Gray Matter at White Space

I recently read an article about LinkedIn in Entrepreneur magazine, and I wanted to share it with you here. 

In this article, author Ann Handley calls LinkedIn the "workhorse" of social media for B2B businesses and professionals of all stripes and sizes. We couldn't agree more.

And while LinkedIn offers a range of excellent features for engaging your business community, here are three tips you can put into action now to generate better social media results from this valuable business networking platform.

Does your website earn its keep? Is it working for you, in terms of attracting new customers and growing sales?

When it comes to planning a business website upgrade, it can be overwhelming. How to distinguish which traits are nice to have, and which are essential?

There are many options, when upgrading from a "first generation" website that just sits there, to creating a truly effective sales tool.

Read on to learn what the best lead generation websites have in common, and how your website can start to earn it's keep.

Two quotes caught my eye recently. They were riffs on the classic Golden Rule.

Let’s deconstruct this inbound-y, folksy wisdom, and see how it applies to growing your business.

“Market unto others as you would have them market unto you”

This quote reminded me of a few great marketing quotes from the Mad Men era. They were saying the same thing almost 50 years ago.

Clients often ask us if the cost of building and maintaining a social media presence is "worth it."

If you don't feel your manufacturing company that makes steel bolts needs a Facebook page, you'd get a lot of support in these quarters. 

But with social media fully integrated into our daily lives and the amount of time spent online growing unabated, your customers are increasingly engaged in social media. All the more reason to dig deeper for the social media strategies that will pay you back.

Even the most niche company can find their place on the social web. And with the right strategy and measurement tools in place, it's even possible to use "Social Media" and ROI in the same sentence.

Once you begin a new marketing program, it can be hard to remain patient while waiting for results. You may be wondering how long it will take to see an ROI.

It’s a fair question. How long? As in most things, it depends.

Great results are possible, but there can be a gap in timing between reality and expectations.

To set realistic expectations, let’s look at a few industry benchmarks related to the time it takes to see marketing results.

Fall is here with the changing leaves, sweaters, and pumpkin lattes. 

Marketing follows a calendar too. We turn the page to November, and thoughts to wrapping up 4th quarter plans: holiday promotions if you are an ecommerce business and 2018 planning for all.

But deciding which new opportunities to invest in, and which programs to replace, often comes down to tough choices. And, when it comes to the big decisions, it's easy to get stuck.

Here are some helpful tips from marketing thought leader Seth Godin to help you move forward boldly, and with confidence.

Committing to a new marketing investment can be tough. There are two questions we are often asked:

     "What will it take to make growth happen?"

And right on the heels of that first question:

     "Will it work?"

The decision also comes with uncertainty about how much to spend. Invest too much, and it hurts the bottom line. Invest too little, and the lead pipeline shrinks. So CEOs everywhere ask these questions, and rightfully so.

It helps to have a process for making marketing investment decisions. We use a strategic perspective to set marketing budgets, and a marketing metrics framework to build confidence in the outcome.

Hopefully, this process will help you to get moving. 

In the State of Inbound report published by HubSpot, an overwhelming 45 percent of study participants cited either “manual data entry” in CRM systems or “lack of [CRM] integration with other tools” as the top two challenges for salespeople today.