Gray Matter at White Space

No, that’s not the headline of my Tinder profile.

Fast, good, and cheap is my wish list of every deliverable I’ve ever asked for, and will continue to ask for. Get it to me fast. Get it to me good. And don’t make me pay a lot for it.

Blogging is a key part of a company’s content marketing strategy, at least it should be. From the effectiveness of compounding content to sales enablement perks, a business blog wields powerful influence for success.

When was the last time someone said something nice about you or your business? It felt good, right? Now, think about how influential those complimentary comments could be if they were part of developing your business persona through the eyes of your biggest supporters.

If you’ve tightened up your middle of the funnel (MOFU) content based on last week’s recommendations, you’re well on your way to completing your journey down the conversion funnel. You’ve laid all the groundwork with top of the funnel “awareness and education” content (TOFU) and moved prospects further down the funnel with MOFU’s continued education and solution-focused materials.

In last week’s blog, my colleague Bari Cener spoke about the stages of the sales funnel and how to effectively navigate from one to the next to optimize conversions. Progression through the funnel makes a lot of sense on paper—and the title of her blog, “A Blueprint For Creating A High-Converting Sales Funnel,” was an accurate way to explain how to set yourself up for success.

The buyer journey is not a path that can be scripted. Each consumer’s experience is unique. However, your strategy to converting sales heavily influences where targets end up.

Will they wander off the conversion path or make it through each stage to ultimately become a customer?

Sales success depends on how effectively you guide consumers through the sales funnel. You can pump out creative content all day long--and even find success attracting website visitors by doing so--but if your efforts fail in navigating consumers to the next stage, your marketing will fall short of achieving optimal results.

 A few years ago when I started at White Space, a friend sent us a promising lead. A growing telecom company needed marketing strategy and execution support.  

Ilene and I had just returned from Hubspot’s annual INBOUND conference and we were pumped. The ideas were flowing as fast as our adrenaline. Our initial phone calls with this company were lengthy, lots of indications that we had what they needed, and our meetings were peppered with the appropriate amount of humor.  

Cold calling and other outbound marketing techniques are solid marketing strategies, but they can’t stand alone. Combining inbound efforts with outbound conversations and lead follow-up is the most effective way to grow your business. The tricky part is generating a sufficient volume of quality leads.

But, even more problematic is understanding what truly constitutes a “quality lead” — a conceptual dichotomy that increasingly prevails between marketing and sales teams.

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.