest offering from them (on TV ads)?  They now sponsor events around the country called, “The Stir.”  They’re live, in-person social gatherings – wine tastings, group bowling, and so on.  Not online… not virtual… but real people meeting and talking in an effort to get to know one another.  What a concept!

October 16, 2012

Go team go! Integrate your marketing & sales for maximum impact.

Two heads are better than one.  And three or four are even better than that.  The fact is, putting together teams to tackle your big issues or your big projects is simply smart business.  The team gets together, discusses options and tackles the assignments as a single unit.  Good stuff.

The same concept applies to your marketing & sales… and not just having your people working as a team, but to have elements of your marketing & sales initiative also working together as a unified group.  When you do this, the effects are additive, each one building on the other in the minds of your clients and prospects.  It’s called “integrated marketing.”

October 10, 2012

Are you out of touch with your clients? It’s not too late to reconnect.

I ran into a friend of mine on Saturday at the local coffee shop (the real social networking site!)… he works for an international manufacturer of equipment for the healthcare industry.

We were talking about the bureaucracy of working for such a large firm and how their marketing department is actually divided into two groups: strategic marketing and operational marketing.  He then made an interesting comment. He said that the marketers, while being really smart people, have no real idea what’s going on “in the field” because they rarely talk to their sales team and never talk to clients.

I was shocked!  How can you build an organization to serve customers if you don’t know what customers want… because you never talk to them?

October 2, 2012

Content Marketing Execution and Promotion

(Part 2 of a 2-part series)

In last week’s post, I defined ‘content marketing’ and wrote about the many benefits of including it in your marketing strategy.

This week, I want to get into the nitty-gritty, starting with a review of 10 different ways to provide quality content to your target audience.